Days 37-42: New York, New York

I woke up on Janelle’s couch, fairly late in the day since we didn’t really settle in until after 3:00 AM. Since she is a champion, she had already headed to work at 8:00 or 9:00. Even though it was my first day in New York, probably a day to be out doing hardworking and speed-walking things, I spent most of it writing and editing my show in her empty house to take advantage of the quiet. In the early evening, I re-packed my stuff and walked to my friend Mark’s house, where I’d be staying for the rest of my time in the city. Janelle only lived about a mile from Mark, both in Brooklyn, and I got to enjoy a leisurely walk through the iconic row houses.  I had been mentally prepared for NYC in August to resemble a hot garbage scented concrete sauna, but the night’s rain had tempered the humidity and restored a pleasant and temperate climate to the city.

Mark is also from Spokane and it was interesting to talk with him about living in New York. By this point in the trip, though I’d enjoyed a lot of other places, I was feeling pretty affirmed in my decision to largely live in Spokane in the future. I like the slower pace, the different communities I’ve found there, and the seasons (though it’s hard to say how long those will last).  We were both hard at work during my stay, both generally with writing, but we had some time in between to talk about our shared hometown and our different impressions of New York. He is the type of person who thrives on the chaos there, the unpredictability inherent in the sheer density and diversity of the population. I talked with one of his roommates as well and explained the general outline of Spokane to him. I told him I liked New York but wouldn’t last a month there because I lack the hustle to keep up with its frenetic pace and that I didn’t really understand how anyone manages to do so. He was a little bit morose after we talked and said it was nice to talk to me about it because he “forgets that it isn’t normal here”.

Given how overwhelming NYC is, I had put out a lot of vague feelers for interviews, but only had a few projects or people very high on the list. There were experiences that I wanted to have though, too, and I spent some of the time visiting sights and just walking around to take it in. One of my priorities was to visit the Brooklyn Museum and I did early in the week.  Going to museums alone is the safest option for me because I take forever, often backtracking to look at work again and trying to subtly take photos of other patrons (more on that later). Here are a few of the highlights from my visit there:

“Faces & Phases” was the first show that I went to and its emotional impact took me by surprise. I stood and read the entire chalkboard above before continuing on to the portraits, taking my time and soaking in other people’s realities. While I try to understand that art is subjective and that we all interact with it differently, I still found myself annoyed with people who breezed through this and other galleries, taking it personally when they shrugged off the content and continued on. The portraits were beautiful and showed a spectrum of experience and expression that we don’t often get to see in the homogenous media landscape that rarely presents real people outside of comfortable tropes.

Once I was prepped for tears by stories of resilience and expanding our notions of what is feminine and powerful, I turned the corner to an incredible prelude to Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”, created by women incarcerated at York Correctional Institution in homage to Chicago’s work and dedicated to women they found inspirational that pushed me over the edge. I more or less held it together, though, at least for the moment.

From there, I headed in to see “The Dinner Party” in full after fully and nerdily consuming the entire timeline that shared the vestibule space with the piece described above, taking mental note of women I needed to research, books to acquire. The actual piece is both impressive in its sheer scale and the intricacy of the task of building and painting and embroidering so many items, but also in the huge amount of research and organization that preceded the creation of the work. Here are some of my favorites women who were chosen by Chicago as emblematic of their time.

I wandered through the permanent galleries and checked out some of the classic American pieces that are housed there, some of which are interesting, but none of which are so utterly compelling to me that I need to spend a lot of time with them. I did get a fist bump and a “hell yeah” from a stranger for the selfie below, though.

The museum was also presenting previously unseen work from Jean-Michel Basquiat, largely consisting of his notebooks from the earliest days of his artistic development coupled with a few newer and larger pieces. It was strange to consider, despite his having been dead for longer than I’ve been alive now, how Basquiat might feel about having every page from his day-to-day notebooks splayed out on a wall for people to seriously consider as they walked around. It was great to see ideas forming in this raw medium though, paired with quotes from later in his career.

The last show that I spent much time exploring was the large-scale FAILE exhibition, part of the long term collaboration between Patrick McNeil & Patrick Miller, that included sculpture, paintings, and an entire functional arcade filled with re-skinned vintage games and black light. They incorporate pulp imagery alongside religious and classical imagery in work that pokes cheeky fun at consumer culture.

 

The following day, I returned to Janelle’s house (without the giant backpack) to finally record the interview with her that I had been instructed to by many of the regulars at Bread and Puppet. After talking during our six-hour drive, I was well-prepared to ask her the right questions. All through this trip, a lot had been adding up and showing me the value of artistic and cultural work; Janelle was a perfect person to help me understand how those tools can be leveraged for social change and set me up with some great examples of people doing the work. Her interview can be heard in part on Praxis 145 and will be posted in full here soon.  She pointed me to a variety of people, but one who she highlighted was Rachel, who I met up with later in the week.

An artist friend in Spokane had told me that I “absolutely must” contact Heidi Russell while in New York to interview her about her work with the International Women Artists’ Salon and as host of Salon Radio. I expected that she might be hard to reach, as many New Yorkers ended up being (but I get it, after spending just a short time there, that life is harried and it’s nothing personal), but she was incredibly accessible and even flipped the script on me when I contacted her–asking that I instead join her on that week’s program for Salon Radio. I agreed and prepared ten minutes, half of which would be interview and half, more terrifyingly, written work. At this point, I am utterly unfazed by on air banter, but am still very shy about sharing any creative work with the world. That said, I chose a non-fiction piece and (gasp) a poem and made my way to the studio on Thursday night. I ended up sharing the hour with the captivating team behind the new one-woman show “My Ass (In the World)” and being part of an interesting and emotional hour of radio, which as you may know by now, is kind of my thing.

We debriefed after the show and I was struck by how supportive these women were of one another and of me, someone they had just met with next to no experience or street cred. It was not what I had been prepped to expect from either New York or from female peers in general, but a welcome surprise. Neither did I expect to be invited to read at the monthly Salon Lounge event as a literary “salonista”, but I found myself changing my plans to stay an extra night, be brave, and do it.

The following morning brought my third interview of this stop, with the now-infamous Rachel. It turned out that I was already familiar with her work without knowing it–her epic Occupy flowchart had caught my attention years before proving that our brains work in some of the same strange and awesome ways. We talked in her home about the origins of her artistic activism, her role in organizing artists for the People’s Climate March, and how it all built up to current work with #FloodTheSystem.  I loved the explanation of choosing the name “flood the system” and thinking about the different ways that we can use water metaphors to express the ways we can work together to change systems and communicate the interconnection of everything. That interview can be heard in part on Praxis 145 and in full here soon.

Later that night, I finally made it to the Museum of Modern Art, where I hoped to stalk Yoko Ono and capture a quick conversation or a selfie with her during her retrospective show. I am usually not weird or even interested in meeting celebrities, but here is an exception. Though I didn’t find her, I did enjoy the show and especially seeing people’s reactions to the work. It was free Friday night at the museum, so it was crowded and filled with an incredible mix of people. Highlights for me included getting to read the original instruction paintings which range from silly to seriously moving (at least for me) and the more participatory aspects of the show. One room was empty and somewhat set apart within the central area of the gallery and contained only a small placard that said “Touch Each Other”. I had wandered into the room at the same time as a random guy and we ended up in a strange moment–a “who, us?” looking around–before I reached out one finger, E.T. style and he reciprocated and we both cracked up. Well played, Yoko.

I finished that night at the MoMA checking out the main painting and sculpture galleries during the limited time I had before closing. I have, as this post proves, taken photos of my share of art while in museums, but I also found it very strange to observe people walking around the edge of a gallery, photographing each piece of art, and viewing all of the art through the medium of a smaller and much less high-resolution screen. Particularly given that they were photographing some of the most famous art on earth, which has already been digitized in a very high quality format and can be accessed for free at any time, it made me laugh and I took a few photos of the phenomena in action.

The next morning, I packed my stuff and said goodbye to Mark’s Brooklyn apartment, which had been a great temporary home for the last few days, and headed to the Upper West Side (right by the Dakota! Another failed Yoko spotting opportunity) where my cousins run a yoga studio to meet up with them and bring my stuff to their place in the Bronx where I’d spend my last night. I was juggling plans to also meet a long-lost co-worker for brunch, but it all came together and I was able to both walk around Central Park and eat brunch with her and also meet up with the family crew and hitch a ride home with them. Gabriel and Mikaela are at very exuberant ages and I had a great time learning all about each of their current life passions and aspirations (software engineer and singer, respectively and both well on their way). I was able to kick back with them for a while before heading to the Salon Lounge, a long subway ride away, and get out some of my jitters.

When Heidi had invited me to perform, she asked whether I had anything on the theme of cross-generational engagement. I did not, and was pretty limited in what I did have considering that I largely write by hand and was only carrying the current notebook and a smattering of scraps held in my Google Drive or published here, so I opted to write something new in the 40 hours between being invited and performing. I had been really frustrated earlier in the week and unduly distracted by Facebook arguments that ended up being great fuel for the essay. You can read what I performed here. The format of the event was great with a section of literature, a section of theater, a section of music, and a film selection and I found again an unexpected level of genuine support and camaraderie.

Having not performed anything publicly in my own city for years, it felt a little strange to show up in New York for the first time and perform alongside much more established women artists, but in a way that experience really encapsulates the magic and myth of the most mythologized city in our popular consciousness. Heading home after that adrenaline-rich experience on the hot garbage scented subway, I was fully seduced by New York, at least temporarily. As I sat in the train, waiting for it to pull away, a young man was singing so beautifully on the platform that everyone had stopped talking outside to listen. He had a sign propped up in front of him, “Need $1,000 for school”.  I knew that he was going to get his money because he would show up here every night and sing and sing until he had it. And while normally I’d be cynical about that and dwell on how messed up it is that young people need to beg in the street to pay for school, at that moment it seemed like the utmost expression of the raw, too-human beauty of this crowded and hopped-up place. And I could have stayed forever then, though I knew in reality, I wouldn’t last a month.