Memorial Day Weekend NYC

Hope you had a good weekend. Mine was cool - saw some movies (Scott Pilgrim, The Vinyl Frontier (more on that below), and The Kids Are All Right), ate a lot of food, and biked around the empty city.

Friday started off with some time-warp, wrinkle-in-time shit:

Saw this dude at the Apple store with a “Clobber” shirt on - like whoa. Clobber was a big rave clothing line from Los Angeles circa 1991. Nice one guy! Don’t make me break out my SJobeck or ConArt gear! Meet me at the smartbar!

Went past Ryan McGinness’ studio for a visit on Saturday - this is him run through my favorite iPhone app of the weekend, Percolator. It turns your photos into these circle abstractions. Don’t base your next design project on it no matter how seductive it gets. We all know 500 people out there already are.

On Sunday headed out to Queens for a few spots on the CreativeTime Key To The City project by artist Paul Ramírez Jonas; it was the last weekend before it ended. Long story short, you could go a kiosk in Times Square, get a Medeco-supplied key presented to you, then go to various places around the city and get access to locked doors that would open with the key, places not normally open to the public.

Started by going out to the Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens, where the ‘Key To The City’ granted you access to Satchmo’s downstairs bathroom, unchanged since his wife Lucille passed away in 1983. No, you could not use it. There’s a tour, you should check it out if you’re a fan. There were some art pieces up on the walls, some collages Armstrong used to make out of photos and newspaper clippings, usually of some stuff he liked or was into - sports, other entertainers, politics. I had no idea he was into anything visual like that but it turns out he’d do these things on his recording tape boxes, etc. There’s a book there about it, The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong.

I didn’t get any flicks, but the coolest thing for me was seeing some envelopes from some fans that were on display - All that was written on them was “Mr. Louis Armstrong, USA” and the postal service still got them to him - THAT is balling out, people.

Next, headed south over to the next Key To The City spot, Tortillarea Nixtamal restaurant, a Mexican spot in Queens that has some excellent food going on, and a small factory for making corn tortillas in their basement. They told us that they supply the fresh corn tortillas for many restaurants all over the city. Using the key let you wander downstairs into the kitchen, where you got a tour of the tortilla area and got to make a tortilla to eat. Upstairs while I was waiting to take the tour, I had some excellent enchiladas and a cane-sugar Coca Cola.

Gringo making a tortilla. I kinda do this at home occasionally, so I knew what was up with the masa, hermano!

Me and The Sucklord heading uptown, fitting in a little interview for my podcast

On Sunday I met up with fellow Star Wars enthusiast and toy maker Morgan ‘Sucklord’ Phillips, and we headed up to a screening of The Vinyl Frontier, a movie about vinyl toys that we’re both in. There was a Q&A afterward with us, sculptor Mike ‘Nemo’ Mendez, and Daniel Zana, the filmmaker who put it all together. Check it out if you have any interest in the mild world of toymaking - Daniel put together quite an informative film.

Daniel Zana, filmmaker

I finished up the weekend doing some Photoshop. Back on that same ‘ol, hallelujah…