Naytin's blog

Ode to a Bra Tree: There are links to opinions at the bottom of the blogWhile reading Frazier’s essay, “Bags in Tress”, I wanted to give him my full attention. I, too, get annoyed with trash in trees. It makes me feel the filth of the city even more readily. As if seeing filled trash bags all over the street weren’t enough. I wanted to read and commiserate. Finally someone raised the issue.
But instead of simply jumping onboard I got distracted. I kept thinking about bra trees. What is a bra tree, you ask? I’ve never heard of a tree that bears supportive lingerie fruit!
Well, to allay your concerns, it doesn’t actually grow brassieres. It’s an entirely normal tree, but with special human enhancement. On most ski mountains there is at least one tree, the bra tree, which becomes the focal point of an annual ritual. Every year people throw their bras and other undergarments onto it. These ornaments come to litter nearly every branch by the end of the winter. The tree transforms into a cotton and timber reminder that no matter how prissy the resort, there are people there that still want to have a good time.
It was easy to tell the difference between the two in the beginning. Bra trees are enjoyable because they give energy and become a funny emblem, while bags in trees are only a reminder of bad littering habits. But when I learned that there is actually a faction of people that enjoy this sight, that just relish in the rough glittering of shopping bag strips, I wasn’t so sure of where to draw the line anymore.
I assume that there are also people that get offended by the bra trees. Some older people probably think it’s a sign of cultural decay, or just don’t want their grandchildren to witness the horrors of lace. As well, others may see it as an intrusion on the beauty of the pristine mountain. So there are contending points of view around this type of tree embellishment. It became confusing.
I started thinking about how, since there were clearly polarized views regarding both, I could formulate an educated opinion about why I like one and not the other. Why did I think the bra tree was fun and festive, while the bag tree was disgusting? It seemed that the way I perceived these defined places came down to a question of ratios. This is relevant because bags litter trees everywhere. I hardly think that people would get upset enough to make a totally new invention, the bag snatcher, if there weren’t many trees like it. The bra tree, conversely, stands alone in a natural setting: a single reminder of human presence. In the former case, it seems that man is ruining nature while in the latter, man is only making a small mark on nature. giving himself a place of reference.
It seems interesting in terms of place making because it speaks to the uniqueness of a place and what people value in it. When a place, no matter good or bad is unique it will be much more valuable and noticed, while once it becomes ubiquitous it loses its value and people may come to dislike it.
In my research I came across a few links that discuss the bra trees and their origins/
Here’s a link to a discussion Group about bra trees, most of the bloggers are older women: http://www.theskidiva.com/forums/showthread.php?t=749
This one has more about the history of them:
http://skiinghistory.org/forums/showthread.php?t=183&highlight=tradition

Confusion and Ecstasy on The Subway: Link to River of Steel- It may give the Subway a better Sense of PlaceBy July I’ll be making a big decision. To move, or not to move? Not down the block; nor a different neighborhood, or across the river. I’ll have to decide whether or not to leave New York. All five boroughs. I don’t presume that my situation is special or severely interesting. Most people graduating from NYU are probably grappling with a similar question. However, I think that my answer will come with a little bit more of an informed perspective on what I may be leaving behind.
New York is a vibrant city with a distinct, though shifting, culture. As people are pumped into the city and flushed out they leave small marks here. Each person has tagged the side of a building, has chipped away a brittle sliver of door paint, or maybe has just worn away a millimeter of sidewalk. These changes seem miniscule. However, their amalgam has a definite character. It’s a character of rapidity and inconsistency.
Everyone here moves so quickly that their traces seem to have no associations. Changes in the city become immediate relics of contemporary culture. They’re without owner or origin. They might stay on that block, donating an orphaned flair. But equally likely is the mark will get covered. The graffiti tag will get cleaned, the chipped door will get repainted, the sidewalk will be worn further.
Don’t get me wrong, though. This detachment can be insanely inspiring. Getting caught in the rush of motion and confusion is part of what makes New York so attractive. It’s what has made me love this city for so long. However, at this point in my life it’s valuable to question whether this is what I want. Do I want such impermanence?
At times, this lack of specific place has been very upsetting. I sometimes want to feel more at home, more settled. I think it’s a cause of the classic “break-ups” with New York. People are continually balancing its charisma with its flakiness, and sometimes the relationship seems to go sour. Occasionally, New York doesn’t have time for you. It’s completely pushing against you and it’s hard to know how to argue back, to make the city see your point of view.
But what’s become apparent through this class is that maybe these emotional fits can be avoided, or at least muffled, through knowledge. In all of our texts it seems that a common thread (insanely obvious, but valid) is knowing where one is: understanding his location. As we progressed through chapters and books, I noticed more and more the things they were talking about. The city was colored in novel ways. These hues ranged from the reasoning behind the gridded streets to another person’s opinion about bags in trees. It’s sort of ironic that what I’ve learned from these books is less about how to craft a specific place, and more about how to make any space into a place. All one needs is to have enough informational attachment. Exploration is key, intentional or incidental.
It seems to me that what I need to remember is that in between the places I’ve made and perceive in New York, the world is constantly in flux. It’s rapidly being demolished and rebuilt around me. This can be frustrating, but also exciting. It’s a place that draws spirit from everyone’s ability to feel lost, to feel away from his life just around the block. But this feeling is tempered with the knowledge that he can return home easily. It’s amazing and dislocating at the same time.
I still don’t know if I’m going to leave New York. All these discoveries are pros and cons. Whatever this city is, it’s a fascinating specimen of life that I’ve enjoyed and will continue to enjoy. But there are other places out there. I’d like to explore them in this similar way. The areas where space and place are demarcated, separate, merge and blur. Maybe I’ll move in July, or maybe I’ll stay in this intricate mess of space and place.

Mr. Reichenthal is wearing a faded maroon shirt, slightly torn blue jeans and a pair of black oxfords. His hair’s a bit messed up, probably the wind.
I’m wearing the same…exact...outfit.

Me: So nice to meet you Mr. Reichenthal, I’ve been waiting a very long time to meet you. It’s really such a pleasure.
Nathan: Oh, don’t call me that. Please, just Nathan. I can’t believe we’ve never met before. I’ve heard a lot about you though.
M: Yes, I think we know a lot of the same people. But I really have to run to get dinner soon so could we get this done relatively quickly.
N: Sorry, then let’s get rolling.
M: No problem…So…When did you first get into public art?
N: Well, I never really thought about it much in this form until a few weeks ago. It was one of the first nice days of spring and I decided to take a long walk from campus to Central Park West. Along the way I took care to notice tiny things that made the street beautiful, though sometimes they weren’t gorgeous as a whole. It got me thinking about what I want to do with art and what I enjoy.
M: So did you-
N: Could you let me finish my incredibly interesting story?...Thanks. So I was walking uptown and I’m noticing all these small things. Then I go into my sculpting class. About an hour into it, I got really pissed off. I was making a sculpture of a neck and realized I had no direction, no passion for it. So I was thinking about what I wanted to do and realized that what I most enjoyed was finding beauty in unexpected places and sharing it with people. Then, on my subway ride home I realized that while I was looking at all these small details and was mesmerized by the lights whizzing by as we rushed through the tunnels, most people looked like the life had just been sucked out of them. Faces blank and bored. Then the idea for the project hit me.

People use their time here as a chance to shut off- to get away. No cell reception, no friends or family, nothing to think about. Yet this retreat is a place that most people hate. They try their best to be in another world. It’s a mode of transportation, nothing more. I-pods blare, books consume, and advertisements make great focal points. Yet here, in this underground shuttle, I often find myself absorbed and stimulated by the world around me. There is so much life on the subway, so much beauty, but people don’t seem to notice.

The goal of this project was to help others understand that this space is important, or at the very least interesting, by creating an art installation in a subway car. New Yorkers spend hours of their week in the subway. Some may feel that this period is lost. It’s relegated to the transportation category of time usage, just below the root canal category. But this time can actually be well spent. Being in the subway is an experience of both society and spatial relations. One only needs to realize this to garner meaning from his daily commute.

The first portion of this experience can be seen in Ian Frazier’s Gone to New York. His anecdotal style gives a place social character. The snippets of lives and experiences he captures reveal that every space where people interact will become interesting. In “Take the F” Frazier speaks about subways specifically. He says: “ I have spent days, weeks on the F train. The trip from Seventh Avenue to Midtown Manhattan is long enough so that every ride can produce its own minisociety of riders…Once a woman an arms length from me pulled a knife on a man who threatened her. I remember the argument and the principals, but mostly I remember the knife…”(92). Frazier’s writing illustrates a way of seeing the subway. It shows how even without cognizing its importance we can tell there’s a culture that forms between travelers in close quarters.

In my project, I attempted to make this connection tangible. My friends and I installed a dry erase board, comment boxes next to advertisements, and a guest book. The purpose of all of these was to help passengers create a short, shared history of a subway ride, to connect people with those that have ridden just before them, and to recognize that there are people with lives here and that it’s not a barren, fluorescent lit, hall of hollow faces. The aesthetic portion of riding the subway, which Frazier alludes to but doesn’t specifically touch on, is noticing the details that can enliven the space: the lights outside, the guts of the city, the detailing of the metalwork inside, the small symbols and letters on the walls. There are so many small attributes that we, as urban dwellers, take for granted. But against all odds, those lights outside can be as beautiful as watching the stars. The pipes and wires can be as intriguing as the bustling city above. And the pearly interior can be as intricate as a painting in MoMA. To draw attention to these visually interesting portions of the subway, we employed framing and accenting. We framed windows, symbols, and functional hardware with construction paper and colored tape. By setting them apart from the rest of the car we hoped to show the viewer our own interest and the potential for their appreciation. To achieve a similar affect, we accented points of interior design. Most prominent was the use of spiraling tape around curved portions of the metal bars, a place where one can truly see the care and artistry that goes into these machines. In this project, the two types of experience, aesthetic and social, were made tangible and collided. While my friends and I were fashioning this installation, we were having both social and aesthetic experiences. As we looked around the car for ideas, our close evaluations helped us to develop a keener sense of our surrounding. But this attention would also change our conception of the L train. It would, from now on, be the place where we cut colored paper, wrote in makeshift guest books and framed unlikely objects of interest. Our social and aesthetic experiences were mutually enriching. Additionally, the random passengers who saw us would as well have a new and deepened perception of the subway. It will now be the place they saw those insane students sitting on the dirty floor and hanging a dry erase board. Hopefully, it will also be the place they noticed the floor’s speckled details or the elegant curves of the blue benches. Hopefully, our work promoted this experience in others: that once we left the subway and our creation stood on its own, people let themselves be a part of it. Hopefully, these New Yorkers can now look at the subway in a new, more loving light.

"All eyes on me in the center of the ring just like a circus": The classy taste-maker, Britney Spears, even wrote a song on the subjectToday, I was walking along Fifth Avenue near Central Park. While I was taking in the budding green trees and the lush grasses I failed to immediately notice a similar energy in the people. It wasn’t the warmest of our spring transition, but it was a Sunday, and Sundays (the warm ones) call for relaxation outside. So, I started looking at the people. As my friend and I came to the corner of 57th and 5th, a corner of plaza ubiquity, I noticed that the three squares were dotted with people. There were some larger dots, smaller dots, medium dots, but on the whole the plazas were well dotted. (As opposed to the dot-less Winter season).
And all of the sudden Tuan popped into my head. He sure is doing a good job with that increasing “the burden of awareness” (203) thing. In Chapter 12 Tuan says that objects, more specifically sculptures, “have the power to create a sense of place by their own physical presence….[that] A single inanimate object can be the focus of a world”(162). That, like people, they seem to make their own spaces. In the three surrounding plazas I could discern three dominating central objects. The Apple Store Plaza has its Apple Store atrium jutting through the pavement. The Grand Army Plaza has its grand armed statue and its less glorified sister plaza has its less glorified fountain.
People seemed to be congregating around places to sit and places close to the central objects, similar to what the video in class revealed to us: that people sit where there are places to sit. It also said, however, that people tend to avoid open, central spaces. Which seemed as well true. The fringes of the plazas, lined with benches and ledges were popular places to sit and stand. Also, the objects, close to the actual centers of the spaces, were crowded with people. It seems that people indeed liked being near the center. This doesn’t prove that the video was false, if anything it shows how right it was. The video spoke about how people didn’t like to be in central, OPEN spaces. What the statue, the fountain, and the atrium do is diffuse the central space. By placing something there they have made it more comfortable to be there.
Tuan also says that ordered spaces are indicative of cultural rhythm. In this way, it seems that people don’t like to feel they are the focus of all random street attention. They don’t want to feel that everyone’s looking at them, scrutinizing their appearance and actions. Yet people ARE in the center, reclining at the base of statues and the steps of fountains, mingling with the focal object. An explanation could be that these three inanimate objects function in the same way as a street performer does (who, incidentally, usually stands at the center of a space). By drawing attention to himself he lures a crowd. They feel comfortable standing around him, populating a central open space and so they stay. But once he’s finished and moved to the next block, the crowd disperses. The mass of people no longer feels at ease in this center of focus, so it backs away, back onto the benches and fringe hideouts.
It seems that people, though usually only feeling comfortable at the edges and not wanting to dominate public attention, congregate around these objects because it allows them to a) sit where there is place to sit and more importantly b) because it lessens their burden of self awareness. Like with the situation of the street performer, the person gets to advantage of central view without all the responsibilities of being the center of attention. So, it seems that statues perform a vital function, making people feel comfortable in the most area of an open plaza, while also making it that much more beautiful.

A Fabricated New York Story: some people seem to think it's as important as reality: Click meWhitehead takes a lot of time and care to both explain and lace his prose with a message that all of us have our personal versions of New York. They are based on the thing’s you’ve seen and the random facts about its history you find relevant. Your truth is arbitrary, a product of timing and demeanor. But the one thing that really struck me was that he shows us that the stories we fabricate, tied- but only loosely- to reality, can be just as important for our stable perspective of the city.
I’m not sure if I buy his private New York theory. I think that mine is a product of overlaps that are inherent to its construction. My New York is only there because certain people share my places and experiences with me. Without their vantage points and memories my New York would cease to exist. But, of course, there are certain stories that I’ve created of places and people in this city. They are hardly based on an empirical search for truth; they are just the products of meandering musings.
There are the old tenants in my apartment building. One is unhealthily overweight and only wears black. I’ve only ever seen her wearing all black, smoking cigarettes on the stoop or walking back up to her apartment. She lives across from a friend in the building and the base of her door is different than the rest of ours. It’s a rotten wood, and the smell that creeps from the crack is….interesting. It always gets me thinking about how she lives. The living room I’ve fashioned her in my head is always dusty and dimly lit. It’s the epicenter of East Village roach population. They make pilgrimages there, see old friends and family, then scurry off down 11th street and disperse into the neighborhood.
Then there are the two guys I can see from my window. I only see them up on what I assume is their private roof terrace. I’ve never seen them out there together, but I’ve imagined they both live in the same apartment. They’ve been living together for over two years now, after their small wedding in Vermont (after all there’s a rainbow flag on the top floor). They both like to garden so keep some plants up there. But mostly they both like to get away up there. I’m assuming there will be big dinner parties in the summer; there’s a large table with a bunch of chairs.
Then there’s the scraggly guy that I met one of the first days after I moved in. He was sitting on the stoop and chugging a beer. He raved about Obama. Said he lived in the building next door. Every few weeks he’ll come up to me on a random street, not knowing who I am and ask for money for a beer. I imagine he was into politics as a child and just never found his way to law school. He goes in a similar category as the homeless guy that buzzes my apartment a few times a week looking for Scott, my roommate. Scott sometimes befriends the homeless. I should probably ask him for more back-story to see if my fictional truths for him are anywhere near the actual truths.
The stories are almost as important to my conception of New York as the REAL deli down the street and the new coffee shop that just opened up.
I see some new people looking off a roof just down the street. Two older women, both smiling. I’ll get back to you with a dialogue and back-stories.

Urban Icarus: A Modern Painting of Icarus' FallWhen I went back over City of Glass something in my head kept twitching. I’ve been reading for my colloquium and one of the last books I reviewed was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In this explication of Greco-Roman divine history, one passage that interested me was The Story of Deadalus and Icarus. Twitch. Deadalus was stuck in a foreign land. Twitch. He was an inventor. Twitch. He designed mazes. Massive Twitch. And that’s when it hit me. I knew why I kept thinking about it. In the first chapter Auster writes about Daniel Quinn’s dislocation saying: “New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know his neighborhood and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost not only in the city, but within himself as well” (8). Deadalus was in a similar situation: he creates a labyrinth and then is trapped there. He has no way to return home, back to reason. So, he fashions wings to carry himself and his son across the ocean.
In this act of creation, it seems that Quinn may be like Deadalus. To escape the confusion of New York, he creates a new persona. He is a detective with a purpose. This purpose and the distractions it entails are the wings. Somewhere along the way though, he gets lost. His flight is increasingly unstable. The excitement of the chase, however, blinds him. In the confusion of his target, he meets other people in his similar situation. Stillman also seems to have detached himself from the Real to quell his maladjustments. He focuses on a new language that will finally bring humanity back to reason, will rescue it. His new persona is of a revolutionary.
Following these two characters, one can easily see that this theme of ways to extract oneself from the world is a theme woven throughout the novel. Even in the writing style, one is made unaware of where the characters really are. The long and fumbling descriptions of walking routes in the city serve as a way to confuse and make all places seem the same. In the end, the reader is left questioning if this story was even real at all. Was this just the musing of an insane person? In the comparison with Don Quixote, as well, we are asked to ponder if these characters are actually insane. Are they just engaging in an urban version of JB Jackson’s Helix sports? Are they fabricating a world of amusement? It seems not. Now maybe we will associate these tragic characters with Icarus. In their attempt to extract themselves from an entrapping reality they have plunged into the sea (Stillman senior literally jumping from a bridge). They flew too high and the sun melted their wings.

Modern LobbyThere have been many interesting things I’ve read, many of them even like what Tuan says in these powerful pages. However, none of them came together in my mind so clearly as with his idea of mother as the first actual place one knows. This place is moveable and quite unlike any other place one would imagine. A person is so separate from a place, other than noun, it doesn’t really fit into any of the same categories. But what Yi Fun Tuan postulates is that we actually learn about places from interactions with our mothers (or whomever we first associate with place).
This really applies to my colloquium and puts together a few pieces of my formerly disjointed theories on the ways spaces become important and alive, as well as the ways humans interact with them. It all suddenly became clear to me that people interact with spaces either in terms of how their views themselves or how they relate to others. A person finds a minimalist, stark lobby to be much like a high-minded (some read: snobby), contemporary man that one might meet- with a bit of curiosity but also a bit of wonder how he became what he did. There is no trace that he has a history or that he intends to grow from his future. He is a bit too solid and unyielding. This is almost exactly how I have interacted with many contemporary modern spaces.
In terms of the places many of us find to have character, they have things in common with those we keep close. They speak to us in a way that only someone who shares a commonality can do. They make us feel comfortable. How does a space do this? A space that has withstood time, that has been resilient in the face of age and weather, can communicate with the human being quite well. We as people appreciate when a being outside of ourselves can reflect our internal feelings and history. This is exactly what this type of space does, by revealing its cracks, like scars on a person, it shows where it has been and that it has been affected by its lifetime.

Dive InAs Laura and I sat down, the cold waters pounced at our feet. Both our faces pulsated with the jumbled reactions of pain, surprise, and a relaxed fulfillment of winter-long yearning. As the shock faded and the strange contortions of my face gave way to a happy smile, my other four senses (aside from touch) slowly returned and the laughter of children and dogs illuminated the space around me. The different people and their pets invited a playful conversation between my friend and me. Who were these people? Which dogs were cutest? Which ones looked like their owners? The small sounds the questions and answers made vibrated to the same beat as the surrounding social hum. In the warmth of conversation and caressing sunshine we took our conversation to the middle of the river. Splashing as we spoke, we met the friendly dogs and their equally friendly human companions. The conversations were easy, and relaxed, while underneath the water my feet attempted balancing acts on the rough terrain. When I wasn’t socializing, the communication between my feet and brain to keep upright were enough to satisfy me. The occasional slip or accidental splash provoked smiles and laughs from friends and strangers that made it feel we were on a whimsical adventure. But when our conversation came to a slow meander, my brain began to quiet the buzzing of evaluation and thought to allow for a pleasantly unmediated communication with nature. I laid my back on the smooth rock face below, eyes towards the clear blue sky. Looking up in this trance, through the sunlit mosaic of trees and sunshine, my thoughts fluttered just far enough away from earth to feel a part of it, while simultaneously remote.

Florescent Jesus: Vernacular Use for ReligionIn this weeks reading there was both and image and message that really stuck in my head. So much so that I decided I need to do a small project about it. In “The Other Directed House” Jackson talks about our precondition to value intellectual art above popular art, as well as its architectural sister. He spoke of how many new materials and media are often more readily accepted by the masses. Though I’m not sure if this is always the case (oftentimes the avant-garde is a pioneer in thought and inventive uses) it definitely is one that occurs often. Establishments like the established. The image that stuck in my mind was when was speaking of how highway signs use neon lights. We all can recognize, if we think about them, that there is some inherent beauty in these vibrant, attention-grabbing tubes. Jackson muses on “what a gothic or a baroque architect would have done to exploit its theatrical and illusionist possibilities, its ability to transform not only a building but its immediate environment”. So, I decided to take the task upon myself, obviously not with all the time given that of a great architect, but enough to muse a bit on it. How WOULD a gothic architect employ this? I have always been fascinated by Gothic architecture and its obsession with both light and ascendance (as well as transcendence) seemed to be a fruitful starting point to explore. To start, I must admit that it was very hard to get over the initial disparity between the austere grace of a cathedral and the exuberant gaudiness of a neon light fixture. However, what they do share is this “exuberance”.