Tasty Pop-Up Museum

The Whitney offers contemporary art in a super modern building next to the Highline.

Across the street, there's a warehouse-type building that offers ice cream.

It's simple. Buy tickets. Wait outside on line. Answer ice cream trivia while you wait. Tell everyone your favorite flavor. Eat Dove chocolate. Eat Nerds. Basically, while you're on the line, they treat you like you're a 5 year old so you don't get too antsy.

Then you go inside and you eat ice cream.

Then you look at ice cream art.

 Then you eat an ice cream flavored balloon but only if the ice cream balloon machine is working. It wasn't working when we went, but we still got to look at the ice cream cone wall.

Then you contribute a scoop to a larger ice cream cone in the hopes of being part of a world record of greatest number of scoopers to create an ice cream cone. Then you learn more about ice cream by reading what's on the walls and listening to the guide.

Then you wait in a chocolate room that's pretty dark. I suppose it's a dark chocolate room. Get it?

Then you go swimming in a pool of sprinkles. You can eat ice cream toppings from the containers on the wall when you're done.

 

Slightly scared of sinking in and not getting out

Then you go into the next room where they give you a small sucking thingie to put on your tongue. And you do it because you're in the Museum of Ice Cream and not at Woodstock or a rave, so you don't question if it might be the bad acid. Then you take an ice cream cone from the wall of ice cream cones. Hands appear with cones that go into cone holders, and you take one as it appears because you're in the Museum of Ice Cream. Any other place, this would be creepy. Here, it's delightful.

You suck on the lemon and lick the ice cream. Remember that thing you were sucking on your tongue? That's supposed to counteract the sourness of the lemon and the ice cream. That did not work for me, but everything was still delicious.

Then you go into the ice cream playground and see saw and swing and love love love.

Then you leave with sprinkles in your pants, leaving a trail behind you down the street, on the train, in the car, and everywhere until you shake everything out at home.

The Museum of Ice Cream wins.

Sabbaticalling: Weekly Roundup #18

Eighteen! My sabbatical is now a legal adult!

This week went back to semi-normal with more reading and writing. I finished reading one poetry collection and began reading another. I also read online a lot, lots of journals, some Tumblrs, daily poems, and random links.

Writing came in both prose and poetry. I finished up and submitted my April Poetry Has Value guest-post. That should appear any day now. Then I got to revising old poems, some that I didn't even remember writing. That's the best kind of revision; it's like giving feedback on someone else's poem. Sometimes I'm like, Oooh! I wrote that! That's so good! Most of the time, though, I'm like, What? Huh? What does that even mean? Then I wrote some new almost-poems, though I think what I wrote is stealing from other poems I wrote at the beginning of my sabbatical. Does that mean it's over? I've come full circle? I've nothing left? Well, sabbatical is almost over, but I do have a lot left to do.

The a lot left to do is because of my change of course for Liberating The Astronauts. I'm now focusing on space. The fairies, nymphs, and gnomes have allowed me to give the astronauts some time off, and now that I've returned, my focus is on space. I do have a mermaid on the moon poem (entitled "Mermaid On The Moon" because I'm really creative), so that kind of allows me to move back and forth between the two collections. And the creature/critter poems may not be a full collection after all. They may find their separate ways into different collections or simply individual publications or just hang out on my laptop for eternity. In the meanwhile, the focus is on space and liberation.

So I watched Gravity. It was neither good nor bad. It was short. Like barely an hour and a half. But it was a good start. I made a list of movies I want to watch: Home, Stardust, Paycheck, Serenity (2005), Paradox (2016), Time Lapse (2014), Earth to Echo, Time Line, Upside Down (2012), The Martian, Interstellar, Starman, Barbarella, and The Day The Earth Stood Still. Then I'm going to rewatch Blade Runner, Space Camp, 2001, 2010, Contact, Men In Black, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Space Balls. Some of these are about space. Some of them are space-adjacent. Some are simply guilty pleasure. I also started following some space-related sci-fi artwork accounts on Tumblr, some of which show book covers for books that I will then read or skim.

I'm also going to create erasure poems from Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. Like, the whole thing. Maybe.

After planning all this, I submitted to journals and a reading series. To top off the week, I met up with my brother to see the Warhol exhibit at The Morgan Library. The show is about his books and book cover art (because it's a library), and you're not supposed to take pictures. I took covert pictures. My brother kept walking away from me whenever I did. They are very artsy because they were taken at weird angles. I'm so artsy. However, since I'm not supposed to take photos, I'm not sharing them here so that I don't get arrested.

There were other people who were taking photos non-covertly. They were getting yelled at by security. One woman continued to take pictures and continued to get yelled at. I overheard her telling her friends, What's his problem? These pictures are for educational purposes! I'm all for teachers, of course, but I also understand the rules of copyright, and being an educator doesn't mean you get to break the rules. Plus, showing your students pictures on your phone really doesn't make for a Warhol experience. Buy the book. Or take covert pictures and teach your students something really useful.

The only thing security told me was that I needed to put my coat back on or check it. I put my coat back on.

We also saw the photography exhibit across the hall. We were allowed to take pictures, so my brother didn't pretend to not know me. We liked a lot of the show, but there was this one photo that involved a rock and a cactus and a ruler and we were like, What the?

Two serendipitous instances:

1. Sophie Calle is part of the exhibit and she's one of my favorite artists in the history of art. She includes a lot of writing in her art, and that's probably why I love her so much.

2. There were space things!

We checked out the second floor exhibit while we were there. It was pastel drawings, many of heads that were numbered into the hundreds. The wallpaper was the stunning part, but I have no record of that. We were a bit taken with the heads.

To end the night, NYC's skies confirmed that space is the place I need to be poetically.

Whitney Walking

Fun Fact: The Whitney Museum moved since the last time I visited.

Fun Fact: There's rarely parking at the train station during the day.

And so, I walked to the train station from my house. This took about 25 minutes. I encountered an off-leash dog wearing a sweater along the way. I got to the train station as the second early train I thought I'd make was pulling away.

Quiz Time!

True or False: I was one big sweat ball when I got to the train station.

If you answered False, you don't know me at all, do you?

The next train was direct to Penn, so I was able to settle into a seat at the station to wait while reading my book. Then I was able to settle into a seat on the train while reading my book. Or so I thought. Mobs of people appeared, and for most of the train ride, I was sitting with a family who talked to each other in spurts. When people disembarked at Jamaica, I disembarked from the family and found an empty row of seats. There, I took off my jacket to take off my sweater so I could stuff it in my bag and put my jacket back on. Cause, you know, the sweating.

I got downtown pretty quickly. No one breathed on me too badly. Then I walked. And walked. And walked some more. Not only had the Whitney relocated, but it kind of put itself in Witness Protection or something because it was far from basically everything. Okay, it's probably not really that far, but the day turned windy--which is my least favorite kind of weather--and here I was walking again and there was a lot of construction going on and then there were cobblestones. At least the neighborhood was groovy.

I'd gone to see two things. One was an installment of Open Plan with Michael Heizer. I'm not sure exactly why I needed to see floor-to-ceiling photo projections of standing in a hole, but I really really wanted to. So I did. I got myself up to the floor by taking the stairs--more walking--instead of waiting for the elevator because museum elevators have the worst wait. Then I walked into the exhibit, which is the entire floor of the museum. It's very dark. There are couches. Basically, it took about 20 seconds to see the installment. Yet, I'd taken a little under two hours to get there. I sat on a couch, and in the dark, I wrote these notes from the description, which made the experience last longer:

M. Heizer. Actual size. Munich Rotary. Lose track of horizon as the the depression were endless. "There is no beginning. There is no edge . . . It was evanescent." 18,200 square feet [something scribbled out] Land art. Art so large, scared to approach it. up close it gets fuzzy. It moves.

Then I made my way out of the darkness.

Next up was Laura Poitras's Astro Noise. So I have this full poetry collection called Liberating The Astronauts, and it's gotten me kind of magnetized to anything that sounds spacey or space-adjacent. Astro Noise is about war, not space, but it sounds like it's about space because of the Astro part, so that was next on the list. It took more than a few seconds to see. Some of it was neat, like making art out of the screen images from radar and drones. Some of it was disturbing, like slo-mo videos of people witnessing horrible war-things. I walked right by that stuff. Then I came upon a dark room. Very dark. When my eyes adjusted, I saw people lying down on a platform. I noticed a screen on the ceiling. So I got on the platform and on my back and I was transported back to my grammar school planetarium trip for a moment. I stayed there until the film started to repeat. My trip was now worth the sweat and time and 22 dollars. I was looking at the sky around the world and into space. See? It's about space after all.

On the way out of this exhibit, there were walls with holes in them. If you looked in the hole, you could read things. Here's my view of one such hole:

Short People Problems

Then it gets creepy. Really seriously creepy.

Hello Big Brother

 Then I ran through the rest of the museum, dodging school groups and tourists, taking in the rest of what the Whitney had to offer. I enjoyed the outdoor galleries and sculptures.

I enjoyed getting to be in this picture because of the mirror. I think that's exactly why the mirror is there. Or not.

See me?

And of course I enjoyed this.

I took the stairs on the way out because I'm apparently training for a marathon. All the walking and climbing meant that not only was I getting my culture on, but I was also killin' it at Project Pants Fit.

Artsy look at the stairs