Last weekend Karl and I went to New York for Heather’s graduation. We arrived by Chinatown bus at 1pm and stumbled to lunch in Little Italy. Scavenger hunters were taking photos of themselves with camera phones at an adjacent restaurant while we waited for our lasagne. The great thing about scavenger hunts is that they allow for unlimited routes, and the best route will determine the winner when all else is equal. So I guess my RFID street race would play out like a scavenger hunt…

After lunch we spent a couple hours wandering our way through Washington Square, Union Square, and up to Penn Station, stopping only at places that really caught the imagination and weren’t selling things that cost a fortune.

The first stop was the Leica Gallery, where we saw the work of Platon a youngish portrait photographer. But these pieces were mostly from the Middle East, and mostly not traditional portraits. Some things I loved seeing in his photos:

- light reflecting off of diverse surfaces.. an array of pots and pans hanging on the wall of a kitchen, with the sunlight coming through a door at the other end of the room, making them sparkle.
- smoky rooms, people smoking, interesting glass, and late afternoon light shining through thin fabric
- patches of bright color in a muted scene
- going slightly off angle
- traditional 35mm film: seeing the film grain was so nice
- black & white photos: I think he uses HP5. not that it matters.

It all sounds so dry when I lay it out here. I guess it takes more than this to make a brilliant photo, and these photos were brilliant.

After the gallery, we visited Other Music, which Pam had told me about. I loved their categorization system:

In
Out
Electronica
La Decadanse
Krautrock
Groove
Psychedelia
Then

and I was happy not to be faced with another enormous store like Amoeba Music in SF. But Other suffers from a serious problem: I can’t listen to the music before I buy. Is this a form of exclusivity (“If you don’t know the story behind this obscure Japanese punk band, you aren’t cool enough to hear/own it” or “You won’t find this online so you’d better buy it here, now”), is it a sort of alt-neo-luddite movement, are the administrative costs too high for listening stations, or is the theory that you’ll buy because the cover looks cool (and the music is crap, which I doubt)? Whatever the reason, I’m surprised and disappointed, because by not providing any samples, they appear to be selling only the outside (the packaging) of music from subcultures that so badly want you to focus on the music itself! (Other Music’s web site does have some realaudio samples. So the protocol is: listen online, then go buy in person if you want the whole disc.)

I purchased an Arthur Russell disco cello CD from the 70s that was pretty avant-garde and disappointing, especially after reading the NY Times’ raves.

On to New Jersey and to Heather’s place near Little Silver, about an hour from the city. On the train I’m reading Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (p. 30: “The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement”). In Heather’s car we pass New Jersey strip malls and tiny houses on tiny plots. The graduation was at an Italian restaurant with a 50s-style plastic American Italian decor. Picture an open bar, drunk relatives, extremely loud carpeting, extremely loud wedding reception music with a DJ who sings along, cloyingly sweet graduation cake, rough accents, big hair, and big tattoos. There were some fantastic photos to be had by the photographer with the right sense of humor.

I hated to imagine the expense of this gathering. I realized pretty quickly that the party was not for Heather, it was for her parents and all their friends. Karl and I must have looked funny out on the dance floor, rocking out to the Postal Service while all the macho guys and their girlfriends sat and stared at their appetizers (only willing to rise when a slow Sinatra tune came on— K & I’s cue to sit).

Reading on the train back to the city in the morning after a long and v. restful sleep in a tiny attic bed at Heather’s (rain on the windows). Finished The Man Who Ate Everything just as our train hit someone. It was definitely time to go back to Boston.