Weekend Review

Art Around the Park was washed out and canceled. An email said they would reschedule, but I think that would be weird without the rest of the Howl Festival going on inside the park.

Then Sunday was the make-up day for all the cancelled festivities and it was a difficult decision to choose between the East Village Radio.com festival at South Street Seaport and the music offerings at the Howl Festival in Tompkins Square Park. Getting an early start was the key. After being reprimanded by my garden members, I fully weeded my little plot early this morning, then, downtown to the Seaport.

I like going to these kinds of places periodically, to experience NY from the tourist point of view. Here we could eat overpriced and very disgusting nachos, plus see all 4 waterfalls from one deck, something I hadn't realized. I thought you had to drive down the FDR to get a look at them.




The decks at the seaport have reclining chairs in the shade overlooking the river, which is nice if you can get one, and on the north side you can see a lovely and empty hammock garden, reserved only for people attending the wickedly expensive Spiegelworld extravaganza. I want to see Absinthe but I am too cheap to fork over the $79 per person.

But we were here for free music. It turned out to be a disappointing array of bands who stand on the stage and play their music. One band played instruments, not very well, with the lead singer staring up into space looking like she was slightly off her rocker. Another band fiddled with some knobs and pounded a synthetic drum which was turned up to reverberate through your body, with no other redeeming payoff.


I lamented the whole day about the lack of showmanship. I paid my free money, I want a show! Where have all the performances gone? Where is the rock and roll? We walked into the smaller, indoor venue to see what was happening there and it looked very interesting with a she-male writhing on the floor shouting things in a very, very small room with the amps ramped up to 11. It was excrutiating and unbearably loud so we couldn't watch what we thought was the only fun thing happening down there.

After a couple of hours of wandering, it was back uptown to Tompkins Square Park where we finally got the show we were waiting for. The Low Life burlesque review was a riot, the most fun I've had in weeks.