DUMBO

Cabbages on lightposts.The hunt for an elephant that paints (really). Stacks and stacks of iron stairs to climb, chasing abstract arrows to an artist’s open studio. A net, strung with glittering decoupage. The smell of Barbosal; $2 PBR. At least a half-dozen wedding parties—layers of ruffles; aqua, pink, chocolate brown, bobby pins and smiles—oblivious until they arrived. This was DUMBO’s Under the Bridge art festival, Saturday afternoon.

I adore festivals unconditionally; art, beer, books are among my favorite excuses. I particularly love festivals that I leave, inspired. The day is warm, sunny. Jeans, layered tanks, sunglasses, Converse. It’s not winter yet—yet. I hoard information in my satchel, constantly scanning, constantly scouring the flyers, the upcoming shows. It’s the hopefulness. I hoard the feelings of the day, determined to catalogue, so that in February I can remember it.

[I love this photo. It's a chicken (get it?) fashioned out of entirely consumed/entirely recycable materials (mostly). This cluck of chickens is so fucking cute.]

You can also see this rambling at www.artsreporting.blogspot.com.

mail...

Also reported on: http://artsreporting.blogspot.com

So I saw something tonight that’s in development (am I allowed to be blogging about this? I will be judicious.) And it was awesome, even in its un-doneness. Writer-director-guru Aya Ogawa and tech-arts-guru Irwin Chen workshopped an early (and very unfinished) version of a theater show tentatively titled “Artifact” as a part of CUNY’s Prelude Festival. I will disclose few relative details—what do they matter anyway when they are subject to change—but this show did inspire me to think about email communication in the present age.

It’s funny. Email is generally perceived as the most off-hand, causal of forms, and yet, with its cursory computer-based text format, it’s more prone to revision than say… a handwritten letter. Maybe this just hit home for me tonight because I’m presently keeping a (handwritten) journal that will be reviewed by someone not myself, and I’m actually fretting about the spelling of those stupid words I can never spell correctly, but it was incredibly impactful to watch someone who you don’t even know (and can’t even see, really, their back is to you) to struggle to type out a letter that is… important to them.

In the way of salutations, in the way of how letters expressed real sentiment. But typed. They wrote, spontaneously. They paused, and reread. They deleated, by highlight. Other times, it was by cursor backspace. 

We’ve all had those emails that are important, (emails that are letters?), where you edit yourself, because you can. That scene left me wondering, where do those feelings/ that initial sentiment/ go? It can’t just disappear. Energy expended only changes forms. What if… all of that energy we put into our super-composed emails… that form that is supposed to be so freehand… what if those original feelings are still, somehow, imbedded in the spaces in between?

culture is dead.

That's a bit of hyperbole on my part. But I did recently hear someone whom I think knows a thing or two about the subject issue a not-unlike indictment of the state of cultural affairs. Culture has been in a headlong tailspin since the mid-twentieth century, she lamented, and she's sorry that this is what we've been left to work with.

I beg to differ. If only because of the sheer volume of information that’s available to us—literally at our fingertips—we are living in the most diverse, dynamic cultural period yet.

Granted, it's nearly impossible to compartmentalize the cultural sphere in a postmodern world, particularly after the explosion of digital technologies in the last decade. That wasn’t a death knell, but a signal of evolution.

Culture today is a kaleidoscopic vision, fragmented into a thousand pieces, constantly shifting, expanding outwards, various forms spontaneously intersecting and collaborating before evolving again, all within a decentralized power structure.

In short, it's a minor revolution.

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The purpose of this blog is to document in that evolution/revolution as manifested in New York City, my home turf. This blog is my breadcrumb trail tracing my discoveries, my encounters, my revelations. It is also an entirely subjective catalogue of the best references I can find for information on goings-ons within NYC's fringe culture—the locus of my interest.

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I realize that this all sounds very high-flautin’ and I hope you’ll bear with me. A majority of my future entries are going to be very grounded in actual events and experiences, informative and hopefully entertaining. But that doesn’t mean the occasional waxing poetic won’t slip in… every once and a while.