Well, I guess I should do my review of the New York trip now.
We got in at eleven pm last night, after having had to make the trek to suburban Milwaukee as soon as we got back from New York. I finally got to unwind, see the cats, and remember what it's like to sleep in my own bed.
New York was, for the most part, a sobering and disillusioning experience.
We got into New York without much incident, aside from a delay out of O Hare. A well dressed man older man offered Rob a ride in a limo, so we all trekked across the parking garage to his black lincoln town car. Well, it wasn't a limo, but it was still a lot nicer than a cab. We checked into our room at the Warwick which was absolutely gorgeous. It had a nice view from the sixteenth floor, too. I would later comment that although it was a great hotel room, I would never want to stay there if we didn't have the fifty percent off convergence discount. It was a good hotel, worth the three hundred a night we were paying for a one bedroom suite, but was far from worth its usual rate of six hundred a night.
I was still pretty excited about New York, though, and we walked around looking for a bite to eat. It was too late for all the lunch places but too early for dinner restaurants. So, we went to the hotel restaurant which turned out to be a good call, as it was a five star Italian restaurant. I got quite filled up and had a very tasty meal.
That evening, we went to see a really bad anime movie in this art house theater in the village. The theater was nice, though their popcorn lacked a salt option and they were a bit frugal with the air conditioning. And the movie was pure torture. Afterwards, we went in search of a bar. We walked up St Marks, and found a comic shop that was still open at one am. I found a cool Lenore lunchbox there, so I bought that along with a couple of comic books. It was a damned furnace in the comic store. After I paid for the stuff, I got my change but the cashier didn't give me my bag, she just left the stuff I'd just bought with her behind the counter, and started saying something to the girl at the other register. Not wanting to be rude,I waited patiently. After a few minutes she said, "Oh I guess you're waiting for this." And handed me the bag. "Yeah, that would help," I said with a laugh. "Well EXCUSE me!" She snapped. Um wow. That was just really psycho. Silly fucking me, to want the stuff I just paid thirty bucks for.
We found a bar after walking around for a bit, but it was also completely sweltering. It seems no place on St Marks believes in air conditioning. So we walked on. But we'd walked twenty blocks before we found another bar. By this time, I was too tired and dehydrated to drink. This had also given us a nice tour of the city by then. I had found the immense amount of attitude on St. Mark's a bit unnecessary, and the fact that it was smelly and you had to walk over junkies constantly, and stepping in vomit was inevitable, made it seem highly overrated. I mean, I can get that in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where a one bedroom is $400 a month, not $4000 a month. There wasn't anything there that's not in every other decent sized city I've ever been in, so I was starting to wonder what the fuss was all about.
A bit disenchanted, we went back to our hotel room, where we watched a movie on pay per view.
The next day, I had my tour of the School of Visual Arts. Before we went over there, we grabbed breakfast at a cool deli across the street. The guy behind the counter was the stereotypical wacky New Yorker in a deli type, which was kind of cool. And the bagel was, of course, delicious. So we went over to the School of Visual Arts. It turned out it was one of those group tours. (Nice of them to tell me beforehand.) I had emailed the admissions office to try to get a specific appointment with a counselor, but no one had gotten back to me. I had also emailed the financial aid office asking if it would be possible to speak to someone about my financing options while we were there but they, also, did not get back to me. They gave everyone a catalog. While we waited to start, I looked through it and noticed that the computer art program charged a grand a semester in fees. That's on top of the $16,000 a year tuition. Wow, that's pretty steep. Finally, the tour began. I thought the school looked and felt frighteningly like Columbia College of Chicago. Rob said it felt like a hospital or a mental institution. So, we were both right. I made the mistake early on of letting it be known that I had GED, so I got a lot of attitude from the admissions counselor from that point on. She was very discouraging of my trying to apply. She flat out told me to not expect most of my courses to transfer. She also told me that my drawing skills would have to be highly advanced because, get this, "You don't do much drawing in the computer art program". I guess her rationale is they want you to graduate with those skills so if a program doesn't offer it, that you should have it to begin with. Wouldn't it make more sense to simply have a few foundation drawing courses as part of the criteria to graduate? I tried to explain to her that I'd had no formal drawing training, and wouldn't until next semester, but she just got even snottier about it. It was kind of depressing actually, because she was very obviously looking down on me as some talentless hack just because I hadn't had much formal art training. I thought that this might be an attitude for the parents' benefit, but they were all pretty friendly to me and seemed to think parts of the tour were a bit ludicrous. And, on top of that, the student art was pretty mediocre. I might have expected this sort of treatment if there were cream of the crop students going there, but this was obviously not the case. I saw the facilities and they, too, were good but nothing to write home about. I couldn't even see the computer art facilities. They were all locked.
I left there feeling like I had visited a school that was as bad as Columbia College had been only a lot snottier and more condescending. I also felt like the admissions counselor had made assumptions about me based on a few things, without even seeing my work, and determined me not the "type" they cared about going there. The fact that I could have some very strong talents in the area I was going into hadn't occurred to her, after all a high school drop out can't possibly be a successful artist, can they?
This would cause me to go into something of a creative depression for the rest of the trip.
Going back to the hotel, we had a fun cab driver (even if he did keep talking about jesus) so that was cool. I was noticing that as much as I had been impressed by the area where we were staying, it didn't look any better than Lincoln Park or Lakeview, and these apartments were going for about ten grand a month. I was starting to really wonder what all the New York fuss was about.
That night, we hung out with our net friend Greg Wilcox. It was cool to meet someone who you've had on your mailing list since it's inception, and he was a fun guy. We popped into Starbucks to look at a paper and see what was going on. Rob had ordered a brownie frappucino, but I was dehydrated and didn't want coffee, so I just had a glass of milk. The Starbucks in the village resembled an assembly line. I waited for my milk. And waited. And waited. Rob's brownie frappucino had come up, and I waited some more. I finally, annoyed, said something. I told one of the "hourly partners" (bleck) that I had been waiting a long time for my glass of milk. She looked at me like I was from mars and opened her mouth to make a smart ass comment (I could see from the look on her face that this was coming.) so I said, " I mean, it's a glass of milk. It's not like it's a challenging order." Which seemed to shut her up and get her to pour me my two dollar glass of milk. I couldn't help but notice that there was an overprevalence of people who resented having to do their job in this town. And generally speaking, if you so much as point out something that they haven't done (like give you the item you just paid for, a recurring theme I was beginning to notice) they get really mad. Come on, if you really hate your job that much, just quit.
So we went to CBGBs, which was pretty dead. There was a cool lounge in the downstairs, but it closed at one am, so we went upstairs and sat around and drank for a little bit. Then we walked around for a bit, before saying goodnight to our friend and heading back to the hotel.
The next day, we decided to go to MOMA. It was a madhouse in there, and at first I worried we wouldn't be able to get in, but we did. As we walked around, we all were pretty unimpressed. Yeah, they had some famous paintings, but so do art museums in both Detroit and Chicago. There wasn't anything that was any better than anywhere else. And, in fact, I thought that DIA was a ton better. The exhibit was this really bland "architecture art" thing, which contained a lot of floorplans for really bland buildings. It wasn't even anything remotely interesting. Wow, it was seeming that everything was pretty overrated.
We went to the Coil show but by then spirits were low and tensions were high, and it wound up not being such a good time. I drank alot, and made something of an ass of myself. So, by Sunday morning I was so ready to get the hell out of New York.
We went to check in at the curbside, but the guy there was incompetent and couldn't find our reservation. So we had to wait in about the longest line I'd ever seen in an airport. On top of that, they didn't have any of the e-ticket machines that you usually find in airports. This would have made things a lot easier, if we could have just gone to one of the e ticket terminals. But apparently, La Guardia has not made that bold leap into the eighties yet. We finally got our boarding passes though, and figured the worst was over.
Boy were we wrong.
We boarded the plane and then they announced that air traffic control was staggering flights to Chicago and we would have to wait to take off. So, we sat on the plane for two hours before taking off. This officially made La Guardia my least favorite airport that I've ever flown out of.
So that was New York. I'll save the Wisconsin trek for my next entry. But, suffice to say, there is no chance of us moving to New York. Both Rob and I liked Chicago better as a city, we can get a luxury loft apartment downtown for what we would pay for a hole in the wall apartment in Manhattan, and we really didn't see anything in New York that's not in Chicago, or any other major city for that matter.
So, I guess it's settled. We're moving back to Chicago in May...