Days 2 and 3: Dadaists and Scientologists

The weather in New York right now is cold and biting. Everyday, we bundle up in sweaters and coats, and still, the cold can be painful and overwhelming. The snow, however, is beautiful, and watching snow fall is something I don't get to see at all in Orange County.

Sunday morning, we visited the Guggenheim in the Upper East Side to check out the Richard Prince exhibit. Prince is an artist who's most famous for taking photographs of advertisements and taking them out of context to show how advertisements idealize consumerism and lure us into believing that we too can be beautiful and bourgeois if we buy a piece of furniture or jewelry. With all mention of the product cropped away, advertisements can also be strangely alien and beautiful. Prince also does pop art that reminds me of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, but instead of Campbell's soup cans, he juxtaposes New Yorker comics and low-brow jokes for an oddly provocative and displacing effect. I also liked his series of nurse paintings, where seductive nurses from romance pulp novels turn into bloody specters. The latest work by Prince is also very interesting, where he fuses the painting style of William de Kooning with pornographic images. The effect was disquieting, but it forces people to rethink their perceptions of sex and their hold over them.

Also of interest was the Modernity in Central Europe exhibit that featured Dadaist publications and Eastern European avant-garde photography. I loved looking at the stuff people from the Bauhaus school in Germany worked on in the post-WWI age. Decades might have passed since then, but the works at the exhibit still look edgy and fresh today.

I was looking forward to seeing Frank Llloyd Wright's work on the Guggenheim, but the exterior of the museum was under renovation. The interior, however, was amazing, with its spiraling gallery walls and clear-glass roof.

Afterward, we hit up Papaya King on 5th Ave, which serves up onion/kraut hot dogs and fresh papaya juice. Apparently, this one is the original hot dog/papaya stand of New York. I usually don't like sauerkraut, but the kraut dog was neither too sour nor pungent, and the onion dog was slathered in tomato sauce that hit the spot after a long day of museum-browsing. The cajun fries with cheese were served piping hot with cold, fresh papaya juice to wash it all down. I haven't tried Gray's Papaya, a rival restaurant, but I hope to do so by the end of the trip.

In the evening, we walked along 5th Ave to look at the holiday window displays at the big department stores. Bergdorf Goodman was most impressive with their over-the-top, exotic fashions (mix of Madison Ave chic and ancient Egyptian royalty) and glittering golden props (an elephant included).

The crowds were getting too unruly, so we escaped to the East Village and ate at Kenka, a Japanese restaurant along St. Marks Pl., located near a depressing CBGB (RIP) gift store. The food was not the best, and the portions varied from generous to standard. You can order cheap, like $5 ramen and $3 soba, but the catch is that you have to order at least $6.50 worth of food for each person. It's a stingy rule, but a combination of that price can get you a bowl of ramen, rice, miso soup and salad. Eating at the restaurant was fun, not because of the food, but because of the great lengths the owners went to recreate 1950s Japan. All throughout, there were vintage Japanese sake posters and framed pictures of old Japanese lounge singers. The walls are adorned with only Japanese, and the menu implores people to use Japanese if they're going to tag up the bathroom walls. One curiosity were the "rules" stipulated on the menu: no masturbating, no throwing up outside the restaurant (or pay $20), no fighting and no breaking anything (or pay for the broken item). This is probably a result of one too many nights of drunken bastards going on a sake-fueled rampage.

Monday morning, we woke up to to eat at the West Village, where we headed to Fatty Crab for some damn good Chinese food. I don't know what kind of Chinese cooking it was, and I admit that I was a little skeptical after seeing that the entire staff inside was white (including the cook). We ordered some noodles, salad and soup for the meal. The noodles had vinegar, Chinese sausage and watercress, with the flavor turning from sweet to salty with one bite. The salad contained watercress, watermelon, fried pork and pickled radish -- the pork's slight greasiness a nice contrast to the fresh vegetables and fruit. The soup, served in a claypot, was light and warming, with chicken and tofu creating sophisticated flavors that I, as an amateur food writer, don't know how to describe. To break the flavor of the dishes, we also had some rice lightly seasoned with coconut. For dessert, we had some coconut cake -- lightly chewy and sweet. So far, this was the best meal we had in the city. The restaurant was nicely furnished with red walls and simple wooden tables -- a lot like Burma Superstar in San Francisco -- and they played The Arcade Fire, which I think was a nice touch to my dining experience.

After lunch, we went to the Chocolate Bar for some coffee and hot chocolate. The hot chocolate -- their specialty -- was rich and thick, with every sip like having a big chocolate bar in liquid form. While in the Village, we went in search for Bob Dylan's one-time apartment on 4th St. When we got there, all we found was a non-descript apartment next to a lingerie store. Nevertheless, it was cool to think about Dylan living there, making waves in the Greenwich folk music scene.

Right now, Bryant Park is filled with cool shops (selling everything from handmade leather journals to small New Yorker magazine cover prints) and an ice skating rink. Surrounded by highrise business complexes, the park is a welcome sanctuary in a city that can get crazy. Next to the park, the New York Public Library is a beautiful, ornate museum/library that's currently housing a Jack Kerouac exhibit (with original manuscripts, letters and photographs by Kerouac, Ginsberg and other members of the so-called Beat Generation). What got me most excited was the original typed manuscript of On the Road, which I didn't expect to catch here in New York. The library is also having an exhibit for modernist graphic design, but we decided to visit that later in the week.

At the end of the day, we were tired and looking for something to do, and we happened to run across a Church of Scientology near Times Square. We went in, and we were greeted by a friendly lady who took us into a small viewing room to screen a 15-minute introductory film on Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard. The film focused mostly on how talented and intelligent Hubbard was -- it emphasized his prolific body of literature (which amounted to a lot of pulp fiction from the 1930s) and Scientology books (which it also repeatedly mentioned were NY Times best-sellers). Then it went on to emphasize that Scientology was, indeed, a legitimate, government-recognized religion. The narrator of the film was a blandly good-looking square who couldn't pass off a sincere smile if it depended on his life. I liked how out of all the celebrities the movie featured as testimonies for Scientology's greatness, it conveniently left out Tom Cruise. There was one particular bit that was interesting where the host interviews an "auditor" (which the film does a piss-poor job of explaining what he actually does) who talks about the evils of psychology and how all psychologists are malevolent quacks who should be put out of business.

At the end, the host ends in a really cheesy, really grandiloquent speech about how joining Scientology is the logical evolution of mankind. It was filled with emotional pandering and loaded rhetoric, especially one particular line that went something like "If you walk out of this building and never talk about Scientology again, that's fine. But you might as well jump off a building or blow your head off." Geez. Talk about heavy-handed. Then the film ends in a door opening up to a great white light.

In summary, the film was as vague as possible with explaining what Scientology is actually about and how Hubbard went from being a prolific pulp writer to a prolific writer of spiritual guides. Also, it kept on emphasizing the volumes and volumes of books left behind by Hubbard and the importance of buying these books for increased knowledge and spiritual enlightenment. After we were done, the lady kept on pushing us to buy an introductory book about Scientology for $15, and when we refused, her tone changed immediately from congenial to frustrated.

We hightailed the fuck out of there and went out to eat.

Tomorrow: Columbia University and Harlem?

Papaya King
Locations throughout NYC

Kenka
25 St. Marks Pl.

Fatty Crab
643 Hudson St.

Chocolate Bar
48 8th Ave