Musings from the God of Cities

it's no secret that i. like. dogs. and as i mentioned earlier, i fell in love with an adorable pup named racecar while on vay-cay in chicago. how could i fall in love so hard and fast? wouldn't you if you'd come across a face like this:


here's racecar being all wistful


here he's being demure


here, he's all sweepy


and here, his daddy brian is making racecar "do cobra"

if there were any way i could have smuggled racecar back to nyc, i would have...

"Is it so different to be new? And is it so strange to be different? Now, I'm not saying that new isn't bad, of course it is. But on this St. Arbor's Day week, we must realize that the new sapling grows into the mighty old oak, which we cut down to make our new ax handles which, in turn, we use to chop down our mighty old oaks."

---jerri blank

i haven't posted in a tiny little while because i've been on vay-cay. i took a ton of pictures while i was away, so it's going to take me a minute to sort through 'em, jazz 'em up a bit, and post them. in the meantime, please enjoy this video of racecar, my friend brian's dog. i met racecar (quoth brian, "it's a palindrome!) during my trip and fell so in love with him that i would have stolen him and smuggled him back to nyc if there were any feasible way for me to do so.



here's the youtube version in case the photobucket one doesn't. if that doesn't work, you might wanna try watching them through IE instead of firefox.



this is the link if all else fails.

23 street 1 train stop, manhattan, nyc, april 2006.

so, one of the better things about hanging with dw is his interest in and knowledge of all things both arty and farty. things like the art galleries of chelsea. i feel like a lot of new yorkers talk about the great art in the city, and how there's so many great galleries, etc., but they never go to any. there's probably a lot of folks who also think that art galleries (especially in chelsea of all places) are probably all snooty and obnoxious. well, actually they are. but whatever, who cares? a lot of 'em have really cool shit in 'em. here's some highlights of what i saw when i went to some chelsea art galleries a few weeks ago:

tara donovan at pace wildenstein. basically, it was about a jillion plastic cups stacked and arranged around a big-ass room. the whole thing is almost infinitely cooler than my description makes it sound.






next up was brian alfred's works at mary boone gallery. i liked that the bright colors, and flat geometric style of alfred's works made them look like they were made of paper cut outs.








after that was mattia bonetti's flower tables at luhring augustine gallery.



i wouldn't even have seen this exhibit if i weren't following this dude to try to take a picture of his seeming in ability to find a belt hr feels is "just right."

after the flower tables we saw this big lot filled with a bunch of differen't artists' works. unfortunately, i'm a big fat stupid and forgot to jot down any of their names or the who the show was associated with. update: the show is called "survivor" and was organized by david rimanelli for bortolami dayan. more information available here. thanks, dw.




blow-ups of "wacky" news articles


an ode to lucy.


bin laden youth


van halen.


i went into both of these to see if anyone had either numberoned or numbertwoed in either one. (no one had.)


this picture shows the neon lights reflected from the piece in the previous picture, obvs.

then we went to gallery henoch and checked out eric zener's recent works. i loveloveloved his stuff 'cause i really dig photorealism. (uhm, if that means "paintings that look like pictures". otherwise, never mind.)

this one is called "sacred breath" and was probably my favorite painting at the exhibit.









then (gee, can you tell we walked all day?) we hit up galerie lelong to see their jaume plansa show. i recognized the artist because we'd seen some of his stuff at the armory show. the piece at the show wasn't as cool as these hanging letters:



dw strikes a pose.

and (f'ing) finally, we went to see johnston foster's delusions of grandeur at rare gallery. i like that he made these pieces out of things like construction paper and electrical tape. it's cool that such neat-o art can be made from such common household items. it also makes me kinda jealous that i'm not the kind of person who is clever enough to make arty things out of household items.




my absolute favoritest piece from that day, though, wasn't something in a gallery. it was this sticker outside the d'amelio terras gallery:

despite the near impossibility of improving on perfection, i've figured i should try to be a slightly better human being. to that end, i volunteered (and plan on continuing to do so) at the b.a.r.c shelter in williamsburg. you can either walk dogs or hang out with and pet cats. being deathly allergic to cats (and hopelessly in love with dogs) i walked a tan shepherd mix named jessica (aka bigfoot). Jessica "came to BARC from the city shelter after being hit by a car, and injuring her foot - hence her nickname 'Bigfoot'. She is a sweet girl, who loves people and other dogs. Her foot is healing, but it may require futher medical attention in the future."






anybody wanna give jessica a forever home?

while poking around philly, i stumbled upon a rather artful wall. the wall was one of those temporary one that get put up around construction sites. this wall was right in front of a large office building in downtown philadelphia. like many large office buildings, there are tons of bike messengers going in and out every day. apparently the wall outside of the building has become a place for philadlelphia bike messengers to mark there territory,




express their feelings towards cars


and post their art


the wall is apparently such a great canvas that bike messengers aren't the only ones using it to feature their art

i saw different kinds of public art in philadelphia. one kind that i was particularly struck with was sticker art. there seemed to be a pretty thriving sticker art scene going on in philly. here are some examples:


when i took this picture of a batman sticker, a little girl walking by saw what i was doing and asked her mom why i was taking a picture of a garbage can and giggled hysterically when she saw my flash going off.


horny robot


meep


girls sharing a hand-grenade

this dude played off of the "love" sign in philly




the most prolific sticker artist i saw in philadelphia was the guy (or girl!) that made these weird robot looking figures













Update: turns out it's not a weird robot looking figure, it's a bull looking figure named "el toro" and it's creator is this dude, frost. thanks, michael!

most of the stickers around were stuck on newspaper boxes. i figured it's because anything out on a street sign would be taken down by the city, but no one is going around making sure newspaper boxes stay clean. but maybe i'm wrong. anyone in the know wanna illuminate me?


alonso


kasso





some folks got so inspired by using newspaper boxes as canvases for their sticker art that they took things one step further and painted the boxes