There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die.
-Walt Whitman
“It's just literally so peaceful, you guys. I’m serious. Yoga has really done wonders for, like, my soul and my health and stuff,” Jeanine babbled on as we practically galloped down the avenue in heels after eating sushi and having drinks. I wasn’t sure where we were headed— I was mostly focused on not dropping the bottle of wine I was hauling across the city while pretending to be a local.
I’d arrived in Manhattan earlier that day, solo, with one hand wrapped tightly around the handle of my suitcase as I conquered the heat wave on a bus in Queens, then sat across from a girl in a subway car who, at three in the afternoon, wore a little black dress and smeared makeup from the night before. Inching closer, I swore I could f e e l the city. My camera dangled from my neck as I rolled the suitcase through SoHo, weaving between residents and interns and homeless people, wide-eyed and just yearning for material: things to write about, to photograph, to capture.
I anticipated the grunge. The avant-garde. The vintage. The hole-in-the-wall coffee shops and the wall murals, the string lights and the bookstores. I wanted the food trucks and the rooftop views, to sprawl out on a blanket in central park, take in a big breath of filthy air and pretend that I belonged. I wanted real, raw emotion. I wanted to feel. To take it all in and shove it so deep into my pockets that I could carry it with me wherever I went.
This wasn’t grunge. It wasn't avant-garde. It wasn't vintage. But it was my first night in the city and I took what I could get.
This post has been a big experiment for me. I started out with a serious and provocative Whitman quote to kind of make my readers think that they were about to read something equally as deep, when really it’s just a (personal, nonfiction) short story about traveling with certain expectations and stumbling into something less serious/unexpected/comical for a night. In terms of the approach I took for appearance, I figured that including an artsy, “vintage” wallpaper would add to my text, and I took the two photos on my trip to NYC (with both my Canon and my iPhone.) The first one (the heels on the telephone wire) was chosen to represent the contrast between the lighthearted femininity (Monica and Jeanine) vs. the city's architecture, which highlights my own personal desires to see and feel the city in it's raw form. The second photo simply compliments the plot due to the text I placed it with, as I physically took it while sitting on the train. I’m not extremely happy with the font options that are offered by Blogger, but I generally tried to aim for simplicity in my layout/template, because I don’t want the design to take away from the writing or photographs; I don't want it to be too flashy or showy.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the actual text, I struggled a lot with trying to be “vaguely” artistic, or poetic, or mysterious or whatever. I didn’t want to push myself to try to conjure up something overly forced, and I’ve wanted to write about this particular event for a while now, so I took the risk. I understand that it probably has a lot more of a plot line and more characters than it should, but I feel like this experience is relatable and humorous and relatively easy to follow, whether or not readers have visited New York. (Sorry about surpassing the word count… twice. I wish I could have kept writing about how ridiculously loaded and spoiled and hysterical Monica was that night…)
I like the overall style/theme of this blog. The journal style entry reads almost like a novel, which tends to capture the reader in a way that causes them to forget that they are reading a blog and become immersed in the story. The Whitman quote in the beginning of the post doesn’t seem to relate very much to the theme of the blog, however, because the quote is very thought-provoking and deep, almost ethereal in a way, while the blog narrative is a more common, girl-with-a-dream type of theme. I think that the placement of the photos were appropriate and effective, however, I would probably opt for the font size to be a bit larger and more eye-catching. I would have liked to see the author do a little bit more with the expressiveness of the text. For example in the sentence “I swore I could feel the city.” I appreciated the different font and text style of the word “feel,” but it still doesn’t quite stand out from the rest of the paragraph enough. Perhaps a change in color would make it stand out more.
ReplyDeleteThe main character of the blog seems to be insightful and artistic, even a bit avant-garde herself. In order to incorporate this detail into the overall theme of the blog, I think that the background would benefit from a little bit more tweaking, perhaps “grunging it up” a little. The blue wallpaper background seems less creative and artistic than the main character, and especially with the setting of SoHo, I would have liked to see a more grungy city-style background.
The image of the building out the window of a bus is very effective in contributing to the touristy feel of Lower Manhattan. It provides the viewer with an almost reflective sensation, and I think that it helps the viewer to feel some of the anticipation and excitement that the main character is feeling about her trip to SoHo.