Governor's Island

Today Junette and I finally tackled Governor's Island, which is just below Manhattan (sort of parallel to and slightly east of the Statue of Liberty). You have to take a ferry to get over there, and now it's the Atlantic HQ of the Coast Guard. Historically it was always a military base, and it became a national park a few years ago. It has rather funky hours, only open on weekends and only during the summer, so you have to plan when to go. There are all sorts of ads all over the subway and it's been on my to do list for ages, so Junette and I finally made it happen today. The occasion was a funky art festival featuring one of her artists from her gallery, Lawrence Weiner. I went to a gallery opening of his works back in the winter--he does funky things with words on walls and stuff like that. For this show he put up the following installation on the pier at the Marine Maritime Building (where the ferry leaves):


It's supposed to be some sort of meditation on the duality of the two coasts (Manhattan and Governor's Island) and how passengers are crossing between the two.

We also saw two pretty cool videos by a hot young Dutch artist with whom Junette's gallery has connections. One of them featured an orchestra and choir on a barge singing the lacrimosa from the Mozart Requiem.

Beyond the art, we also appreciated the view:


As well as a hippie "go green" installation, which was a major highlight. First we came upon a dragon made entirely out of chairs:


As well as a mobius strip, of which I naturally approved:


All in all a highly successful outing...lots of sun, and a nice little picnic too!

No place like home

It's pretty incredible how, as disaffected New Yorkers, we often forget just how amazing our city is. I mean, I generally do the same thing every day...get up early, take the subway to school, do my work, maybe hit up a bar for happy hour, and then head home, to finish up the day's activities and prepare to start all over again. Sometimes we stop and appreciate the skyline from places like Astoria park, but most of the time I don't even bother to look up anymore and appreciate just how tall the skyscrapers are or how incredible it is that so many millions of people manage to coexist on an island that, in the end, isn't that big.

In short, I'm just as guilty as the average person of losing the sense of transcendence one can find in a city like New York. But then every once in a while something comes along that reminds me of how lucky I am. Getting trapped in the Queensboro tunnel sure isn't one of those things (haha), but rollerblading across the Queensboro Bridge and watching the sun rise over Manhattan definitely is. I regretted not having my camera with me this morning, but then again I was too busy paying attention to where I was going (and to not losing control on the downhill part of the big-ass suspension bridge) that I couldn't have really stopped anyway. But still, I don't think you can know New York until you've seen a sunrise from an outer borough. Truly amazing.

And perhaps you can't really know New York until you've roller bladed down second avenue, but that's another experience I could probably live without, haha. I couldn't find the entrance to the East Side trail and got stuck in the stop and go traffic of second ave for about 3/4 of a mile before I could work my way over the FDR and get to the trail. Once I got to the trail it was great though! All in all the ride in took me an hour and 40 minutes, although I bet if I did it right I could do it in an hour and 15. Just need to figure out how not to go twice around the barn to get to the house when exiting the bridge and heading for the river. humph.

As a side note, I think the other magical place in this city now is Times Square, the part with all the lawn chairs. It's another form of transcendence to sit there and feel the eery calm with all the insane billboards and ads flashing at you from every direction and knowing that you're in one of the most famous intersections in the world. I love it!

In other adventures, last Sunday we celebrated Isaac's birthday at this really cool bar called Frying Pan, which is located on an old boat at Pier 66 on the Hudson. I met Lisa and Sarah, and I think I look pretty damned good seeing as that just before meeting them I went rollerblading on the west side trail and took a SPECTACULAR spill. I had just gotten back from cleaning off all the dust from my clothes and washing out the burn on my hip and cut on my cheek (yes, it was a glorious fall). But you wouldn't even know!



And here's Jess and Isaac, the newlyweds (and birthday boy!)


Next up is a weekend of festivities surrounding Lisa's birthday, but before that I managed to talk Junette into doing a "tanilates" class with me in Astoria park tomorrow morning, HAHA. From what we can tell, it's a pilates class but sort of more about the tanning than the pilates!!! Hilarious.

Fuerza Bruta update

Special props to my aunt, who just posted (CLICK HERE) a few short videos of Fuerza Bruta, if you're curious to see what the show's like. These videos to way more justice to the experience than anything I could ever write. I particularly recommend the second one, "ceiling swirl"!!!

Today I had an experience that, for the first time ever, I think, genuinely forced me to ask myself if I would get out alive. For real. Fortunately the uncertainty was relatively short-lived so it wasn't like a long, drawn out agonizing process or anything.

I hopped on the subway a little after 11, and as we were passing under the East River in the Queensboro Tunnel, the train came to a bit of a jarring halt. But it really wasn't anything extraordinary, subway trains bump along all the time and slightly abrupt halts are fairly routine. Thinking nothing of it, I keep reading my newspaper. A minute or two go by before all sorts of people come rushing into our car (I was in the third from the front, I think), just saying to get moving to the back of the train. The people in our car were rather confused but we got up and started walking.

That's when word spread that the people in the front car had witnessed a giant fireball that suddenly exploded in front of the train.

They obviously hadn't wasted any time getting the hell out of that car, so we didn't know if there was a big fire or a small flame-up or what. We did know that the further away from that spot we could get, the better off we'd be. So we started trudging to the back of the train, and I do have to give my fellow New Yorkers a lot of credit. We never so much as look at each other on the train under normal circumstances, but in this case everyone pitched in to help the mother who didn't speak English and was toting around a baby and a stroller and the woman having a panic attack because she was stuck in the subway for hours on 9/11. It was remarkably orderly, not a stampede or anything (it helps that it wasn't a rush hour train).

Mind you, we're underneath the RIVER at this point, so of course we all start wondering how strong the tunnel walls are and how far under the river bed we are. And also if an evacuation has to occur, how it would play itself out. Walk back to Queensboro? (Which would be a long haul in nasty conditions) Or a rescue train? And of course at that point we still didn't know what was wrong, only that we sure wanted to stay the hell away from the front of the train. Was it a fire that could spread? We had no idea.

So we got as far back as the crowds would fit and proceeded to wait. Everyone was looking around in panic (and taking pictures with cell phone cameras, of course). After a few minutes that seemed like a lifetime, the conductor got on and explained that a fire extinguisher had somehow fallen off the front of the train and gotten stuck between the train and the electrified third rail and had thus blown up. So overall a fairly minor event in and of itself, although they still had to put out the fire and extricate the wreckage of the extinguisher from under the train.

Eventually they cut the power on the train, got the extinguisher out (fire extinguishers really do smell like crap) and we were able to make it to the Lexington Ave stop in Manhattan. From there I could bail and catch the Lex line down to Union Sq. I had even left early enough before a meeting to run some errands. The errands obviously didn't happen, but I miraculously made it to the meeting right on time. And of course as soon as I walked in I was like, "we need to take a minute to talk about ME first, so I can relate my adventure..." hahaha.

All told, the whole ordeal only took about an hour and a half out of my day, which seems pretty good given the circumstances. I really did have visions of trucking my way out of the tunnel on foot and ending up in Queensboro totally filthy (those tunnels are HOT, WET, and FULL of rats). I was ready to kiss the Lex line when I got on it at 59th St, haha.

The craziness continues!

So much for being good about regular updating. It seems as though the summer has slipped through my fingers yet again. This past weekend Anne and Claire and my mother were all in town, and we had a glorious weekend of sight-seeing, Broadway show attending (I got singled out of the audience THREE times at Hair, HAHAHA), and ethnic food eating (yes!). Seriously, we had some ridiculously good dining experiences. And we also hit up Fuerza Bruta, a show about which I have already tried to blog and failed miserably since it's damn near impossible to put into words just what it is. It's also tricky to get good pics of the show, as you can see that the lighting is rather funky. Here I am with Claire:


The show appears to be some sort of meditation on life and the rat race, etc, and it is puntuated with these amazingly acrobatic and lyrical moments, such as this one:


The woman was in the plastic basket (above our heads) spinning one way while the guy was attached underneath the basket, spinning the other way. Very cool effect.

Then this one had a foil curtain around the audience and these acrobats chased each other around the circle:


The finale is the best, when a giant plastic sheet comes down over our heads:

And then people jump on it from above with all sorts of water flowing around, kind of like a massive slip and slide. Again, hard to explain but very cool!!!

Afterwards I took the group to a gay showtunes bar, where we drank and sang showtunes I don't know, haha. But Marie's Crisis is a West Village institution, definitely worth seeing.

Once everyone left on Monday morning I had to throw myself back into reality and start teaching, but now that's done for the week. I had a Bastille Day part-ay for my students chez Judy on Tuesday, which made for a crazy Monday night of cooking (involving making cupcake batter in the bowl of her salad spinner because she doesn't have mixing bowls, hahaha).

Next up: I've been invited to the cast party for that 7-hour French show, which is tonight and starts at 11:30. Should be an Experience with a capital E, to say the least. woohoo!

Why not to wear a miniskirt to class

So I never wear a miniskirt to class, for obvious reasons.

Except today, for whatever reason that remains unknown to me, I randomly decided to wear a short denim skirt to class. Not terribly short, but short enough. When I got to the library (where I teach), I discovered that it was closed for some water issue, in that it had none. So we dutifully trooped over to the Institute of French Studies and got going there. I was rather smug that we had managed to deal with the problem, get all the students in one place, and get started, all while only losing about 5 minutes of class time total.

Then, about 45 minutes later, someone came down to say that they were doing a fire drill in the Institute and that we'd have to clear out for a few minutes. So we headed outside to the Mews (the Institute is on this really chic block that is cobblestone and closed to cars) and hung out for a few minutes. This is when I learned about that Robert Pattison movie that is still wreaking havoc on the neighborhood. It's apparently a "romantic thriller" in which he and some girl from Lost get together and then their family members start dying. Unclear. But it's still a zoo around here.

Anyway, the 5 minutes turns into like 20, and then the maintenance team comes out and says that it'll "only" be another 15-20 minutes. Right. So we go back down and grab our books to do class on the Mews. The students are thrilled, since students always love doing class outside. Particularly on beautiful days like today (low 80s, low humidity, gorgeous sun).

I, however, am faced with two problems:
1) With the miniskirt, I can't cross my legs or sit in much of any comfortable position.
2) With my knee, I can only tolerate sitting on the curb with my legs bent sideways for a few minutes.

So in the end, I am sitting with my legs out in front of me, ON THE COBBLESTONES because my students are all on the sidewalk and I need to be able to see them.

Add to that the fact that last night I went to the second installment of Les Éphémères, which has pew-like seating. Natalia and I weren't sure if that was to heighten the experience of being in a theater (à la Brecht...there were a few other more overtly Brechtian moments, so it's not out of the realm of possibility. In either case, I question the logic of making the audience physically suffer when you're already putting them through a 7-hour show...) or whether it's just what they ended up with, but damn the seating was debilitatingly painful. My back is still a mess, and it sure isn't much better after spending so much time on the cobblestones, haha.

Needless to say, I'm never wearing a miniskirt to class again.

Reasons why I love NY in the summer

So last Thursday on my way to class, it was impossible to miss the GAGGLE of girls standing on the street waving copies of Twilight. It wasn't much of a leap to figure out what was going on, as there were all sorts of movie trailors and equipment around. And because my students always know more about what's going on, they informed me that Robert Pattison is filming some movie called Remember Me. I don't know anything about it, but it was a pain to get back to the office after class because the streets were all blocked off. Right. They were out there all day, standing around and cheering and watching the filming. I, on the other hand, couldn't be bothered to even wait a minute to see what I could, haha.

Friday night I managed (through a long and complicated story, but Judy is super tight with the troupe) to get tickets to the dress rehearsal to THIS show. Well, to the first half on Friday, second half tomorrow. Because the whole thing is SEVEN HOURS LONG. Indeed. I don't think I've ever seen a show that long, haha, but it's kind of cool. We shall see how phase two goes tomorrow!

Yesterday I had a bit of a gathering chez Judy for the 4th. Perhaps the most amusing photo is of me with Harley:

Then we went to the fireworks, where my pics of people were way better than my pics of the fireworks themselves: