Snapped last night at the Roger Smith Hotel in the company of a friend who was kind enough to meet me in Midtown super late, even though he's tired of meeting me in Midtown. (Honestly, who can blame him? There's so much more to NY than Midtown.)
So next time: we travel North to Cloisters territory. (Or I do. He stays put and tells me how to get there, because he's also a public transportation savant.)
There's a back story to this shockingly cool installation that I was too tired to grok or even snapshot well last night after a full day of being and speaking at our annual client forum. I'll see what kind of info I can dig up after I've had a chance to nap a bit.
Posting by cameraphone en route to JFK.
Update: The space is a storefront that has been re-purposed for THE LAB:
THE LAB (For Installation + Performance Art) is a New York based, converted storefront turned fishbowl producing 30+ fast paced performance art and installation exhibitions annually. Aimed at furious midtown foot traffic, THE LAB’s programming is designed to confront modern relationships between art and audience and seeks to force interaction between high energy, "outrospective" exhibitions and nearly 25,000 daily passersby. It is THE LAB’s goal to reach out through the glass and capture, fascinate, amuse, bemuse all who pass within eye or ear shot of the corner of 47th and Lex.
And here's a video interview with the artist, Grimanesa Amoros, about the piece. Bonus: contains sound clips of the composition that is piped out over the sidewalks on Lexington:
Long story. But this weekend's New York trip that was to have salved the wounds of the canceled London trip has been canceled due to illness.
That's two in three weeks.
I'm beginning to have serious doubts about whether the Yucatan, home of both the Mayan site of Dzibanché and raging outbreaks of the swine flu virus, is really in the cards for Christmas.
So said Mr. Hoo when he emailed me some links re Frank Lloyd Wright in and around Buffalo, NY last week when I was just a few scant hours away in Warren, PA. He suggested that, as long as I was in the neighborhood, I should take an extra day to see a few -- including the tremendous Martin complex right in the city, and Graycliff, also built for the Martins and a brief drive outside the city limits on the shores of Lake Erie.
But my schedule didn’t have any give in it, so I made my plans to return home right after the last of the meetings wrapped up, do what I had to do to ship off some more work, speak to a gathered assembly of creative types in Chicago, and then daytrip into Manhattan the following day.
And then, unforeseen, the last of the meetings canceled, and I was left with *just* enough time to stop by Graycliff on my way to the airport in Buffalo (and perhaps enough time to squeeze in the Martin House in the city, if only it weren’t closed on Tuesdays...).
I squeaked in for the 2 o’clock tour as the docent was corralling the only other folks to materialize -- a couple from Sweden who had taken in the Martin house the day before. Our docent was two unsteady years into her volunteer stint, and delivered the story line like someone who didn’t entirely believe the fiction: “Frank Lloyd Wright carried the octagon through the negative spaces of the facade. (Can you see it? I’ve never been able to see it.)” She was a stern task master, insisting on stopping at the predefined spots on the tour and reviewing her mental notes before we moved on, all three of us eager to get under the eaves.
But we did all right. And we got to see the summer place that Wright built for the Martins sometime in the late ‘20s, which was open and wide and penetrated by clear glass panes throughout -- something that Isabelle Martin insisted upon, given her failing eyesight. (No colored art glass in evidence.)
The central living area opened on both sides to the drive and to the lake shore, the doors and windows alternating in balanced syncopation (the door on the left confronted a window on the right, and vice versa) to minimize strong drafts through the core of the house while still encouraging cooling breezes. It felt very much like the receiving area of Unity Temple, although where that is a place in between the primary spaces (the Sanctuary and the Meeting Hall) this was a place where living took place, rooted in the most impressive Frank Lloyd Hearth I’ve seen to date.
The hearth was flush to the floor and as tall as a standing man -- if that man were Frank Lloyd Wright -- and it was populated, on the day I was there, with thick logs tented together like a traditional campfire. Ablaze I imagine it would light and warm the entire room.
There were echoes of the Heurtley House here -- a screened stairway that led to a long promenade hallway, opening into rooms that overlooked the lake. Settled, refined, surprisingly without ostentation. A place to remove the working world mask and be still awhile.
Something I could use a little more of right now -- if only I didn't have to get back to work.
Happiness is this: Finding yourself suddenly in the early Spring chill of a New York evening, via Long Beach via downtown L.A. via a warm bed in Pasadena that you didn't want to leave (and certainly not at that ungodly early hour, the sun only just scratching the sleep from its eyes); missing the sunset entirely because you were snoozing stiff (and certainly snoring) in the middle seat on a five hour flight -- the kid to your right completely clueless as to the etiquette of the elbow (dude: you had the aisle. that armrest should have been mine.) and knowing that all you had to do on arriving on this only semi-familiar block in midtown is walk to the end of the street with your eyes wide open and you'd find it: the perfect place for dinner. And even though it's nearly 10PM it's not even close to closing time.
Just polished off a majestic and nourishing avocado salad. Moving on to the best piece of hamachi I've had since Santa Cruz some time back.
New York: I wasn't sure I wanted to see you today, but this I'll take, and be glad for it.
Meeting tomorrow. Then home late to a wide open weekend.
Snapped this from my rental car while stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway yesterday, while I was still feeling optimistic about my ability to navigate my way first to Brooklyn, and then across Lower Manhattan and finally to Secaucus, New Jersey, where I did my business this morning.
That was before my first U-turn on Delancey (cut to sign reading: "Welcome to Manhattan"; cut to me with thought bubble over my head, clutched forward over the steering wheel, thinking: This isn't Brooklyn...); and before my wide loop around Willoughby and Adelphi in (finally) Brooklyn; before my second U-turn in Little Italy (Manhattan again, dark now); before I queried the guy in the tollbooth on the NJ Turnpike for directions to the nearest gas station (where I hoped to find a map of the wastelands that are the Meadowlands) only to find the station (after my third U-turn) dark and deserted along an equally dark and deserted row of warehouses.
But there was the call to A, who googled me a map and got me out of there, and there was the sound of gurgling babies in the background, twins, just six-weeks in this world, and the memory of holding one of them, sacked out and REMing[1] in my arms, just shortly before.
The reason for going to Brooklyn, the reason for all the U-turns and turnoffs; the best reason, only reason, really, to rent a car out of La Guardia, ever. (No regrets, but next time I’m cabbing it.)
That's my kind of New York evening: catching up over dinner with the lovely litwit at Angus McIndoe before the show; Liev Shreiber tearing it up on stage as Barry Champlain in Eric Bogosian's Talk Radio -- the same day he received his Tony nod -- with a stellar off-stage cast of voices (on stage the talent was strong too, but once again the pretty girl was the weak link -- why do they cast pretty? why don't they just cast strong and passably pretty?). And then an aftershow "talk back" with the cast and the visiting Reverend Al Sharpton.
Regrettably, with Al there, the questions from the audience skewed toward Al's political decisions over time rather than the actual play (does anyone still remember the Tawana Brawley incident? Apparently, around here, they still do.) Still. Fun night.
And the capper was giving litwit a quick hug goodbye and spinning around to head in the other direction -- and nearly colliding with Al as he chatted with some well-wishers just beside me. No handlers that I could see -- just Al headed to his ride at the curb. Back at my hotel I tuned him in live on Larry King, talking about Falwell's passing, which must have been where he was headed next.
I can't spot an old abandoned airplane hanger anymore without thinking of b1-67er's idea to turn one near his home into a giant pinhole camera.
What would the world be like if every cool thinker executed every cool idea they had?
Infinitely cooler, I think.
That said, the Chicago Art Institute ran a show not too long ago of pinhole camera images taken in darkened hotel rooms -- the photographs were as big as the wall of the room, and depicted the scene just outside the curtains.
That was a nice dose of coolness, anyway. I'll look up the artist and try to post a link when I get home.
Detritus had a hit from Croatia this last week from someone looking for "farnsworth house,mies,bathroom".
I love that.
(Landed them at beinahe nichts -- I hope they weren't too disappointed.)
Just for you, my Croatian friend, I'm going to offer up another Mies van der Rohre bathroom -- this one in midtown Manhattan -- and a good one to have tucked away the next time you're tooling around the big city.
Tucked unobtrusively off 52nd Ave, just off the main 375 Park Avenue address for Mies’ and Phillip Johnson’s Seagram Building, is the lobby for the Four Seasons Restaurant.
When I was there back in September with my darlin' companion the lobby was all ours – the coat check was unmanned, and none of the people behind the gentle sounds from the restaurant upstairs ever ventured down the glorious travertine staircase. The restrooms were all ours too – sweet little Miesian marble stalls with their own individual light fixtures (those, too, in marble) and wide open slots where the ashtrays used to be. (Although I can't vouch for the loveliness of the men's room.)
One of the best public restrooms in New York City, for my money -- if you rank public restrooms (as I do) for their cleanliness, ease of access, historical interest, and proximity to architectural greatness.
