No monkey business

Yes, this is the first sports-related post on my culture blog. That's if you consider remote-controlled robot monkeys zooming after whiffle balls to "Chariots of Fire" to be athletic. It got my heart rate up!

Saturday night K. and I headed out to Greenpoint, Brooklyn to witness what is sure to go down as one of the best-fought "chimpionships" in the history of monkey sports.

Monkey robot sports tournaments are the brain-child of artist Dan Walker (the explosive lamp-sculpture below is his work. Dan's in the background, in character, donning Panama hat and pencil mustache as he arbitrates the game). We started hearing about the chimpionships last year and since then they have taken off, moving to larger venues (Saturday's game was held at Greenpoint's hip t.b.d. bar), crossing state lines (this summer Miami held its first chimpionship), and acquiring sponsors (like Amp energy drink).

So this is how it works: there are two, three-monkey teams, red and blue. There are three different sizes of monkey on each team, and each has different strengths (and weaknesses). The monkeys are controlled by humans, which is a big part of the fun. The teams are trying to score by corralling three balls (each a different size) into the opposite team's goal. Like soccer, though goal tending was against the rules.

I took a turn and, while I only scored once, and completely by accident, I had a lot of fun making my monkey disco dance in the center of the ring. The fans (hundreds of small plastic toys arranged on stadium seating around the field) loved it.

Another big part of the fun were the announcers, who called every play and made plenty of monkey wisecracks. In fact the theater of it all, the careful attention to each detail, was what made this event so much fun. That and the beer.

Everybody Loves Governors Island

It is rare in New York, where our endlessly diverse tastes are satisfied by a seemingly endless array of activities, to find so many people I know buzzing about the a single event. Yet since returning from Brazil, everyone I ask has either already ventured to Governors Island or really wants to go there. Apparently this quirky patch of land between Manhattan and Brooklyn is where it's at.

Right: A dragon sculpture made from found furniture by Benjamin Jones and Anna Hecker

A few weeks back, the New Yorker profiled this Island's storied history and uncertain future in comprehensive profile, details of which I won't repeat here (it would make a great urban policy case study). I will tell you that it was one of the cheapest and easiest city-exit-strategies I've found. Hop on a free ferry at South Ferry, watch as the island approaches for about 10 minutes, disembark, and wander.

It's a hard space to get a sense of and, were it not for the views of the financial district, Red Hook, and the Statue of Liberty as constant reminders of place, it could be quite disorienting. In one section I felt like I was on a New England college campus, complete with deans' houses, another section looked like abandoned housing projects, and one side of the island has a maritime feel with a series of decaying piers. Yet this spacial and temporal disjuncture lends the island a certain mystique while also leaving each visitor to discover the island as she wants, without a prescribed itinerary or agenda.

Part of the Wind Nomad exhibit of 400 "flapping" paintings set up all around the island.

We never figured out how they flapped

And this is just what we did. Our visit coincided with the New Island Festival (created by Dutch artists), so there was funky art around every corner and many performances including a jumping cow (we saw the cow twice, but never a jump). We wandered into a gallery space that had been created in one of the island's many empty buildings and enjoyed the pencil portraits of Flemish-New Yorkers by Ellen Depoorter. We took a ride to one tip of the island called picnic point and lunched in the shadow of our lady of liberty, watching families flying kites and throngs of bikers pedal by. We played mini golf on a course made entirely out of recycled materials. There was no one telling us where to go or what to see and therefore no pressure to do anything beyond what struck our fancy. In short, it was a beautiful way to spend an early fall day at no cost. If you haven't been to Governors Island already, you should go. But chances are you were already planning to!

This oversized table maze is actually a hole on the recycled mini golf course. It was really hard!

Carnaval, West Indian-American Style

Two weekends ago I attended what I'm told is the largest parade in the U.S., and yes, we're too early for Thanksgiving. This parade was in Brooklyn and featured no inflated cartoon characters, though I did see a devil, a snake man, butterflies, and many other fantastic creatures. I also saw a lot of bodies, barely dressed in the most ornately decorated bikinis, and a lot of sensual dancing. This was the West Indian-American Day Parade (also known as West Indian Carnaval), held every year on Labor Day Monday in the neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It draws somewhere between 1 and 3 million spectators. On this balmy early September day, my boyfriend and I took the subway down to Brooklyn and met up with a high school friend, Will (also the creator of sublime sculptures), who was in town for a visit.

We wandered around for a while along the parade route as the opening acts filed past--political candidates, unions, and professional associations (our favorite were the New York City corrections officers which rolled by in two nearly empty school buses). Eventually we swam upstream and found a spot that offered good views as the different Masses (as the parade troops are called, like in New Orleans Mardi Gras I'm told) prepared to pass the judges booth. Each Mas had a semi truck filled with speakers and a crew of organizers, DJs, and dancers perched atop a wooden frame dancing, sunning, and yelling to the crowd and their throngs of dancers below.

Though I was a shade disappointed that none of the Masses we saw had any live musicians, the costumes made up for it. Bright plumage, bejeweled bodices, glittering leggings, headresses--we were all mesmerized (especially my male companions). Personally, I most enjoyed the dancers' footware, from sneakers to slouchy boots, that each dancer had decorated with spray paint, glitter, jewels, or dye. I also enjoyed the inventive larger than life puppets, mounted on rolling frames pulled by key paraders and representing that Mas's theme.

Snake/scorpion man in frame costume

Unfortunately we didn't get to see any of the Masses in formation, catching them right before they were to head past the judges. We did get to see hundreds of young people, who, though restless and overheated, were clearly excited and proud of their elaborate costumes and having a lot of fun. Still, after nearly two hours of watching all that flesh shake and gyrate down Eastern Parkway to the pulse of highly amplified soca music on a sea of fuschia and gold features, I had had enough. For this year.

Last minute bead attachment en route to judges booth

[Since you've probably noticed that food is a big part of how I experience the world, I won't leave you hanging: I ate well at the West Indies Day Parade. Surprisingly, though, it wasn't the pricey styrofoam dish of spicy jerk chicken, dirty rice, and fried plantains that most tantalized my palette but instead the $2 plastic sack of small fruits that looked like key limes but behaved like lychees. Parade spectators in the know (those sporting flags of West Indian nations) were snacking on them, so I followed suit, buying mine from an older man who had dozens of bags hanging off his fingers. I thank my friend E. for later revealing the identity of my mystery fruit. She told me: "It sounds like you had what is the genipa, quenepa, quenette, genip, mamoncillo, or Spanish lime, depending upon which tropical land you're in. It is in the same family as lychee, that is the Sapindaceae. And yes, it is a pain to eat." Try one. You'll see why.]

Tagging through the grime

I understand that some graffiti is about adding (applying paint, paper, light, knitting to surfaces) and some about taking it away (scraping into subway windows, etching into paint, peeling a message into paper).

Today I saw a very satisfying example of the latter variety: Someone had tagged the 7th Avenue subway stop walls by cleaning their name into the grime. The New York City subway is notoriously filthy--most every visitor I've spoken to concurs. So seeing how the signature layer of sooty grease had been cleaned away to reveal, in the bright white tile, someone's stylized signature, struck me as genius, not to mention free. And, at the rate those walls get cleaned, this "wash me" approach is probably more permanent than many spray-painted tags in public places. Go Semz.