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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Things I’ve been doing in New York:
That’s it for New York experiences for now. I am sure there will be others in the future. I’ll keep on exploring.
Tonight was a good night.
It started off with seeing Kid Beyond, live-looping beatboxer extraordinaire, at the Living Room. Andrew was fantastic live as always. Alas, the Living Room was too small a venue for him - it ended up being standing room only as we were packed in like sardines at the back, and had a hard time seeing. But still pretty awesome.
Dylan’s friend Nate showed up, as did Nate’s friends Beth and Dan, so we all went out afterwards to The Library, a nifty little East Village bar, which was having Zombie night. Dan got painted up with zombie makeup, Evil Dead was on the big screen, all good.
Oh, and Beth was wearing a shirt that said Chicago Men’s Volleyball, so I asked about that, and it turned out it was her boyfriend’s, who she had met playing volleyball. When she found out I used to play, she was totally psyched, and recruited me to be a sub for her league team. It’s some stupidly large league (30 divisions of 10 teams each), so that should be a great way to meet some more people, especially since Beth promised to introduce me to her tall volleyball-playing friends.
Later on, we went next door to Julep, which had a pool table. Dan and I challenged on, and we won, which was awesome, especially after the two women we defeated told us that they had held the table for a few hours against all comers. I played a couple games, then passed on the table to others in our group. Dan put on 80s hair metal (there’s a Poison/Cinderella concert later this summer that he’s trying to talk me into attending), and then asked me what my favorite 80s hair metal band was. I went with Def Leppard, which he granted as pseudo-hair-metal, we put on “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, and everybody in the bar started rocking out. I need to get that album.
Anyway. Good evening. It’s nice having a crowd to go out with.
More tomorrow on identity - I had originally planned to write up some thoughts tonight, but it’s too late and I’m too tired.
Gosh, what have I been up to since my last journal post two weeks ago?
The day after that post, I went to see my first Dorkbot in NYC, which was excellent. I really enjoyed John Arroyo’s presentation on rhythmic research. He’s using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyze drum beat patterns in songs. Originally he was doing it to help classify music into different categories, but then once he had the principal components, he realized it would be interesting to use them to generate music as well. Very cool stuff. I was one of only a few people who had any idea what he was talking about (since I used PCA extensively for data analysis at one point), which was also fun.
Jeff Han’s presentation on his multi-touch interaction research was jaw-dropping. He was only showing videos and people in the audience were audibly gasping (oh, wait, maybe that was just me). If he’d had a live demo, he never would have gotten out of there. Check out the videos on his site; the ideas his group has for how to use a multiple touch interface are pretty well thought-out and make for some neat possibilities.
In a random coincidence, I ran into mim, who turned out to be a classmate of the first presenter, John. Small world. So mim and his friend and I went out to dinner at some place around the corner, the name of which I’ve forgotten, but which was really good.
That was Wednesday night. Thursday night I packed, and Friday night I flew back to Oakland for Seppo’s wedding. In another coincidence, my mom was in town for a trip with some high school friends that weekend, so we met up for brunch on Saturday morning before I ran off for the wedding on Saturday afternoon. Sunday was an all-day brunch affair at the Isle of Tortuga, and I flew back Monday.
On Wednesday, a couple of the boys from Squid Labs were in town for some reason, so I had dinner with them and some of their pals. After dinner, Limor showed us around Eyebeam, the gallery at which she is artist in residence, and then we headed back to Wonderland to hang out. Wonderland’s an awesome space - a warehouse loft where about ten people live, all of whom seem interesting. I need to go hang out there more.
Thursday and Friday night, I was studying for the GRE, which I took on Saturday morning. I’m planning to apply to an executive master’s program in technology management at Columbia, and they wanted GRE scores. Apparently, ETS only keeps official scores for five years, so my scores from 1993 (!!) are long gone. It was no big deal. The computer-based version of the test was pretty entertaining; because I knew it used adaptive questioning, where it picks out questions based on how I answered previous questions, I started meta-analyzing how I was doing by the questions it was giving me. At one point in the verbal, I got three sets of reading comprehension questions in a row, which made me wonder if I’d missed a question on the first set. But given that it was starting to make up words by the end, I was pretty sure I was doing well. It was also nice to be able to go at my own pace - I test fast, so I was out of there in less than two and a half hours rather than the four hours alloted. And being able to get the scores right away is pretty gratifying, although I’ll have to wait and see how I did on the essay writing sections.
Wes is in town this weekend, so he got a bunch of his friends together to all meet each other last night. Unsurprisingly, it’s an interesting group of folks, with an eclectic mix of geeks, singers, and artists. Fun times. I might write up thoughts on one of the conversations after this. Oh, and for my own reference, one of the folks last night recommended Cast Party, an open mic night at Birdland, where lots of Broadway folks hang out and try out new material. Sounds like a fun time - I might have to check it out one of these weeks.
Today I took the west-side bike trail all the way up to the northern tip of Manhattan. It ends around 205th st or so. It’s a wonderful ride - up in the northern part of Manhattan, it goes through some trees and there’s not many other people around. In places, there were trees blooming with flowers, a definite sign of spring. And being out near the river on a nice sunny day was excellent. The bike ride definitely had my legs hurting a bit by the end, which made me feel pathetic until I got back and Google-mapped the ride and found out that I’d ridden about 18 miles, which seemed a bit less pathetic than I’d originally feared.
Oh, one last New York experience. I was walking back from the grocery store yesterday afternoon, when I heard somebody say “Perlick?!” It was a friend of mine from MIT who I hadn’t seen in several years. He’d been a grad student at Berkeley, disappeared into his thesis for a while, and I never knew where he’d ended up. Apparently he’s doing a postdoc at Princeton now, and is often in New York on the weekends. And I ran into him on the street. New York is so cool! Yet another advantage of walking everywhere rather than driving - more opportunities for chance collisions.
P.S. Question for my small but loyal readership - my posts will generally split into one of two main categories: journal posts about things I’m doing, and thought posts about things I’m thinking. Oh, and review posts about things I’ve been reading if I ever get around to catching up on my backlog of book reviews. Right now you can separate them out by subscribing to individual RSS feeds (e.g. the journal feed or the thoughts feed), but if you just visit the main page or use the main feed, they’re all mixed together. Do people mind this jumbling? Would it be more convenient if I did journal type posts at a separate location? If you have an opinion, either comment or email me. If you’re fine with the status quo, do nothing. I’m just feeling guilty because I’m doing less thought posts and more journal posts because I’ve been running around so much, doing fun things. But maybe that’s okay.
So in the spirit of my last post, let’s recount some new experiences of the last week, aka a “This is what I’ve been doing” post.
Last Wednesday, I went to see a talk by Natalie Jeremijenko at the Whitney Museum (I got a free ticket through the dorkbot list), who I first saw speak at Jofish’s recommendation at the 4S conference. Man. She’s really odd. I don’t understand how her brain works at all. She’s an enigma - I can’t really peg her. She started her talk by dissing the Whitney for not showing some art that a friend of hers submitted for their current biennial exhibition. Then she spent some time talking about how towers change when people become more expensive than materials. I wasn’t quite sure what her point was. But I have to admit that trying to figure it out was somewhat entertaining.
She pointed out the orwellian implications of the public transit signs that say “If you see something, say something” - we are being encouraged to surveil each other and report to authority, rather than actually doing anything ourselves. It tears at the social fabric to give up responsibility of ourselves and our surroundings like that. I liked the idea of the Anti terror line, where people call in to report abuses of authority and stuff - sweet - opposite of the tips line.
The Facemask project was also interesting - “who has the evidence?” of air pollution - “who can participate in the political decisions?”
But her talk really demonstrated that she really has no attention span, wandering all over the place. She took a quick digression to rant about how the signs of “don’t feed the animals” is ludicrous because it implies we shouldn’t interfere with them, but we can change the climate, which is way more interfering. She’s an interesting but hard-to-follow speaker, because she wanders through something interesting but then wanders off. Alas. Still, a good excuse to get out and be exposed to a different viewpoint.
Saturday evening, I had my housewarming party. About ten people showed up, which was surprisingly gratifying, given that I’d only been in New York for a month. It was a little bit of a weird dynamic between the techies and non-techies, but I think it was fun. And, hey, any event where conversation goes til 2:30 in the morning is a success in my book.
On Sunday afternoon, it was an absolutely gorgeous day, so I took my first bike ride in New York City. I biked out to the Hudson River, where there’s a bike path that extends the length of Manhattan, and then up to the Upper West Side, and over into Central Park, which was _packed_. I had entertained thoughts of finding a little quiet space to myself in the sun to read, but there was no hope of that - every bit of lawn was filled with people. On the plus side, cars were being kept out of the park, so I rode the big loop road around Central Park. That was fun, seeing all of the different areas and activities available in the park in quick succession as I rode on by. The only thing I didn’t see was an ultimate frisbee game, which was mildly bumming. But I’ve looked it up online and now know where they allegedly play, so I’ll check again in a couple weekends. But in any event, it was really fun to get back on my bike and zoom up and down the island. And I’m really glad I have the mountain bike - I hit some potholes while negotiating the city streets that would have destroyed a road bike.
On Monday evening, my friend Qw. convinced me to try his Kundalini Yoga class. He’s really into it, going every day, and I figured that I need to be more willing to give things a shot, so what the heck. It was surprisingly physical, holding some of those poses. And there were a couple times where my comical lack of flexibility was a problem. But it was an interesting experience. I don’t think it’s for me, necessarily. It might be good for me - I’m totally unable to “empty my mind” at this point, and maybe studying yoga for a while would help with that. On the other hand, I’m not sure I like the inward-focused nature of it - I spend enough time in my own head as it is. One of the points of me doing activities is to go out and be socially interactive, which is why I liked chorus and ultimate. So I think I’ll try a few other things and see whether they work for me any better.
That’s the wrap-up from my world. Work proceeds apace. I’m handling most tech support emails, starting to handle tech support phone calls, and have to devise a scalable computer backup solution soon. Plus there’s some ideas about starting to build up our customer community a bit that I’m mulling but don’t have time to really do anything about.
Oh, and the last new experience? Posting a blog post from my couch because my DSL is finally installed! Now I can truly call this home.
Yes, that’s right, I finally found a place in New York. It took about a week in all. But a very long, stressful week. The sequence of events went something like this:
Just to put this into perspective, it took much less time and effort for me to BUY a condo in Oakland than it did for me to RENT an apartment in New York. It was easier to get approved for the mortgage, it was definitely easier finding a place (although that was because Robyn Mohr was excellent), and much less stressful.
But it worked. I even started my job yesterday! So far I’m mostly configuring my computer and playing around with the company’s products, but they’ve got a lot to put on my plate. Oh, and I’m thinking of applying for this master’s program in Technology Management at Columbia. Feedback is appreciated.
Crazy week. Once my stuff arrives tomorrow, and I spend the weekend putting my apartment in order, I can actually start enjoying New York. Woo!
P.S. More interesting thoughts when I get my life in order. And it’ll help once I actually get internet at home - DSL will take a couple weeks to be installed and unfortunately there are no unsecured wireless networks visible from my apartment. But that’s the way things go.
P.P.S. Thanks to everybody who listened to me kvetch over the past couple weeks - I’m better now. It continues to amaze me how easily I can keep in touch with folks across the country with the internet and cell phones, not to mention jet planes. It’s a good thing I changed my cell phone plan from 400 to 1500 minutes a few months ago; in the month to March 14th, I used approximately 1300 minutes, which stupefies me.
P.P.P.S. Come crash at my place! Contact me if I don’t send you the new address in the next couple days as I catch up on correspondence.
That’s right. Crazy as it sounds, I’m going to move to New York. I’m still somewhat in disbelief myself. Here’s how it happened.
Four or five years ago, I found this guy on the web who wrote about software development and software management and called himself Joel on Software. His ideas made a lot of sense to me (treat your people well, keep management simple, stay out of the way of productive coding). I became a disciple, quoting his essays to my managers and trying to learn from what he had to say. But he was in New York City, and his company was only hiring top-notch software developers that were described as coding “animals”. Since I mostly do software because I’m good at it and it pays well, I didn’t think that description fit me, so I never applied to work at his company. But I kept on reading his columns and daydreamed about someday working at a company that was run along those principles.
In a separate storyline, it was five years ago that I sang at Carnegie Hall. I stayed over the following weekend, and had an absolute blast exploring New York with some friends of mine. We had bagels at Zabar’s, hit a jazz club in Greenwich Village, wandered through Central Park, etc. And I started daydreaming about someday getting to know New York better, maybe spending a year or two living in New York.
Last spring, I decided I was never going to get the chance to live in New York for an extended period of time, so I spent a three week vacation there. I sublet an apartment in the East Village, and walked all over the place visiting museums, going to shows and restaurants, etc. It was a blast. I’d kind of been hoping that three weeks would get New York out of my system and make me feel like “Okay, now I’ve done New York - time to do something else”, but instead I felt like I’d barely scratched the surface. But three weeks had already been stretching how long a vacation could be, and I couldn’t really do that every year.
Meanwhile, I’d steadily been growing more disillusioned with being a software engineer. I could do it, and do it well, but it wasn’t my passion. I wasn’t really sure what my passion was, although bad management certainly seemed to raise my ire. I started to explore the idea of moving into management myself - I had the technical chops to have the respect of technical teams, but could also communicate effectively to my less technical colleagues. And I started to understand how hard good management was. But getting onto the management track is tricky, especially coming from a technical background. Most companies will not hire a manager that does not have management experience (or an MBA), so I had to find a company that would hire me as a technical person, but give me the opportunity to gain management experience.
At the end of October, I happened to read Joel’s post where he announced that he was looking to hire “the next generation of management” at his company. He didn’t care whether applicants had previous management experience or not. He preferred a technical background. Wow. I had to apply. So I spent a few days working with friends to polish up a cover letter and resume, and sent it off.
And then I mostly forgot about it. I mean, sure, I thought I would be a good fit. But something like 300,000 people read Joel’s writings on the web. And a couple hundred people apply for every job opening at his company. So I knew my chances were statistically slim. But I kept it in the back of my mind as a daydream through the next month and a half - “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to work for Joel in New York?” I almost didn’t want to hear an answer because that would mean I would have to stop daydreaming and confront reality.
In mid-December, I got a phone call from the 212 area code. New York. Yikes. “Are you still interested in the position?” “Yes.” “Do you have time to speak with Joel this week?” “Um, yes!” I did an hour-long phone interview with Joel later that week - we chatted about management, about various projects I’d been involved with over the past several years, etc. And at the end, he invited me out to New York for an in-person interview. We couldn’t squeeze it in before the holidays, so they flew me out in the first week of January.
It was great. They hired a car to pick me up from the airport. They put me up in a fantastic hotel across from the New York Public Library. The interview was a lot of fun - the questions were interesting, and I enjoyed meeting the different people at the company. And, at the end of the day, I got an offer.
Yowza.
Suddenly, I was presented with the opportunity to fulfill several of my daydreams at once. I could work with Joel! I could live in New York! I could move onto a management track! I’d get to join an early-stage startup! (they’re still less than ten people, but looking to grow)
It was disconcerting, to say the least. I’ve settled into my life in the Bay Area over the past ten (!) years. I have friends I adore, and a variety of social groups with whom to do stuff, from the chorus to ultimate frisbee. I’ve got a burgeoning professional network. I bought a condo four years ago. I bought a new car last summer. I know my place here. And I’m going to trade this life in for some ill-defined fantasy?
But the lure of New York was too much to deny. I have no idea how things are going to work out. But this way I’ll at least have found out whether I can convert those dreams into reality, rather than always thinking that the grass must be greener somewhere else. I may return in a couple years to the Bay Area with my tail between the legs, but it’ll have been worth it just to know once and for all.
Wrap-up comments:
I think that’s it. Crazy!
Nothing too exciting to report on my last few days in New York. On Tuesday, March 29, I wrote up a few book reviews in the morning, and headed over to see the Guggenheim Museum in the afternoon. I don’t think I’d visited the Guggenheim before, so seeing the space was a wonderful experience. I loved the big skylights, the way the various galleries flow into and through each other, and the way you can often peek into galleries from a floor above or below. It plays with the space, and I just love that. So yay.
I wasn’t all too impressed with the main exhibit by Daniel Buren, the centerpiece of which is two large mirrored walls installed in the main circular atrium, forming a corner. It looks kind of neat, especially from the angles where it almost perfectly reflects the atrium, forming a complete circle, but it doesn’t really do much for me. And his work with repetitive stripes is just dull. I did like what he did with the secondary atrium, where he covered the windows with colored films - you can see the splashes of colored light on the right.
None of the rest of the art on display was too exciting. I think they were between exhibits because the main spiral was devoid of art, which is not normally the case. The permanent galleries had some good early modernist work. I did like the work of Franz Marc, particularly Stables (seen at left) and Broken Forms, as well as Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower. Of the Kandinsky collection, I liked their initial acquisition, Composition #8, the best. Having realized my artistic preferences while I was visiting the Met, it was amusing to see how all of the stuff that caught my eye fit those criteria. I’m so predictable.
The next day (Wednesday, March 30), I went out to lunch with a friend of a friend at Junior’s deli in the Grand Central Station food concourse. There was an enormous amount of meat on my reuben. Yummy, but almost painfully too much food. I’m such a lightweight these days. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and with a high of 60 degrees, so I headed uptown to explore the northern half of Central Park, which I’d never done. I started off walking around the reservoir, which I captured in a landscape photo above, and then just kind of wandered around for a bit, by the ice rink (sponsored by Trump!), the ornamental gardens, and the Harlem Meer (Meer is apparently Dutch for lake). It was fun to see all the different people out in the park, from the mothers walking their kids, to the joggers, to the guy practicing his golf swing with what looked like whiffle golf balls, all enjoying the weather.
Afterwards, I wandered by the immense Cathedral of St. John the Divine, since I was in the area. It’s in bad shape, having suffered a fire a few years ago, but its sheer bulk is astonishing. I took off my headphones when I walked in, and then had a better idea, firing up the Requiem of Tomas Luis de Victoria, as performed by the Tallis Scholars. That was cool, walking around this enormous space with this amazing music playing in my ears.
Then back down the island to check out an art exhibition my parents had told me about called Ashes and Snow. It’s this guy who’s spent the last 13 years going around the world and staging photographs of people with animals in a way that’s meant to evoke the fundamental interconnectedness of us all - you can see a bunch of examples on the website. But I thought it was pretty lame. I felt that it was designed to tug on the emotional heartstrings, with wide-eyed children sitting near elephants, falcons, jaguars and other animals. But it felt overtly manipulative to me, sentimental pablum, with the emotional depth of a Hallmark card. I hate being manipulated. I had to blast Nine Inch Nails on my headphones for thirty minutes afterward to scour my brain out.
I hit the Life Cafe for dinner. The place where I was staying was two doors down from the Life Cafe, and I’d been thinking of stopping there my entire time in New York, but it was finally clinched when I noticed the poster for the musical Rent, with a comment that they were mentioned in a song. I was like, “Wait a second! I know that song!”, at the end of the first act, where they all go to the Life Cafe to hang out and drink “Wine and Beer!”. So I had to go there. It was okay. I had a draft Guinness and a bowl of chili. But the Rent connection is pretty amusing.
The next day was my last day in New York, at least this time around. It was another relatively nice day, so after I finished packing up, I wandered down through the Lower East Side to go walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, because I thought that’d be cool. I was walking along the way I thought I needed to go when I saw a sidewalk up onto the bridge. Excellent. I started walking out over the river, and got a good five minutes before I realized I was on the wrong bridge. Oops. This was the Manhattan bridge, not the Brooklyn Bridge. So I retraced my steps, walked further, found the right bridge and walked it. For future reference, Brooklyn Bridge has the pedestrian walkway down the center where you can see stuff. The Manhattan Bridge has a bikeway suspended underneath the bridge, next to the subway tracks, where you can’t see anything.
It’s a pretty walk, with good views of the New York skyline. Plus the bridge itself is a great piece of engineering. And walking across the bridge had the added (uncoincidental) bonus of delivering me to near where Grimaldi’s is, a pizzeria located under the bridge on the Brooklyn side. I’d read a couple good reviews of the place (the Zagat survey rates it as the best in New York), and I had realized that I hadn’t had real New York thin crust pizza in my time in New York, which was unacceptable. This was good stuff. I don’t remember the pizza we had at John’s Pizzeria well enough to compare, alas, but both places are darn good. Grimaldi’s was absolutely packed, which makes sense since it was the tail end of lunch hour, but a bit surprising, because there really didn’t seem to be anything else around it, so I wondered where all the people were coming from. Anyway, I ordered a 16″ pizza (they didn’t do slices), and ate 2/3 of it, which was a bit much. The advantage was that it solved the question of what I was going to do for dinner at the airport, since I now had leftovers.
Then back to the apartment for a final once-over, grab the bags, and head out on the subway to JFK and thence back to my life in the Bay Area. I had a great time in New York. I think this trip might have been long enough. I did pretty much everything I had planned to in New York, and I’m ready to sleep in my own bed again. I’m not quite ready to deal with going back to work, but that’s the way it goes. Gotta pay for this vacation somehow.
P.S. I wrote most of this entry on the plane. Yay laptop. I had been planning to read a bunch more of Latour’s book, but the reading light was busted for my seat, which was a first for me, and so when they turned out the lights, I didn’t have a lot of choices. I worked on this entry, napped a bit, I read some of a social software essay I had downloaded, I rewatched “After the Sunset”, which doesn’t really make any more sense the second time around, I listened to music. Plane rides without reading suck. On the other hand, I read the book on the BART ride home, and I only was able to struggle through about ten pages. Man, that book is dense.
P.P.S. The trip home was a delightful(?) conglomeration of transit options. I left the New York apartment, walked the half mile to the subway, took the subway to near the JFK airport, took the “AirTrain” from the subway stop to the airport terminal, took a plane from JFK to SFO, took BART from SFO to the Macarthur stop, and took a taxi home rather than carry my suitcase for that last mile. Trains, planes, and automobiles, oh my.
Thursday, March 24, was pretty much a lost day. I was worn out from too many days of sight-seeing and meeting people, and the weather wasn’t great, so I found it difficult to drag myself out. I did a bunch of blog updates in the morning, punted around a bit in the afternoon, and finally headed out in the late afternoon. I walked up Fifth Avenue, admiring the Empire State Building, before heading over to the Theater District to see if I could get a ticket to see Henry Rollins in his new show. I didn’t really know anything about Rollins, but a friend of mine had told me that Rollins was going to be doing shows in New York while I was here, and recommended that I check him out. So I did.
Excellent stuff. Rollins calls himself a spoken-word artist, which basically meant that he got up on stage, and ranted for two and a half hours straight. And he was utterly engrossing the entire time. Whether he was railing against the Bush administration, or describing the seven day plus two hours that he spent on the Trans-Siberian railway, or spending thirty minutes leading up to the “time I was funny”, where the punchline is anticlimactic, but the thirty minutes of storytelling was wonderful, or how he went on a USO tour, and then visited injured soldiers in hospitals in Washington DC, he was always interesting. And it’s hard to do that. Well worth seeing, if you get the chance.
Friday morning, my friend Jofish picked me up. We stopped by his friend’s art installation at a gallery in Chelsea (one of many I didn’t get to), and then headed off to Cornell, where he’s a grad student. Batman drove down from Toronto to meet us, and we spent the weekend talking and eating and drinking, hence the lack of blog updates. I met some of Jofish’s cohort of grad students, and it was fun discussing the research that people were doing. I don’t think I’m ready to go back to grad school yet, but I could see it as a possibility in the right situation. Something in the space of science and technology studies, maybe. Or something about the intersection between social practices and computers.
Monday morning, it was miserable and raining, and since Jofish had a ton of work to do, Batman and I decided to clear out, him driving back to Toronto, and me taking the bus back to NYC. At Ithaca, the bus only had about ten people on it, and I stretched out and it was quite nice. When we hit Binghamton, though, the bus filled up, with every seat taken, so that was less fun. But the bus got back to New York in about five hours, which wasn’t so bad, although I was amused to realize that it took the same amount of time to take a bus from western New York to NYC as it does to take a flight from San Francisco. Distance just doesn’t mean anything any more.
The other nice thing about the bus trip was that I finished off Me++ (Man, I’m like three book reviews behind at this point - maybe tomorrow morning) and picked up Latour’s Politics of Nature, where I slogged through the really dense 20 pages necessary to figure out what’s going on, where he does a four page overview of the book, with 15 pages of term definitions. I think I have a grasp on the overall thesis of the book now, so I think I’m going to be able to tackle the rest of the book now. But man, reading through that hypertextually linked glossary was hard - the perfect task for a cramped bus ride on a rainy day where there’s nothing to see.
So, yeah. Back in New York City. I’ve got two and a half days left before I return to my normal life. Kinda scary. I haven’t even started on a couple of the things I said I was going to do on this vacation, like lay out the outline for the cognitive subroutines book. Man. I need to buckle down.
I’d been saving the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a rainy day, and Wednesday definitely qualified. It wasn’t just raining, it was snowing, and cold and miserable. A perfect day to spend inside. As usual, I got off to a late start, but it worked out fine. I got to the museum around 1:30pm, and spent the next four hours until the museum closed at 5:30 wandering around. Their collections are just too huge. I had to do some massive triage to even have a hope. So I ignored all sculpture and decorative arts, because I generally don’t find those interesting. I punted on most of the art of other cultures, although I did walk through the big Egyptian temple, because that’s just neat. So I mostly concentrated on the American wing and European paintings, with visits to old favorites like Arms and Armor, and Musical Instruments.
I had an insight into my own preferences while walking around the paintings. I realized that I didn’t care for bright primary colors, for simplistic shapes, and for “realistic” depictions. Anything that seems to say “this is the way it is”. I like having different perspectives, of having new ways of looking at things. I live in a world of grays, not in a world of black and white, right and wrong. So paintings that are slightly abstract, paintings that have a more muted palette with faded blues and greens and grays, those appeal to me. Not fully abstract. I still can’t get into the work of Rothko or Pollock or anything. Anyway. It was interesting to me.
It was also fun to realize my eye for art is slowly improving. I was able to recognize the work of most of the masters like van Gogh and Monet. When I was walking through the American wing, I saw a painting and thought “Wow, that looks like JMW Turner’s work.” Then I read the little placard which said that the artist’s use of light “suggests the artist’s appreciation of the English master JMW Turner”. It turns out there was a whole school of American landscape artists, the Hudson River School, whose work was heavily influenced by Turner, so I spent some time browsing that section, because I love that particular use of light, the way it is almost impressionistic in the way it illuminates a scene, as illustrated by the work by Thomas Cole seen to the right.
After getting kicked out of the museum at closing, I had to head crosstown to get to the dinner party I was going to attend. Rather than take the subway down, across and back up, I decided to brave the elements and walk across Central Park. It was a reminder of things I don’t miss about the East Coast - by this point, the snow had accumulated enough on the warm ground to turn to slush. Yum! I made it across the park, found a cafe, and hung out there reading and warming up for a bit. Unfortunately, by the time I left, the snow was actually blowing sideways. I gave up on the umbrella as being useless in that strong a wind, and trudged through the slush off to my dinner party, where we ate good food and had interesting conversations until midnight, of which more in another post.
I spent the morning catching up on blogging, and blathering on about the meaning of power, before heading out at lunch time. It was a beautiful spring day, sunny and getting up to about 50 degrees or so. That, combined with the fact that my one-week unlimited subway ride card had run out, convinced me to walk rather than take the subway. I walked from the East Village over to Chelsea again, and spent a couple hours wandering through the galleries there. Since it was a nice day, I wore my spiffy sportcoat, which immediately upgrades anything I wear it with. That plus the hip Adidas sneakers that I bought with my friend Wilfred, at least made me feel like I was dressed well enough to venture into these galleries and be taken seriously.
A few exhibitions that I thought were neat (again, this is mostly for my own recollection):
David LaChapelle had a really neat exhibition. He’s a photographer - the exhibition had two sets of photographs, one with him staging somebody dressed as Jesus in a bunch of sketchy situations, like Jesus presiding over a gang meeting posed as the Last Supper, reminding us that Jesus spoke to and was with the outcasts of his day, the disenfranchised. The other was similarly stark but brightly colored stagings of what looked like a pimp and prostitute. Very colorful and somewhat shocking. Looking at his website, I really like the portrait work that he’s done too.
I liked the black and white photography of Masato Okazaki. He starkly captures the decay of buildings, such as the piece to the left.
I liked the Sublime Sanctum exhibition I saw of Madalina. I particularly liked Freedom, seen at the right.
After that, I walked over to the Theater District. I’d had vague thoughts of trying to get rush tickets to Wicked or Avenue Q. The way it works for those two musicals is that you fill out an entry form for a lottery ticket, and then they pick the 12-20 lucky winners. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but when I showed up, and saw the hundreds of people lined up to fill out the form, I punted. I walked over to the half-price booth to see what was available, and saw that they had tickets for Shockheaded Peter for 35% off, so I took one of those tickets. It turned out to be way in the back and off to the side, but the theater was small enough that it didn’t matter.
I had wanted to see Shockheaded Peter when it came to San Francisco, but never got around to it. It had been described as subversive, sinister and stylish, all of which appealed to me. Alas, it was a disappointment. It’s supposed to be shocking because it tells fractured morality tales where children misbehaved and are killed or punished. Like the girl who plays with matches and burns herself up. Or the boy who’s told to stop sucking his thumbs and doesn’t, and gets his thumbs cut off. But that’s it. They tell you they’re going to do that at the top of the show, and then they do it. There’s nothing surprising, nothing even particularly whimsical about their presentation of the material. I wanted something that would make me involuntarily grin or be shocked or something. It was just kind of eh.
That being said, the production and staging was fabulous. This was a show that people who produce shows should see to note how a little can go a long way with some imagination. For instance, the bit with the girl burning herself up with matches. To simulate that, she had on a skirt, with a bunch of red-and-yellow colored underskirts. As she allegedly caught on fire, she started lifting her outer skirt a bit, so that the red poked through, and then started dancing around the stage, with her lifting the skirt higher and higher, until it was over her head and all you saw was the red and yellow underskirts. And then she jumped into a stage trapdoor. Creative and simple staging of something that could have been done very poorly.
There were lots of nice little touches like that, with effective use of paper cutout scenery and dropping things from the top of their set. But the stories they were telling were just not interesting enough to me. Maybe I just didn’t get it. Alas.
