Category: NYC

a bit more on the MoMA reopening

Following up on yesterday’s post, here are two more articles from the Times on the MoMA reopening.

First, Holland Carter’s general review of the new MoMA. It’s a pretty positive review. He gets a little cynical near the end:

My guess is that in some hopefully ever-improving version, this 21st century MoMA will work, if only for self-preservative reasons. Multicultural is now marketable. To ignore it is to forfeit profit, not to mention critical credibility. And the new MoMA is obviously tailored to a new and younger audience, one that has no investment, nostalgic or otherwise, in the old pre-Taniguchi model, which now lives on mostly in the memories of a fading population (…).

I guess I’m old enough to be part of that “fading population,” but I am interested in seeing what they’ve done with the place. As long as I can still find Monet’s Water Lilies in there somewhere.

The second article, Backstage at the Modern, is a short piece from the Times Magazine.

I plan on hopping on a train today and going to the member preview, so hopefully I can share my own opinions later today.

MoMA reopening

I’m currently several months behind in reading the stuff in my email “read/review” folder. So far behind, in fact, that I just hit two NYT articles about MoMA’s closing, from back in February:

MoMA to Close, Then Open Doors to More Expansive View of Art

MoMA, the New Edition: From Monumental to Experimental

I may or may not have read them (and/or posted them here) when they were published. (February is a long time ago. Also, apparently, the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Sigh.) The first one is a straightforward news article, and the second is a “Critic’s Notebook” piece by Holland Carter.

And here are two more recent articles, now that the reopening is almost here:

The New MoMA Is Here. Get Ready for Change.

With a $450 Million Expansion, MoMA Is Bigger. Is That Better?

The first is a fairly long feature article and the second is a “Critic’s Notebook” piece, by Michael Kimmelman, more about the architecture than the art. It’s a pretty interesting piece that digs into the history of the site, and includes some diagrams showing how the museum’s footprint has grown over the years. I have mixed feelings about the way Manhattan has evolved recently, with so many new “supertall” skyscrapers, like the 53W53 one that’s now tied into MoMA, but I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole today.

The first day for member previews is tomorrow, Sunday. Since I was in NYC last weekend for NYCC, I wasn’t really thinking about going back again this weekend, but I think I probably will. The weather looks pretty reasonable, and I’m feeling mostly recuperated from the con.

 

NYCC 2019 wrap-up

I’m back home from NYCC, so I might as well write one more post about my trip. I didn’t go to the con on Sunday. Instead, I took a walk from my hotel up to the Met. I took a fairly circuitous and leisurely route through Central Park. It was a pretty good day to do that. It was a nice autumn day, and Central Park on a Sunday morning was certainly more quiet and peaceful than NYCC would have been. At the Met, I went into the members preview for The Last Knight exhibit. (The title of the exhibit is quite similar to the title of the new Scott Snyder Batman series, Last Knight on Earth, but they are definitely not related in any way!) I then walked down to the Breuer and saw the two exhibits that are currently running there. The Vija Celmins exhibit was pretty interesting. A lot of her “Night Sky” paintings are cool.

My hotel was just right across the street from MoMA, so it would have been easy to go over there too, but they’re still not open. They will be opening to the public October 21, with member previews next weekend. I’ll probably miss the member preview, since I’m going to have other stuff to do this coming weekend. But maybe I can get in on Sunday. The NY Times has a lengthy article about the reopening that I haven’t had time to read yet. I did peek through the windows at MoMA, and it looks like they’ve enlarged the gift shop, which isn’t a surprise. That was about all I could really see. I’m definitely curious to see what they’ve done to the place.

Back on the subject of NYCC, The Beat published a Sunday wrap-up article that includes links to all (or most) of their NYCC content over the whole con. This includes a write-up of the big Castlevania panel that I missed. It sounds like it wasn’t that different from what I saw of those guys at the Viz panel, just longer and with more of the cast and crew present. And there’s a write-up of the Star Trek panel for Discovery and Picard. That one would have been fun to go to, but I imagine it would have involved waiting in a very long line and was probably quite crowded. I just found a reddit thread talking about the panel and various other NYCC Star Trek items. It turns out that there was also a Star Trek panel as part of PaleyFest during the con. If I’d known about that, I might have gone to that one, since you have to buy tickets in advance for PaleyFest panels, so it wouldn’t have been one of those “wait in line for two hours and hope you get in” things. Oh well. I’ll try to keep a closer eye on Paley Center stuff in the future. I should probably sign up for their mailing list.

Despite being fairly interested in Discovery and Picard, I still haven’t talked myself into paying for a CBS All-Access subscription. Nor have I managed to convince myself to shell out for a DC Universe subscription, despite some interest in a few of the shows on that service. Any time I get too tempted to subscribe to DCU, I remind myself that I just bought a Blu-Ray box set of the complete Batman Adventures, and I should probably just watch that if I’m keen to see some superhero action on my TV. (And I’ve got the new seasons of Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, and Batwoman to look forward to also!)

I’ve spent a little time reflecting on whether or not I learned anything from this year’s con, and whether or not I’ll go back for next year’s one. Here are a few takeaways:

  • I surprised myself a bit, in that I made it through four days in NYC carrying around a backpack and getting in 20k+ steps each day, without really much back pain or any major trouble sleeping. Yes, I did bail out on a few things, but I still did quite a lot.
  • After five nights of pretty decent sleep on a hotel mattress, I think I’ve almost convinced myself that I need to buy myself a new mattress. Depending on how I feel tomorrow morning, after my first night back on my own mattress, I might have to start getting serious about that.
  • There might be a few new things that I’m curious about, but I’m not really jumping on any bandwagons right now. I have such a huge backlog of stuff to read and watch that I can’t add anything new unless it’s really great.

So it’s back to the old daily grind tomorrow. I haven’t checked my work email since Wednesday, so there should be a good pile of stuff to go through when I get in tomorrow morning. (Yes, technically I could check it now from home and clean it up a bit, but I really don’t want to!)

NYCC day three, part two

OK, so this post is an end-of-day wrap-up post, which I’m writing in my hotel room on Saturday evening, because I bailed out on the con early. I had a pretty good morning at the con, and went to the DC Year of the Villain panel, and a Mutts panel with Patrick McDonnell. Here’s a write-up on the DC panel. Nothing unusual came out of that one. Just more talk about what’s coming up in the Year of the Villain event.

The Mutts panel was a lot of fun. It was mostly to promote the new Mutts book The Art of Nothing. It looks like a really nice book. McDonnell did a slideshow of various old bits of Mutts and pre-Mutts art and ephemera. I guess I never really knew much about him or his history. I was surprised to learn that he’d once been in a punk band that used to open for The Ramones. I don’t really read any daily comic strips anymore, and I’d kind of forgotten that Mutts was even still running, but now I’m finding myself thinking about picking up this book. (I’m also thinking that maybe binge-reading a bunch of old Mutts strips might be a good antidote to reading about current events, so I’m going to keep that idea in my back pocket for possible future use.)

I fully intended on hanging out all day at the con, and going to the 3:30 Adam Savage panel and the 6:30 Castlevania panel, but it all got to be a bit much and I bailed out around 1 PM. I went off and did some other stuff, skipping the Adam Savage panel, and came back around 5 PM for the Castlevania panel. But again, the con was just a bit too crazy for me and I bailed out again.

So my plan for the rest of the night is to maybe watch some TV then go to bed early again. I feel kind of bad about that, but not too bad. I’m on vacation and trying to relax, and if hanging out watching Supergirl on my iPad is more relaxing than fighting crowds and waiting in lines at Javits, then that’s fine.

I don’t really have much that I want to do at the con tomorrow, so I think I’m going to bail on it entirely and go to The Met instead. I think that will be more my speed. After that, maybe I’ll hit a couple more museums and wander around the city a bit. Then back home on Monday morning and back to reality.

NYCC 2019 day three

I’m sitting in my hotel room on Saturday morning, eating a traditional New York breakfast (bacon egg and cheese on a roll and a coffee, bought from a guy in a street cart), and I have a lot of random thoughts running through my head. (Not enough coffee yet.) I suspect that this breakfast might be a little non-traditional, actually, since I think the guy used turkey bacon. But close enough, I guess.

First, I guess I should write up a run-down on yesterday. I took the subway to Javits. That worked out reasonably well. It was fast and not that crowded. Coming out of the Hudson Yards subway station, they were herding everyone around the block, so we all had to go around the back end of Javits and then come back up. That was kind of a pain, but it’s good crowd control, and really the only way to do it, I guess. When I got in, I spent some time wandering around the show floor, the same as I did on Thursday. I didn’t really stumble upon anything interesting that I hadn’t seen yet. I hadn’t made it down to artist’s alley at all on Thursday, so I went down there and wandered. I bought a pack of Weirdo trading cards from Denis Kitchen, which I will probably give to my brother for his birthday. And I bought a Love and Capes comic from Thom Zahler. He’s a pretty cool guy. He was on Mac Power Users recently.

I missed out on the DC Nation panel, since it was apparently full already when I got there. (I’m still a little confused about the process for swiping your badge in the morning to reserve a spot in a main stage panel. I couldn’t figure out how you were supposed to do that. Of course, I didn’t ask anybody either. But I didn’t think a DC panel would fill up the main stage.) There’s a fairly coherent write-up about the panel at The Beat, and a liveblog at Newsarama. A few interesting tidbits came out of the panel. I guess the biggest thing is the new continuity timeline. I remember being somewhat excited back in the 80s when DC was doing Crisis on Infinite Earths, and rebooting their continuity. But they’ve rebooted and revised so many times since then, I don’t think continuity really matters anymore. So I can’t really get excited about this. All I can say is that, if they do another New 52 or Rebirth style wholesale reboot, I’ll probably take that as a good jumping-off point, and stop buying monthly comics again. (I may want to do that anyway, but that’s maybe a subject for a future post.)

I went to a couple of lower-profile panels in the early afternoon, one on Berger Books and a DC Wonder Comics panel. Berger Books has published some pretty cool stuff, but I haven’t bought or read any of it. I’d like to, but there’s just so much good stuff being published these days. Eventually, I’ll get around to it. I have a lot of respect for Karen Berger.

The DC Wonder Comics panel was pretty good, though Bendis isn’t at NYCC, so it was a little weird to have a panel about his imprint without him being there. I’m actually a bit interested in the new Amethyst series, after listening to Amy Reeder talking about it.

The big panel for me was the Viz panel, with Warren Ellis. There was a long line to get into that one, and they filled up the room, but I didn’t have any trouble getting in. The panel was really a general Viz Media promotional panel, so the first half of it was largely a guy from Viz going over their upcoming releases and stuff like that. I’m kind of interested in some of their stuff, but, again, there’s so much stuff coming out these days I just can’t buy and/or read everything I’m interested in. They brought out Ellis and three of the voice actors for the second half of the panel, and did a Q&A with them. (Not an audience Q&A, just a Q&A with the panel moderators.) It was fun, and they all do genuinely seem to be enthusiastic about Castlevania, but there was also a bit of a “we’re doing a contractually-obligated press tour for this Netflix thing and we have to be relentlessly positive about it” vibe. And I can now say that I’ve seen Warren Ellis in person, so that’s cool. There’s a full Castlevania panel on the main stage tonight, and I will probably try to get into that one too, though I don’t think they’ll cover much ground that they didn’t already cover yesterday. (I really wish they could have gotten Ellis to do a general “spotlight” panel, or least participate in one of the DC panels, but, hey, I’ll take what I can get.)

I walked back from the convention to my hotel, which is about a two mile walk. Between that, and a bunch of other walking, I set a new record on my Apple Watch for my “move” ring, burning 957 calories (530 active calories). I also got 137 minutes on my exercise ring, over 23,000 steps, and a total distance walked of 11.8 miles. I actually didn’t get as tired as I did on Thursday though, for some reason, and managed to stay awake until my usual bed time of 10 PM. I’m a little worried that I might hit a wall or crash at some point today or tomorrow, but I seem to be doing ok.

The plan for today, to the extent that there is one, is to take the subway down to Javits again, and probably follow the same circuitous route into the convention center again. I’m not too enthusiastic about that, but it’ll probably be fine. After I get in, I want to go straight to a 10:30 DC “Year of the Villain” panel. Other than that, there’s an Adam Savage panel on the main stage at 3:30 PM and the Castlevania one at 6:30 PM. So I’d like to try to get in for both of those, but I won’t be surprised or (too) disappointed if I can’t.

I was fairly smart about food yesterday. I brought a couple of apples, a couple of Kind bars, a falafel wrap from Pret, and a full bottle of water with me, so I was eating reasonably healthy food and staying hydrated. I want to do the same thing again today, so I’ll run over to the grocery store that’s near my hotel before heading for the con.

And now it’s 8:30 AM and I’ve been working on this blog post for about an hour, so I should really wrap it up and go get some more coffee.

NYCC 2019 day two

I managed to write a blog post for each day of the con last year. I guess I’m not going to do that this year, since it’s already day two and I haven’t written anything yet. So here’s a few notes on yesterday and maybe a couple of thoughts for today.

It rained all day yesterday, so that put a damper on things, to some extent. I took a cab down to Javits and spent most of the day there, inside. I took the subway back to my hotel at the end of the day, since the Hudson Yards station was actually open this year. (It was closed for most of the con last year, for maintenance work or something.) It should be clear today, so hopefully I can wander around the city a bit more than yesterday.

I went to a few panels yesterday. The first was the Christopher Eccleston panel. I really liked his portrayal of the Doctor, and was sad to see him go after only one season. He mostly kept away from anything to do with the show for years afterwards, but I guess he’s OK with talking about it a bit now. He has a book out now, about his father, and their relationship. The panel was fun and I’m glad I went to it. (It was also the only panel I “won” in the lottery, though it wasn’t crowded and anyone would have been able to walk in.)

I also went to the DC Meet The Publishers panel, with Dan DiDio and Jim Lee. I’d gone to that one last year on Thursday too, and have gone to other Dan & Jim panels at other cons, so I knew what to expect out of that one. Mostly Dan doing his “carnival barker” thing (he described himself that way at one point in the panel), with a bit of Jim Lee’s more laid-back self-deprecating style mixed in. This year, they were pushing the new Joe Hill imprint, which sounds good, if you’re into that kind of thing. (Personally, I’m not, but it does sound kind of cool.)

And I went to a couple of other, smaller panels, one on horror comics (from Dark Horse) and one on women in Jack Kirby’s comics. Both were fairly interesting, though I will admit that I was also just using them as an opportunity to sit down and relax for an hour.

I left the con at around 5 PM, mostly because I was really tired by that time. There were a couple of more panels I wanted to go to, but I decided to give up and go back to my hotel. I got some nice spicy lamb noodles from the Xi’an Famous Foods branch that’s right down the block from my hotel, watched some TV, then went to bed at 8 PM. I had really just intended to take a little nap, then get back up and do a few things, but I gave up on that and decided that I’m old enough to go to bed at 8 PM without shame.

Today, I’m looking forward to the DC Nation panel, maybe the Marvel Cup o’ Joe panel, maybe the Berger Books panel, and definitely the Castlevania panel with Warren Ellis. Ellis posted a photo from New York on his blog last night, so I assume he made it into town in one piece. I’m still a little disappointed that he’s only doing the Castlevania panel. I put my name in the lottery for a signing with him, but I didn’t win that one, and (as far as I can tell) there’s no public signing with him and he’s not on any other panels. He doesn’t really do cons, and he almost never comes to the US anymore, so this it probably my only chance to see him in person. So hopefully that’ll be a cool panel.

Anyway, I got up at 6 AM today, so I’ve got a good ten hours of sleep. Hopefully, that’s enough to get me through the day. I do need to pace myself, since that Castlevania panel isn’t until 5:15, which is dangerously close to my bed time.

almost NYCC

It’s almost time for NYCC! I decided to go all-in on the con this year, so I’ve got a four-day badge and a hotel room from Wednesday night through Monday morning, so I’ll be in NYC all day for all four days of the con. (Last year, I had a hotel for Thursday night through Sunday morning.) I’m going to work a full day tomorrow, then take the train in to NYC after work. I’m not sure how good an idea that is, but hopefully, it’ll work out.

I’ve been looking back over my blog posts from last year. I wrote blog posts on every day of the con:

(These links are mostly for my own reference. I don’t expect anyone else to read them all.) I think this year’s con will be pretty similar to last year’s, though I think there’s a bit less going on this year. (Or at least less stuff that I’m interested in.) And the con seems a little less well-organized than last year. (There was some confusion about the lottery, for instance.)

In my first post from last year, I noted that I’d been having trouble sleeping, and I’m having trouble again this year. I’ve been having trouble maybe two or three nights a week. Last night was one of those nights, so I’m pretty fried right now. But I’ve got (almost) all of my packing done, so if I can get some sleep tonight, and make it through work tomorrow, then I’ll have four solid days of vacation in New York. I won’t have to get out of bed at 6 every morning, and I’ll (hopefully) have a nice comfortable hotel bed to sleep in. Of course, that’s a bit of a crap shoot, as there are plenty of factors that can interfere with sleep in a Manhattan hotel. But I’m optimistic.

Climate Strike, Batman Day, NYCC and more

Happy Batman Day! I’m a big Batman fan, but yesterday’s climate strike is probably a bigger deal than Batman Day. (Also bigger than Talk Like A Pirate Day, which was two days ago. Or the reopening of the Fifth Ave Apple Store, which was also yesterday. Or the reopening of my local Apple Store, which also reopened yesterday.)

Today in Somerville we have the Village Brewing Oktoberfest, not to be confused with the Tapastre-sponsored Oktoberfest, which is next Saturday.

It’s all very confusing, especially since I got no sleep last night, due to the music on Main St playing until 1 or 2 AM last night again. I have a bunch of stuff bookmarked that I’ve been meaning to write thoughtful and/or entertaining blog posts about, but I just haven’t gotten around to it, and now my brain is kind of fried, so… you get this post. Sorry.

New York Comic Con is just about two weeks away, so I’m looking forward to that. Warren Ellis is going to be there, which is kind of a big deal, since he doesn’t really do conventions anymore, and definitely not conventions in the US. He’s only coming to NYCC to promote the Castlevania Netflix show, so I probably won’t get to hear him talk about his comics work, but I will definitely go to that Castlevania panel. There’s also an Adam Savage talk that will probably be good, but costs $75 to attend. (He also has a regular panel during the con that doesn’t cost extra, so I’ll probably try to go to that one.)

There’s a lot of serious stuff going on in the world right now, and I’m trying to balance concern/involvement in the serious stuff vs. staying sane with Batman and NYCC and Castlevania and what-not.

A couple of end-of-summer visits to NYC

It’s Labor Day morning, and I’m kind of exhausted from a visit to NYC yesterday, so I think I’m going to write a rambling blog post about my two recent visits to the city, and some associated topics. I hadn’t gotten into New York much this summer. I always think about doing a bunch of stuff in the city over the summer, then I do about 10% of that. Or maybe 5%. Anyway, I tried to make up for it a bit with a visit last Friday, and another visit yesterday.

On last Friday’s visit, I first went to the Met. I hadn’t been there in a while. I finally saw the Play It Loud exhibit. I honestly didn’t expect much from it, but it was great. They had a lot of stuff in this exhibit that reminded me of my teenage years, including my obsession with Jimi Hendrix, and Rick Griffin’s album and poster art, and guitar rock in general. The exhibit included one of Griffin’s Hendrix posters (which I had on a t-shirt when I was a kid), Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar, and many other guitars, played by the likes of Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, and many others. I don’t actually listen to a lot of classic rock these days, but the exhibit reminded me of how much I loved that stuff as a kid. So that was cool.

I also went to the Batman exhibit at the Society of Illustrators. There have been a number of interesting exhibits at the Society of Illustrators in recent years, and I keep meaning to go to them, but I never get around to it. So I’m glad to say that I finally made it to one of their exhibits. It’s a small space, and the exhibit was primarily black and white original art, so it’s not immediately visually impressive, when you first walk in. But they had a lot of really great art on the walls. There’s a good write-up of it on syfy.com and another one at the NY Times. I was glad to see that they had some art up from some of my personal favorite Batman artists, like Jim Aparo, Marshall Rogers, and Gene Colan. (Colan, in particular, isn’t primarily known as a Batman artist, but I really liked his Batman work in the 80s.)

For yesterday’s visit to NYC, I made it to three museums: the Guggenheim, the Met (again), and the Frick. At the Guggenheim, their main exhibit right now is called Artistic License. The idea is that they’ve gotten six artists to curate themed mini-exhibits through their rotunda, one on each level. It’s a mixed bag. There are some works in there that I really liked, but a lot of it didn’t really do much for me.

At the Met, I saw Apollo’s Muse again. (I’d seen it once before, not long after it opened.) I also made a point of wandering into Death is Elsewhere, which I’d also seen before. And I saw Epic Abstraction again, which honestly isn’t that great, but it’s got some good Jackson Pollock works, so I like it. And, for the full Met experience, I got a hot dog from this cart right outside of the Met for lunch. (The lady in that video is actually the one I bought the hot dog from.)

After that, I stopped by the Frick. I hadn’t been there in a while, and I figured that maybe I should, since they’re closing for renovations soon. They have an Edmund de Waal exhibit going on right now. I was curious about that, since I read his book The Hare with Amber Eyes a few years ago, and liked it a lot. But the exhibit didn’t really do much for me. It’s a bit too weird seeing his abstract art in a setting like the Frick, I guess.

I wound up doing a fair bit of walking yesterday. I took the subway up to the 86th, initially, and walked across Central Park to get to the Guggenheim. Then, I walked down to the Met, then the Frick, then walked the rest of the way back to Penn Station. So that’s a fair bit of walking for an old man like me. (Which is why I’m too tired to do much other than write a blog post this morning.)

As an aside, I walked by the Paris theater at one point, and thought to myself, “Cool. The Paris is still there.” Well, yes, it’s still there, but it just closed. It was, apparently, the last single-screen theater in the city. I’m kind of sad about that, since i have some good memories of seeing films at a number of the great single-screen theaters in NYC, including the Paris. And now they’re all gone. The article ends with this quote: “All these people lamenting the loss of the Paris, I would be curious about the last time they set foot there.” Well, ok, yeah, it was probably twenty years ago.

If it wasn’t raining today, and if I wasn’t so tired, I’d take a look at this Labor Day art guide and maybe catch a couple of more exhibits in the city. I’d like to get to the Whitney Biennial before it closes, for instance. But I think I’m going to spend the day reading comics and watching TV instead.

MoMA closing and related museum stuff

MoMA shut down for renovations in June, and will be closed until late in October. I still have a MoMA membership, but hadn’t gotten in to see it much lately, so I really wanted to see it once before it closed. I made it in, on June 15, the last day that they were open to the general public. (June 16 was a “member day,” and I wanted to go in for that too, but didn’t make it.) I’m glad I went in. The museum was pretty crowded, but it was fun.

The Times had a few good articles about the closing, including this general overview, which links to a few other articles. This one about staring at Starry Night for 30 minutes is light (and mostly pointless) but kind of fun. And this one, where the Times talked to a bunch of random people who were in the museum on the last day, is also pretty good. I identify with the guy from NJ who says “I’ll sit in front of a Pollock for 20 minutes.” Me too!

I’ve been curious about what they’re going to do with some of their more famous works while the museum is closed. I’ve had no luck in finding any information about that online though. Starry Night, in particular, seems like something that probably shouldn’t just go into storage for four months. I thought maybe they’d loan it out to another museum, but I’ve found no indication of that. (There’s an exhibit called Van Gogh and Britain at the Tate in London right now, and it has Starry Night over the Rhone, but that’s not the same as Starry Night. Looks like a great exhibit though!)

Or I thought maybe they’d set up a mini-MoMA pop-up at MoMA PS1, but they’re not doing that either. The Frick will be moving into the Breuer building while they’re closed for renovations, in 2020. I kind of thought maybe MoMA would do something like that, with PS1 or another space somewhere, but I guess not.

I also haven’t gotten in to the Met in while. I’m interested in their new exhibit Apollo’s Muse, which is an exhibit about the moon, tied in to the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. (There’s probably a bunch of cool stuff going on related to that anniversary. I should do some more internet searching and make some plans.)