What's Up?

I used to say "what's up?" to my flatmates, and they used to look at me, bemused, and say, "the sky. Clouds. Ceilings." Those Brits. And "what's up?" is: not much. I had a lovely Thanksgiving, ate an absurd amount of pumpkin-related goodness, slept in a real bed, lost every single card or boardgame that I played, and brought back 3 cans of Wegmans jellied cranberry sauce (I love real cranberry sauce, like the VERY good kind my Aunt Sue made, with oranges, but Wegmans is just so fab). And I got to see my fam! (HI!!)

Brooklyn is as ever. The bookstore has started playing Christmas tunes, which means I'm about to enter into some unmitigated Retail Hell, but no matter. My roomate has put up her fake tree in the living room. I am baking peanut butter cookies, listening to some cheesy '80's pop, and actively avoiding grad apps (AGAIN.) Today I scanned period rooms at the museum and went to the grocery store. It drizzled, but not in a bad way. Some guy tried to spit on my foot as I was getting ready to cross the street this morning. I dodged it though, lest you all were concerned.

This time two years ago I was in Scotland getting a tattoo. Last year I was...what? I have no idea. Probably writing something and being a nutter about finals (now there is something I don't much miss.) As for what is "up" next for the blog--possibly a guest post! And a backstash of arty reviews, pictures of graffiti, and the like. Stay tuned.

Giving Thanks

I thought this wall-advertisement was appropriate for all you turkey eaters out there...I passed it on my walk to Target this morning, and fortunately had my camera with me. (and if you think that I don't crack up every time I see this sign, then you don't know me very well.) The craziest part about the building is that it stands alone in the midst of browning grass and barbed wire, as you can see:

I am closing at the bookstore tonight (blerg) and taking an early train up to my aunt's tomorrow for 3 WHOLE DAYS OFF. And I'm really, really excited to see my family, eat myself into a stupor, and play a myriad of board games. Perhaps I will even post some gratuitously cute pix of my little cousins on here. I am hoping the "fresh country air" will knock out whatever NYC pathogens have taken my lungs hostage (I have never had asthma or allergies, but in the last two days breathing has become a bit of a bugger, to be honest, and I'm not sure why.)

I hope you all have a wonderful family and friend filled day tomorrow. Drive safe. And right now I am thankful for huge William Smith sweatshirts, bagels with scallion cream cheese, the fact that I *don't* have to work on Black Friday, and all of you.

The Usual

I love brunch. Who doesn't? (well, I guess people who don't like eggs. But those people are probably sad all the time.) And I am a BIG fan of dive-y diners, chipped cups and all, although I draw the line at lipstick-on-a-mug. We went in search of brunch on Sunday, and walked by The Usual on Vanderbilt Ave and it looked cool, so in we went. And cool it was! It's a cash-only place and one of the walls is brick; the omelets were on the table in 5 minutes, and came with toast and heaps of home fries, and you could tell it really was "the usual" hangout spot for a lot of the patrons, which is always a good sign. Not to mention the music selection was solid--"Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" to "Ob la di, ob la da," to "Light my Fire." It also had a nice Water St Cafe vibe to it.

In other news, it is 12:37 and I can't seem to fall asleep.

The Garden

Hell, you ain't no kind of man if you ain't got land.
--Delmar, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?


Faith Ringgold, The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1991, Private Collection*

I don't often recommend movies to people, because my tastes tend to run from the sappy (Colin Firth + anyone else), the cheesy (STAR WARS! STAR WARS!, but only 4-6), or quirky with a good soundtrack (The Royal Tenenbaums). However, we watched The Garden last night, which is a 2008 documentary directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy. And it is very good.

It tells the saga of the South Central Farm, which was a 14-acre garden/community in the middle of Los Angeles. The land became available after the race-related riots in 1992, and the garden was around for 10 years before a bunch of forces conspired to shut it down. The man who originally owned the land was given $5 million for it, because the city seized it through eminent domain laws. In 2003 he decides he wants it back, and the city sells it back to him--through really, REALLY questionable circumstances. There are alleged backroom deals with the City Council, and another activist group that wants to turn the land into soccer fields (well, they say soccer fields but they really mean a few soccer fields and then 10 acres of warehouses.) It complicates matters that the South Central Farmers are mostly poor Latinos, and the guy who originally owned the land is a horrid xenophobe who says in his deposition that they should be "thanking" him for being gracious enough to let them use the land. He continually calls them un-American.

And there are court orders and secrecy and shady judges and the South Central Farmers raise the $16 million that the owner wants for it (they get a bit of help at the end from Joan Baez and some others.) And he won't sell it to them (to reiterate: he is a xenophobe.) I'll let you watch it and find out what happens, but I will say that I was pretty angry and frustrated, so you can guess what happens...

Community gardens are important. The South Central Farmers were able to grow food for themselves, and it gave them something to work for, for them and their families. And it really was beautiful--tall plantain trees, multi-colored corn, fat radishes, bushels of greens. There is a community garden, of a much smaller scale, near my usual subway stop. And there are co-ops in some of the fancier neighborhoods, but a lot of places in New York have those gardens too. (I mentioned one in an older post on gardens, here.) So--if you have a garden enjoy it! At least when it's warm again.

*Faith Ringgold is totally, totally rad, and it is my not-so-secret life goal to meet her. So Professor Ringgold, if you're reading this... ;)

A Day in the Digital Lab

So in my other life, when I'm not taking germy money from germy people, I work for a stipend in the Brooklyn Museum's Digital Collections and Services Lab. (note: I have a cold, which I am surly about and blame retail for. However, I like it that my voice is an octave lower than normal, because now when I sing Billie Holiday standards in the shower, it sounds more authentic. In case you were curious.)

I am at the Lab currently, scanning, so I thought I would give you an account. I am being funded as part of a grant given by the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) to the BM. This grant is used for scanning and uploading on the website some areas of the collection (over 1,000,000 all told) which are underrepresented. Prior to this, most of the images on the website were "greatest hits" of the collection, which left out a lot of works. So, the curators went in and picked out the objects they liked and found interesting, and gave us a list, and we've been scanning them. My realm is the black and white photonegatives. (Photonegatives are film, like you would have in a normal, non-digital camera, except they are a larger size. And since they are negatives, what appears black on them would be white in the actual work, and what is white would be black.)

Anyway, here is what I do:
1. Consult the master list of the IMLS objects, and start pulling slides out of the boxes. They are arranged by their accession number, which is the year in which they entered the museum. For example, 12.53.2 would be something acquired in 1912. It was the 53rd group of objects acquired that year, and the 2nd object in that group. There are 89 boxes of black and white photonegatives.
2. Once I have a pile, I power on the scanner, which is a flat thing (technical terminology, ha) which opens and has two large glass plates. I clean the plates with a chamois cloth (which traps more dust than a regular cloth, allegedly.)
3. I put on one white glove, like Michael Jackson c. 1985. With the white-gloved hand (finger-prints = VERY BAD), you grip a negative in the corner by your thumb and forefinger. Drag the cloth across both sides of it to remove dust. Hold it up to the light--the dust will show up as white specks, and then you can keep cleaning accordingly.
4. Once the negative looks pretty clean, I hold it under the light to figure out which side has emulsion on it. You can tell which side is emulsion-ed because it will not transmit light. The non-emulsion side will reflect light back at you. In these scanners the emulsion side goes UP, but it's different for other machines (were I to put the emulsion side DOWN, the image would be scanned reversed, and I would have to redo it.
5. The scanner I use fits 8 images comfortably, so once 8 are loaded then it scans and I have a few minutes to get tea or blog (yo!) or email or wander around.
6. Once the batch is done scanning, you save them in very specific folders (there is a whole naming process for each image, involving "bw" and "IMLS" and "view 1" and "a-c" and a bunch of stuff that normal people don't need to know about.) Then you open them in photoshop and crop, straighten, color correct (which for the black-and-whites involves grayscale, curves and layers and little eye-dropper looking tools.) Finally you blow them up to actual pixel size and delete any imperfections/dust/scratches. My problem is I tend to over-edit and delete things which are flaws of the work, and not just flaws of the negative (like if a page from a manuscript is torn, I have a tendency to edit out the rip, when it is really a part of the work. If that makes any sense.)
7. After all that, you look up the image in a bunch of databases, make sure the accession number is right, update the info in Microsoft Access and email a bunch of people to let them know that it is ready to be uploaded to the website.
8. Repeat. Indefinitely.

Now, if you think this sounds boring and monotonous, you are darn right it is. However, sometimes you get either totally awesome or totally ridiculous images, which breaks up the boring. Like today, on the awesome scale, I got a Rothko watercolor. I've had a few Hoppers (mmm) and some Mary Cassatt's which were cool. The JJ Audobon nature prints are fun, because they are very stylized, and you can play with the contrasts--plus the foxes are CUTE! Some of the Asian collection's hanging scrolls are great, and there is one really fun one which is a series of insects, who all have little humanoid faces...some are grumpy, some are smiling, which cracked me up. On the ridiculous scale are the period rooms, which were photographed in the '70's (the BM has a whole floor of period rooms, mostly from the 19th century). The food that is displayed on the tables is usually pretty funny--today we got one that was turkey, pot roast (we think), shrimp, peas, mushrooms, and what looks like goblets full of jell-o.

In the next few weeks I get to start scanning papyrus slides from the Egyptian collection, so that could be neat. (What is neat is that the actual photographs are over a century old and on glass plates instead of film. So at least that'll be different.) And then next time you go on a museum's website, think about how many people it actually takes to get those images to you!

Procrastination

Today, I: made tea, emailed some people, went for a long walk to get tea, realized the walk was longer than I thought and took the bus home, made a veggieburger, ate a veggieburger, watched 2 episodes of "The West Wing," cleaned the bathtub, tried unsuccessfully to take a nap, and read a book. Basically, everything other than write my grad school essays. Clearly, procrastination has not left me post-graduation. And it doesn't help that I feel like a total twit whenever I have to write about myself, and I would rather do almost anything else, and so I just have 2 sentences to show for my entire day.

So, here we are, and I know what I need to do tonight, and am kind of dreading it. But I thought I would put up a picture that totally cracks me up--I took this a few weeks ago on the ferry from Manhattan to Governor's Island (I just realized I still need to write about that, whoops!) The old ship was here for the Henry Hudson 400th anniversary celebration, and it looks like it's about to do battle with the Staten Island ferry. It looks like I photoshopped it.

Buddy, can you spare a...piano?

Some of you already know this story, or parts of it.

When I first moved here, I started looking around for a place to practice the piano, and decided that churches would probably be the easiest places to start: they usually have pianos, and many days of the week they are unused. My first stop was the very large Catholic church a few blocks up the street. I spoke to an aide, who gave me the priest's phone number. After calling him, our conversation went something like this:

Me: I just moved to the neighborhood, blah blah blah, I'm looking for somewhere to unobtrusively practice, on some day that would be most convenient for you.
Priest: I see. So you are in my parish.
Me: Well, not exactly.
Priest: What parish are you in?
Me: I'm not in a parish.
Priest: So you are unchurched [note: he actually said "unchurched," which to me sounds like something from the Spanish Inquisition.]
Me: Erm, well, I'm not Catholic.
Priest: Well, why don't you stop by mass sometime, and we can have a discussion.
Me: Would it be possible to meet at some time other than mass?
Priest: No. I will see you at mass. We can discuss this further then. Our church is often occupied, so meeting at another time would be impossible. Goodbye and god bless.
Me: [stares at phone]

Now I take his point that it is his church, and I am "unchurched," so perhaps I shouldn't be allowed to use his piano, or apparently even enter the building. (This begs the question of what I would do at mass. I can't take communion, nor do I say the rosary, and isn't that kinda the whole point?) He was, however, extremely condescending. I fumed about this, and told my friends, who thought it was hilarious. It's pretty funny in retrospect. It's also funnier if you know that I spent my senior year in college writing a lengthy paper about nuns and art patronage, and I actually know more about saints than normal people do (in a fit of scholarly activity, I signed up for Saint of the Day emails). I also spent a weekend in a Benedictine convent in Erie PA. I didn't mention this to the Priest, because, frankly, my nuns are too good for him.

The next opportunity presented itself a while later when I was walking to the library and passed a Presbyterian church, and figured, why not? So I met the secretary (who has blue hair, and who offered me the cornbread and greens she was eating for lunch). She introduced me to the music teacher who uses the church, and he said I could come any night that he has the church unlocked, and that he'd be happy to teach me some jazz sometime if I'd be interested.

So I've been going there once a week, or every few weeks, whenever my schedule cooperates. I volunteered to help out when they have a concert with the little kids who are taking lessons, which probably won't be until the spring. The piano seat is too high, and the bass keys stick, and chucks of paint from the ceiling occasionally fall off, but who cares? I can play and no one bothers me. It's a cool old building: cool as in there is no heat, and cool in that the rafters are hung with rows and rows of West Indian and African flags. It has a musty church-smell of candles and damp and old choirbooks. And when I leave, Mr. B asks me how I am, and we talk a little bit about Chopin, and I ask about his students, and then I go home.

And that, my friends, is what music should be all about.

Here Comes the Sun!

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.
--Love Actually aka the Best Movie of All Time (which seemed appropriate because I've spent a lot of time in Penn Station the past few days)

I had a wonderful weekend, as two of my friends visited.* And what did we do? We got treated to brunch by my magnanimous cousin, we hung out in Brooklyn Heights and saw the skyline, we walked from Brighton Beach to Coney Island while the sun got larger and oranger and began to set, we got spicy hot chocolate at Joyce's Bakeshop, they got to see my "hotspots": Prospect Park, the Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, Eastern Parkway, and the apartment, of course. One went back sooner than the other, so two of us went to the wine bar up the street last night and heard some live jazz music and then went to the raver at the Museum's First Saturday party, and then got bagels this morning. There was a lot of people watching to be had.

I miss them already already already and really need to get dressed for work (who goes into work at 5 pm. C'mon now.) But it was a lovely time. I mean this: visitors ALWAYS welcome!

And the title of this post refers to the fact that it is GLORIOUS out. Enjoy it while it lasts!

*HI GUYS!! LR if you send me that pic, I will put it up here...it's not TWIP, but it'll do. ;)

The Yankeeees Win!

I admit to being fairly ambivalent about baseball in general, although I prefer the Yankees over most teams. So tonight was pretty exciting, mainly because I live in The City and people are serious about their sports teams. I was at work and we put the game on in the cash office, and then intercomed it behind the registers. I felt like I was in the 1930's as we all huddled around the phone and shushed each other and tried to hear the radio through the static. Everyone working was a waste of space, and everyone in the store really just wanted to hear what was happening. It's exciting because everyone was into it. The Bronx, though, is crazy right now. As I was leaving work the security guard said, in his heavy Jamaican accent, "you walk safe, lady, and no getting boozey and tipping over cars." Sound advice. Hope other people follow it as well.

In other news, I had the worst customer I have ever had tonight, so the Yankees winning was a wonderful mood lifter. She was French, and didn't know how to work Traveler's Checks, and called me a pest, and incompetent, and as she counted out change she dropped a Euro in my hand and said, "this is a Euro. You've probably never seen one before." (you'll be happy to know that I responded with, "oh, the Vitruvian man? That's my favorite Euro design" and smiled in a way that would appear polite if you didn't know me.) It was dreadful. But then I had a guy later on who completed his transaction speaking in a fake-Cockney and then a Pirate accent. It made me laugh. The Yankees fans that are on TV right now are making me laugh too! Nothing like a good chorus of "We are the Champions" to put you in a good mood.

Bedtime. Goodnight, friends.

EDITED: Thursday 11/5. The NY morning news show (I think on CBS) made a bet with their Philly affiliate that whichever team won the World Series got to choose a song for the loser to sing on air. Which happened at 5:30 this morning, and I was half-asleep listening to it, and it was hilarious. Of course they had to sing "New York, New York" but it was completely tuneless and everyone was just laughing the whole time. If you want to watch it (and you really should), go here, type in "morning" in the search box, and pick the first one-- Hu-phili-ation: CBS 3 in Philly loses bet to CBS 2.

All the News that Fits

Not much happening in the ol' Bk in the past few days (again, sorry about the pedestrian nature of this blog. I'll try to spice it up soon.) It was a really nice fall day, and I spent most of it in the library trying to plan grad school and life (clearly grad school requires more research and planning than moving to NYC, for that I just watched "The Muppets Take Manhattan" and hitched a ride out.) So I did that, and made lentil-tomato soup (Aunt Sue, I finally found a use for those hot peppers!) which was pretty tasty. It was less dramatic than the last time I tried to make soup, which some of you know about...a few weeks ago I was blendering squash soup and filled the blender too full and the blender exploded and spewed boiling squash chunks on my hair and arm and shirt, and the walls, floor, microwave, cookbook. It was like that scene in Bridget Jones' Diary when she's trying to cook, and then Colin Firth shows up (no Colin Firth this time though.) But the squash soup actually ended up being pretty tasty, too.

I was at the bookstore on Hallowe'en and helped hand out candy, and some of the kids were super cute. I saw too many Michael Jackson costumes, though. And a little girl came up and said to us at the Info Desk, "what kind of bugs live in cemetaries? Zombees!" so we gave her about 10 pieces of candy.

Tomorrow is Election Day, and I am pretty ambivalent about it because I am not registered here (and I actually forgot to request an absentee ballot from home. Bad citizenship award). But here are some more exciting news stories: 1. "Pink it's time to move: Technicolor house is for sale in Park Slope." On my walk to work, I pass through some stately brownstone blocks in Prospect Park West and Park Slope (picture where the Cosby's lived on "The Cosby Show".) But the other day, I went down Garfield Street and my retinas were temporarily damaged by a pepto-bismol pink house, still connected to all the other ones. It gives the cerulean and purple one (with a gold chimney, no less) on my parents street a run for the money. It's like in Chautauqua when they have laws about what colors you can paint your house, and what colors are acceptable for trim. (Bollocks, I say. But no one asked me.) Anyway, I think the neighbors are probably not happy with this, but it's certainly interesting. And 2. "Flatbush jobs listing mystery solved!" There are a lot of job postings on telephone poles on Flatbush Ave, which is a very long street that cuts through Brooklyn. Turns out they are placed there not by city employees, but by an older Carribean woman who prints them out at the library and tapes them up because she sees "so many young men wasting their lives," and this is how she wants to help. I just think it's nice.

P.S. M and P--Melis is sitting on the living room floor wearing her "Got Melk?" shirt and reading out loud from the Black's Law Dictionary that you two got her. I forewarned her that this might be going on the blog, and she said you'd be glad to know she was putting the Dictionary to good use. Now she is reading a Croatian children's book.
P.P.S. Now the Yankee game is starting--world series win tonight?!