I finally finished the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail (OCA). This trail follows the path of the old water delivery service between the Croton Aqueduct and New York City. The aqueduct went 29 miles from bucolic natural land, through the suburbs of Westchester County, and ended in the city. The aqueduct is no longer used, but the land it was on has been wisely converted into a long trail that serves as an escape from the hectic congestion of New York. Beginning in the Bronx and going in a fairly straight shot, one can feel many miles away from hte world of concrete, taxis and construction.
Before Iris was born, I walked about 20 miles of the trail. Since then, I haven't had the opportunity to finish the OCA. Last week, however, Iris was in daycare and there was a clear sky and moderate temperatures. I pounced on the opportunity to walk in the woods.
Getting off the commuter train at Scarborough, I picked up the trail and immediately realized I had chosen the best time possible to walk the OCA. The woods were ablaze; leaves were falling and in full fall splendor. I reached for my camera right away, but to my chagrin realized I'd forgotten it. So I decided to make some sketches in the little sketchbook I always carry with me. Every so often, I'd stop and do a quick scratchy sketch of something that caught my eye. But these weren't enough. There was something of my experience of the trail that was missing: COLOR.
I began grabbing leaves from the ground and looking very closely at them. I was amazed at the variation, of course, but also how the variations spoke to a lot of my current artistic concerns.
Off symmetry: Autumn leaves can look like Rorschach tests. Green splots mirror each other on brown leaves, almost perfect mirrors - but not quite. There are slight variations on the symmetry that makes the leaves more dynamic and alive, in process. There is a classical beauty to symmetry, and the variations make them seem more in motion.
Soft and hard: When I would bend down to pick up a particularly interesting leaf, I frequently wouldn't know if I was going to feel something brittle or soft. Leaves on the ground are dying and turning crunchy, but frequently they were soft and wilted. Usually the darkest browns, reds and purples would feel dry and the lightest greens and yellows would be moist. But it's not always the case. Feeling a yellow leaf with dark brown edges is always surprising and intimate. One gets to know where the leaf is in its life.
Two colors: Like an exercise by Joseph Albers, leaves can "fool" your eyes. I picked up an ocher leaf and thought it had blue spots. I looked closely and found the spots to be a different color when isolated, a more neutral green. But these two colors together effect each other in our mind in ways that aren't true. No color lives in isolation.
Edges: My paintings are always exercises in how edges are formed. Do colors bleed into one another, forming a soft boundary, or do they sit next to each other with hard boundaries? This is an untrue question. Look at an impressionist painting and you know why. Those pointillist canvases of little flecks of color are thousands of "hard" color decisions that add up to a soft effect. The idea of an edge truly depends on perspective, and I was surprised at how the microscopic colors of leaves reinforce this idea. Look at the spine of a leaf and you might be surprised to find how the leaf's colors reinforce the hard edges. For instance, a dark brown spine might look dark only because there's a soft border of yellow that bleeds into an equally dark brown on the leaf.
Complements: Thank you, thank you! No, really. Please, I don't deserve all this adulation. Stop. Who told Mother Nature that green and red are complements? And yellow and purple? Is it coincidence that color theory, which says complements make each other more intense, complements the color of leaves when they're at their most brilliant?
Line: Leaves can have such an astounding color rhythm. But it probably shouldn't have surprised me how much of the color is determined by the structure. One can look at a leaf like a painting and see the Renaissance war between desegno and colore. It all comes back to Venice and Florence! The Italian masters were forever debating what makes a painting special -- the way it's designed and laid out or its use of color? Thankfully, leaves provide a very clear answer: these ideas are inseparable. The most beautifully colored leaves come from a relationship with the way the veins unfold.
I could go on, but writing all of this makes me want to paint. Below is a painting I did after coming back from the trail, and the quick sketches I made in lieu of a picture machine. It's good to get out of the city once in a while.
I was not expecting to find what I did when I went to see Roxy Paine's "Maelstrom" installation at the Met. You can read my piece on it over at the Examiner.
On my last birthday, people asked how old I am. I confessed to being 34 years old, and expressed relief that I've made it past Jesus's age. I thought it was a stupid joke, but people laughed. They would laugh to the point that I had to keep saying the joke. All day I was telling a joke I didn't believe fully in because it got a positive reaction. It was better than just telling the truth, plainly. Now I know how Bob Saget feels on stage, and now you know a little bit about what it's like seeing the New Museum's current show, "The Generational: Younger Than Jesus."
The premise of the show is that it's a global review of artists who are under the age of 33. There's a lot of provocative, interesting work in this show, and it's varied enough that most visitors will find something they connect with.
Not surprisingly, artists raised in the internet era like working in different media and are willing to create an overload of material. It's not about crafting objects as much as it's about the rapid churn of creativity. That idea, which has been around for a long time, is especially timely when there's so much information (including art) out there. The only way to rise to the top is by doing more, bigger, faster.
So, for instance, we are greeted on the fourth floor by Josh Smith's wall of panel paintings of varying individual interest. None of them may hold your interest long, but there are a lot of them to look at.
Josh Smith, Untitled, 2008
Once an artist abandons the idea of specific, personal connection between the work and the viewer, it leads to strange places. There is a broadness to a lot of the work in the New Museum show, which becomes both a strength and a weakness.
Cyprian Gaillard's video of fight clubs sparring in the streets of projects in Belgrade is set to a soundtrack by Koudlam and becomes exciting to watch, if only because it features large crowds of men beating the shit out of each other. The wall text makes note that Gaillard shot this footage illegally, as if Gaillard were putting himself in danger. And that may be true, to some extent, but make no mistake: this footage is shot from at least 100 feet away from the fighting, from an elevated platform. The video is only cut when Gaillard changes locations.
Gaillard's film becomes a Gen-Y equivalent of anthropological classic "The Ax Fight," which is an ethnographic analysis of what happened during a Yanomami fight in Venezuela. Unlike that film, however, Gaillard provides very little context and doesn't seek to analyze. Instead, he provides an electronic soundtrack. There is a sense that this sort of thing happens out of boredom and frustration in the projects. The world is imperfect, so why try to figure out details?
Here's an excerpt of the video, but is not exactly what's shown at the New Museum:
One of my favorite pieces in the show was Faye Driscoll's video called "Loneliness." Driscoll had a friend take photos of her dancing around her apartment, wrapped in a green tablecloth. Then she edited the photos to music by Dynasty Handbag. The small screen, tucked in a hallway, is intimate and personal and strikes at the core of what a lot of art is about -- rejoicing in life, and staving off the demons of time.
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski's paintings impressed me as strong combinations of abstraction and figuration. Like other work in the show, the specific is subsumed by the general. In a series of portrait-like paintings, what becomes important is the gestalt of a head and not the details. This is a kind of primal reading of reality, where flesh is the byproduct of a deeper force. It comes to fruition in a painting he does of a great battle scene under a kitchen table, where rows of figures in uniform become expressions of something greater.
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, The Great Battle Under the Table, 2006
This idea of something greater makes the work in this show less chancey but also less strong. The idea of interconnectedness is taken for a given. Commitment is rare, because nothing is taken in isolation. If one thing leads to another, why stay with one thing?
Unfortunately, this habit of mind leads to a watering down of what could have been the best work.
Ryan Trecartin is one of the finest video artists working today. And by fine, I mean he's so foyn. His past work overflows with creativity and is jam-packed with weird referential fragments. Trecartin and his friends create elaborate environments and he edits to overstuff his video into a manic hyperreality. Any one moment in his video leads to a dizzying array of references and associations. For instance, in one moment he's dressed in white drag, stroking his hair while snowflakes fall. It's strange and alarming, but one can't help but think of Snow White, Mariah Carey videos, or any number of images.
It becomes a bit like W.B. Yeats's philosophy of poetry -- to use broad, symbolic images to connect with deep, internal human associations. Trecartin's references aren't always deep, but there's an unstoppable, restless searching to them that's instantly endearing.
In his installation at the New Museum, however, he's taken over two rooms and installed broken pottery, wacky furniture, headsets, etc. It's like Trecartin's video environments have spilled into real life. And guess what? I couldn't pay as much attention to the video. The video ceases to be a metaphor and becomes real life. And if Trecartin's sets become real life, then it's just more stuff in the world, too distracting and confusing to be metaphorical or symbolic.
I kept coming back to an important question while strolling through the museum: Is art special? What makes the art experience different than entertainment? We can have personal experiences watching TV or surfing the Web. Does it matter that this work is "art" and not just on YouTube? Can art be on YouTube? Clearly, for this generation where different platforms are just different ways to experience the same thing, the answer is yes.
But I'd like to get back to the title of the show. Not enough people have commented on it.
Why didn't they call it "Younger than John Belushi" or "Younger than Chris Farley"? Both of these men died at 33. And why 33? Is there actually a religious component to the work that demands Jesus actually be a reference? Outwardly, of course not.
But the reference to Jesus is appropriate for several reasons. Firstly, in a show that's about global art practice by Generation Y, irony is front and center. My guess is most of the artists on display aren't religious at all; what they share in common is the overload of imagery and symbols created by lives submerged in mass media and the internet. Jesus becomes another reference. And in a world of infinite connectivity and endless references, the stronger the better.
The other aspect to this name is the idea of salvation. With the idea of avant-gardism thoroughly discredited -- artists are in no way paving the way to an ideal future which non-artists will follow, which was a subtext to the Gaillard video -- there is a lingering question of what art is for. Of course, I'm not talking about the kind of art that has always been with us since the cave paintings. I'm talking about the kind of art that sophisticated people pay money to go see in hopes of ... what, exactly?
It's not salvation, but it's a kind of eternal cool. In a thoroughly materialist society (in both the Marxist and the shopping sense), there is a premium placed on the experience of youth.
In a pre-youth culture era -- that of the existentialists comes to mind -- the feeling of incompleteness people felt was connected to a loss of faith. Now, post-Beatles, post-hippie, most adults have gone through the furies of youth and graduated to a similar feeling of incompleteness.
There is no Jesus or loss of God to blame. So curators and collectors go to the fountain of youth for an answer. And let me tell you, friends: there are no answers there, either.
Sometimes I feel like I'm living in Peter Saul's world. He's an artist drawn to the shocking and outrageous. He twirls everyday forms around his finger like a wedding ring; he's married to the wild explosion of surplus and junk in American life.
A stellar show of his early work is on view at George Adams Gallery in Chelsea (through April 11). Saul's later work becomes more dayglo and provocative as it gets more character-based.
In the early drawings, though, we see Saul beginning to grapple with comic books and highways and refrigerators while the art world was still in its abstract-expressionist hangover. Everyday objects tend towards the abstract and become occasions for whimsy and endless whirl.
In some ways these drawings remind me of Antonioni's great finale to Zabriskie Point, where a brand new suburban home explodes in the American desert, sending all manner of consumer goods tumbling through the air to a Pink Floyd soundtrack (go to 3:30 in the video below for the explosions. Trust me: it's worth it).
But where Antonioni is making a movie about the catastrophe of modern relationships that are intertwined with suburbia and consumerism, Saul is taking a bumpercar ride through their birth.
I like women, I like art, and I like New York. So of course I'll be seeing Chiara Clemente's portrait of five female artists living and working in NYC. It's showing at Film Forum. Here's their press release:
It's an affecting love letter to the city which strings together the self-told narratives of five women artists (ages 30 - 80), each of whom has a passion for art-making inseparable from her devotion to New York . Swoon, the youngest, exhibits cut-outs directly on city walls and subways, and exudes idealism and energy while carrying a two by four the way some women would carry a briefcase. Cairo-born Ghada Amer mixes media -- embroidering with painting -- to confront sexual taboos that cross cultural boundaries. After experiencing the New York Dolls in San Francisco , Kiki Smith realized she needed New York 's energy to create her wildly influential paintings and sculptures; Marina Abramovic, originally of Belgrade , is a performance art pioneer who often uses her own body as a canvas. And Nancy Spero returned from Paris with artist-husband Leon Golub in 1964, to meld art and activism during the Vietnam War and become, in her own words, "a woman warrior."
Last week I wondered what it meant to be a Yaddo Artist. As it turns out, you can decide for yourself on Jan. 24 (my birthday!), when there will be a Yaddo Artist Studio Crawl through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. More info here. Participating artists include:
David Baskin
Andrea Belag
Louise Belcourt
Peter Sumner Walton Bellamy
David Brody
JoAnne Carson
Patty Cateura
Emily Cheng
Lisa Corinne Davis
Joe Diebes
James Esber
Rochelle Feinstein
Jane Fine
Joshua Fried
Joanne Greenbaum
Stacy Greene
Sally Gross
Dennis Kardon
David Kramer
Melissa Meyer
Amy Myers
David Packer
Oona Ratcliffe
Gina Ruggeri
Katia Santibanez
Jonathan Santlofer
James Siena
Joan Snyder
Natasha Sweeten
Alexi Worth
As part of their show "Regift," the Swiss Institute is sponsoring a project by artist Maria Eichorn. Here's the press release for anyone who may have an unwanted Texas-shaped jello mold hiding in their closet:
REGIFT, curated by John Miller, will be on view FEB 18 - APR 4 2009; the exhibition focuses on the chains of obligation that gifting generates, on one hand, and the incalculability of gift values, on the other.
Clearly I don't take the Q train enough. I haven't seen Bill Brand's subway zoetrope in person yet, but the NY Times has an article on its restoration. Created in the late '70s, Brand's zoetrope is based on the 19th century invention that showed movement with a series of still pictures seen through slits. Decades later, the subway zoetrope was abused and in disrepair from graffiti and neglect from the city. Brand, getting access with an MTA key someone slipped him long ago, spent years lovingly going back to clean graffiti from his work in this abandoned train station until it was a hopeless cause. Now, after getting funding for clean up and proper lighting, it's back in full force. Below is good video of it since the Times's stinks. I love how the passengers totally dig the suprise in the first video.
Here is great vintage news footage from the early '80s, including interviews with passengers and artist Bill Brand talking about the zoetrope's conception and construction.
Walking around Soho, I saw a poster from about 50 feet away and had to do a double-take: Why would a gallery plaster the street with posters of an Alex Katz self-portrait?
Once I got closer, I realized the mistake. It's just an ad for Grand Theft Auto IV that happens to feature a character that looks like the artist (and in Katz's flat style).
But still. Since this is the fourth installment of the notoriously violent game, maybe they're trying a different approach to keep it fresh. Summering in Maine, cocktail parties, lunches with poets... The kids are going to love it!
For a few years now, I've kept a list of art shows I want to see at galleries and museums in New York. It's a little file on my Mac and I've updated every few weeks or so, as information comes to me. I try to keep a copy of the list on me at all times, since I never know when I'll find myself in midtown or the Upper East Side with a little time on my hands. Of years of ridiculously hording this knowledge, it finally occurred to me that other people might find this list useful in the quest to find quality art shows.
It's a page that I will update on a rolling basis and users can check into to see if there's anything interesting showing. I've put a handy graphic up on the right for easy access.
Since I haven't seen most of the shows on the list, I can't guarantee quality. Let me know if you've seen a show that you don't think deserves to be on the list, or a show that should be on it but isn't.
Everyone loves a parade! Or at least on a day when spring seems irrevocable and the nibs on the tips of trees are enchanting us into the thinking life might be for the enjoying. OK, that wasn't a sentence but really all I want to say is this:
First Annual LIC Bike Parade
Queens, New York
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Registration 11:30 AM
Workshops 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Parade 3:00 PM - 4:00PM Free / Rain or shine!
I finally made it out to the new New Museum on Bowery. I have fond memories of the old building in Soho, although I would always leave that space remembering the awkwardness and particularities of a museum shoe-horning itself into a very old building not designed for museum display.
The first thing I noticed approaching the new building on Bowery is that it looks like a prison, except designed for Dr. Caligari. I understand the steel fence is supposed to operate like a scrim, filtering out light to a shimmering effect. Instead, it just looks like constrictive chain link. WIthout many windows, the steel looks like it's designed to keep people in.
The charming, weird character of the old space -- the space I was sometimes frustrated with, but always remembered -- is gone. No more mini-mezzanine or exposed brick or little spaces for curators to figure out. That's been replaced with a lot of new space for exhibits. There are three floors for New Museum shows.
The space is generic. Large white box warehouse space that could be in Chelsea or Cleveland or anywhere. It's monumental space with high ceilings that can actually house monumental sculpture and painting (ironic, given the first show is called Unmonumental).
This big generic space is theoretically flexible -- they could build temporary walls for each exhibit. That didn't happen for "Unmonumental," but I hope it happens in the future. Otherwise, it's just a big space with a bunch of things thrown in, formless.
There are some good things about the new building. I love the roofdeck (see above). It actually looks like an advertisement for a new condo building, and in real life it looks that way too. Like living in the future, when the future is pretty much the same as the present except for lots and lots of white minimalist design. That effect is mixed in my mind, but any time you can be outside and mix public space with the open is OK with me.
And I feel like I should say the best thing about the new New Museum is the bathroom. There's a fantastic mosaic mural in there of grayscale flowers on bright orange. The flowers are comforting and the gray and orange accents the pixilation effect. So I guess that's new. In any case, it's a hell of a way to take a piss.
Could the new space be better? Yes. Is it better than the old space? Probably. For me, the most important thing is that they've made room to show more work. At a certain point the architecture isn't the point. Creating good shows is.
Wow. That headline sounds as if I were editorializing in the Akron Free Press. But anyways... on the the moralizing!
On Saturday, I got Punk'd. Starbucks has a clever marketing gimmick here in New York. They have cars driving around Manhattan with a Starbucks cup fastened on top, as if the driver accidentally forgot to bring his coffee in with him. As the car slowly cruises by, throngs of people on the sidewalk will point and yell at the driver that he forgot his coffee on top of the car. I actually walked up to the car to hand the driver his coffee and was greeted by the driver: "MERRY CHRISTMAS, FROM STARBUCKS!"
It's a clever idea. Too bad it's the season of giving, and not April Fool's Day. The total effect of the Starbucks campaign is to make people feel foolish for not getting it. It's like Starbucks took us. This would be appropriate for a Halloween trick-or-treat, but not for Hannukah and Christmas.
The appropriate thing to do would be for the driver to give a gift certificate for a free coffee to anyone kind enough to try to take the coffee off the top of the car. That way, Starbucks would be endorsing acts of kindness. Instead, it's a gotcha moment.
I saw another car today. The same thing happened to others as happened to me. For shame, Starbucks!
[And yes, I did write this as a ploy that some Starbucks official would send me free gift certificates. 'Tis the season!]
We moved to Long Island City. My old super, who is 72 years old and has only twice left a two-block radius on the east side, keeps asking us "How's Long Island?" She doesn't understand. LIC is in no way like LI. Unlike the Brooklyn old-school brownstone neighborhoods, and unlike the tacky weirdness of other Queens neighborhoods, LIC is a strange beast. It's a weird, funky neighborhood of factories and garages and stray houses. It's been filled up with old-timers, artists, Latinos, and now a new breed of folks looking for a reasonably priced neighborhood with a classic New York vibe. And we've found it in LIC.
So I'm neighborhood proud. And there's a great website devoted to it all: LICNYC. Check it out.
They're not just in Kansas anymore. The pseudo-scientists have invaded New York state and are pushing for our kids to learn Creationism 2.0. This stuff isn't junk science, it's just junk. The summary of the bill introduced to the NY State Legislature on May 3 by Catskill Assemblyman Daniel Hooker:
Add S803-b, Ed L
Requires teaching in both theories of intelligent design and evolution in their
curriculums; provides that the board of education or trustees of every school
district shall provide appropriate training and curriculum materials for the
regular teachers who will be providing such instruction, to ensure that all
aspects of the theories, along with any supportive date, is fully examined.
Campbell states that the book addresses the question, "Should public school science teachers be free to teach the controversies over biological origins?" His introduction sets the tone for the discussion of this question with three false assertions: "ID is a science, a philosophy, and a movement for educational reform." As science, Campbell says, ID is "an argument against the orthodox Darwinian claim that mindless forces-such as variation, inheritance, natural selection, and time-can account for the principal features of the biological world." As a philosophy, it is a "critique of the prevailing philosophy of science that limits explanation to purely physical or material causes." As educational reform, "ID is a public movement to make Darwinism-its evidence, philosophic presuppositions, and rhetorical tactics-a matter of informed, broad, and spirited public discussion."
Science, however, does not consist of "arguments against" anything. People who claim to have a scientific theory must actually do scientific work and produce original, empirical data; but at an October 2002 ID conference, CSC fellow William Dembski, ID's leading intellectual, admitted that while ID has made cultural inroads, it enjoys no scientific success. And in criticizing science's limitation to material, i.e., natural, explanations, Campbell reveals ID to be not a philosophy, but a religious belief that would explain natural phenomena by invoking the only alternative: the supernatural. Campbell, of course, cannot use that term without divulging ID's religious identity, which is the chief obstacle to the Wedge's plans for educational "reform." But the public discussion of "Darwinism" that Campbell seeks to advance toward such reform is nothing more than the usual creationist carping against evolution.
Forrest makes a great point later -- all the Intelligent Design theory is coming from people who are NOT working evolutionary biologists. They're Bible thumpers in an Ivory Tower who only have pseudo-scientific qualifications and don't know the first thing about collecting and interpreting data. What they're pushing isn't science, and New York must not let their agenda into our science classrooms.
Is Manhattan ready for Leslie Crocker Snyder? The former prosecutor plans to challenge District Attorney Robert Morgenthau this year in the Democratic primary. Snyder's main argument? Morgenthau's dusty. He's 86 years old. Also, he spends a lot of money and attention on white-collar and terrorism-related crimes that are better handled by the Feds. This New Yorker article has a kicker of a close:
Now Morgenthau, who was born closer to the Presidency of Martin Van Buren than to that of George W. Bush, is looking ahead. “I have a lot of unfinished business here,” he said. Indeed, Morgenthau believes that he may go on even longer than another four-year term. As I was getting ready to leave his office, I asked him whether he would promise not to run for a tenth term in 2009, when he will be ninety years old. “Never say never,” Morgenthau said. “Wouldn’t want to be a lame duck.”
New Yorkers, watch your wallets when friends of Reverend Al enter the room.
A top presidential fund-raiser for the Rev. Al Sharpton was convicted yesterday in a massive Philadelphia pay-for-play corruption trial.
...
Hawkins and Philly powerbroker Ron White were caught on FBI tapes saying Sharpton could gain them access to New York City pension funds and "billions" in Pepsi contracts. White died before trial.
"Let's say they [Pepsi] probably have some minority mandates . . . We could take insurance, we could take printing, we could take their pension fund . . . If you just broke off, like, you know, 10 percent of that s- - -, man, like, you talking billions," White tells Hawkins on a March 31, 2003, tape.
It's a travesty the good Reverend holds one iota of power in NY politics.
A prominent NY Republican has joined the slow fight for treating marijuana in a rational way. State Senator Vincent Leibell introduced a bill that would allow doctors to prescribe pot for seriously ill patients.
The GOP convention has been very generous to special interest groups this week, but certain New York City businesses have suffered from the Republican love machine.
For many of the businesses near the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, this week has been far from a party.
Yury Vinogradov estimates business is off 80 percent at his store, It's Another Hit, which sells baseball cards and comic books on West 33rd Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues.
"Exceptionally bad," said Vinogradov, 47, when an employee of a nearby tuxedo shop stopped by and asked, "How's it going?"
Vinogradov's store is on a street blocked by barricades; pedestrians must show identification to proceed or name a specific store or address where they are going.
But it's not just businesses that have been hurting. Hotel concierges, are complaining too:
They say Republicans are the certainly the party of fiscal restraint — at least with their own money.
"I wouldn't call them bad tippers — I'd call them non-tippers!" said Thomas Potesak, a concierge at the Sheraton Manhattan, where the Alaska, Iowa, South Dakota and Virgin Islands delegates are bunking.
On any given night in New York City, you can see Julie Atlas Muz swimming in an aquarium as a mermaid, peeling off the outlandish costumes she dons, or covered in fake blood in the basement of a gay bar--in essence, expressing her bawdy, irreverent and unexpected sense of humor. Humor being as essential aspect of her work, Muz never strays too far from the burlesque--forever dedicated to keeping dance in the realm of the absurd.
My reality collided with reality TV during episode seven of NBC’s The Apprentice. The premise was a hyped-up competition over real estate. The remaining participants were challenged to renovate and rent one of two ‘rundown’ Brooklyn apartments in 48 hours. One of those apartments was a third-floor, one-bedroom in a brownstone on Third Street, where my family and I live on the first two floors. On screen, the team leaders stood outside our stoop and negotiated for the apartment above us. Off screen, we knew a few things they didn’t. A month before, for instance, the previous occupant and my upstairs neighbor had jumped out the window.
My second home is no more. Yesterday MoMA's Gramercy Theater on 23rd Street bid adieu with a retrospective of Sofia Coppola's films. The ridiculous idea of cannonizing Ms. Coppola after two-and-a-half films fits my sadness, which is for the loss of something that was a temporary home while the museum fleshes out its expanded 53rd Street space.
The Gramercy was close to both apartments I've had while living in New York. The screen was the perfect size, and every seat on the floor was fantastic. The experience at the Gramercy was second only to the Walter Reade for optimal viewing. And plus, there were those weird bleachers where you could make out if the movie were right.
Because of my corporate slavery, I could get in free with a certain company's ID. The Gramercy made a real classic movie buff out of me as I watched the entire series on Nicholas Ray and Vincente Minnelli. And when the lights came on, you could quickly turn around and see an army of old cotton-topped retirees coming out of their slumber, some slunk back with their mouths open.
The 53rd Street theater will re-open November 20, 2004. Here's an Observer article about the squabbling in MoMA's film department.
I'm So Loathsome I Could Cry, or Five of the Least Loathsome New Yorkers
Following the oft-bandied-about New York Press list of the 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers, we can't help but wonder why a small magazine few people actually read is always so, well, hateful. And while it's certainly easier (and ok, perhaps slightly more fun) to bitch your way into New York's blogland, we prefer to celebrate the best NY has to offer. Without further ado, we present five of dailygusto's Least Loathsome New Yorkers.
We've mentioned him before, and we'll doubtless mention him again. Although his timeslot is more elusive than Bin Laden, every week Ed brings us the "premier guide to high and low culture" on cable access TV. From the impossible-to-find film clips to the "Deceased Artiste" tributes, Ed is a fount of both useful and useless information delivered in his frighteningly overcaffeinated fashion.
For more info on Ed, check out this oldie but goodie article on him for SVA's Visual Opinion, penned by dailygusto's very own J. Mattthew Brauer.
4) Mario Batali
Mario could make this list simply by not being the ubiquitous, smirking Bobby Flay. While we at Gusto aren't rich enough to afford Babbo, the antipasti at Otto is terrific.
3) Sarah Vowell
Smart, witty, prolific, and a gifted storyteller. Also a great Conan guest. 'Nuff said.
2) The Good People at NY 1
Ah, the All Nerd Network. Despite its Time Warner Cable ownership, NY1 is consistently a welcome break from the sensationalist Problem Solving morons at Fox 5 News and their many program tie-ins ("Tonight's story - could you be America's Next Top Model?"). With its long-format, in-depth news, interviews, and opinion, NY1 is the best news thing going on local television.
1) Jen Chung, aka "Jen Gothamist"
We honestly don't know how Jen does it. Not only does she manage to post stories light-years before anyone else, while holding down a full-time job, she goes where few bloggers before her have dared to go -- she updates on the weekends. And unlike the "loathsome" Choire Gawker (for whom we will admit to a certain fondness, anyway), her posts are funny and interesting without unnecessary bitchiness or hipster posturing. Gothamist is THE place to go for all things New York (or alternately, all things Law & Order).
p.s. We wanted to make this a round ten but work is sadly interfering. I'd love to hear other ideas, though, so email me at teapot at dailygusto dot com if you have suggestions.
It's a true cliche about New York that despite its size, it's quite insular, particularly within neighborhoods. You end up seeing a lot of the same people over and over again -- sometimes acknowledging each other's presence, sometimes not.
If I had any artistic talent, these are the neighbors I'd draw:
1. The aging punk-rocker in a similarly-aging Ramones t-shirt, fine shoulder-length curly yellow hair, and a limp, from my old neighborhood in Chelsea. I always saw him (from my balcony) crossing 23rd Street on 7th Ave. Wonder where he was going?
2. The wiry-gray-haired woman in her mid-fifties who lived in our Chelsea building; I think her name was Dottie (although I may have imagined that because she looked like a Dottie). When I'd see her in the building, she would speak to me briefly in an abrupt yet strangely monotone manner, but she never acknowledged me when I passed her on the street. One day when I met her coming out of the elevator, she blurted out, "I'm dying of cancer," as if she'd just found out but it hadn't fully sunk in yet. I'm not sure she had anyone else to tell. I didn't have a clue what to say, so I just said, "I'm so sorry" as she walked toward her apartment.
3. Our doormen, also in Chelsea, who knew us predominately as "Oh, yeah -- you're the Red Sox fans."
4. Our current upstairs neighbors, frat-boy types whom I've never seen but whom I associate mostly with yelling, since they a) often come into the building talking in raised, cruel voices; and b) have sporting event get-togethers where an entire throng of frattish boys scream at once.
5. Our 60+ year-old female super Lindy, who goes drinking and playing pool several times a week but who always seems ashamed when we pass her outside the bar. Since we live on the first floor, we often hear her muttering to herself about the "idiot tenants" when she's gathering up the trash.
For other neighborhood stats nerds like me, the New York Department of City Planning has extremely detailed neighborhood demographic profiles. Or for an altogether different kind of stats, check out the oldie-but-goodie Bohemian Index, also on The Morning News.
I'm quite excited. Today is my big court appearance. Not as a defendant (they'll never catch me!) but as a juror. What's got me really excited is the hope that my experience will be something like Pauly Shore's in the 1995 movie "Jury Duty." You've got to watch the trailer and get excited about "lifestyles of the rich and sequestered."
Slate has an optimistic story about the changing fads of New York apartment architecture. Author Alex Marshall notes:
"Meier's Perry Street and Pasqarelli's Porter House buildings have sold out at prices per square foot considerably higher than average. This may prompt more developers to realize that adding creative, original architecture can mean more money in their pockets, and this may eventually improve the skyline and streets of this city and others."
Yes, and this will lead to a golden age of New York architecture where everyone pays a reasonable rent. And no neighbors will ever catch a rat on a sticky trap and throw it out their back window into my flower pots. Tour an apartment at the new Perry Street towers and wonder how $12 million penthouses will make our living rooms better.
Adam Gopnik reviews a few histories of Times Square in the latest New Yorker. Definitely a must-read.
The myth they want to dispel is that the cleanup of Times Square in the nineties was an expression of Mayor Giuliani’s campaign against crime and vice, and of his companion tendency to accept a sterilized environment if they could be removed, and that his key corporate partner in this was the mighty Disney, which led the remaking of West Forty-second Street as a theme park instead of an authentic urban street. As Traub and Sagalyn show, this is nearly the reverse of the truth. It was Mayor Koch who shaped the new Times Square, if anyone did, while the important private profit-makers and players were almost all purely local: the Old Oligarchs, the handful of rich, and mostly Jewish, real-estate families—the Rudins, Dursts, Roses, Resnicks, Fishers, Speyers, and Tishmans, as Sagalyn crisply enumerates them. Mayor Giuliani, basically, was there to cut the ribbon, and Disney to briefly lend its name.
Isn't it great when architecture and food collide? No, not the towers of food at Gramercy Tavern. On the way to lunch today I took a look at the models for New York's 2012 Olympic bid. Several people wondered who has won the bid for 2008, and what their village will look like. Wonder no further! Take a look at the upcoming Athens 2004 Olympic Village before checking out San Francisco's Sasaki Associates plan for Beijing 2008.
There's no clear victor in the battle to transform Queens in eight years. Henning Larsens Tegnestue has some nice touches (windmills!) and their twisting hourglass skyscrapers would be a great addition to the skyline. But the pattern of buildings isolates the community in a way that might facilitate a great Olympic experience, but leave behind an alienated mass of buildings disconnected from the surrounding communities (like Battery Park City).
Morphosis' plan includes short buildings that seductively curve along the waterfront, with a boardwalk through 43 acres of restored (re-invented) wetlands and a nice promenade. But the skyscrapers look like a psychologist's experiment and again, the community is cut off from the surrounding neigborhoods. What's the point of building a beach only a handful of people will go to?
And if you want that "ancient Egypt on the East River via Bladerunner" look, MVRDV's towers are for you. Truncated pyramids stretch high into the sky, leaning in different directions, with different colored glass marking each building. Kind of interesting, kind of scary. And the beach looks like a Christo art project, but at least it's big enough to be an attraction and keep people coming to the area long after the Olympics are gone.
If you're looking for sustainability, Smith-Miller + Hawkinson have added a transit hub to insure New Yorkers will come through this Hunters Point community, and integrated the building plan into the current street pattern. This plan is the one that best folds the Olympic village into the city.
And finally, if you've ever wandered New York and thought "boy, this landscape just isn't textured enough," then maybe Zaha Hadid's plan is for you. The footprint pattern is a mass of clustered organic forms.
Very quick little story. I was just returning a car to the Hertz on E. 24th, and this guy (apparently a regular) was exclaiming to the Hertz lady about how the customers at the 24th St. Hertz are so much nicer than the ones at the 76th St. Hertz. To prove his point, he told the lady about a time he was there when Joan Rivers was waiting for a car. Apparently, Joan had a major fit about the service (quelle surprise!) and threw a pen at a Hertz employee, hitting him in the eye, screaming, "I'm Joan Rivers! I shouldn't have to wait for a goddamn car."
Everybody in the Hertz shared a chuckle, as if to say, "That crazy bitch Joan."
Made my day, for some reason.
p.s. I originally titled this with a pun on hurts/Hertz, but I decided you deserve better.
Manhattan User's Guide asked some of their favorite NYC bloggers to describe their ten favorite things about the city. My server's been having problems, so I think my questionnaire got lost somewhere along the way. Without further ado, then, my 10 Favorite Things about NYC.
1. Faces
How many faces does the average New Yorker see each day? My non-scientific estimate is about 1,247. In the street, I've seen ruddy CEOs leaving their sleek black cars and blinged-out hip-hoppers smiling through the windows of their stretch Hummers. On the subway, I once saw a sickly strung-out heroin addict's drool falling down to his chest as he nodded out, the drool bobbing with the movements of the train, and the face of a drunk man laughing his ass off as the druggie's head kept rising... and falling... and rising... and falling. And I've seen the face of Soupy Sales. New York exposes you to every variety of human expression, and every moment has a story.
2. Curry Row
There's something charming about walking down 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. Maybe it's seeing the thousands of blinking red hot pepper party lights strung inside the Indian restaurants. Maybe it's hearing the sitar players, or smelling the spices wafting out of the over a dozen restaurants. My favorite part is the men standing outside each restaurant holding the door open and shouting for you to come in as another man from another restaurant tries to outshout him as he holds his door open. If you go to one of the red pepper light places, the experience is positively psychedelic as Indian music blares from speakers and you realize all four walls are mirrored, reflecting the red lights to infinity as you realize why the Beatles went to India. The food ranges from very good (Calcutta) to very bad. But the experience is always delightful.
3. Morning Light
When I first moved to New York, the only way I could orient myself when I came up from the subway every morning was to look at the light, and see where it was coming from. During rush hour an amber and violet light hits Manhattan from the east, blessing the dark grids of midtown skyscrapers with a digital glow. The uneven spacing and height of the tall buildings creates a collage of light cleaving the space, lighting one corner on fire in yellow and blanketing another in shadowed darkness. Only in New York can you spend an entire morning walking through a stained glass window.
4. Local Sorta-Celebrity Sightings
Everyone can appreciate seeing Uma Thurman (walking down 23rd Street), Robin Williams (shoe shopping in Transit), or David Byrne (leaving a Chelsea art gallery). But my favorite is to spot local sorta-celebrities. I go to plays and see people's indie movies and hear people's bands, and it's great to see the great creative people out and about, like seeing public access TV host Ed Grant at the Winter Garden, or Eric Davis (aka The Red Bastard) at a movie theater. In a town where people are trying to express themselves, it's great to know that we're all part of the same community.
5. Delis
Where else can you get a four-inch tall stack of pastrami on a sandwich with a perfectly frothy egg cream? There are the usual classic places, but when I need a salt-cured meat sandwich delivered at 3am to soak up the alcohol, my favorite place is Sarge's. They're open 24-hours a day, seven days a week. In an age where it seems every restaurant is over-designed and every menu full of trans-continental fusion food, nothing beats an old-school deli for casual comfort.
7. Quality Skyscrapers
Let's face it: New York is full of ugly buildings. The unholy marriage of avant-garde aethetics and corporate capital produced a baby and called it modernist architecture. I've seen the Seagram Building, and it sucks. Even though New York is full of depressing thousand-foot characterless boxes, there are also fantastic modern cathedrals where one wants to work and live. When I walk down my block, I look at the sleek and sensual Chrysler Building and the gothic majesty of the Empire State and realize that there's nothing wasteful about paying a big price for architecture you can live with. Living in NYC would be drab without the Woolworth, the Chanin, the Flatiron, the Met Life, and Grand Central.
8. Horse Racing
Going to watch the Belmont Stakes is one of those New York things that you've just got to do. You get on a train at Penn Station in the morning and people are already opening their coolers on the train and feeling good. The place is packed. Everyone's dressed like they're going to the yacht club and plastered like cheap sculpture. The horses are magnificent, the pageantry exquisite, and it feels good to win. When the time comes for the big race and you hear the sounds of "New York, New York," you'll join with the drunken crowd and feel like you're king of the hill.
9. Street Food
When you find that your $8 sandwich from Cafe Trend is flavorless, remember the food carts. Of course there are the old standbys of hotdog vendors, pretzel carts, and carts warming hot nuts, but I like the Halal carts that dot midtown during the lunch hour. For $3.50, you can get a heap of lamb or chicken or falafel on top of a bed of rice and a salad on the side. There's the Hallo Berlin's wurst pushcart, at 54th and 5th. And during the summer, Danny Meyer rolls his hotdog cart out to Madison Square Park and serves both New York and Chicago-style dogs.
10. The Turtle Pond
Yes, there is wildlife in New York other than pigeons, rats, and cockroaches. But the seemingly dozens of turtles sunning themselves and frolicking together in Central Park don't really belong there. People buy turtles as pets and at some point realize that these cute little critters can actually live over fifty years and decide to ditch their living novelties into the Turtle Pond. One day I watched from Belvedere Castle above as ten turtles formed a weird conga line as they swam through the water, following each other as the sun glistened off their charcoal shells. Where else can you watch naturally individualistic creatures thrown together and behaving in abnormal communal ways?
This is what happens when I'm behind on my blog reading and writing -- I miss a 
My second home is no more. Yesterday MoMA's Gramercy Theater on 23rd Street 
Following the oft-bandied-about New York Press list of the 
I'm quite excited. Today is my big court appearance. Not as a defendant (they'll never catch me!) but as a juror. What's got me really excited is the hope that my experience will be something like Pauly Shore's in the 1995 movie "
Slate has an 
Isn't it great when architecture and food collide? No, not the towers of food at Gramercy Tavern. On the way to lunch today I took a look at the models for 
