This is not Art

If you walk along the south side of Grand Central Terminal, you'll pass under a roadyway atop which is this taxi cab, which for reasons unknown to me sits over the guard rail as if there were a horrible wreck or a giant picked it up and tossed it aside.




Weird.

Open House New York is going on right now and B, D and I made it to the Chrysler Building to look at the lobby and listen to the lecture. Here are a couple of pictures.






This is just a picture of part of the ceiling mural above where I was standing. I couldn't get a spot where I could see the guy who was talking, so I had to stand against a column and look at the people and the ceiling from there. This photo was one of the results.

Hilarity at DSW. K and I convinced D to pose for some pictures in these big, pink, furry boots. I told her it looked like her foot was being eaten by a peep.












It wasn't until we were trying to help her take them off that we realized she had donned two left shoes!

Sculptor: John Quincy Adams Ward (1830-1910)
Date: 1866
Placed in Park: 1869
Donor: 23 American artists and art patrons
Material: Bronze with granite pedestal

Indian Hunter was the first sculpture in Central Park by an American artist. Having studied the Lakota tribe, Ward was interested in developing American subjects. This sculpture of a hunter, his bow and arrow in hand, restraining his faithful hunting dog, shows Ward's sensitive commitment to realism and anatomy.

Source: The Central Park Conservancy

From Wikipedia:

The Feast of San Gennaro, originally a one-day religious commemoration, is now a 11-day street fair held in mid-September in the Little Italy area of Manhattan. Its defenders call it an annual celebration of Italian culture and the Italian-American community. Yet many people who live in Little Italy see it an an annual invasion of noise, drunkenness and garbage. One thing is clear about the festival: although it is portrayed as a neighborhood event, neither the organizers, the vendors, or the attendees live in Little Italy.

Centered on Mulberry Street, which is closed to traffic for the occasion, the festival generally features parades, street vendors, sausages and zeppole, games, and a religious candlelit procession which begins immediately after a celebratory Mass at the Church of the Most Precious Blood. Another festival is held with the same attractions and New York City's other Little Italy, in the Fordham/Belmont community in the Bronx. The streets are closed to traffic and the festivities begin early in the morning and proceed late into the night.

San Gennaro (Saint Januarius) is the patron saint of Naples, Italy. His feast day is September 19 in the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. The first Feast of San Gennaro was held on September 18, 1926, by newly-arrived Neapolitan immigrants who retained the customary observance from the old country.

Here's the saint himself. He looks bored with the whole production. I can say that by the time I pushed my way through the throngs of people, I was over it, too. (That's the top of cute guy's head in the lower left.)


One of the first booths we saw was one filled with magnets of all sorts.




And, strangely enough, there was a small sideshow setup featuring a "snake girl." Just weird.


I am not a fan of crowds. Odd that I love New York so much, right? I don't mind lots of people milling around, but I hate when they're all pushing in on me and there's no way out. As far as I am concerned, the feast of San Gennaro is hell on earth in this regard.


Apparently, this is what it's all about. There were more food booths than anything else, which makes sense since it's a "feast."

That is what appeared to be an albino python. I wasn't fast enough digging out my camera to get a good shot of it, though.