Only in the Las Vegas Airport

I"m not suggesting that the baggage claim section of the Vegas airport (which looks exactly like a casino, btw) is the only place in the world you can find a vending machine dispensing fresh cut flowers, but it's the only airport baggage claim section I've ever seen that features such a machine.

Two, in fact.

BBG #2: Indoors looking out

Of course, the main reason anyone visits a place like this at a time like this is to sneak in some warmth, and the Botanic Gardens do not disappoint: there are tropical rooms, desert rooms, humid spaces, dry spaces, and all sorts of other artificial microclimates within the Steinhardt Conservatory. An unguided tour:





That last image, btw, is of a bonsai indoors, and the regular-sized plants on the outside of the window and their cold, sometimes cruel world.

BBG #1: Outdoors looking in

As I'd hoped, I really did make it to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens last week. (Over time, I am learning to catch myself when I want to add an "ical" to "Botanic.") Yes, it was February, but as a hardy Western New Yorker, that didn't stop me at all. As I expected, there were plenty of somber, slightly depressing vistas like this:



And lots of picturesque frozen lakes and ponds:



But my eye was mainly on plants that look good in the winter. I'll spare you my notes on that front, since it is a minor goal of this blog to impart no useful gardening information whatsoever, but I can tell you I'm growing more and more fond of nice sturdy seedheads:

Why I'll always love winter, no matter how miserable it sometimes gets

(Jackson Park, NYC, Feb. 2009)

"We are beautiful living mammals on a garden planet..."

Sadly, I missed this particular screening of Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, a new documentary about a whole collection of interconnected subjects I'm interested in to varying degrees, described on the official site as "the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstacy in the modern world by weaving a synthesis of ecological and evolutionary awareness,electronic dance culture, and the current pharmacological re-evaluation of entheogenic compounds." The lineup of talking heads interviewed includes Ralph Metzner, Alex Grey, Terrence McKenna, and Daniel Pinchbeck, among others. I'm intrigued. Here's a trailer:

"I am the water that joins your land to other lands"

I saw a performance by the wacky Spanish performance group La Fura Dels Baus ("Rats from the Sewer" to you) almost 20 years ago in a gigantic, then-abandoned movie studio in Queens. Found it simultaneously fascinating and a little empty, as I recall. Mostly I remember performers emerging from the ceiling and then chasing us around with chainsaws or something, and a guy in a huge fishtank. (For the record, they were on the cutting edge of that whole suspended-from-the-ceiling craze, which is now so ubiquitous that I caught some other wacky performance group doing it during one of the Inauguration Day balls on the way to a commercial break on NBC. No chainsaws or fish/human hybrids, though.)

Tonight I stumbled upon a YouTube video of excerpts from a much more recent outdoor performance by LFDB. Judging from brief snippets of other pieces, it looks like they've gone in a more Cirque du Soleil direction of late, although this one is not in that mode so much, and the English-language text makes the political/ecological theme way more explicit than what I saw all those years ago. (Visually and verbally, it's not that far from the recent Day the Earth Stood Still remake. Check out the Gort!) Feel free to fast-forward now and then, but prepare to be dazzled:



Spectacle on this scale often evokes fascism to me, but then these folks' parents and grandparents lived through the real thing, so who am I to talk? There's one moment where you see that the seedlike dots in one huge, vaguely flowerlike form are actually human beings, which made me think of this blog title I love so much.

Everything in its right place

I was a fan of the print version of Arthur, and just wrote about its (hopefully temporary) demise on my music blog a couple of weeks ago. In the meantime, I've grown fond of its blog, Magpie, which is still going strong. The focus of both is broad: mostly ultra-indie music, but there's also a fair amount about theater, psychedelic culture, visual art, politics, and other loosely interconnected subjects--dubbed "homegrown counterculture" in a shout-out to an earlier wave of organic gardening and wispy bearded folkie singer-songwriters (both of which are now popular again with The Kids Today).

Even so, I was taken by surprise by this Magpie entry exhorting readers in frigid NYC to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens (especially on a Tuesday, when it's free).

For one thing, given the mag's neo-hippie vibe, I had always assumed it was based out west somewhere. But what really took me aback was the sight of a site I've always linked to music suddenly addressing another, more recent passion of mine. Talk about crossover! It's funny: since at least the late 70s I've devoted my energies to trying to bring things together, to blur or ignore boundaries, to search for connections (between people, between ideas) instead of differences--but when I started blogging, it seemed wiser (or at least simpler) to separate out my diverse interests (music here, gardening here, one kind of performance I'm involved with here, a personal/political account of getting married here, and so on) rather than trying to lump them all together. And then along comes something from the music pigeonhole advising me to "spend some time communing with the cacti, ferns, and bromeliads." Crazy!

As luck would have it, I'll actually be in New York next week, though a bit too busy on Tuesday for a visit. But after paying a too-brief visit to Buffalo's equivalent a few days back, I'm awfully tempted to find some way to the BBG during my stay. I was only there once, back in the early 80s, and was even contemplating a return trip the other day.

Who knows--maybe they even sell CDs in the gift shop.