{"id":19026,"date":"2017-06-04T13:29:10","date_gmt":"2017-06-04T17:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/?p=19026"},"modified":"2017-06-04T13:29:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T17:29:10","slug":"geocaching-a-keith-haring-mural-or-how-walking-around-leads-to-adventures-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/geocaching-a-keith-haring-mural-or-how-walking-around-leads-to-adventures-discovery\/","title":{"rendered":"Geocaching a Keith Haring Mural, or how walking around leads to adventures & discovery"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Carmine Swimming Pool inside the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center is a well-known remnant of Haring’s contributions to public art in NYC – indeed on a NYC parks website page ‘remembering’ Keith Haring<\/a> the mural has the most photos of any singular work, showing it in progress & completion. It’s a great work – a blend of mer-creature and humanoid shapes with fishy friends:<\/p>\n

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I have looked at the mural a lot – so I was well aware of who made it & from whence it came, but perhaps not its entire history.<\/p>\n

But that’s just the beginning of this adventure – the mural was just a stepping stone to a greater ‘huh, who knew!’ exploration.<\/p>\n

Walking up 7th Ave one evening, intentionally strolling as slow as possible to look at and take in as much texture as possible – buildings, architecture, light, artifacts – I noticed a sticker stuck behind a window grill that made me think, “Hey what’s that?”<\/p>\n

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Upon closer inspection it contained a QR code:<\/p>\n

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With an app already installed I scanned it. The link contained a series of instructions. I wasn’t able to pursue them today, as the first destination (a library) was already closed, but I’d be back.<\/p>\n

A few weeks later I buffered the necessary time to pursue the instructions. I made my way to the nearby public library:<\/p>\n

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I located an oversized artist book on Keith Haring, which contained a spread on the Carmine pool mural. The spine wasn’t cracked per se, but the book did have a ‘comfortable’ opening at the page on the pool mural; it had clearly been opened many times before:<\/p>\n

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I read the entry on the mural – I never realized previously how often Haring talks about himself in 3rd person – writing, frankly, is not his strong suit:<\/p>\n

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Back to the instructions, they further guided one to locate the first word of the twelfth line in the second column:<\/p>\n

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Clever.<\/p>\n

The instructions continue: At this section<\/em> in the library was a ‘book’ by an author with the surname of the boxer from the moving Raging Bull<\/a><\/em>. The answer to this I did not know, but these days we all have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips – I did a quick Google search to locate the name ‘LaMotta’:<\/p>\n

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(The movie – connecting the dots – has a scene that shows the pool in the background)<\/p>\n

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OK this is getting fun.<\/p>\n

I walk up to the ‘Classics’ section and there’s a guy leaning back on a chair looking at his phone, a power cable plugged into an adapter in a nearby wall outlet; his cable is slightly obstructing my approach but he recognizes that I want to access a book and leans forward in his chair so the cable slacks out of the way. I find the book – the spine labels clearly distinguish it from the other books on the shelf:<\/p>\n

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It’s clear from pulling it off the shelf that’s no book!<\/em> It has a funny weight, and something inside jostled around. The guy in the chair begins looking at me, curious as to why I am taking photos of shelves of books and this book I just pulled off the shelf? He’s unsure what’s happening. I open the lid to the hollow book and inside is a ‘log book,’ under which are a bunch of trinkets:<\/p>\n

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At this point the guy in the chair can\u2019t help but lean towards me and inspect what\u2019s going on. I turn to him and he pulls out his headphones. I explain the notion of geocaching, and how it leads people on small adventures of exploration and discovery. His face goes from mostly-expressionless to an ear-to-ear grin and he goes, \u201cCool man. That\u2019s real cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

I encourage him to look up the website and read more about the phenomenon. And so can you. I’ve been aware of the adventures for a while – many, many years – but this is actually my first geocache. I like that it was a completely random stumbleupon, of an area that I walk by often and otherwise hadn’t noticed the window & sticker before. Also reinforces my intention to walk as slow as possible in this city – I mean when I’m in a hurry I’m in a hurry, but otherwise I prefer to pace myself, and really observe the vibrations of the streets, because there’s always a door that beckons to be opened or a sign that has hidden meaning or a history of a place or object that will redefine what you think<\/em> you know about a place and time.<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Carmine Swimming Pool inside the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center is a well-known remnant of Haring’s contributions to public art in NYC – indeed on a NYC parks website page ‘remembering’ Keith Haring the mural has the most photos of any singular work, showing it in progress & completion. It’s a great work – a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1385,1384,962],"series":[1315],"class_list":["post-19026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local","tag-geocaching","tag-keith-haring","tag-mural","series-nyc-best-of"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/IMG_20170530_161553-2.jpg?fit=1280%2C960&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6OfVu-4WS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19026"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19058,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19026\/revisions\/19058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19026"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nicknormal.com\/normalblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=19026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}