How to stay warm creatively

In case you haven’t heard or noticed, it’s cold.

Fortunately, in New York City, there is no shortage of ways to thaw out when the mercury dips below the freezing mark. Though Starbucks has pretty much taken over the city, there are still plenty of cool independent coffee shops downtown, serving up steaming hot beverages. Theaters are great places to cuddle up. And if you’re really, really cold, you can try to do what I did yesterday, which is to sit in front of a 2,000-degree furnace full of molten glass.

Yesterday was open house day at UrbanGlass, which is a very large glassworking studio in an unassuming building on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn. During open houses, staff members take the public on free guided tours of the facility, which includes areas for making glass beads, neon signs, lamps, mosaics, fused pieces, stained glass panels, sandblasted pieces, and, of course, blown and kilnworked glass. Each tour concludes with a glassblowing demonstration by professional artists in the very toasty “hot shop,” where the furnaces and glory holes (or superheated gas chambers, used to keep the glass hot while manipulating it) are located.

The tour was a very warm, and yet very cool, way to spend a Saturday afternoon. I learned so much about glassworking, and the studio environment made me feel creative; I sort of want to take a class at some point in the future, though UrbanGlass’s education programs are, at least for the time being, pretty far from fitting into my budget. Maybe I’ll return sometime for a weekend workshop when I have a little money to spend, and make a paperweight or a mug. There’s something so appealing about the idea of making a functional object completely from scratch, from raw — and super-hot — materials.

Riding back in time on the Nostalgia Train

Stop! Before you read any further, it is absolutely necessary that you look through your music collection and find a recording of Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Go ahead; I’ll wait.

Found it? Okay, now press “play.”

It’s a fitting song for a recap of Sunday afternoon’s adventure aboard the MTA’s Nostalgia Train. I met up with a few friends at noon at the Queens Plaza station to take advantage of this holiday treat. And just look how festive!

This was just the thing to get me out of bed on a dark, rainy Sunday: a fully operational subway train, made up of the R1-9 cars that ran in passenger service from the 1930s through the 70s, with authentic period details including vintage subway ads and classic maps.

Ticker tape

On November 6, the Yankees celebrated their 27th World Series championship with a ticker-tape parade on the “Canyon of Heroes” in Lower Manhattan. I had an appointment that morning, so I didn’t actually show up early to attend the parade, but I did head downtown long enough to snap a few photos from afar. So many people showed up to watch that I couldn’t get anywhere near Broadway, but even though I was confined to Battery Park and Trinity Place (which runs parallel to Broadway), I still got showered with confetti! People were even throwing it from buildings on Trinity Place, a full block from the parade route.

The crowd…

Lunar New Year: now with food porn

Behold, my greatest action shot ever!

I snapped it this morning as a young acrobat, no more than ten or eleven years old, completed a death-defying aerial flip in the middle of Main Street in Queens. As you can see, I was not the only person to find him a subject of great photographic interest. Here, I would just like to note that if I had taken this photo with my old camera, it would have been a complete blur. Everyone go buy a Panasonic Lumix TZ-5 right now. If you already have one, buy another. It has a “sports” setting for moving subjects!

As you can see, I ventured out as promised into the cold on this sunny Saturday morning to photograph the continuing Lunar New Year festivities, this time in Flushing, Queens.

Peace, prosperity, and pork buns

January 26 was the first day of Lunar New Year, more commonly known as Chinese New Year, and I am frankly let down by the fact that Google has not incorporated an ox into its website logo to mark the occasion. I, on the other hand, decided to do this particular holiday right, in hopes that some good luck for the new year will rub off on me and my job-hunting efforts, now that I’ve finished up my internship. I was born in the Year of the Ox, after all, and because the ox has come around to take its turn again, I am hopeful that that can mean only good things for me.

I have also been suffering from severe cabin fever due to the persistent below-freezing temperatures, and Lunar New Year celebrations downtown afforded an opportunity for me to get out of my apartment in the morning, put my cover letters aside for a little while, and enjoy the sunshine. It was still appallingly cold — and that’s coming from someone who much prefers chilly weather to summer heat — but I bundled up in a scarf (red, of course) and hat and set out for Chinatown. I attempted to make it down to Roosevelt Park in time for the firecracker detonation, but I missed out because I didn’t set out from my apartment quickly enough to make up for my having to transfer on the subway. I did, however, manage to see plenty of large and intimidating beasts, some of which appeared to have swallowed teenage boys whole.

Farewell to Christmas — and camels

Today is officially the twelfth day of Christmas, which means that I have stripped my Christmas tree of its decorations and had my roommate haul it down to the curb, where it awaits pick-up sometime during the next week. It was a pretty tree, and I am sad to see it go (especially because it is, at the moment, languishing on the sidewalk outside my building), but I can rest easier knowing that it will be mulched and used to help other plants grow in New York City parks.

Wasn’t it just charming, though?

I also marked the end of the season by allowing my curiosity to get the better of me this morning, and making my way up to El Barrio (also known as East Harlem or Spanish Harlem) for the Three Kings Day Parade.

Obligatory introduction!

It seems that all of my friends have gotten blogs for the purposes of staying in touch and sharing opinions or pictures or YouTube videos, and I decided it looked like fun. So here I am.

I will make an attempt at updating this thing fairly regularly, with the intention of having it replace my old NYU-hosted website. I will still take pictures of old buildings and tell you why you should think they’re cool, but I think I can do that in a less didactic and more casual way, while also writing about other stuff, like good books I’ve read that I think you should read, or fun stuff I’ve done that you really should do. (Gosh, I feel so influential already.)

Do enjoy, and feel free to comment and link to me.

- Shea