Oddologies

So, Coney Island.  I started thinking about our trip to Coney Island, spurred on by this creepy, creepy image I saw on Flickr…

Man with his ventriloquist dummy .ca 1870.
Photographer: William James Harding
Reference number: 1/4-006818-G
Wet collodion glass negative
Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library

Thank you National Library! 

 There’s something about the imagery of old circus / funfair stuff that’s extremely disturbing, and I certainly found that when visiting Coney Island. 

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not actually even an island and is located waaay down in Brooklyn.  Getting there by subway from Manhattan takes about 40 minutes, and its approach is heralded by the growing number of excited teenagers on the train.  The beach itself is crowded, dirty and bleak, with a Soviet-style vista of high-rise apartment buildings.  Ironically enough, the next beach down, Brighton Beach, is a haven for Russian-Americans, where businesses have signs in Cyrillic and Roman script and you can buy all sorts of delicious Russian cuisine.

(Psst, remember you can enlarge images by clicking on them)

We wandered along the boardwalk, dodging the cops driving along the wooden walkway (US cops are really like the lazy doughnut-eating stereotypes!) and the large holes in the boardwalk caused by aforementioned vehicles.  Coney Island is an OSH / ACC nightmare, complete with a 1920s wooden rollercoaster and this wonderful sideshow, “Shoot the freak”. 

Walking along the boardwalk was also a lesson in American fast food.  Although by this stage we had been in the states for nearly 2 months, Coney Island demonstrated to us that we had a lot to learn.  What’s a knish?  And eww, what on earth is a funnel cake?

Even though it’s seedy, dodgy and scary, it seems to hold a place in the imaginations of New Yorkers.  The (brilliant) Brooklyn Museum had an exhibition a while ago called Goodbye Coney Island? reminiscing about its past and possible demise.  They also have a cool Flickr pool with loads of Coney Island photos people have posted.  Here’s the link. 

Dearest readers

In this latest, hot off the press installment the much belated ’Bruce and Fiona travel around the world and do stuff’ travelogue, I thought I would tell you some more about Ireland.  Many of you may think that Ireland is all about Guinness, the craic or rainy skies and green grass.  Of course, this is all true, but totally false at the same time. 

Ireland is all about old mystical stuff.

Perhaps the coolest place we visited while we were driving around Ireland in a very small car was in County Meath, on the east coast of Ireland, just north of Dublin.  It’s called Brú na Bóinne, and it’s an area containing loads of prehistoric megalithic tombs, structures and standing stones.  We visited a place here called Newgrange, which is perhaps the most impressive of all these structures.  Thousands of stones arranged on a dome on top of a hill, it dominates the surrounding flat countryside. 

(Images in this post courtesy of Flickr, more specifically those wonderful Flickr users who not only know what ‘Creative Commons’ is, but are OK with other people using their photographs.  Thanks!)

They think it was built around 3200 BC, and it’s a passage tomb, which means you walk down a long passage to the centre, where there is a large space they think was used for funeral rituals.  The most incredible thing about Newgrange is that it’s aligned for the Winter Solstice, which means that for several days in December, the morning sun shines along the passage and into the central tomb, which is pitch black at all other times of the year.  The passage tomb was discovered in the 1600s by a farmer who owned the land.  It had collapsed and the surrounding area was strewn with stones.  This farmer guy was looking for stones to build a wall, and realised that he had found something odd when he found thousands of pieces of white quartz, a stone not found in this area naturally. 

It had a bit of a sad history from then on, with lots of people visiting the site and grafitting their names inside the tomb, and one of the amazing concave stones in the tomb itself being damaged by some people looking for gold, but it managed to still be fairly intact by the time the 20th century rolled around.  The tomb was reconstructed in the 1960s, when an archaeologist researched the position of the stones and constructed the tomb how it may have originally looked.  As well as the white quartz covering the exterior sides, there are a lot of carved stones, including this curbstone that people originally had to walk over to enter the tomb. 

Check out this link for some information that has not been filtered through the Fiona brain - I particularly recommend the section on myths surrounding Newgrange: according to one myth, it was a destination of deliciousness, where visitors could find an endless supply of ale, trees always in fruit and two pigs, one always alive and the other always cooked and ready to eat.  Disclaimer: when we visited we found no evidence of this, so I can neither confirm nor deny.

After an epic trip halfway across Europe then halfway across the world, from Galway - Dublin - “Frankfurt-Hahn” (good old budget airline Ryan Air, making a hick town in Germany seem like Frankfurt although it’s 160km away, kinda like calling an airport “Auckland-Hamilton”) - Frankfurt - Bangkok - Auckland - Hamilton (phew!) Bruce and I are now back in NZ, hiding out in a secret bat-cave of a location, making sense of our travels and figuring out the ‘what next’ kinda stuff.

My head’s been spinning with all the things we’ve seen, and when showing our photos to people (watch out, if we see you we’ll be forcing our heavily-edited-174-photo-strong-deathly-boring-holiday-slide-show on you!)

I thought I’d give you a bit of a slide show and tell you about some of the wacky arty-stuff we’ve come across during our travels. As always, the best art can come from the most unlikely places, from rooves to streets to fields.

The Museum of Modern art, as could be expected, was a real highlight. I had been looking forward to going there ever since my Nana told me about it after her trip to the States when I was a kid. Being the ‘budget conscious’ travellers we are (read: flat broke) we researched all the free nights at all the NY museums and were able to hit MoMA and the Guggenheim in one night (largely helped by the fact that the Guggenheim was being renovated and having an exhibition installation, so there was nothing to do but gaze at the Frank Lloyd Wright architecture from the lobby).

(Click on the photos above for a larger image)

One unexpected highlight at MoMA - when you are seeing nothing but artists from your art history textbook it’s wonderful but hardly surprising - was this new acquisition, a photography collection from a private collector. There are perhaps close to 100 photographs in the collection, and they are small and amateur, hardly worth noting aside from one fact. In each photograph, the photographer is present in the form of a shadow. This lays bare the business of photography and makes it a wonderful collection of photos, the foregrounds all taken up by the slightly menacing shadow, looming toward the photographic subject. Very cool.

The other naughty highlight of MoMA was seeing someone spin Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel. Well, I must admit I didn’t actually see it, but I turned around to see the wheel vigorously spinning and the security guard looking like he was about to faint, laugh or both. For someone who still has ‘art touching disaster’ dreams it was a bit of a relief to realise that it even happens at MoMA!!!

New York was a total blur of art and museums - we managed to visit the American Folk Art Museum, MoMA, the New Museum, the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum and the Met.

Along with about a million other people we saw the Jeff Koons works on the roof of the Met - Bruce was taken with the quality of the construction of these sculptures, with the creases you would expect in balloon rubber being replicated in metal, whereas I was more entranced with the amount of people photographing and being photographed…

We also made a mission to the Bowery to see the New Museum. In a sparkly new building designed by a mad Japanese architecture firm stuck in the middle of a neighbourhood consisting of old, tired, industrial buildings and businesses, the stack of white boxes stood out in the dim evening light. The exhibitions were very fashionable, but what I remember most about this museum visit was a feeling of disorientation.  It seemed like all floor space was given to exhibition galleries, to the detriment of entry / egress, so stairwells ended nowhere, alarms were being set off by people using fire exits by accident, and the fluoro green elevator was extreeemely slow…

Frankly we were a bit museum-ed out after all of this, and found that often the best art was found in the most unlikely places. Here’s a sight we saw on the street in Manhattan. Really, I have no idea about the why, but it does definitely look cool.

Well, stay tuned for more retrospective posts, I’m an impatient broadband addict, so once I have a high speed connection I will have more time and patience to spend in front of the screen!

our apologies for our lack in bloging its just that we have been having way too much fun tripping around Ireland. After counting our remanding pennies and assessing the prospects of finding work in Ireland - and realising that a Irish summer is as balmy as a NZ winter - we thought we would rather have a brilliant road trip of Ireland rather than live i squalor pulling pints for a living. After making that decision we grabbed a hire car and hit the road. We traveled the length and breadth of that tiny island and had many odd adventures that we will share with you in future blogs. we arrived back to NZ on Saturday avo very tired so we decided to spend a week at my parents batch in the Coromandel to recuperate . But despite being surrounded by bush and gravel roads we still have Internet access - so over the next week we will be posting blogs of our travels.

Something odd has happened to the sausage industry in Ireland. browsing the sausage section in a supermarket yesterday I came across a frightening sight - sitting amongst the array pork sausages was the super sausage - a new breed of sausage genetically engineered with a face so that it can talk to you as you eat its meaty goodness. Apart from this sausage monstrosity we have also enjoyed Ireland’s traditional sausages such as black and white pudding hmmmmm and little pork sausages.

So, tonight’s our last night in Berlin before headed to another of the world’s bright-lights-big-city capitals - Galway.

That’s in Ireland, by the way.

Tomorrow, we will be catching Berlin’s wonderful S-Bahn train to the airport, then flying Aer Lingus to Dublin, then promptly jumping on a bus to Galway (that’s 3 great forms of transport in one day). Thanks to the English love of drinking beer in slightly foreign lands there are no hostel beds in all of Dublin, so we have decided to move on to Galway, our ultimate destination in Ireland, and leave Dublin to the lager drinkers.

But anyway, about Berlin. As Bruce would say, “Berlin’s BRILLIANT!“. Here’s a bit of an illustrated account of some of the marvellousness.

(Disclaimer: all these photographs are totally un-Photoshopped, and some have some weird contrast stuff going on. My only excuse is that I’m still trying to figure out the peculiarities of my camera…)

Berlin architecture has been one thing that has constantly amazed Bruce and I. Being in a city decimated by war, that rebuilt itself in the last 50 years or so, but has managed to retain historical integrity, has been wonderful to see. Above is a weird photograph I took of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, a church in Berlin heavily damaged during WW2 that was rebuilt in the 1950s. It’s amazing to see that the remaining portion of the original church wasn’t just demolished.

The TV tower in Alexanderplatz is one of my favourite Berlin things. In addition to being a fantastic example of future-is-now-ism, we were staying nearly exactly beneath it, so it was a brilliant landmark to find our hostel wherever we were in the city.

As we are staying in Mitte, a part of the former East Berlin, there are some wonderful examples of Soviet architecture at its finest. Here is a cool theatre that has the added bonus of demonstrating the Berliners’ love for bicycles.

And here’s the much-talked-about Jewish Museum in Berlin. This is my second visit and I found I enjoyed it just as much as the first time. It is architecture at its most over-the-top, but somehow it manages to still be cool.

Oh yeah, and that other architecture thing in Berlin - the Berlin Wall. The one part of the wall of any significant size that still remains, the ‘East Gallery’, is much more disintegrating and tacky-graffitti-covered than when I saw it 5 years ago. It’s crazy to think that one day there will be nothing remaining…  Except in the tourist shops, where they will probably be selling pieces of the Berlin wall forever.

So, more about search engine terms. These are the words people are typing into Google to find this blog. I have just checked the search engine terms for the past week and now I’m sure someone is messing with me.

Crazy photograph Fair enough, I’ve always wanted some kind of explanation for crazy photographs. Why can’t photographs just be normal?

Looptopia, pink balloons Someone was desperate to find out more about the pink balloons at Looptopia, the 24 hour festival in Chicago we went to in May? Or is there something more sinister about this I should know more about?

Dog gay art No way am I supporting this kind of animal exploitation.

Trainspotters manual This is what is confusing me. I can’t confess to know that much about trains, but I do have some sort of inkling that there must be more trainspotters on the internet than just me… Indeed, Google auf Deutch (how does it know I’m in Germany? Why can’t I search in English???) tells me: Ergebnisse 1 - 10 von ungefähr 78.600 für trainspotting manual.

I’m extremely confused. Should I just accept that the internet works in mysterious ways? Or is it necessary to start investigating further??? Being in an ex-Stasi-land makes me aware of the possibilities…

Oh but what i meant to mention is that Alexanderplatz is a major hang out for young Berlin punks and their pet dogs - it seems very quizzical that punks would own a dog. One would think that by enslaving our K9 brothers and sisters would be a very nuclear family conformist sort of activity. Perhaps they are more emo Neo punks - of the fashionable sense - indeed it looks as though many of them have walked straight off the set of the Matrix film.

Alexanderplatz a plaza just down the road from were Fiona and I are staying is a fantastic place. Fiona has already mentioned the futuristic clock - the icon of Alexanderplatz however is the TV antenna/revolving restaurant tower built in the late 60s well ahead of its time (and makes the Auckland sky tower look like a conservative Lego building) its name is the Telespargel (translates as the TV-asparagus!). Alexanderplatz was part of East Berlin the Soviets built the Telespargel to help create a modern downtown area. However the existing pre war features are just as brilliant such as an outlandishly baroque fountain depicting king Neptune installed in the late 19th  century.

As Fiona mentioned today was full of future fantastic architectonic wonders of the 20th century. However what Fiona glazed over was the amazing cuisine that the German people have. Being a great lover of both sausage and beer i have been greatly expecting arriving in Germany since it is these two things together with baking that they do the best. The image says it all - salty wurst absolutely drowned in tomato sauce sprinkled with curry powder and served with fries just add a 500ml bottle of beer and away you go. Us kiwis have much to learn when it comes to take away food.