November 15, 2005
The Cloisters
Way, way up at nearly the northernmost point of Manhattan is the Cloisters Museum, a collection of medieval art in a setting designed to recreate the original context in which the art would have been displayed. It's pretty amazing, and hard to believe you're on the same island, in the same city that holds Times Square. As part of the bus ride assignment for Applications, we had to ride the M5 bus to 175th street, and since we were so close to the museum we decided to check it out.
Posted November 15, 2005 05:27 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 10 | Permalink
November 08, 2005
Fall Colors in the NE and the Empire State Building
And the New York City Marathon. This week was a banner week for me doing new things (much to the chagrin of that part of me that was trying to get work done).
On Saturday I went for a hike in Chappaqua with Alix and Susan, two friends of mine from Pomona. It was a great escape from the city. And, judging by the colors, perfect timing. This was my first bona fide experience of being blown away by the fall colors. I have heard a lot about how great the leaves in New England are, but I really hadn't had the experience of seeing them firsthand until now. I was deluded into thinking that Utah's leaves compete (actually, I still think Utah's leaves compete against these. But these were pretty awesome.)
And then on Sunday morning I went to David's apartment in Fort Greene to watch the runners whiz by.
As I was watching the marathon, I got a call from my best friend from college, Daniel, aka the Danimal. He was in town from LA and wanted to hang out. We met up that evening and he took me to the top of the Empire State Building. His grandfather had designed it, so he had a pass that let us skip the lines and go straight to the top.
Posted November 8, 2005 12:59 AM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 9 | Permalink
October 31, 2005
The $5 Haircut
It is said that you can find anything in New York. For the past two weeks I have been on a mission. As my locks got ever longer (some would say mangier), I searched the city in vain for the holy grail of cheap haircuts: the $5 haircut. Unswayed by cheerful Supercuts ads and $2 off coupons online, I kept my ear to the ground, diligently tracking down leads, to no avail. On Friday afternoon, however, a small, hand-lettered sign taped to the wall of my gym caught my eye. Maybe it was the judicious use of green and pink highlighter that I saw; maybe the misspellings and solecisms grabbed me; you can call it whatever you want. I call it fate.
The King Barber school, the ad said, located on 3rd avenue between 9th and 10th streets. "Ask for George. Haircuts $5."
I swaggered through the plate glass doorway, shook the hair from in front of my eyes, and surveyed the scene. Which of the estimable hair stylist herein would I deem worthy of trimming my mane? For a few moments, none stepped forward, and then a single brave soul whom I will dub "Jorge"—due to my not remembering or not having been told his name—looked me in the eye. "What you want?" He asked in a gravelly baritone.
"I'm here for the $5 haircut," I replied, leveling his gaze. With nary another word I was swept into a barber's chair and enrobed in a fetid black cape. Jorge and I negotiated the deals of the haircut (price: $5. length: shorter in the back), and he went to work with, his hair trimmer droning away.
Like many of the upper-class hair salons that charge 2, even 3 times the amount at Kings, the hair stylists there have an apparent moratorium on scissors. No matter. Jorge and his mentor "Sal" (name also apocryphal) deftly showcased the range of the common hair trimmer, using it superbly for both fine detail work and to shear great locks of hair at once.
If I were to make one niggling complaint (and it be a minor one), it would be this: Jorge, with his black comb, seemed to have a personal vendetta against my protruding ears. Time and again he sliced the comb through my hair only to whack it against my gibbous (and not slightly tender) flesh, so much so that I would be unable to contain a pavlovian grimace every time he wielded that shiny plastic weapon.
So how's the haircut? You can judge for yourself. Personally, I feel a little bit too much like a Willard-era Crispin Glover.
Posted October 31, 2005 06:21 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 8 | Permalink
October 16, 2005
Digital Life
I gathered some friends from ITP and went to Digital Life, the consumer electronics and gaming convention, on Friday afternoon. The convention was a huge extravaganza, and reminded me of ComDex, which I used to go to with my Dad and Uncle while I was in college. DigitalLife promised to show us new products, exciting new games, and celebrities. I was there for the freebies, and as such, I was pretty disappointed.
The tickets to Digital Life were being given away rather promiscuously (promotion codes could be found all over google), and I'm guessing with the volume of thrill-seekers (as opposed to actual buyers) present, giveaways were not as high a priority as at Comdex. Still, there were a fair number of trinkets being handed out (I got an RCA dog keychain), but the lines were ridiculous. The big to-do when we arrived on Friday afternoon was the Tivo giveaway—apparently Tivo had held a "funeral for VHS" at noon, and anyone who came by to drop off a blank VHS cassette as part of the service could get a free Tivo if they also purchased a year's worth of service at the same time. There were people smugly toting their free Tivos all over the convention floor.
I couldn't help but be smitten by this cute little robot. He's only about 14 inches tall.
At the same booth, however, there was a really creepy animatronic monkey head with weird rubbery skin (and quite a bite). I got a picture of Matt with him, and a detail shot below.
There was also a large gaming influence, and to celebrate the release of a new Star Wars-themed game, Storm Troopers were roaming the floor.
Among the games, non-standard controls seemed to be a theme. There was a fighting game where the controls were little transmitters one wears on each wrist like bracelets. I saw someone flailing wildly but having dubious success in the game. There was also a slew of mats used as input, for running and jumping. There was another, a bowling game, with an actual bowling ball used as the input device. The kid trying to bowl had to take four wind-ups before he was able to successfully get the bowl rolling down the lane (gutterball). Clearly, the consumer electronics industry has a ways to go with the cutting-edge control pads/devices.
Posted October 16, 2005 07:33 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 6 | Permalink
October 11, 2005
Concerts, Events, my father's Godmother
I didn't do any single standout event that I could write about this week, so I'll attempt to cull all the little mini-new experiences I had and mash them together into something that counts as my new experience for the week.
Starting on Saturday night, I saw the band Graham Smith at Tonic, a bar just south of Houston on the east side. It poured on Saturday night so there weren't that many people in the bar and there was also a large puddle in the middle of the room, right in front of the stage. Going to a concert in New York is not new for me. In fact, I wrote about seeing the Spinto Band for my new experience in week two.
I also saw Graham Smith again last night (Monday night), when his band played at Mo Pitkin's. Going to see a band twice in a row is, perhaps surprisingly, also not a new experience for me—I saw the Spinto Band two weeks in a row, too. My new experience was the dawning, while watching Graham Smith play last night, that I have come to appreciate music in a completely different way than I used to.
I was a late bloomer, musically. I bought my first CD, Smashing Pumpkins' double Melon-collie and the Infinite Sadness, my junior year of high school. I made up for the lost time with the intensity of my devotion, however. From that point on I was hooked, always searching for something new and obscure to listen to. At that time, music was an enveloping thing for me. I gave a lot to it, and took a lot out of it as well. I derived vitality, self-confidence and meaning from those songs that I would listen to for hours, probing the lyrics.
As much as I was into music then, though, I wasn't really a concert-goer. This is partly due to circumstance: the nearest city that could draw any band I ever wanted to see was 85 miles away. Despite this, I never really enjoyed the music as much as I did when I could hear it on my own terms. I wasn't a spontaneous enjoyer of music. This is not to say that I didn't have fun at the shows I went to. I did, and when I would get back to my bed late at night it wouldn't be just my ears that were buzzing. My whole body was alive, having sponged up the energy of the event. Looking back on those concerts, they were great.
At the time, though, they only ever really affected me when I heard songs I already knew by heart. In the distortion and confusion of your typical punk-rock show, the subtleties of the melody get lost unless you already have them running in your head. I used to be fond of saying that I had to like a band before I saw them, that I never really fell in love with any band the first time I heard them.
Lately, though, for really the first time that I have ever noticed it, I've been drawn into a songs hooks from the first chords of its bridge. Last night I saw a band for the first time, and though I didn't like all their songs, there were a couple that immediately struck me, and I didn't feel like a poser anymore bobbing my head to their beat. The reason I came back on Monday to see Graham Smith again, in fact, was because I was instantly in tune with his songs, and had to hear them again. The setlist was little changed from the previous show, and I found that after just one listen, I already recognized lyrics, hooks, bridges, etc. It was great.
My father's godmother, an amazing 91-year-old woman, lives on the upper east side and I try to make a point to visit her every time she's in town. I used to live in Boston and I would visit her every few months when I would take the Chinatown bus down to New York. Her name is Margie McBain.
Margie had a stroke about a year ago so she has lost some control of her faculties, and sometimes has trouble remembering who people are. My dad warned me that I might be surprised if I was expecting her to look like she had when I last visited her a couple years ago (he had seen her earlier in the summer, so he knew firsthand how she was doing). Margie was bedridden and the stroke had made it so that she couldn't really use much of the left side of her body.
I had to sit on the right side of her bed and lean in close to hear what she had to say, but we were able to carry on a pleasant conversation. I mostly regaled her with stories of what I, my sister, my parents, my relatives had been up to lately.
Posted October 11, 2005 01:49 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 5 | Permalink
October 04, 2005
Fisher's Island
Last Friday I went to Fisher's Island, a small (approx 4 or 5 sq miles) island about 5 miles off the coast of New London, CT. I was invited to come stay by Mary, an old friend from college. Her family has two houses there along the shore that have been in the family since the time of her great-grandfather. She's been going there every summer since she was young, just like her mother did.
I am a rural kid, mostly. I was raised in Logan, UT, a small town (pop. 40K) in northern Utah about 20 miles from the nearest interstate, and about 80 miles from any airport. I am used to open space, no traffic, ample parking, the ability to drive 5 minutes and be hiking in the wilderness in solitude. When I am living in a city, the need for aloneness in nature wells up over time and, every few months, turns into a powerful force that drives me out into the country, however I can get it. I knew that, living in New York, I would be visited by this feeling sooner or later.
I actually haven't yet heard the call of nature; the energy of the city still buoys me nicely. But I considered my weekend jaunt to be a kind of stay against that feeling when it comes.
Being on Fisher's island did drive home the relativism of the idea of Peace and Quiet. Sitting on a park bench in Washington Square with my head in a book, or sitting on a hill in Central Park had begun to feel peaceful to me. Sitting on a bench at the end of the boathouse, with no humans in sight (excepting those piloting sailboats across the sound), upset my Peace and Quiet equilibrium, for it was several layers deeper; the quiet fairly rang in my ears.
Posted October 4, 2005 11:43 AM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 4 | Permalink
September 26, 2005
Robert Smithson's Floating Island
Update: Kara blogged this too.
Because I was out too late at TNO* the night before, I overslept a little and had to rush to meet my friend Kara at her office on Broadway. We hurried east on Houston all the way to the river, but we made it just in time to see, as Kara called it, "the ass of the boat," heading downriver. There was construction at the river's edge, and a chain-link fence keeping us about 30 feet from the river, so we scampered south to get a better view. Of course, by the time we got there the boat had turned around, so we scampered back again, and again caught the ass of the boat, with island in tow.
(This is the official link for the island at the Whitney Museum)
The elusiveness of the island gave it a bit of a mystical feel for me, as though it were always just out of reach. Similarly, I feel like any sort of complete understanding of its significance as art lay just a little out of reach the whole time.
The island is, in a sense, a gigantic, floating flowerpot: There is a great mass of dirt in a flat, wooden frame, with around a half-dozen trees planted in it, and grass covering all the dirt. All of this is pulled along the water by a tugboat, at about 5 miles per hour. When the exhibition is finished (on Saturday, Sep 24), the trees will be planted in Central Park.
I knew of Smithson because of his "Spiral Jetty" sculpture, which was built in the 70s in the Great Salt Lake. I grew up in Utah, and the idea of a contemporary artist choosing someplace as conservative and unfriendly to contemporary art as Utah for (what became) his masterpiece, seemed odd somehow. As a result, the jetty has always stuck in my mind as Utah's one piece of modern art. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a higher profile outside of Utah—no one I knew growing up had any idea that the sculpture existed, virtually in their backyard.
Sometimes the point of art is simply to provoke a reaction, any reaction, in the viewer. There were a lot of things going through my mind when I saw the island, but the overwhelming response was to laugh. The incongruity, the paltriness of just a few skinny, almost plaintive trees, against the backdrop of the most industrial river I have ever seen, was hilarious. I struggled to make sense of it, and then, failing, couldn't help myself but to laugh.
*Thursday Night Out
Posted September 26, 2005 07:16 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 3 | Permalink
September 25, 2005
Everything Happens in New York
While on the subway reading the Onion, I noticed first that an obscure band from my college, We Are Scientists, was playing that night in the village. I then noticed that another obscure band, comprised of the high school friends of two of my college friends and called the Spinto Band, was also playing the same night.
Probably not that remarkable considering the volume of bands that rock through NYC everyday except that I had just been in LA visiting one of said friends who played a bunch of songs off the Spinto's latest release for me. He was also going to burn me the CD but forgot to, and then later when he offered to send it to me I demurred, saying I'd just support his friends' band and buy it myself here in New York. So ever since school started I've been looking for the Spinto Band's latest CD.
And then I find that they are playing, right in my area, that night, for only $10. It seemed like a remarkable coincidence, and I count myself very lucky to have been browsing the A.V. section of the Onion at that moment.
The Spintos played as part of the CMJ Music Marathon at the Pianos Bar in the East Village, and I was able to both name-drop our mutual acquaintances' names and purchase a CD directly from the band. Mission accomplished.
The show itself was quite good. Reviews for their latest CD on Amazon are splattered with commendations of the bandmembers' lackadaisical, none-too-serious stage presence. I agree—they seemed both humble and talented and unpretentious, which is rare. And sometimes they even seemed to be mocking themselves, which I'm not sure I like, but it's better than most of the alternatives.
The backup singer/guitarist had the most stage presence, although in his case it should probably be called strange presence: As he played, he would rock up and down, his guitar's head rising and falling like the prow of a ship in heavy seas, with a goofy, gape-mouthed grin and his eyes bug-eyed toward the sky, like someone in the throes of the rapture. I found it pretty disorienting, and he teetered from being annoying to just silly enough to be amusing.
On the CD that I purchased, there was a sticker comparing the Spinto Band to Pavement, the Flaming Lips and Yo La Tengo. I can hear it, yeah, but the lead singer so reminded me of Rivers Cuomo that I kept envisioning them as a fledgling Weezer.
I found out in talking to the band after their set that they're playing again this weekend at the Mercury Lounge. I'm going to go, and this time I'll figure out what's up with that backup singer.
Posted September 25, 2005 10:56 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 2 | Permalink
September 21, 2005
A walk around Hall's Pond
Over the weekend I visited my girlfriend in Boston, and on Sunday morning her grandmother took us to a nearby nature preserve, Hall's Pond. Three and a half acres of pond, marshland and woods are hidden there, in the middle of residential Brookline, MA, just behind the stately brownstones of Beacon Street and about 6 or 7 blocks from Boston University and Commonwealth Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares of the city. When we first approached the pond, a blue heron was at the water's edge, staring at us.
I used to live in Brookline, a little over a year ago, not far from Hall's Pond, and so I was surprised that I had never known of it before, especially because I used to take long walks all around my neighborhood. The twin realizations that raw nature can still exist in a busy city and that it can be so well-hidden got me to thinking about the balance that humans are continually striking not only with the environment but, in a larger sense, with each others' needs for space.
Even though my family moved numerous times (within the same city) when I was young, I don't think I ever had more than an inchoate sense of the way that there are options to consider and compromises that are made regarding the proximity to others, to nature, to the rest of a city, when choosing a dwelling. It wasn't until the fall after my graduation, when I moved to Boston, that I had any real experience of the conscious choosing of a place to live. (I lived on campus all four years of school and, for all their idiosyncrasies, the dorms at Pomona were all similar enough and close enough together to make the choosing of a room not that important of a decision. Certainly choosing a room was far less important than choosing a roommate, say.)
So it was after I first lived in an apartment in a city that I learned peripatetically how a housing decision can affect the structure of one's life; where one walks to buy food and other staples, to catch the T, to send a letter, to get money from an ATM, even the people one meets on a daily basis are dictated in large part by the location of that ultimate destination, the home. I am still occasionally fascinated when I see homes or apartment buildings to think about the lives of the inhabitants and why they chose to live where they do. I am especially curious on long car trips about those who live in America's smallest towns, dotted around the country. What do they do for fun? What is it that keeps them in their little villages? What do they do for a living?
I came to realize that, while the choice of a home is largely a private choice, as a society we—through our elected officials—also choose the makeup and layout of cities. Zoning plans, public transportation systems and routes, availability of green space, and so on all affect the quality of life for the residents of a community. In our urban centers land becomes increasingly precious the more community members there are that must share it, and so the questions of how best to use the land also become increasingly difficult.
Most of the time, in situations where space is in such short supply and high demand, its preservation in natural form seems to some short-sighted city leaders the least effective use of it. I was glad, then, to find that Hall's Pond had been preserved by the thoughtful council-people of Brookline. I found it an apposite complement to the city life and an excellent place to contemplate nature and one's place in it. Or, for that matter, nature's place in the city.
Posted September 21, 2005 08:49 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 1 | Permalink