Category — Or?

If there is any type of cuisine I am familiar with, I am certain that it is not Jewish cuisine.

Walking into Symphony Space, I became extremely excited. The building seemed small, but it helped create an intimate environment. The mood is set as soon as you walk through the doors. It was not a place that sold out crowds to thousands of people, it was meant to convey important information to the select few that found Jewish food interesting. Sadly, I was not one of those people. As soon as the food talk began, I was able to follow along with what the historian was saying. She was analyzing a photograph taken years ago. That specific part was easy to understand. However, everything after that confused me. I was lost less than halfway through the program. I think this is because Symphony Space expects only well-educated groups to come and sit through their events. I’m sure that if I were Jewish, or at least ate Jewish food sparingly, I would have understood what was going on more.

Out of all the events to thus far I have to say the Columbia comic book archive was my least favorite. Not to say that it was a bad experience or a horrible time, but it just wasn’t great. I enjoy comics and have a little bit of knowledge regarding some of the more popular, mainstream comics such as DC and Marvel so I expected the archive to reflect those aspects of comics and maybe explain their history and how they have evolved. Maybe because of what I was expecting to happen didn’t happen altered my view of the event, but I think it was more so of the information that was presented. All the comics and pictures and everything present were actually interesting to view and talk about, but I felt the collection was lacking in information of what comics actually were and how their history relates to the time now/ how they have affected modern media. But what I did learn more of is the different types of comics, and the more business-like and analytical aspect of comics. The most interesting thing in the collection for me was the cosplay costume, because it was honestly really cool, and the Columbia comic made by the students. I was so surprised about the crude and MTV like nature of the comic and how students years ago who today we view as super intellectual sounding students who would casually say things that sound directly out of a Victorian English novel would create something like that. For me that comic showed how no matter what the age and decade is, college boys basically have the same type of humor. I wish the archive was more inclusive towards people who have little or no interest in comics and had more information of the topics/characters that we associate comics with.

So I had originally gone to the Met last week to see Garry Winogrand’s exhibit, but I forgot to post about it. So I’ll just go on about how the day that I went was. Last Friday when I had gone, I arrived to the Met before it had even been opened, so I when i had entered the Met, it was basically completely empty. I had forgot Garry’s name so i just went around the museum looking for the 900’s exhibits because I only remembered his exhibit numbers.

When I entered into his exhibit, I was pleased by how all his photographs were displayed. Nothing in his exhibit popped out at you. I don’t mean that in a bad way, since all of Garry’s black and white pictures should all be equally presented to you. The exhibit made it easy to be able to look at all the pictures one by one without another one catching your eyes too much and making you focus onto it.

I do like Garry’s style of taking pictures. There was a lot of variety to them, nothing was type categorized, such as pictures of zoo animals, beach scenes, riots, and others kinds. Garry had those pictures which differed drastically from one another. I really liked the picture, “Hard Hat Rally”, it showed a lot of violence and chaos, but in a way that makes the picture seem so authentic. Garry didn’t try to hid any of the distress in the people’s faces. He made the picture to represent what was really going on and he didn’t try to hide any of the struggle. I saw one of Garry’s quotes on the wall, “The world isn’t tidy; it’s a mess. I don’t try to make it neat.” and that quote is exactly represented in that picture of the hard hat rally. Since his photos are so authentic I really did enjoy looking at all of his pictures.

I’m not trying to say that I only liked the violent pictures, but that one picture did really stand out since Garry had a quote to back it up with. His photo of the what looked to be a family with human parents and chimp children was also nicely taken. Since it is suppose to show a parent’s love and a child’s trust, that photo was very touching in a way.

I guess to sum up the exhibit, all of Garry’s works were really nice to look at. I honestly liked some more than others, however it was still amazing to be able to take a glimpse at the world from a very honest camera point of view.