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Give me a lever long enough & I will go to New York.
So yesterday I went up to New York. I do this a lot these days--at least once a month, usually--but the thing is that I inevitably wind up at most of the same places, so I'm not going to talk about going to Kinokuniya, McNally Jackson, Pret á Manger, Hampton Chutney Co., or Joe the art of coffee. I will say that the new Book-Off is easily twice the size and twice as nice as the old one, and I got $26 for selling back every single last volume of Bleach that I owned. I am free, free at last!
I was originally planning to see Diane Duane at Books of Wonder, for A Wizard of Mars, but she was stuck in Zurich due to the volcano so I exercised option B and went down to the Lower East Side and The Dream House. (Sidenote: I don't think I will ever not get disoriented coming up out of the subway stations to which I have never been before, not ever. This is why I always carry a map.) The Dream House is a joint art-and-music installation by La Monte Young, the minimalist composer, and his partner Marian Zazeela, the visual artist. For the past 17 years they have installed light sculptures in conjunction with one continuous chord comprised of 32 frequencies within a set interval derived with prime numbers and constantly modulated in real time through a synthesizer. There are magenta gels on the windows, and the whole thing is unlike any other musical experience I know.
The trick is that the chord sounds different--you hear different things--depending on whether you are siting, standing, walking, or lying on the floor, and how you turn your head while you do any of those things. I was the only person in the place and I stayed for 30 or 40 minutes just listening and watching the light sculptures make shadows on the walls. The world sounds thin after you leave.
It's interesting to me that a minimalist composer is the one who came up with this idea, because The Dream House in many ways is the complete opposite of minimalism--even the most thickly orchestrated pieces for chorus and orchestra don't hit so many simultaneous frequencies, for all that they can be louder. But what the listener hears is completely unscripted by the artist; it's the ultimate idiosyncratic experience. I can't recommend checking it out for yourself enough.
I've learned with mass transit to trust the wisdom of crowds. When I got to Hamilton station I saw that people around me in the parking garage were putting on the hustle, so I did the same and found that contrary to my belief the train had not yet arrived, which allowed me to get to New York 40 minutes earlier than I planned (and this was well worth the $5 surcharge for buying one's ticket on the train). When I got to the 2/3 uptown platform in Penn Station I saw that everyone around me was taking the underpass to the 1 uptown, which allowed me to get the next uptown train rather than waiting on the 2/3 platform for a train that would never come, as signs not on the platform immediately informed me.
I read xxxHOLiC 16 and FMA 25 in Union Square while waiting for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
atolm (who is awesome, I was so glad to pry him out of the library), and setting the two manga against each other was interesting--both volumes contain characters (Riza and Watanuki) saying 「死にかけても、死なない」which is an interesting declaration to be making. They're both right, of course, in their own personal cases, but both manga are concerned with immortality and its discontents in ways that aren't always immediately apparent. Also in Union Square some kid, middle school maybe, asked me if I was reading FMA and in what language, and I handed him the book, and he thought it was cool, and we shared a fannish moment. I love New York.
I was originally planning to see Diane Duane at Books of Wonder, for A Wizard of Mars, but she was stuck in Zurich due to the volcano so I exercised option B and went down to the Lower East Side and The Dream House. (Sidenote: I don't think I will ever not get disoriented coming up out of the subway stations to which I have never been before, not ever. This is why I always carry a map.) The Dream House is a joint art-and-music installation by La Monte Young, the minimalist composer, and his partner Marian Zazeela, the visual artist. For the past 17 years they have installed light sculptures in conjunction with one continuous chord comprised of 32 frequencies within a set interval derived with prime numbers and constantly modulated in real time through a synthesizer. There are magenta gels on the windows, and the whole thing is unlike any other musical experience I know.
The trick is that the chord sounds different--you hear different things--depending on whether you are siting, standing, walking, or lying on the floor, and how you turn your head while you do any of those things. I was the only person in the place and I stayed for 30 or 40 minutes just listening and watching the light sculptures make shadows on the walls. The world sounds thin after you leave.
It's interesting to me that a minimalist composer is the one who came up with this idea, because The Dream House in many ways is the complete opposite of minimalism--even the most thickly orchestrated pieces for chorus and orchestra don't hit so many simultaneous frequencies, for all that they can be louder. But what the listener hears is completely unscripted by the artist; it's the ultimate idiosyncratic experience. I can't recommend checking it out for yourself enough.
I've learned with mass transit to trust the wisdom of crowds. When I got to Hamilton station I saw that people around me in the parking garage were putting on the hustle, so I did the same and found that contrary to my belief the train had not yet arrived, which allowed me to get to New York 40 minutes earlier than I planned (and this was well worth the $5 surcharge for buying one's ticket on the train). When I got to the 2/3 uptown platform in Penn Station I saw that everyone around me was taking the underpass to the 1 uptown, which allowed me to get the next uptown train rather than waiting on the 2/3 platform for a train that would never come, as signs not on the platform immediately informed me.
I read xxxHOLiC 16 and FMA 25 in Union Square while waiting for
atolm (who is awesome, I was so glad to pry him out of the library), and setting the two manga against each other was interesting--both volumes contain characters (Riza and Watanuki) saying 「死にかけても、死なない」which is an interesting declaration to be making. They're both right, of course, in their own personal cases, but both manga are concerned with immortality and its discontents in ways that aren't always immediately apparent. Also in Union Square some kid, middle school maybe, asked me if I was reading FMA and in what language, and I handed him the book, and he thought it was cool, and we shared a fannish moment. I love New York.