Monday, February 21, 2011

Through panes of glass...

One of the many windows in the city from the old Custom House, now the Smithsonian's NYC Branch of the National Museum of the American Indian.

My oldest sister, Sariah, had a fascination with windows and the world outside of them. From the time she was a baby, she was attracted to the things on the other side. There is a yellowed photograph from an old battered album documenting the brief history of the (remarkably dull) events that occurred in my family during the few years before I was born (a remarkable event which illuminated their drab little lives). The image in the photo was Sariah as a baby, climbing up to the window in a shanty farm house my parents lived in for a brief time, and she was staring ever so majestically into the sunlight, looking as wise and as noble as an 18 month old can. She began her existence already enamored by life on the other side of the glass, and she never quite grew out of it. While she was always looking at the world outside of the windows, I often found myself taking the alternate approach from the outside looking in...

In the City of New York, there is no shortage of windows. On sunny days, much of the city shines as if tiny jewels have been embedded into the masses of stone that aim toward the sky, full of busy hives of people all trying to stay one step ahead of impending poverty. In this way, the city can be reminiscent of a really colossal ant farm, if all the ants had smart phones and caffeine addictions. Most of the people milling about in the buildings of midtown are so busy trying to get through the tasks of their day, they hardly have a chance to look up or follow Sariah's lead and peek out a window every now and again. I make it a point to look out of windows every chance I get, but generally, I just find myself looking into other windows as a result.

My office is situated in a very "no-frills" district of midtown Manhattan, just below Pennsylvania Station. Although there are several windows in the room, they all have a fantastic views of the rear-facing brick walls of the surrounding buildings. There is enough of a view to at least clearly see four or five floors of the buildings to the side and the back of my own, and during the moments I need to avoid the insanity of my job the most, I escape into the views of the other offices around us. Directly across from me there is an office full of clean looking thirty-somethings, sharply dressed in smart business casuals, and different members of the group meet at least once a day, sitting around a table facing a large flatscreen, where I assume they either do video conferencing or else they just really like to actively talk back to television programs for sport. Their workspace is brightly, but not TOO brightly, colored in a sort of "retro-mod" motif and there are always bagels (I wish my office had bagels). There are certain members of the group I have singled out as my favorites, and I periodically look out my window to see if they've entered the meeting. There is one man, tall-ish and balding with a cocky face - always wearing some sort of tasseled footwear, and I've decided I don't care for him. He's probably one of those people with a name like "Preston" or "Dayton" who drinks brandy out of a gold-rimmed snifter discussing his salary with members of his prep school alumni association while making jovial guffaws about his subordinates. When I get to the point where I begin fancying him to be a womanizer who has broken the hearts of all the female members of my office window soap opera, I know it is time to stop and get back to whatever task I've been avoiding by spying on my neighbors.

In the floors above and below the office full of young active people are two very dull views that rarely provide more than a momentary distraction. One window, the office above, peers into a room piled high with disorganized books on sagging shelves, where a very uninteresting old man sits in front of a computer all day, occasionally visited by a secretary of some sort who brings in beige folders full of what appear to be multi-colored forms (I like to call her "Helen"). He often eats his lunch out of a brown bag, prepared by some wife called "Marge" or "Barb," no doubt, and then he leaves every day, promptly at 4:30. In the office below, there sits a middle aged man with bushy peppered hair who seems to do little more than read magazines or the New York Post all day with his feet up on the desk. One time I saw him take a swig from a flask. I always try to see if I can catch him do it again. The only other point of interest in the views I have available to me is into a building directly behind mine. There is an office occupied by two uptight women who do not seem to get along. The sit, all day long at their computers, not speaking, one often pulling her hair back tighter and tighter as the day progresses. At least once a week, the tight-haired lady has to sit and listen to a paunchy older man, who has nose hairs that are visible from a building away, angrily talk at her for fifteen to thirty minutes while making severe hand gestures. I imagine he has bad breath. She then tightens her hair some more and furiously pecks at her keyboard until she leaves.

I realize at times that I may get a little too carried away with my imagination when escaping into the ambiguous scenes of the lives progressing around me through panes of glass, but I feel it's generally a way to connect with a much larger reality that is so easy to feel excluded from. Leading up to my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, there are several little cafés that attract neighborhood residents and their visitors each night. Often when I'm walking home, and especially on cold nights, I like to look in the windows at the people sharing their evenings together over warm food and cool drinks and I like to pretend I know them and I can hear what they're saying. Often I'll see someone I recognize from the subway platform or the market or one of the apartment buildings on my block, and I feel glad, as though I've seen a friend (when in reality I rarely ever talk to my neighbors unless absolutely necessary). For a split second, in my glance, I've shared a moment in time with a familiar face, and in a city of eight million little ants running around behind glass, it is a comfort to feel human every now and again.



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Thursday, February 10, 2011

My weekend museum adventures in the city: indulging the curiosity of my inner child...

One of the many beautiful statues adorning the Brooklyn Museum

Growing up in the mountains of Colorado, sequestered away in a tiny town, I always dreamt of taking off on spontaneous adventures to far off places and seeing exotic and beautiful lands and people yet undiscovered. Although the San Juan mountains were beautiful, they acted as a barrier between me and the world outside. In my imagination, I would fly up over the snow-capped peaks to worlds beyond my own grasp and comprehension. My weekends were often occupied by bicycle excursions in the wild adobe hills or the alleyways of the town, but more often than not, my end destination would be the small public library I affectionately revered as my tangible portal to the places and things on the outside of the scope of the Rockies. I would find piles of books about art, history, fairy stories and travel to wonderful places. The stern and humorless librarian, Rosalie, who seemed to hate all living things - especially children, took a strange liking to me and she would tell me new subjects to explore or even hold new books for me as they came in. During my nerdy Saturdays of youth, while my peers were playing baseball or having slumber parties, I was immersed in the alternate reality of dusty books, socializing with misanthropic librarians and perpetuating my budding eccentricities...

Now that I live in New York City, there is no shortage of imagination-inspiring curiosities and/or world view-broadening places to see. As a sort of New Year's Resolution, I decided two things; I really need to start taking more photographs and I have to do all I can to take advantage of living in this city - I owe it to the dorky small town child inside of me. As a means to satisfy both desires, I have begun planning little weekend "adventures," mostly focused on museums or historical sites where I can feed my hungers for my childhood love of exploration and brain-filling afternoons spent around ideas and artifacts from the past while having many subjects to photograph. Rather than the outdated books and magazines that somehow made their way into rural Colorado, I now have the privilege of seeing concrete and attainable pieces of the vast world which occupied my youthful daydreams. Even in college, earning my second undergraduate degree in Art History, the closest I could be to the things I so dearly loved were the slides projected onto cold and empty walls in darkened classrooms, like phantoms, so far from anything physical or "real." Now a sampling of anything existent in the entire world is just a subway or bus ride away.

Over the past four weekends, I've made it a point to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art (one my favorite places in the world), the American Museum of Natural History, The Cloisters Museum, El Museo del Barrio and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as the neighborhoods around these wonderful places while documenting points of interest with my camera. New Yorkers, overall, seem to have a stigma when it comes to going any place where there may be an abundance of tourists, especially to take photographs and appear to be a tourist like the other "riff raff" infesting the pristine utopia of our urban habitat. I do, so badly, want to one day be worthy of being considered a real "New Yorker," but I know I still am in my "training wheels" phase and have a very long way to go. Since I am still quite a rookie, I figure it's reasonable to indulge in childish fancies and idiotically bring my camera to the sacred and hollowed ground of these wonderful places and look at everything as if it were a moment to be captured for future use. Being a tourist in my own new home has been an addictive and wonderful thing. I want to see and know every corner of the place. I want to have it all imprinted within me. I want to feel my footprint on the pulse of each street and feel like the city knows me as well as I may one day know her.

Erring on the side of childish geekdom, I would love to say eventually that one day I've seen every museum in the city, but as there is no conclusive or agreed upon figure for how many "true" museums there are within the five burrows, it makes seeing all of them a rather subjective goal. The various declarations are that between 70-200+ museums exist in New York, but the definition of the word museum, I have found, varies quite curiously depending upon who one may ask. The town in which I was raised had one museum, dedicated to the local Native American group that had been mostly forced out and ostracized from the area over a period of prolonged struggles and hardships and scattered about in reservations. To see such an abundance of institutions dedicated to the triumphs of human progress and achievements in one place, rather than a necessary and important, but quite grim reminder of human tragedy, is a tremendous thing. Overall, during my time in the city, I've been to a dozen or so of these museums, but now I'm on a mission to to see them all.

I will continue my quest for experience and knowledge indefinitely among the museums of New York. I will also continue my photographic exploits, as well, to connect with my inner tourist. Most of all, I will prove to the anti-social child I once was, that the anti-social adult I've become still understands. I wish that I could somehow find Rosalie, the people-hating librarian of my youth, and thank her for all she un-knowingly did for me. Rosalie, wherever you are, this one's for you...


A Small Sampling of my Photographic Experiments:

Tiny dancers by Degas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Butterflies at the American Museum of Natural History
Outdoor courtyard garden, frozen for the winter,  at the Cloisters Museum
Neo-Classical sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum
On my way home one evening, I stopped in Battery Park to see the sunset, and look who I found...