"these streets will make you feel brand new"

and so i tried the CouchSurfing in America. Mathew was an awesome host! no worries, all accommodations and a living encyclopedia of New York City. i arrived via Amtrak and Bayardo by bus. props to Bayo for not bailing out like everyone else. him and Nick are the best travel buddies ever. hard to imagine our discovery of that just a year ago in Dallas. pause for good memories.

NYC, omg! i mean, i've been there before, but this was my first time independent of school or the 'rents. i got to really throw myself into it and damn was it beautiful. maybe it's just because of this time in my life and all the opportunities i've got after graduating this year. who knows, but every moment of walking through the streets, i could NOT get that Jay-Z/Alicia Keys song out of my head.

[Bayardo in Times Square at night]

even now when i go back and watch the music video, their pride looks, feels so inclusive, so alive. i loved how EVERYwhere there were quotes about the city. sometimes they are on construction fences. sometimes they are on window decals. sometimes they are engraved in granite facades.

[construction by South Ferry]

additionally, i was blown away by the internationality. maybe i was especially sensitive after my travels through Europe. of course there were lots of tourists too, but even from the people walking out of apartment buildings, i overheard so many people speaking German, Spanish, French... keep on going. Again on history, my mind was a total whirlwind.

[Statue of Liberty from Battery Park]

with a big dash of luck, Bayardo and i got to be present for the beginning of a performance piece, ...and Counting by Wafaa Bilal, who had come to ECU last year. amazing man. in this work, he had a map of Iraq already tattooed on his back and this night he was having a dot for every American and Iraqi that had died so far in the war. let me clarify: that is 105,000 pricks in 24 hours. go to the webpage to get the entire description. the names of all the dead were also to be read while the tattooing took place.

and wow. never been part of a performance piece before. there is something about the time frame that sets it apart. first off, documentation of the event (ie: photos) are very important, but what appeals to me the most is the brevity. it ends. it dies. and after that, the memory of it is what's important.

[filming Wafaa]

anyone could read names, and most would read a page and then the next person would come up. for my turn, i chose the list of American soldiers just so i wouldn't butcher the pronunciation and also because i'm familiar with the abbreviations for military ranks. reading a list is quite redundant and when i finished one page, i automatically flipped to a second and kept reading. it didn't strike me until i was around the eighth or so that i had gone so far.

i choked a bit at the feeling of actualization for this work by Wafaa. it was the same feeling of overwhelming that i usually get when i start making connections between a city and it's history and then applying it to the present day; except this time i was part of a piece of art, so it touched ME personally. it was like grabbing on to an electric fence and not letting go. and i had no desire to let go.

Wafaa Bilal. check out his work. especially Domestic Tension.

pause.

okay, i could probably have made that bit a post of it's own, but maybe the length of this one helps explain my feelings about New York.

and on to Coney Island. unlike me, Bayardo was hopping around and staying in a different place every night. i went down earlier in the morning with Mathew, who went to buy a couple gifts to give on his own CouchSurfing travels that were coming up soon, and we met up with Bayo there on the boardwalk. i had no idea how popular the movie The Warriors was OR how thick Coney Island was with Russians.

[polar bears sunning in 50°F weather]

Mathew left us after some nice conversations and Russian pastries, then Bayo and i took the bus up to Prospect Park. originally we wanted to go to some museums, the botanical gardens and maybe the zoo, but somewhere in our wandering we ended up in the public library and opted to go straight to Dumbo and the bridge.

the timing was perfect. it was late afternoon and natural sidelighting always makes for good photos. we probably spent an hour on the bridge, photographing and dreaming of living somewhere in the Upper West Side, biking daily across the Brooklyn Bridge to a studio in Dumbo.

[Bayo on the north side of the Brooklyn Bridge]

last stop: art museums. i had no idea how big the Metropolitan was. almost 5hours and i barely saw half! not to mention, it's free to get in. there is so much stuff from all over. makes me wonder how the hell anyone can accumulate it all. gotta love having Graziani as an art history prof. made me appreciate the old stuff a lot more. =)

[a cappella group in front of the Met]

Bayo was bored with the Met, so we went on to MOMA. again, i can't say enough about seeing artwork in person. there is no way a textbook can do an 8' x 8' Picasso painting justice. i suppose one could go back to the concept of how the human eye has a bigger tonal range than a camera. that is, without Photoshop. ;)

[men in front of Matisse]

oh, and of all things, ran into Brian McBride after hitting up B&H Photo. i felt like Uncle Tosh, seeing people i know everywhere i go. but really, more than all the sightseeing, good company wins overall. like Nick, Bayardo and i had lots of good conversations as well. it was nice to talk about language barriers and have a mutual understanding, plus a lust for travel. after all the new friendships in Europe, there was a great relief to come back to something established and even watch it grow more. thanks, Bayo!