"In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes".

This well worn saying has been quoted and misquoted in hundreds of different ways in the forty years since Warhol first coined it [1].

Bad Scientist Ben Goldacre, in his keynote speech* at Science Blogging (sciblog) 2008, highlighted one of these deliberate misquotes, which he attributed to NTK.net (Need To Know: Britain's most sarcastic high-tech weekly newsletter). It goes a little something like this:

"On the internet everybody can be world famous for fifteen people".

This wonderful expression captures the nature and scale of science blogging on the internet today in a nutshell. Personally, I think it also sums up much of the spirit of the Science Blogging 2008 conference as well. In total, around eight groups of fifteen people, attended the conference. It was physically impossible to talk to all of them in one day, especially since I had to slink off early at 7pm, but I did manage to meet the following people:

Fifteen random people I've never met before

Fifteen people I've never met before (virtually or actually), nice to meet you all!

1. Martin Robbins of leyscience.net
2. Jeff Marlow, rocket scientist, starting PhD at Caltech working on the next mission to Mars (wow!). Currently working at Imperial College London (and absorbing soccer football culture - but has given up on understanding cricket - I don't blame you mate!)
3. Scott Kier, Royal Society, who hosted an enjoyable and lively unconference session "bored of blogging: how to keep motivated"
4. Jenny Beard British Association for the Advancement of Science, see the Fantastic Big Question web site, e.g. Will the LHC in CERN create a black hole, and why should we NOT be worried about it? Ian Mulvany isn't convinced
5. Ed Yong Cancer Research UK, not exactly a rocket scientist, see European genes mirror european geography
6. Prateek Buch, University College London Genetics / clinical trials, is he obsessed with penises? Probably, aren't all blokes obsessed with the size of their manhood?
7. Hungarian biologist Victor Poór who draws funny cartoons
8. Edinbugh ecat? electronic laboratory notebook bloke whose exact name and software I've forgotten. Damn.
9. Coracle (takes his name from a gene/protein he worked on in fruit flies), when he is away from the bench he hangs around at badscience.net
10. Marco Boscolo, Bologna, Italy XML is his DJ
11. Biologist-cum-statistician Bob O'Hara, who looks nothing like the cat shown in his profile picture.
12. Government bods from DIUS, must have been Mike Rose? probably and Steph Gray defintely, see DIUS sciblog report. I liked the demo of how to embed funky DIUS widgets in your website (techie note to self: WordPress strips out <script> tags so I can't embed widgets here. Doh!
13. Hilary Spencer(?), Nature New York, she must be the person responsible for sanity checking submissions for managing the development of Nature Precedings
14. Victor Henning, who works on Mendeley which helps you to "manage, share and discover academic knowledge".
15. Bronwen Dekker, who works on Nature Protocols, see picture of the Dekkers (who kindly obliged my very amateur photography)
    

Fifteen people I met in person (at last!)

Fifteen people I finally met in person, having virtually "met" online by reading their publications, blog posts or through email contact.

1. Raf Aerts (Raffa), Tropical Ecologist, had an interesting chat with him about the Ethiopian mountains, where he does his field work, home to the bone-dropping Lammergayers. Makes me wish I'd never given up field work.
2. Alexsander Griekspoor, who now works on Mekentosj.com and "Papers" full-time
3. Henry Gee, the croc-wearing phenomenon and sciblographer
4. Richard P. Grant (RPG), University of Sydney, (Note to self: find out how he convinced his department heads to pay for his round-the-world trip!). Not to be confused with RPG or Richard E. Grant (women tell me the latter isn't as sexy)
5. Roland Krause, finally we meet for real to take notes from the biomass
6. Graham Steel, Journal of Visualised Experiments (JOVE) blogger (we are all scientists now) I think we have the same sense of humour. Must be a Scottish thing, I'm sure I've got some scottish in me somewhere (not just in my name). While I don't have a visible ginger gene, I sometimes get tingles down my spine when I hear bagpipes. Also, after several pints of Deuchars IPA, I can even sound like I'm scottish too. Och aye! Does that make me Scottish?
7. Maxine Clark, Nature editor extraordinaire "the world needs more editors"! (not scientists?)
8. Heather Etchevers, France, who is wondering what to do with all her conference notes
9. Chemist and informatician Egon Willighagen, see his sciblog report
10. Li Kim Lee, runs Nature Network London
11. Matt Brown, runs Nature Network London and organised a scientific pub crawl in London town. Mr. Barman, I'd like five pints of your finest beer science, preferably the bitter English variety, not the fizzy American stuff.
12. Brian Clegg who came out with one of my favourite quotes from the conference, "there aren't too many scientists in the world, there are too many biologists. What the world needs is more physicists, chemists, mathematicians, engineers etc" - or words to that effect. Discuss. He also argues that Scientists alone aren't enough to communicate science to the general public. Hmmmm.
13. Jennifer Rohn, partly responsible for lablit.com when she's not pondering the celebrity geek phenomenon
14. Martin Fenner, see his His Paper Writing Dream Machine version 1.0
15. Matt Wood, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute informatics-type. I'm glad somebody likes my impact factor boxing joke. Ha ha, where's the punchline? I'm looking forward to seeing the Sanger bioinformatics demo up at Amazon Web Services (with hadoop) sometime soon and hopefully attending Bar Camp in Cambridge (BarCamb) next year, which Matt organises.

Fifteen people I've met before

Fifteen people I've met before, good to catch up

1. Euan Adie, Nature (but no relation to Kate), he has seen the future and its bakeable, pass me the futuristic cheesey snacks Euan!
2. Alf Eaton, Nature, hublogger and hubmedder
3. Ian Mulvany, Nature, responsible for connotea (Ian, Alf, Euan: thanks for the free lunch!)
4. Timo Hannay, Nature, manages all the webby people.
5. Chemist Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge
6. Chemist Jean-Claude Bradley. We are looking forward to your gig in Manchester tomorrow.
7. Aussie Chemist Cameron Neylon, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and University of Southampton, blogs at OpenWetWare
8. Mind Hacker Vaughan Bell, who helped me understand the crucial differences between the Royal Society and the Royal Institution (I'll tell you later). He's off to Colombia, not Columbia the University in North America , but Colombia the country in South America (it sounds very similar in spoken language). Bon voyage, Vaughan.
9. The totally zen Mike Barton, busy releasing bioinformatics survey results (under a CC-BY license of course)
10. Anna Kushnir, Nature (but not a big fan of PubMed). You and me both.
11. Corie Lok, Nature, organises Nature Network Boston
12. Attila Csordas, who likes the "equalising" effect of blogging. Oh yes indeed.
    
13. Andrew Walkingshaw, see his talk on Linked data and scientific publishing, is the "linked data" bandwagon just a rebadged and repackaged semantic web? I dunno. Discuss.
14. Oh b*ggeration! (imaginary friend 1)...
15. ...I can't quite fill this list to fifteen (imaginary friend 2)

Fifteen people I didn't meet

Fifteen people I didn't get the chance to speak to, maybe next time. So many people, so little time...

1. Marc West, a podcaster responsible for the Mr. Science Show
2. Ben Goldacre, medic and journalist, I've got a stack of nerdy questions about badscience.net and big bad pharma that will have to wait for another time
3. Simon Frantz, one of the people behind the nobelprize.org website
   
4. Clare Dudman Keeper of the snails, did a great session on creativity
5. Gia Millinovich so how come we rarely see you and your hubby Professor Brian Cox in Manchester?
6. Those Digital Curation Centre (DCC) people (Martin Donnelly?) look interesting, eg. Digital Curation Blog: How to make repositories a killer app for scientists.
7. Professor David Colquhoun FRS. One of a handful of Professors (of Science) with a blog, and I'm pretty sure the only Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) with a blog.
8. Aussie journalist Zoë Corbyn from Times Higher Education, didn't get the chance to hassle her about writing that myexperiment news article soon.
9. David Bradley of Science Base
10. Oliver Obst head of the medical library of the University of Munster, see Science Blogging 2008 London: Nachmittag (Ja!)
    
11. Gavin Bell, Nature, hand held blogger
12. Charlotte Stoddart, podcaster (or should that be "podder"?), see her podcasting Ben Goldacre here
13. Simon Hughes, British Library
14. Dr Aust who likes to vent his spleen
15. Brain Duck who is trying to understand uncertainty

Actually there are a lot more than fifteen people I'd like to meet, there is the other sixty as well.

2009: Fifteen Science Professors blogging?

Phew! That's four groups of fifteen people, around half the total conference attendance. A very interdisciplinary bunch, just like leafing through a copy of Nature, you get genetics on one page, climate change on the next followed by missions to Mars to wrap it all up. I think this is something special that makes Nature and Nature Network unique.

The striking thing is, with a few exceptions, most conference attendees, nature networkers and bloggers are relatively young. Why don't more senior scientists blog? This is a challenge Timo Hannay and PMR posed at the end of the conference, "get more senior scientists blogging". There is a BIG prize up for grabs, an all expenses paid trip to the next Science Foo Camp (scifoo) in the Googleplex, California (August 2009). Details to be posted online soon. Maybe this will mean science blogging 2009 will have fifteen senior Professors in the audience?

And finally, if you are one of the ~ fifteen (or so) people reading this O'Really? blog, thanks for visiting. I hope you enjoy my random ramblings, I certainly enjoy writing them. For any Professors out there reading this (I know a few that do), when will you start blogging? Now, blogging is no substitute for peer-review, but it certainly fills some of the gaping holes that traditional scientific publishing leaves in the web. What are you waiting for?

References

1. Andy Warhol (1968) (volume released to mark his exhibition in Stockholm, February–March, 1968) "Warhol, Andy" The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Ed. Elizabeth Knowles. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online.
2. Journal of the Hyperlinked Organisation (JOHO) famous to fifteen people
3. Wikipedia: Fifteen minutes of fame

* A video of Ben Goldacre's talk should be available online soon.

(Creative Commons licensed picture of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol, "stolen" from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) New York by oddsock)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

There are also sculptures and architecture and design and photography, prints and even illustrated books on display, and Film and Media - this place is a total contrast to the MET due to the contemporary nature of the artist and their respective works, so I must say this was the highlight for me!! I absolutely loved walking around this place. The Salvador Dali exhibition was on , so that was another highlight for me, to be able to see this mad genius of modern times , have on display all his works both in print, canvas, film - simply too overwhelming to describe it all here I must say. But I think you can get the drift of how much I enjoyed this time.

Happily after about 4 or more hours housed in the MOMA, we walked -this time to the Rockefeller Center located between 5th and 6th avenue(also known as the Avenue of the Americas). Built in the 1930's, during the height of the great depression in the US, the Rockefeller Center was the first project to combine retail, entertainment and office space in what is often refereed to as the "city within a city". The project itself gave jobs to approx 77,000 workers over the nine years it took to build.  The views from the observation deck on the 67th floor are the most stunning 360 degree views of the city.

Another fabulous day and night to what has been a great introduction to New York.

1.  Why do banks only lend money to people who don't really need it?

2. Can we fix the baldness problem by making it illegal for bald people to procreate? And, if so, how long would that take?

3. At what point will the Museum of Modern Art drop the Modern from its name?

4. How did they get the lines so straight when they made the borders for Colorado?

5. Why do we wait a year before we start counting birthdays?

Y por dejar de fiarme radicalmente de una de las guías de Lonely Planet, una pequeñita, que recomendaba un bar que ya no existe y aseguraba que el MET era gratis (precio sugerido $20, y a ver quién es el guapo que sugiere mejor no pagar nada)...

Y por descubrir que Zack Morris se sigue ganando el pan... moreno y, por dios, con más frente... Raising the Bar es la serie, abogados cabreados el tema

Y por disfrutar del cuadro de Tom Wesselmann 'Still Life #30' mientras el resto le sacaba fotos a 'Campbell's Soup', sin menospreciar a éste, desde luego...(MOMA, $20, sin que haga falta sugerirlo)

Y por conocer las fotos de un desconocido del que tan sólo se conoce su sombra... (unknown, MOMA)

Y por ser testigo de lo que le da a la gente por coleccionar a lo largo de la vida... (Ripley's Odditorium, $25)

Para disfrutar realmente de la ciudad, preguntad al que sabe, al autóctono, sin miedo. Yo sigo por puntos varios de Florida, con tormenta tropical, claro...

De band is officieel uit elkaar en Byrne doet al jaren solo-projecten met o.a. Brian Eno. En hij ontwerpt aardige dingen.
Zo schreef The Department of Transportation in New York een ontwerpwedstrijd uit voor fietsrekjes, iets waar een ernstig gebrek aan is in Manhattan. Byrne werd gevraagd als jurylid maar liet ook 'even' zijn eigen schetsjes zien. De reactie was "Leuk, als je ze zelf produceert, gaan we ze plaatsen." Zo geschiedde en de Big Apple is nu negen fietsrekjes rijker o.a. in de vorm van een pump (nee, geen fietspomp), een dollarteken en een gitaar. Ik zou ze graag gaan testen maar ja, de douane daar is al een dagdeel kwijt met een mens, stel je voor hoe lang het duurt als je nog een fiets bij je hebt.

(Foto: PaceWildenstein)

In fact, for some of the outdoor exhibit, I am happy to have read the site since the information was a bit hard to understand over their "call this number from your cellphone" informational system.  And there are better inside photos of the micro-compact home that were hard to get a sense of with so many people trying to see the exhibit.  Touching and getting the sense of size are difficult online, but avoiding the lines and being rushed are also nice. (note pic of line below).

Other than the micro-compact, I was not very impressed by the other designs. They seemed impractical or poorly built.  The cellophane house for example was the most striking from the exterior, but the layout was awkward and use of space poor.   Did I mention how cool it looked from the exterior? Okay and they had a nice integration of PV into the windows/exterior walls.   But practicality wise, I felt it would be difficult to carry drinks/food up 3 floors to the roof-top deck, among other issues.

The outside exhibit was only half of the fun. On the inside (6th or 7th floor) they had a very comprehensive collection of drawings, videos, models and photographs which played out the history of pre-fab homes.  The information was alot to take in, so I had to carefully navigate to insure nothing was missed.  The exhibit was also one where photography was not allowed, thus no pics.    I was pretty amazed my the progress that had been made in pre-fab earlier in the 20th century, both in the U.S. and abroad.    This part of the exhibit is not as well represented online though.

All in all, I was happy to have gone. My expectations were probably a bit unrealistic as I thought I might see something radically amazing, but since a group of fellow bloggers follow this topic closely, it was an unlikley possibility.

As for the other parts of the museum, I really liked the Design & Architecture exhibits.  They were like a step back in time and I really enjoyed it.

This attractive mouthful was designed by Greg Lynn in 2005 out of fiberglass, foam, and fabric, but the real innovation was using three-dimensional modeling software to turn a two dimensional square into a chair-shaped volume. The legs, arms, and backrest are formed out of lumps and swells that seem to have grown organically out of the initial geometry. In fact, the chair is constructed out of two pieces -- molded plastic on the bottom, molded foam on top -- fitted together like a square of, you guessed it... ravioli!

Location:

A gigantic kitchen in an undisclosed office in the SoMa district of San Francisco. 

Situation:

A handful of coworkers are hanging out while preparing their breakfast around the center island of the kitchen.  Two female coworkers get to reminiscing about how their mothers dressed in the 80's.  One coworker told a story about how her mom used to wear muu muus big, flowing, colorful, butterfly dresses... but admitted that they were living in Hawaii at the time so it was pretty normal.  Another coworker added to the conversation,

"Do you know what's worse?  My mom used to wear that stuff too and we lived in AMERICA!"

Other than that, we were at the Museum of Modern Art, which contains, well, a lot of modern works of art. Now, I'm not exactly a fan of modern art, especially the kind that I don't understand. And that seems to be more than I'd thought, because I went through some of the expositions constantly shaking my head. There was however one exposition that really was worth it, which was the Dalí-exposition. The topic was Dalí and film and it showed some of Dalí's film script autographs, some sketches for film scenes that he wrote and a few paintings that showed his affinity to the medium of film. Also, there were screenings of some film scenes from movies such as "Un chien andalou". I know, I've never seen it myself, and it is quite wacked, but since that applies to almost all of Dalí's work, that came as no surprise.

This time around, we also stayed overnight. All I knew up front was that we were staying in a hostel that just opened a few weeks ago. What I did NOT know, however, was that this hostel was in the middle of Harlem. What I also didn't know is that Harlem is not a bad part of New York at all. As a European, the first thing that came to my mind were crime, gang violence and drug dealing. But it's really not like that at all. Actually, apart from the occasional run-down parts that you have in almost every city, it was pretty nice. During the last few years, the city of NY invested a lot of money to bring Harlem back on track, and it seems like these incentives showed some results.

What else...concerning my arrival back home, it will be on the 4th of October at 12 noon. I am still looking for a victim to pick me and my seven bags of luggage up from the airport in Nuremberg....so, if anyone's still interested...(Jon?) :)

That's it for now, I guess I'll be getting back to you later this week if there's any more interesting stuff.

Here we have Lebbeus Woods, who "continues to work at a small drafting table in a corner of his apartment here, a solitary, monklike figure churning out increasingly abstract architectural fantasies..."

Would someone please get this man a Second Life account?

He even has a show running at MoMA called 'Dreamland'  (not to be confused with Anshe Chung's virtual 'Dreamland' empire in Second Life).

If ever there was an architect who's work would benefit from virtual immersion, it is Lebbeus Woods.  His sketches are brilliant, and will always hold an important post in architectural expression, but they are just so many static portals into his imagination.  Wouldn't it be better if the rest of the world could walk inside  living, breathing, holistic creations in a virtual environment instead of traveling to MoMA to see sketches?

We have seen several projects within Second Life that have this kind of 'shake-up' potential to challenge the status quo, and even some outward facing projects that challenge real life architectural norms.  But they're still essentially off the industry radar, with very little uptake in mainstream discussion or education.  There is no doubt in my mind that native architectural talent already immersed in Second Life has the skill and wherewithal to achieve such great heights, but how and when will their work be counted amongst the industry's FIC?  Will it ever be?  Should it be?

In my humble opinion, the vast, amorphous, virtual fabric of the Second Life grid itself is already worthy of inclusion and consideration as one of the most significant architectural achievements of our time.  The profound, the abstract, the literal, the silly, the corporate, the preposterous, the serious...the whole thing, every prim of it, ought to be considered a magnificent architectural manifestation on par with even the most recognized theoretical inventions.  To be sure, Second Life is the greatest singular manifestation of free, creative architectural expression the world has ever seen. Yet it remains all but ignored by our profession.

When will architectural giants of theory see the low hanging fruit of virtual environments as a tool for enabling people from around the world to more fully experience their ideas in an immersive and holistic fashion than sketches and illustrations offer?  Will they ever?  Or will it have to be born from within?  It seems increasingly clear to me that the architectural greats of tomorrow's serious theory might not come from hallowed halls, but from avatars, and communities of avatars operating in virtual environments- not starchitects or solitary monklike figures.

Here are some other 'food-for-thought' quotes from this article about Lebbeus that I find very applicable to our collective work on the virtual frontier of architecture industry.

"During the 1960s firms like Superstudio in Florence, Italy, and Archigram in London were designing urban visions intended to shake up the status quo. These projects - walking, mechanized cities and mirrored megastructures that extended over mountain ranges and across deserts - were stinging attacks on a professional mainstream that avant-garde architects believed lacked imaginative energy."

"By abandoning fantasy for the more pragmatic aspects of building, the profession has lost some of its capacity for self-criticism, not to mention one of its most valuable imaginative tools."

And finally, a quote directly from Woods, "what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules."

Welcome to Second Life, Mr. Woods!

Quotes from "Lebbeus Woods: An architect who still explores the fringes of reality" in the International Herald Tribune.  Full article HERE.

Images from 'Architecture My Ninja Please" post HERE.  Lebbeus Woods on Wikipedia.

In the evolution of the 20th-century city, New York played a crucial role. Gotham haunted the imagination of everyone from John Dos Passos and H.G. Wells to Le Corbusier and the German Expressionist director Fritz Lang. A man-made colossus, it embodied in its concrete grid and in the tidal migrations of its pedestrians the very spirit and rhythm of the modern age.

By now, that affinity is so well known as to seem platitudinous. Less well known is that, half a century later, with the dawn of Postmodernism in the late 1970s, New York City would reassert its power over the minds of a new and very different generation of architects and writers. Pre-eminent among them was Rem Koolhaas, whose book "Delirious New York" defined this new feeling and can be taken as its manifesto. His highly influential text is now 30 years old, and its influence is being celebrated in a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, "Dreamland: Architectural Experiments since the 1970s," curated by Andres Lepik, together with Christian Larsen.

For some of us, it is an open question whether Mr. Koolhaas is a theoretician, which suggests a sustained and systematic point of view, or rather someone who has embraced the phenomenon of New York and of urban centers in general, with a new kind of enthusiasm that spills over into design. Three decades ago, what was new, if not entirely unique, about "Delirious New York" was a subjective, playful, almost spasmodic approach to urbanism that stood in direct contrast to the propeller-headed high-seriousness of the Modernists.

To an earlier generation, it was the regimented order of our grid plan and the mechanomorphic aesthetic of our skyscrapers that held out the promise of urban life as a well-oiled machine, as consummate social engineering. By the late 1970s, however, when New York had reached the perigee of its fortunes, when the very idea of the modern city had been widely discredited, Mr. Koolhaas and other young architects presumed to find in its chaos and danger an invigorating charm that could serve as a new and desirable model for social interaction. As a result, there are a great many oddities in the present MoMA exhibition; scenes of Piranesian devastation, earthquakes, and topsy-turvy distortions that celebrate New York's clamorous and ungovernable diversity.

Fantastic architectural drawings surely did not begin to be made in the 1970s. The first image you see on entering this exhibition is a work of Hugh Ferris, from the 1930s, a typically moody and darksome exercise in the noir style that he pioneered. But that work is unique in this exhibition. Far more typical is a painting by Madelon Vriesendorp, the wife and colleague of Mr. Koolhaas, in which the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building are lying enervated upon a bed, presumably after having just made out. That presumption is supported by a short animated cartoon that Mr. Lepik discovered and included in this show, in which the two skyscrapers are doing exactly that.

In another, even earlier work by Mr. Koolhaas, from 1972, "The City of the Captive Globe Project," we see a riotous variety of architectural types set into an exact grid resembling the one Le Corbusier conceived for his "ville radieuse." But here Mr. Koolhaas's point is exactly opposite to Le Corbusier's. Mr. Koolhaas seems to argue that New York, the postmodern city par excellence, is not defined by uniformity but by the unsystematic collision of unnumbered architectural styles.

"Dreamland" is made up entirely of works from the museum's own collection. It includes images and collages by some of the most visionary architectural draftsmen of the past generation, among them Raimund Abraham, Daniel Libeskind, Steven Holl, Peter Eisenmann, and Zaha Hadid. There are even entries by more straitlaced practitioners, among them Paul Rudolph, who was really a Modernist fully a generation or two older than the men and women in this show, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the one firm that, more than any other, defined the look of postwar Manhattan.

In the "Dreamland" exhibition, the drawings hang along the walls of the Robert B. Menschel Architecture and Design Gallery, on the third floor. But in the center of the room, on a raised platform, are two dozen architectural models, many of them corresponding to projects that have actually been built. It should come as no surprise that these models tend to feel far more earthbound and conservative than the drawings. Whether in SHoP Architects's design for the Museum of Sex in New York City or Lindy Roy's PoolHouse in Sagaponac, N.Y., or Diller + Scofidio's Slow House project in North Haven, N.Y., we see the return of a begrudging respect for the laws of gravity and something like architectural coherence.

Still, the mood of these projects has been directly affected by the antic spirit of Mr. Koolhaas's 30-year-old book, even if New York City itself, the town that inspired his meditations in the first place, has fewer imaginative monuments of this sort than most other important cities in the developed world.

James Gardner
New York Sun

Most cities are expressions of surrounding landscape, culture, and people.  But New York is an expression of America.  Stand on a street corner and you will see Anglos, Asians, Latinos, and Jews; the same variety that makes America so rich.  Hidden by the bustle and noise of the city is abject poverty, desperate crime, and yearnings for change.  Side by side, poverty co-exists with unimaginable wealth, success, and power, the glistening future of our nation.  Decrepit monuments and infrastructure infrastructure stand next to splendid temples of capitalism, while throughout a sort of rotting malaise saps the vitality of the city.  From the filthy streets, to the crumbling buildings, to the rancid air, this rot shows the need for change in America as well as New York.  But there is also astonishing beauty, and a majesty even in the decaying monuments of the past.  Most of all, New York is a city of power, an expression of the industry and glory of an entire people.  New York is greatness.

Some highlights of the trip:

There was a Dali exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.  There is no beauty in the works of Dali, only genius.  Dali's is the work of unbounded, unlimited creativity, and not madness as some assume.  But then, is there really a difference between the two?  The highlight was "The Persistence of Memory", which struck me as being rather small for its reputation (trivia: the fleshy animal in the middle of the paintint is actually Dali's face in profile). 

Rent was one of the broadway shows we watched, but I was unimpressed.  It seemed as if someone had written a touching, sentimental little story and then set it to music, and to me that isn't what makes a great musical.  A true musical takes an emotion or an idea, and expresses it in a series of songs.  The greatest of these is Phantom of The Opera, the second broadway show.  The Majestic Theater where we saw it was, in a word, majestic,  and the performances were nothing short of phenomenal.  I never stop being amazed at the sheer depth and range of Phantom, Broadway's longest running play.

We met with one of Dad's friends, the IT director of the Museum of Natural History and enjoyed a private (and free) tour of the museum.  The museum's scope was impressive, but it seemed a little antiquated at best, not the best quality for a well-respected museum.  The only really remarkable feature was the Hall of Precious Metals, an incredible wing filled with precious stones and minerals.  Within are huge slabs of jade, gold, gems of every variety, diamond, ruby, and saphire.  Truly an unforgetable experience.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art can be described in one word: exhausting.  It is filled with amazing, phenomenal, beautiful works of art, but there are simply too many for them to be fully appreciated.  My memories of the museum are of a swirl of beautiful and famous artwork, and not of any piece in particular.  Well, there was one.  "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" is one of the most intriguing works of art I have ever seen.  Other than that, however, I remember only vague impressions of specific artists.  Matisse's painting is stylistic to the point of childishness, but his sculpture is very thought-provoking and innovative.  Chagall is over-sentimental, but on rare occasions produced works of simple beauty.  Monet is one of the most beautiful and touching painters in the world.  Picasso's work is generally unconventional for its own sake, but expecially in the "blue period" his art can be affecting.  Seurat's paintings are innovative and pleasing, unfortunately there are very few of them. Rodin should stick to sculpture.  Van Gogh has a talent for taking even the everyday and imbuing it with meaning and life.

Fifth Avenue and Broadway are breathtaking examples of capitalism gone mad.  Concentrated in these two places are more merchandise and wealth than the collective economies of some countries.  Macy's alone contains enough to clothe (fashionably I might add) an entire city.  The creative potential of all of America is channeled here into new product lines and marketing enterprises.  The theaters of Broadway contain the collected theatrical brilliance of the American people.  And at night, when the crowds come out and the lights come on, it really is marvelous to think that the whole world is in New York.

Finally, there is Central Park.  Called an oasis in a sea of urbanization, it's really a world unto itself.  Go on a weekday when all the crowds are at work, and absorb the quiet wonder of the place, a land of nature from which the industry of man is visible.  I sat on a park bench with a beef empanada and apple juice and listened to Rhapsody in Blue.  And just sitting there, looking out at the skyscrapers, at man's unlimited potential, sitting amidst the whispering trees of man's humble origins, that was perfect.