de/composition

I saw another of those subway poster reappropriation art pieces yesterday that made me laugh out loud and John was all 'I'm glad there are some things you like about New York.' Of course there are such things and they are kind of all around. They have nothing to do with things in general or in any one thing but about small things. Like the subway graffiti - mustaches on poster supermodels; different commentary on the same advertisement in different places; an abandonded bicycle locked on my route to the subway that I have watched slowly be destroyed over the past few weeks, like watching a time-lapse of a dead animal decomposing. I'm sure that in a few months all that will remain is a broken U lock. I guess that's the thing that is most surprising - that it isn't the New York of the movies and the lifestyles of the rich and famous that make me like it. It's the urban erosion and simultaneous growth that I find so fascinating and enjoyable. And I don't think I'm the only one for whom this is true. It's kind of been the very nature of this place, just as real as the glamor it also touts. We went to the Philadelphia Museum this weekend and they had a bunch of early to mid 20th C American paintings on view and quite a few were New York City scapes either in fact or in abstraction and I felt happy that not only are the details still pretty much the same, but that I am not alone in history in finding them remark-able.