Epic Whim
Anyone reading this who knows me and my circle of friends recognise the happy couple?
No?
Well, I hadn’t even met them when I took this photo. But they were the reason I was in the States a week ago.
The slightly longer version of the story was that I met a girl on the bus between Philly and DC back in February. It was a Chinatown bus and therefore liable to burst into flames in the middle of the highway, so we struck up a conversation just in case it was the last one either of us would ever have. Turned out we were each other’s sort of people so we kept in touch.
Fast forward to March or so when she emails me a bit of a saga about a friend’s upcoming wedding and how she doesn’t have a date for it and since I’m “only” over in London would I like to come to New Jersey in May and go with her. Obviously this is a totally bonkers idea and of course, after clearing the time off with my boss I said I’d love to!
But this would be a dual-purpose trip: I have another friend in the NYC contemporary art scene who is curating a huge show (45 artists!) in a great big old ex-silk factory in Paterson, NJ. It’s a massive undertaking whose progress I’ve been following for the last couple of months on Twitter and Facebook and the grand opening of the exhibition was the Saturday after the wedding. So I thought I’d go for Sarah’s friend’s wedding, hang out in NYC for a week and catch up with some other friends and then turn up at Olympia’s show as a surprise.
The first part of the plan went off without too many hitches in the end, though whoever coined the phrase “hop across the pond” was taking the piss—my flight was delayed, we had to fly around the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud and I spent over an hour and a half in the queue at US immigration, meaning it was past 1am NYC time when I finally arrived at my accommodation in Brooklyn. The next morning I had to get some money to the friend of the person I was subletting from, then I couldn’t get straight to 34th St Penn Station because the A train wasn’t running, then I got confused between the PATH train and NJTransit, all leading to me making the last possible train I could get and be in time for the service by about 38 seconds.
But, I made it in the end. The service, reception and happy couple themselves were all lovely and it was all a heap of fun.
There was a little bit of a hitch with the next part of the plan as it turned out: this being the heavily socially networked year of 2010, it is impossible to keep secrets. I didn’t want to not be able to mention where I was on ze Twitter and ze Facebooks, but I knew if I did Olympia would notice and the jig would be up. But there is no “be invisible to this person” option on either of those services, so the best I could do was put her on my restricted profile list on Facebook and block her on Twitter and hope she was so busy preparing the show she wouldn’t notice.
But the best laid plans… of course I got sprung, but that just meant I got to come out earlier in the week and help Oly and her lovely assistant Sarah move some artwork around and clean up the building some. That was a fun day. We nearly got arrested by traffic cops in the process—you mean you’re not allowed to sit two people in the front passenger bucket seat of a U-Haul van? Who knew! But the show did eventually go on and it was wonderful. Lots of large scale transient art, which, as a Burner, I’m obviously into.
The intervening week was spent catching up with various other friends in NYC and mopping up a couple of things which fell of the end of my list during the month I was there earlier in the year, like the Whitney Biennial. I now consider myself a surrogate son of Brooklyn and have the t-shirt to prove it (but not the fixie.)
Oh, and of course while I was in the States…
