Vanderbilt Cup

Just imagine a place where you can see the newest Corvette, but at the same time Rolls Royces from the 1930s, the legendary Duesenberg, a car that looks like a carriage and a lot o people. People that have one thing in common. They just love cars. Old, new, it doesn't matter. What impressed me the most was being so close to such old cars. Some of them are not even made today, some of them are the only survivors of their species. It's interesting to see what car design meant back then and what it means now. Back then the racing cars had the form of a bullet, narrow and long, while nowadays they are wide and very very low. So low that if you would try to fit a tennis ball between the car and the ground, you couldn't.

But let's get back to the design of the cars and let's see how the perception of art changed in the last centuries.

Let's just consider these 2 cars. It may only be my imagination, but I feel that the design of the old cars is supposed to resemble the human face. Ok, we don't have popping eyes, but still the headlights are the eyes, the grid is the nose and the mudguards are the cheeks, you just have to be a bit more imaginative to see that. The old cars are curvy and big, some of them are quite huge, measuring up to 18 feet, although they only have 2 seats.

And here come the new cars:

slick and small, taking advantage of all the aerodynamics principles. They are no longer big and curvy, but lean and small.

Could this have anything to do with the way the human figure has evolved. Back in the 30s or 40s, big, Rubensian figures where considered beautiful, so the designers took the Rubensian beauty into the shape of the cars. But know all that has changes. We look up to skinny models, tall and lean. And maybe the new design of the car is made accordingly to our idea of beauty. Nowadays, for many people Rubens is just a painter who painted fat women, certainly not an inspiration to us. Today we get inspired by the skinny girl in the jeans campaign.

there's art everywhere

In NYC you can find art everywhere you turn you head. Even if it's on a huge trash can at the subway. I don't remember what station it was, but I know it's somewhere in the East Village. Why I like this? Because it's so New York. You take a sheet of paper and some markers and all of the sudden you have a poster that can be hung in a subway station. It doesn't take that much to be an artist, if you really want to be one. In case you see Shells or Scott, tell them I said Hello.

9/11 - 6 years

It's been 6 years. Six years ago the life of an entire continent changed forever. I remember I was at my parents house in Craiova, Romania watching a soap opera. I usually don't watch soap operas, but that summer me and one of my best friends decided to watch "The Young and the Restless" just to see how stupid and illogical the action could get. At one point the soap opera got interrupted...BREAKING THE NEWS...one of the Twin Towers got hit by an airplane. Everybody thought it was an accident. I went into the other room where my mother was sleeping, I woke her up and I told her: "Mom, an airplane hit one of the WTC buildings in NY !". She replied that it was probably an accident. For exactly 16 minutes the whole world wondered how such an accident could have happened. And then we got the answer. A second plane hit the second tower. It hadn't been an accident. When I went into my mother's room to tell her about the second plane she said: "Oh, God ! The war is coming !". She couldn't have been more right.

I remember the images, people running, screaming, people fighting for their lives. There is a footage which I cannot get out of my mind no matter how hard I try. The footage is with a man the dives out of the window of one of the floors just under where one of the planes hit. Even now, six years after seeing that image, it still send shivers down my spine. I keep wondering what he must have felt, if he knew he was going to die... back then, when I saw the image live, I kept praying that something would break his fall and he wouldn't die. After he fell, I realized that in that very moment his life had ended.

I live in NYC now, and a few weeks ago I went to Ground Zero. All the things I had seen on TV came rushing back to me. All the terror, the deaths, the despair... I had never seen NYC before 9/11, but it somehow felt like I was there when the planes crashed. And then I saw the cross made out of the structure of one of the towers as a tribute to all the people that died there. I stood there wishing that something could have been done for all the innocent people that died there. I didn't know any of them, but still I consider their dying as a big loss for all North America.

Today I wanted to go to Ground Zero at the commemoration, but I was afraid. Not of another attack or anything like that, but of seeing all those people who have lost their loved ones there, of seeing so much grief in one place. I didn't know if i could handle it. I only lost 2 people that were dear to me. I accepted the death of one o them, maybe because he was in his sixties, he had lived a great part of his life and, considering the fact that he was ill, his beautiful part of life had pretty much ended. But the death of one of my dear friends...I don't think I will ever be able to accept it. He was 27 and his only fault was that he got on the wrong bus with the wrong driver. It was raining, the driver was speeding and in a curve, he lost control of the bus and crashed it. My friend died instantly... There are 2 reasons why I will never accept his death:
1. he was young, full of energy, full of life and hope
2. I didn't get a chance to tell him I had been thinking about him. We grew apart after college when everybody is eager to start the adult life, but lately I kept thinking about calling him. I had a phone number that I was planing on trying that very day. But I got a call from his best friend before I ever got a chance to check that number. He asked me if I still remember them. I laughed and replied that I had been thinking about calling Manu (our friend that died) for the past few days, I just didn't get around to doing it. He told me I should have done it sooner, because now, there's no way to do it. I felt as if everything around me had vanished and I was alone in an empty room collapsing on the floor.
Manu was gone. That very instant I started remembering all the memories I had about him and I prayed I would not forget any of them. I kept trying to remember more and more. I felt that if I could remember enough then maybe he wouldn't be dead. I couldn't bring myself to understant it. How could he be dead ? And what is death in the end ? Why did he die ? Was there a reason ? An ultimate goal ? I ask myself those questions about the people who died on 9/11 also.

I was scared of going to Groud Zero today, because I was scared of feeling the way I felt when Manu died.

Fashion Week

A few days ago I had the opportunity to go to a fashion show during the NY Fashion Week. Needless to say that the place was crowded with a zillion of photographers, camera men, but also extremely beautiful women. The type of women that any regular person envies, not because they all looked so gorgeous, but because models always have an aura around them when they are on the runway. Of course, it's all in the lighting technique. While the public remains in the shadow, the spotlights shine upon them making everything even more spectacular. The models always entered the runway on the left side and exited on the right side, gracefully gliding in the sea of light as if nothing around them mattered, not the people, not the flashes, not even the huge lens on the photographer's cameras.

Bodies

New York is in itself an exhibition because anywhere you go, there are people trying to express art in ways maybe you didn't even imagine. Whether it's graffiti on the warehouses or a painting gallery, or maybe just a child that buids sandcastles in Coney Island. When I came to New York, I realized that this is the kind of city where it's worth to have a camera always with you. There is always something to photograph and with the right angle and the right light, you could shoot a piece of art in the heart of the Art City.

First exhibition I saw in New York was Bodies. There was no frame to analyze there, no foreground or background. Just people that were once alive, real people that stood there for us to gaze at the amazement that is the human body. But now, these people didn't have any names, they were just human specimens, no first names or last names, just that. Impressive as it was to see inside a human body, it felt also a bit scary to see how frail we are. An amazing machinery able to adapt to almost anything, but at the same time subject to being destroyed in a second.