seeing the light...of ingo maurer

Hi again. It's been a little over a week, and thanks to the encouragement of some friends + family, I am back to blogging again! I did promise my friend BEAU that he would get special props for rejuvenating me back to blogging, as he had specially BOOKMARKED my blog. Wow - being bookmarked in someone else's list of "hot sites" is kind of cool. It's like I can't let people down now. So anyway, a LOT has gone on in over a week's time -- here's a recap of one of the highlights.

Friday night, Anna and I went to the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. In honor of National Design Week, admission to the museum was free for the week, and they are currently running a cool exhibit on Ingo Maurer, this cool guy who designs very funky lighting structures.

Here is a wall designed with "wallpaper" that has a repeating rose motif, where each rose is lit from behind. The clear plexiglass table is embedded with small squares of yellow and green lighting.

There were tons of other amazing light fixtures - the MaMo Nouchies - are a whole collection of paper lanterns and lights, where Maurer collaborated with fellow friend and designer, Isamu Noguchi, and thus the fun-to-say name "MaMo Nouchies." If you're in a bad mood and you say "MaMo Nouchies," I guarantee you will be in a better mood by the time you've finished saying that. Anyway, I would have snapped some pictures of the MMNs, but the cranky security guard lady told me "No photos" right after I snapped the one of the wallpaper roses. Maurer also had some really cool neon-type structures that were really bright and almost painful to look at with my recently-lasered eyeballs. Another cool lighting display was a flat aquarium type structure with floating mirrors, lit from below, where goldfish swimming in the water cast shadows onto the wall, and the mirrors were also reflected onto the wall. Very cool.

This was another one of his weirder lighting "blobs," hanging in the stairwell leading up to the exhibit on the second floor.

Note the freaky portrait hanging on the wall behind the light. The man in the painting has eyes that animate and move every few minutes or so -- odd and slightly disconcerting. It happens just slowly enough that you aren't quite sure the eyes moved, but you catch just enough of a glimpse to think you may be going crazy. I saw these same "paintings" at the swanky bar in the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, and it was a big conversation piece then too.

After our very quick museum visit, Anna and I were walking down 5th Avenue, debating on taking the subway or cab, when the M3 bus rolled by and stopped at a light. Our fellow NY gals-about-town, Jenne and Dayna, are constantly taking the bus EVERYWHERE -- to the very ends of the earth, it seems -- so Anna and I decided to hop on and see where it took us. Luckily, this was the M3 that went straight down to West Village. We got to see 5th Avenue by bus - which is yet another NY first for me. Being on a bus in NYC feels a little bit like being a tourist. Indeed, the lovely German couple next to us asked Anna where to get off for Rockefeller Center, and in her very friendly Midwestern manner, Anna told them to get off 3 blocks before the actual "Rockefeller Center" stop. Whoops. In any case, I finally rode an "M-something" bus in NY, which makes me feel like even more of a New Yorker these days.

Now it's time to turn in. My eyes are really dry these days. The doctors warned that my tear ducts would be producing fewer tears because of nerve damage from PRK. The vision is still not 20/20 yet, which slightly annoys me, but I am being good and using all those eye drops daily. Stay tuned for the next post - mural painting in the Bronx!