Re-MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art in NYC re-opens to the public tomorrow after a two-and-a-half year absence from Manhattan. I’ve been in the new space a few times during construction and last night I was lucky enough to go to the re-opening party. More on that in a second. First, the building. Impressive. There’s a new spaciousness to the galleries that really allows the works of art to exist in meaningful relation to one another rather than simply next to one another. Yoshio Taniguchi has made some great choices with interior windows and portals, teasing visitors (spot Matisse’s Dance ) with snatches of art seen from afar. Perhaps my favorite part of the new architecture are the windows (specially treated to minimize direct sunlight) that look out onto the sculpture garden and the museum’s “architectural neighbors” in Midtown. Upcoming tours available in the museum will actually make a point of commenting on the architecture visible from the windows, an extension of the museum’s architectural holdings — literally a museum outside the walls. I like that concept.
The party was well done. DJ’s on every floor, a band on the top floor, open bar, cafés turned into hip lounges. One can’t complain. No red wine though. “We’re MoMA. We don’t do red wine,” I was told. I wasn’t cool enough to construct a comeback so I can only think he meant they don’t serve red wine because of the staining possibilities. But maybe there’s another story. Like, we’re MoMA and red wine is so The Whitney.
A few photos of the space and event are available.
“Floating Enthusiast”
Can one be enthusiastic about floating? Not sure. But my wife certainly can be mortified that I let a news crew into our bathroom. Here’s the full clip (Quicktime). Note: the iron wasn’t even plugged in and that is not me in the tank. Body double.
Sensory deprivation
I spent an hour in a sensory deprivation tank a few weeks ago. A friend of mine and I did it together (though not, you know, together). Basically you crawl into a small capsule (pictured above) and lay down into 10 inches of water that’s absorbed 800 pounds of salt. So, you float without effort as in the Dead Sea. The water is warmed to body temperature. There is no sound and no light whatsoever. You can, of course, get out at any point and I did do a bit of feel-around exploration when I got in to allay any panic. The idea is to promote extreme relaxtion (and perhaps other extreme modes of being). Not sleep, exactly, but more like a prolonged hypnagogic state — that weird not-awake, not-asleep period just before you drift off. What’s most striking in retrospect is that, once I got situated, my first thought (and the closest I came to panic) was “what the hell am I going to do for an hour?” I guess that means I needed sensory deprivation. Before long — it is utterly impossible to assess the passing of time — I was just floating, being, not really thinking of anything. My father-in-law is an avid meditator and I can only imagine it was something like that. I did rub my eyes once. Bad idea in the salt solution. All senses deprived except for the sensation of excruciating eye pain! Once out I felt totally refreshed, as though I had taken a long nap. That night at a dinner party I mentioned to friends what I had done. Then, I essentially forgot all about it.
That is, until last week when one my friends — a producer for ABC News — called me up to say that they were going to do a story on sensory deprivation, spinning it as the high-tech answer to the hectic pace of modern life. Oh, and would it be OK if I were interviewed? Sure, I said, thinking I’d just do a quick phone interview. Silly me. They wanted to come to my house and film me being the harried working dad: taking conference calls, working online, changing the baby’s diapers, packing for my business trip, and so on. The irony of it all was that my wife was out of town on business — the first time she’d had to do that in years — and so I really was a bit harried. I called her to see if it was OK to let a TV crew into our house — a house, mind you, that me and two small children had had to ourselves since she was gone. When she picked herself back up off the floor she noted that anyone who saw the newscast would know that it was a complete fabrication and that our nanny was hovering just off-camera. Jealousy, I thought, from an absentee mother. Finally my plight as an overworked father would be known.
The piece is supposed to air in Chicago on ABC at 10:00 PM tonight as part of a ‘Healthbeat’ segment.
It’s a blast from the past but can it really relieve stress? Some say you can float your troubles away. Some people are rediscovering a water technique that shuts out the world. Could just one hour in a special tank not only cut your stress but help with everything from pain relief to fatigue?” Watch “Healthbeat: A Stress Solution?”
I’ll digitize the clip, if possible. Update: the whole segment has been digitized by one of the other people who appears in it. Float on.
Oh, by the way, the lady pictured above wasn’t in my tank. That wouldn’t be deprivation, now would it?
Hot off the grid(dle)
Today the World Community Grid opened to the public. Basically IBM has developed a distributed computing system (think SETI@Home) for tackling major problems in science and health, all with a humanitarian bent. Coverage in the Times and the Trib.
Rejoice, for now you can satisfy your hitherto unmet desire to crunch human proteome data with your computer’s free processing cycles.
Chicago finally gets destroyed for entertainment
We were getting a complex with New York and LA and Paris getting wiped out so often. Luckily Chicago is back amongst the cities that matter enough to be annihilated by natural forces. CBS has given us Category Six: Day of Destruction.
Quick quiz. Which of these statements is the least believeable?
- A category six hurricane develops over Lake Michigan
- The streets of Winnipeg, Manitoba standing in for Chicago, IL
- Nancy McKeon acting in anything but “The Facts of Life”
- On-the-cheap CGI tornadoes pixellating in high-definition
Tough to answer. Perhaps the finale on Wednesday will settle the matter.
Speaking of destruction, check out this photoshoppery of the east edge of downtown Chicago destroyed and submerged. Nice job with Navy Pier. (Not from the CBS series; I found it on the web, but I can’t remember where. Anyone know?)
At Zero
I’m part of a team working with the International Freedom Center, one of the four cultural institutions that are part of the World Trade Center redevelopment. Today I visited Ground Zero for the first time. I’d gotten close before, but never felt I was ready or had enough time to be able to reflect on it. The experience was somewhat uplifting, really. There was so much human bustle and vitality orbiting it (and in it at the rebuilt PATH station). Like platelets coagulating over a deep wound.
Who the terrorists least want in office
A few months ago a friend of mine told me that, come Election Day, the choice of who he would vote for would be made simply by answering this question: ‘Who do the terrorists least want in office?’ By this he implied that the answer was Bush, the assumption being that Bush scares terrorists. I think this isn’t just wrong, but diametrically wrong. Bush is the best adversary that a terrorist could want. Determined, zealous, combative, and antagonistic, Bush is the epitome of a straight-out-of-a-comic-book enemy. He elevates the conflict to epic drama, precisely the kind of drama that instills fear and recruits impressionable moderates to the terrorists’ cause.
And let’s not forget that a regime as worrisome as Iran actually endorsed Bush, though perhaps that’s more a comment on Kerry. Hard to know.
I really don’t think that terrorists are trembling that Bush will lead America for the next four years. The vast peacable majority of the world’s populace is disappointed, of course, but terrorists aren’t like most people. To them the only good conflict is one that becomes mythic and changes the way people think. Bush is this mythic enemy. Can you imagine a terrorist trying to rally young men to his cause by invoking the evil determination of John Kerry?
Man vs. sailboat
So here’s a new challenge for runners who live in urban areas bisected by waterways. Outrunning drawbridges. In Chicago you know that fall is here (meaning winter will be here tomorrow) when the drawbridges on the Chicago River are raised to let the sailboats back in from Lake Michigan for dry docking. So, the other day I went for a run at lunch. I had forgotten about the drawbridges — I think they raise them twice a week during the fall — and I found myself unable to cross the river to get to the path that takes me to the lake. OK, no big deal. If you know Chicago you know that you do not have to go very far to the next bridge. Except that my pace was just behind that of the boats and I could tell I was going to be repeatedly thwarted if I did not pick it up. Worst of all, the north side of the river east of Wabash (where Trump’s new paean to himself is going up) has these high stone railings which only permit the very tops of the sail masts to poke out as they slide by on the river. Looks exactly like shark fins. Just when I thought I’d make it to the next bridge one of the fins would slide into view and I knew I’d lost the next bridge. Eventually I did make it past the last bridge (Lake Shore Drive) and got onto the lake. But I rather enjoyed seeing if I could outrun Gilligan and company as they took their last rides of the season back into the city.
Satisfying inconvenience
A while back Bailey’s liqueur was running an ad called “Zero Gravity Bar” wherein neo-retro hipsters float about slurping up weightless Bailey’s globules. I loved it — not so much for the space theme but because of the music. Part Herb Alpert, part Fatboy Slim, it perfectly evoked a future with a loungy past. So, I had to find the tune of course. Googled “Bailey’s Zero Gravity Bar”. Got a few hits at some odd forums that are devoted solely to discussing commercials. Had I stumbled upon these forums in any other circumstance I would certainly have made fun of the people who post to them, but in this case they had what I needed. Or so I thought. The few that mentioned this commercial were fairly certain the track was called “Les Fleurs” by 4Hero. (This was confirmed by Bailey’s website, which I should have gone to in the first place.)
OK great. Checked Apple Music Store. Nothing. Checked the sketchy Russian download sites. Hit! Downloaded for a cool $0.10. Wrong song. Damnit. Turns out there this song applies to the non-US version of the commercial. More Googling. For a few weeks — weeks! not a normal unit of time in Internet search terms — there were no new leads on the song. Then, after finding more chatboards devoted to commercials (the ad-obsessed are a diverse community, I reckon), it was noted that the song was called “Swing It Back” by Avenue A. There was a link to a production company which listed the album as “Never the Less” and had a sound clip. I verified that the clip was the correct song. OK great. So, you’d think that armed with all this info getting the song would be a no-brainer. Back to Apple Music Store. Nope. Sketchy Russian stores. Nyet, nyet. Walmart and company. Hell no. Peer-to-peer. Nothing. Let me tell you: never was a sequence of words less conducive to a Google search — ‘avenue’, ‘a’, swing’, ‘it’, ‘back’, ‘never’, ‘the’, ‘less’. I turned up next to nothing. It was the first time in a long while that I was stymied in online searching. This, of course, was making me want the song all the more. I was becoming willing to pay far more than a dime for this track.
Eventually I tried searching not on the keywords that I had (since they returned junk) but on other words that might be associated with them ‘jazz’, ‘beat’, ‘trumpet’, etc. Actually I always threw ‘avenue’ in there as it was the most unique of the original terms. I came across a wholesale distributor who seemed to carry the album — in Chicago no less. And, for a few hours per week a commoner like myself could walk in and buy something. This is the opposite of online music shopping. It was not cheap, not convenient, and not on-demand. I had to wait for a three-hour window on a Saturday to drive myself to the shop. Of course, the actual space probably was what an online operation looks like: stacks and stacks and stacks of music, organized for inventory purposes not for consumers browsing the aisles. I had my album. Having only heard a short commercial and an online clip, I was now the proud owner of twenty-two dollar’s worth of album. But that’s the thing. I was happy to pay. Maybe I was just glad to relive the experience of hunting for an album like I did when I was younger. (I have fond memories of flipping through cut-out bins in record shops looking for some obscure album.) Maybe I simply recognized that scarcity in a world of online ubiquity drives price way up.
Best of all, the whole album is amazing. “Swing It Back” isn’t even the best track. I highly recommend the album — if you can find it. Or, rather, especially if you can.
UPDATE: I’ve received lots of requests to share this track and/or album. I’m sorry to say that I can’t. I’ve e-mailed the band to see if there is a reissue in the works. Will post any info that I uncover here.
Derrida departs
Upon returning to the States I learned that Jacques Derrida died in Paris on the day I left there. Reading Derrida was tough, no question about it. But you felt so damn accomplished when the concepts all came together. Adieu, monsieur.
Coincidentally, that’s Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of writing (and source of the “Tut” in Tutankhamun), on the cover of Of Grammatology. Makes sense, I suppose. Aren’t most of Derrida’s ideas present in the Thoth episode of Plato’s Phaedrus?
Must. Stop. Making Egypt references.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
I went back through it this blog (and my Flickr account) on its 20th anniversary, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
