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December 11, 2005
Macy's vs. the Brooklyn Museum
Last Tuesday I spent a harrowing two hours lost in the Macy's Maze looking for women's socks. Socks! Frigging socks! How is it that not a single employee knew where they were?? I walked for miles, got disoriented and dehydrated and confused (this always happens to me in Macy's), was told to go to four distinct locations to find socks, breathed in at least a pint of noxious perfume, was distracted by countless departments I didn't know existed, and guiltily ate a mall pretzel. When I finally found the socks (by asking a fellow customer with socks in her hand) and figured out what to buy after nearly collapsing from the mall-walking and mall-air and mall-distractions, the cashier couldn't ring things up right and I had to return them and re-buy them somewhere else. I'm never going back. I hate Macy's.
Thank goodness for the Brooklyn Museum. The point of my taking a half-day of vacation on Tuesday was to visit the museum during the holiday members-only 20% discount sale. The Macy's visit was meant to be a quick stop, not a sanity-threatening nightmare. I wish I'd gotten to the museum earlier. The new entrance is such a welcoming sight at night when you're walking out of the train station. And the shopping environment was the opposite of the pandemonium at Herald's Square -- it was more like an antidote to the holiday shopping frenzy elsewhere. First, it's quiet. Second, there was a little area for sitting down and relaxing, which Derek convinced me to do over the phone after I explained the Macy's episode. Third, in the little area-of-relaxation there were free hot drinks (cider, coffee) and FREE COOKIES. It was very nice. And then, of course, the store is great and I bought a whole bunch of gifts there. Volunteers were even stationed outside of the store to wrap them.
Speaking of the Brooklyn Museum, we went to First Saturday last weekend and saw a fantastic Flamenco performance and the Edward Burtynsky exhibit. I absolutely loved the Burtynsky photos -- the exhibit is called "Manufactured Landscapes" and it's only running until January 15. If you like photography I highly recommend it. Burtynsky (that site has some representative images) takes beautiful large-format pictures of industrial landscapes -- marble mines, oil-processing plants, Chinese factories, etc. The images are arresting -- usually the scale places emphasis on the immensity of industrial undertakings and how tiny their human instigators look next to them. The industrial landscapes themselves are beautiful. There's something fundamentally appealing to me about a landscape full of non-natural geometric shapes, like the endless cubes of marble with rust stains in a mine, or a complex system of pipes in an industrial plant. There is beauty in efficiency. Because of this, the photos are also quite disturbing -- these immense industrial undertakings are clearly unnatural, and the viewer becomes aware of the scale of the damage done. There is one picture of masses of Chinese factory workers pouring out of buildings during a shift change. It's eerily similar to a very dark shift-change scene at the beginning of the movie Metropolis. Industrial coordination is eerie. There's a sadness to the photos. Huge oil rigs, for instance, look like tremendous, domineering monuments in one set of photos -- but the photos document the process of taking these rigs apart to reuse the materials.
Posted by csageday at December 11, 2005 11:19 PM