Monday, November 28, 2011

best dressed, in dumbo


There are few places that I go to and get completely stuck in the neighborhood. For a whole weekend.
On Friday, I headed out to Dumbo for a magazine launch. I clued in all of you readers that maybe you might want to come too, that the after party in Dumbo is always worth it. That there is never an end to the night until all of a sudden you realize how damn late it must be since the sky’s starting to get bright again.
Alas, it wasn’t that late when we left on Friday night, but I did happenstance the Under the Bridge Festival on the way. How could I miss it? in the adventure down the cobble-stoned hill to Water street we couldn’t help but notice a larger than usual amount of people milling about, and many of them had these green pamphlets. Something was happening.
In a slight miscommunication, (she was headed already for the after party, I was headed for the magazine release) Brynne and I argued about the direction we needed to go, we actually ended up Under the Manhattan Bridge. Or, -UMB-. Here a series of projections lit up the underside of the vaults with animated blooming flowers. At ground level, people huddled around on benches and curbs to watch and the dig the environment. With the echo, an interesting din bounced from the stone until the train went by and vibrated everything, including the projection. Next time add some music and a free-form club ensues…
(Sean Capone’s Camera Rosetum)
Heading back west to find the bookstore, and now trying to locate some friends who have texted that they’ve moved on from the bookstore, we round the corner and there’s something glowing pink from a window and getting closer, there’s a massive line from the door all around the corner at the DAC. This must be something to see, or at least somewhere to go.   Everyone in line seems to think so, as they eye me up standing on the corner of Washington and Plymouth, telling my friend on the phone that he’s got to meet us at the glowing pink thing.
In any case, at powerHouse books I connect a few stragglers of college friends and make plans to chat further at the after party at the reBar.   But on the way, we determine that whatever this huge pink or red thing at the DAC requires further investigation.
The Experience of Green by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen proves to be this wild red craft paper creation. Tree trunk-like structures aggregrate along the floor, reaching up to the ceiling and sometimes dispersing in twisted paper roots or peel away from the core’s twisting in petals. Super amazing, the scale of it. Two completely enclosed red spaces allowed only patches of light in from the top, one even full of twisted roots cascading down, obscuring your vision and disorienting the size of the “room” and whether that was someone else’s arm or a twisted root. (It was the next day when I photographed a girl’s Edisa Weeks Hair Sculpture she told me : “it’s scary in there, everything looks dark and green.”  Maybe there’s the experience of green. While all the adults wondered why this Experience of Green was all red craft paper a girl with a fairy and 16 inches of daisies stuck in the bun on top of her head got it.)  The only thing missing, as G pointed out as we settled down into the folds of the inside “green” of one of them to check out the way the light came in from the aperture above, the smell of something green. Maybe we’re forever tainted now by Neto’s anthropodino and expect every large scale installation to encompass olfactory senses. And where anthropodino smelled like cloves and nutmeg, lavender and chamomile, this we expected to smell like a forest, like trees, like woods, like green. The red craft paper, in the different ways that the artists crafted it in either dense layers, laminated and exposed in cross section or peeling away from that on its other axis, achieving fantastic transparencies in a petal-esque floating. The technique actually reminded me of the incredible red rock formations in Zion National Park in Utah. The variety of grains, tone and how the light reacted really made it something special out of relatively unsuspecting craft paper. 
So the night went on. I highly recommend reBar. The music was good, the drinks are good, the atmosphere is super good (good lighting, nice big table, small intimate spaces carved out of big space with gorgeous iron screens and different levels of seating).  And I didn’t try the food but it smelled amazing. It was here that the party gathered some steam and we all headed out to 20 Jay for some real party, where the lights are dim to conceal the fabrication machines, rings hang from the super high ceiling and a spectacular compilation of video streams… and the dj made us pull out some great moves, share necklaces, pull each others hair and the like.
At arguably the end of the night I was awarded best dressed by Mollie. Go Steelers. Sigh.  I love Dumbo. This is the crazy story of how we met:
I stumble out of this party at the fabricator's studio.  Time for me to GO, as Andres and Brynne are joining others on the rolling carts, cruising through the industrial corridors.  Mollie is there, sitting in the corner with her sister and another friend. Her other friends are on the cart with mine.  Her sister's got on a Steelers shirt and in my drunkenness, I can't help but be obnoxious. When you grow up in Pittsburgh, football is in your blood.  (other things in my blood include all the lyrics to Led Zeppelin songs and recipes for killer bolognese).  I appropriately pull up my shirt and show off my tetracuspid tattoo.  That's that, friends for life.

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