June 30, 2009
About this time last year we spent the afternoon out on Governor’s Island, an uninhabited former Coast Guard base, to check out the art installations and hear a friend read from his new novel, which is set largely on Governor’s Island. Will snapped a bunch of shots of these crazy cast-concrete babies. Would not want these critters in or anywhere near my house.
June 20, 2009
This photo is from this same weekend last year, when Will and I took a little day trip up the Hudson Valley to visit the Dia:Beacon art center and the Storm King sculpture park. This piece by Mark di Suvero at the Storm King was the highlight of my day. The photo doesn’t quite do justice to its sheer size, but note teeny-tiny Will standing in the middle of it and keep in mind that the trees surrounding it are all 20 to 30 feet high.
July 30, 2008
I was just about to lose hope for interesting squirrel news this week, when I stumbled upon a listing for an event in the upcoming Minnesota Fringe Festival: An Inconvenient Squirrel!
Joseph Scrimshaw--Evil Genius Squirrel, Writer, and Director
In the lost village of the Squirrel People every squirrel is named for their most distinctive trait–there’s Clumsy Squirrel, Wise Squirrel, and even Socially Awkward Squirrel. But the village is thrown into chaos when a young squirrel refuses to pick a name–an inconvenient squirrel!
An Inconvenient Squirrel is a live action cartoon for the stage. Designed to engage both children and adults on their own level, this fast-paced morality tale tackles issues of identity and conformity with wit, intelligence…and several grown men dressed as squirrels.
How AWESOME does that sound? I’ve never been to Minneapolis, but I swear, every time I hear or read something about that place, I love it a little more. People there seem so weird and creative, and there’s such great support for the arts. If anyone out there goes to see this (and I’m totally jealous if you do), please write in and let me know how it goes.
June 22, 2008
Yesterday we took a little road trip about 70 miles up the Hudson Valley for a three-tiered adventure, each leg of which cost us a bargain-basement $10.
First we arrived at the Dia:Beacon, a celebrated contemporary art center on the west bank of the Hudson River. Friends had described the place to us before, but nothing could really prepare us for the sheer scale of this museum. This former box factory has a staggering 300,000 square feet of gallery space, lit almost entirely by natural light from the sawtooth skylights that cover most of the building. The galleries in the spooky basement are lit mainly by the art, which was mostly neon light sculptures and film installations by Bruce Nauman. We wandered through the building for a few hours, awed equally by the art (my favorites were the galleries devoted to Agnes Martin and Sol Lewitt; Will was having fun with Richard Serra and Michael Heizer) and the unbelievable sweep of open space. Unfortunately, photography isn’t allowed there, and there seems to be a dearth of photos on the gallery’s Web site. So you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Next we headed back across the river and about ten miles south to the Storm King Art Center, which again bowled us over with its scale. This unusual museum is actually a 500-acre sculpture park (for my local folks, that’s bigger than Prospect Park, to give you an idea) with enormous sculptures that would certainly never fit inside any building and would really be out of scale in most traditional sculpture gardens. See, for example, Mark di Suvero’s Pyramidian:
Those are full-grown (20- to 30-foot) trees to the left of this piece. I was absolutely transfixed and spent most of my time there hanging out at the base of this sculpture. Click on the photo for the full slideshow. This place was really amazing.
Following that, we headed back up to Beacon to watch the Hudson Valley Renegades get a thorough pounding from the Staten Island Yankees (click on picture for full photoset).
Despite the home team’s poor showing, the game was attended by a record 5,111 fans, about 5,000 of whom seemed to be small children. There were goofy little contests and give-aways between each inning, silly sound effects spilled from the loudspeakers every few seconds, and many people were waving stuffed raccoons in the air (the mascot is Rascal the Raccoon). It was a fun, small-town night out–many people seemed to know each other, kids were having fun, and nobody seemed to mind very much that their team was getting schooled.
So for a total of $30 each in admission fees, we managed a solid eight hours of entertainment and new experiences. It pays to get out of the city every now and then.
June 8, 2008
It’s been a pretty busy weekend of fun new things, although the sudden stifling heat makes it seem like I’ve been moving through quicksand. A quick selection of photos follows; click on each for a full slideshow.
Friday was Will’s birthday, so we had a few friends over for drinks and a trip out to L&B Spumoni Garden for pizza and ice cream:
Saturday we rode our bikes out to Brighton Beach to seek out a particular brand of vodka–it was fun but there was nothing really visually noteworthy on this outing aside from the wicked sunburn that developed on my shoulders.
Today we made our first trip out to Governor’s Island, that odd little patch of earth out in the middle of New York Harbor that has only offered limited access to the general public in the past few years. Prior to that it had been a pretty closed-off fort and then military base for the past 200 years. The occasion was to see our friend Gabriel read from his latest novel. We took a few hours to stroll the grounds and take in the really weird sculptures:
Freaky! But if you click on the photo, it’ll take you to the full slideshow that gives you a much less menacing overview of the place.
Returning to Manhattan (I originally wrote mainland, but Manhattan’s an island, too!), we headed to the other half of the Battery Terminal to check out David Byrne’s “Playing the Building” installation:
This is the slideshow most worth clicking through. Mr. Byrne happened upon this abandoned space and decided it had great muscial potential. So he gutted this organ and ran wires out of it to various pipes, radiators, and columns throughout the building, so that pressing the keys unleashes this cacaphony that sounds like a construction site crossed with a haunted house crossed with melancholy pan flutes. This is one of the better conceptual/interactive works of art I’ve seen. I may have to go back when it’s not 100 degrees.
Always Double Back 