Saturday, April 10, 2010

Boring Travelogue, Part 4: NYC

I hate it when people compare New York to SF, because it's totally not fair and NYC has 13 million people and a lot more land mass and Donald Trump and all we have is 49 square miles and Dolores Park and Frank Chu, but I can't help it. New York is fucking awesome.



Since we got here, we've been running around like crazy, what with the Empire State Building and the Ellis Island and the Museum of Modern Art, but let me just share a few observations:

- The ratio of tourists to NYers on most major arteries (i.e., 5th Ave., Broadway, etc.) is like 1 to 1. There are a fuckload of British people here. I have never seen so many British people in my life.

- Tourists are pretty much the same everywhere. They love taking pictures. Yesterday, at the MOMA, I watched a Japanes girl methodically move from painting to painting, snapping a pic and then moving on, like she was boringly photographing her shit for insurance purposes. Hey, how about looking at the art for a change? Look at these fucking photogs:



(Incidentally, that famous Dali painting with the melting clocks is really small. I was picturing it maybe 3 by 4 feet, but it's like a foot square. Also, Jackson Pollock paintings are way cooler IRL than when you see them in books.)

(Also incidentally (and maybe obvs.) the people pictured above are not at the MOMA.)

- Oh, speaking of ratios, the ratio of very attractive girls to very attractive guys is like 4:1. NYC would be a great place to be if you were like an average-looking guy with any game at all.

- If you're ever in NYC, go eat at Five Points. So fucking good, I'm not even kidding. I had the line-caught sustainable swordfish, but that shit was so good that I wouldn't have cared if it were the driftnet-caught unsustainable Last Swordfish on Earth.

- Then we went to dinner last night with my cousin (or nephew or something, I forget) and his wife at Odeon, which was also completely fantastic and totally lacked the pretense and arrogance I was expecting. Liz told me that it was the place on the cover of "Bright Lights Big City" but I didn't run into anyone snorting coke in the bathroom.

- Only one celebrity sighting. At Five Points, The Wife said "That's Zachary Quinto!" and I said "Who's Zachary Pinto?" and she explained he's some actor guy from some show or movie or something. You take what you can get.

- Oh, and yeah, awesome about the 4-0 Giants and I love it and whatever, you know they're going to start sucking as soon as I get back.

- Going to Brooklyn tomorrow. I wanna see if their hipsters here are like our hipsters in SF. I'll try and get some pics.

1 comment:

toddx said...

Sounds like you're having fun. Five Points is definitely on my list of to-dos. My friends loved it, too.