Bordeaux and Palmiers

I usually don’t spend a lot of time in museums. Like many, I tend to only visit them when I feel guilty avoiding it, and while I often enjoy myself, museum visits remain few and far between, especially when I’m not “touristing,” i.e. in Paris or New York.

A friend came to visit while I was home this month, and she suggested that we visit the MoMA. Even though the forced marches through museums that I was subjected to in elementary school didn’t include this particular place, and I had never been, I wasn’t terribly excited to venture into the world of modern art–something I had never really understood.

I used to consider modern artists to be lacking in the talent that I recognized in the works of other artists who painted portraits or still lifes that were so perfect and detailed that they could have been photographs. I didn’t see why I should appreciate a plain red canvas with a stripe down the middle: how could this even be compared to Renoir and Manet?

As my friend and I meandered through the MoMa, however, I began to understand. I read the plaques next to each work. I understood the time frames behind Warhol’s repetition of prints and Picasso’s chaos and stark black, white and grey palette. Political works that seemed to represent little to no real-world items began to speak, and I started to understand.

A room full of pillows with the projection of an abstract film had an especially deep impact: the whole place and atmosphere of it started to make me feel. Feel what? Hard to say… I was comforted and homesick, amazed and confused. Happy. Bored. Calm.

I won’t say I understand all modern art after one trip to the MoMA. I still spent a lot of time in front of the massive floor to ceiling windows instead of the art, leaning far enough forward so that I couldn’t see my feet and imagining what it would be like to pitch forward and fall headfirst onto the snowy streets like the white flakes that whirled under the darkening sky.

But I liked the MoMA. I still don’t quite know why.

It’s nothing like the repetition of representional paintings lined up on the wall of most museums. It invites emotion, reactions. One Frenchman who assumed he wouldn’t be understood muttered, “C’est de la merde, ça.” 

Maybe he was right. I really don’t know. But I liked it.

MoMa

11 West 53 Street,
between Fifth and Sixth avenues

http://www.moma.org/

For all my praising of everything European, I am, in fact, a New Yorker, born and raised. I’ve been home for a few weeks now, but I have yet to write anything on this blog about NYC.

I don’t have any particular haunts to support for the moment: New York is so ever-changing that when you leave it for as long as I have (the most recent length of time being a year), the places you used to love are gone in the blink of an eye.

However, there are certain aspects of New York that do not change. There are no addresses to provide: they’re simply characteristics of the city which, like a person, has a personality and attitude so individual to itself that it has become the favorite city of many.

While I do love my adopted home, I also often tell people (sometimes in that obnoxious manner that only New Yorkers can pull off) why New York is one of the best places to visit.

10. The food

Every New Yorker has their favorite bagel (I’m partial to H&H) to top with shmear and lox. We’ve got great hot dogs, knishes, and the famous New York pretzel with mustard, and, especially in the summertime, entire ten-block stretches are blocked off for street fairs featuring cultural street food.

9. The Strand.

The Strand is heaven to anyone who loves books: 16 miles of used books at their store downtown, plus a stand at the end of the park when the weather is nice. You can come out with a stack of books and only spend a twenty.

8. Soho

Soho is famous for its shopping, but while it’s a little more expensive than it was in previous years, the neighborhood is still trendy and really fun for walking around, even if you’re just window shopping.

7. The Lower East Side

Once you cross into Alphabet City from Soho, designers are replaced by thrift shops, and classy cocktail bars becom divey coffee joints. It’s nice to walk outside the modern city for awhile to hang out with what’s left of New York’s hippies.

6. “I’ve been there!”

New Yorkers live on a movie set, constantly recognizing our homes on the silver screen. If you’re in New York when the weather is nice, you’re almost guaranteed to see a film crew. They used to annoy me when I was trying to walk around a gaffer to get to school, but now I like seeing Sarah Jessica Parker filming in the street.

5. The people

New Yorkers get a bad rap because we’re brusque and hurried, but we love our city, so we love showing people around… as long as you don’t want to see the Statue of Liberty. To find out about little holes in the wall, the places where locals really hang out, talk to a New Yorker: we’re not as scary as we seem.

4. Central Park

Not only are there great areas for running, but there are gardens, playgrounds, and lots of space to just sit and escape the bustle of city life. It’s also one of the largest city parks: I still haven’t seen everything it has to offer.

3. The culture

At the risk of being cliché, I had to mention the museums and plays. It’s not all about Broadway and the Met though, off-Broadway plays are sometimes even better and much cheaper, and the smaller museums are a lot less overwhelming than the Met.

2. The Subway

In New York, the taxis are plentiful, the buses come every fifteen minutes, and the Subway runs all night. You can party until five in the morning and still get home OK… or you can have a Nuit Blanche all over the city, riding the 6 up and down the island.

1. It’s always changing

New York is not the same place it was in the Great Depression, when the bridges were built to give people jobs, or in the 1970s, when crime ruled the streets. People come and go, shops open and close, buildings are erected and destroyed. New York is alive: an ever-changing place that still retains the spirit and personality that has been drawing people to it for years.

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving everyone! I know, Thanksgiving was yesterday, but here in Paris, it’s not a national holiday, so I was in school all day yesterday and I had no time to make pie. We’re doing a Thanksgiving today, which is going to be made up of a hodgepodge of expat Americans, French and one Scot who is quite proud of the fact that she took a plane “for a large meal.”

If you’re interested in what a Parisian Thanksgiving looks like, head over to my food blog and check it out. I’ll have all the photos and recipes up by tomorrow.

I have to admit that this post has a bit of an ulterior motive… you may be able to guess it from the title. I’m heading home to NYC! Not permanently, of course, but because I’m graduating, I decided to allow myself an extra long vacation before starting at my new job here in Paris, and as of December 20th, I’m going to be home for a whole month! The weird part? I don’t really know what to do with myself.

New York is always changing, and it’s hard to know what to do when it’s been so long since you’ve been back. Most of my old favorite hangouts (DTUT, Alt Café) are closed, and the only place I’m sure to hit is the Strand bookstore downtown. I’ve been perusing some of your blogs and have made a short list of new places to hit, but I need some recommendations. I love coffee shops, used bookstores, dive bars, good restaurants… anyone want to help out a displaced New Yorker? Leave a comment here!

Here’s my list so far:

Pinche Taqueria- 227 Mott Street, New York NY 10012 (between Prince and Spring streets) for fish tacos

The Redhead- 349 East 13th Street (between 1st and 2nd), it’s a bar

I have by now traveled through much of Western Europe, but I have seen comparatively very little of the US. I was born and raised in New York, and I’ve seen a lot of the Eastern seaboard. I went to high school in New England, and I lived for one year in San Francisco, but I haven’t seen a lot of Middle America… I don’t really know where everyone else lives.

When I lived in Canada, I had a friend who liked to do random things, which was lucky, because I like to do random things too. One day, we decided we were going to go on a road trip with no destination, and so at five o’clock in the morning, I picked him up, and we drove. We drove from Toronto to New York State, and then we decided that we wanted to cross another state boarder. After consulting our map, we decided to go to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

We took the entire trip on back roads, driving past houses and tiny towns made up of no more than a gas station. We drove on winding, hilly tarmac, often the only car rushing past the landscapes of rural Pennsylvania.

We stopped on the shoulder every so often to take pictures: I had never concentrated so much on where I was instead of where I was going. We didn’t actually reach Lancaster County until the following morning, but it didn’t seem to matter.

I drove for ten hours, and though my sanity was temporarily threatened, in retrospect, I loved that trip. I loved everything about the all-American vibe we got from every town we stopped in. I loved taking pictures of little things I never would have seen otherwise.

I loved the quaint diner we stopped in when we arrived in Lancaster County in the morning, and I loved the severely cheap breakfast that we were served there (and the unlimited coffee).

Being in Europe makes me appreciate the pure Americana of a trip like that. America is just so big compared to Europe: they don’t have landscapes like that over here. There are rural areas, make no mistake, but everything about them seems to be quaint… a little bit false. There’s something so comforting to me about knowing that places like Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania exist somewhere in the world.