Artsy Fartsy #2, or The Lifestyles of the Rich and Not-So-Famous, or Ew. Really?

This week I had the pleasure of attending my second MOMA member affair, courtesy of my friend S., the member. There it was, the glorious open bar, and after we had guzzled our way through a few glasses of wine, we had perhaps less patience for art than usual. S. is less enthusiastic about modern and contemporary art, anyway, preferring the old stuff, and I mean old--classical, greco-roman. I luff contemporary art, but I was less thrilled about the pieces on display than about the Jack Daniels awaiting my return. The pieces that stood out to me the most (to my dismay) were photographs (by a British photographer) of street scenes in New Orleans. There was a photograph of a (seemingly) poor woman eating food out of a styrofoam container. A photograph of someone standing between a highway and a gas station, maybe, or maybe a fast food joint, or a Wal-Mart, I don't remember. The implicit commentary seemed stale, and the photographs themselves were dull, perhaps purposefully formless. As usual, I wondered if the people in the photographs even knew that they were on display.

As the clock ticked away and we hurriedly drank booze as freely as we breathed air, we ran into S.'s friend H., one of the duo of Mexican artistes we had met up with last time. H. introduced us to another friend, a young woman, whose name I have since forgotten, who was definitely pleased with herself and her ability to seduce anyone in any room. She and some others were going to a party at some swank hotel top floor bar, and we all simply had to go. This was a Tuesday, now circa 9:30pm, and I excused myself, explaining that I had to get back home to Bushwick (in Brooklyn, between Williamsburg and East New York), which might as well have been a foreign country to them. The enthusiastic girl, henceforth referred to as G., would not take no for an answer. "You must come," she said, only it didn't sound aristocratic, as it looks on the page. Her tone of voice was more BFF, which was more flattering than off-putting, one of the perks of being attractive--she sounded more generous than needy. "You must come," she said, possibly even taking my hand. Everyone was taking cabs. I asked how close the hotel was to a subway. I said I had eight dollars in my purse. She said not to worry, she would take care of anything if needs be. I didn't have to be at work until 5pm the next day, so I acquiesced. I was a little beyond pleasantly drunk. I was feeling a tad reckless, like the world needed to catch up to my expectations. I wanted to play reversal of fortunes.

The bar was nice, with floor-to-ceiling windows that afforded a sweet view. I mean, it was nice in a very expected sort of nice--mood lighting, polished counters. It didn't smell like beer. It didn't smell like anything. All the men were wearing sort of boring suits. The DJ looked like a 14 year old Korean boy who had watched too much Miami Vice. It was Mardi Gras, so some women at a table were hawking charity beads. G. pulled a wad of cash--and I mean a wad--and peeled out a twenty for two strings, one for her and one for me. Hers was gold and mine was purple, an inferior color according to her, so she tore it off my neck, marched back, and replaced it with a gold one. I asked her what the charity was far, and she marched me over to the table, asked the lady what the charity was for, and pulled me over to listen. "At least one of us should know!" she said, turning away, leaving it up to me. The charity lady said something along the lines of, "This money goes to help third world countries." No joke. She didn't even have to try. No one there cared what it was for. They just needed the beads as status symbols. G. proceeded to bully the guy in the boring suit (that she was getting to buy us drinks) into buying a string, too. While she was working him over, I sipped my wine, more out of having something to do, and somehow began talking to an objectively attractive guy, the kind of guy who might have played lacrosse in high school, the kind of guy who might have been the older brother of an Abercrombie and Fitch model, the kind of guy who has been groomed for a life of bars like this. I forget his name, but he was from Sweden. He was in New York on business. He was promoting wind turbines. Alternative energy--cool, right? Er, I asked him what his favorite part of New York was. He said the strip clubs. They didn't have strip clubs in Sweden. In fact, it wasn't just New York. He like the strip clubs in Chicago and Las Vegas, too. He didn't actually care about alternative energy. He could care less about his product, but he was a good salesperson. I asked him what tactic made him so successful, and he said the most insightful thing all night: that selling is more about listening than talking. Then he asked me if my friend (G.) was "with" that guy. "She's really attractive."

"I know," I said. For half a second I felt the sting of rejection. Worse--the sting of him assuming that I wasn't even in the game. Of course Mr. Swede wasn't talking to me for my sake. Five years ago, that might have devastated me. But then I realized, I was totally disgusted by him...I probably failed to hide my disgust at his dismissal of alternative energy (which was more offensive to me than the strip clubs, by far), why should I care that he wasn't interested in me? Hello, ego. My friend S. finally found us in the melee, and we took photographs of ourselves in front of the glossy window while H. chastised us on how the flash would be reflected, obliterating the city lights. Then we left, satisfied with poking through that membrane into how the other half lives, happy to tumble home to Brooklyn and Queens. As we made a beeline for the elevator, G. was talking to the DJ, coaxing him to play a song for her, but making him feel special, bathed in her affection, so in the end everybody won.

Artsy Fartsy (interlude)

Artsy Fartsy

So my friend S. has a membership to MOMA. The perks include occasional after hour events for members (and a guest—lucky me) in which you pretty much have free reign of the revolving exhibits and…can you believe it?…OPEN BAR. We’re not talking donated beer from some corporate sponsor, either—wine and quality liquor. I went to one of these events last November, at which point we also connected with S.'s artist friends, two men from Mexico City who split their time between Mexico, New York, and Greece. I don't believe they have ever had to work a day in their lives. Most of the night I made the mistake of thinking these guys were a couple. The art, what I saw of it, was underwhelming. I prefer MOMA's bastard little cousin, the edgier P.S. 1 in Queens. But the event was gorgeous with gorgeous people, all made up, from old lady elegance to stupid Brooklynites with carefully crafted, obscenely bushy beards. Afterwards, the Mexicans invited us to see a friend’s studio in East Williamsburg (never West Bushwick), which miraculously was near the same subway stop of another party, Mexican-themed, no less. We spent less time in the artist friend’s studio than upstairs in the two apartments in which it seemed a few other elite Mexico City natives dwelled. They were all reminiscing, and S. and I got bored until the neighboring couple’s children came over and began vying for our attention. There was a girl and a boy, approx. seven and nine years old? Maybe eight and ten? They were amazing. I’ve never wanted kids, but they made me reconsider. The little girl was really into drawing, and when she asked me to name my favorite animal, I said an okapi, an answer that rarely fails to elicit a puzzled frown. Well, she frowned for a second or two, but then she ran over to her crate of plastic animals and pulled out a miniature okapi (a shorter-necked relative of the giraffe, with zebra-esque stripes on its legs, a rare and shy creature). Then she proceeded to draw three okapis, two larger and one smaller that I assume is meant to be mom, dad, and baby. She wrote the title “Okapi” and flanked it with two hearts. It is my favorite work of art, ever. Meanwhile, one of the (original) Mexican men kept trying to get S. to make out with him, which is when I realized he wasn’t gay. And then I felt stupid because I realized his not-boyfriend hadn’t necessarily been so interested in my conversation for conversation’s sake. Oops. We finally made it down the three blocks or so to the Fiesta. Many of the partygoers were replete with sombreros and crudely penciled “Mexican” mustaches. My friend there, M. feared that the Mexican artists would be offended. I don’t think they cared less, but they were more interested in wooing young women in somewhat elitist settings than playing homemade skee ball in a converted warehouse. Tequila was imbibed, a piñata was busted, and we all warmed up enough to re-venture back out into the night and stumble home. I never stumble home, actually. I soar. The other day, I cleaned out my desk (well, I didn’t exactly clean it, but I was hunting through it in search my generic sleep-aid), and I rediscovered my okapi picture. The little girl and little boy had put their emails on the back of the paper, and I remember being tempted to email them, but then that seemed like a creepy thing to do. You can’t email children of people you don’t really know, right?

Six Views/Undetermined Number of Dogs

THE James Frey?

http://www.anderbo.com/anderbo1/photo3/anderbophoto3-01.html

After an initial hehehe, I felt kind of bad for Frey, actually. I never saw the whole Oprah hoopla but definitely heard about it second hand. Here's the thing--Frey submitted A MILLION LITTLE PIECES as a novel--it was the publishing company that asked him to re-describe it as a memoir, because it would be more compelling (i.e. sell better). No, that doesn't let him off the hook for dishonesty, but who is ultimately Responsible for inauthenticity in the published word?

Still, despite my sympathy, I was a bit dismayed to find this random link to six (bad) photos of his dogs. Just because you're a celebrity-turned-faux-celebrity, does this merit boring (not even weirdly entertaining) snapshots of your pets on some virtual literary magazine?

New Mexico, A Retrospective: en route to Thoreau (pronounced "Through")

October 8, 2004

Why is lightning so exhilarating? Is it the inherent violence that, so removed (up high in the sky) has so little chance of hitting you? Is it voyeurism? The feeling of partipicating in something dangerous without actually putting yourself at risk? Or is it the magic of an unbidden, unorchestrated laser show? The childlike (never childish) sense of wonder at this dazzling phenomenon that refuses to be explained (for whosoever describes the scientific processes behind lightning to me will never succeed in explaining away the magic of it all)?

Why does the sky seem so big in New Mexico? And why, unlike the ocean, does a big sky not make me feel small but rather the contrary--part of something huge, all-encompassing, and vital?

Chemical Pleasures

I compulsively must try new things. When I recently went to Sunshine mart, a Japanese market in Soho, I overlooked the sushi and seaweed salad, even the plethora of red bean and lychee and green tea-flavored squishy buns, until I found something I definitely wasn't looking for : "Japanese Tamale". Fortunately there was a vegetarian curry option. Even better: the price. At $3.50 for a hefty husk, it was half the cost of any of the sushi options. Then I spent ten minutes trying to find the weirdest possible candy (weird being culturally constructed, of course), opting for a packet of "Yogurt Scotch."

I wonder how some people are content to go with what they know. Are they too timid? Or for them, is the act of trying something new too much of a gamble? I would never gamble money, or no more than $10, tops (as proven by various side trips to the Coeur d'Alene Casino in Idaho, where I tried to make up my losses by drinking $10 worth of free soda--not a great idea when it was an hour drive home). Those who seek the familiar are guaranteed to get what they like. And for all my forays into the unknown, do the times that I've been thrilled really outweigh the times I've been disappointed?

Some scientists suggest our need (or lack thereof) to try new things is hardwired. For some people, trying new things "releases chemicals which produce a feeling of pleasure" in the brain. For others, not so much. Here's a shorty (very) layman's article.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1088827/Why-likely-try-new-exciting-experiences-others.html

I'm at the far end of the spectrum, I think. I'm embarrassed to show my full resume to any potential employer because it's littered with all kind of odds and ends. In the past seven years, I'ved lived in nine cities (and two countries). Often I berate myself--am I adventure-seeking or just indecisive? Travelling solo in Mexico in 2007, on July 25, as I sat on a bus heading to the Sierra Norte mountains, I wrote in my journal:

"Superhero cartoons abound. I just saw a turtle in a cape on the outside of a convenience store. Pigs in the back of a truck. Beautiful graffiti next to the Circo and a McDonald's with its plastic playground walls bulging like a giant eye, a ball of pus. The gear shift looks like a robot kicked through the bottom of the bus, and the driver wields it like a weapon. In these brief instances I am in heaven--at the novelty of it all. I have transcended the known world; I have transformed. Every time I see a donkey in the street or a woman balancing a basket of tortillas on her head, I am born again. This is my drug, and I fear that like most addictions it seems to get harder and harder to achieve my high."

The Japanese Tamale was okay--nothing to write home about. It was much more like a regular tamale than I had envisioned, not much of a fusion dish, heavy on the corn, bland on the vegetable filling. The yogurt scotch turned out to be a hard candy, little lozenges, better if not for the taste but because it truly was strange--slightly sour, indefinable. But I'm reminded of the tamales I did have in Mexico that were truly wonderful. One, in Guanajuate, a cheesy tamale that a street vendor pulled out a plastic bucket that had the gushy texture of velveeta but a fresh-off-the-farm taste. And the other, another, saltier cheese variety, that I had on a bus en route from San Blas to Puerto Vallarta. Vendors would often ride the bus from one town to another, getting on and off merely to sell their wares, much like street musicians and performers ride the subways in New York.

Can we really attribute all our behaviors to our gray (and white, according to that article) matter? Do we seek new things because it triggers chemical pleasures, or is it possible that our choices trigger these pleasures, regardless? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Am I a naive humanist, or am I justified in being skeptical of science's almighty conquests?

I don't remember at all what I ate on the day I went to the Sierra Nortes, but I do recall the hike, in the off-and-on rain, following the guide, a middle-aged native woman of the village who, in her knee-length skirt and plastic shoes, clambered over enormous boulders and scaled slippery slopes with the dexterity of a mountain goat. I remember riding the bus back, adrift in unfamiliar terrain as mountain dissolved into something sparser but not quite desert, floating in a bubble of locals who largely ignored me, speaking a language I largely failed to understand. I remember looking out the window, letting the world slide over me, feeling, for the time being, quite drowsy and full of pleasure.