EVENT ON MARCH 9, 2007
That’s right, another week, another taste of New York culture. Next thing on the list is Point Break Live! a live performance based on the wonderfully ridiculous movie of the same name. The movie featured such Hollywood hotshots as Keanu Reeves, Gary Busey, and Patrick Swayze, but this time the star of the show is a volunteer from the audience! How great is that?
THE EVENT
For my second cultural experience, I wanted to go with something slightly more traditional, like a museum, but my night at the museum turned out to be anything but traditional. While I was checking out possible exhibits and hours online, hoping to maybe even find one with some kind of break on pricing, I stumbled upon something unexpected: a party. As it turns out, the Guggenheim hosts a major party on the First Friday of every month that features an abundance of music and booze to go along with their fine collections of art.
Don’t get too excited though, there is a catch. Rather than paying the regular $18 admission fee, they hit you up for $25 at the door, plus the cost of “drink tickets.” Three bucks gets you a ticket, two tickets will get you a plastic cup full of beer or wine. All in all, this got pretty expensive over the course of the evening.
In addition to the steep pricing, the space got crowded quickly, and there was a long line to get in. Despite arriving twenty minutes early, it took me about an hour to get in the door, check my coat and buy my first drink.
THE SCENE
Inside, the scene was a lot like a very well lit dance club, minus the dancing. Since no one was allowed up to the exhibits with drinks in hand, most people simply stayed downstairs on the entry level, which consequently became uncomfortably crowded. Music was provided by two supposedly big name DJ’s, but no one was really paying attention, and it didn’t seem to add much to the experience. Honestly, I can’t say much to recommend this party over any other bar or club that you could get into cheaper and with less hassle, so if it’s the party scene you’re interested in, you might as well skip First Friday and go elsewhere.
If, on the other hand, you’re interested in getting a little exposure to the arts with your revelry, you can simply slug back your drink and head upstairs to the galleries. Once you get up the ramp and onto the spiraling landing where the exhibits are on display, the crowd thins out considerably, and you can take your time viewing the various pieces at leisure.
THE ART
The exhibitions currently being shown contain a variety of paintings by Spanish artists from “El Greco to Picasso,” as the gallery proudly proclaims on its walls. These pieces were separated out not by artist but by their subject matter, including still life, portraits, landscapes, and many others. In this way, I was able to see highly accurate representations of, say, a person sitting at a table, side by side with the jumbled images of a Picasso piece on the same subject. My personal favorite among these was “Peasants at a Table” by Velazquez, which I starred at for quite a while, spinning up stories in my head about the people in the painting. Dali’s “Madonna of Port Lligat,” along with much of his other work were also favorites of mine.
Religion, nobility, and death were all fairly prominent themes from these Spanish artists, whose pieces were displayed in the spiraling main gallery, but branching out to the side I found another smaller space with an exhibit called “Family Pictures.” These were picture and portraits, mostly of children, showing families or family members. Many of them were rife with implied violence and gender distortion, however, giving the entire experience an unsettling feel. One piece in this gallery wasn’t a picture at all, but a series of video clips depicting what I can only describe as some kind of overly exaggerated caricature of kissing. While strange and perhaps even a little disturbing, this bizarre gallery held my attention for quite a while before I decided to wrap up my visit and head home.
FINAL THOUGHTS
While I had originally set out to find a deal on museum admissions, I ended up dropping quite a bit of cash instead. The art was enjoyable, and the experience may have even been slightly enhanced by the few drinks I’d had before heading up, but on the whole, the party wasn’t that great. If I had to do it again, I would probably skip the party altogether and go during regular viewing hours. Wandering through the entire museum (or at least everything that was accessible at the time) took me a little under two hours, but that would have certainly been elongated had I been able to take advantage of the complimentary audio tours which they have during the day. All told, it was a fairly full, if somewhat pricey evening, but the scene was simply not what I was hoping for.
So until I figure out how to make a calendar for this blog, I’ll be posting my upcoming events here. Feel free to follow along, or come and check them out for yourself!
Friday 3/2/07: The Guggenheim
Friday 3/9/07: Point Break Live!
Friday 3/16/07: Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre
Saturday 3/17/07: St. Patrick’s Day in Tampa
Saturday 3/24/07: Brooklyn Brewery
Thursday 3/29/07: Live Music at 55 Bar
Saturday 4/7/07: The Brooklyn Museum
As Friday night and my first NYC literature reading approached, I have to confess that I got a little nervous. While I typically try to include others in my plans, I had purposely set this event apart as something that I would attend alone, so as not to be distracted or deterred from my cultural quest. Unfortunately it made me antsy, realizing that I would have no fallback if the reading turned out to be something dreadful or dull, but at this point I was committed, so after work I got on the train and made my way to KGB Bar.
Despite trying to leave a little early, I ended up arriving about fifteen minutes into the first reading, which was a shame, because the first reader turned out to be absolutely hillarious. I quickly found myself laughing along with everyone else in the room as he calmly walked us through his diary-esque depiction of one unfortunate man’s attempts to cure a stubborn sinus infection with a series of increasingly bizarre herbal remedies. The deadpan delivery, along with the comical absurdity of his character’s mounting plight were enough to make this an instant hit with me, as well as with the rest of the assembled listeners, who showed their appreciation with chuckles, giggles and outright peels of laughter. As far as I could tell, that poor sick man never did get cured, but at least we all could take something positive from his experience.
After being primed by this first author, we were introduced to the second reader, whose work was considerably more serious. To me, this requires a different approach to listening if you want to get anything out of what is being said. In my experience, reading a good piece of literature is a very personal, even introspective act, so finding ways to appreciate the same work in a public setting can be daunting, but by no means impossible. I think that the key is not to get too caught up in your surroundings. I try to clear my mind as best I can, focusing solely on the voice of the reader. I find that if you ignore everyone around you, and allow your mind to add a few layers of image and sound to the scene, you might just find yourself transported. At this point I should note that KGB Bar proved to be an excellent venue for this sort of focus. Thanks to a curteous audience and a competent reading, I was actually able to get a lot out of this particular performance.
Finally, following the serious second reader, the third and final reader, Melissa Kirsch, stepped up to the podium. As she began to speak, I got a sense that this woman would be, in some way, the headliner of the evening, and I wasn’t disappointed. While she declined to read from her major work, The Girl’s Guide to Absolutely Everything, she chose instead to read some of her poetry and discuss, as she put it, “misery.” This may sound like the beginning of a long and painful episode, but it was actually quite the opposite. I’m not typically a connoisseur of poetry, but i found her readings to be fantastic, witty and in some cases very funny. Even her discussion of what she described as misery was in fact an entertaining and inspirational tale of how she came to be a writer, a journey that many in the audience could commiserate with.
After the readings were finished, I was able to mingle with the other patrons and even speak briefly with Ms. Kirsch. While I hadn’t necessarily anticipated bumping into any of the readers or taking time to chat with the rest of the audience after the event was over, the post-reading atmosphere that pervaded the bar was very relaxed and sociable. The relative smallness of the space worked to great advantage here, and I found this part of the evening every bit as enjoyable as the readings themselves. All told, my first cultural expedition was everything I had hoped it could be, and it had cost me nothing more than than about three hours of my life. Dare I say, “Mission Accomplished?”
Unfortuntely I’m playing catch-up this week as I’ve been somewhat absorbed in setting up and learning about this blog that I’m writing, but now I’m finally ready to provide an account of my premier adventure in the city. Since the post ran kind of long, I’ve broken it into two parts, of which this is the first:
After having made the decision to seriously pursue this project late last week, I had to come up with something great to start the ball rolling. I immediately decided that due to lack of proper time to plan, this wouldn’t be a fancy outing. That meant nothing requiring an advanced ticket purchase, or other special preperations of any kind. Thus, with these restrictions in mind, I set to work brainstorming some ideas. After initially casting about for inspiration, I finally decided on something that I had thought of several times since arriving here but never acted on: a reading of poetry or literature.
Now naturally not all readings are what you might consider accessible to the average person, but fortunately this is New York, and as I quickly learned, there are a variety of readings being performed literally every single night. One merely has to choose.
I personally went the Google route and found MurphGuide.com which provided a few solid leads. From there, I checked out some of the venues and their events, and ultimately opted for a reading at KGB Bar simply called “Paragraph.” I did not know what this meant, or even really what the bar would be like, but then the whole point of this is to try new things, so I decided to take the plunge. After a quick lookup on HopStop, I was all set to get out and experience my first taste of New York culture.
Hi, my name is Tony Floriani and I’m the mind behind NYCultureblog.com. This, of course, isn’t exactly my day job. I currently live in Brooklyn and work in internet marketing for a Manhattan based interactive company. I’ve been in the city since Summer, 2006, and as of the creation of this blog, have been mostly overwhelmed with working and trying to make a smooth transition into being a New Yorker.
Going back a little further, I attended undergrad at Northwestern University in Illinois, about ten miles north of Chicago where I studied English and Sociology. I also belonged to a fraternity where I made some of the best and worst mistakes of my life.
Going back still further, I grew up in Morristown, New Jersey, where I swore I’d never ever live in New York. Funny how times change, no?
Anyway, now that I’m here, it’s time to make the most of my stay, and that’s what this blog is all about.
Hello, and welcome to my NYCultureBlog! As this is my first post, I’d like to preface it by saying that this blog is not just a website to me, but a whole lifestyle project. I aim to better myself by experiencing all our city has to offer, and I want to invite you to join me on this quest to find and experience new cultural activities wherever they may take me.
During the course of this venture, I’ll be seeking out and exploring one new event, activity, monument, exhibit or show in the city every week and writing about it in this blog. Ultimately, my hope is to use this opportunity to not only enrich my own life, but also to inspire others to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities New York has to offer. That, of course, is where you come in.
While I’m out performing my own cultural exploration, I expect to hear from others who are doing the same, so write to me at afloriani@gmail.com and let me know about your own adventures, or send me suggestions for things that you’d like to see me write about here in the future. Remember, I’ll be updating this blog once a week, but you don’t have to wait for me. There’s a whole city to explore, so go out and live it up New York!
My NYCultureblog is a site about New York and the endless possibilities for cultural enrichment that exist here. I’ve heard it said that you can do anything at any time in this city, but most of us never bother to try. Well I, for one, have spent enough nights in front of the TV. It’s time to find out what the city that never sleeps really has to offer.
Thus, as part of an ongoing project, I will be going out into the city at least once a week to do something that I might not ordinarily try, and then I’ll write about it here in the hope that others will follow my example. The only unifying point to these adventures will be a focus on cultural experience and growth. Culture exists all around us, and there are a million different ways to experience it here in New York, whether it be through a simple walk in the park, or a wild indie rock concert. So if you think of culture as being something confined to the halls of a museum, prepare to be challenged.
Finally, I want to promote participation in this project by readers and fellow bloggers. Bearing that in mind, I’d be thrilled to hear other people’s stories of quirky or casual adventures in the city via email at afloriani@gmail.com, and will offer to post any appropriate stories that i recieve. If you don’t have a story of your own, but maybe have a suggestion about something you’d like to see me write about, I’d love to hear those too! So read and participate and together we can really paint the town red!