Creative Cogitation

I have been send­ing pic­tures and writ­ing about my adven­tures in New York City on Face­book and Twit­ter.  If you want fre­quent updates you prob­a­bly should fol­low me there.  Mov­ing along…

Trans­porta­tion: I set up a car rental, but var­i­ous folks said, “You don’t need one.” so I didn’t pick it up-throwing myself to the ten­der mer­cies of local pub­lic tran­sit.  Gen­eral overview? Not bad except for the wait­ing part, but a book or phone with the mobile web can help with that. The hotel I am in offers a free shut­tle to Newark Air­port where I pick up the train to NY’s Penn Sta­tion (not to be con­fused with the Newark Penn sta­tion) for $25 round trip. A week unlim­ited pass on the sub­way costs $27.  I have yet to find out what a cab costs as other than that I have been hoof­ing it.  Sug­gest very com­fort­able shoes. 

Sub­way at Penn Station

Why am I in Newark NJ? Mediocre hotels in NYC after taxes start at $300, my dou­ble with pri­vate bath etc in NJ $50 a night. Even with the cost of trans­porta­tion it’s still less than a third of what I would be pay­ing on Man­hat­tan, and at least half of rooms else­where such as Queens or Hobo­ken. No bed bugs here. YMMV.

Food.  Prices range from very rea­son­able to vary expen­sive.  There is a cer­tain amount of con­ser­va­tion of enjoy­ment that goes on too.  Being able to sit down costs extra, hav­ing ambi­ence costs extra, a view costs extra, and if you have a view at a rea­son­able price the food is likely to be so so.  I find myself aim­ing for tasty sit down-as I am din­ing alone, ambi­ence is not nec­es­sar­ily required.

Cen­tral Park. Pretty, but in the end it is just a park whose real claim to fame is that it was not gob­bled up by sky­scrap­ers long ago.  There are city streets that go right through it, plus bicy­clists and jog­gers so you have to watch your step. 

Boy chases ducks at cen­tral park reservoir

A lot of parks pro­hibit dogs or pro­hibit dogs in cer­tain places so dog poo is not usu­ally an issue, but I would be care­ful about sit­ting down on the ground next to a wall as New York­ers do have pooches and all those canines need to whiz some­where.  The own­ers do carry bags to col­lect their animal’s drop­pings though.  I have not noted very many cats in this city. 

Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art.  I thought it would be open longer than it was the day I vis­ited.  It took me a while to get ori­ented so I viewed some things I had no inter­est in (such as mas­sive amounts of dead Egypt­ian things) and missed out on some things I wanted to see (such as half of the con­tem­po­rary art col­lec­tion).  For $20 2 hours was not enough time.  Advise you get there ear­lier if you are doing MoMA dur­ing the week­days as the close at 5:15 PM sharp.  In addi­tion to con­tem­po­rary art, and the Egypt­ian funer­ary items, there is fur­ni­ture form var­i­ous peri­ods, musi­cal instru­ments, paint­ings from var­i­ous peri­ods includ­ing Cezanne, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, even a Kuinji (which sur­prised me), Pol­lack, Japan­ese stuff, Chi­nese stuff, a bam­boo instal­la­tion on the roof, stat­ues, a tourist shop, a cou­ple of cafes, etc.  You prob­a­bly could roam around for 4 or 5 hours with­out get­ting bored, starv­ing or get­ting thirsty. 

River walk parks.  Lovely this time of year and there are lots of them — at least in lower Man­hat­tan — I don’t know about uptown.  There are also other parks sort of stuffed in odd cor­ners of the city. 

SoHo and Nolita.  Lots of shop­ping.  Ditto the main drags south from Penn Sta­tion (6th & 7th AVE).  Cer­tain areas of the city seem a lit­tle grungy to me.  YMMV.  Lots of var­ied and spec­tac­u­lar architecture. I also cruised around ground zero — you can’t see much except for cranes and the new build­ing grow­ing sky­ward.  Street ven­dors sell­ing food and fresh fruit every­where. There are also ven­dors sell­ing “Rolex” watches, I (heart) NY T-shirts, etc here and there, but espe­cially in Chi­na­town and SoHo/Canal Street.

Airan Kang sculp­ture, Light Read­ing, at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery NYC USA

So mostly what I have been doing other than hoof­ing it from point A to point B suck­ing in lower Man­hat­tan fla­vor is walk­ing about Chelsea (arts dis­trict).  The arts used to be in SoHo but now the cool kids are hang­ing out West of 10th AVE between say 20th and 27th ST. Open­ing nights tend to be Thurs­days, which I find to be an odd day for open­ings.  Most Gal­leries are open­ing from 10 AM to 6 PM Tues­day through Sat­ur­day, and show open­ings to close on Thursday.  

A lot of the art I have seen in Chelsea is what I would describe as “dead serious.” There are also a num­ber of instal­la­tions. I won­der if some of the art I see in Chelsea is of the “art you can live with” vari­ety for your aver­age col­lec­tor in NYC. It is inter­est­ing to be sure, but I per­son­ally could not “live with” dark and dis­af­fected very long… to each his or her own (although there was this one artist who did some­thing called “Flow­ers” which reminded me of Hello Kitty so…) There are also some mas­sive works includ­ing very min­i­mal­ist stuff.  I guess these sig­nif­i­cant pieces are for col­lec­tors who have space, which is some­thing I hear a lot of New York­ers are short on.   

Maybe art for the com­mon New Yorker is lim­ited to chara­ca­tures drawn by street artists and prints sold on the street.  I dunno.

US Bien­nale Group art being hung at Broad­way Gallery 473 W Broad­way 7th FL NYC

My show opens on Sat­ur­day (tomor­row as off the date of this blog).  I was told the open­ing is off the NYC Thurs­day open­ing sched­ule because of Yom Kip­pur. I don’t know how that will affect turn out.  The gallery owner enjoys my work, but he said it was priced too low, which was the sec­ond time in a week I had heard that — so I am rais­ing my prices. He also wanted to know if I did any­thing big­ger than 24 x 24 (I do — in fact I pre­fer large, I just don’t enjoy stor­ing it). We dis­cussed where I could go with the Binary Birds in the future.  It was an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion over 3 dif­fer­ent days.  I find myself with a lit­tle more insight into the art­work of this city.  But I don’t know if my tweet­ies will ever be that gritty. 

Before I leave I do intend to visit the Museum of Mod­ern Art.  As for the rest of the stan­dard touristy stuff, it’s not usu­ally my cup of tea but I may get around to some of it if I have time.  I am sup­posed to leave in less than a week so we will see. 

A blast of impres­sions. I find the activ­ity and energy of the city to be very fre­netic.  The Thurs­day open­ings are packed.  When you walk down the streets there are tons of peo­ple going this way and that.  Pedes­tri­ans seem to view lights as a sug­ges­tion.  It seems like half the cars fly­ing down the streets are taxis.  At night there are lights every­where — less than say Las Vegas, but still pretty bright.  I have not expe­ri­enced the packed sub­way phe­nom­e­non but I don’t think I want to.  Peo­ple are close and dis­tant at the same time.  My talk­a­tive nature seems to catch peo­ple off guard — they laugh ner­vously while main­tain eye con­tact and back­ing away.  The weather for my visit has  been in the 70s-80s & partly cloudy except for the first day, when I could have been car­ried off to Kansas by not one but two tor­na­dos; I got soaked to the bone before haunt­ing the Thurs­day night open­ings with New Yorker and artist, Assunta Sera. I come back from the city with a 100 pic­tures, exhausted, every night.  My feet are very tired. 

A park in the mid­dle of the street in NYC

Right now I think NYC is a nice place to visit, but I am a lit­tle home­sick for my mate, cats, kitchen, bed, car, my stu­dio and of course lower cost of liv­ing.  But I am not miss­ing the heat of of my home in Phoenix AZ.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

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