Category: NYC

no SDCC for me this year

I went through the motions yesterday, but unsurprisingly, badges sold out in an hour, and I didn’t get one.

Today, I went to New York and paid a visit to the Met and MoMA. There wasn’t much going on at MoMA, since the Picasso sculpture exhibit has closed, and the Edgar Degas exhibit hasn’t opened yet. There were other exhibits going on, of course, but nothing much that was of interest to me. I think the Degas exhibit is the only one coming up that I’m really interested in.

At the Met, I really enjoyed the Power of Prints exhibit. There were some really great prints on display, from a wide variety of artists, including Edward Hopper and Toulouse-Lautrec. It’s not a high-profile exhibit, and I really just stumbled into it, but it was a pleasant surprise.

The Vigée Le Brun exhibit seems to be the big thing right now; it was pretty crowded. But I didn’t really get much out of it. It’s not the kind of art that really does much for me, generally speaking. The historical context is interesting, of course. Maybe I should go back and give it another look when it’s less crowded.

No More Ziegfeld

I’m really disappointed to hear (from this NY Times article) that the Ziegfeld Theater is closing. I haven’t been there in a while, but it’s a great theater and I’ve seen some great movies there, including Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm.

As this post on Cinema Treasures points out, this leaves only one single-screen movie theater left in Manhattan, the Paris. I’ve seen a few good films there too, including Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which was quite an experience.

It’s sad to see so few big movie theaters left, since the experience of seeing a good film on a big screen is so much different from seeing it on a smaller screen in a multiplex, or on a TV screen at home.

As much as I appreciate venues like Film Forum or the theaters used by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, they just don’t compare to big old theaters like the Ziegfeld.

paying for news

I’ve been thinking about the ways in which I consume news lately. I read The NY Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, and The Guardian, with varying degrees of frequency, online (obviously), and I haven’t been paying for any of them. I’ve had print subscriptions to each of them (except The Guardian) in the past. I probably read the NY Times more often than any of the others.

This past week’s junk mail included offers to subscribe (in print) to the New Yorker and Economist at discount rates. I was somewhat tempted to do that, but I still have a small pile of unread New Yorker issues from my previous print subscription, in 2013. (I’m still working my way through them, and enjoying a lot of the articles, even if they’re a bit out of date.)

I’ve thought about signing up for a digital subscription to the Times on a number of occasions, but it’s always seemed a bit too expensive. And they’ve had this weird tiered system, where you pay one rate for a web & iPhone subscription, a higher rate for web & iPad, and an even higher rate for “all-digital access”. Well, I noticed today that they seem to have given up on that and set the all-digital rate to the old web & iPhone rate of $3.75 a week. And they had an offer for 30% off for the first year. So that’s a little over $10/month, which isn’t bad. I’ll have to review it next year when it goes up to $15/month.

So now I can read as many Times articles as I want, on any device I want, without jumping through any hoops to get around the 10 article per month limit on freeloaders. I also want to think about better ways to find and read articles from the Times that would be interesting and/or useful to me. I already subscribe to a couple of Times newsletters, and have one IFTTT recipe set up, using the NY Times channel. I could probably set up a few more. I also follow a few Times feeds on Twitter, but I’ve noticed that those usually only promote a certain kind of content, and don’t really help with the stuff that’s buried a bit deeper in the paper.

Long ago, when I had a print subscription to the Times, I actually went through the whole paper (or at least a good chunk of it) every day, skimming through all the headlines and reading at least a half-dozen articles every day. And I’d spend at least a couple of hours on the Sunday paper each week. (Heck, on a rainy day like today, I could spend nearly the whole day reading the paper.) I’d like to get back into the habit of reading and keeping up with the news at a bit of a deeper level this year. I’m never going to go back to reading the Times “dead tree” edition on a daily basis, but hopefully I can come up with a system for surfacing and reading the stuff that’s interesting to me in a way that’s convenient and useful.

Jackson Pollock

I went to see the Jackson Pollock exhibit at MoMA today. Pollock has been a favorite of mine since high school. This exhibit is all stuff from MoMA’s collection, so it’s not a huge exhibit, and I’ve already seen all of the major works that are included. But there are a number of minor works and odd bits that usually aren’t out for display, so it was nice to see some of those, and to see so much Pollock work all together in one place.

I was hoping that they would have produced a new book to go along with the exhibit, but they don’t seem to have done that. I have only one book on Pollock, and it would be nice to have a keepsake from this exhibit. In fact, I couldn’t find any books related to Pollock in the museum gift shop. Lots of random Christmas  knick-knacks though. Tis the season, and all that.

I was hoping to do some more stuff in the city today, maybe including a visit to the Met, but I was really tired after I was done with MoMA, and went straight home. This was my first big excursion since my surgery, and I think it went pretty well, but I guess I’m not at 100% yet. Or maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’ll try going to the Met next weekend.

Not at New York Comic Con

New York Comic Con is starting up tomorrow. I won’t be going this year. I was a little sad about that last week, but I’ve caught a little stomach bug this week, so now I’m glad I don’t have tickets. The Javits Center is no place to be if you need to use the bathroom every 30 minutes.

If I’m feeling better next week, though, maybe I’ll see about going to the “Superheroes in Gotham” exhibit at the New York Historical Society.

a trip to New York, and new glasses

I took a trip into NYC today, to visit the new Whitney, take a walk on The High Line, and see about buying a new pair of glasses at Warby Parker.

My eyes haven’t changed much over the last decade, so I just haven’t bothered getting new glasses for quite a while. The last ones I bought, about ten years ago, are still in good shape. But I think my vision has changed enough that it was time for new glasses. I knew that going back to the same optician where I got the last glasses would be convenient, and I’d likely get another great pair of glasses, but I also knew it would be very expensive, so I kept putting it off.

I was a little leery of Warby Parker, but I’ve been hearing good things about them, and a friend just got glasses from them, and they have a store right by the High Line and the new Whitney, so I decided to stop by and see what they could do for me. I have a very strong prescription, so their $99 glasses are actually going to cost me $225, but that’s still a lot better than the $700 or more that I’d have paid to get a new pair from the local optician I used for my last pair. The frames I picked out are clearly not quite as sturdy as my current ones, but hopefully they’re good enough. And on the web site, they’re listed as women’s frames, though they were specifically recommended to me by a store employee who could clearly see that I wasn’t a woman. But I guess they’re gender-neutral enough, and they looked ok on my face, from what I could tell. It’s likely that I’ll need to switch to progressive lenses or bifocals within the next few years anyway, so I may not need to keep these glasses as long as I’ve kept my current ones. They should be ready in a couple of weeks. Warby Parker has a 30-day return policy, so I guess if I don’t like them I can just return them.

After Warby Parker, I walked over to the new Whitney. I’d only been in the old Whitney once or twice, but I liked it. (That old building has been acquired by the Met, and should reopen as the Met Breuer next year.) The new Whitney is really great. After buying my ticket, I took the elevator to the top floor (the eighth) and worked my way down, using the outdoor staircases when I could. It’s a nice space, with a lot of room for them to show off a lot of work. Their current main exhibition, America is Hard to See, fills most of the museum, and has some nice paintings, including one from Jackson Pollock that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and a few from Georgia O’Keeffe. There’s much more of course, and I’d really like to go back and take another look. (And I probably will, when I go back to Warby Parker in a couple of weeks to pick up my glasses.)

After the Whitney, I took a stroll on the High Line. It was quite crowded, which I guess should be expected on a beautiful spring day. But it was a nice walk regardless.

Monty Python

I went into New York today, and saw a couple of Monty Python films, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. I saw Life of Brian (which I hadn’t seen in many years) and The Meaning of Live, which is a new documentary, mostly about the final Python live shows from last year.

Life of Brian had a Q&A afterward with John Cleese and Terry Jones, and Meaning of Live had a Q&A with Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin. So, now I’ve seen all of the (surviving) Pythons, except for Terry Gilliam.

It would have been fun to go to the Holy Grail screening last night too, but that one was pretty expensive. The Q&A for that one had all the Pythons, though, plus John Oliver, so that would have been awesome!

Seeing these films has made me think about the value of humor, and realize that I’m really not getting enough of it lately. On my way home, I picked up the Weird Al guest-edited issue of Mad Magazine, so that should help restore some balance. (It’s been many years since I picked up an issue of Mad.)

A nice day

We finally had a nice day with moderate temperatures yesterday, so I took the opportunity to make another NYC museum-hopping visit, and also did some walking. (It’s funny how my definition of “nice day” has been downwardly adjusted by this harsh winter. It was overcast yesterday, and the streets were full of melting grey slush. But it was above freezing!)

I first went to MoMA. I’m curious about their Björk exhibit, but I didn’t bother trying to get in to that. There are actually multiple parts to the exhibit; the centerpiece, I guess, is the “Songlines” exhibit, “an interactive, location-based audio experience”, which required timed-entry tickets, even for members. So, if I decide that I’m really interested in that, I’ll come back on a day when I can go in early. I’m not sure I care about a Björk exhibit that much. It seems like mostly just a novelty exhibit. But I guess stuff like that helps pay for the more interesting, less popular, exhibits, like the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit that’s coming to an end soon.

After MoMA, I went to the Met. While I had no particular agenda for that visit, when I got there I realized there was a members preview of the Plains Indians exhibit going on, so I went in and took a look around. It’s actually really interesting and well-done.

To get some additional exercise, I walked from the Met back to Penn Station, making a quick stop at Kinokuniya. I don’t think I’d ever been in this particular Kinokuniya location before. I was surprised at how many English-language books and comics they had. They have a really good selection of American and European graphic novels on the second floor.

So it was a good day, overall. I’m looking forward to an even nicer day when all the snow is melted and the Met roof garden is open, so I can spend a little time in the sun up there, maybe enjoying a beer or coffee.