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Now:

Three days from now:

The Project for Public Spaces is organizing a Parking Day NYC. I’ll try to stop by the one in Park Slope tomorrow. I don’t think I’ll be in the city. Would be neat to check some out though…

Coffee is a singular experience in New York. Though I have yet to experience the perfect cup of Joe here at the very least it is plentiful and there is a fair amount of independent shops — far fewer per-capita than should be but fair none-the-less. There is, however, a unique ritual to the purchase of coffee at the numerous corner stores (Bodegas in Brooklyn, Delis to Manhattanites). I don’t pretend to be an expert on East Coast culture (candle pin bowling? wtf?) so perhaps the experience is wider spread but to a transplant from the west coast it seems a New York enough thing.

First off when ordering coffee you wont find a little side counter with choices of sugar and creaming agents. Maybe its just a space issue but I’ve found even in coffee shops where space is less premium than at my bodega they insist on filling your coffee for you. This is sort of like traveling to Oregon for the first time and realizing you are not allowed to fill your own gas tank. What results is sometimes a light brew far too milky for my tastes but an experience which makes you feel like you are getting white-glove service. The delivery of sugar being in increments of 1, 2, or 3 is far more reserved and I find a much better fit as I tend to over-sugar my brew.

If the full-service coffee event is easy to adjust to the coffee doggie bag is simply odd to the out of towner. Being from an environmentally-minded town in California I’m probably more sensitive than most to the wastefulness of bags given out almost everywhere. No, thank you, I don’t need a bag for this water bottle that I’m about to open and enjoy instantly, Ms. Duane Reade. But if you visit a corner store in New York with any amount of regularity (usually meaning twice in a week) you may find the same being asked about your to-go coffee. A bag? For coffee?

What a delightfully wasteful practice! How so very much New York. Having moved here two years ago I am happy to have missed the plethora of styrofoam I would have inevitably been exposed to and forced to dispose of on a daily basis. Coffee to-go still comes in a paper cup with a sealed plastic lid like the rest of America. So what’s with the bag offer? Perhaps its an offering to the walking and public transit riding New Yorker who, unlike the rest of the U.S. may suffer convenience for lack of cup-holder in their Urban Assault Vehicle.

Despite the wastefulness, the New York style coffee doggie bag does present a nice little pleasantry I’ve not found elsewhere in the U.S. Often folded closed with care and packed up nicely-fit the bag is often full service with napkins neatly pressed up against the coffee so as to let the cup stand straight upwards and avoid spillage. Not only do the bag and napkin arrangement prevent wet clothing on the run to the subway they also provide a gratifying unwrapping experience. Its like your parting gift at a birthday that you can’t wait to unwrap and when open is overwhelmingly adequate and expectant as well as lacking the splendor of a personal gift. It’s one of the few occurrences in New York I’ve found that celebrates the mundane and whose procedure lends a bit of ritual to everyday life — even if most of the time when asked if I would like a bag I just respond with “No thanks.”

This is the second article about this nifty under-sea tube thing I’ve seen in the last couple of days .. and while I don’t fully understand it I must check it out! [link]

Hot damn!! I’m there!! [link]

A really interesting article about gentrification and how to confront it in new and interesting ways: [link] (via BLAST) What strikes me most about the article is this conception of the influx of young, middle-class into the neighborhood as somehow devouring the community in its wake. I live in a highly gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn that has been for at least 5 years. I don’t think that the neighborhood lacks community or culture.

Certainly displacement of low-income residents is an issue but what the article seems to do is set up a false dichotomy between those who bring culture and those who rob it. It begs the question of what the characteristics of a modern neighborhood and community are. Does “culture” — whatever that means — get defined solely by persons of a lower-income level? What is admirable here, however, is the actions of these groups like the SCEG (see the article) who take a pragmatic approach favoring action over debate. Maybe the act itself is what defines the community.

[picture via nytimesbooks.blogspot.com]

I digs the barrel chair.

Finally made it to the Cherry Blossom Festival at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It was like a festival as to be expected, food, music, tents but I was sort of surprised at how wondrous it felt. I floated from area to area running into kimono-clad Brooklynites and Japanophiles. Everyone was taking photos much to my bemusement as I had come for the purpose of photography. Everything was fair game.

The grass was lush and wet and the cherry blossoms hung right in our faces so that it felt like we were in the clouds. The air was dewey and overcast but it never rained. On the Cherry walk, a canopied walkway dripping with blossoms inches above our heads kids ran around and jumped up into the tree branches. When they dropped it was graceful like a dangling leaf that at long last unshackled itself in the fall’s breeze. Spring has not come soon enough. photos

The first thing that strikes me about © Murakami is how blatantly familiar everything seems. Anyone accustomed to Japanese or anime culture may find © Murakami unremarkable. Life-size sculptures of transforming robots — aside from their explicit sexuality — could probably be found in the markets of Ginza in so many vending machines . (at least in my imagined Japan. I’ve never been ) the murals painted on giant canvases hanging in the Brooklyn Museum look sort of like vector graphics some hippy drew for his blog. The real remarkable thing about seeing all this work up close is how utterly unremarkable it is.  Murakami deals in the realm of pop culture.

The images we see in the galleries are the same ones we see littered across the net and in hip magazines and really that’s the point. Murakami like Warhol before him (and to whom Murakami is frequently compared) revels in the icons and symbols of a over marketed overly bright overwhelming culture. Standing a few inches from an encompassing ten foot canvas some degree of skill can be ascertained. There appear to be no brush strokes and the gigantic eyes whose pupils descend to a point of paint less than a centimeter wide speak to a skilled attempt at reproduction.  

Whether Murakami painted this or his team does not matter. The point is that a great amount of care went into getting the color just so — at the very least more difficult than selecting the paint bucket tool and clicking on the box. For some of the murals the museum has put up studies of their plans not sketched in an Adobe app as one might assume but hand drawn in pencil and laid in with cryptic codes indicating the exact shade to be used for the coordinate on the finished product.

Meticulous detail to attain a throwaway look. A mural of magic mushrooms gives way to a canvas displaying Louis Vuitton logos.  Is this an advertisement? Is it art? The great thing is that its impossible to distinguish the line. The Louis Vuitton canvases hang a room over from a display case of Louis Vuitton bags. Looking around one may not notice that they’ve stepped out of a gallery and into a shop. A Louis Vuitton boutique is centered in the exhibit further blurring the lines of commercialism and art. When asked by my friend of the success of the store the shop woman said they do quite well. Just as well as a “real boutique”.

Several other displays showcase cups, magnets, pins and dolls all of which are for sale later on at the end of the exhibit. When you purchase a toy model of the exhibit are you purchasing a reproduction or are you participating in the show itself? Is this exhibit about commodity or is commodity itself the art? The fact that these questions can be posed at all prove the existence of the blur that pervades Murakami’s work. A few rooms are literally painted wall to wall with anime style colors and characters. In a room surrounded by smiling rainbow colored flowers I felt overwhelmed. Perhaps this is a comment on the over-saturation of consumer/cute culture. If it is commentary its still also celebrating it and all done with a tremendous amount of skill.

All of this blurring has my head dizzy but I’m smiling. The question “is this art?” is still ringing through my brain. What © Murakami proves is that art, at least gallery art, is defined purely by its frame. Take any high-end purse vendor on Fifth Avenue and place his/her shop in the halls of a museum and patrons have to focus on it. Not only the displays but the activity of commodity exchange and our willing participation in it. At once overwhelming, cool, cute. To comment on it is not just to comment on an art exhibit but also to comment on Japanese society and by extension any capitalist culture. Art is bought and sold every day and it exists as a commodity as much as it exists as an aesthetic practice or beautiful artifact. © Murkami draws attention to this while, presumably, making a handsome profit and we are all willing participants. Whether we choose to ignore it or not.

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