city sidewalks wrapped in holiday cheer

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Exile on Pain Street

Store windows are a pretty big deal in New York. Designing window displays is an actual profession out here and the penultimate store window display each year is the series of holiday windows at Lord & Taylor on 5th Avenue. People anticipate their unveiling and queue up in line nightly to view them. It’s been a New York holiday tradition for over 80 years.

The Lord & Taylor holiday windows do not display merchandise. They are painstakingly detailed scenes of vintage holidays of yesteryear. There are a lot of moving parts and animatronics. I would describe the color palate used as “violent.” It takes a lot of detailed work by a team of artisans to put these windows together and in this high-tech age, they seem quaint and innocent.

holiday spirits #1

Posted on December 10, 2008 by Exile on Pain Street

Each Christmas, I make it a point to reach out to friends who I haven’t seen in a long time and meet them for a festive holiday cocktail or two. Or three. The great thing about Christmas in New York is that all the fine (and not so fine) drinking establishments get dressed up with cheap-o lights, fake trees and stuffed Santas. I love it.

I met E at St. Andrews for a dram of Balblair. The bartenders wore green and red kilts! I first met E in 1980 when I was in the U.S. Coast Guard. That’s a long time to know someone! We only get together once or twice a year but it doesn’t matter; once we sit down it’s as though no time has passed. There aren’t many people in my life like that. I can count them on one hand. Friendships like that happen organically over a long period of time. They can’t be manufactured. Of course, the fact that we always meet over a few good, stiff drinks probably has a lot to do with the longevity of our friendship.

* * *

I had some time to kill before meeting E so I ducked into the International Center for Photography.

The upstairs exhibit was Cornell Capa’s photos of political dissidents, missionaries, the plight of indigenous tribes and the Attica prison uprising. On the other hand, the exhibit downstairs was the work of Susan Meiselas, which included photo essays of political upheavals in Central America.

It seems that every time I visit the ICP, the exhibit is centered on politics and oppression. Or, if you will, The Politics of Oppression. The previous exhibit I took in was Robert Capa and his photos of the Spanish Civil War and WWII.

I’m going to boycott the ICP until they mount an exhibit that treats photography like the art form it is, rather than just a tool for disseminating news and political viewpoints. I’ve had it with black and white blow-ups of dead bodies. How about a nice Elliott Ewritt retrospective?

all by himself

Posted on December 9, 2008 by Exile on Pain Street

I took the number 6 local down to Bleecker Street…

…and saw Mike Birbiglia’s Sleepwalk With Me.

One man shows are dangerous affairs. They can be breathtaking, but they can also be painful to watch. Have you ever watched someone die on stage all by himself? It’s one thing to sit anonymously in a dark movie theater and suffer through a bad movie, but watching someone die on stage in an intimate playhouse is very personal. Fortunately, that was NOT the case here, thank God almighty, but it wasn’t what I expected, either.

The best one man (or one woman) shows are when someone tells a story from many different viewpoints. Watching an actor seamlessly and convincingly morph from one character to another is magic. This was not that kind of show. Mr. Birbiglia is a professional comedian and what he has done is inject some dramatic passages about some medical problems he had to overcome into his stand-up act and is calling it Off-Broadway. It’s not a bad show at all. I think he was trying to go the Spaulding Gray monologue route. I’ve seen Spaulding Gray. He ain’t no Spalding Gray.

The show is having quite a successful run and got a nice write-up in the New York Times. I laughed along with everyone else but I’m not sure it’s fair to call it a one man show. It’s stand-up.

During the show, Mr. Birbiglia mentioned that he uses Google Alert to monitor media and blog traffic about himself, so there’s an outside chance that he might actually stumble across this, which is pretty disconcerting. I liked the show. I’m just not sure it’s fair to sell it as theater.

Beforehand I got a quick bite at bite. It’s a quirky outdoor food kiosk that juts out onto Lafayette Street and Bleecker. There are a few bar stools under a heat lamp on the sidewalk, but no indoor seating.

oh, tannenbaum

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Exile on Pain Street

I read a lot of posts about how difficult it is to get into the Christmas spirit. The older you get, the more illusive it is. I can assure you that these two are not having any problems embracing the holiday.

queen

Posted on December 6, 2008 by Exile on Pain Street

I took the number 7 train one stop into Queens, got off at Vernon Boulevard-Jackson Avenue and walked up Vernon Boulevard through a light drizzle to attend the opening of an exhibit by friend and artisté Sharon Florin at the Art-O-Mat gallery. She recently joined 7-Year Old Daughter and me for an afternoon at MoMA. It seems every time I see her it’s in conjunction with an art exhibit. You want to keep people like that in your life. They’ll help prevent you from becoming dull.

The exhibit is a series of paintings of Long Island City, where her studio is located. All of her paintings are architecture-centric. Ironically (or, perhaps not!) many of the beautiful old structures in Long Island City that she painted have since been torn down and replaced with something less dignified. Architecture preservationists are begging her to refrain from executing any more paintings of the neighborhood before it completely vanishes.

Actually, that’s not true. That’s a joke.

Here are a two of my favorites. This is the tile mosaic of the Vernon Boulevard-Jackson Avenue subway stop.