re: New York or Not

I just got back this week from the longest ever trip to New York. Now it is time to play a fun game called "look at all the people I got to hang out with." The trick of the game is to figure out which people were real live New York residents and which ones were fakers just like me. (Turns out, I planned a trip while half of Utah was out in NYC)

People!

Kristin in Central Park. I wish I were friends with the guy in the speedo.

Steven at the MURAKAMI exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

Helen at our picnic in Prospect Park, after we get kicked out of the Botanical Gardens for bringing our illegal food inside.

Wait. Let's try a photo of Helen taken through the blublockers. Whoa. That is much better. Rawr.

Chris and Davey at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on the hottest day of the year. Chris normally looks a lot taller, but I think his butt was melting in this picture.

JLC just being all famous and stuff on the train.

Birthday BBQ with Stephen (and Peter's arm) on the roof. Birthday suit not pictured here.

Eva and Kirk of Sycamore Street Press at the Renegade Craft Fair (before getting totally rained out).

The Faulkner brothers at Coney Island, about to hit the Wonder Wheel. Kristin and I played the best trick on Ben, making him think these were just two random dudes that we met in line at the park and decided to hang out with all day long.

Brig and Collin, just being all New York.

Suvi, rocking the mic during a Rock Band sesh.

Di at Magnolia. You can't tell that we just stuffed ourselves with banana pudding and red velvet cake. But we did.

Chris R (who doesn't usually look like he wants to punch people in the face) picnicing at park.

Derek on the Brooklyn Bridge. Well, 2 feet above the Brooklyn Bridge. Who doesn't love jumping pictures?

Ben at the MOMA, bathed in the light of the Olafur Eliasson exhibit.


Now you probably want me to tell you the results of the game, right? You were probably scrolling down this whole post, taking painstaking notes about which people you thought were the real new yorkers? Well. This is the part of the game where I ruin everything when i tell you that I am not posting the answers. And then I try to make you feel better by showing you these dogs that I saw in Brooklyn walking eachother.


Thanks for the good times, New York and all the people inside of it.
(More photos coming soon right here.)

re: public transit

For those of you that don't have your GPS readers tracking my every move, I should tell you that I am in New York City for the week.

One of the first things I did upon arriving was to meet up with a few new yorkers in Brooklyn Heights at the New York Transit Museum. In all my New York travels I had never even heard of this place, and it was so cool. It is a museum all about the history of the subway, and better yet, it is located inside a historic 1936 subway station with old historic faregates and trains and all sorts of other neat things to poke and sit on.




Here is the thing - I don't even hardly want to blog about the museum because brigham took such better photos than I did and will probably have much more interesting things to say about the experience once he gets around to blogging about it.

But there are a few pictures that he doesn't have that I feel pretty okay sharing. I don't know if it is the ridiculous NYC heat or if Brigham always acts this way when there is a pole in the room, but the historic train cars got a bit of a show.



(And then he walked away as if he were all confused about what had just happened.)

Not to be upstaged, Collin did a little transit gymnastics himself.



Please never let anyone tell you that public transit is not a fun and sexy time.

re: One man's trash

I went to an art show in an unlikely location last week ... the city dump.

Leave it to San Francisco to make sure that one of their most popular art residencies is at the local Recycling & Disposal center (aka the dump). The number of trash cans and recycle bins almost outnumbered the guests, but at least you didn't feel too bad throwing things away knowing that they didn't have very far to go.

The artist's name was Paul Cesewski, and I was excited because I knew he was a member of local bike rodeo gang Cyclecide. These are the guys that make "pedal powered" carnival rides out of old bikes and whose aesthetic of dress can only be described as "hobo clown."

Sure enough, the whole back patio had been transformed to look a bit like an old circus, with all these amazing bicycle powered kinetic sculptures that you could ride to make things happen. This neat cymbal machine would crash as you pedaled.
See all the spare junk parts? He made a generator out of an old wheelchair motor I think.

These bikes shot water as you pedaled.

This fancy contraption hauled a little metal ball to the top of a mousetrap-the-game-esque railway, and hit a bunch of bells and other noisemakers as the ball made its way down. Juliann is over there making the magic happen with just her legs.


My favorite piece was this joke machine, rigged so that as you pedaled, the bicycle wheel would turn and eventually the spikes attached to it would hit the drums and cymbals, making the classic "da-dump, cha!" joke noise.

Better yet, there was a book of lame riddles and a microphone set up so that you could tell jokes and get the appropriate 'ba dump" sound as you pedaled. But you had to have the comic timing right so that the wheel would turn correctly just as you were telling your joke. This one is mine:

What has 4 wheels and flies?

Bike art at the dump! ba-dump, cha!