First Blog of 2010!! very excited to be sharing with the rest of the universe about my life as a , YOUNG, beautiful, and poor New Yorker. For starters, let's get one thing straight: This is a blog about being healthy, happy, and living as cheaply( but healthily) as possible. There may or may not be content that includes being shamelessly cheap in order to pay rent and survive. ex: eating free food at Whole Foods, friend's apartment, and sometimes churches. However, I will cover mostly fun and cheap events happening around the city, really ridiculously cheap food, and once a month, a "splurge moment" where I stupidly and impulsively purchase something that I will love and regret for the rest of the month. So what have I been doing to play and save pennies?
1. Whitney Museum Biennial 2010 (Free)
Rule number 1 of being cheap: social networking.
How did I get into Whitney Museum for free? Connection. If you have friends who work for corporate companies with free events and benefits, totally hit them up and get the network going!!!! My fellow Taiwanese friend happens to be one of these lucky employees, and with her help, I got to see some pretty alarming and amazing new art. Located on East 75th and Madison, this year, Whitney museum included some pretty fantastic artists. My favorite? Aurel Schmidt's drawings on humans filthy creations and self-destruction to a symbolic and alarming message. With simply color pencils, graphite, acrylic, beer, dirt, and blood on the paper, Schmidt beautified this political message about men's ugliness by fusing a half man, half bull creature that explodes beer cans and cigarettes. With a soft palette of colors, Schmidt managed to make grotesque flies, plastic maxim condoms, worms, and beer cans look...well....pretty.
Aurel Schmidt ( pictures courtesy of Whitney Museum)
Another of my favorites was Lorraine O'Grady''s comparative photographs between French poet Charles Baudelaire and American pop sensation Michael Jackson. According to O'Grady's hypothesis, even though the two artists share opposite family background( Baudelaire: french aristocrat, Jackson: youngest of a poor family), they are both aspiring performers, perfectionist, ambiguous with their sexuality, and addicted to drugs. It was really interesting to see their photographs together arranged by age. From Jackson's rise to fame to Baudelaire's fall to poverty, they are also 150 years apart from each other. In my opinion, it would've been cool to see them as great friends and jamming to MJ tunes in the modern society.
early days
later days: imagine Baudelaire in metallic gold?
(pictures: courtesy of Whitney Museum)
A photography fan, I couldn't helped but notice this artist who brought back many of my childhood memories: mainly on watching my idiotic brother sink battleships and whistle the choo choo train. Tam Tran's vision on photographing different identities continues with these series of pictures where every boy (or girl) at some point fantasied about : being a hero.
Yes, a blanket and a stick in this little boy's mind is the perfect heroic outfit. I particularly love the photo where the boy's back was captured. We see the the robe flowing, the sun setting, the stick rooted firmly on the ground with his little hand, and the "watermelon" haircut just adds more hilarity and adorableness to the imaginative child. Well, these are all the artists who captivated my attention, and impressively, stuck with my long term memory. However, there was also a pretty cool wooden made architecture space next to the sandwich bar on the bottom floor of museum. We can hear the repetitive Buddhist chanting that brings the atmosphere tranquility. Well both my friend and I were enjoying the peaceful and monotone chanting, we were more distracted by our creativity to document history. i.e. taking loads of Asian style pictures with peace signs all over the place. Unfortunately we got caught. too excited about the possibility of endless angles and natural potential to be super starz~~~
Tam Tran
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