At the third-annual Art Parade this afternoon, performance pieces and artistic floats advanced down West Broadway between Houston and Grand Streets. It recalled a miniature Village Halloween Parade, except more surreal, if that’s possible. The Halloween Parade, for instance, is slightly less likely to feature a float resembling the corpse of Snoopy.
I didn’t get a photo of this one so you’ll just have to trust me. A bunch of guys strained forward to haul a wheeled platform on which the large papier-mâché puppy lay, in his familiar atop-the-doghouse repose, except that he appeared to have been dead for some time and ravaged by vultures, his ribcage arching up from his skeleton. A party of followers held thought-balloon signs filled in with various non-sequiturs.
We didn’t understand it, but it was fun to watch and see if the next group in the parade could top the act before it. Also, we had catbird seats at the bar, then a table on the sidewalk facing the street, at a bistro named Diva, where we knocked back numerous drinks and ate an early pizza dinner.
A few sticks of dynamite sprinted by, as did a bunch of chefs with others dressed as food. I walked to the barricades between the street and the sidewalk to get a closer look and some photos.
There was an apparently unironic mariachi band, and a full marching band that appeared to have wandered over from a high-school football game halftime show as it played “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”
A man in a head-to-toe costume of plastic shopping bags paused at intervals to lie on the street, which Beth noted didn’t seem very sanitary, even for a hulking human wad of garbage.
A circle of maidens approached, each girl’s long hair braided together with the hair of the next. They moved gingerly with their heads held rigid and bringing up the rear was a girl whose pigtails were held aloft by a pair of helium balloons.
I appreciated this lone gentleman whose conical head covering tapered to the ground with a wheel at its terminus.
After the parade, Beth and I stumbled around Canal Street among the tourists and the men who sell them fake watches and luxury handbags. We spotted a large bright light a few blocks away and decided it was safe to approach as we didn’t appear to be near death. According to a brisk gentleman in a headset blocking foot traffic, Nickelodeon was filming a commercial. It appeared to involve kids dressed as bees throwing black and yellow paint on one another.
At the famed discount art supply store, Pearl Paint, we climbed the stairs to the markers floor and rifled through the small sketchbooks used for testing the writing utensils, then removed some of our favorites.
A short jaunt up Broadway and we arrived at Pearl River, where we fiddled with the tin wind-up toys, the alarm clocks and the parasols. I bought a golden, two-inch-tall figurine of a roly-poly pig with a different face on each side like Janus and Beth said she’d return to buy the string of lights mounted in colorful wicker spheres.
We had dessert at Souen, a natural/organic/macrobiotic restaurant on Sixth Avenue at Prince Street. My fruit compote was paved with a busted-up heap of homemade granola while Beth’s tofu cheesecake, glazed with a fruit gel, was softer and more gooey than cheesecake has a right to be.
Diva
- 341 W. Broadway
- (212) 941-9024
- Meal 39 of 52: goat cheese and black-olive pizza ($12.00) and several mojitos (?$).