Saturday: my sister and I popped over to the Brooklyn Museum, as it was First Saturday. Crowded crowd – guess they were out for the Murakami exhibit, which opened this weekend to a positive review (so far as I can tell anyway). The line looked long and you had to have a ticket (a long line to get that!) and a wristband – so I wasn’t eager to check out the Murakami stuff; just saw what they had in the lobby – the simultaneously ugly, cute, sexy and scary all at once – that’s Murakami for you (or a derivation of anime, even). Maybe I’ll check it out another time.
Perhaps not entirely a coincidence: in addition to the Murakami (which was contemporary Japanese art), the Brooklyn Museum had “Utagawa: Masters of Japanese Print, 1777-1900,” exhibiting the works of three or four generations of the Utagawa workshop, as they went from traditional to more modern print work. Prints of traditional folk stories, kabuki actors, contemporary Japanese life, and the rise of Western influence – with single point perspective – it was easy to see why the Japanese prints influenced the Impressionists in the West and how Western art influenced Eastern art.
West Point course educating the cadets on cultural diversity… in Jersey City.
In the NY Times’ City section: words from Mr. Sahadi, of Sahadi’s in Brooklyn.
Sooo… as Jennifer 8. Lee so succinclty summarizes in the NY Times’ City Room blog: for the longest time, the Beatles, on behalf of their Apple, Apple (the Steve Jobs’ Apple) in a trademark dispute, and now Steve Jobs’ Apple is engaging in a trademark dispute with NYC regarding the GreeNYC campaign because the latter is using a green apple symbol (’cause, I don’t know, NYC’s been called “The Big Apple” for a real longtime and NYC wants to, I don’t know, go green?). Do we not realize that “apple” isn’t exactly the most unique thing in the world? Flashes from Trademarks class from law school are actually coming to mind.