Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Hello - I've returned from my vacation.  We travelled up the east coast, culminating with five days in NYC.  I spent a lot of time in various museums, although not as much time as I'd have liked.  The Guggenheim was largely closed to facilitate the installation of a James Rosenquist travelling exhibition (the same exhibition closed portions of Houston's CAM the last time I was there, several months ago), and a significant part of the MoMA's collection is currently in Queens (or touring - again, currently at the CAM).  But we did spend time in the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I honestly can't imagine living in New York City, but the presence of so many fine museums is certainly enticing.  I would love to spend more time just looking at stuff, if that makes sense.   I was talking to my girlfriend about the fact that I was really drawn to the Met's collection of African/Pan-Asian art, as well as to its superb collection of Modernist paintings.  That stuff was deeply sensible, and comprehensible, to me because I've spent so much time at The Menil, which focuses on a similar range of things. I'm conversant in that language, if you will.  So, I got to wondering what other things I could come to understand (and therefore more deeply enjoy), if I had the luxury of wandering around The Met for a few days each month. New York City doesn't really seem the place for such musings, though.  There's an certain aspect, or edge, to my personality that stressful, high-pressure, fast-paced situations seem to draw out.  And this is a side of myself that I do not value, or particularly enjoy (although it certainly serves its purpose from time to time).   So, it struck me that living in New York City might just turn me into precisely the kind of person who has no time or patience for roaming about museums.  I crave that understanding, though.  I'm quite clear on the manner by which certain events in music and literature move me, but am woefully blind to the reasons why this series of Francis Bacon paintings makes me slightly anxious, or that Leonardo painting makes me weepy and morose.  I don't feel that that type of knowledge distracts from the experience.  It just seems like a path to understanding (of both my internal and external worlds) by way of some sensual pleasure, and that's more than fine.  It strikes me as more than a little childish that my best culinary experience (among numerous highlights) was the chocolate cupcakes at Magnolia bakery on Bleeker.  We went there twice - the first day as part of a day-long expedition in the Village, the second on a purposeful mission to score those damn cupcakes (and I absolutely mean use of the verb "score" to imply the junkie-like craving that these cakes induce).  The absolute, utter, and complete deliciousness of these cupcakes is hard to convey, as it is so completely entangled in the entire experience - walking downtown amongst the brownstones, turning the corner and catching that first whiff of chocolate, waiting in line, nestling them carefully in the box for the subway trip back to the hotel (for they absolutely must be eaten in bed).  If you travel to New York City - forget the Statue of Liberty, forget the Empire State Building - immediately go down to the West Village and get a few of these cupcakes.  I also ate a lot of good grown-up food:  bruschetta and pizza at Picasso on Bleeker, huddled in front of their brick oven on a suddenly cold, me-with-no-coat afternoon, sushi and mojitos at Sushi Samba in the West Village (my girlfriend said it was the best miso soup she'd ever had, and our nice waiter wrote down shops where I could buy the coat I purchased, then stupidly left in the hotel room for the rest of the trip), excellent Korean at Dok Suni in the East Village, and incredible Japanese at some no name hole-in-the-wall in midtown Manhattan.  Plus excellent eggs and coffee and nytimes at the Astro Diner just across from our hotel.   We saw the brilliant Eddie Izzard during his four-night, sold-out stand at the City Center, and Beth Gibbons (of Portishead) at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn (right under the Brooklyn Bridge - I stepped outside around midnight for a smoke, and was simply overwhelmed by the view).   I even watched the Yankees beat the Red Sox in a crowded bar on 5th Ave (well, the Yankees played out in the Bronx, of course;  we just watched it on TV). Well, I'm out of time - my constant problem these days.  Lately, I've found myself returning, as I occasionally do, to the books of my youth - dipping into favorite chapters, sometimes allowing myself the indulgence of re-reading an entire treasured text (something I rarely do).  I just re-read Crime and Punishment in an excellent, relatively new, translation. Although it is perhaps my most dearly-treasured of all books, I may never read Ulysses in its entirety again.  There is just so little time, and the list of things I feel I must read grows ever longer.  But I frequently take a look into it, sometimes simply opening to a random page.  I've looked at it so many times, and over so many years, but I never fail to be seduced, to fall in love.  Here's a lovely bit for you, gentle readers.  Be well. What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to anamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible. 6:27:41 PM