Central Park Skaters: Halloween Party
Celebrating the last day of the season, the Central Park Dance Skate Association hosted their annual Halloween Party. This fine group of people have been in my life a lot lately as I am writing about the CPDSA’s president, Lezly Ziering. Here is a preview of some of my photos for the project!
Lezly in his red costume. Usually, he wears purple, but for Halloween he even covered up his skates!
It was a great day, the weather remained perfect, and the energy high and good.
Banksy Caged:The London artist’s latest show in NYC
From the outside, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill in the West Village looks like it has always been there, but it hasn’t. The “shop” is the shell holding the latest work by the British graffiti artist Banksy.
A sandwich board standing on the straw covered sidewalk out front reads, “Open for rare breeds, pet supplies, mechanically retrieved meat.” The last phrase most accurately describes the main theme of the controversial exhibition inside the pet shop: processed meat pets.
This isn’t the first time Banksy has created a politically charged piece of art, but, the execution of his art, which normally revolves around graffiti – spray paint, stencils and cut outs, is new. By having an actual show, with a press release, web site, and location, Banksy deviates from his classic presentations. Also, by displaying his art legally, in a building, Banksy has put his creativity in a box, which juxtaposes his exhibit of fake animals in their pens and cages.
Using animatronics, Banksy has created a world of mechanical animals and moving food inside the pet shop. Placed in a large fishbowl, two giant fish sticks swim around a plastic plant like a pair of goldfish. Six glass tanks line the wall next to the fishbowl; their inhabitants, consisting of a series of sausages, move as if they are alive. A mustard adorned hotdog “drinks” from a stainless steel dish in one tank, while below him, a tube of baloney squirms in its plastic casing. To the left of the baloney, a group of cocktail weenies wiggle on a rock, a container of toothpicks resting near by.
The most striking of the six are the salami, which resemble a snake emerging from its skin in slices, and the tank included a feed dish filled with olives. While it’s unusual to see processed meat displayed in this way, this is exactly how you would expect to see turtles, fish and lizards for sale in a pet shop. Though in a pet shop, the lighting wouldn’t have had the fluorescent glow of a grocery store. Because Banksy showed these pieces this way, he made the impression what if we bought our processed meat the same way we bought a gerbil.
The wall-mounted shelves behind the tanks are filled with Swanson’s TV dinners, cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, and other meaty human food, none of which you would feed a pet. In this way, Banksy relates humans to pets, and pets to the animals we unconsciously eat. The feeling of watching a hot dog come to life was more comical then disgusting, lending humor to the way we view our food.
The most disturbing part of the show is a pen of chicken nugget chicks feeding from a classic McDonald’s style sauce container, while a more naturalistic sculpture of a mama hen dozes in her roost. Even more unsettling than the nuggets dipping themselves are the series of eggs on the other side of the coop. One of the eggs has “hatched,” an un-battered nugget with its resin afterbirth puddled around the shell. These images invoke the idea of what if our meat was born the way we eat it. If an egg looked like a chicken nugget, would we have a different attitude about consuming the chicken?
Banksy also looks at animal exploitation beyond factory farming, which is in stark contrast to his last New York show where some viewers chastised him for animal abuse after he painted and displayed a live elephant. In this section of the exibit, Banksy focuses on the idea of manipulation of animals for human benefit.
In a pen viewable from inside and outside the shop, a white rabbit sits on her hind legs filing her nails with an emery board, the scritch-scratch of her grooming barely audible, but distracting, above the Johnny Cash and classic country music playing in the shop. She wears a pearl necklace, blush, and eyeliner, and her automated head tilts seductively. Her vanity mirror is laden with makeup by Cover Girl, which is made by Proctor & Gamble, a company that commonly uses animal testing for their products. By displaying the rabbit with animal tested makeup on, Banksy draws the viewer to question if beauty is important enough to destroy another being and what if we tested on humans, would we still wear the eyeliner?
A chimpanzee sits in a cage on the other end of the shop. He wears large DT770 Pro headphones and watches chimps having sex on the Discovery Channel while breathing heavily and rubbing his crotch. In his foot he clutches an empty Budweiser can, and on his right, sits a local pizza box scattered with crusts and a pack of Marlboros. On the left side of him rests a National Geographic magazine with the cover article, “Who Killed the Mountain Gorillas?” But, he remains fixed and glassy eyed as the chimps copulate on the screen. By this image, Banksy makes a statement about how Americans ignore what’s going on in the animal kingdom by drowning it out with booze, porn and food.
The last in this trio is the leopard. From the outside, it appears to be a asleep on the style of branch you would usually see in the zoo. Its tail swings in rhythm, and you can almost fancy it breathes. But enter the shop and cross to its other side and the leopard turns out to be a coat, positioned to look like a gutted animal with the brass buckle doubling as the wild cat’s balls. How could anyone want to skin a leopard from the zoo? It makes wearing fur look truly cruel, without the in-your face tactics of PETA activists who throw paint on rich women in Manhattan.
Banksy’s show poignantly comments on our view of animals as products, without chastising viewers for their choices. Rather, he simply illustrates some of the current issues relating to animals. The show directs the viewer to ask the question, “Hey, did you ever look at it this way?” And, based on the disgusted and intrigued reactions of the people in the Village Pet Shop, they haven’t, which makes his show a success.
Down and Out: Review of Chuck Klosterman’s novel
Down and Out
Review of Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman
By Linnea Covington
Set in the fictional town of Owl, North Dakota in late 1983, Chuck Klosterman’s debut novel Downtown Owl attempts to find deeper meaning in the daily grind of a quiet Midwestern cow town and its inhabitants. Chiefly, the book centers on three main characters: a young female newcomer, a 73-year-old man, and a high school football player.
Fresh out of college, Julia, came from Madison, Wisconsin to teach seventh and eighth grade history, including the course “Our State,” which is all about North Dakota, a place she never thought she would live. Julia’s arrival marks her as one of the only available woman in Owl, giving her the role of fresh meat and a natural receptacle for the men’s affection – shown in the form of potent gin and tonics at the local bars.
Horace, a long time Owl resident, never achieved his dreams and spends his days in the town’s coffee shop, talking with other old men about a legendary football game and who did what to whom in the town. While his life has remained relatively quiet, Horace has a couple of secrets that set him apart for the average Joe.
The third character, teenage Mitch, appears to be an average, naïve high school student. He plays football, hates his teacher, and relates the town to his class reading, Orson Wells’ 1984, which leads him to conclude that they already live in a Big Brother run society.
While Klosterman attempts to organize his characters by titling the chapters with the date and individual character’s name, he muddles the stories with too much sudden and pointless information about other townspeople and events that don’t help in showing the town. The result made the three characters he tried to highlight fall flat, as they don’t distinguish themselves in the readers mind. This causes the reader to maintain apathy towards them and conclusively, the book.
Klosterman also has the tendency to interrupt the action in order to tell a story about random people, and often, as soon as he introduces them, they disappear. This is especially true in the case of Julia. Her chapters were riddled with descriptions of the drunks at the bar and internal dialogue with Vance, the sad football hero she fancies herself in love with. Klosterman offers an unconvincing female character that not only remains one-dimensional, but whom the reader never really knows, or cares about in the end.
Klosterman does a little better with Horace, who turned out to be the most compelling character, as his plot moves with purpose. He is old, but still changing and challenging himself. Hence, his character grew throughout the book and he is the only one to survive it.
Aside from Horace, the other characters sound the same. Perhaps this monotonous portrayal of people is what Klosterman wanted to illustrate. Even their thoughts display the idea of normalcy. He wrote, “What Mitch wanted most was what he already had: a room…He wanted to sleep in a room that expressed nothing, because rooms were supposed to be meaningless.” [pg 108] As Klosterman wrote it, meaningless describes the lives of the people in the Owl, and it’s true. Instead of experiencing emotional or physical change like many characters in other novels, the characters in Downtown Owl end up drowning in mediocrity.
Klosterman understands this kind of place because he grew up in a small town in North Dakota and he left for bigger and better things. Still, if his goal was to illustrate that typical equals tedious, he succeeded, but without convincing us that these people are normal. The result is a rather boring book, whose sudden climatic ending does not compensate for hundreds of pages of nothing.
Despite his weak story line, Klosterman does a fine job with the details of the town and demonstrating his obvious talent with words. Like when he describes Owl through Julia’s eyes, “The land here was relentlessly flat; it was the fattest place she’d ever seen…When she looked out her bedroom window, she could see for ten miles to the north. Maybe for twenty miles. Maybe she was seeing Manitoba. It was like the earth had been pounded with a rolling pin.” [pg 9]
Another facet Klosterman expertly utilized was his application of 80s detail, like references to Trapper Keepers and acid washed jeans, which lent authenticity to the setting. He did however fail to create personality through description like when he said, “Julia washed her paws while Naomi dried her talons.” [pg 32] This statement gave the false impression that Julia is a sweet innocent girl and Naomi, another teacher at the school, a harpy.
His most detailed and dramatic scene involves a ghastly description of a tortured cat, an image that didn’t do anything to change or add to the perception of the town, but instead, appeared there purely for shock value.
Known for his non-fiction books like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto and Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, Klosterman’s wordy fiction reads like his non-fiction, which doesn’t work in this novel. The writing is compelling enough that the reader constantly wants to continue with the story in an attempt to figure out a plot, but it never takes shape. The underlying feelings of non-commitment projects from every character save for the aforementioned Horace.
Klosterman himself appears bored of Downtown Owl, as his quick, dramatic ending takes the place of a slow resolution or development of an actual purpose to these people’s lives. In the end, Klosterman fans would have spent their time better rereading one of his clever essay collections.
Crazy Central Park Guy?
I was working on a story in Central Park today and this awesome looking guy came by. Seriously, is he not a dream? One of the fellows said he was gay and from Puerto Rico, which, to him, meant he couldn’t understand anything.
