we don’t need any kind of big parade

maura @ 10:45 pm

Yeah, I’m phoning it in tonight. I had 2 classes this evening and, while you’ll be happy to hear that they went well, I am wicked tired. 12+ hrs at work is a long time.

So here are some photos!

This is from the art windows that I pass on the way to work. It’s a mandala made of lots of little things on the floor inside this storefront.

It seems to change every few days. Perhaps this is why:

Yay for public art!

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5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0

maura @ 9:08 pm

At times like this I’m glad I have a picture on my camera I’ve been meaning to upload:

I took this picture last week — it’s of the big jello mold art in the Willoughby Windows that I mentioned, one of my favorite things to walk by in the mornings on the way to work. After I wrote that post I searched all around Flickr, thinking that someone had to have taken a photo of the big jello mold on a table, but I couldn’t find anything. So here it is for your delectation.

I should probably join Flickr. I don’t know why I never have, just hasn’t occurred to me, I guess. I don’t take that many photos (though I do take more now that I have a phone w/a camera) and I’m not sure that I would ever remember to upload them. But it would be nice to add to the pool of Creative Commons-licensed images out there in the world, so maybe I’ll take the plunge soon.

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untogether

maura @ 9:41 pm

I didn’t ride my scooter to work all last week, because the week before I took a spill. I know, I know, why didn’t I tell you, internets? Well, I was (understandably, I think) embarrassed: as I keep saying, the only thing dorkier than an old lady in an orange helmet riding a kick scooter is the same eating it on the broken pavement near the Atlantic Center. Duh. It wasn’t the end of the world — a couple of small scrapes and a bruised shoulder and a chunk out of one hand, and thankfully the worst of it is on my left side (I’m right handed).

With my (minor) injuries I’ve been walking to work the past week or so. It’s funny how sloooooow it seems to me now when I walk to work. It only takes 40-ish minutes, but it’s easily twice the time it takes me to scoot. (Though I’m pretty sure that walking is better exercise, even with the uphill scoot home.) I do listen to podcasts or music during the walk, which I can’t do when I scoot, but it still seems long and a little boring.

Until I get to the art, that is. Then things get more interesting. You may have seen this story in the Times last week about the rise of pop-up art galleries in vacant storefronts around the city. I know it’s not a good thing to have vacant storefronts, but I have to admit that I vastly prefer the art.

I actually walk by two of the galleries mentioned in the Times piece. The first is a long stretch of storefronts with a ton of space, and lots of interesting sculpture and paintings inside. Right next door is an Applebee’s* which just increases the artistic tension, as far as I’m concerned. The Kenny Scharf mural (photo in the Times) is there, and a weird industrial chunky sculpture that’s all wood and oil drums and pipes and water. There’s also the melting waffle from the plaza near my work! I was so glad to see it — it disappeared from the plaza a few weeks ago and I’ve missed it.

* I’ll never get used to this Applebee’s being there. It’s so incongruous.

The second set of gallery spaces is smaller but also pretty cool. There are a couple of pieces with an anti-consumerist bent, which I totally groove on. It’s also nice that the old store signs were left above each storefront; the 1 Hr Photo, Check Cashing and Taco Rico signs really add to the effect. One of my favorite pieces has a table with two chairs and a huge jello mold on it. It’s the spiritual sibling of the enormous melting waffle. Go weird big food art, go!

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and then the next thing you know

maura @ 10:16 pm

Oh dear, I seem to have fallen into that beginning-of-the-semester-hole again. I meant to blag all week, really I did, but I was just so tired at night and now that Dollhouse has gotten interesting it was much easier to watch than write.

Last Friday evening I met Jonathan and Gus at the MOMA to see Projects 90, an exhibition by the Chinese artist Song Dong. Since it was just before a holiday weekend I’d hoped the crowds wouldn’t be too bad, even though it was the free Friday night dealie. But it was packed and Gus was crabby, despite the gelato we bought him in the sculpture garden. Sigh, 3rd graders are not so easily bought off, I guess.

Still, Gus was reasonably content to sit in a corner reading while Jonathan and I took turns looking at the exhibit. It was fascinating, totally worth the grumpy kid. The story behind it is that the artist’s mother became somewhat unhinged after his father died, and she took the traditional Chinese thriftyness to a whole new level and refused to throw anything out. She packed it into their tiny house and it spilled out all over their yard. Finally the artist was able to convince his mother to move out of the house and allow him to create an exhibit of all of the stuff, which she then helped him curate.

The result: a wooden-framed house skeleton in the center of a room at MOMA surrounded by neatly arranged stuff: tied bundles of magazines, folded clothing, rows of toothbrushes, scads of plastic bottles, a stack of soap cakes, a pyramid of pill boxes and bottles, furniture, etc. Watch the installation video — it’s mesmerizing (as was the exhibit). Of course the stuff is just recognizable, normal stuff, but as Jonathan said when you actually walk around it all and see the arrangement close-up it’s almost like a model of a city. Here’s the crayons neighborhood, over there is where the shoes live. So cool. And, you know, full of implications for our modern lives and all the stuff we use and whether it’s necessary etc. etc. Sometimes I miss thinking about material culture, so I was really glad we got to see this before it closed.

And then this week, with the busy, and now it’s now. I’ve been doing a bunch of reading about writing lately and last weekend I got all fired up about setting aside time to write on a near-daily basis. But then this week was busy at work (and it was short to begin with) and I ran out of time as usual. I’ve been thinking all week about Song Dong’s mom’s house, just an empty timber frame, as a physical manifestation of my goal: one empty hour to write most days. As ever, the problem is partly my fault and partly not. Not my fault because, well, objectively, it’s busy at the beginning of the semester. But my fault because my list is too long to begin with. And my fault, too, because I tend to fall into the trap of procrastinating writing with other work. Yes, sometimes the other work seems to scream loudly: “pay attention to me!” But it’s rarely truly urgent, and certainly can wait an hour.

I was wondering today whether Anne Lamott would be disappointed in me since I didn’t meet my writing goals this week. But then I thought that she’d probably understand. And she’d probably make me a cup of tea and tell me that next week will be better.

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here’s your future: it’s gonna rain

maura @ 9:39 pm

I’ve been mentally blogging all day in discrete paragraphs rather than sustained narrative, so I’m going to kick it list-style here tonight:

1. After multiple recommendations I finally got my hands on some Thermals records. And they are awesome! Good for listening to while cleaning the stacks of papers off your desk, arranging the fall workshop schedule, and doing the dishes. Since it has rained here for a million billion jillion days straight, the line that’s the title of this post seems particularly apt.

2. Seriously, it has rained for a million billion jillion days straight. I mean, I used to dig in Ireland, I know from rain. I finally bought some big tall boots, but this is still getting pretty old. No rain today but the forecast for the weekend looks ominous, bah.

3. Last week we went to the curriculum share at Gus’s school to see all the fantastic work they’ve done all year. I am completely in awe of his teacher: she took those 27 kids on a ton of field trips all over the city (they studied a lot of architecture this year), including walks over the Brooklyn, Manhattan AND Williamsburg bridges (not all in the same day). Among the work Gus showed us was a book he made entitled “All Kinds of Awesome Poems By Gus.” Which makes me giggle every time I think of it.

4. I finally cleared a whole bunch of random old photos off my phone recently. Here are two:

This is from a crazy place with tons of inflatable stuff to climb on called Bounce U that we went to with friends earlier this year. Gus had a blast, predictably.

There’s a fun public art project all along a street near my work for which lots of people knitted cozies for the parking meters! It’s amazing, very Doctor Seussian. I took this photo right after the cozies were installed — they look much more droopy now that they’ve been rained on for a month. You can get a better look in the nice Flickr photostream and there’s also more info in the Times.

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til the end of time

maura @ 9:40 pm

It’s been a long week. A good week, too, though I’m surprisingly melancholy @ teaching my last english comp library session of the semester today. Still, I went to Manhattan three (3!) times, had a parent teacher conference, helped trim the cats’ nails, and felt better enough to walk to work today. Which sounds like a full week to me.

There’s new public art in the plaza near my work!

A melting waffle! I kind of feel like that right now. Plus there’s last night’s TV to watch, and beer to drink.

Maura out.

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like he said he would

maura @ 5:36 pm

Today I was looking through photos on my phone and found this one from last weekend. There’s some neato public art in Madison Square Park: treehouses! Might they be a good place to live? Well, it’d be cold, but you could be first in line for Shake Shack every day!

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