How did I miss this? - Nudity in New York City.

                 I ask a lot of questions. Some questions are more important than others. Will I get to work on time? How am I going to pay for this? Do I have cash on me? Are you going to finish that? What are you doing on Friday? Do you want to hang out? Why does it smell in here?

                Today, all of these questions are made moot upon a particular artist coming to New York, one Erica Simone. She’s a world renowned photographer, winner of many awards, and appears in exhibitions all over the world. With all of her work, she posits important questions to the viewer. Her latest work speaks volumes to me, and forces me to ask an extremely important question:

                Why was there a naked woman walking around New York City and I didn’t notice it? 

                Personally, I feel this is a question we all should ask ourselves. If fully naked people are walking around our cities, how do we miss them? Are we just really busy with our lives, imagining what people might look like naked. Or, even worse, we could be working. That’d be far worse. 

                Obviously if you decide to look at her photos, perhaps you should know these are Not Safe for Work (NSFW, in case you didn’t know the acronym. You’d be surprised how many don’t.) Erica walks around completely naked. When I first heard about this, my immediate hope was that she wore shoes at least for the pictures. I don’t know why this was a worry, the sidewalk is disgusting. Apparently she realized shoes were necessary. 

                Her objective appears to be showing people in their natural state, without clothes to distinguish socials status or ranking. Or, as some art critics have stated “to show off her rocking bod”. A few prudes have mentioned how children might be affected by seeing some woman walk around naked. The retort has been nearly a resounding “Shut up”. 

                All of these photos will be displayed at The Dash Gallery on April 14^th, 2011 on 172 Duane Street, NY. In case you are unable to attend, due to living in a more heavily clothed city, well you can see a small selection of about 24 pictures on her site all in various stages of undress (sometimes she wears a hat). 

                Naked, we see all her imperfections, like the painfully lame tattoo she has on the small of her back. Little Stars, are those really that original? I mean, aren’t you an artist, shouldn’t you have better taste in tattoos than a small child? That’s another question she forces all of us to ask. Are artists aware of what good tattoo are, or is the old saying true that 99% of all tattoos are bad ideas born in a drunken debauched haze.

                Gazing through the pictures, people appear to be surprisingly tolerant of a hot naked woman in their midst. Most of the time people fail to react to seeing her naked. Those who claim the subway shows the opposite are wrong. One of the rules of riding the subway is to pay attention to nothing while at the same time figuring out where you’re supposed to go. Subway riding is an art form.

                Whenever I’ve seen papers cover up her nakedness, there have been objections. The Daily News covered up her butt as she shoveled snow, which drew the ire of several commenter s, stating far worse material was in the paper than a little side ass. Most of the humor she aimed for in these photos is due more to New Yorker’s complete blasé than anything she did. Besides, she probably did this on a Tuesday or something, when people were busy getting to work. At least that’s what I’d like to think and not that I missed seeing her over the weekend. 

                Questions were brought up regarding her experiment. Various individuals wondered how this differed from streaking or exposing oneself. The most important question came from one individual who mentioned how they looked at their cat and wondered why they couldn’t walk around naked like their small pet. That’s a question worth asking indeed. Why do small pets get to walk around naked while we need to work to put food on the floor? An even better one would be: why can’t we switch with cats, where they work to keep jobs and maintain infrastructure while we nap on a windowsill for 16 hours? 

                Clearly Erica Simone gives us a lot to think about.

PS: Let me know if you think I should attend this event. I hope I can ‘get off’ that day, from work.

Thoughts about Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is my least favorite holiday. Usually this is the part of the year where I begin to prepare for the winter. Foods are purchased, dark chocolate consumed, and I engage in some extremely personal form of artistic expression which is either photography or music. Since I don’t come from a large family, there was never any purpose to celebrating the holiday that much.  My fondest memories of Thanksgiving include some Indiana Jones movie that happened to be playing on TV. We’d sit down and pretend that we were too busy to bother interacting with each other.

Most of my family is either vegan, vegetarian, or semi-vegetarian, so Turkey didn’t matter. We didn’t have many people over, so the food served was mostly food we’d have anyway. Cranberry sauce served as the only reminder that this in fact was a holiday.

Having said that, there are a few things I’d like people to look at differently. Perhaps it is impossible to exactly be ‘thankful’ for some of this stuff, but my goal here to help you realize that with every grey cloud there is a silver lining. Or that grey cloud could be a poorly kept silver cloud that hasn’t been polished for a while. Either way, it is important. Below are some things I think most people should at least try to enjoy or take part in to help the winter melt away. 

1.       Colds – A lot of people hate colds. I don’t blame them. They are dreadful things, forcing you to keep in coughs as you try to impress a significant other. But don’t look at them as all bad. Rather, take advantage of those little perks you get while being sick. A big bonus to these is the pass you get on not paying attention. Usually I tend to have my mind wander while someone is saying boring work-stuff. But with a cold, I’m allowed the benefit of the doubt to be spacey, something I often am regardless of having a cold or not. That sweet spot of being zoned out and the social acceptance of being zoned out while on various cold medications is one of the few pleasures you get out of sickness

2.       Hibernation – Winter provides lots of animals with hibernating options. Bears get to say “Eh, this looks boring; I’ll be back in the spring.” I do the same thing. After Christmas and New Year’s Eve parties have passed, I say “See you later!” to the world and engage in ultra-personal endeavors. Also, I get to finish a book or two in the meantime and work on making myself vaguely more productive and creative once the spring/summer rolls around.

3.       Musical Research – I guess this is what I do all year round. During the winter though there aren’t as many interesting releases. Most artists tend to save their music for almost any other part of the year. As a result I go back into discographies, busy figuring out this web of music I’m developing. How each artist is connected in this great blanket (bonus if you know this reference)?

4.       Movies – From the few movie reviews I’ve done on here, it should be obvious to anyone that I consider movies to be foul. I don’t get them; I’m just not a movie person. So many of them follow such similar formats that I generally can’t give a damn. This ends up being doubly disappointing to me since I think of all the potentially great visual and storytelling aspects they could indulge but don’t. Whenever I listen to a song, I get an image in my head of what ought to accompany the said sounds. So I don’t understand why movie directors lack this capacity to engage me. Due to the winter, I can’t really go outside to bike or swim, so I’m stuck catching up on movies recommended to me years ago.

5.       Ice Skating- This one is fairly new. As a kid, I never did this. Apparently one of my colleagues was a professional ice skater or something. So he kind of got me into it. Now this is one of the most therapeutic things I can imagine. The rhythm behind it eludes me, though each year I get just a little bit better. Skating in the Northeast is such a thrill anyway. Sorry those of you in the southern half of the globe. 

Overall, think about what you are thankful for this holiday. What worked out/didn’t work out for you? Is there something that you can improve as we move towards the end of the year, something you wish you could do better? Do it, I believe in you. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!