Musings from the God of Cities

people get all excited about the gates (i'm certainly no exception) but often forget that as new yorkers, we're lucky enough to be surrounded by art. here's a small sampling of some i've run into of late:

here's a stenciled sticker of the chrysler building on a phone booth from where you can see the actual chrysler building. taken in front of grand central:



here;s another sticker. this one is of a young maiden and some sort of large beast like a buffalo or yak. (found by tavern on the green):



here's the uberorgan which i saw the day i saw the gates get unfurled:



















that same day i saw a winter-drab tree that someone had (pardon the pun) spruced up with some green ribbon and plastic leaves:








the bear sculpture in the park by the met:



and finally, this botero, "el gato" ("the cat") .

(not pictured: pepe le pew chasing after the sculpture)

everyone has their reasons for loving or hating the gates. i don't wanna hear yours, and i'm assuming you don't wanna hear mine. that said, please enjoy this glut of pictures of the gates that i've been taking since the day they were first unfurled:














notice the cardboard tube falling out of the gate as it unfurls. i tried like the dickens to get a good shot of one of those rolls popping out from the unfurling gate.









the following are some views from the roof of the met:







and finally, the gates in the snow:






skiers...

"...Benjaminson's group cut chunks of muscle five to 10 centimetres long from large goldfish. After washing the chunks in alcohol, they immersed them in a vat of fetal bovine serum, a nutrient-rich liquid extracted from the blood of unborn calves, which biologists usually use for growing cells in the lab.

After a week in the vat, the fish chunks had grown by 14 per cent, Benjaminson and his team found. To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, they washed it and gave it a quick dip in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried it and showed it to colleagues from other departments."

"Another character, called the Greenman, became the center of the narrative. He has bulbs or roots coming out his ass and mouth, which in the film develop into blooms. He lies under the truck on a specially constructed plate and masturbates against the main driveshaft. There are a couple of climaxes. The film opens with a close-up of his penis going from a relaxed to a fully erect state, a two- to three-minute continuous shot. Later, the Greenman has an interaction with an endangered golden lion tamarin monkey (a doll), whose shit, which is crucial to the production of certain antibiotics, is used to lubricate the driveshaft the Greenman masturbates on."

i took the day off today, and after some debste as to how to most elegantly waste the day, i decided to go the museum of natural history. i figured (correctly) that there'd be percious few people there, which is a rare treat in manhattan museums. on the way there i saw...

a whole lotta dogs


...which reminds me! while most of y'all were watching that big sports thing, i was lucky enough to catch something... a little more my speed. (and just ordered the dvd. someone please shoot me.)

but i digress. i also saw:

this douche


this petco employee shadily smokin' a butt outside the "office"


and this scrap of garbage which caught my eye 'cause i'm always on the lookout for interesting garbage. and uhm, wrestlers


i saw that the MET is apparently getting a face lift...


...which didn't seem to bother this cute nebbishy fella, sitting on its steps


i decided to walk through central park because i wanted to see how the installation of the christo and jean-claude gates installation was coming along.

i walked into the park


and saw what i'd been seeing from the bus every day. namely, little orange markers signaling where the individual gates would go


then i saw what would become the actual gates




i even got to see a crew of volunteers putting up one of the gates












the flags themselves haven't been unfurled yet, and all of the gates aren't up yet, but it's starting to look pretty neat










maybe not everyone is as jazzed as i am about the gates (and for the record, i am v.excited by public art in general, and this project, specifically)

though it's possible the graffittier wasn't being negative towards the art, but was simply stating a fact.

before heading out of the park to spend the rest of the day museuming it up, i also caught

a cute central park dude


a fella enjoying the sunshine


and finally, a dude who'd been so inspired by the color of the gates, he decided to rock it himself

A New York State court ruled today that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry, in a decision that Lambda Legal called “a historic ruling that delivers the state Constitution’s promise of equality to all New Yorkers.” Lambda Legal filed the lawsuit last year, representing five same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses in New York City.

In a 62-page decision issued this morning in New York City, State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan said that the New York State Constitution guarantees basic freedoms to lesbian and gay people – and that those rights are violated when same-sex couples are not allowed to marry. The ruling said the state Constitution requires same-sex couples to have equal access to marriage, and that the couples represented by Lambda Legal must be given marriage licenses.

"Sometimes he seasons the menus to taste like the main courses. Recently, he used dehydrated squash and sour cream powders to match a soup entree. He also prepares edible photographs flavored to fit a theme: an image of a cow, for example, might taste like filet mignon."

thanks, patty!

[rose is talking about how she lost the little miss st. olaf contest when she was a girl]

rose: sure she was more talented, but i smelled a rat.

blanche: you mean the competition was fixed?

rose: no, that was my talent...smelling rats.