Smaller bites

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Feed them if you must, but tread carefully! Feeding turtles in the mouth is a very bad idea…

It isn’t clearly visible in the photo (low resolution), but there is quite a lot of blood dripping from the man’s finger; he’s just been bitten by the turtle who -surprise- mistook it for food. Totally unintentional but no less painful! 

The man didn’t seem to mind too much but I silently hoped, for his sake, that he would look into some tetanus shots possibilities…

Adventures @ The Turtle Pond, Central Park

June 24th, 2017

Spotted: The ‘real’ Daily Planet

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We were on our way back from a lunch break when my co-worker, who had been in the City much longer than I, pulled me aside:

”Wait, have you seen this?” ”C’mon, you’ll love it!”

In, he dragged me, through a revolving door and before I knew it I was facing a giant revolving globe amidst a stunning art deco interior with just a touch of brass, as if Jules Verne had walked by and left his mark, and I could hardly contain my excitement. For the lobby we had walked into belongs to The Daily News Building, the iconic skyscraper built in 1929–1930 to become the headquarters of the New York Daily News paper, up until the mid 1990s. But it gets better: this, as I discovered by looking at the photographs on the wall, was the very building that served as the offices of the ”Daily Planet”, the newspaper where none other than Clark Kent and Lois Lane, played by Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, worked as reporters in the 1978 Superman and its 1980 sequel.

I am still in awe!

Today, the New York Daily News has moved on, but the building is still home to its broadcast subsidiary, WPIX.

The News Building was designed by architects Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells, in the Art Deco style. Other Art Deco designs by the same architects include: the American Radiator Building, Rockefeller Center (Hood) and McGraw-Hill Building (Hood).

The News Building
42nd St., between 2nd & 3rd Avenues

June 22nd, 2017

In the presence of the words that were spoken I began to hear the music – Philip Glass

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We were there too, with a couple of hundred more admirers, sharing the same space with one of the most important musical minds of the century – and the century before, enjoying a casual conversation about his life, friends, lineage [”covers a lot of things… but the important thing about lineage is the connectiveness”], lessons learned from his father, Ben, like mental chess or, the most important of them all, how to listen…

[”Father had a record store…”][”…After a whole day in a music store he went home and listened to music. If he had records in the store and couldn’t sell them, he wanted to see what’s wrong with them. So he brought them home and listened to them. His idea was, if he could find out what’s wrong with them he could buy the right records… Pieces he brought home were mostly modern pieces; it could be Shostakovich… Bartók, and he would listen to them over and over… he became kind of expert on modern music… and his little store in Baltimore became the place to go when you were looking for modern music…”]Paul: ”I love the story of John Cage saying to you: ”It’s good… But there are too many notes!”
Philip: ”No, he never said it was good…! Don’t make it better than it was!” ”He said:  ”Philip…. Too many notes!” And I said: ”John, I’m one of your children whether you like it or not…”Thoughts, pauses, reflections, life fragments, anecdotes, friends; his epic Einstein on the Beach; the inspiration he took from Rothko’s vision; his creative combination of live performance with film in La Belle et la Bête; his memories of Moondog, the mighty Viking of 6th Avenue… the fact that he worked as a plumber and, more adventurously, as a taxi driver to fund his music. [”At some point, I began to ask myself where did the music come from; then, I decided to write music because it would be a way to learn where it came from. But it turned out not to be true… I spent the rest of my life trying to answer that question… and I still can’t…”]

Paul Holdengräber, founder and director of Live from the NYPL talk series, was the host.

Philip Glass | A Mind of Music, NYPL

June 15th, 2017

Reminiscing

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About last summer

The A train brought us to the beach in 1 hour and 15 minutes from 42nd St. Port Authority. I thought this must be the longest subway line in the City – and it is! It actually stretches all the way from 207th St. in Northern Manhattan to Far Rockaway, in Queens. A 2 hour and 15 minutes trip – on a subway train! Isn’t this amazing?

We won’t be doing it again, though. While the trip to the beach was fairly smooth for NYC Subway standards, on the way back we found ourselves tightly squeezed (read: trapped) among groups of hopelessly loud teenagers high on creative cocktails of soft drugs, alcohol and, well, life. That’s totally fine, of course, as long as we can keep at a safe distance and save our unacquainted ears from the hazardous effects of such extreme noise exposure levels.

Next time, we’ll take the ferry.

June 11th, 2017 – A Sunday afternoon in Rockaway Beach

Watch This Space

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On 20 July 2018, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst welcomed the legendary electronic band Kraftwerk and 7500 visitors to the Jazz Open Festival on Stuttgart’s Schlossplatz – live from the International Space Station, where he will live and work until mid-December 2018.

Watch them perform live. In real-time. In direct line. With space.

Alexander Gerst: […”The ISS is a Man-Machine. The most complex and valuable machine humankind has ever built. Here, in the European Columbus Laboratory, the successor to the Spacelab, the European Space Agency (ESA) is researching things that will improve the daily life on Earth. More than a 100 different nations work together peacefully here and achieve things that a single nation could never achieve”…]

∞ °•° ∞

Paired with the reflective, illusionary, upside down, spacey architecture by Samara Golden.

The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes, 2017 was a site-specific installation using insulation foamboard, extruded polystryrene, epoxy resin, carpet, vinyl, fabric, acrylic paint, spray paint, nail polish, plastic, altered found objects and mirror.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial

June 10th, 2017