Growing up with a small patch of Australian bush up the road I never understood why the woods were supposed to be scary. The bush has always been a place of adventure, discovery and good times. Warm, dry and bright with a strong eucalypt scent and the comforting buzz of insects. I never once found a trail of breadcrumbs or scary bears looking for porridge.

Back in Siuslaw, the road through the forest curved on and on – even tunnelling through a mountain – before ending up by streams, rivers and finally the coast. We drove through small towns which were variations on a theme with a few quirks thrown in. One town had an eBay shopfront where a power seller (TM) was dispersing to the world the goods of computer-illiterate locals.

We spent our first night of the road trip in the seaside town of Port Orford. It was remarkably smaller and darker than Google Maps told us (things always look bright and easy on Google Maps). Despite arriving at our B&B at 5.15pm it was well and truly pitch black. Being from the city, I can’t remember the last time I saw this much darkness, however it fitted in nicely with the wood fire and the home-made cookies at the beautiful Compass Rose B&B.

We headed straight out to dinner (“restaurants close at 8pm around here”) at Griff’s On The Dock, a slightly kooky place recommended on the Thorntree forum (“ask them what’s fresh and order it”), and by the B&B owner. The place reminded me of a tiny truck-stop – all red and white tablecloths, busy walls and a waitress with all the charm of your no-nonsense school canteen lady. Our table quickly filled with clam chowder, salads, calamari, halibut, steamed clams, garlic bread and beer from nearby city of Bend. The place really was right on the dock, a shack amongst boats, although we were oblivious to them as we curved down the ramp towards the sea. Like going through digital camera photos the morning after a party, we drove back to the dock to see just what we had done the night before.

Arriving to a town in darkness – especially one too small for a walkable strip or streetlights – means you need to wait til morning for it to reveal itself. We woke to see sunshine streaming through the forest and a view through to the marshes and a lake. It was a beautiful and secluded spot. Walking around the forest on a sunny day was nothing like the scary misty forest of the previous day. The ground felt like thick Persian carpet and there were soft textures in all directions. There were birds, salamanders, and deer hoof prints, although it wasn’t until we were leaving that we saw actual deer frolicking by the side of the road.

The dramatic coast of Oregon and the beaches of Port Orford are best left to photos – even my amateur ones.

But I think it’s fairer to say you’ll know why Nirvana wrote the music they did. It’s a city for book reading, movie watching, music making and discussions over coffee. Whenever the weather got too much for us – too cold or too drizzly – it was an excuse to stop at a cafe for chilli soup, for crumpets, or for coffee and a cookie; or an excuse to pop into the wonderful Elliot Bay Books to buy heavy hardcover things we never realised we needed; or an excuse to pop into yet another record store over-flowing with new and used CDs in all imaginable genres.

So I can imagine it would be a good place to hang out in a shed with a few mates and make some melancholy rock music. Although this grey weather = melancholy music theory doesn’t stack up when you think about Glasgow’s twee pop masters, Belle & Sebastian.

My list of things to check out in Seattle:

Georgetown. Unless you’re into Fantagraphics Comics there’s no real reason to come here, but this area known as the wild west has an abandoned industrial town feel to it – and in a good way. Cute cafes and bars are popping up around here too.

Capitol Hill. I think this is the swankier part of town. Suddenly there were people dressed in coats rather than in waterproof North Face jackets and sneakers (the uniform for the rest of the city). Pike Fish Fry is an excellent place for all your deep fried needs – even the vegetables are fried. The fish and chips were the best I can remember but there’s also pulled pork and hanger steak for the non-fish lovers out there.

Pioneer Square. Pretty area of downtown where Elliot Bay Books is located.

Pike Place Market. The tourist epi-centre. Buy some donuts because you want something warm and comforting then regret it later. On 1st Ave but still part of the markets is The Crumpet Shop. It’s probably the only place to go for decent tea, not to mention home-made crumpets.

Seattle Centre. More touristy-ness which is probably an equivalent to Sydney’s Darling Harbour but the lack of sunshine gives it an abandoned theme park feel, in a good way though (I’ve really got a soft spot for neon signs glowing in the mist now).

The Experience Music Project is in the Seattle Centre Park. Go there to check out more garishly shiny work of Frank Gehry and then stay to learn how to play the chord progression from Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’.

Coffee places other than Starbucks. I’m confused that Starbucks (the worst coffee in the world) comes from a place known for having good coffee. Did Starbucks once make good coffee but the standards went down as they expanded across the globe? It’s the white elephant in the room so I didn’t dare ask but instead found some places with a menu I recognised and espresso machines rather than drip coffee sitting bitter in the corner. A tiny hole in the wall, Cafe Bambino in Ballard just down from The Sneakery, served the real stuff, and the cafe underneath Elliot Bay Books did too.

The next day we set off on foot to the western side of the city. Past the Art Gallery of Ontario with its bulging submarine-like facade, a recent addition by Frank Gehry; past the Royal Ontario Museum, an old stone building which has been attacked by a contemporary steel with pleasing results; then to our destination Kensington Market. This is an open air market where the stalls all have shop fronts, more akin to shanty-town markets I’ve seen in South East Asia than to something like Paddy’s market in Sydney. Colourful fruit and vegie displays, smelly fish shops, European delis and Middle Eastern stalls of dried fruit and nuts sat amiably next to signs of gentrification.

The area around Nassau St is one place to find the work of local designers. There’s Hardboiled printing t-shirts with designs from locals, and across the road is Kid Icarus, a stationary shop with pretty cards, paper and actual prints from locals. Can we have one of these in Sydney please?

The area has a laid back hippy vibe, helped by the shops being more like converted houses with front yards. Like stumbling into a tea party you’re not invited to, I was on my best behaviour and decided against whipping out the camera. In front of the bookshop, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library, two guys solemnly tinkered on their clarinet and guitar as if they were sitting in their own lounge room with no one else around. Girls in beanies stood around with coffee in cups and saucers, presumably from the cafe next door.

Further south and a couple of days later we would welcome more of this hippie vibe. Want soy bacon with your French toast and maple syrup? Sadie’s Diner is known as one of the few places in the city to get a decent vegan breakfast. We met a couple of ex-pat vegans there who had recently relocated to Toronto with much ease, commenting on just how pleasant the customs people were.

We also met up some some “Irish” relatives while in town. I say “Irish” because, like my Mum, this cousin of hers left Belfast some decades ago. Being chauffered along the scenic route to Missisauga showed us more than we could cover on foot. The site of the yearly fair, leafy inner suburbs, High Park, a Polish neighbourhood and a strip known for its gigs. Despite having never met these relatives before, a common history and some similar interests – music, theatre, online media – gave us plenty to talk about. And we were of course pleased to have a wonderful home cooked meal after many nights eating out. Can anyone make mashed potato as well as the Irish? I think not.

Two other great things I must mention about Toronto: shoe shops and the Art Gallery of Toronto.

The Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto is dedicated to the history of the shoe. Yes, it sounds frivolous but the best bits were thoroughly educational from the oldest known footprints (found in volcanic ash) to early shoes from different continents and religions.

So given there is a shoe museum it makes sense that there are also many great shoe shops, particularly boots. If you’re going to spend half the year wearing boots you want to have a few to choose from. Gum boots are taken to a new level, and apres ski-boots are just as fashionable as regular boots. Even Camper and Nike make snow boots.

The Art Gallery of Ontario with its $18 entry fee almost didn’t make the cut. The special exhibitions weren’t that exciting and we’d just been to plenty of museums and galleries in NY and DC. But with nineteen Canadian dollars left in my purse and a few hours before our bus left I decided it was meant to be. The stars must’ve aligned because it was the best gallery experience I can remember. The Gehry extension to the gallery made a smooth transition from looking in the gallery to looking through the windows to the park and street below. The elevator had a video installation work which went for as long as your ride (“You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to”). There was a whole room of Henry Moore sculptures naturally lit by skylights at the request of his daughter. Canadian art was well represented and its significance explained. There were two floors of contemporary art, many rooms of drawings and a room crammed from floor to ceiling with paintings minus labels to demonstrate how women’s art used to be exhibited. I peaked around a corner from the drawings to look out the window and was invited to have a look at their study room and adjoining print archive where they store 60,000 works. They had a few works out on the tables for closer inspection, including The Vampire by Edvard Munch. The only disappointing bit was not being able to find postcards of the Gehry building in the shop!

It’s the fourth time I’ve been to NY yet it still takes me a moment to get used to the pace. Stay to the right. Walk without making eye contact. Speak up when spoken to. Know your order when you get to the counter. Don’t stop suddenly on the pavement.

Of course, breaking any of these rules will get you nothing more than a scowl from the people around you. You soon realise it’s all a game and the more you play the more addictive the city becomes. Soon you’re crossing against the lights ahead of the locals and cursing the subway gate when it doesn’t let you through on the first swipe. You start reacting without a thought and become an unaffected urban-dweller.

Needless to say, the buzz of NY was a welcome relief after a couple of days in DC. Driving into Manhattan that night to the endless blocks of tall buildings, busy sidewalks, colour, grit and dirt woke us from our DC slumber.

The East Village would be our home for the next four nights in a warehouse called East Village Bed & Coffee. It’s a simple and excellent idea: own a warehouse in a hip neighbourhood, put a few rooms on each floor, let it run like a share house complete with little signs telling you to clean up after yourself. Provide bikes to share and a dog, Mango, to greet you when you get in.

NY highlights (in small bite-sized chunks)

The food:

Porchetta has six stools and a huge lump of slow roasted pork. The shop front, about 2.5 metres wide, resembles that of an old-fashioned butcher’s with clean white tiles and a big glass window (see for yourself in exhibit A). The pork, slow roasted with garlic, rosemary and fennel, is served either on a roll or on a plate with beans and greens. We also got a chicory salad on the side and crispy potatoes with burnt ends. These ‘burnt ends’ were delightful little shavings of crisp pork – a fairy floss for the meat lovers of the world. Wash it all down with fresh lemonade.

Joe’s Shanghai has been doing soup dumplings, or xiao long bao as they’re known in Sydney, since the mid-nineties. They’re large, highly soupy and are served with the traditional vinegar and shredded ginger. Not quite to the standard of Din Tai Fung in Sydney or the even better Hu Tong Dumpling Bar in Melbourne, but a still a reliable feast. The ma-po tofu on the other hand more closely resembled the American-Chinese food we’d had in the past, too sweet and not enough chilli.

Some French restaurant on Ave A: I love that in NY you can go out for dinner at 10.30pm on a weeknight without feeling rushed or lonely in the restaurant. The food here was fine without being spectacular, but the real joy was its cosy local vibe which somehow made the wine taste better and the moules and frites just what I was looking for.

The outdoors:

The High Line is a new public garden made on top of an disused elevated railway line which once served the meat-packing district. It currently runs from around 8th St to 20th St but it will expand further north with it’s hardy plants interspersed between train tracks and stylishly formed concrete.

The artificial rolling hills and horse and carriages of Central Park are all a bit twee, but the size and placement of this park is hard to ignore. Walking through with the tips of buildings sticking out behind the trees makes the experience feel almost like a movie set. The weather turned cold so we wussed out on the original plan to cycle all the way through it.

We walked through Tompkins Square Park everyday and NY is spotted with little local parks like this one with a many fenced off areas serving different purposes. This East Village one is flavoured mostly with dog-owners and kid-owners, although later at night it seemed a little sketchy but was still harmless.

The culture:

The Tenement Museum is a lot like Susannah Place Museum in The Rocks area of Sydney; social history told through stories of the people who resided in the buildings. The tour starts in front of the bustling little shop on Orchard St with an introduction by the guide – not a dusty old guide, but a young hip one from Brooklyn – then proceeds into 97 Orchard St for the rest of the tour.

Doing The Met Museum and MOMA in one day would perhaps be ambitious for some, but we like to wander through somewhat aimlessly and then leave again before fatigue sets in. The Met’s scale, design and collection is reminiscent of European Galleries, and its setting right on Central Park makes it a beautiful tourist stop. MOMA is always satisfying with the permanent collection, sculpture garden and special exhibitions. We borrowed a MOMA membership card from our accommodation to get us into a member viewing on the new Bauhaus exhibition before it opened. I was so pleased with it that I’ve been carting the very heavy exhibition catalogue around with me since.

From my days of working for a museum I knew The Brooklyn Museum was the envy of all for its ability to experiment online and succeed. I didn’t realise just how much this approach carried over to their actual museum. We happened to be there for Target First Saturday where the museum is open for free until 11pm with performances and a bar. You may have been to after hours events at galleries before but I bet it wasn’t like this. The place was crammed with people of all demographics: the obligatory hip, young scenesters, Japanese tourists, African American families and older locals. It wasn’t about being seen or getting in for free, the museum has become a meeting place for the local community. People stopped to chat in crowded stairwells, kids ran around looking at African art, others lined up for over half an hour to see the temporary rock photography exhibition. While this happened up above in the wings, down on the ground floor a DJ was remixing Billie Jean to a crowded dancefloor and people peered through arches two storeys up to get a glimpse of the action. So the lesson here? Throw out the conservative approach to after hours exhibition viewings and instead let the public experience the museum in the way corporate venue hire clients do.

In DC I found myself making the same excuses I make in Canberra and talking up the positives of the place. Yes, the parks are lovely and the museums are great but where is the city centre with some sign of life? North-west of Dupont Circle had a certain buzz in the evening and plenty of restaurants and bars. Georgetown was leafy and pretty but it verged on being painfully quaint.

We hired bikes near the Washington Mall area to meander through the monuments and museums. I’m sure American tourists get a lot more from this place after hearing about it in school for years. My main connection was with the Lincoln Memorial where I remembered The Simpsons episode where Lisa went to him for advice. He certainly was imposing in real life. It’s a massive shrine that looks down upon the memorial pond.

The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum was next. It was huge, having to accommodate planes after all. We walked through some old planes and looked at space food sticks, so I can’t really say it was the most riveting museum experience. We then crossed the park to The Smithsonian National Gallery of Art, an imposing building, all stairs, columns and heavy doors without signs. This building was amazing, possibly more amazing than the art it contained. The rooms had the all the ambience and style of a European art gallery but without the crowds. A few rooms in was an indoor garden, green and lush with water features and garden furniture to sit and appreciate. Of course, more marble columns and a high skylighted ceiling.

Across the road at the east wing of the gallery is the contemporary collection. This one impressed with both architecture and content – Jackson Pollack, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein.

It took me a while to pinpoint what felt odd about all of the museums and then it clicked. The only people working in the museums seemed to be security guards. Security guards checking bags on the way in and more guards spread throughout the galleries. They were completely free of the usual information desks, membership signs or art students working between studying. If felt like no one was really curating exhibitions or enhancing the collection. They had a big pile of of great artefacts and art and so it’s just been housed in these museums and forgotten.

Of course, maybe I’d think differently if I’d slept the night before.

Down in the Mission on a Monday night, waiting for a bus, a Cuban band plays unnofficially in a corner square in front of a supermarket. A couple start dancing in front of the crowd and passers-by jump up on park benches to get a better view. We’d just finished a burrito (shared because even a single burrito in the US is family sized) at Farolito Taqueria after discovering Artillery (24th and Mission), a shop full of gear by really local, as in Mission area, designers. At first glance I thought it was just a hipster-den, but beneath the surface it actually had some substance. I walked out of there knowing I was doing my bit for the local community by buying a bag, a dress and a t-shirt for Peter.

Speaking of hipsters, there’s about 10 times more of them in the Mission area since we were last there in April 07, particularly on Valencia. Not that I mind. More cool shops in addition to the bookstores and record stores we visited last time, lots of bike porn (although far too many fixies) and even a decent coffee place.
Given the general low standards of coffee in the US, Ritual Coffee Roasters was quite a find only hours after I got off the flight from Sydney. I ordered a machiato to go and the guy tried to convince me to have it in a real cup in the cafe “to keep the temperature high and not have any paper taste.” I somehow didn’t think their coffee would be so precious to deserve such treatment and I was right. What came was more like a piccolo latte rather than an espresso with a drop of milk, but it was perfectly nice, almost as good as the stuff around the corner from work. I couldn’t believe that people were lining up out the door only to order grande mochas. Surely the single origin goodness wouldn’t come through in a milkshake sized chocolatey coffee? Baby steps, baby steps.

But the hipsters haven’t taken over this area, rather, they sit nicely in the varied pot of cultures. While Valencia is becoming gentrified, Mission St is still full of local stores, and most importantly for me, cheap good food. Mexican, African American and Vietnamese still dominate the area named the Mission because the first outsiders to arrive, the Spanish in 1776, they set the local Native Americans to work building them a mission. It never really turned out so they ended up handing it over to the Mexicans who made something of the area. Two Mission Mexican meals into the trip, I’m grateful for it.

And the people are nice, the food is good, the transport works. We’re just back from seeing an excellent play by one of my favourite playwrights, Harold Pinter, called The Betrayal which was on at the Stephenwolf Theatre. There’s still the Art Institute of Chicago and Millenium Park to go.

Can I stay here?

Nicole put me onto it after visiting the place many times when she lived there a few years back. We’re glad we ran across to it from it’s kinda sister restaurant/bar/venue across the road, La Sala Rosa, where we were seeing a Deerhunter gig. What type of art does it contain, I hear you ask? 3″ CDs, zines, drawings, buttons – the possibilities are endless, and I love the gamble of choosing it by a vague image on a little button.

If anyone has a spare old-school cigarette machine in Sydney then let me know and we can all be having a little bit of local art in our lives.

Note: Turns out there are a few of these machines around Montreal and you can find more info from here.

It was meant to be four days. We were supposed to arrive 6am Monday morning but instead we reached our accommodation at 2am on Tuesday. Now let me tell you about our accommodation. The uncle of a friend of a friend just happens to have a spare apartment in the Chelsea part of Manhattan and he just happens to be a slightly eccentric New York jew. Funny guy though, and a great story-teller.

So we arrived at this place and collected the keys from the 24-hour deli downstairs and not long after the owner, Victor, drops by to show us how things work – he lives nearby and seems to be awake 24/7. The place had lamps galore, as well as kooky collectables and a huge bookcase. He told us half the books there came from a film shoot that was once done in his apartment.

The next morning we were immediately struck by how different NY is to San Fran (and probably the rest of the US). It’s such a competition to see who can be the toughest and the most independent that it’s actually quite funny. It’s that whole thing of nobody having anytime for being polite in NY. Although, I don’t think it’s actually got anything to do with time, I think it’s just all show. Anyway, it’s hilarious and I love the city. I remember wandering around NY on my own when I was 16 and trying to be first to cross the road before the lights changed just like they all did.

The only problem this posed for me was that it meant there weren’t many conversations I could overhear and record. It’s not that I deliberately tape people’s conversations but wandering the streets recording atmos picks up some great snipets of random conversations. There was lots of conversation and random shouting on the streets and in the buses of San Francisco but sadly not so much in NY because everyone was keeping to themselves. I wish I was recording when wandering back to the apartment on 7th Ave late one night and I hear ‘So this guy was about to go to court and then he has a heart attack and dies’. On the radio pieces that could’ve been used in!

We checked out Brooklyn and Williamsburg on the first morning because we didn’t get a good look through this up and coming area last time. After lunch I went onto SoHo and got all excited because there were so many cool shops – a shop called ‘Bags’, a shop called ‘Shoes’, a Camper store, Sephora, Aveda, a MOMA store and plenty of indie designers. I probably didn’t buy anything because I had good intentions of getting back there but my bank balance is happy I didn’t.

My bank balance certainly wasn’t happy that I found a place called Century 21 in the financial district across the road from the World Trade Centre site. I like to think of this place as a department store where designer clothes go to die, but not so much die as be snapped up by a would be super-shopper. Can you believe that there were people walking around this place with shopping trolleys? Inside it looks like Kmart during a boxing day sale, except that it’s full of Moschino frocks, Costume National suits, Paul Smith cashmere and a plethora of other designers too expensive to have previously touched. My prize find was a Vivienne Westwood skirt which has inverted points that remind me of her Witches Suit that I saw in the V&A exhibition last time I was in London. Oh, and a teal leather laptop bag – just the plane accessory a girl needs when backpacking around the US.

Later that night we met Victor for dinner at a local Szchehuan restaurant. Many stories later we were the last to leave as Victor showed us photos of the dogs of Chelsea (there are lots of dogs in Chelsea) and he walked us back to the apartment in the freezing wind.

It seems we packed so much into our short time in NY that the rest will have to wait for another post.

Blogging

The first session I attended was a pre-conference workshop on blogging given by the talented bloggers and web guys at the Walker Art Centre. They could often be seen blogging live, as were plenty of other people including a fellow Sydney museum web person.

They’ve nicely left a wiki of their notes from the workshop. I thought it was pretty cool that they’ve managed to get their director blogging.

Here are some interesting points I left the workshop with:

Opening plenary – all information available to everyone

The day started with an inspiring opening by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive arguing that it’s possible for all the information in the world to be available to everyone. He continued to demonstrate how digitisation projects to archive all the books, audio and video in the world are completely within our grasp, some of it having already happened.

The big question he leaves us with is that digitisation is happening, but who is going to control it – the public or private sphere? It’s easy to leave digitisation projects to the big tech companies by making excuses that it will be too expensive, but while these companies might appear to have the public interest at heart now, what’s to say they don’t change their minds in the future? Think about who already owns most of the web: NewsCorp owns MySpace, Yahoo owns Flickr and Google owns YouTube, and that’s just to name a few.

If this sounds inspiring to you then you’ll like some more details from the blog of the Walker Art Centre guys. If it sounds like the rantings of a hippy then you’ll probably prefer to read this slightly different opinion.

Web 2.0

This was the hot topic of the conference – everyone wants a piece of it, and with good reason.

Jeff Gates from the Smithsonian American Art Museum guided us through his museum blog, and the process that they’ve created to make blogging viable at their institution. What I found interesting about their blog is that it’s a very polished piece of material, treated in the same way as an official publication would be. I think this goes against what blogging is really about, but I hear it’s wildly successful so it’s great to hear they’ve found a way to make blogging work for their organisation.

Shelley Bernstein and Nicole Caruth of the Brooklyn Museum were the talk of the conference because of the cool web 2.0 stuff they’ve been doing to engage their local community with the museum. The web 2.0 stuff seems to be working for them because, firstly, interactive material is incorporated into the live museum experience, and secondly because the web team are active members of the online communities they’ve created. Check out their strong presense on Flickr, and read their paper complete with photos and screenshots.

Mike Ellis of London’s Science Museum talked about addressing organisational barriers to web 2.0 in a very practical way. The best point I think he made was that the reputation of museums are at stake if we don’t embrace web 2.0 technologies because that’s the direction the world is heading in. Good stuff on this topic can be found in his paper.

Redesign

It was great to get an insight into the resdesign process of SF MOMA. I was surprised to hear that their current site is almost 10 years old because the design has held up really well. I was also surprised to hear that their redesign process will in total be 2-3 years. Not long after I realised that my own museum’s website redesign should take longer than we originally thought too.

It’s late and this post is getting long so read more for yourself in their paper.

After hearing about SF MOMA from the web people I then got to go to SF MOMA for the opening night reception. I was too busy talking to people from New York, Saskatchewan, Cape York and Amsterdam (check out the annual Museum Night in Amerstdam – I’m linking to 2006 because the 2007 site is only in Dutch) to actually see any of the exhibitions, but luckily I made time to go back there on Sunday morning.