Without further ado, here is my first tip for the weary and wanderlusting:

The Murakami Exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

 

I couldn’t afford to go to Japan this spring, but I could afford the Brooklyn Museum’s student price of 8 dolla to see the 2 floor exhibit. Despite the obnoxious comments by Brooklyn’s bitchiest art snobs -one woman, while looking at statues of anime women with huge boobs, wings, and guns, responded to my friend’s “that’s awesome” with “Some people say the stupidest SHIT!”- it still managed to be a stint in a magical world.  Murakami is one of the most influential Asian  artists today, and it’s easy to see why.  With a Louis Vuitton store in a hallway bridging two of the main exhibit rooms, Murakami fuses art, fashion,  commercialism, and the Japanese psyche,  all the while making you giggle with pleasure at each of his “superflat” characters. I’m dying to get to Japan, but until the dollar gets stronger that’s not really likely to happen any time soon. Meanwhile, I was happy to escape to Murakami’s  Tokyooklyn for the day, and complete the experience by crawling into bed with “Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” a book by my favorite author of the same name, Haruki Murakami, for some whimsical mind bending reading to compliment my day.