For some reason, I haven't had the urge to take a lot of pictures recently - even when I've lugged my camera around. So this will be just a quick recap of highlights as they occur to me, before I go back to final revisions of my last conference presentation paper for 2013.
- Thursday and today, I went for dim sum with friends. Both places were somewhat disappointing. Thursday's place was OK but had a very limited selection; from comparing notes, we inferred that they lost their chef a month or two ago. Today's place had a C rating from the Health Department. I decided to sit at the table and enjoy conversation, but declined to eat or drink anything. The friend who checked online to see why they got the C rating (in order to convince me that it was not really that bad) instead lost her appetite. Eep.
- Yesterday, I went to the High Line with a friend who is a passionate amateur photographer. He didn't actually take a lot of pictures during our walk, but he was really fascinated with some of the photos that people were selling in the park. One guy was selling photos he took with homemade pinhole cameras - that was really cool. Afterward, we grabbed brunch at a nice bistro/restaurant that (among its other claims to fame) tiled its floor with 480,000 pennies. As we completed the loop, we were able to stop in at a few art galleries around 24th Street.
In one gallery, I really liked three photographs of reeds in water, by Bill Jackson -- these nicely blurred the line between painting and photo, with stark lines and haunting images. My favorite was "Ambiguity" (which looks a little like the work called "Impound the Sun" at this link: http://www.billjacksonart.com/scapes.htm). I could have bought it for $1,800. There were also some cool surrealist paintings, including one that looked like a take on a famous classical painting of a Renaissance woman holding a calla lily... as you look at it, you realize that it is not quite right... she has a third eye along with the other two, which seems almost natural to her face (as if showing perspective from a side angle).
At another gallery, I really liked a painting called "Trojan Horse" which featured two towers made of toy blocks, facing each other, manned respectively by red and green apples armed with cocktail skewers. From the green apples' tower, some of the green apples are entering a toy horse through a trapdoor in the back; some of the red apples are holding on to the string attached to the toy horse's nose. There are also some green apples, divested of their cocktail skewers and bound with twine, in the red apples' tower. The painting style is clean, simple lines - which gives it an impression of directness and realism; but the details are very clever and reward careful attention. There were some nice paintings of divers (in one of them, I thought the divers could easily be replaced with dolphins) and of glass jars (beautiful blue ones, with stoppers that show the landscape upside down). The painting my friend liked best (a Norman Rockwell style view of a violin-maker's shop, with nice sense of depth) was a mere $250,000.
- For Independence Day, I listened live to a lecture by Tom Shippey about Beowulf. I was on the roof, where the wi fi reception is particularly good. As we were finishing up, people started trickling in to stake out spots for the fireworks. I wasn't interested in waiting 4.5 hours for the fireworks to begin, so I went back downstairs and continued reading "Cold Days" by Jim Butcher. I figured I'd pop back up to the roof when I heard the fireworks begin. But I guess my windows are more soundproof than I imagined - by the time I checked my watch around 10:30 pm, I realized I'd probably missed it. Hadn't heard a thing. Oh well. I've seen 'em other years.
- Yesterday, after enjoying dumplings with a friend who graciously listened to a run-through of my conference paper, I caught the late-night showing of Despicable Me 2. I really liked it, but I realize now that I did not see the original (and allegedly superior) Despicable Me. So I've rented that to watch en route to Michigan.
- Today, I played mahjong with friends on the roof. That was fun - we completed two rounds (East Wind round and South Wind round) and we all got a chance to win more than once. I even had a mini winning streak (3 games in a row), which was nice.
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