September was a lovely month, I spent it catching up with friends and family and spending as much time outdoors with my mom up in Canada as I could. October was its polar opposite, spent mostly working on my CELTA. With the shortening daylight hours, my life consisted mostly of waking before dawn, drinking coffee quietly by myself while taking the few minutes of the day that I could to NOT think about teaching, then walking to the subway as the sun rose, spending all day at International House New York, where I received my certification, basically spending the morning learning about teaching and the afternoon applying what I'd learned, then walking back to the subway after the sun had set and returning home to plan for the next day. It was a grueling month and while I think overall it was worth it, it did not make for a lot of fun times. A couple of beers and nice lunches grabbed with my fellow CELTA "applicants", a movie on a Saturday afternoon once or twice, a visit from Zach towards the end of the month. That was about it for fun, for me, in October.
So once I'd finished and gone out to celebrate Halloween in proper fashion with my CELTA buddies, I took a couple days to organize my life then headed down to North Carolina to see my brother and sister-in-law, soak up some early November southern warmth, and enjoy a little R&R before I started working as a substitute teacher at IHNY, a position I lucked into because they just happened to be looking for people to teach the actual classes they hold for paying students while I was finishing up the CELTA (our students got classes free of tuition, as they are the guinea pigs of student teachers).
All of which is to say, North Carolina is an interesting state. I knew that Ben and Casey would be working a lot on most of the days I was visiting, so I did some research on one of my new favorite websites, Atlas Obscura, beforehand so that we could make the most of the days we had to hang out together. It was there that I stumbled upon Mary's Gone Wild Folk Art and Doll Baby Museum (aka Mary's) and demanded that we make the two-ish hour pilgrimage out to Supply, North Carolina to see it.
Which is what we did, on a perfectly temperate November afternoon. But before we could get there, we ran across something almost, if not weirder, than the main event: Fort Apache, junkyard spectacle with a strongly anti-crackhead message located along the road on the way to Mary's. We drove past this place and I'm pretty sure I did a triple take and before I could even get the words out to demand we pull a u-turn to investigate what I had just seen, Ben was already turning around. We were not disappointed.
(side note: for more info on Jeff Koons or Nick Cave, Artsy has a lot of interesting photos and information!)
Where are all these toilets even coming from???
The RV, outside and inside.
(Sorry, too lazy to rotate this. Just turn your head to the side!)
This is not quite timely, but yeah, there were a TON of confederate flags all over this park. I don't have any warm and fuzzy feelings towards the confederate flag; I do think it represents a legacy of oppression and violence. However, having lived in Texas (where many people fly the Texas flag and not the US one) and traveled through the south, I can at least understand that to many people it is also an emblem of the south persevering through economic devastation and strife (which, to be fair, is the result of building an economic system based on owning other people, so not a great plan there guys). And with places like this it also seems to be part of the collage of kitsch, one stroke in a painting of garish-ness and ill taste which together represents an underdog, salt-of-the-earth, making the dilapidated beautiful in its own way, kind of mentality. I don't know if that makes any sense. I'm not saying I would ever fly the confederate flag nor that I think other people should, but I'm also not writing about this place to condemn their flying it. I do think the place is beautiful, I think it's hideous and beautiful at the same time and I have no conflicted feelings about that contradiction. The flag, I do have conflicted feelings about. I think people should take it down. But I suppose I wish they could understand the point of view of people who want them to take it down, and not be forced into doing it. Naive as that may be.
/rant.
The door of this car opened, and it seemed only natural that Ben would jump in.
He seemed slightly less confident after we closed the door and found there was no door handle on the inside.
Yeah. Those are Union soldiers, hanging next to the confederate flag. Like I said, I do think this junkyard was beautiful. I think any time people can take garbage or unwanted items and make it visually or thematically interesting, there is beauty there. Which is not to say I agree with all the messages it offered up. (Except NO CRACKHEADS! I think we can all get behind that one.) But I could still appreciate its aesthetic value.
Looking inside the yard through the locked gate, it was unfortunately closed for the afternoon.
A trail of toilets.
Ben making friends.
So that was Apache Fort. Can junk be art? I think so. Can junk be art and be offensive? Yeah. That also. Let's continue on to Mary's place, a far less offensive and ominously strange place that is instead far more whimsical and only slightly suggestive of mental illness (instead of strongly indicating crackhead-related paranoia and obsession). I realize my photos may not fully do justice to the anti-crackhead stance that the Fort Apache owners felt the need to display, just trust that there were a TON of signs all over expressing their [not good] feelings about addiction and those who suffer from it.
We almost missed Mary's, there are a couple signs out b the street but from the front it looks like an almost-normal house with perhaps a few more lawn ornaments than your normal falling-down country roadside home.
Once you park your car out front and wander around back, though, it's pretty damn hard to mistake this place for anything else but Mary's Wonderful World of Slightly Terrifying Christian Baby Dolls and Mild Insanity. I don't know that any words can really explain how strange and otherworldly this place was. I'll let the pictures do the talking:
("Only one thing in the world could've dragged me away from the soft glow of electric sex gleaming in the window...")
Everywhere you turned, there was something to look at.
Obviously my favorite of all the houses, I was pretty much prepared to move into this one.
What else is there to say about Mary's? Even while we were there we could see men working, building additional wings to the rambling main house (which we stepped into and which was filled ceiling to floor with even more antique/junk shop knick-knacks). Each house had its own strange personality, and yet there were recurring themes: tiny churches and altars, the play of late afternoon sun coming through old bottles piled on each other to make a wall here or there, the red-headed mermaid that seemed to follow us, showing herself on every surface of all the houses, the dirty multitude of dolls creating various innocuous tableau's, the hand-painted signs expressing folksy Mary-isms everywhere. We met the lady herself as well, she was sitting in the central house in the backyard (queen of the baby dolls, seated among a sea them as though she we were herself one, all of them but Mary and a few human visitors frozen mid-tea party from now until the end of time). She was lovely, and gracious, laid-back and odd at the same time. She was kind, though, and welcomed us to stay as long as we want, look at anything we want, take as many pictures as we want. It was a much warmer experience than Fort Apache, though perhaps disturbing in a different sense.
Is it art? Dunno. It makes her happy though, and it made me happy, and I enjoyed my quiet, eerie hour or two wandering around the fantasy that Mary has created.
The rest of my time in North Carolina was good as well, we also visited the county carnival where we saw a lot of livestock and rode some rides that actually made me fear for my life. And of course, we ate a ton of great burritos, pizza, and carnival garbage food. I took a ton of photos of those events on my iPod which are sadly all lost, due its untimely drowning by monsoon on a particularly unfortunate bike ride home from work. What else? We even went and saw a GOOD movie for a change, Interstellar, from which we came away baffled/impressed! I saw Ben's band practice and got to meet some of his friends, and I may have done something my parents aren't going to be happy about when they read this blog post.
(Sorry, guys. I was going to tell you but I figured why tell them while living with them when you can tell them while living halfway around the world?Iloveyoupleasedon'tbeangryatleastthisoneishiddenmostofthetimesorry!!)
Just a beautiful sunset seen from my wonderful, generous, fantastic, lovely parent's apartment.
Next up: I returned to New York City and started substitute teaching at IHNY, but I did take a weekend to go down to Philadelphia and visit friends, including my good friend (and fellow ex-Ingles Abre Puertas volunteer) Zach. He took me to happy hour in his neighborhood, which turned into taking in the local drag show competition. It started at midnight. This was not easy for me as I am a senior citizen at heart. But Zach brings out the best in me. (Sorry for the quality of these, I took them with my iPod [RIP little epod] which took potato-quality photos.)
The judges, former winners and famous Philadelphians alike.
But was it art? Fuck yes it was!
Visiting J-Bar and delighting in her sister's dog, Reuben, who is some kind of beagle-corgi-dachshund hybrid genetically engineered to destroy my heart (because he is that cute).
Speaking of dogs, some shots of Jack taken with my new camera (in which is particularly handsome/goofy/faunlike):
One of his favorite games was this: walk into the room and stare at you. If you don't immediately get up and follow him to a second location where he will stare at you until you interpret what it is he wants, he will start barking. It was a pretty shit game, really.
Even in his infirmity, he was pretty damn cute.
Then Jo came up to visit me for a night, and got to partake in my parent's interesting decision to cook a goose:
Just...disgusting.
Not at all disgusting. Polar opposite. GOD I MISS BRUSSEL SPROUTS!!!
This was a pretty good pie that was even better for breakfast the next morning, with coffee.
META.
My mom and our neighbor, Piki, exercising their culinary skills.
This is a face I miss dearly. Also, experimenting with my new camera's settings.
My dad carving the goose.
LOOK AT THOSE BEAUTIFUL BRUSSEL SPROUTS.
Stuffing. STUFFING. Oh god what am I gonna do when Thanksgiving rolls around?
This is the face of longing.
But you can understand why, right?
Deluxe.
The next day Jo and I rolled ourselves out of the apartment and headed over to the Jersey side of the Hudson River, to the Palisades to work off some of that feast and do a little light hiking. The trail we chose turned out to be more of a stroll than a hike and the weather didn't give us much to work with but it was still a nice afternoon, barring a few very creepy True Detective-looking structures.
The fuck is a Dredge Room.
And why does it look like a murdertorium?
DEFINITELY a murdertorium.
I think this picture should in the dictionary with the entry for SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). This was about as sunny as it got.
Weirdly, a bunch of dead fish on the trail.
Some dude just chilling out, at the Palisades, playing the bagpipe by himself while staring off at the Manhattan skyline, just your regular Sunday afternoon activities.
One more thing and then we'll get back to talking about art. But for now let's talk about Christmas cookies. (Because I sure as hell won't be making them this year.) Turns out, my hella awesome new camera is particularly good at capturing the delicious essence of Christmas cookies/treats. Maybe I should get into the food photography business.
Poor Jack. Always a beggar, never a baker.
Sugar cookies.
Chocolate chips.
My personal holiday favorite, nut cups. (Yeah, yeah, make your jokes. Those things are delicious.) ((If you really want to get inappropriate with it, consider that "kuki" is slang in Hungarian for penis. Nut cup cookie. Ponder that for a moment, if you will.))
Speaking of Hungary, I obtained the recipe from my contact teacher/friend Erzsébet to make diós beigli, a traditional Hungarian Christmas dessert [and/or breakfast item]. Although I think the poppy seed variant may be more popular in Hungary, I personally hate the flavor of that one so we made the other famous variant, walnut/cinnamon/raisin. It is... the bomb. The Hungarian bomb. I didn't like a lot of Hungarian desserts just because they were so cake-y or dry but this one was maybe one of my favorite things about living there, especially during the holidays.
And of course, snickerdoodles. No Christmas is Christmas without them. My mom sent me off to Vietnam with a box of them (which were gone by the end of my first night in the hotel in Hanoi) so I consider my Christmas for this year covered retroactively, more or less.
Next up: more adventures with my mother!
"Time to get those 'Hillary for president' posters out of storage."
Walking along the High Line, and visiting some galleries in West Chelsea. First up: the Jack Shainman Gallery, where Nick Cave's exhibition Made by Whites for Whites was showing. Speaking of kitsch factor and the compiling of garbage/unwanted items for aesthetic re-purposing.... this happened.
My mom's "I'm trying to be open-minded about art" face. She's gotten a lot better at this since she moved in next door to/befriended an art curator.
But is it art? I have no fucking idea anymore! Maybe? I love a good collage, where there is so much to look at that your eyes can barely focus or land on one specific object. I appreciate the sensory overload. For a time. But after the first 4 or 5 of these pieces it was hard to even really see them anymore. I don't think that negates its value of art, I just don't really know if I'm too dumb or Nick Cave's message is. The point is... we're like magpies? We like shiny things and can't see what's beautiful and what's not, so we're desensitized? I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.
Finally, Zach came up to New York for a weekend and we took in the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney. At this point my mind is melting thinking about all the art or "art" or 'art' or whatever the hell you want to call all the things I spent last autumn doing and seeing. Is what Jeff Koons does art? He certainly puts a lot of effort into it. It's aesthetically interesting. I don't know how much I really felt affected. It wasn't like Mary's or Fort Apache, where I felt transported. But then again, the Whitney is a much more austere setting than a junkyard or a North Carolina backyard. And I didn't feel the overwhelmed confusion/dissonance I felt at Nick Cave's art. I think some of the pieces were amusing, I read some of the explanations and some of them I could understand on a theoretical level, but I didn't really have any kind of reaction to a lot of this.
This I could not help but laugh at. I even read the description, the idea being of glorifying and glamorizing everyday items. Cast the common household bucket in silver and now it's art? Yup. Okay.
So. Many. Selfies.
So it was, all in all, very shiny, very colorful, very interesting. Was it art? Yeah. Okay. It's art. It's in a museum, so it must be... right?
One floor up, in a much less crowded/popular exhibition, frames filled with entirely white and black paintings. I mostly took these for my brother Justin, who rails against this kind of art, and because again, I have no fucking clue if this is art but I find myself more amused than moved than this kind of shi---- I mean, work.
I didn't write about this earlier and I'm not going to write anything extensive about this now, but after Christmas my parents went up to Canada with our family dog, Jack, who we inherited from my Aunt Maureen (who had several other dogs at the time of giving him to us whom he did not get along with). He'd been ailing for some time and they made the difficult decision to end his suffering. He had a pretty good run, especially the second half of his life where he was basically a little princeling of Manhattan who spent his winters as acting HBIC in my parents' apartment and his summers romping around the Canadian wilderness. But he'll still be missed, strange, obtuse, gentle creature that he was. These are a couple of candid photos I took of him after he went to the groomer and was looking quite lustrous and handsome, a fact of which he was obviously aware.
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