Movement

I've associated New York City with Keith Haring since my first visit here. He's someone I wouldn't have known about without KTB, and so when I came here for the first time, I made sure we went to Pop Shop, the store on Lafayette that sold all things Haring - t-shirts, mugs, skateboards, dominoes; you name it, it was there with a Haring design. We bought an unbelievably cool flanneled hoodie dressing gown with Haring's Little Angel on it for our friends' 8 month old (meaning that child is now 10 - holy hell). I bought a cool t-shirt that I still own, albeit tattered and faded.


Today I went to the Members' Preview of Keith Haring 1978-1982, a really cool retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. It was fabulous. His works were enormous and vibrant; they surprised me in their visceral and often overtly sexual nature. His work was playful and joyous and exuberant. I hadn't realised how much he used video, whether bopping away to a messed up version of the Flying Lizards' Money (That's What I Want) as his Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt, or painting away to a Devo record. That movement is echoed within his paintings, where everything is in motion: his figures grow and stretch and dance and kick and wave. His use of street art is exciting and part of his overall sense that art should be for the people, not something bourgeois or only for the educated middle classes. One of my favourite things in the whole exhibition was a wall reproducing adverts for his performances and art works and installations - fliers with his photo, scrawled times and dates. You got the sense of excitement, but also how easy it would have been to ignore his work. I see signs stuck everywhere in the city but would never have thought that there could have been a Keith Haring behind it.

The exhibition also emphasized how bloody cool New York City was in the late seventies and early eighties and just why those who were here then have a sense of superiority at having been here; why they feel it's not as edgy or cool. Because it's not. Not anymore.

Queensberry Rules

My latest fitness fad, after my flirtation with Bikram last year, is boxing. With a friend I'm taking beginners' boxing classes. These lessons emphasise everything I love in exercise: a lot of sweating; competition; a real sense of personal progression; and, significantly, stressing the skill, speed, and strength of your body - this is not exercise solely for the sake of getting skinny. Although I thought I'd like it, it really is beyond anything I'd imagined. I feel much more mentally calm - despite being physically shattered - after our classes. While you're working on your technique that's all you can think of, how to get your body to do what it needs to do, how to improve. While you're holding for someone else, you're watching what that person does, how she or he does things better than you, and how to hold better so your wrists don't ache all day. It's utterly absorbing and consuming.

And it's all due to the power of Groupon. Yes, I finally used a Groupon and have used up nine of my ten classes, and am definitely going to be buying more.

The Morning After the Night Before

So, I drank last night. The first drink was at one of my favourite bars in Brooklyn, and it was a strong one: the Aviation, a combination of gin, maraschino liqueur and creme de violette. I did have a couple more drinks over the space of the evening - a michelada at Caracas, a purveyor of gorgeous arepas, and then something called a Honey Bear. They were nice indeed, although the michelada was the drink I enjoyed the most, I think. I have to learn how to make a good one.

This morning I did not too clever, I have to say. I paced myself last night - three drinks in four hours. Lots of water, lots of food. But this morning I felt rancid. Stomach churning, head hurting a little. But it wasn't those things that bothered me the most; instead, it was the fuzziness, impreciseness, forgetfulness. I am not good in the mornings at the best of times, but this morning I had to go back to the house twice: once to change my coat (mine was covered in goodness knows what stain - from arepas sauce, I think), and then again to pick up my work pass. I really feel as if I've been clearer-headed in the past month. Having not had any for a while, it was fascinating to fully experience the effect of alcohol in much greater depth and detail than one does if one drinks a lot.

It's only an initial foray back into drinking, so I should not make grand pronouncements. But I think a potential lesson is that quantity for the sake of it is not worthwhile. Certainly not on a school night. But, also, no need to overreact, eh?

One Giant Leap Back for Womankind

Today is February 29. It is a significant day for three reasons.

First, selfishly enough, it is important because it marks the last day of my month of abstinence. I'll reflect on that after my weekend which will involve drinking, I think, but I feel this month really has been different from previous years' efforts. Second, it's the birthday of various people whose birthdays only come every four years. Yay to you, Joss Ackland!

Third, more significantly, it's the traditional flip of tradition, given that someone years ago decided that today would be the day that women ask men to marry them. It's led to an astonishingly depressing set of conversations on FB about how only men should ask women and lots of expressions of horror at the thought of a woman asking a man. It's hard to start expressing my unhappiness at the tone and positions behind it. Needless to say, I disagree, but I also dislike the whole you-have-to-wait-for-someone because obviously you as a woman are desperate to get married. Ugh. Also: gay proposals. Men get asked; women do the asking. It's not sex-specific and it won't kill you or your relationship.

I keep thinking that my views are fairly common, that it's normal to decide together because you're both so in love and you're planning together to share your lives and all the legal obligations and benefits that come from that. Instead it's about him deciding, but enough people have written about that, and it's not just bad from that perspective. Recently I've been talking to people whose friends have planned increasingly ridiculously elaborate proposals. So now there's a shedload of pressure on him to come up with something special, something to tell the kids, something to post on bloody facebook. It's like weddings - the pressure to create something special, to basically be the star in your own movie or fairytale, seems ludicrous, expensive, and overwhelming. I wonder what it is that's making us feel we all need that, that the normal/everyday can't be special. Weddings are fun - I love them, absolutely - but there's so much pressure on them and given that divorce rates are so high, why not just concentrate on how wonderful is to hang out with the person you love, and to choose to spend the rest of your life with them - whether or not you legalise it?

Bah humbug. I probably just need a drink.

Freedom of Association

TOH and I ventured south to Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love, this weekend. It was my first trip to the city. Sad to say, we didn't see much of it, despite my aims to:

1. Recreate the beginning of Trading Places
2. Find Paddy's Pub
3. Play me some b-ball on the courts of West Philadelphia

Alas, it was not to be. The weather was cold and windy and rather unpleasant, and instead we cooped up indoors making pizzas and hanging out with our friends' cool kid. But we did manage to go to the Italian Market, which pleased me greatly (despite it basically being all shut down apart from one stall with a bin on fire and, fortunately, the cheese shop where we purchased mozzarella for the homemade pizzas).

We also went to the Art Museum. Assessment: mixed. There is decidedly too much English art on exhibition (Gainsborough, ugh), but there was a glorious Stubbs of a Hound coursing a Deer - rarely does an artist capture the sinew and weight and movement of an animal like he does - and a Turner I'd seen, I think, in the Turner Monet Whistler exhibition from a few years ago at Tate Britain, of the Houses of Parliament burning down. There was also a lovely Goya portrait of a toreador that I'd not seen before, with its typical glowing, expressive brown eyes and soft background and squiggly clothing details.

There were also lots of bits of churches ripped out and placed in the museum, something which I find a bit strange (see The Cloisters here in New York for a prime exhibit). The labels at the museum feature a lot of the passive voice - when the panels were removed, when the triptych was removed - which, felt a little unnerving as a British person rather familiar with the methods of stocking The British Museum (not that I don't love it there but you know... Residual ickiness with how we got the things doesn't stop wonder at the things or the loveliness of the building. Or something like that). There were glorious tiles and a Hindu shrine recreated, which were beautiful and calming. The art museum itself is gloriously situated, with that amazing panorama of the Philadelphia skyline (which I couldn't look at without hearing the theme tune to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - that association is fixed for me, I'm afraid) and the sweeping run toward the main city made so famous by Rocky. Of course, TOH recreated the run up the steps, but it was horrendously windy so sadly it was not quite the triumphant moment it should have been (i.e. the two of us doing it together in full photoed montage).