oh but nyc

NYC was so wonderful. I needed to just move at hyperspeed from one thing to the next, and thankfully that is what I did. I saw the origninal Phantom of the Opera in Prospect Park, Alloy Orchestra providing the score. The second projecter blew (in a great flash of light and puff of smoke!) and so we sat through the reel changes listening to the theramin drone. E and I ate sushi and people-watched. It was another one of those situations in which you feel as though you ought to be running into a hundred people you know, but actually these are people like your friends in an alternate universe. And then in five years you'll make a new very close friend and one day you'll be sitting in a coffee shop and someone will walk by and you'll think, whoa, their posture is just like Lon Chaney's when Christine takes off his mask, and you'll tell your friend about it and she'll say, oh, yes, isn't that so, and then you'll realize that you were both there on the lawn in 2005, and you'll try to remember whether you noticed each other. But yes, the gesticulations were amazing. My favorite part of the movie was when the police inspector was wandering in the underground tunnels with Raul and he told Raul to hold his hand up beside his neck because it was quite likely that the Phantom might throw a noose down over their heads at any minute. And then Raul forgot, and we all kind of giggled, and then the interstitial titles (or whatever the proper term is) came up and the inspector was admonishing him, "Keep your hand up! It may save your life."

Mango ice is amazing, particularly when you have it at a pizza parlor/ice cream vendor where you end up the next night for slices of pizza with your soon-to-be-roommate after watching her friend's pirate rock girl band (er, mostly watching the lovely oceany slideshow which was actually somewhat better than the band) and it turns out the place is 2 blocks from her NYC apartment. You know, small city and all.

The Friedlander exhibit at MOMA was quite good, and I was really happy to see his contemporary work, which was a larger format than most of the 35 mm work I'd seen of his in many, many books in the Bard photo library where I would sprawl when I was supposed to be working on my Senior Project. What was fascinating was comparing the recent series of self-portraits with the earlier work, which was all about reflection and shadow, and the way the figure of Friedlander became inflected in the compressed, flattened landscapes he created. In the later work he was actually in the photographs "in person," but he arranged his body against backgrounds (like photo collages, or woven blankets, or simply the side of a picture frame and a corner of a bed) so that the lines of his body and the lines of the background (or the lines of shadow and light) got all mixed up with each other, flattening the space as much as in the earlier work. And it was fun to go with E and hunt for the reflection of Friedlander in all his reflection photos, even if our giggling caused a bit of a ruckus. What was more unsettling was noticing a girl with a bar code sticker on her ass and trying to decide whether we should politely inform her. When E decided to intervene (cause, you know, bar code sticker on her ass?), the girl turned around and said "yeah, I know." In a very patronizing fashion. And I realized it was a girl I studied photo with at Bard. And all 3 of us tacitly agreed (as the looks of recognition flashed over all our faces) not to acknowledge this fact. It was kind of beautiful, actually.

And also. I was very happy to see CJ. It's been too long, I've been feeling lately, since I've been in good touch with the old guard, the people who have known me good and well and long. We watched the roller skaters in Central Park (including the guy who skated with three water bottles stacked on his head and the man who held his hands like he was rubbing the heads of two small children roller skating beside him) and then rowed off into the pond, which wasn't quite as good as sailing on the Charles (or Swan Boating) but was still a singular experience. And we ate mussels at a darling French Bistro (which is exactly what one does with C in the city, whereas Scrabble in a gay coffee shop is exactly what one does with E in the city) and drank wine and just laughed.

And the moral is: I was so glad to remember the big wide world outside CTY.