jealous of my weekend in NEW YORK?

...you probably should be. so should you and you and you and especially you.

ha ha.

so yeah, i spent a couple weekends ago on manhatten enjoying myself completely and not once thinking about the seven-zillion things keeping me busy and annoyed in good ol' edmitten.

now, i'm sure you're wondering how the fuck i affored to just jet off to new york for the weekend...some backstory:

in 2004 i graduated from the uofa as did my friend katie. katie got accepted to the mfa acting program at new school university in nyc (also houses parson's school of design if you're curious) and moved herself to new york. i visited her during thanksgiving of the same year. we watched a parade and drank our faces off.

then about a year ago i met a boy, got a little caught-up in good kisses and intimacy and some pretty strong feelings. he moved to the other side of the country and i was suppose to go for a visit. a few days before i was suppose to leave he tells me he didn't want me to come. the results were a broken/demolished heart and a credit with air canada.

so i had to use this credit by the booking date of my flight which was early june and since may is going to be full up with rehearsals i decided i needed to go asap. initially i was going to go to chicago for the weekend because i love it so much but it would have been an additional $200 as opposed to the extra $60 that i am required to pay for changing my flight. so nyc it was.

i hadn't planned on staying with katie because the last time we'd spoken she was living in jersey with her boyfriend and i wanted to be on manhanttan and whatever so i texted her and said, 'yo! i'm coming to nyc! wanna have a drink?' and she texted back saying, 'the bf and i broke up. i'm living in the east village! please come stay with me; i need a taste of home!' so it was set. how could i resist nyc at this point. I COULDN'T! so i booked my flight and i was set to go.

so the trip itself was rad. the last time i was in nyc i was really overwhelmed and i didn't totally love it but this time i was more familiar with it and knew where i was and where i was going and i knew where i wanted to go. i fell in LOVE LOVE LOVE with that goddamn city. it's amazing. it's unparalled. all the things people say about new york are true.

so i hear you wanted details...here they are.

thursday april 20, 2006

4:10am: wake up and finish packing. i'm slightly hungover from sex talk and snazzy drinks with the girls but i'm excited. the hangover passes quickly.

i had to get up so early because i had to be at the airport before 5:30am and my dad was suppose to be picking me up 4:30.

4:45am: dad still hasn't arrived. i call him and he's forgotten to set his alarm. he tells me to take a cab to his place (half-way to the airport-in millwoods) and he'll pay the cab driver and then we'll go the airport.

5:00am: arrive at dad's. he pays the (really nice) cab driver and we leave.

5:20am: we arrive at the airport, pull up to air canada say our goodbyes and i check in. i have to automatic check-in, that's new, but it's easy so i'm happy. i then go through security and wait in the excruciatingly long line-up for a soy chai latte that tastes like dishsoap. i chuck it. i don't want to wait in that INSANE line again...so whatever.

7:00am: my flight leaves on time and i am off to the tdot.

time sort of gets lost at this point. i sleep through my flight to toronto, go through customs, get a sandwich...wait. wait. wait. wait.

i get a little mad in toronto. i see this family. two girls and a boy. the girls are probably 8 and 11 at most and they're reading teen cosmo and teen vogue and teen people and talking about lipstick and celebrities. girls need to be girls. those magazine send such a scewed image of adolesence and those girls weren't looking at it critically and their mom was encouraging them...'oh yes daughter, that lipstick would look great on you!' SHE'S FUCKING EIGHT! let kids be kids and teach them to look critically at the media. just because it's published doesn't it make 'true' or right or a fair representation of life...

5:40pm: i arrive at new york's laguardia airport. laguardia is actually in queens but it's a short trip to manhanttan. so i call katie, get her address and decide to splurge on a taxi. the taxi driver takes the 'bridge route' to avoid the toll on the tunnel and so i get to see manhattan as we drive onto the island. it's amazing. it opens up before you like the mouth of the beast and you want nothing more than to crawl right in and get lost.

$26 later i arrive in the east village (avenue a and e. 5th st. to be exact)
to give a little perspective about where in nyc i am.
cbgb's is on bowrey and 2nd ave. (joey ramone ave)
avenue a is one block below 1st ave. bowrey is between 7th and 8th st. (i think).
so that's where i am. it's a fucking famous part of town.

6:20pm: katie's place. i get there just as she's getting home from school. she lives on the third floor of her building so we walk up the stairs. her apartment is TINY and expensive but i love it because when you look outside you see the back of buildings with fire escapes bolted to the ancient brick* and gardens and noise and the entire world below you.

katie and i just talk for the next couple of hours. or, katie talks for the next couple of hours. she's stressed as fuck about school and her ex boyfriend and her ex ex boyfriend and all things in general. katie is stress. it's the one thing i will never forget about her. drama personified.

all that talking makes us hungry so we decide to head out and find some supper.

9:00pm: we decide, after walking around alphabet city (below 1st ave) for a little while that we want indian food.

here's one of the many awesome things about new york: there is a whole street in the e. village of indian food restuarants. the managers stand outside and try to intice you into their restuarant.

we pick a tiny little place about half the size of cafe mosaics with the ceiling covered in streamers and mirrors and chili lights. it's cozy and red and smells like heaven. we eat pounds and pounds of food. we don't drink cuz we forget that most of those restuarants are byob (yep, byob) so we just chat and catch up more. we remember parties and who we had stupid makeouts and fights with. it's great to see her again.

11:00pm: we finish dinner and it's cheap (like $25 for the both of us...) and we walk around some more totally lost in chatting.

12:30am: we get back to katie's place. have a glass of wine and pass out. i'm exhausted after a day of travelling and her stress and wiped her out.

i do not sleep well.

friday, april 21, 2006.

11:00am: i wake up after a restless sleep and a little bit of a 'post-airplane ride' sniffle but i'm good to go. katie has school all day and rehearsal in the evening to i decide that my day is going to be taken up with art and theatre. yay!

12:00pm: i get on the subway and head to upper east side to go to the whitney museum of american art and i'm lucky because a) the last time i was there it was closed and b) they have their biennial on. the biennial showcases the best in current american art.

the really interesting thing about this year's exhibit, aside from the fucking amazing work, was that for the first time the whitney included artists who were not born in the united states but emmigrated to the states and have something to say about their experience relating to the 'american dream'.

i love that contemporary art never fails to remind me that artists are political beings. that art for art's sake is fine but to express dissent and question the world you live in is paramount. these artists question and fight and rally their collective voice against sexism, racism, war, hurt, etc...it's amazing. i spent the afternoon inspired.

i also love the fact that these amazing visual artists are unafraid to mix media and to play with the tools of their craft. i wish theatre artists were more commited to collaboration with other (non theatre) artists and mixing media. we are so rooted and eaten up by tradition that we can't get out. i hate it!

(i wanted to post pics but the whitney website uses flash and i don't know how to copy flash into my blog...sorry)

so after the whitney i was totally inspired and fired up so i decided to go see a play. katie had told me a lot about a new adam rapp play called red light winter at the barrow street theatre in the west village. (lower west side).

6:oopm: leave the whitney and head to the subway. i head back downtown on a mission to get a $20 student rush ticket to the play, it's $65 otherwise. theatre in nyc ain't cheap! so i get downtown, get my ticket and realise i am fucking hungry!

6:30pm: i get a sandwich and some delicious iced tea at this lovely little deli in greenwich village and sit infront of the window looking out on bleeker street and people watch. i am falling more and more with new york in that exact moment. for the first time i realise that i could in fact, live in new york city. financially it isn't really possibly but artistically and emotionally i could do it. i felt good and safe and relaxed and full.

7:00-7:40pm: i grab a latte and walk around greenwich. i am in and out of record stores mostly and am completely overwhelmed. vinyl only, used only, electronic only, anything you want in the world can be found in new york. goldfrapp and stereolab seem to feature predominantly and i smile because i've heard of them. it makes the snob in me happy to know that bands i listen to and love are popular in new york hipster record stores too! god...i don't buy anything. there isn't time to really look. the play is starting!

8:00pm-10:30pm: red light winter by adam rapp plays at the barrow street theatre. i sit in the same audience with kathy bates. she is beautiful and no one approaches her. new yorkers are obviously used to seeing celebrities at the theatre or are just too cool to make a big deal about it. i just remembered katie telling me about congratulating phillip seymour hoffman on his oscar. ha ha.

so red light winter...coming from a sold out run at steppenwolf in chicago it was getting a lot of press in nyc and had an open run. that's cool but the play itself was only alright. i have a feeling it was getting a lot of hype for the sexual content and the 'grit'...the female actress seemed unfocussed and when she wasn't talking she looked like her mind was elsewhere, one of the two guys was underdeveloped but the third was amazing. i think the play suffered for the press and suffered for the fact that it was seen as being edgy and representative of the existential crisis faced by artists as they approach their 30s. the whole, 'peterpan' complex thing...it's cliche and we've all seen it; putting a cock on the stage isn't going to make all that much of a difference. it was still good though, just not THAT good.

11:30pm: there was a tonne of weird train things going on and i was suppose to meet katie nearby but she had a breakdown after seeing her ex with another girl so we met back up at her place, drank some wine, ordered some pizza and chatted. mostly i just witnessed katie's complete and total nervous break down complete with hysterics, embarassing text messages and declarations of, 'i'll never fall in love in again'.

3:30am: katie tired me out. i passed out. gah...

saturday, april 22, 2006

11:00am: wake up! katie has rehearsal from 2-4 but we both really want to go to see the munch exhibit at MoMA so we agree to meet up in front of the museum at 4 and then we'll check it out and then get some food and then go to a house party.

12:30-3: SHOPPING and walking.

so there's this fantastic little record store about 12 steps from katie's place that specializes in experimental electronic music and indie rock. etherea: damn sexy.

so i spend $100US on music. wanna know what i bought? this is, afterall, suppose to be detailed.

so here's the list. judge away, hipsters.

matias aguayo:are you really lost. kompakt
pitchfork doesn't really like and i heard this called 'micro-house' and i have no idea what that means. who cares, i dig this album hardcore. it's HOT, made for dancing and fucking and dark dark clubs.

tortoise: millions now living will never die. thrill jockey.
i know this is old. i know i should have got it a long time ago. i've never seen it in edmonton. granted i wasn't really looking that hard. tortoise makes me cry.

venetian snares: winnipeg is a frozen shithole. sublight records.
i just found out a venetian snares a little while ago whilst on the hunt for something insanely abrasive. venetian snares definately does that. but it grew on me. meathole was one of the best of 2005. i like this album. it's YUMMY!

deerhoof: the runners four. kill rock stars
DELICIOUS!

ok...i'm sick of pseudo-reviews and editing html all over the place...i also got: stereo total's 'my melody', tortoise and bonnie "prince" billy's 'the brave and the bold' ('daniel' kills me. sick!), hella's 'bitches ain't shit but good company' and yeah, i think that's it. they're all wicked good albums so i chose well. oh yeah, and i got this tiny little mum ep but the dude forgot to put the cd in the case...fuck! i have to remember to email them and see if there's something to be done.

after cd shopping i wandered around the e. village, popped into bowrey tattoo out of curiosity-that's where the first 'skin' tattoo was done-a project that i am a part of- and then just mosied my through the east village towards the nyu area.

nyu isn't like the uofa. i don't really know why but i am sure it's the brownstones and the crack heads in washington square park but there is a totally different vibe. maybe it's cuz nyu doesn't reek of oil money and coke funding the way the uofa does...who knows. either way, i wish they had an mfa program in directing, but they don't... c'est la vie.

so i finish browing and katie calls me a little earlier than expected so i head down to meet her and we head uptown to the museum of modern art: MoMA for the Edvard Munch exhibit.

i don't know what to tell you. never have a i seen a more timely exhibit. Munch painted what he saw-not accurate naturalistic representations-but the heart of people and places and experience. he captured what few painters, in my humble opinion, were able to do-he painted the soul of the person as opposed to their face. "the scream" wasn't there, it was stolen and no one knows where it was but i didn't need to be there.

our world is so completely fucked up and every day it just seems to get worse and worse and it becomes hard to maintain any level of optimism. we're at a point in our collective existence when we sit and look out our windows and wonder how god couldn't be dead. how we're hanging on by anything more than a thread. our bodies are being held together by nothing more than skin. in an act of futile self-preservation we zone out even more, we lose ourselves in television and meaningless everything, and rely more on more on the things that ultimately are harming us. what the munch exhibit reminded me of is how lonely all of this is. we have nothing but each other because god is long dead, if he ever existed at all, and we're all wading through heartbreak and death and shit and all we can do is cling to each other and even then we're still pretty much fucked. it broke my heart and at the same time reminded me that i have people in my life who probably aren't going to stab me in the back for my last scrap of sanity or food or a joint or a beer or whatever.

and the other really cool thing: my friend katie, a fairly shallow albeit amazing girl, was moved to tears by munch. granted, it wasn't the looming global existential crisis that got her but her broken heart splashed all over munch's canvases; but it did something for her...

after the exhibit we went looking for jackson pollack because katie had never seen one but they weren't on display so we planted ourselve's down amongst the contemporary digital design exhibit and talked about art and politics and whether or not art for art's sake is a responsible position for an artist to take given the current state of affairs or whether we have a greater responsibility. we also had a really interesting discussion about politics in general. katie comes from oil money and her parents raised her to be very conservative in her political beliefs. for a time she was lending, all the way from calgary, her full support to bush and the war. we didn't talk about politics ever back then...if nothing else living in new york these past two years has really broadended her horizons and at almost 25 she's starting to find her own perspectives. the first thing to go? her support for the war. thank god!

anyways, after an amazing conversation we went for supper and then made our way to a house party one of her classmates was throwing.

here's the deal: the party was fun. it was a party. drinking, chatting, the usual. although, i was totally weirded out by the fact that not a single person at that party smoked weed or had any weed...weird...whatever. so it was a party. more specifically, it was a drama party and it was disheartening to discover that no matter where you go and no matter where you come from drama parties and drama kids (in theatre school) are all the same. i like to think that in my two years out in the 'real world' i have lost some of the 'drama kid'-isms i am sure i once possessed. i'm pretty sure of this because by 2:30am i NEEDED to leave.

seriously, the volume and the spectacle was too fucking much.

and i was a little disappointed because the lovely cadence weapon was playing a show in nyc on that same night and i wouldn't have minded checking it out but katie wasn't into it and she needed a friend. i couldn't in good conscience ditch her for rollie.

we got back to katie's about 3:30 and we chatted for a little while longer. mostly she raged about some of her classmates and her ex and all that shit i am so glad i left behind when i graduated and then we passed out.

oh, did i mention it was raining INSANELY hard? no, i don't think i did...between our walk to MoMA, the restuarant, and amy's house (the party hostess) we were soaked to the bone. everything i was wearing was wet and i shivered all night long...

the next morning was no different. rain! rain! rain!

sunday, april 23, 2006.

11:00am: wake up.

i have to be at the airport around 1:30 to flu home so katie and i decide to go for breakfast and celebrate a last rainy sunday. it take four blocks for me to find the BEST BREAKFAST i have ever had. we went to a place called magador (or something-it sounded like matador but wasn't) and we had:

- fresh squeezed oj made partly, i think, from blood oranges. it had a pinky tinge and tasted like europe. or at least italy and how i remember it.

- green salad.

- hashbrowns cut from organic red baby potatoes cooked just right.

- spinach, tomatoe and goatcheese omelette that was pretty much the greatest omelette i'd ever eaten in my entire life. not even pretty much, absolutely the best breakfast i'd ever had in my life.

i could live in new york for that breakfast alone.

st. mark's place between 1st and avenue a-if you're ever there.

1:45pm: i arrive at the airport, i sit and i wait and then i fly. i get home at 10 after stops in montreal and ottawa. ironic that at the end of all of it i still found myself in ottawa.

so that's that. i don't really know how to end this. as i write these last few lines almost two weeks since i got home i am feeling some tears and a little twinge of sadness and i don't know if the conversation i'm having with someone who i wish i knew better or if it's because we're talking about new york or if it's new york itself...all i know is i feel something and i kind of like it.

i'm altogether less overwhelmed by the whole thing, i suppose.

sorry this was so long.

love love love
michelle.

*a prize to anyone who tells me where i stole that line from.