THREE DAYS IN NEW YORK CITY

MY WEEK IN PHOTOS: APRIL 22-28, 2019!

I spend my birthday in New York, we see cherry blossoms, the city in the rain, museum hop, and watch the musical Hadestown.

Enjoy!

Nearing the end of April already

Pottery, more weird boys

Tweedy’s profile cracks me up

More Tweedy love. Do all shih tzus just let you rag doll them around? Or is just Tweedy?

Sufi loves his new little sit spot in the bedroom

Leftovers for lunch, always the best to have spam musubi at the office

Never can get in control of the white fuzz balls on my dark sweaters

New Gudetama

Early birthday present! Now I can live in Stardew Valley around the house all the time, I never have to leave.

And tiny pikmin succulent planters!

One red eye later and we are in New York for the weekend! We came out here to see a musical that Zach’s mom was involved in. Also it is my birthday over the weekend, so it was a welcome weekend away.

The weather was a bit unpredictable. Raining and then clear, then raining, then clear.

Stonewall Inn, walking through LGBT history.

Wet New York rainy scenes

It started to really pour, so we popped into the New Museum

Installation by Mariana Castillo Deball: “Her works often take inspiration from Mesoamerican iconography and narratives, considering their early-colonial transformations and their presence in Central America today. Exploring her philosophical interest in time and space as well as cosmology and depictions of natural order, Castillo Deball has engaged a diverse range of scholars in her research. Her works and installations often reflect Surrealist writer Roger Caillois’s notion of “diagonal sciences”—unusual cross-sections of the world that reveal what he called “neglected correlations,” and “tissues of thought.”

More copy and paste because it’s all interesting context, and Natalie the curator wrote it best, “The exhibition’s centerpiece, a specially commissioned inlaid wood floor installation, draws from an early colonial map of San Pedro Teozacoalco, Mexico, which bears a unique stylistic blend of European maps and Mixtec codices of the sixteenth century. A large-scale sculpture, No solid form can contain you (2010), offers a peculiar visualization of space as a would-be mold turned inside out—panels cast from a statue of Coatlicue, the Mexica, or Aztec, mother goddess, are inverted to reveal their concave sides and reassembled to create a hollow figure. Do ut des (2014–19), Castillo Deball’s series of perforated books, borrows its title from a Latin phrase meaning “I give so that you will give,” and her Mathematical Distortions (2012) refers to the shifts in knowledge that occur with shifts in position. Together, the works in the exhibition speak to the place of the viewer, the permeability of surfaces, and ideas of reciprocity and exchange.”

Then we went upstairs to the Nari Ward exhibition.

““Nari Ward: We the People” features over thirty sculptures, paintings, videos, and large-scale installations from throughout Ward’s twenty-five-year career, highlighting his status as one of the most important and influential sculptors working today. Since the early 1990s, Ward has produced his works by accumulating staggering amounts of humble materials and repurposing them in consistently surprising ways. His approach evokes a variety of folk traditions and creative acts of recycling from Jamaica, where he was born, as well as the material textures of Harlem, where he has lived and worked for the past twenty-five years.”

“This presentation highlights the continued importance of New York, and Harlem in particular, to the material and thematic content of Ward’s art. Many of his early sculptures were created with materials scavenged from buildings and streets in Harlem. These items—baby strollers, fire hoses, baseball bats, cooking trays, bottles, and shopping carts—were chosen for their connection to individual lives and stories within the neighborhood.”

“In his more recent work, Ward directly addresses complex political and social realities that resonate on both a local and a national level, reflecting the profound changes gentrification has brought to Harlem and the increasingly fractured state of democracy in the United States. He uses language, architecture, and a variety of sculptural forms to reflect on racism and power, migration and national identity, and the layers of historical memory that comprise our sense of community and belonging.”

We also played an onion game where Zach took all my onions and I felt betrayed.

We walked over to the Tenement Museum to try to buy a last minute tour. We got lucky and nabbed some spots on a tour, but still had to kill an hour.

What better way to kill an hour than to eat a bunch of Vanessa’s Dumplings

A walk around the Lower East Side

We squeezed a lot in our hour

Then we made it back for our tour at the Tenement Museum. I’ve been here once before, but you can go on a few different tour experiences. And they purchased another building on the same block and have a few more units and tours to experience, so this time we went on Under One Roof which looks at three families who all shared a relationship to the garment industry and who lived in the same unit over the course of 50 years. The Tenement Museum is so great because you can really get a sense of the fabric of the neighborhood and hear about the history of New York through the families who did their best to get by in a changing city and changing country.

Then we went for dinner at the Little Owl

I tried skate, we shared a salad, and Zach had some meat. Oh, and some fries of course.

The restaurant is in the ground floor of the building that was used to show the exterior view of the Friends apartment. There were people outside taking photos haha.

Hopped on the subway

To see Hadestown! A musical about Orpheus and Eurydice and hades and Persephone, and that familiar story you might have heard about Orpheus leading Eurydice out of the Underworld on blind faith that she was following him…

On Saturday, my actual birthday, we journeyed to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to check out the Sakura Matsuri festival

All kinds of color in bloom

Checking out the bonsai collection

I look better a little out of focus

It was really started to get crowded so we decided to stay goodbye to the cherry blossoms and head to the museum

But first, a pit stop to get some food.

Thai food!

A stirfry with eggplant and chicken and basil, plus a spicy seafood soup with cod

AND MANGO STICKY RICE cannot resist

A Farmer’s Market was winding down outside the library

We made it! I just started watching Pose, and it starts with a scene where they rob the Brooklyn Museum. Fun stuff.

Do Ho Suh’s full-scale re-creation of their former apartment in Chelsea. They lived there for 19 years. “Drawing on a longing for home, feelings Suh initially experienced as an immigrant, the work highlights the important connections we make between physical places and memory. Currently based in London, Suh, like other globally acclaimed artists, lives a nomadic existence, traveling from city to city to execute commissions and participate in exhibitions. But having created sculptures that allow him “to carry my house with me,” he is at home wherever he is.”

Tragically couldn’t get entrance to the Frida Kahlo exhibition.

Eric N. Mack. “He encourages the viewer’s intimate relationship with the work by folding, fastening, draping, or even suspending his paintings so that visitors can move about the space—walking among, or even under, the elements of his installation. In this insistent consideration of how the viewer’s body relates to his paintings in real time, Mack’s work draws from not only sculpture but also fashion—a medium of particular interest to him with its potential for aesthetic experience within everyday interaction.”

Kwang Young Chun sculptural compositions. “South Korean artist Kwang Young Chun combines hundreds of paper-wrapped parcels to create sculptural compositions, called Aggregations, that look like crystal formations, asteroids, or the surface of the moon. The Aggregations are simultaneously Space Age and nostalgic, beautiful and violent, powerful and fragile. They draw on the artist’s training in abstract painting as well as memories of his childhood, when Korean apothecaries sold medicine in similar little bundles.

Each parcel is wrapped in old book pages, printed in the traditional manner on Korea’s celebrated mulberry-pulp paper, called hanji. Chun likens the parcels to cells or units of information, and sees analogies to both chemistry and the human condition in the ways that the parcels interact physically: sometimes meshing, sometimes clashing. He compares the fragmentary passages of text on the wrappers—most taken from classics of Korean and Chinese philosophy—to voices overheard in a crowd.”

Greenwood Cemetery. The cemetery was founded in 1838 and was one of the first rural cemeteries in America. It is also a Revolutionary War historic site, currently has 560,000 permanent residents (included Basquiat!), and now is recognized as a National Historic Landmark.

Why not spend my birthday contemplating mortality and spending time in a peaceful serene atmosphere embracing the eventual truth that we will all die.

It’s a beautiful place to walk around and get some green. If you are freaked out by graves it might not be for you.

Went for beers at Industry City

They have an entire Japanese market

And for dinner experienced a beautiful sushi meal with Zach’s dad.

Sunday morning on the Highline

With Zach’s mom and stepdad we climbed the “Vessel” a monstrous sculpture outside of Hudson Yards, the fanciest mall I’ve ever seen outside of Vegas hah.

Weird to climb this little human ant farm and look down at the old train and shipping yards, only to now be replaced by a huge mixed-use fancy development.

Pondered the changing city, paid for $5 coffees and parted ways, wandered the Highline a bit further before heading to the Tolkien exhibition at the Morgan.

The Tolkien exhibition brought original sketches, letters, and manuscripts from the Tolkien Archive at the Bodleian Library and other places together.

Original cover and sleeve designs, and maps and illustrations—including the working copy that was covered in cigar burns, coffee, and was adjusted over time, folded and unfolded and folded again.

Plus awesome illustrations

And in the evening said our farewell to New York and headed to the airport for our night flight back to Los Angeles. A short but sweet trip.

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A question that you may or may not feel inclined to answer? So! Let’s do it. I invite you to answer in the comments:

Have you been to New York? If so—what is your favorite thing you’ve uncovered about the city? Could be a gallery, a bar, a neighborhood, whatever!

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Much love friends!