Stray Cats
Posted: November 28, 2011 Filed under: Art, Chinese, New York | Tags: Guggenheim Museum, knock-off handbags, museum practice, New Museum, Tourism Leave a comment »Last week on Canal Street I saw a Chinese woman get arrested for selling knock-off designer handbags. Looking on vacantly with wide-eyed shock and fright, she was handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police cruiser. This woman, clearly a new immigrant from China, is part of a large, complex knock-off luxury goods system in the Chinatown/Soho area that caters primarily to American and European tourists.
The next day, business continued unimpeded as if the arrest ever happened; that woman lost and potentially forgotten in the system. Further north on Grand Street, I frequently pass Spanish and French tourists carrying multiple bags from the myriad retail chains on Broadway back to their hotel rooms. Tourism and shopping are close cousins, contemporary activities basic to middle class life across the world.
The art world has awkwardly tried to tailgate on this actuality, chasing around tourist money with art fairs and biennals in every corner of the world. Dealers, artists, curators, critics and collectors flock to Miami this time every year hoping that living it up next to the beach might propel art sales and provide a career boost. Museums also feel compelled to lure tourist audiences with exhibitions that sometimes feel like decorative installations in shopping malls or amusement parks. Check out the latest from the Guggenheim and New Museum.
Museums are like stray cats after thanksgiving, tearing apart any trash bag at night to find the leftover carcass of a bland-tasting bird. If a little mouse runs by, they’ll forget about the ravaged turkey and try to chase that down instead.
Driving in New York
Posted: November 18, 2011 Filed under: New York | Tags: Driving in New York 4 Comments »It’s a cliche that driving in New York City requires patience. After more than seven years of having a car here, I’ve learned that what’s more important is actually having a stern conviction to your core principals of the road. For instance, if you believe that you should always go north on 1st Avenue instead of 3rd Avenue to get to the Queensborough / 59th Street Bridge because past experience has proven a high probability of congestion around 42nd and 57th Streets, then always stick to that strategy. Here are other codes for cruising the grid:
When going crosstown east to west in the morning, use 34th Street. When going west to east, use 23rd Street. When going crosstown on either, always know which avenues are going uptown and downtown and avoid turn lanes ahead of time. For instance, traffic on 7th Avenue is one-way downtown. Therefore, when going east on 23rd, always be in the left lane when approaching 7th Avenue to avoid all the cars waiting for pedestrians as they try to turn right onto 7th. If driving to Flushing, Queens from Brooklyn or Manhattan, always take the Brooklyn / Queens Expressway (BQE) to the Grand Central Parkway (GCP) and avoid the Long Island Expressway (LIE). Never go uptown on 8th Avenue or downtown on 9th Avenue if you’re passing Port Authority (41st Street). These are just a few of my basic tenets.
There is an internal logic to the city that can’t be tricked and the principals of the road can usually be banked on, except during the late spring to summer when street fairs close off blocks upon blocks to motorized traffic causing ripple-effect jams far away. The next time you’re on the outer roadway of the Queensborough bridge, beating the congested traffic on the inner roadway, glance to your right and you’ll see why you can only trick the system with the wisdom.
Fish on Sundays
Posted: November 2, 2011 Filed under: Chinese, Sports | Tags: Lowell High School playgrounds, pick-up basketball, RSF UC Berkeley Leave a comment »I wonder what Fish is doing now. Fish was a minor playground legend on the outdoor basketball courts of Lowell High School in San Francisco during the mid 90s. On Saturdays, after a day working at my parent’s dry cleaners, I would race north on interstate 280 to catch the last hour of daylight, looking for a little run on those courts. A few friends might already be there, and sometimes, Fish was around. But the real action at Lowell was on Sundays, when at least 3 courts would be running 5 on 5 games with a minimum one game wait. Fish usually arrived when the day was peaking with competition, sauntering in sleepy-eyed, looking like he didn’t want to play, much less be there. He would always be distractedly eating something – a bag of chips, a candy bar, a banana. He didn’t seem to want to do that either.
Fish was Chinese and likely got the nickname from the way he looked. He had big, bulging eyes, a small mouth that was always open, and a pronounced profile. Fish’s head would look good on a coin. Eventually he would loaf onto the court, shoes lazily scraping the ground. Ballers sitting on the sidelines waited in anticipation for his lefty jumpshot, launched usually from well beyond the 3-point line. He would always try to bank it in and was usually on the money. The real beauty in his game though, was the way he would dictate play with his ball-handling, getting even the most limited players the ball in exactly the right position at exactly the right time for them to score easily. He championed his makeshift teammates as if they were his little brothers, urging them on and instructing them with genuine enthusiasm. Fish would light up as the day went on, his gloomy disposition brightening as the weather eventually and predictably deteriorated. Basketball never stopped even though a summer fog always rolled in annoyingly in the mid-afternoon to that southern part of San Francisco known as the Sunset, bringing with it a cold, misty wind. Nevertheless, we ran until it got dark.
Sometimes after a full day of basketball my friends and I would drive to the Vietnamese spot in Daly City and each get a bowl of pho before heading home for a proper dinner with our families. Pick-up basketball at Lowell was mostly an Asian thing. Chinese, Philippinos, and Koreans owned those courts. Back then, we chased basketball.
Lowell was just one of a handful of possibilities during the week. On Fridays, I’d often meet up with childhood friend Ben Lei at the RSF (Recreational Sports Facility) on the campus of UC Berkeley for a night of intense runs. And I’d play at least three afternoons in San Jose State University’s gym, racing there after sleeping through an art history or graphic design class. At night there was either an intramural game or a less serious run with the after-dinner crowd looking for light exercise. Basketball junkies chase fleeting moments when they feel unconscious and unstoppable, when they reel off 5 or 6 games in a row, when they beat a clearly more talented team, when they shut up a trash talker. For me those moments were a sign from higher powers at how right the universe could and should be. It was a little piece of nirvana. Basketball will never quite be like that for me again. When life revolved around hoops, Fish was the man. Now, I struggle to remember what kind of sneakers he wore.
Hands
Posted: October 22, 2011 Filed under: Art | Tags: 7 train, Hands, New York, touch screens 1 Comment »I see hands twitch jobless on the train, others clutching a coffee, a bubble tea, or a steamed bun. On the 7 train, some Korean girls have recently been rocking different colors on each nail. Green for the thumb, blue for the index, orange in the middle. They fiddle with their iPods. The touch screen has given the hand a new lexicon of moves, new patterns for its work. A flick of the fore finger and thumb offers up a new world on a new screen.
A dignified Indian man, always in a proper suit, always sitting, wraps his hands around an English language newspaper. His eyes track each word into sentences. He probably reads it in the same way everyday. The paper is part of his uniform. It turns out that many are clutching a paper, some handed to them for free at the base of the subway station on Roosevelt Ave in Flushing by a Chinese man whose posture is diminishing. His eyes look up in spite of the forces pulling the rest of his body down, through glasses, past the bill of his incongruent red baseball cap, and with his parched but eager hand, pushes a paper towards an onslaught of commuters: “Morning! AM New York.”
As a young couple drifts asleep on this rumbling, packed train, their fingers find eachother and lock together on her lap. She’s Chinese. Her fingers are long and bony like her, and today the nails are freshly painted fire-engine red. He’s Hispanic with an over abundant frame and naturally chunky hands. Across the way, a middle-aged white man in a raincoat looks straight ahead with his hands grasping his knees. His hands default to his knees when they’re at rest; they are its holsters. Sitting still like that for the whole train ride, he begins to look unnatural. His hands’ stillness holding on to violence.
Hands are the most difficult part of the human body to paint because of their delicate proportions – if the first knuckle of the thumb (the one closest to the wrist) isn’t just the right distance from the first knuckle of the other fingers, the whole hand can look grossly deformed. Its colors are a complex blend of flesh tones, reds, greens and purples. Hands are always gesturing. Painting them, therefore, is painting movement with psychological or emotional effect. Compare the hands in a John Singer Sargent painting to the cloud studies of John Constable and you will see that painting hands are like painting clouds.
In Defense of Hipsters through Keren Cytter’s Berlin
Posted: October 13, 2011 Filed under: Art, Politics | Tags: hipsters, Occupy Wall Street, protest Leave a comment »They flicker on screen as representatives of the young and creative, the numb and self-obsessed, the philosophical and sensitive. If they were doing this in New York, the Berliners floating around in Keren Cytter’s videos would be cast as hipsters – the despised class of superficial ‘interesting’ people. In the real estate-centric logic of New York, hipsters move into ‘undesirable’ ethnic enclaves and neglected warehouse zones, opening the floodgates to generic Thai restaurants, luxury condos, Duane Reades and the destruction of a certain kind of urban purity.
Cytter’s characters look like this menace. They are fashionable in their extraordinary ordinariness, rampaging through Berlin’s streets and in their cafes, enacting the existential dramas of an artist’s idle pondering. They talk in eachothers direction, sometimes uttering the same perfectly composed lines another character spoke earlier but with different intonations and in a different context. Instead of being ironic, her hipsters inhabit the cynicism that drives irony, recycling that psychological position into a productive consideration of the conventions that lock us down. Through the hipster she is able to examine the logic upon which an alternative to what we have now can be imagined.
The protesters that have been occupying Wall Street for weeks now were first disparaged as hipsters looking for the cool new scene to contaminate, armed with homemade signs but lacking a clear, unified message. The cynical take on it all implied that the hipsters were so bored gentrifying neighborhoods they decided to de-gentrify Wall Street by occupying it. But after four weeks their action has proven to be an important platform from which to air all kinds of grievances against big banks and the government that bailed them out. The hipsters defiantly took to the streets seeking an alternative, trying to find the right poetry to voice their dissatisfaction of the righteous powers that should be protecting us. I’m down with these hipsters.
Note: Keren Cytter’s exhibition Video Art Manual is on view at Zach Feuer Gallery, New York until October 15, 2011.
Cormega’s “Raw Forever”
Posted: October 4, 2011 Filed under: Hip Hop, Music, Rap Music | Tags: Cormega, New York hip hop 1 Comment »In the mid 90s hip hop heads were as desperate to know who Cormega was as they were to peel off Ghostface Killah’s mask. Cormega’s name reverberated in the beautiful nightmare Nas described on One Love, his letter to a jailed friend: What up with Cormega, did you see ‘em, are y’all together? When he finally released his first album The Realness in 2001 after disputes with his label and beefs with former associates, it felt like it dropped 5 years too late. On that album, he rapped with a straight-forward poeticism about the morally conflicted condition of the hustler, themes that Jay-Z had already monopolized by then.
Ten years later, he has released Raw Forever, an understated and intense work that feels like a small victory for the possibilities of rap to speak to the down-and-out in all of us. The two-disc set is made up of a best of compilation and a surprisingly effective collaborative effort with a live band called The Revelations, who played on Wu-Tang Chamber Music. Cormega titled the tracks with Roman numerals according to their order on the disc. Track 2 is titled “II” for instance. This small act of music biz mockery undercuts the expectation that there has to be a unique subject for each track; in reality Cormega has always rhymed about one thing: the uncompromising code of the streets.
Though his music hasn’t changed much over the last 10 years, the rap world around him has. New York boom bap fell out of favor in the mainstream and the South’s sound rose to dominate urban radio. It seemed like any rapper who wasn’t from New York had a shot at the big time, or at least their 15 minutes. Eminem from Detroit, Nelly from St. Louis, Kanye West from Chicago, Lil Wayne from New Orleans, T.I. from Atlanta, Rick Ross from Miami, and now Drake from Canada. As America’s economy boomed, rap softened; honesty, self-effacing humor and vulnerability became fashionable. In this new context, rappers like Cormega seemed cynical and reactionary.
But now in the midst of a global economic plunge, his directness when talking about his own uncertain place in the game feels right and exact as in when he fires off the following lines on “IX”: My cocaine flow solidified I spit crack now…Ever since I started rhymin the crime rates lower…I’m too young to die, too old to try the corners. Cormega’s outlook really hasn’t switched since he rhymed these words in “The Saga” in 2001:
uneffected by police intrusions
or street illusions we were consumed wit’
I’ve even grown away from people I grew wit’
I mean we cool, but I don’t need to bullshit
Perhaps the greatest victory on this album is “VIII” which re-introduces us to Red Alert, Parrish Smith of EPMD, Grand Puba of Brand Nubian, KRS One and Big Daddy Kane on an old school posse cut backed by a smooth funk melody. Red Alert introduces and closes it out in his helium tinged rasp and each rapper seems invigorated by the company. In the middle of it, KRS-One pulls out this line: they standing next to the flesh, I’m next to the soul. Cormega has stayed true to who he is, experimenting with the form of the music but not messing around with his narrative. This new album shows him as an important artist for this moment.
