©MURAKAMI Pt. 2: Eyeballs With Teeth Vomiting Mouths Vomiting Vomit

When Tim went a few weeks ago he snuck some pictures with his very capable camera phone. Below we see two views of Tan Tan Bo.




Here are two of 727-272. This was one of several that were elaborately sanded down to create a shifting series of colors and textures.




This was probably the most breathtaking one: Tan Tan Bo Puking - aka Gero Tan. It was probably about 40 feet long and 15 feet high, and the level of detail was astounding. You could stand back and see the whole scene, with enormous cascades of vomit oozing out between the teeth into the mouths of melting frogs, or go in close and see all the other details - tiny creatures holding staffs topped with skulls, eyeballs with teeth vomiting mouths vomiting vomit, a field of little spiky exploding antennae...and it goes on and on.
Just breathtaking.


This one below kind of shows how big it is. But it was actually bigger than it looks here.


Another great one: Reverse Double Helix. I'd only seen these in print reproductions, and hadn't really had any idea how big they were. I knew they were large, but I was thinking maybe 4 ft square or so...I think this one was about 8 feet tall.



I was really happy that this one was there: Homage to Sir Francis Bacon (Portrait of Isabelle Rawsthorne). This is my favorite piece by Murakami. It reminds me of a huge fleet of living Star Detroyers morphing into...something even more awesome.

*phew*
Ok, I could go on and on, but there was some other stuff that went down in the city, too! Saturday was the first hot day of the year, and entering the humid odiferous air of New York reminded me SO MUCH of being in Bangkok. Perhaps such an atmosphere is common to all big cities, but NY like Bangkok seems to keep the apparatus of its existence on the outside. Everything is slightly used, a little dank and crumbling; even in the nice parts of town you could tell that there would be a grimy little alley opening up just after the next storefront. It wasn't necessarily bad.

This is Philip drinking water in Yaffa, an underground (literally) restaurant in the East Village, every square inch of which was covered in animal prints (leopard, zebra, dalmatian), Rococo decorations, enormous faux cameo brooches, chandeliers, mirrored stickers, little blinking lights, statuettes, paintings large and small, the color red, antique tapestries, vintage pinups, a mirrored portrait of Jim Morrison and fake flowers. I had a wrap.


I was fascinated by the wealth of fire escapes that this building somewhere near Union Square possessed.
***
In a word, I would sum up my New York visit by saying: 'There was a lot.'