Every year for Easter I head to the Bronx for Easter. My grandparents and great-grandparents on my mom side were members of a German based Club off the ocean front (if you can count the Long Island Sound as ocean front). I put a lot of hype into the weekend even though as I get older the trill of it lessens. I'm at that point in my family that I don't fit in with the children, but I can't really identify with adults. (I know I'm 21 but I think I'm rather immature.)
Anyways.... The first day (Friday) we got to New York I spent like a half an hour in my Nana's, my great-grandmother, basement. She actually has a system of strings so that you can turn a light on from one side of a room to the other. And she has a root cellar. You probably don't even know what a root cellar is (wiki). Her whole house is suck in the 40's.
Usually the first night we are up there we get Chinese food for dinner but my mom had to do my Nana's taxes so we didn't have time to get there so we ran down the street to get pizza. Later that night we went to the Club bar and I tired a mudslide. There was way too much rum in it, but then again I not really a drinker.
Saturday we went to MoMA (I wanted to see the Tim Burton exhibit), because I had successfully managed to convince my mom to take us there because it takes less than an hour on the subway, and than five blocks from there. Over the years I had this jagged view that the subway was scary… it really wasn’t. There were some interesting people on the train, most of them asleep, and a lot listening to music. I didn’t make eye contact and prayed my grandmother would stop chatting with strangers, just in case. I’m usually over paranoid.
I wasn’t ready for how huge everything is. The moment we got out of the subway the first thing I did was look up and all I could see was the massive buildings. At one point when I was looking out the museum windows you would think the weather had changed from sunny to completely rainy. No. It was the shadows that some buildings made on others.
My mom had brought a membership to the museum because the exhibit had been sold out for the weekend. It was nice because the lines were pretty much insane. I usually enjoy museums, but this one was way too busy, you couldn’t walk anywhere without running into someone, and someone running into you without saying sorry. There where tons of hipster European tourists especially the French.It may just be my opinion but when you go to a museum you are supposed to look at the art, but everyone was standing in front of it taking photos, especially in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. You can find a picture of it on the Internet; why would you take a picture of it when you can look at it? I want to see the brush strokes (which is something I’ve always wanted to see). Seeing Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was an experience. I’ve been told in my Art History class that some of these pieces are large, but it isn’t until you see a person standing in front of it that you realize how large it is.
Other artists I’ve learned about in class that I saw (long list, go): Cindy Sherman, Mondrian, Beckman, Malevich, Kandinsky, Rousseau, Matisse, Richard Avedon, etc. Some other works I enjoyed was a piece from Yin Xiuzhen series the Collective Subconscious (in which she altered a mini-van and stretched it out) Ernesto Neto’s Navedenga (I’m not sure how to describe that). I got to see Richard Avedon’s Golden Marilyn Monroe piece, not only do I love the fact it was much larger than the size I’m used to but he’s managed to capture some of her vulnerability. I got to see the famous Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cups (which were as long as a gallery wall), some Jackson Pollock’s, an artist I became really interested in High School.
Of course I can’t by without mentioning Marina Abromovic’s exhibit The Artist is Present. My sister walked and said, “What the hell is this?” I was basically thinking the same thing but I wasn’t going to mention it out loud. The idea of trying to blend performance art in a museum setting seems, some one said somewhere, was impossible. I’m not sure why she does some of the pieces she does, but for me its something that goes along with the shock value. In Modern Art class my professor mentioned that many artists do things just because they know they will shock people, and I know that I can respect her work for that reason. It made me uncomfortable, and that isn’t a negative thing. I read up on her and she’s done some pretty intense stuff, like spending a twelve days in a three-room structure allowing the audience to watch her in the process. Currently she is spending every day that MoMA is open during her duration sitting in the same chair for the whole day not moving, almost a living statue. If that it isn’t dedication to art, I don’t know what is.
The first thing we saw was the Tim Burton exhibit. I’m not going to lie I felt rather let down by the experience, but it wasn’t with Burton’s art but it was because of the massive amount of people in there. You had squeeze your way into see anything. I had no idea about the amount of work he puts into his films, the amount of sketches, and notes written down on paper. Also all sketches he done his entire life, the walls are covered in them. I’m becoming a huge fan of stop-motion animation so seeing the puppets from Nightmare Before Christmas and the Corpse Bride where a treat. My mom enjoyed his witty pieces like, “Undressing her with his eyes” where a mans eyes were literally undressing a girl. My grandmother loved anything to do with Edward Sissorhands. In general I think the trip to MoMA is something my family won’t forget for a while, and will probably annoy me about for awhile because none of them are much of Modern Art fans, and especially the Artist is Present exhibit.
Easter Sunday went by very quickly. Before dinner I went to church with my grandmother, and her small church is so much more diverse than my large church. There was a lady with a Jamaican accent, a guy from near Russia, and a Korean couple named Lee. It was kind of refreshing that her church seemed so much closer than mine. I barely remember dinner. Afterwards everyone went to the beach (I mean that sarcastically because its pretty much just a thin strip of sand now), and when the family left I stayed with my mom and grandmother at the bar as they talked to people we don’t see very often. I ended up talking to a distant cousin more last night then I have in my whole life. We went to my uncle’s shop after that, and I got to witness the comedy act of him and his friend, as they had switch glasses to see text messages. I don’t think they are too much older than my mom?! It was pretty funny.
Later that night I ran after the Mr. Softies Ice Cream truck (there has been an ice cream truck where I live in years), and the weekend was pretty much over. We left this morning, and I’m really tired. I can never sleep in my Nana’s house. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.
I'm going to post some more photos on my flickr pretty soon. I was fighting with blogger way too much just to get that amount on.
In non New York related news, I may get to go on a couple extra vacations this summer, and the new series of Doctor Who started. Matt Smith’s doctor right now reminds me a bit too much of David Tennet’s right now, and some of the same plot lines from other series are surfacing already, but I enjoy it so far, and I’m sure it’ll get better.
2010 movie count: 50 (Last seen Bringing Up Baby, I’m developing a Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn obsession)
STNG count: hell, I haven’t watched this show in a million years. Eventually I’ll get back on it.
P.S. Two Door Cinema is frikin’ amazing. Hannah can always call good music. Always. She never fails.
