Tag Archives: living in new york is neat

What is Art?

Posted by katie ett on July 19, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under arts and crafts, good times at everyone else's expense, living in new york is neat
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I love art, and I love to make fun of it, too. When my friends Ellie and Kinard came to visit late last year, we went to MoMA one afternoon, and before we left, we had a long conversation with my roommate about who gets to decide what art is. I think his basic argument (and I’m sure he’ll lambast me in the comments if I’m wrong) was that the individual observer gets to decide; if it’s art to you, it’s art. I think Ellie‘s basic argument was that nobody gets to say that something isn’t art. I think Kinard‘s basic argument was, “Let’s go to Shake Shack again.” Just kidding; that was me.

But yeah, I’ll defend your art to the death, even if it involves throwing soup on a statue. Still, here are some of the pieces at MoMA that gave me pause:

Questionable MoMA Art
Belgian Lion by Marcel Broodthaers

The placard for this said, “Found object in frying pan.” It was under glass, which makes it all the funnier to me. ART.

Questionable MoMA Art

These are evenly-spaced orange squares. ART!

Questionable MoMA Art

There was a great story behind these that I don’t remember. Some benefactor said he’d give some artist, like, 10 bajillionty dollars to paint him an original piece every year or something, and this is what the artist gave him. And he totally didn’t murder the artist after receiving the first one. ART!!

Questionable MoMA Art

I don’t think there was actually a rifle shot in this wall. AAAAART!

Questionable MoMA Art

I absolutely love this description: “Each site was photographed at the time the marker was placed with no attempt made for a more or less interesting or picturesque representation of the location.” NOT-EVEN-TRYING ART!

Questionable MoMA Art

I actually kind of like this one.

Questionable MoMA Art

And this one, too.

But here’s some more ART:

Robert Barry’s 90mc Carrier Wave (FM) “consists of radio waves generated by a hand-engineered FM radio transmitter installed in this gallery but hidden from view”. INVISIBLE ART!

While all of this is a little laughable, it’s all a little wonderful, too. And really, I’d rather be too willing to call something art than not willing enough. Take a look at Mark Rothko’s No. 10 and tell me you want to be the person described in the last sentence of the MoMA placard next to the piece:

“The irregular patches of color characteristic of the artist’s Multiform paintings of 1948 seem to have settled into place on this canvas, which Rothko divided horizontally into three dominant planes of color that softly and subtly merge into one another. Between 1949 and 1950 Rothko simplified the compositional structure of his paintings and arrived at this, his signature style. He explained, ‘The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.’ MoMA acquired No. 10 in 1952. The painting—the first by Rothko to enter the collection—was so radical for the time that a trustee of the Museum resigned in protest.

ART!

Otto, PS1, 5Pointz, and Other Really New Yorky Things

Posted by katie ett on June 26, 2012 – 12:30 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, restaurant ramblings, there's a difference between films and movies
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On Friday night, my co-workers and I went to Mario Batali’s Otto for pizza and pasta and cured meats and gelato in flavors like OLIVE OIL and CREME FRAICHE. My friend Ash took awesome pictures of the meal, including some of me pretending to eat an entire plate of salad like a taco once we figured out there was a big slice of cheese underneath all the lettuce. No big deal.

Otto Pizzeria
photo by Ash at Not Bored in NY

Afterward, we went to see Prometheus in 3-D, and I thought we’d all agree that it was awwwwwwwwwwesomely entertaining, but it turns out that fully half of the group thought it was a plague on the rest of the franchise. So go see it if you want fun and suspense and gore, but don’t see it if you like films that don’t try to cram three movies’ worth of material into one.

Saturday, we met our friends Nik and Marko at PS1, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) baby sister in Queens. There were some crazy cool things there (a roomful of confetti being blown around by fans, a movie with animated LEGO people reading pathetic online conversations between real people), but because some of it was a little avant-garde, it was no surprise to hear middle-aged women saying things like, “This is as useless as Twitter.”

P.S. 1 NYC
Wendy being constructed in the museum’s courtyard

Then we walked across the street to 5Pointz, a factory that’s been turned into a graffiti park where artists can spray on the weekends. We’ve probably seen it a hundred times from the 7 train but have never stopped to actually take it all in.

5 Pointz Graffiti Park NYC

Obviously it brought out the badass in the boyz:

5 Pointz Graffiti Park NYC

And then we went to a Bosnian restaurant to eat cevapi, the sausages Nik and Marko ate while growing up in Serbia. They were totally delicious,

Cevapi

and now I’ve threatened to take everyone out for Ohio food.

Adventure Time with Kat and Kam: Southern Roosevelt Island

Posted by katie ett on June 21, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under adventure time, creepy boyfriend obsession, just pictures, living in new york is neat
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Between the East coast of Manhattan and the West coast of Queens is Roosevelt Island, a strip of land two miles long and 800 feet wide. You can walk from one side of it to the other in literally five minutes. It’s considered part of Manhattan, so the rents are high despite there being exactly one subway stop on the island and no actual way to get there from Manhattan by car. But the way you do get there is glorious. Before you actually get there, though–at least if you’re Kamran and me–you have to make a couple of stops.

Roosevelt Island Walk

We started at Kamran’s neighborhood CoCo for bubble teas and took them to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, which is clearly the most rolls-off-the-tongue park in NYC. Birds cooed on the arches above us, the United Nations building beckoned from across the street, and a heavily Photoshopped sky loomed darkly over Jesus.

Roosevelt Island Walk

Roosevelt Island Walk

Roosevelt Island Walk

We walked along the river in the park below Beekman Place and stared across the East River to Roosevelt Island, which has this creepy old shell of a building on one end that’s always lit up at night, making it even creepier:

Roosevelt Island Walk

On the way, we’d stopped at Choux Factory for cream puffs that aren’t nearly as huge and gushing as the ones at Schmidt’s in Ohio but come in more interesting flavors. I barely care about blueberries at all and nearly passed out from the deliciousness of this:

Roosevelt Island Walk

Kamran looks pretty pleased with his boring vanilla, too:

Roosevelt Island Walk

But then we spotted this on our way out of the park and threw them both up:

Roosevelt Island Walk

We walked up to 59th Street and watched the tram to Roosevelt Island come in:

Roosevelt Island Walk

Roosevelt Island Walk

And then we boarded it ourselves and took it across the river. I’ll never get over how it feels to hang so far up in the air, to see taxis look like matchbox cars, and to peek into the windows of twentieth floor apartments like that pervert Superman.

Roosevelt Island Walk

Roosevelt Island Walk
hanging in mid-air over the East River

Roosevelt Island Walk
the many apartment buildings of Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island Walk
a sign evidently left over from the days when Roosevelt Island was known as Welfare Island

Roosevelt Island Walk
the Queensboro Bridge, which passes over the island on its way from Manhattan to Queens

Roosevelt Island Walk
Kamran under the bridge with a Queens power plant in the background

Roosevelt Island Walk
seagulls over the Goldwater Hospital

Roosevelt Island Walk
Manhattan through the gates surrounding Southpoint Park

Roosevelt Island Walk
this was a really terrible picture, but then I made it look retro, so now it’s art

Roosevelt Island Walk
the Pepsi sign, one of my favourite parts of Queens, through the grass on Roosevelt Island

Roosevelt Island Walk
the tippy-top of the old Smallpox Hospital

This thing was built in 1856, lasted 100 years, and then fell into disrepair after it was abandoned. (Here‘s a picture of it from the 1870s that’s so romantic it makes me kind of want smallpox.) In 1976, it was designated a New York City Landmark and then . . . left to rot some more. The city is currently working to stabilize the building so that it can be open to the public when the new park on the very Southern tip of the island is finished. It’s lit up at night with green lights that make it look suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper haunted-housey from Manhattan, so it was awesome to finally see the thing up close and realize that it’s just as creepy as we thought.

Roosevelt Island Walk
Kamran, looking pretty wary of the ghosts

Roosevelt Island Walk
and then looking happy

Roosevelt Island Walk
and then looking like he really wishes I’d stop so we could eat the Milky Way we brought with us

After walking all over the Southern tip, which is really just a couple thousand feet long, we got back on the tram and rode into 59th Street again:

Roosevelt Island Walk

Roosevelt Island Walk
looking North up 1st Avenue

Roosevelt Island Walk
a, um, rather specialized store on 60th Street

Roosevelt Island Walk
Kamran looking sad, because Sprinkles was closed

Roosevelt Island Walk
purdy archytecture

Aaaaaaaaaaaand then we went home.

The End.

Just Another Day in the Life of a City Curmudgeon

Posted by katie ett on June 8, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under good times at everyone else's expense, living in new york is neat, why i'm better than everyone else
Tagged as , ,

Last night, Kim came over with Big Gay Renly Brownies™, and we finished this season of “Game of Thrones” (I fell in love with Khaleesi all over again), and then my roommate/landlord/co-worker/friend, Jack, and I watched the last three episodes of “Girls”, all of which were so entirely MY LIFE that I have no idea how everyone isn’t feeling the bignostalgicfeelings I’m feeling for this show. Hannah considers moving back home to Michigan for exactly one minute before realizing she needs to date boys whose buttholes she can stick her finger in, and those boys don’t exist in Michigan. She and her friends go to a Williamsburg warehouse party not because they want to but because it’s just what everyone’s doing. She calls herself a writer but is really an unemployed administrative assistant by anyone else’s standards. It is good.

This morning, I was waiting in line to go up the stairs from the subway platform when a woman in a way-too-classy-for-work silk blouse and pencil skirt clomped by me in some suede sandals with too-tall heels. Her feet had gotten sweaty from the heat, so she was sliding around in them and appeared to be having a really hard time walking, but that didn’t keep her from cutting in front of ten people in line to get upstairs first. I got on the escalator, still thinking about her sweaty feet, and watched as a shrimpy little man in a tight polo shirt tucked into pinstriped pants that showcased how tiny his waist and how ample his backside were ran up past me like his bowels were imploding. I heard him start saying, “Excuse me! Pardon me! STEP ASIDE!” to someone ahead of me and saw that the woman was standing still on the left side of the escalator. WHICH LITERALLY EVERYONE KNOWS is for people who wants to walk up instead of ride up. He said to her, “Do you not know how to use an escalator?”, and she said, “Shut up!” But you know she moved aside.

Then, going into my office building, a woman behind me got frustrated with my leisurely pace, decided she couldn’t wait for me to get through the revolving door, and opened up one of the side doors. I’m not sure why, but people not using the revolving door causes seething hatred to rise in me; I feel like these people are not just careless but, like, actually-bad people who torture kittens and send spam e-mails to grandmothers asking that $50,000 be sent to an offshore account to help rescue the king of Namibia from his captors or whatever. She rushed ahead of me and was already waiting in the elevator bank when I got there a minute later. We have one of those newfangled elevator panels where you type in your floor, and it tells you which elevator to get into. Only not all of the elevators are in the system yet, so it sometimes just tells you to wait for one of the unmarked elevators to come. Well, she had evidently been told that, because when I came up and typed in my floor number and was told to get into Elevator C, she watched and then huffed and puffed like the elevators had committed a personal offense against her. She then came over to re-enter her floor in an attempt to get on my elevator, but my elevator arrived just then, so as she approached with her arm already outstretched, I cut her off, and she apologized for the privilege.

I know that I’m a very small person, but I feel like everything’s coming up Katie.

Welcome Home, or Welcome Back to NYC, At Least, Because It’s Still Unclear If This or Ohio is My Home

Posted by katie ett on June 6, 2012 – 12:00 pm
Filed under living in new york is neat, no i really do love ohio
Tagged as ,

There are a lot of things I love about Ohio, neither ironically nor just out of sentimentality for the first twenty-four years of my life. Of course because my family and my lifelong friends live there, but also because the people are kinder, everything’s wildly inexpensive, and it’s just generally easier to exist there in the wide-open spaces. The cool things in Ohio seem cooler because they’re undiluted by a million other cool things around them, you know?

But after the most perfectly Ohio goodbye with a lunch at The Cheesecake Factory with my best friend and our friends Erin and Jenn, I came back to NYC on Saturday afternoon, and the city felt welcoming for once. My plane flew way up past the airport in Queens over the Bronx and City Island, over sailboats sprinkled in Pelham Bay, over tiny islands I’ve never seen before with a single house on each one. Pea Island! Goose Island! Hog Island! Kamran and I walked to Grand Central to shop once I arrived at his apartment, and the employees at Banana Republic were extra nice, the desserts at Financier were extra delicious, the cheese selection at Murray’s was extra impressive. We ordered organic grass-fed burgers for dinner, which you have a hard time finding in the grocery store in Ohio, let alone have them delivered to your house for free by a man on a bike. And then we stayed up all night watching ancient episodes of “X-Files” in which people wear pink eye makeup.

On Sunday, a Mila Kunis/Zoe Saldana/Marion Cotillard/Clive Owen/Billy Crudup movie was filming outside Kamran’s building, which we only figured out when we realized we’d been hearing squealing tires on the street below for three hours straight. The modern street signs had been pasted over with “Knickerbocker Ave.” and “54th St.”, and 70s-era cars filled the parking spaces while cops in old-fashioned uniforms staged a chase between them.

United Nations Rainbow

There was a rainbow over the United Nations building, which we attempted to follow to the river but lost somewhere between 43rd and 51st Streets. The sky in general was brooding and bright blue at the same time and somehow more expansive than it’s ever seemed. The French pastry place was closed and the Jamba Juice was closed, but we found a restaurant specializing in Indian kati rolls and stopped by Crumbs for cupcakes, and everything was more delicious than ever. And we went to our grocery store that only has natural and organic products, and we ordered dinner from our usual favourites that don’t exist in Ohio, and it felt like this place missed me.

Roosevelt Island and the East River

I love Ohio, and I love NY, and they’re almost complete opposites, but I still think of them both as home.