Art-up
Who wouldn't want to live in New York if they could afford it?! Everything is here. You feel more creative having just spent a few days soaking up bits & pieces, sights n sounds. Despite rushing about like a man possesed I've barely seen a thing and now only a few days to go. If I get my act together i'll try to bus it to Boston and back before flying out to Canada on the 13th.
Geez it's hard to recollect everything I've seen already. I've been staying in hostels around Manhatten, which is the most heavily built-up of the five bouroughs in New York, and taking subways and buses all over the place. The Museum of Natural History was a real treat. If hanging out in some of these insanely populated cities makes you feel like an insigificant bag of bones then this museum makes you realise that in the grant scheme of history you're just a fleck of dust at the back of a dinosaur's scrotum! The exhibits on all the major cultures of the world were insightful but demolarising too when I thought of how much more of the world there is to see and so little time.
I overdid it a bit again yesterday with the walking and I'm feeling it today. First up was the old bohemian district of Greenich Villiage. Like all the once-cool downbeat places it's all gentrified thesedays with expenisve restaurants and shops. Keroauc, Burroughs and Ginsburg et al used hang out here in the 50s and 60s. I ate my sandwich on the spot where Dylan first started playing his folk tunes to passersby.
In the afternoon I look the subway into Brooklyn and I pounded the streets under the hot sun for what seemed like forever. Brooklyn is one of the five bouroughs of NY that's almost entirely populated by African-Americans. It's got a very different feel to slick Manhattan. The town centre was really full-on. I kept wandering further and further out until I started to get some weird looks from some homeboys close to dusk.
I found myself in the East Villiage in the early evening. It's the cool area when most of the first-generation punk bands started out in the late 70s. I could almost picture Joey Ramone slinking along Avenue A. I was reading in the NY Times earlier that day about this group of homeless Polish men who tend to congregate together around a certain spot in NY and sure enough this old guy who slumped down next to me on a park bench told me he was Polish. A lively girl from Seattle I chatted to pulled a piano accordion out of knowwhere and started accompanying a nearby busking Frenchman. The drunken Pole bellowed 'only in New York' as he danced a jig to the tunes.
The weather's not as good today so I hit the Guggenheim Art Museum this morn' to Art-up with some Picasso! A lot of the space was taken up by the concepts of some British architect that were pretty impressive (I guess). I was more taken though by the Jackson Pollack pieces. His big canvases like Blue Poles on display in Canberra are fairly well known but this exhibition showed a lot of his smaller work on paper. It's funny, two separate people I've met on this trip have remarked that I should be some sort of artist(?). I wish somebody had told this lost soul that 10yrs ago...
MG
On the Ipod: Ramones, 'Rocket to Russia'
Geez it's hard to recollect everything I've seen already. I've been staying in hostels around Manhatten, which is the most heavily built-up of the five bouroughs in New York, and taking subways and buses all over the place. The Museum of Natural History was a real treat. If hanging out in some of these insanely populated cities makes you feel like an insigificant bag of bones then this museum makes you realise that in the grant scheme of history you're just a fleck of dust at the back of a dinosaur's scrotum! The exhibits on all the major cultures of the world were insightful but demolarising too when I thought of how much more of the world there is to see and so little time.
I overdid it a bit again yesterday with the walking and I'm feeling it today. First up was the old bohemian district of Greenich Villiage. Like all the once-cool downbeat places it's all gentrified thesedays with expenisve restaurants and shops. Keroauc, Burroughs and Ginsburg et al used hang out here in the 50s and 60s. I ate my sandwich on the spot where Dylan first started playing his folk tunes to passersby.
In the afternoon I look the subway into Brooklyn and I pounded the streets under the hot sun for what seemed like forever. Brooklyn is one of the five bouroughs of NY that's almost entirely populated by African-Americans. It's got a very different feel to slick Manhattan. The town centre was really full-on. I kept wandering further and further out until I started to get some weird looks from some homeboys close to dusk.
I found myself in the East Villiage in the early evening. It's the cool area when most of the first-generation punk bands started out in the late 70s. I could almost picture Joey Ramone slinking along Avenue A. I was reading in the NY Times earlier that day about this group of homeless Polish men who tend to congregate together around a certain spot in NY and sure enough this old guy who slumped down next to me on a park bench told me he was Polish. A lively girl from Seattle I chatted to pulled a piano accordion out of knowwhere and started accompanying a nearby busking Frenchman. The drunken Pole bellowed 'only in New York' as he danced a jig to the tunes.
The weather's not as good today so I hit the Guggenheim Art Museum this morn' to Art-up with some Picasso! A lot of the space was taken up by the concepts of some British architect that were pretty impressive (I guess). I was more taken though by the Jackson Pollack pieces. His big canvases like Blue Poles on display in Canberra are fairly well known but this exhibition showed a lot of his smaller work on paper. It's funny, two separate people I've met on this trip have remarked that I should be some sort of artist(?). I wish somebody had told this lost soul that 10yrs ago...
MG
On the Ipod: Ramones, 'Rocket to Russia'
posted by Matt G at 11:30 AM
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