Musings from the God of Cities

Yoko Akino: This pizza is so enticing and so aggressive. It reminds me of my hit song "Blue Jeans On Fire." [ singing ] "Blue jeans on fire.. Chevrolet Elvis.. Blue jeans on fire.. New York, let's go!" [ giggles ]

"When I was younger, I considered my love of comics more than a love - it was almost like an addiction. I had to have my comics! I also had to have every issue of a series whether I was enjoying the current storyline or not. I read dozens of issues of certain series, hoping it would get better, because I just couldn't stop myself from buying them. Does this sound familiar to anyone? How many of you keep buying a comic you're not really liking hoping it will get better or just because you feel as if you have to have every single issue of the series? Which comics? Have you reread any of them recently? How do you feel about them now?"

this weekend i walked around the city, and saw...

some kind of shaved chimp that someone dressed up and taught to walk upright on 3rd ave.


a cute smoker on 14th street.


presumably, an nyu student by the virgin megastore in union square


fun kids on union square west


then i walked through chelsea




and to the fleamarkets where i saw these fine folks
















i then made my way to a street fair on park avenue south where i ran into these cats,








after that, i walked through madison square park and saw kids fencing


and finally wound up in murray hill, where i caught the bus and snapped some pictures of these two class acts

last week i had the following conversation with dm:

me: have you ever been to 'medieval times'?
dm (disdainfully): pfft, no!
me: oh. i've always wanted to go.
dm: yeah, me too, secretly.

“We also noticed that individual fish release more bubbles the more fish are in the tank with them,” Dr Wilson said.

“In other words it seems that herring like to fart in company.”

this past weekend i went to the opening of the rubin museum of himalayan art. it wasn't the gala affair that one thinks of when one thinks of when one hears about a museum opening, but i'm hardly the kind of guy who would go to a gala affair anyways, so it's all good.

the opening was celebrated by a tiny little street fair where they had:


folks playing some kind of tibetan dice game,


artists artisting it up,


storytelling for children,


folks in ethnic costumage,




attractive lads (though i think their presence was largely coincidental)


and a parade of tibetan dogs, which included:


democratic dogs (hey, this is new york, after all.)


as well as some thoroughly gay dogs (again, this is new york).

the museum itself was quite lovely. one of the docents informed us that the floors themselves had been designed to be like mandalas as you can sort of see here:





there was a ton of awesome art:













so much art, in fact, that after a while my companion, the lovely and talented mizz p-hol, and i left after only really having seen about two-thirds of the exhibits. one can only look at so much himalayan art before one wants to emulate the figure below, and drive arrows through one's eyes.



all told, i'm completely new to, and largely ignorant of art in general, and himalayan art, specifically. because of this, i read most of the captions by each individual piece of art, which grew tiring after a while. also, not having any base knowledge of what i was looking at, everything looked very similar. even though the art was really amazing in terms of details, quality, etc. it got kind of tiring after a while. ah well, next time i'll just take the audio tour...