Showing posts with label Worlds' Fair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Worlds' Fair. Show all posts

01 June 2016

Afternoon Delight With The Rocket Thrower

I had an Afternoon Delight today.  No, it didn't have anything to do with that.  This is a blog for PG audiences!

All right, that all depends on how you define PG.  Anyway, my afternoon delight was a short but sweet (ah, the cliches!) ride via a circuitous route to Flushing Medow Park.

Tosca seemed content to ride and fade into the background.  She had the chance:



I mean, if she wanted to camoflauge herself, could she have picked a better spot?

Actually, I think she looked quite lovely there.  The folks in the New York City Parks Department do a nice job.

Even if the arrangement had consisted entirely of lilies, Tosca would have been hiding in plain sight of this icon:



The Rocket Thrower clearly has his sights elsewhere.  Good thing:  He probably wouldn't want to see some of the things that go on right at his feet.  

For that matter, he probably wouldn't want to hear, either.  When he was unveiled, for the opening of the 1964-65 World's Fair (held in Flushing Meadow Park), some people said absolutely terrible things about him.  One of the most merciless was the New York Times art critic (who else?) John Canady described The Rocket Thrower as "the most lamentable monster, making Walt Disney look like Leonardo da Vinci".


Robert Moses, the "master builder" behind the Worlds' Fair, famously sneered, "Critics build nothing".  So, perhaps, it isn't a surprise that he tried to console Donald De Lue, the sculptor of The Rocket Thrower.  "This is the greatest compliment you could have," Moses said.  "[Canady] hates everything that is good."

Hmm...I'll admit, it certainly doesn't compare to Da Vinci or Michelangelo or Rodin.  Or even Brancusi.  But it fits into something like a Worlds' Fair, especially one in the age of space exploration.  And, on his lofty perch, nobody can take "selfies" with him!

20 May 2014

A Detour From The Worlds' Fairs

Just recently, the Big Apple (a.k.a. my hometown) celebrated the 75th and 50th Anniversaries of its most recent Worlds' Fairs.  (It also hosted one of the earliest Fairs, in 1853.)  As I have mentioned in one of my earliest posts, I attended the 1964 Fair with my family when I was--well, let's say I was very young.  Very, very young.


 

I'd love to say that my family and I rode there together.  Well, my parents were like about 99.99 percent of American adults of the time in that they didn't ride bikes.  And of the Valinotti children, I was the only one who had graduated from tricycles.  I think my youngest brother was only a few months old when we went to the Fair.

But someone named Jay Kenney rode there. In fact, he pedaled about 1300 miles to get there:  He started in Richfield, Minnesota, with a group of cyclists about his age (16 at the time) on an American Youth Hostels tour.

I stumbled over his photo album when I was researching something else about the Worlds' Fairs.  But it made my day.  This photo--of the Ludington Light in Michigan--was worth the "detour".

Ludington Light, Michigan, USA

Now, what was I researching again?