THE LIGHT IN FRONT

Ah, New York City. A city I often claim to hate but always love to visit. That feeling got tested about a few miles before even entering the city, when I had to pay nearly $30 in rapid-fire tolls. It’s like paying entrance to some kind of amusement park. All other big cities are pretty chill, maybe $5-10 at the most in tolls to swing by, but no, NY has to be like “Oh yeah, we’re fucking New York City” and stiff you 3 times that.

Note: Unfortunately, I had to completely skip Philadelphia in order to get to NYC at a reasonable time, so no pictures of delicious Philly cheesesteak.

I had carefully arranged my schedule to make sure I hit the city on the weekend of July 4th, thinking there would be some good activity going on. And there certainly was a lot of activity, mainly right before I arrived, when apparently half the fucking city packed their bags and took the fuck off to the beach elsewhere. This meant that instead of places and streets being packed to the tits with people, they were packed to maybe just under the bellybutton. Disappointing at first, cause I realized there wasn’t gonna be too much outrageous partying going on, but it turned out to be fantastic, because for a change, New York was totally driveable and chock full of awesome parking spots everywhere.

I immediately met up with my friends Guille, Nicole, and Eddy, and chilled for a while before crashing for the night. The next day I had scheduled myself a trip to the Museum of Modern Art, which I’d always wanted to visit. After the intense nature experiences, I was due for a bit of art review to balance it out. The place did not disappoint, packed with super influential landmark pieces I’ve been seeing in books since I was a little kid. Interestingly enough, it seemed like it was totally OK to take pictures, although I find the taking of pictures of famous pieces of art to be a supremely useless endeavor. Nonetheless, there were a few unsung heroes that I felt needed to get a bit more exposure.

For example, here’s a portrait of David Carradine:

This is obviously fucking brilliant work:

And this is a piece by Giacometti called “Disagreeable Object”. I think that’s a great name, because I very much disagree with it:

This was a room-sized installation where visitors marked their height and the date of visit, and over time, as thousands of people added to it, a fuzzy band built up lined around the room:

It was a very thought-provoking piece. Mainly, it made me think about how many of the low marks were made by children, and how many were made by midgets. Then it would make me giggle. I agreed with this piece much more than the previous one. Finally, we have OOF:

OOF.

My artist longings satiated, I met up again with my friends and headed to Central Park to chill for a while and do a bit of people watching. My favorite person was this dude who who showed up with a newspaper and dropped face-down a few yards away from us. He looked like a Mexican laborer. Dude opens his newspaper, and reads it for about 7 seconds before he looks up and stares at the girls around him while gently grinding his crotch against the soft grass. Unfortunately my camera had no video zoom, so you can’t appreciate the subtle hip motion, but at least you can see him in position here:

After the Park, we headed to the IMAX theater in Lincoln Square to watch a movie I’d be anxiously awaiting to see, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I was super fucking pumped to watch another Michael Bay movie about giant robots punching each other on a giant screen, and had patiently waited to get to NY before doing so to make sure I got a true IMAX experience (there’s a lot of theaters out there being touted as IMAX, when in fact they’re just regular theaters with the screens shifted closer to the seats to appear larger). My excitement dwindled a bit when I got in and realized that the entire other half of the city who didn’t leave for the weekend had decided to come see Transformers at the same time I did. We had to sit in the very first row. In an IMAX theater. To watch Transformers 2. If you’ve seen the movie, you know it’s 2 and a half hours of being bludgeoned over the head with clanging metal, explosions, robot testicles, dogs humping, generally loud shit, and John Turturro in a thong. Thankfully it also contains a lot of Megan Fox ass, which looked truly fucking spectacular up on that screen. Despite the circumstances it was a pretty rad experience overall, it completely set a new bar for GIANT STUPID SUMMER MOVIE. Let’s see if 2012 can top it.

After having my brain melted, my ears imploded, and my neck twisted for nearly 3 hours, we headed back to rest a bit before heading out to get a bit of drinking going. We met up with my friend Selena and headed out to a bar called Nu Blu, which sounds like a brand of sunglasses you can get on TV. They had a really sweet jazz/lounge improv band going, and we proceeded to get hammered in an commonly expensive fashion:

I then violently passed out on the cab ride back home:

Apparently, I do this a lot.

Next day, we head out to check the Apple store, since I was in need of an extra battery for the Modbook that should come in handy out west, where electrical outlets will become much more scarce. Pretty trippy, ultramodern place filled with people who had no interest in buying a Mac but sure like playing with them pretty things.

After that, I wanted to go to B&H Photo, a giant photo supply warehouse that does a ton of business online, and whose single retail store resided in Manhattan. I had been eyeing a new camera that had me supremely intrigued, but was only available online. Only like 3 stores carry it in stock for retail, and they’re all in NYC. B&H was by far the most well-known of the three, and I was told it was crazy magical place run by a huge crew of Hassidic jews, which made it sound pretty interesting. So while I knew I wasn’t gonna be doing a lot of price haggling, I was excited about checking out the jewish equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

Problem was, this place was about 30 blocks away from the Apple store. Plan A was to grab a cab or train there, but somehow Selena, who punches people for a living and is in remarkable shape, convinces me that we should walk there. I figured I’d been doing a lot of damn walking lately anyways and the exercise between drives could only be a good thing. So we walked, and walked, and walked. And fucking walked, until we got there.

And it was fucking closed.

I couldn’t fucking believe it. How could they possibly be fucking closed? Big retail store? On a Saturday on a big business holiday weekend?

Oh. Right. Saturday. Jewish people.

A big forehead slap afterwards, we grabbed a train to Queens to check out PS1, an offshoot of MoMA that showcases hip contemporary art, and which during the summer hosts a number of rad daytime parties in its outdoor areas. Every year they hold a contest for people to submit design proposals to build some sort of crazy structure and/or space to host said parties. Apparently, this year’s winning entry was a a series of big furry volcanoes. The vibe and space this thing created reminded me a LOT of Burning Man, so it was immediately awesome to me:

Really good beer on draft too, with DJ’s running sets all day. Saw some more rad art, met a few people from RISD I haven’t seen in years, and generally had an awesome time.

After a few hours, we headed back to get some dinner, which came in the form of incredible pizza. We had apparently lost track of time, cause we were only halfway on our food before fireworks started going off on TV. It was like “Oh shit. I guess we missed that”. Mostly I was OK with missing it, because after watching the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies (the event where China dropped its pants and told the world to suck its mighty red dick) firework shows don’t really impress me anymore. It looked pretty cool though.

After some deliberation on what to do that night, there were apparently a few good parties going on in Brooklyn, we decide that we’re all old and exhausted and can’t handle extra night craziness, so we grab some booze and head up to Guille’s office rooftop for some chill skyline nighttime lounging:

Besides it being really fucking cold and me forgetting my jacket, it was a perfect way to end the day. I was pretty beat, and was scheduled to get moving to Providence early the next day.

Like all departure days, I tell myself I’ll get up at 7 to get on the road early, and end up waking up close to 10. I say goodbye to all the good folks who came out to hang, then head immediately to B&H Photo to get a second try at that camera. Sure enough, the place was open, and it was fucking EXACTLY like I had imagined it. Yarmulkas and curly sideburns everywhere, and crazy conveyor belt systems running in a million directions delivering packages everywhere in the store. I found the camera I wanted, fiddled around with it a bit, and instantly fell in love and bought it:

It’s a Casio EX-FH20, part of a crazy line of cameras that are able to shoot awesome slo-mo footage and have a huge array of options for shooting objects in motion. This thing can grab 40 full-size 9-megapixel images in just one second, and shoot video at up to 1000 frames a second, which makes it extremely awesome and fun to experiment and play with. It’s particularly well suited for outdoor/wildlife photography, which made it perfect for my needs. I’ve since had a chance to get to know it better and have shot some rad stuff with it. Expect more images and video, and less written stuff as the trip unfolds and I head out west.

I ended up leaving rather late for a 4-hour trip to Providence, land of my alma mater, RISD, to officially begin the middle leg of the journey. And that, folks, is coming in the next post.