#182 - Rothkos & Electric Woes Row Row Row into: The Twelve Days of Smokemas Day 12(!) | We Made It!!!!!

WELL HEY HI HOHOHO MERRY SMOKEMAS!!!!

(Is now a good time to admit that I keep saying "Smoke mas, live mas" in the Taco Bell ad guy voice every time I write it? It's been a long 12 days!)

Today was so long and yet here I am, committed to sticking the landing and writing one last essay that I will send out after midnight wheeee!!!!! We did it this is #52! YAAAAY! I made a promise to myself and kept it woohoo I have 52 more pieces of writing that I did and put out into the world because sharing art is a huge part of making it and the law of averages means that 26 of those essays are above average yaay I <3 math!

Speaking of art, we went to the MoMA today!

I haven't been in a really long time, but man they really do curate the shit outta that collection. And it's so fun to stumble into the Water Lillies room and have your breath taken away because no matter how many times you see it, it's always like...wow.

Really looks like water. Reeeeally calms you down!

We had breakfast at a diner (shoutout to the inventor of the turkey club sandwich the rare triple decker menu item) and then showed up and uhhhh the line was literally the entire block and it wrapped around but THEN they opened another entrance and we hustled on over and were inside within like 10 minutes it! was! a New York miracle!

Museums rule. Art is so cool. The stories we decide are important to tell range in severity but are all captured and displayed in ways that treats them as equals.

There was a room showing an environmental film and it was mostly helicopter shots of giant glaciers that morphed as more and more fragmented text was overlaid. (I bet you can picture it so clearly.) And I got so overwhelmed by the shots of the glacier that I left the room and opened up the notes app because it felt really important to write this down:

And yes I was being very dramatic and feeling big feelings and art does that but also, hours and hours later, I still think it's true.

The earth is actually entirely capable of handling the seas rising. It survived the meteor. It made it through the ice age. The earth will be just fine (+ plastic).

Climate change is man made. It's mostly the cars and the manufacturing practices and the airplanes and the manufacturing practices and the lack of regulations and the manufacturing practices. Oh an AI???? A thing we don't actually need at all so why does it get carte blanche to wreck the energy infrastructure????

Deep breath and let it out, Rothkooooo.

A lot of my Favorites are in the collection and stumbling upon them without a map is always very rewarding. There were little placards next to some of the work that were intended for kids (as pointed out by the title For Kids! on every one of them) that were thought provoking questions intended to help kids identify or think critically about the art in specific ways. I found it really sweet that they were aiming it at children but also I used every single suggestion to deepen my own reflections and it was so satisfying and helped me drill down and interpret more than I ever had!

Looking At Art was not something I thought I was "good" at. Like I liked certain things and not others, but beyond colors or movement I couldn't really articulate what I thought I was supposed to be looking at. Especially when it comes to more modern and interpretive work it always felt intimidating to be in a crowd of people who seemed to be really taken and engrossed by a piece that I didn't have a single original thought about.

But I think learning more about art history periods, having friends who taught me a lot about what went into curating shows and developing artists, even just paying attention while they discussed different American art periods on Antiques Road Show (one of my prouder art moments was identifying a Grandma Moses painting by familiarity with her aesthetic but she pops up on AR all the time. I've also gotten a lot about colonial furniture from the twins PBS rules everybody say thank you public broadcasting for caring about art!) has over time layered in my brain enough to allow me to understand that there's no such thing as "correct" when it comes to art: there's just what you get out of it.

And yeah sometimes understanding more about the piece, the time period, the influences, all really add up and imbue the art with deeper meanings. But I also think there's a lot to be said for just having gut reactions to things and finding your personal taste through being honest about likes and dislikes.

I went to a lot of museums as a kid and I'm really grateful that my parents diligently exposed us to art. But much like rereading the American Classic Novels I was assigned in sophomore year of high school (the 1984 essay is imminent), I just get a lot more out of them now.

But that first exposure is good, great, and necessary, because good art is something you can endlessly go back to and discover something new from. Because all interpretations are going to be centered through ourselves, and if we evolve, so will our opinions. And you've got to read something, see something, take something in the first time without worrying too much about getting Everything from it on the first pass.

Art is big! It makes us feel huge. Telling stories really really matters and I think it's really cool that people go to school to hone their really specific taste in art and then they get to tell thousands of people every day about it and show them pieces that matter to not only them but history at large and also modern art RUUUUULES ugh it's so COOL there's so much COLOR and MOVEMENT and people are being WEIRD ON PURPOSE and I LOVE IT!!!!

Speaking of people being weird on purpose, we capped off our Christmas Eve in the City Adventure by going to see A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic at the Nitehawk where they bring you food and you have a cute little table and everything is lovely and they played archival Bob Dylan footage before showing like three movie trailers that were mostly for old movies they're showing in January which is SUCH a better vibe than the 30 minutes of wall-to-wall screaming ads at Regal before every single movie.

And I gotta say, the performances are really good and I listened to Bob Dylan on the way home! I'm going to go see it again in a few days because I already have a ticket and I think I'll have more thoughts on it as a movie rather than just a really enjoyable experience because going out to the movies is a REAL treat and a movie theatre like Nitehawk is just a little extra fun. Like going to see something at the drive in it just adds atmosphere!

I just, I gotta say it because it really has become the running theme of this essay series: I fucking love New York.

I love this city and all of the people and the trains and the local businesses that are unique and special and even though MoMA doesn't offer local discounts on tickets (shoutout to The Met for allowing you to pay as little as you can muster yourself to say to the people at the ticket booth if you're an NYC resident! those extra taxes BETTER pay for something they're fucking raising the subway price again ahhhh!) it's fucking rad that when my sister was like "should we visit the Guggenheim or the MoMA" that both were even options and there are like dozens of other museums that could have made that list because this city was and is a city of artists and it's the center of the universe with the busiest airspace in the world and I had to navigate around so many tours today and they were all in different languages and we walked 20,000+ steps and took trains all over and it ruled I love walkable cities I love when it snows I love tucking in and sharing a little spliff before going to look at art!

The best movie theater + movie matchup of all time was going to see Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel at the Hollywood Theater in Portland. The place is super old and the staircases are all worn velvet carpeting and kind of windy and the bathrooms make you feel like you've stepped back in time and everything looks like a train and it was the first movie I ever saw in Portland but they had amaaazing cherry cider that I never found again and honestly I think that experience contributed a hefty amount to our decision to move there. So, movies can impact your life beyond uhhhh reason sometimes but oh well what a life to live!

Can't go back gotta look forward babeeey!

Life is what you make it, so make art!

Truly truly wishing everyone the happiest holiday's!!!

Thank you so much for reading, for being here, it really means a lot to me and I should express that more often (and more eloquently but I'm feeling BIG EMOTIONS HERE) (I had two ciders and a few spliffs and it's Christmas Eve and as we went over yesterday, Christmas is about honesty, apparently)!!!

See you next year! ✌️🕶️✌️