Andrew, Jess and I took part in some more of my favorite New York things and some new ones. We had brunch at the French Roast. We wandered through Central Park where we saw goats in the zoo. At the Brooklyn Museum, we mulled over Judy Chicago’s famous feminist installation, The Dinner Party. Walked the boardwalk and rode the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island. Then we returned to Manhattan for a costly dinner of lobster rolls and assorted other seafood delights at Ed’s Lobster Bar and dessert at Cafe Lalo.

Bonus photos: Mine are here and Andrew’s are here.

After a late brunch this afternoon, Tina and I checked out the “Golden Legacy: Original Art from 65 Years of Golden Books” exhibit at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. I enjoyed seeing original artwork from The Poky Little Puppy, Scuffy the Tugboat and one I’d completely forgotten until I saw the illustration of a bunny in a yellow shirt and red overalls hiding under a mushroom from the rain, I am a Bunny. It was written by Ole Risom and illustrated by Richard Scarry in 1963 and it was a weird emotion to remember after many years the simple story of a bunny that looks forward to the changing seasons.

Tina and I roamed the museum, dodging children that ranged from Alien-style speed-crawlers to Dora-loving shriekers, and ensured the hands-on interactive exhibits were jerk-proof. Alas, we found this clown that is not only creepy but that can almost spell “tits” with its rotating letters.

Better living through geometry: that’s inventor-visionary-crackpot Buckminster Fuller, in a geodesic nutshell. The man was bursting with ideas, most predicated on the idea that geometric symmetry is a form of perfection and, specifically, that the tetrahedron was “the most fundamental, structurally sound form found in nature.” The shape appears in most of his designs, including his best known, the geodesic sphere or dome, readily recognizable as Walt Disney World’s Spaceship Earth within Epcot Center; Wikipedia alleges the sphere’s shape and name were inspired, uncredited, by Fuller.

He believed in low-cost, easy-to-assemble structures that could be mass produced. Sensing kindred spirits in the folks at the Butler Manufacturing Co., mass-producer of grain bins (my grandfather had two such “Butler Buildings” on his farm in Delphos, Ohio), he partnered with the firm to develop squat silo-like housing for the military during World War II. The government approved Fuller’s design and the Army put a few hundred to use as operating rooms and houses, but steel rationing killed the project.

After the war, his thoughts turned to all that aluminum that was no longer needed for planes and developed Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, housing for the new suburban masses. On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art within a scale model of an idyllic cul-de-sac, the shiny aluminum spheroids are banded with florescent light. They resemble glowing alien hamburgers. Two people could assemble one in two days; only one was ever produced.

Most of Fuller’s projects unfolded this way: a passionate process of brainstorming and sketches, models and patents, resulting in little practicality. That didn’t stop him, though, and it didn’t stop the seeds of his ideas from sprouting later. I see a connection between Fuller’s Butler and Dwelling Machine plans and the suggestion today to use surplus steel shipping containers as affordable housing.

A black-and-white video of Fuller, standing stiff and blinking in a three-piece suit, shows him discussing the features of his large 4D House, which was suspended from the ground and shaped like a child’s toy top. On tape he doesn’t appear to be the wacky-inventor personality I thought he’d be, but professorial, monotonic and dry. Although that makes for unintentional entertainment when he rattles off selling points, such as how children, should they fall in a 4D House, would literally bounce back from the “pneumatic floors.” They could also, Fuller added, play baseball inside; the tetrahedral windows of the domed enclosure were constructed of certain materials connected so solidly that they could withstand tornadoes and an airplane crash. (Fuller doesn’t mention the impact playing baseball inside his domed home would have on the residents’ furniture, presumably not constructed with roughhouse-resistant geometry.)

Fuller wasn’t all spheres and symmetry: unsatisfied with the distortion in the Mercator projection world map, he developed the Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, which resembles an unfolded piece of complicated origami. And parked in the Whitney’s lobby is an energy-efficient, three-wheeled Dymaxion car, looking very like a whale and, as evidenced on video, moving very like an agitated fish.

The exhibit features little evidence on the popular reception of Fuller and his ideas (nor popular architectural trends concurrent with his timeline, which would have been useful for purposes of comparison) although I enjoyed the clever acrostic written by avant-garde composer John Cage for Fuller’s 85th birthday. How did those two men connect: Cage, master of chaos, and Fuller, master of order?

Spotted serendipitously on the subway afterwards, a quote from Galileo served as the sum of Fuller’s philosophy:

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Its symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to understand a single word; without which there is only a vain wandering through a dark labyrinth.

In January 1960, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth to Manhattan, which he’d never seen before. He spoke little English but immediately started planning and assembling a sculptural homage to the city—a self-destructing machine, actually—that he decided needed to be exhibited in the outdoor sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.

The museum gave him permission and an acetylene torch, then stood back. Tinguely built the machine in part with steel tubing, used motors, a powerful electric fan, an orange weather balloon, 80 bicycle wheels, smoke signals, a car horn, a radio nailed to an upright piano and an address-labeling machine rigged to strike a bell.

Once completed and activated before a large crowd, Homage to New York smoked and trembled. The piano caught fire but continued to play a three-note dirge. A rhythm was tapped out on a washing-machine drum. The labeler thrashed and chattered while the horn shrieked. The crowd loved it and although the machine didn’t fully self destruct, “it managed nevertheless to execute a great many wholly unexpected and startling feats,” according to art critic Calvin Tomkins.

I recalled this tale tonight at the sold-out Sigur Rós¹ concert Allison and I attended in the Museum of Modern Art’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, which looks out into that sculpture garden through a two-story wall of windows. The sun set over the city as the band began while giant spherical lamps on posts positioned just outside the window-wall glowed with shifting colors and patterns. The band’s music wasn’t as cacophonous as Tinguely’s yet just as unusual, transcendent and loud.

Through interweaving layers of delay, distortion and echo, lead singer and guitarist Jón Þór Birgisson crooned in falsetto—often in a made-up language—and sawed his electric guitar with a cello bow with such ferocity that he frayed the bowstring to a chaotic bundle of filaments, which he then whipped into the audience. Bassist Georg Hólm bounced out a constant rhythm on his bass with a drumstick for the song “Hafsól.” Drummer Orri Páll Dýrason rocked the brushes on more introspective song segments but for the loud bits whaled through several sets of sticks. Most of the band, including keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, got a chance on the boards—synths large and small, an organ, a glockenspiel. At times all four band members were playing keys at once.

I’d never seen Sigur Rós perform before now. They’re young guys from Iceland so most publicity shots I’d seen depicted them in cable-knit sweaters, crouching impishly on a caldera, but tonight Birgisson and Hólm were dressed in what resembled crisp, modern versions of Les Misérables-era activewear, accented with a few Adam Ant-style feathers. It seemed strangely appropriate the band shared stage space with Rodin’s craggy bronze sculpture of a robed Balzac.

A string quartet of young ladies dressed like flappers sat behind the band and provided symphonic swells, pizzicato and, for one song, exchanged their strings for cavalry drums. Midway through an early song, a male brass quintet, dressed and gloved in white, uniforms laced with golden braids and buttons, faces speckled with pearlescent glitter, marched down unexpectedly from the second-floor galleries while playing along. Later they emerged unaccompanied, awkwardly clutching sheet music, to play an impromptu and stirring rendition of the Icelandic national anthem in celebration of the country’s independence day as a republic (June 17th, 1944). The crowd was invited to sing along but only the flappers seemed to know the lyrics.

The band played my favorite of theirs, the soaring, eight-minute “Olsen Olsen.” Towards the end of the set, the audience clapped along to the speed-freaky “Gobbledigook” until its collective hands got sore. After the encore and a joint theater-style line-bow from every musician onstage, we exited over the piles of plastic cups and empty Grolsch bottles, strange debris for the stately slate floor of a world-famous museum, though less strange than the burnt machine-remains that once littered its garden.

Bonus Link: Concert photos by Brooklyn Vegan. Note the second shot from the top, in which I appear to be clutching my junk.

¹ Pronounced, according to the band, sih-ur rose; roll those R’s and say rose very quickly. [back]

Beth, Mike and I immersed ourselves in the cacophony of David Byrne’s Playing the Building installation today at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan.

The second floor of the building hasn’t been open to the public in decades and the lower half of the room in which the exhibit rests has been whitewashed, flat over pipes, molding and wall. An antique organ placed near the center of the room is wired by what looks like surgical tubing connected to devices affixed to the room’s pillars, pipes, walls and other elements to make a different noise with each keypress of the organ: tapping, clanking, clanging, tapping, bellowing, whistling. Very strange. It sounds like this.

Needless to say, we needed a beer afterwards so Beth suggested the Staten Island Ferry: an excellent idea. It's a free 20-minute ride—welcomely breezy on a day like today, stifled by humidity and sun—with excellent views of the Statue of Liberty. Best, they sell beer on board for $3.75. And I’ve now set foot in all five boroughs of New York: to prevent hobos and exhibition-goers from having too good a time, what with the beer and the breeze, the DOT requires all joyriders to exit at Staten Island then immediately reboard the same boat for the trip back to Manhattan.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a fan-made video of a dude dressed up like a Catholic priest, wearing shades and a giant grin, dancing and shimmying down the sidewalks of the West Village. Oh, also he’s wearing a pink tutu. It was so good, we demanded to watch it twice.

This was part of an inaugural “Gen-X Singalong series” at Pianos Lounge, which involved creative types making one music video each for every song off the Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen Is Dead. Each video had subtitles and the crowd was encouraged to sing along. The dancing priest accompanied the song “Vicar in a Tutu.” Kelly tackled “Frankly Mr. Shankly” with a creative camera mount (her bicycle) and character (a Mr. Blonde action figure), making it appear as if Mr. Shankly is superspeed-walking through Manhattan.

I had a lot to drink and then walked into a low table and knocked a quarter-sized chunk of flesh off my left shin that I didn’t discover until the next day. Later we had a late dinner gathering at the “Always Open” greasy spoon, Sidewalk. I had a fruit-covered waffle, I think. When the receipt for our group arrived, it indicated we’d “been served by Jason #14.”

Bonus video: Kelly’s version of “Frankly Mr. Shankly”

Sidewalk Bar & Restaurant

• 94 Avenue A (between E. 6th and E. 7th Streets)
• (212) 473-7373
• Meal 26 of 52: waffle and coffee!

Dana and I checked out the Robert Capa exhibit at the International Center of Photography. Most moving for me are his famous D-Day landing photos. I didn’t know this before the exhibit but the blur and high grain of these snapshots were caused by a darkroom error at Life magazine, not from shaky hands on Capa’s part. The look of the photos with these artifacts, though, gives them a sense of motion and confusion they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Later my sister and I had vintage drinks at the Flatiron Lounge. Our dapper, mustachioed, tucked-tie barman broke character when I heard him quote Superbad to a coworker. I felt like clapping my hands for attention and shouting with a lisp, “1920s, people! Stick with it!”

The New Museum, which opened yesterday, injects architectural excitement into a parcel of the Bowery near Prince Street that remains dingy despite near daily pop-ups of condo buildings. It’s noble the curators steered clear of uptown hotspots like Museum Mile and have attempted to introduce art in an otherwise cultural wasteland. Avant-garde architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have designed a building that looks from afar like a stack of blocks balanced awkwardly by a child. Up close, the facing that appears solid gray from a distance is revealed to be metal mesh cladding the building’s surface. Floor-to-ceiling glass on the ground floor, home to a shallow lobby, lends levity and odd street-level views down Prince.

Inside, the excitement wanes. The galleries feature stark white walls, florescent tube lighting and already-cracked poured-cement floors. And regarding the art itself, I’ll let this graffito from a seventh-floor stairwell speak for me.

I’m not entirely sure this wasn’t an actual artwork because the New Museum is one of those contemporary art museums where it’s unclear whether that fire extinguisher you’re attempting to fathom on an artistic level is part of the exhibit or simply a device that one uses to extinguish fires. Either that or the art resembles, as Kelly put it, stuff you’d find in the back yard of a guy who just got arrested on Cops: a bottle-cap studded mattress, a tube light driven through an old couch, a sort-of artful arc of worn wooden chairs, a homeless-man-style clump of cardboard boxes, paint-slopped sculptures featuring plastic army guys, Transformers and, as Tritia noted, a strangely robust amount of Ikea furniture.

The museum’s biggest captive audience by far clustered around a teepee-like structure of long unfinished wooden boards to which were affixed a web of what appeared to be Salvation Army T-shirts. Its spindly legs had given out and the art had collapsed like an exhausted spider. Museum personnel, including a flushed man who gave urgent updates into his walkie-talkie, attempted to re-erect the thing, at one point resembling the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, until it became clear none of them knew how the art had been positioned initially. They ended up solemnly carting the bundle off into the elevator, probably to reassemble it someplace less shameful.

We completed our visit to the museum with a hike to the top floor, a glass-walled penthouse-lounge that had been completely overtaken by sponsor Target, plastered with logos and a bank of cabinets inexplicably filled with corporate-colored junk food: mini candy canes, cinnamon Mike and Ike, red and white Jelly Belly jelly beans, Atomic Fireballs and yogurt-covered pretzels. On the narrow terrace skirting the building outside were beautiful views of the sun setting over the city and blinding spotlights splashing the Target logo-colors all over the place. I can’t begrudge Target too much, however, because they were responsible for everyone getting into the museum for free yesterday and today. Otherwise, I can’t recommend the $12 general admission.

You know, I like photography, and I like women. I also like meat, but I’d never considered that the combination of all three elements could be interesting. There’s this free exhibit, Maria, at the Rivington Arms, of Pinar Yolacan’s large-format color studio portraits of mostly emotionless Afro-Brazilian women clothed or draped in garments made from cow organs. Some of these articles are immediately obvious as offal, glistening with fresh-butchered wetness, while others require a second look; what appears to be a dainty brooch pinned to the collar of an elderly woman is actually a cow eye. Other than the artist making the connection in her statement between the placenta (an organ that appears in several of the photos) and the femininity of her subjects, I’m not sure what to make of all of this, or what, if any, sort of commentary is being made, but I think I like it.

A set of automatic doors at the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport, the ones just beyond luggage carousel #1, has been rigged to play prerecorded messages as part of a Broward County public art piece called “Talking Vestibule” by Jim Green. I’ll bet this guy knows of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its inanimate objects infused with “Genuine People Personalities,” including doors with “a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

With Green’s doors, about once every three opens, there’s a synthesized multinote chime, then the disembodied voice of a man or woman states one of the following, with the diction, cadence and enthusiasm of Mr. Moviefone:

• “Hi there! You’re going to have a great day!”
• “You’re beautiful!”
• “Hello there! You’re looking good today!”
• “Hi there! You make me smile!
• “It’s a beautiful day. Nice shoes!”

The reaction among the travelers passing through the doors wasn’t notable as I observed while waiting for my checked bag to emerge onto the conveyor belt. But I appreciated the contrast between the dueling sets of airport recordings: the vestibule’s cheerfully declarative mood versus the airport’s monotone imperatives about threat conditions, unattended vehicles and clear plastic zip-top bags.

Green’s other sound installation at the airport is part of luggage carousel #1 itself. Instead of a grim buzzer signaling the waiting crowd to press forward for the lurching procession of bags, a jaunty 10-second merry-go-round pump-organ ditty plays, which garnered a few incredulous laughs.

I caught the Frogs: A Chorus of Colors exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon in its last day. In addition to being a confusing space with not enough directional signage in general, the frog exhibit had some of the worst graphic and typographic design ever, with conflicting hard-to-read fonts (and too many of them), rainbow-gradient horizontal spacers reminiscent of a webpage from 12 years ago, and the florescent palette of the Ocean Pacific clothing line, circa 1987.

Many of my questions went answered by the explanatory text on the placards. Do poisonous frogs secrete poison at will or is it on their skin all the time? At what point is a predator going to stop eating a poisonous frog? (I’d think a good chomp from a bird would be enough to permanently disable both predator and prey, which crimps the Darwinian cycle and doesn’t do either party any good.) A placard on mating noted the embrace lasts anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but didn’t mention how frogs might avoid predators the whole time they’re doin’ it in this sitting-duck stance. Also, what’s with the weird names? The Kermit-colored fellow pictured above? Waxy Monkey Tree Frog. No, I don’t get it, either, and that was one of the more normal names. I’m aware that you or I can find the answers to these questions and so much more on the internet, but when I’m paying $15 for an exhibit, I’d like it explained to me then and there, and via an eye-appealing design.

The frogs themselves, on the other hand, are pretty cool, although they don’t do much. Occasionally, I saw one slowly making its way down a tree trunk, or breathing, but mostly they sat there, unblinking. The poisonous ones were the most active and also the most colorful, although some of the others featured such an unnatural shade and sheen of green that they seemed to have been molded from plastic. I expected that if I turned one over, raised text on its underside would indicate “Made in China.”

I think as a general rule, larval is the most disturbing stage of animal development. Maggots, for instance, get no love, other than from hungry birds and reptiles. In the case of frogs, tadpoles are creepy, those translucent, featureless fluke-like beings that propel themselves through water by some strange magic. “They look like fish,” mused someone. “They’re not fish! They’re tadpoles!” piped the precocious human larva who’d earlier demonstrated that by smacking the plexiglas terrariums, she could annoy the smaller frogs enough that they’d hop. In fact there were many children running around the exhibit area, wreaking havoc. Is it possible this show was geared toward kids and that’s why I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have?

Shifting the day to more adult activities, I stopped by Blondies Sports Bar, which is the place to be if you wish to root for your favorite sports team while wearing the jersey of your favorite sports team, as many were today for the Browns/Steelers game. Because the Browns were getting crushed and the place was packed tighter than a rush-hour subway car, I retreated back to Amsterdam for a late brunch at Monaco.

Monaco

• 421 Amsterdam Ave. (at the corner of West 80th Street
• (212) 873-3100
• Meal 40 of 52: goat cheese and portobello mushroom omelet, with home fries and wheat toast ($12.50) and two mojitos ($9 each).

On July 6, 1973, Stephen Shore had pancakes for breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s in Lima, Ohio. Afterwards he drove to the nearby city of Delphos¹ and took three photos: of the intersections of 2nd and 4th at Main, and of the Pitsenbarger Supply Company on 3rd, its brick side wall painted with a small square advertisement for Scherger Monuments (“Preserve Ancestry for Posterity”).

Having taken his photos, Shore then did something unusual: he left some photos. Rather, they were photos of similarly nondescript scenes from similarly nondescript small towns that he had taken earlier then had professionally printed as postcards. He left 30 of them in Delphos that day; he didn’t say where, but the way he worked was to place them into drugstore postcard racks with the others when no one was looking. Then he moved on. By lunchtime, he was in Battle Creek, Michigan, taking more photos and leaving more postcards.

Shore crisscrossed the country that year doing this same thing. He’d printed 5,600 postcards, so he had a lot of ground to cover, and he kept track of it all in a ledger that included copies of his prints, notes on meals he ate, where he stayed and what he watched on TV in his hotel room, ephemera like business cards, gas receipts, parking tickets and, in neat block print, lists of “Exposures Made” and “Postcards Distributed.”

Pages from the 1973 ledger, some of the postcards, and photos Shore took throughout the ’70s and early ’80s are on display at the International Center of Photography in an exhibit titled Biographical Landscapes, and it’s great in its similarities and ordinariness. The large-format color photos show anonymous architecture of highways, intersections and side streets, billboards and signs, gas stations and parking lots, hotel rooms and fast food meals. This stuff would have been completely ordinary and probably boring to someone then, but now the clothing, the cars and the graphic design have a mystical quality and it’s hard to believe any of it ever really existed.

What’s the point of Shore’s work? He’s a New Yorker, born and bred, so a viewer’s first instinct might be to label him a parodist of the oft-maligned middle part of the country, although his images are presented almost exclusively without comment or irony. It may just be, as he said later, that the ledger was borne from “a fascination with how certain kinds of facts and materials from the external world can describe a day or activity,” and that the photos were records of these days and transitory memories. It’s as if he collected traces and evidence to prove to himself that he was where he was. It reminded me of a quote I’ve saved by Cornell University anthropologist Sam Beck: “People need to create their own history, to leave traces of themselves and of the meanings they generate....to leave trails, to say, ‘we are here’....”

Shore’s gone digital and since 2003 has been using Apple’s iPhoto photo-book service, in which the company will professionally print a hardcover book of a digital photo album. There was one at the exhibit that included photos he had taken in New York City a few years ago of pedestrians, signs and cars, and sure enough, I found it dull. But how about in 35 years?

The exhibit didn’t mention whether Shore ever revived his postcard project, but it amuses me to think he may have, just as it amuses me to imagine that Shore’s postcards from the ’70s could lie pressed and yellowing in family scrapbooks, depicting places the senders never were.

¹ Until she married, my mom lived in a tiny farm village just outside of Delphos, which is sort of why I selected it for this anecdote. [back]

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 ($12.00) and several mojitos (?$).

I checked out the Eugene de Salignac photograph exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York recently. I haven’t written about it because it didn’t rattle my bones as an excellent exhibit should. But one of Eugene’s photos, of workers in 1918 assembling a sign for the Williamsburg Bridge, reminds me of the cover for the new CD by Maroon 5.

That is all.

The New York Public Library is exhibiting a fine selection of photos from the Midtown Y Gallery, the late, great non-profit organization that let photographers, famous or otherwise, exhibit their works in the ’70s and ’80s when there were surprisingly few options in the city. (Prior to the ’80s in New York, few galleries showed only photography.) The exhibit spans the life of the gallery, from ’72 to ’96, with a focus on street photography from the late-’70s and early-’80s, offering a time-capsule depiction in gelatin-silver prints of the storefronts, the clothing, the people and the mood during a key era of the city.

There are amazing photos of Brighton Beach swimmers and bathers from the mid-’70s, nuclear disarmament rallies of the early ’80s, and, in the exhibit’s centerpiece, a series spanning a wall the length of the room called “14th Street,” taken on that crosstown artery of Manhattan from 1979-1981 by Sy Rubin and Larry Siegel. Although some of the features remain recognizable, the May’s Department Store is now a Whole Foods Market, while Jullian’s Billiards, Lüchow’s and the Palladium at Irving Place (where the Plasmatics are shown playing) have made way for New York University buildings.

When the Germans captured photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson during World War II and tossed him in a POW camp, the Museum of Modern Art feared the worst and began preparing a memorial retrospective. Imagine their surprise when Cartier-Bresson escaped, heard of the effort and offered to help compose his own requiem. The 300-some photos he selected, spanning his best work from 1932 to 1946, are on display as a group for the first time in a half-century at the International Center of Photography.

It was literally a scrapbook he prepared, of photos taken with his trusty Leica, printed playing-card sized and mounted in a leatherbound album embossed with the gilded archaic phrase, “Scrap Book.” Most on display are these small versions; this is an exhibition necessitating repeated bows and squints, so as to scrutinize Cartier-Bresson’s often serendipitous detail. Thankfully, some of the best prints are presented in larger versions, as they were in the original MoMA exhibition—in fact the blowups are literally from the MoMA exhibit, whites yellow-tinged with age.

My favorite photo, crappily reproduced here but presented in both small and large versions at the exhibit, is this one, Madrid, taken in 1933. (The whole series he took that autumn in Spain of peasants, prostitutes, gypsies and everyday people is genius.) Madrid has an utterly calming symmetry, the balance of frozen human movement grounding the scene as a constellation of windows hovers above, and if Bresson’s favored shooting method is to be believed, this was taken without any specific aim. That makes it a composition with beauty of staggering chance. I wondered how many shots or even rolls Cartier-Bresson exhausted during the same session before he got this one.

In the most revelatory element of the exhibition, I was surprised to learn that Cartier-Bresson cropped Behind the Gare St. Lazare, one of his most famous photos and a personal favorite of his. Normally, cropping would not be worth mentioning in a photo exhibit but Cartier-Bresson rarely cropped, preferring moments de grâce. The museum has on display the only extant copy of the original St. Lazare, complete with crop lines grease-penciled down the left side of the proof, hash-marking into oblivion an out-of-focus slab of fence.

I also enjoyed the photos Cartier-Bresson took in Paris in the mid-’40s of celebrities in the worlds of art and philosophy—Picasso, Braque, Éluard, Bonnard, Satre, Camus—including a small series of Matisse, seated comfortably at home in Venice, holding a dove in one hand while sketching it with the other.

I was talking today about the subjectiveness of what constitutes art and my point just kind of slipped out: “One man’s Dogs Playing Poker is another man’s Piss Christ.”

I’m torn. I consider myself a progressive gentleman, one who respects women and strives to treat them equally. On the other hand, I know the perils of being a “nice” guy all the time, and I’m not adverse to occasional hot girl-on-girl action. To put these conflicting thoughts from my head tonight, I dampened my nervous system with Pabst and cheap whiskey to better enjoy the nubile young ladies of the Pillow Fight League duke it out.

This was in Brooklyn at Galapagos and only the second-ever U.S. outing for the Canadian league—the other was last night, which sold out and inspired tonight’s rematch.

It’s really just wrestling, set up Fight Club-style in the back room of the bar on a ring of mats surrounded by a tightly packed crowd of 200. The big difference is that each fighter, with punny name and matching costume, can use her regulation pillow as an extension of her limbs.

The tourney began with a ceremonial appreciation of our neighbors to the north: a singing of the Canadian national anthem over a slideshow of things proudly Made in Canada: mounties, hockey, Pamela Anderson, etc.

The five-minute bouts pitting the practiced pro players against each other were fast-paced and fun, but the giddy excitement came from the amateur fights, involving local ladies who had filled out a consent form in advance and presumably never pillow-fought at the professional level before.

After the first two amateur contenders wormed their way out of the crowd to the mat, the announcer introduced them by their freshly chosen fighter names: Jersey Girl and Orange Crush. “Fuck Jersey!” shouted a Brooklyn patriot in the audience. “Check her for weapons!” hollered another. “I love you, Orange Crush,” someone added meekly.

As if they were entering lockdown, they were instructed to remove their jewelry, watches, belts and shoes. (Obligatory jerk in audience: “Take it all off!”)

Both wore jeans but the similarities ended there. Jersey Girl, who wasn’t doing much to dissuade a certain stereotype, had on a black CBGB tank top that revealed bra straps and muffin top, while her thong and requisite lower-back tat were also visible. Orange Crush was slim and prim with reddish hair and a cozy gray turtleneck. She looked exactly like Julianne Moore. So the best thing ever was her response to Jersey Girl’s first strike. Imagine striding up to the actual Julianne Moore on the sidewalk as if you wanted her autograph or to praise her work in The Hours, but instead whaling her full in the face with a pillow. Since most of my photos from the rumble turned out as smudged and posterized as Stag at Sharkey’s, here is a visual aide to help you imagine the situation.

What I’m getting at is that Orange Crush wasn’t expecting to get whomped upside her head as quickly as she was. Maybe she wasn’t expecting it at all. But she was pissed and with eyes blazing like her now-mussed hair, unleashed a determined retaliation, thundering down short-armed blows on Jersey with the heft and fury of 1,000 sledgehammers. The crowd howled. It ended badly for Jersey, her face mashed to the mat. She wasn’t pinned for the count, but the judges gave the edge to Orange Crush, possibly because they feared for their safety.

Helping the contenders stand again, the ringmaster asked how they felt, for the benefit of the audience. “Awseome,” said Jersey Girl. “Fucking exhausted,” said Orange Crush, out of breath. The ringmaster got back on the mike for the color commentary: “The first thing the amateurs learn is: you gotta do cardio.”

The next pair of amateurs clearly had learned from the first. Although they started by sparring in place, swinging widely, they graduated soon enough to include fancy footwork. Then the girl who went by the name Sugar Glider, six-feet tall and dressed in a rust-colored terry dress from the ’70s, leapt on her much smaller opponent, collapsed her like a tent, then pillow-garroted her until the ref counted off three. Now that’s entertainment.

There were many young couples in the audience of 200, but a fair sprinkling of guy’s guys, resplendent in their stubble and major league ballcaps, the sort of fellows you could bet had a Sports Illustrated Football Phone in their not-too-distant past. But this being New York they were blessed with a higher wit.

“My inner lesbian’s so aroused right now,” the tough guy to my right said to me. Turning back to the action he yelled “Hump her!”

I overheard others armchair-quarterbacking like the tournament was a warped match of the NBA or NFL, things like “Carbon Monoxide’s cute but she didn’t bring her A-game” and “That Betty Crocker don’t take shit from no one.”

Stepping out at one point to get another drink, I saw a guy standing near the door considering purchase of a late ticket. He asked another exiting guy “Is it fun in there?” The guy walking out looked at the questioner as if he was a cretin. “Hell yeah,” he said. “There’s girls beating the shit out of each other.”

Attention! This post contains the following words and phrases that some readers may find objectionable or funny: “tentacle porn,” “pubic hair,” “ass hair,” “penises” and “cooter.” Also the words “fuck” and “finger” as verbs.

The Museum of Sex: what a great idea. Where else can you finger the cooter of a Real Doll without spending $6,499 to own one? I don’t know, although I made sure I washed my hands thoroughly with soap and hot water afterwards.

The temporary exhibit on the ground floor, “Peeping, Probing and Porn: Four Centuries of Graphic Sex in Japan,” displays the full range, from woodblock prints to looping videos of modern anime. As is often the case, the older stuff is more intriguing.

When Edo (present-day Tokyo) first expanded from a backwater fishing village to a teeming metropolis, young men packed up and moved there for opportunity and to fuck around a bit, figuratively and literally. Edo became known as the “City of Bachelors,” inspiring a booming sex trade, then, in the natural progression of things, copious pornography. The first mass-produced porn, commissioned by the rich or sold as cheap prints to the masses, chiefly depicted the wide caste of prostitutes, from streetwalkers to live-in courtesans, doin’ it with a variety of men. Many prints concern the popular fetish of voyeurism, whether through mirrors or peeping perverts, as well as what’s perhaps the first instance of tentacle porn, from 1820 by the same guy who woodblocked the famous Beneath the Great Wave off Kanagawa.

I found it interesting that pornographers in early 19th century Japan had no qualms depicting pubic hair of either sex, male ass hair or penises the approximate height and girth of the owner’s head. Strangely, they became more conservative in certain narrow respects as the centuries advanced, until, for example, the depiction of pubic hair was banned or at least restricted in modern times.

I stopped by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum today for the National Design Triennial 2006, a rambling, bombastic exhibit on three floors that covers the design of just about everything: architecture, media, advertising, software, lighting, fashion, ceramics, furniture, fabrics, tools, maps and packaging. It’s a hit-or-miss jumble and on the second floor at least, there’s a slew of commercial filler: Nike sneakers, Apple’s iPod, an ad campaign for Court TV and more. Next to enlarged screenshots of some Google sites (including the new Google Picasa, which gets no explanation at all), an earnest placard notes that “‘google’ has become a widely accepted verb found in dictionaries.” Wow, really?

A centerpiece of the show was Sgt. John Blackwell, a life-sized digitally animated character that processes questions asked of it and responds verbally. The placard explains the U.S. Army joined forces with Hollywood to develop the serviceman to substitute for a human during training or informational sessions, which is a fine idea in concept.

Dressed in helmet and fatigues, the sergeant hovers directly in front of you behind a glass pane in a semidarkened open-backed booth. His numerous polygons shift slightly as he waits for your input, for which you hold down a red button while speaking your question into a microphone. He replies with a prerecorded response ideally appropriate to your question. When I arrived at the booth, there was a dad there with a very young girl who he got to “speak” into the microphone as he struggled to mash the button while holding her to the mike.

Girl

Gigaablagh.

Blackwell

You wanna know how I’m talking to you right now? Just ask me.

Girl

Hurnablahjk. Dit dit.

Blackwell

You wanna know something about my technology? Why don’t you ask me?

Girl

Palatalata dommmm. Bbb bbb bbb.

Blackwell

[leans forward testily] Why don’t you just Google it?

Girl

[looks confused, taken aback]

So what you’re most likely to hear is one of the sergeant’s pat responses when he doesn’t understand you or have an answer in his library of responses. The avatar “learns” and although that process isn’t explained, I assume it involves recording the keywords and questions the system doesn’t understand, then having a human filter through them to potentially provide software recognition and a response. I’d love to be the peon charged with reviewing those tapes.

To help cut down on unanswered questions, there’s a list of leading questions posted near the sergeant’s microphone, along the lines of “What is your name?” and “How does your technology work?” At its heart, the sergeant is a much more expensive version of the classic text-input psychologist computer program, ELIZA.

Despite his stunted conversational skills, a lot of people wanted to chat with the sergeant so I didn’t have as much face time as I’d have liked. He did tell me that he’s been in the army five years and joined after seeing Saving Private Ryan, a movie I would have guessed deters enlistment. Having warmed him up, I asked him his position on gays in the military. He offered a random canned response, so I asked again in case he was dodging the question or lost in thought about his technology. He responded, “Not to be cocky, but I’m programmed to help my flesh and blood brethren at war and in peacetime.” You heard it here first: no more of this “don’t ask, don’t tell” crosstalk—Sgt. Blackwell and the U.S. Army are gay friendly and not adverse to some cocky shenanigans.

A slightly less interactive exhibit that caught my fancy at the Triennial was an installation by Electroland that wraps along the inner wall of the museum’s grand staircase in a long white acrylic lightbox. As you ascend or descend, evenly spaced vertical fluorescent tube lights mounted in the lightbox “follow” you, fading in and out as you move, while the system plays an ascending or descending musical scale. It gets cacophonous when there are a lot of people on the stairs at the same time.

Some other cool stuff that would have been even cooler had it been operational was the transparent kayak that weighs only 26 pounds and folds to fit into a backpack, as well as the underwater robotic lobster that can gauge pollution, locate mines and liberate its crustacean cronies from restaurant holding tanks.¹

Comparing the Triennial to the ITP Winter Show I attended in December, the latter exhibition boasted a scrappy youthful exuberance, many more hands-on or active exhibits and not a whiff of commercialism, making it the larger success.

¹ I may have made up one of these features. [back]

Art collided strangely with technology at the Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show I attended today at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was a crowded exhibition of about 125 projects developed by students and professors of the program and set up like a science fair. You could stroll by and watch demos, participate in interactive projects and ask the inventors questions. There were a few hundred people in attendance, milling down the halls and into offices and classrooms where the exhibit tables were pitched. If you were a pornographer so inclined, this event would be the perfect casting opportunity for a feature film called Hot, Barely Legal Nerds.

As you enter the exhibit, you see a large octagonal frame containing a grid of 830 flat wooden tiles. Designed by Daniel Rozin, the Wooden Mirror is connected to a hidden video camera that captures a digital stream of what’s in front of it, interpolates the data on the fly, then activates any number of hundreds of tiny motors hidden behind the tiles, tilting them in and out of the light, resulting in a rough representation of the “reflected” image. Think of it like this: standing before the mirror, you see a crude pixilated representation of yourself. Sometimes you need to stand back and squint, but it’s there. What’s amazing is how swiftly the system reacts: wave your hand in front of the mirror and there’s a hushed sound of scattering as the tiles rearrange themselves to follow your movement.

The most practical invention was the solar swimwear developed by Andrew Schneider. It looked like armor made from a disco ball, dozens of photovoltaic strips of film stitched onto a bikini with conductive thread. On a sunny day, it harnesses enough power to charge an iPod, which can be plugged directly into the waistband. “There is no way I couldn’t do this project,” Schneider explained, and I believed him.

One of the least-flashy exhibits but appealing to me as a writer was a program written in Java by Sai Sriskandarajah that collects the words and phrases a writer deletes when composing a document. These “lost words” can then be output as an abstract poem. I’ve always wanted a program like this!

Here’s a curious invention for the harried New York City pedestrian and commuter: Urban Sonar. Developed by Kate Hartman, Kati London and Sai Sriskandarajah, it records a user’s “personal space” as it relates to her anxiety over an extended period of time. As the team members explain:

The user wears a jacket with four ultrasonic sensors that measure her proximity to other people and objects to her left, right, front and back. The sensors communicate with a Java-enabled mobile phone, which records these four proximity values along with the user’s heartrate. The data can then be uploaded to a server for playback at a later time, allowing the user to consider, with a degree of critical distance, her spatial experience over the course of fixed period of time.

Demo output on a computer showed a stationary red dot centered onscreen representing the user, surrounded by a constantly shifting blue shape indicating the distance of the nearest object on all four sides. This could be even cooler if the output occurred in real time, like those impending-doom proximity detectors used in Alien.

Although there wasn’t enough room at the exhibition to demo it, Sonic Body Pong by Tikva Morowati was one of the funniest inventions. Based on the classic table-tennis video game, Sonic Body Pong pits two human opponents against one another in real-time. They represent the paddles and the ball exists only via a “spatially correct” sound based on where they’re standing on the court. Through headphones, each player can hear the ball approaching, hitting either paddle or banking off a “wall.” The creators displayed a video of sample gameplay, which, without the sound, was essentially two people facing off and stutter-stepping or lunging laterally. I can’t imagine this had much to do with the science but each of them wore a headpiece, presumably containing the location-tracking sensors and headphones, comprised of a hardhat topped by a large green paddle made of foam.

Hanging out in SoHo this afternoon, I walked by 11 Spring Street, which has been overtaken by the Wooster Collective for this weekend only. In an unlikely collaboration of art and real estate, the development company that purchased the vacant building has allowed graffiti artists and street artists to use it as a canvas, inside and out, before restoring it for residential sale.

It’s a beautiful building, with or without the art. Built in 1888, the 14,000 square foot palazzo has more than 60 arched windows and was once a horse stable. On the outside, it’s long been known to feature some of the most intriguing art in the city, including stickers, posters and graffiti. Every time I’d walk by, something would be slightly different.

And the outside was all I got to see today; the wait to enter and see the art there was over 2 1/2 hours when I walked by at 3 p.m. A volunteer broke the news to those at the end of the line that because the exhibit was only open until 5 p.m., they needed to break it up and try again tomorrow.

What I like most about 11 Spring Street is that at least the art inside won’t be destroyed after Sunday but walled over during the redevelopment process, preserving it as if in a time capsule that may be rediscovered someday.

I went after work to a gallery in SoHo, Location One, to check out an arty robot exhibit. It was crowded there but pretty cool. I liked Ill-Tempered Clangier (a self-playing wind chime) and IPO Madness, a slot machine that randomly generates then attempts to connect to an URL each time the lever is pulled. If it’s a valid URL, you win!

Joe and I braved the New York City Marathon crowds getting to the Upper East Side for the Masters of American Comics exhibit at the Jewish Museum of New York. It’s the work of six guys: Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, Gary Panter and Chris Ware. Nice mix!

From Kurtzman, one of Mad magazine’s forefathers, there are some of his early “War and Fighting Men” comics under the series names Frontline Combat and Two-Fisted Tales (plus early sketches and colors from his Little Annie Fanny series for Playboy). An R. Crumb sketchbook from 1962 for Fritz the Cat is a Square Deal Composition book which Crumb has cheekily penciled in “Sex” for the subject-line on the cover. There’s also a beautiful 12-panel series for one of his bluesmen profiles, of Charley Patton.

In the Superheroes subsection of the exhibit, I was surprised to learn that Captain America (along with his “young ally,” Bucky, perhaps the worst scrappy sidekick name ever) fought the Nazis in World War II and that Jerry Siegel, originator of Superman, had less popular characters under his belt, especially “The One and Only Superlover,” Jon Juan (“He fights! He loves! He dares!”).

Media mogul Malcolm Forbes collected items mogulesque: hot air balloons, yachts, Fabergé eggs, Harley-Davidson motorcycles. A cache of smaller, more curious things, antiques you might find in a reclusive grandfather’s attic or garage, are displayed on the ground floor of the Forbes Magazine headquarters at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street.

Joe and I checked it out today. As you enter the exhibit space, there’s an extensive collection of toy and model boats. Malcom bought the André, a toy boat the size of a microwave oven, at the Nain-Jaune toy store in Paris. Get this: it’s powered by a gasoline engine. I have to imagine this isn’t meant for play in your average-sized tub. I can’t guess how much that one cost, but it’s a fact Malcom plunked down $28,600 at auction in 1983 for a model of the Lusitania, a world-record amount for a toy at the time. It’s on display, sinking, just like the real thing.

There’s also a large collection of toy soldiers. One set produced in the 1920s called “The Home Farm” was thought to be complete until King George V saw it and wondered aloud why there wasn’t a village idiot. “No English village is complete without him,” he said. The manufacturer, Britains, hastily added an idiot to the set. This whole exchange smacks of apocrypha to me; it’d be like Regan making a big deal over the lack of a village idiot Smurf and then all of a sudden Schleich adds Clumsy.

Malcom’s neatest toy soldier collection is an army of flat tin figurines produced for the English market by German toy powerhouse Heyde. The set, called The Sham Fight, included miniature cannons that shot dry peas. The goal was to knock down your opponent’s soldiers, scoring one point for each private, two for a drummer, four for a sergeant, eight for a captain and ten plus an automatic win for each colonel toppled. Unfortunately for Heyde, the allies received 11 points and a “Win the War by May” card for firebombing the company’s headquarters and plant along with the rest of Dresden during World War II.

In another room hang early Monopoly boards, including prototypes handmade by patent-holder Charles Darrow in the ’20s and ’30s. I’m hesitant to call ol’ Charlie an “inventor” because as Forbes makes plain, he poached the Monopoly idea from a popular forerunner called The Landlord’s Game, patented in 1904 by one Lizzie J. Magie. Elements are nearly identical, from the shape and style of the board, to the Jail and Go To Jail squares. Good old American entrepreneurialism: profiting from the hard work of others. A small collection of Monopoly sets from outside of America reveals one of the game tokens in the Italian version is a tiny tomato, which amused me.

After visiting her horse, Katie and I returned to civilization and spent the rest of the day at the annual Jersey City Art Tour.

What a great idea! You pick-up a self-guided tour map that indicates dozens of spots across the city where artists are exhibiting and selling their work, then you stop by to check out whatever sounds interesting. We didn’t ever get a program, just a map with a bunch of numbered dots on it, so we made random stops. The cool part was that it wasn’t just studios and galleries exhibiting. Sometimes we’d show up and find the “gallery” was someone’s garage or second-floor apartment, a bowl of pretzels sitting on a table and people milling around like it was a impromptu party. Or it’d be a bar or a restaurant with the art hanging on the walls, inside and out. One of the fancier galleries was nestled under a muddy highway entrance ramp and for refreshments they had a styrofoam cup-full of snack-size Snickers and Butterfinger bars and a bottle of pinot grigio with bits of cork floating in it. Throughout the tour everyone was friendly and cool and there wasn’t any pressure to buy anything.

Among the more intriguing stuff we saw were small handmade blank books, knit cross-section replicas of internal organs, photographs of lightning and hand-tinted Polaroids of Europe, a dress made entirely from unused tampons and other feminine hygiene products, and sculptures of fish made from scrap metal with cranks you could turn to move their fins and mouths.

After the end of a long day, we had dinner at Tania’s, a mighty fine Polish restaurant where we chowed down cheap and tasty pierogi, potato pancakes, sausage, beets, cucumber salad, and Polish beers that our waiter assured us were unavailable in New York outside of Greenpoint. Then it was off to buy cat food which we dropped off for Katie’s cats, then set out again to a party organized by William, a coworker of Katie’s from her Barnes & Noble days who’s an accomplished artist and was one of the exhibitors on the Art Tour. He has a small and comfy apartment crammed with his large oil canvases, sketchbooks, random furniture, records, CDs and books, mannequin heads and loads of knicknacks. The party soundtrack included the Pixies, Mates Of State, some sort of krautrock and an awful lot of Joy Division. A nice touch was a green plastic bowl of cheap and fun party favors, including carpal-tunnel wrist braces, a rainbow-colored elastic headband, a cellophane-wrapped necktie, a laser pointer, compasses and assorted dollar-store toys. When the bowl got low, Katie and I refreshed it with items we stealthily removed from William’s kitchen counter and cupboards: a wrapped white candle, a half-empty tube of Krazy Glue the feline furball remedy, PetroMalt, and a small jar of gravy.

For breakfast, Mom, Dad and I hiked from my apartment uphill through Fort Tryon Park for brunch at the New Leaf Café, an enterprise of Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project, a not-for-profit organization that’s revitalizing grubby public spaces in the city.

I had the challah French toast, served with braised strawberries and, on the side, two plump links of mildly sweet chicken-apple sausage. Delicious. Our server was peculiar in a kindergarten teacher sort of way, not blinking enough as she spoke slowly and obliquely about things like how the gardens at Fort Tryon reminded her of Maurice Sendak illustrations. (The gardens are beautiful, but they’re not Maurice caliber.) Her name was Allison and she signed our receipt with “Allison Wonderland,” which contributed to our suspicions that she was an actor, a stripper, or both.

Afterwards, the garden tour at the Cloisters was informative, although Mom recognized immediately our guide’s mistaken identity of the lavender. “At least she was pointing in the general direction,” Mom said. The tour extended inside to discussion of plant elements in the museum’s famous unicorn tapestries. We learned factual errors, like that pomegranates don’t grow on trees, and that the tapestries teem with allusions to elixirs. Closely grouped but seemingly random varieties of flowers and herbs were depicted to reference the fact that they could be combined to make, for example, an aphrodisiac or a beverage purposed to help women conceive a thoughtful child. Medieval viewers would have instantly caught these references, but to the modern viewer, there’s nothing there but a tangle of plants.

New Leaf Café

• Fort Tryon Park
• (212) 568-5323
• Meal 29 of 52: challah French toast with coffee and orange juice ($15.95).

After breakfast at Edgar’s Cafe in my previous Upper West Side neighborhood, Mom, Dad and I walked through Central Park to the Met for the exhibit Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde. Great works by those two artists, among others by Gauguin, van Gogh and Redon. Because it’s a show focusing on Vollard, a dealer, the placards burst with anecdotes about money changing hands and implied how to become a successful art dealer:

1. Befriend the artist when he and his art are unpopular and buy his paintings cheaply.
2. Offload the paintings when the art/artist becomes popular.
3. Profit!

It was oddly refreshing to have so much of the exhibit concern the intersection of raw talent and raw commerce instead of airy ruminations on artistic method and inspiration. Y’all know the story of van Gogh cutting off his own ear. Well, van Gogh thanked his doctor for that incident with a painting, Portrait of Doctor Felix Rey, one of the works in the exhibit. Rey’s parents hated the thing and used it to patch a hole in their chicken coop. Vollard saw it differently. And now, well, it’s worth millions and hanging in a world-renowned museum.

We checked out Grand Central Terminal, then walked to the Empire State Building. The lines there were aggravating Dad and for good reason: a line to go through security, a line to get tickets, a line to get on one set of elevators, a line to board another set of elevators, a line to take the elevators back down, etc., all the while loud men attempt to sell you package tour deals and audio commentaries. (We could’ve gone to the Top of the Rock, with its newness, better organized lines and timed ticket system, but I heard the voice of Marge Simpson: “It’s wall-to-wall landmarks! The Williamsburg bridge! Fourth Avenue! Governors Island!”) At some point, we upgraded to express passes, which at least allowed us to skip the elevator-related lines. Haze limited the views from the 86th floor observatory to a half-mile, but we could still see Queens, New Jersey and most of Downtown. I pointed out landmark buildings, tried to pinpoint the non-landmark one in which I work and attempted to call Andrew and Jess on Dad’s cellphone just to say, “We’re calling from the top of the Empire State Building!”

Back at street level, we shouldered our way though the wedding party getting its photo taken in the lobby then walked over to Macy’s to check out the wooden escalators. On the subway uptown to dinner at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, Dad had a brief moment resting his eyes that proved the only way to capture him in the wild without having him jerk away from my camera in annoyance.

After dinner we purchased cabernet sauvignon and Jameson 12-year to drink back at the apartment where we reviewed photos from our most recent European jaunts: my trip with Dana to Rome and Mom and Dad’s trip to Ireland.

Katie and her posse visited the Pollock-Krasner House a week ago and she told me that the floor of the studio out back is still spattered with paint: a work of art in itself. (You can walk on it, but you have to wear special slippers.) If ever an artist exemplified intense external emotion best, it’s Pollock. His works are segments of chaos, almost as if that slung paint could go on forever if not for the constraints of the canvas.

I thought about this today as I toured an exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s art from the ’30s through the ’60s on display at the Katonah Museum of Art in the hamlet of Katonah, New York.

Self-contained and insular in his life and art, Cornell is the polar opposite of Pollock. His works demonstrate emotion too, of course, but of reflection or longing, via assemblages he built inside handmade wooden boxes, and more fantastically, inside pocketwatches, antique books and blue-glassed specimen boxes. He’d stock these containers with Boo Radley curios from a lifetime of collecting and hoarding at antique shops and five-and-dime stores. An automobile watchcase contains a tiny silver spoon, fork and knife, with a thin spiral of copper metal and crumbs of pyrite. In a homage to Magritte, Cornell cut uniform coaster-sized discs from photos of the sky and from the pages of a book in French, stacking them neatly in a paperboard powder box along with a lens flecked with white paint.

He spent most of his life holed up in a house in Queens with his mother, crippled brother and an encyclopedic knowledge of art, science, the cinema, ballet, literature, theatre, music and history. He admired actresses and made themed boxed artworks for them. A related work on display at the exhibit, The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice), is a valise box containing detritus from the life of a fictional character: dozens of postcards and photos, a prayer card and a claim ticket, maps, a calendar page from Saturday, August 17, and a tarnished penny.

After Marcel Duchamp befriended and hired him in the early 1940s, Cornell built boxes for the great dadaist’s boîte-en-valise series. One of these on display contains 69 reproductions of Duchamp’s most famous works, including miniature replicas of the Large Glass, a urinal and the Mona Lisa with a moustache.

On my train ride back to Manhattan, a blind couple boarded, each led by a harnessed Labrador retriever trained for public transport. As soon as the couple found free seats, the dogs flattened their bodies and squirmed underneath. Then the man reached down and tucked in his dog’s tail and left rear leg, which were intruding into the aisle. The dogs didn’t appear comfortable with their lack of headroom and the man’s yellow Lab had the doleful look of an animal resigned to its duty. Its head poked into the footspace of the seat behind the couple and the guy there gently bonked the dog’s snout with his shoe by accident before realizing the animal was there. When the couple rose to exit at White Plains, the dogs squeezed out and it appeared as if they were being birthed from the floor of the train.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has the world’s largest collection of Edward Hopper’s art—more than 2,500 oils and works on paper. But the museum is small and only a tiny portion of these works are ever on display at once. That’s why I stopped by after work today for the museum’s 75th anniversary exhibition. Through December 3rd, it has dedicated its fifth floor to nothing but Hopper, including callbacks of popular works on-loan (although not the so-iconic-it’s-cliché Nighthawks).

The Whitney championed Hopper and his art early on, and when he died, his estate returned the favor, bequeathing everything to the Whitney, down to the cheap ledgers he bought from Woolworth’s Five & Dime to thumbnail and describe each painting he sold. A few of these notebooks are on display under glass, opened and annotated with short, fictional backstories his wife added, imagining the settings and characters of the paintings existed in reality.

Also interesting are the dozens of preparatory sketches and etchings Hopper prepared before painting. An entire gallery is dedicated to New York Movie, a masterpiece of light and loneliness. Within the room, it’s surrounded by yellowing scraps of paper framed on the walls, depicting details Hopper considered for the work: sketches of seats, drapery, sconces, pillars, ceilings and minute architectural details, which he drew while scouting New York City movie houses; notes on lighting and specific colors, annotating one sketch to resemble a paint-by-number canvas; and studies contrasting different positions and angles for the woman in the painting. Hopper tweaked these preparations many times to his satisfaction before committing the image to canvas.

I’ve often wondered how Hopper’s paintings should be classified, and seeing so many of them in one place begs an answer. Academically, he’s lumped in the New American or Ashcan school of art, which squares with his lifeline (1882 to 1967). But his technique—blocks of thick-brushed-color—is more obviously inspired by earlier painters, especially impressionists like Monet. Then there are his subjects which, as the Whitney describes, “hang, tantalizingly, between staged theatrics and the utterly familiar.” That could just as easily bond him with the Surrealists; I’ve always seen symmetry between him and his contemporary de Chirico. Are the impossibly empty interiors and Sunday morning streets of Hopper’s world any less strange, familiar and desolate than the phantom trains and landscapes of smokestacks and flags that populate de Chirico’s?

There’s an intriguing trio of exhibits at the International Center of Photography.

Unknown Weegee, about 100 seldom-seen photos from the master New York City tabloid shutterbug, runs the range of high and low society. His images of minor celebrities and “normal” people at functions, dances and in public still have an Arbus-like creepiness, as in one of my favorites, a woman reclining languidly in a car and signing autographs for the boys crowded outside her window.

Then there’s Weegee’s usual special blend of Bowery drunks, strippers, bums, Coney Island disasters and murder victims. If this guy isn’t the patron saint of the New York Post, I don’t know who would be, particularly with his championing of the “If it bleeds, it leads” tabloid philosophy (on display is a $35 receipt to Weegee from Time for “Two Murders”) and his rampant editorializing. One photo of a jailbird is captioned in Weegee’s hand as “Behind Bars . . . for Being a Dope.” Others seem to have been captioned out of context, like the couple making out awkwardly while wearing what appear to be hand-crafted space helmets, above Weegee’s phrase, “Boy meets girl—from Mars.” My laugh out loud moment came courtesy of the photo of a poster from the early ’50s, with an illustration of a stern nurse accosting the viewer, and the command, “Protect the genetic future of your country: Give generously to your local sperm bank.”

Another exhibit of about 40 images downstairs, Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, serves as a fine companion piece to the Museum of Modern Art’s Dada exhibit. Made from the mid-’20s to the early ’30s from newspaper clippings and original photos pasted to board, Brandt’s collages have a pleasing symmetry and a strange cohesiveness considering the breadth of her source material. In a few pieces, you can still see lines and arcs penciled to the board where she considered the exact placement of each puzzle-piece-like element of the whole.

The gallery upstairs is reserved for a few giant, crisp prints by Korean contemporary artist Atta Kim. Strange stuff. A curious series of photos, Monologue of Ice, Portrait of Mao, depicts an ice bust of Mao melting in stages, with a fourth photo depicting 108 glasses of water placed precisely on steel and glass shelving. Concerned with time and movement, he digitally superimposes many takes of his portraits with varying degrees of transparency, so the final image of the individual is overlapped to the point of seeming three-dimensional or resembling those lenticular images that you tilt to change. Kim also favors photos made with extremely long exposures, eight hours in some cases. Much too long to register movement, this timing gives his landscapes a ghostly quality, devoid of people and vehicles, whether they’re of the surprisingly lush Korean DMZ or busy intersections of New York at dawn.

Subway stations here house some of the most intriguing found art in the city. Many stations have these refrigerator-door-sized frames on the walls inside for paste-up posters promoting movies, TV shows and consumer goods. They’re torn down, layered over and defaced, and between postings resemble modern collage. There will often be a dash of pop art present, as in the second poster shown here with its Bud ad fragment.

I did some stereotypical San Francisco sightseeing today. I hiked up Telegraph Hill to see Coit Tower and a prime view of Alcatraz Island. I browsed the stacks at City Lights, co-founded in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as the nation’s first all-paperback bookstore and publisher to the beat poets. Fisherman’s Wharf, which I also stopped by, is the Times Square of San Francisco: chain restaurants, dreary hotels, questionable entertainments, beggars, tacky T-shirts and trinkets for sale, and fat people clearly not from the city waddling about. This photo of a seagull in a shitstained landscape, eating what appears to be a bun, just about sums it up for me.

I salvaged my wharfwalk somewhat with a planned visit to the Musée Mécanique, a collection of antique mechanized penny and nickel amusements, including viewboxes for 3D photos (“See what the belly dancer does on her day off!”), player pianos and orchestrions, photobooths, fortune-tellers and palm-readers, love-testers, mutoscopes and slot machines.

It’s too bad it’s not a true museum but a bunch of stuff some daft old bastard collected and threw into a warehouse on Pier 45. There are very few placards describing who made these Wunderkammern and why, how popular they were, or how they work. Or course, there’s also no admission fee to the Musée, so I can’t complain too much.

One of the two most popular attractions was Knock Out Fighters, a primitive precursor to Rock’em Sock’em Robots. They’re these articulated, marionette-like boxer figurines, made in 1928 by a St. Paul-based scale manufacturer, that are completely mechanical and use no electricity. The arms of each player’s boxer are moved independently by two triggers on the gun handle-style “joystick.” A direct punch to the chin of an opposing boxer pushes in a pin that causes the figure to collapse in defeat. The other crowd-favored game was this mechanical test-your-strength arm-wrestler in a luchador mask, favored by gentlemen wishing to impress their ladies.

I also enjoyed this amusement park model fashioned mostly from toothpicks.

Nearby was an intriguing text-and-photo-based history of the roller coaster and the magic year of 1884, when LaMarcus Adna Thompson, a crafty inventor from Ohio, installed the first, the 600-foot Switchback Railway at Coney Island. It topped out at six miles-per-hour and required passengers to exit their car at the halfway point to switch to another track. But even that couldn’t hinder thrill-seekers who waited up to three hours in line to pay their nickel and take the wild ride. That same year at Coney Island, San Franciscan Philip Hinckle installed the first power-chain operated lift-hill coaster, while in San Francisco, two “continuous oval-track gravity coasters” opened, one at Ocean Beach and another at Mission and Eighth. Here’s the text of an ad from that year promoting the latter coaster:

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.
A Sled-Ride Down Hill Without Snow!
GREAT SPORT!
PHYSICIANS RECOMMEND IT. * OPEN DAY AND NIGHT.
The CALIFORNIA GRAVITY RAILROAD CO.
Cor. Eighth and Mission Sts.
ADMISSION FREE. * FIVE CENTS A RIDE.
Bring your family and enjoy yourselves.
Polite Attendants. Electric Lights.

There are newer exhibits in the Musée as well: about a dozen old video games plunked way in the back. I was disappointed that the only inoperable machine was one of my all-time favorites, Tempest (1980), and to read the instructions revived fond memories. This game was easier than Old Maid:

TO PLAY:
Shoot the approaching enemy and enemy charges. Player loses a life when:
* caught by an enemy
* hit by a charge
* skewered by a spike

Wrapping up a fine afternoon on my long walk back to the hotel, I was able to score some Mexican Coke. No, not the Lindsay Lohan kind. Check it out, baby: hecho en Mexico.

If you wonder what my fuss is about, you are no soda connoisseur. Here’s part of an Associated Press article from 2004:

[D]iscriminating shoppers [...] say the cane sugar sweetener used in Mexican Coke has a sweeter, cleaner flavor than the high-fructose corn syrup in the American version. Many are willing to pay $1.10 per 12-ounce bottle for the imports, even with cans of American Coke sitting nearby for 49 cents each.

I’ve since read not all Coke in Mexico is made with sugar, but I trust that mine is because there’s an official label stuck to the oldschool green-tinted glass bottle by the importer with sugar listed as the second ingredient after carbonated water.

If you believe a recent article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, which doesn’t offer any hard data to back up its claim, you can find Mexican Coke “just about everywhere in Latino communities across the United States.” But most of the officially sanctioned product here is found in Texas and Southern California, two of the largest Mexican markets in the country. The rest of the country’s Mexican Coke may be “grey market” stock brought over the border by third-party distributors or retailers. See, the Coca-Cola Co. limits official imports of the stuff because U.S. bottlers don’t get any money from Mexican Coke and that makes the U.S. bottlers sad.

One reason U.S. Coke isn’t made with sugar is that domestic sugar prices are artificially inflated to several times of those anywhere else in the world in order to help poor Florida sugarbeet farmers buy another Olympic-sized swimming pool for their second house.

So drink Mexican Coke and not only is it tastier than “the real thing,” you’re screwing over sugar farmers, the Coca-Cola Co. and its bottlers. Amazing how quickly an American icon can turn renegade. I’m going to lug my bottle back to New York and store it in a cool, dark place. As is done with Dom Perignon, I will save it to drink with a special someone for a special occasion.

I performed some backtrack subway shenanigans this afternoon to get to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. On a map, it’s about a width of Central Park away from my apartment. But I had the Harlem River to contend with.

I took the A down to 145th Street then transferred to the D back uptown. All of the white people except me and one other token guy got off at 161st Street for the Yankees game. Eventually, near the end of the line, I exited at the Fordham Road stop and still had to walk 15 minutes east to the garden. Next time, I’ll try crossing the river on foot via University Heights Bridge, which I now know has a sidewalk.

Central Park is about 3 1/2 times bigger than the comparatively measly 250 acres of the New York Botanical Garden, but I saw a more diverse batch of wildlife than I’ve ever seen in Manhattan. Here is my checklist:

• regular grey squirrels
• freakish jet-black squirrel with brown tail
• rabbits
• chipmunks
• Monarch butterflies
• pigeons (of course)
• mourning dove (heard)
• robin
• worm (eaten by robin)
• a cardinal
• an entire wedding party (getting its photo taken)

I toured a small part of the grounds and didn’t get a chance to check out any of the indoor exhibits. But of what I did see, my favorite plants were these ornamental onions (allium hollandicum) poking out among the hemerocallis in the spruce sector of the Arthur and Janet Ross Conifer Arboretum. They’re tall with rounded heads, spheres of spokes tipped with vibrant puprle blossoms. It’s as if they were designed in wireframe on a computer.

The lawns in the gardens have many “Keep Off the Grass” signs, but this is more of a place for looking as opposed to the lazing and tromping you get on your average Central Park greenery. So the mood is sedate, the only bustle from slow-moving tour groups of old people. There are peaceful nooks on winding paths where I could pause to watch a stream or take a seat. One crafty arrangement I came across was a long and curved, 15-foot-tall hedge that had ground-level fireplace-sized chunks cut into it at regular intervals; secreted into each leafy alcove was a park bench.

I read with interest the obituary of Allan Kaprow in the April 27th Wall Street Journal. Kaprow, who died April 5th at the age of 78, is credited as the father of Happenings, which are like living public art, and which the article’s author Barbara Rose describes as “theater pieces that fused John Cage’s aesthetics of chance with Jackson Pollock’s physical, gestural manner of painting.”

Kaprow launched the first Happening in 1959 in an artists’ cooperative downtown. Clear plastic walls divided the space into three rooms where performers acted out choreographed movements: a girl squeezing oranges, an artist lighting matches and painting, an orchestra playing toy instruments. Rauschenberg and Johns were among the performers.

Hundreds more traditional-style art-gallery Happenings happened in Manhattan through the ’60; there was some good footage of them in the documentary I saw in February, Who Gets to Call it Art?. But soon after that first one in 1959, Kaprow moved Happenings into the streets to make them even more unexpected, being literally outside of an artistic setting. Here’s one I would have liked to have seen:

In one performance he instructed participants to wait in Times Square and look for a signal from a window. When it came, they were to fall down on the sidewalk. Once that happened, a truck picked them up and cleared the streets of bodies.

I was surprised that the Journal’s obituary closed with Rose stating that Happenings faded away completely starting in the ’70s. Ever since that time, “the boisterous improvisations of the Happenings,” Rose writes, have been replaced by “carefully choreographed, elaborately costumed and phenomenally expensive productions.” She concludes, “[W]hat was born as a Dada gesture has ended as extravagant entertainment.”

I disagree and that’s not how I would have framed the article. I concede the word Happening is as dusty today as beatnik or hippie. But it’s doing Kaprow disservice to not even mention that the spirit of his organized on-the-street performances lives today in the form of the flash mob, defined by this fellow as a “Happening for Internetters,” and in groups like the locally based Improv Everywhere. Read about their shenanigans with blue shirts and Best Buy or an infinite time loop and tell me they’re not something Kaprow would recognize and be proud of.

Continuing the surreal theme of the day, I went to the Paul Klee exhibit Klee and America at the Neue Galerie, a converted mansion on the Upper East Side with a small permanent collection from the likes of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele on the second floor and four rooms on the third floor for the Klee exhibition. Spread through three of these rooms are 58 works by Klee, chiefly from the ’30s and ’40s when he was first being discovered in America. His champions included one of the twentieth century’s original Power Couples of art, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the latter of whom declared Klee the world’s greatest “child/poet.”

Ironically, Klee’s recognition in the U.S. came just as he felt he was gaining it in Europe. Nearing the cusp of his popularity there, he was dismissed from his Bauhaus teaching post in Germany by the Nazis, who had classified his work, along with most of the modern canon, as degenerate art.

The style of Klee is hard to nail down but he’s best known for what one of my art history professors in college called “subconscious doodles,” thin, strange stick figures and symbols he usually sketched in pen or pencil. While he adhered to these instruments, oils and watercolors as his core media, the surfaces on which he worked varied greatly: cardboard, cotton, canvas, wood, many types of paper, burlap (by itself and primed with other media, such as chalk), and black casein ground. Each leant a unique texture. The casein ground, for instance, brought the paint’s pigment, rather than its oil, to the surface, for a result akin to colored scratchboard. Combining watercolors and paste paint on cardboard, the color and texture of The Sick Heart resembles frosting on sugar cookies, while in Orpheus, watercolored cotton conjures the luminous swaths of color in a stained glass window.

Klee often used a technique (which he may have originated) called oil transfer drawing that gave his works gently shifting translucent hues, juxtaposed by his sharply drawn caricature. The famous Red Balloon (depicted above) is an oil transfer drawing and was described in 2003 by the Guggenheim Museum for its show From Picasso to Pollock: Classics of Modern Art:

He brushed a thinned oil paint onto one side of a piece of paper, then like making a carbon copy, he drew on the back of the painted sheet with a pen or stylus. The resulting lines have a feathered, smudged quality, as the artist stated, ‘saving transfer of my fundamental graphic talent into the domain of painting.’ Devised during Klee’s Bauhaus years, the oil transfer method was used for watercolors and oil paintings that are among the artist’s most idiosyncratically playful images.

I had an early dinner at the museum’s Café Sabarsky, which specializes in Viennese cuisine. I got the hearty Gulaschsuppe mit Kartoffen (goulash with potatoes) and Glühwein, heated red wine with spices, orange and cloves that smelled more pleasant than it tasted. Overall better than the stereotypical museum café fare of overpriced, uninspired sandwiches.

For after-dinner drinks and company, Andie invited me over to her apartment to join her, Eric, Katie and the girls’ parents, who are visiting this weekend. We had carry-out tiramisu from Carmine’s and reviewed the group’s adventures, which included a trip to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, Macy’s and the New York City Opera for the revival of Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, starring family relation Lisa Vroman.

Café Sabarsky

• 1048 Fifth Avenue (at 86th Street)
• (212) 288-0665
• Meal 8 of 52: potato goulash ($12) and mulled wine ($10).

I was in D.C. on business today and I stopped by the National Gallery of Art for Dada, the first major museum exhibition in the U.S. of the Dada art movement. (Interested New Yorkers, don’t fret: with some variations, the exhibit’s final stop is the Museum of Modern Art, June 18 through September 11.)

That there would even be a Dada exhibition is ironic because the movement was established to rebel against art’s conventions and pretensions. One of the first things you see upon entering is needlepoint (needlepoint!) by Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, who picked up their needles and patterns because paint-on-canvas stood for “a pretentious and conceited” world, according to Arp. (The exhibit also features some stunning painted wood marionettes Taeuber designed and commissioned in 1918.) Along the same lines, Man Ray postured inventing a new art form with his Rayographs, conveniently ignoring the fact that they were exactly the same as photograms, which have existed since photography. Most famous was Marcel Duchamp’s promotion of everyday objects as artworks, and they’re all on display, ironically, as “reproductions” of the long-lost “originals”: a urinal, a snow shovel, a hat rack, an ampoule of air from Paris.

The work that consumed most of Duchamp’s artistic life and which became a touchstone of the Dada movement, The Large Glass, is represented only by a photo, a study painting and a small descriptive plaque, likely because the last time Large Glass was exhibited in the 1920s, the movers broke it. Duchamp enjoyed this serendipity and painstakingly glued the shards back in place, declaring the damage a new feature of the artwork. The Large Glass now rests, likely forever, in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

As an artistic and literary movement, Dada began in Europe in reaction to World War I. In fact, its branches in Zurich and New York City were specifically established by people who sought refuge from the conflict. In addition, if you haven’t guessed already, there’s a strong sense of humor, randomness and absurdity in Dada, extending through media beyond traditional art: poetry, film and music.

A short stairway leading from one gallery to another was printed, one instruction per step, with Tristan Tzara’s famous recipe for making a Dada poem:

Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.

I watched a few short films and liked Entr’acte [Intermission] (1924) written by Francis Picabia and starring Ray, Duchamp and friends. Entr’acte can best be described as a jolly murder and funeral procession, with a lot of slow-motion leaping. Throughout the exhibition’s halls, you can hear samples of abstract voice poems played through hidden loudspeakers. Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (1922-32) is annoying, particularly because it loops infinitely. (Here’s a transcription of the lyrics.) I better appreciated his printed work.

Although Picasso popularized collage, Dadaists like Schwitters borrowed the technique for their own purposes. My favorites as shown in the exhibit were Prints from Merz Portfolio: 6 Lithos (1923), Schwitters’ assortment of letterpress prints and lithograph-collage combos. (MoMA has an example from the same year, although the color reproduction is completely washed out; fie to exhibits that ban photography!) Letterpress printing is a beautiful, now all-but-dead technology, and Schwitters combined it with freshly discarded materials he gathered from other people’s print runs: scraps of abstract patterns, bits of illustration and ads, and individual letters. You can directly trace Schwitters’ use of unusual cropping, overlapped and bunched elements, angled type and “severe” use of white space, directly to late 20th century graphic design and typography, especially the work of David Carson and his ilk.

After a laundry morning, I went downtown to The Strand Book Annex on Fulton Street for some purchases, including a first paperback edition of H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, Pride and Prejudice to go with my recent viewing of the movie, and another book as a Christmas gift. I had the foresight to clip a coupon from this week’s Village Voice which, with the purchase of any two books, granted me a free, handsome maroon canvas tote bag, emblazoned with the familiar oval Strand logo.

I then moseyed over to the Met Museum Store at South Street Seaport for some more Christmas shopping, then headed out to find what I had really come all this way for: Bodies: The Exhibition.

The cashier at the Met store told me, “You can’t miss it when you walk out—right next to the Gap.” How bad can it be, there next to the Gap, I wondered. The answer: not too bad, if seeing the equivalent of human jerky doesn’t faze you.

If you’ve been living in a cave, or haven’t heard of this exhibit, which has traveled the world, it’s a bunch of human organs and mostly skinless cadavers, preserved, partially dissected and artfully posed, under the guise that you will learn something about physiology. Mostly it’s just cool to look at corpses. There’s a full skeleton literally bursting out of its musculature, and another cadaver, posed like Rodin’s thinker, contemplating its own brain, which is ironically placed in its line of vision. The flayed muscles are marbled with fat and may make you think twice next time you take a forkful of tasty pot roast. They’re a color I can only describe as “preserved pink,” like those desiccated pig ears you can buy for dogs to gnaw on.

Worse, there are a few rooms of atrocities, including livers scarred with cirrhosis, smokers’ lungs, and a full room (complete with a warning placard posted outside) showing fun fetal birth defects.

A wondrous portion of the exhibit for me was the visualization of blood vessels via corrosion casting. For the process, the vessels are injected with a red-colored polymer, then the surrounding body tissue is then chemically removed. What remains is a delicate, dendritic red cluster, like some sort of alien coral.

Later tonight, I watched War of the Worlds on DVD. The instant I saw Tom Cruise operating that cargo crane in the opening scene, I thought for sure he would use it later to defeat the aliens. I was mistaken. Other than that, the movie wasn’t too bad.

Though I was there late last month to see The Destruction of Lower Manhattan photo exhibit, I returned to the Museum of the City of New York for the New York Changing exhibit, which opened July 26^th. Since moving here more than a year ago, I’ve become a fan of Berenice Abbott, whose WPA-era photos graced my recent entry on Penn Station. Furthermore, the style of the exhibit was actually the basis for my “95 Years Ago” entry, which showed then-and-now photos of my apartment building side-by-side¹.

Walking to the museum, I purposely crossed through Central Park at Mariner’s Gate off W. 85^th Street for my own New York Changing experience. I wanted to look at this portion of the park from a perspective I gained from reading an AP article on Thursday (“Clues Sought in Pre-Central Park Village” by Richard Pyle) about Seneca Village, a 19^th century settlement that once extended a third of the way into the park, from Central Park West to the Great Lawn, stretching from W. 82^nd to W. 89^th Street. The village was in the news because archeologists had been using radar to probe as far as 15 feet underground for evidence of relics revealing what life there was once like. Decisions to physically excavate the site will be based on the findings.

History once referred to Seneca Village as a squatters’ camp. That was likely because it was founded by free blacks, then settled by them and Irish and German immigrants. History now shows that many of the settlers were property owners and that the area included homes, churches, a school and a cemetery. In 1856, via the currently hot topic of eminent domain, the city paid-off and displaced some 1,600 people from the full 843-acre rectangle that would become Central Park, including the residents of Seneca Village, which was never re-established.

Walking across the site now, it’s impossible to recognize what was once there. Now it’s trees, rocks, paths, playgrounds and softball diamonds, and lots of open space to sun one’s self, as many people were doing today.

The exhibit, on the other hand, shows in a glance how New York has changed, for better or worse, in 70 years. It showcases 51 pairs of photos, placing vintage shots by Abbott next to ones taken recently by Douglas Levere. He took photos from the same place and at the same time of day and year as Abbott, even using the same large-format land camera, one that generates 8x10-inch negatives.

In general, Abbott deliberately avoided familiar views, although there are a few exceptions. The beautiful Flatiron building is thankfully the same in its 1936 photo as it is in 2001 and in fact is now the oldest remaining skyscraper in New York.

More often, however, the photos show what’s different. Crook-handled lampposts have given way to modern gooseneck streetlights. Once great features of the city—its elevated trains, grand old buildings, the Hudson Piers—have long since been demolished. “Skyscrapers complicate the view,” complains a typical placard at the exhibit.

A shot taken from Union Square by Abbott in 1936 shows the S. Klein department store on Broadway in the background, while in the foreground, the rear of Frédéric Bartholdi’s bronze statue of Marquis de Lafayette flanks a sapling. In 2002, the statue stands same as it ever was, the sapling has grown into a full grown tree and S. Klein has been replaced by a Toys “R” Us (which itself went out of business late last year).

I wanted to romanticize a photo of Abbott’s that depicts the Lyric Theatre, a charming-looking establishment plastered with ads for Charlie Chaplin movies and The Return of Peter Grimm, starring Lionel Barrymore. Then I read the photo’s description that such theaters in the Bowery during the Depression had a clientele that was “mostly transients.” But whatta deal they received: a newsreel, a short subject film and two features, all for 10 cents. When Levere rephotographed the scene in 2001, the Lyric had lost most of its ornamental facade and all of its charm, and had turned into a gay porn theater.

I was also intrigued by the fact that for more than a century, merchants sold Long Island oysters from houseboats docked along the East River. An Abbott photo from ’37 shows two of the last of them, the Brooklyn Bridge in the background and discarded shells heaped in the foreground like an omen. These fishmongers (molluskmongers?) moved to the Fulton FIsh Market, which itself is moving to the Bronx. It’s a city in perpetual motion.

¹ Since then, I’ve discovered such rephotography is common. For instance, Eugene Atget’s classic photos of the streets of Paris have been retaken and cast side-by-side by Sophie Tusler (France), Tom Gore (Canada) and Gerald Panter (United States). [back]

Eric, Andie and I took the A train to Fort Tyron Park, two stops before the line ends at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, where we ate our lunch of Eric’s Dagwood-style sandwiches and watched boats and jetskis pass by on the Hudson. Afterwards, we walked over cobblestone paths up a hill to The Cloisters, built by John Rockefeller Jr. in 1938 to resemble a monastery and serve as an exhibition space for some of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval art and architecture.

It’s a dim, stuffy museum of small Gothic chapels and halls, packed with statuary, ornamental windows, tapestries and other relics.

Most intriguing were these spooky oak reliquaries from early 16th century Brussels. At first glance they seem to be busts or ornamental cookie jars. But reliquaries often took the forms of the body parts they were made to contain, so these were designed to store skulls. Some churches assembled large numbers of them within their sanctuaries and paraded them about town on particular feast days.

I hadn’t expected to find open courtyards within the Cloisters, containing fountains and small, lush gardens of spices, flowers and fruit trees. Andie and I decided this is a place our moms would enjoy visiting.

Here’s a quince tree, which I’d never seen before.

As we were leaving, Andie was surprised to find that a girl who works at her bookstore also works as a cashier in the Cloisters gift shop, putting in 13 hours a day to make ends meet. I asked her if she could grant us access to the Cloisters’ tower, which seems to be off-limits to visitors and mysteriously has curtains in its windows, but she said she couldn’t and that the only thing in there was the office of the museum director, who she assured us is a jerk.

After yesterday’s post about terrorist-spotting, I didn’t think I’d read anything more surreal about the NYPD’s training. Then I read a front-page article by Ellen Byron in today’s Wall Street Journal that the force is bringing groups of newly promoted officers to the Frick to examine paintings in order to improve their observational and analytical skills.

Although the course began last year, presumably it will be useful for spotting terror suspects on public transportation, a keen concern of cops these days. Specifically, it seems to be aiding the NYPD in its profiling efforts of suspicious-looking Middle Eastern men¹.

Standing in front of El Greco’s “The Purification of the Temple,” David Grossi, an NYPD captain, recognized Jesus as the painting’s central figure, characterized the scene as chaotic and explained the work’s use of light and color.

“The gang unit would probably be called in,” he continued. “It appears there’s grand larceny here, felony assault there, and Jesus would probably be charged with inciting a riot.” Counting 17 people in the scene, he added: “Good thing there are plenty of witnesses.”

¹ Although Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that the massive, heavily armed police response to reports of five Middle Eastern men with backpacks aboard a NYC tour bus on Sunday was the fault of the bus company’s report, not the NYPD. The men didn’t have backpacks and were Sikhs from Britain on vacation. Nonetheless, Bloomie encouraged the public to continue reporting “suspicious activity.” [back]

In 1967, more than 60 acres of buildings were demolished in Lower Manhattan to make way for redevelopments including the World Trade Center, a process documented in photos by Danny Lyon now on exhibit.

I walked over to the Museum of the City of New York this afternoon and checked it out. I’d never been to this museum before and after having been to the park and the dog run named after him, it seemed serendipitous that there should be a larger-than-life statue of DeWitt Clinton standing outside, rebuking me stiffly for poking fun at him.

It’s one of those museums that used to be an old house, handsomely built of red brick, renovated and well-kept, with pleasantly creaky floors. On my way to it, a few blocks south, I walked past the Guggenheim and noticed it was swarming with summer tourists, so I feared equally dense crowds at the city museum. But the there were only a handful of elderly patrons that looked as if they could die at any moment and become part of an exhibit.

The museum’s motto is a quote by Abraham Lincoln that begins, “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives,” a stark contrast to the Lyon exhibit. I don’t know what was in the water in New York City in the ’60s, but I don’t want any of it. In addition to the vast swaths of chiefly 19th century buildings leveled below Canal Street, you’ll recall from a recent entry that the elegantly original Penn Station was razed in 1963.

I imagine many of these buildings were beyond repair and had to go. Others, Lyons suggests, were architecturally and historically significant, torn down at a terrible loss. For instance, at 258 Washington St., on the northeast corner of Murray Street, was the first cast-iron building erected in New York (1848) and possibly the oldest cast-iron building in the world. It was demolished.

Lyon risked limb by sneaking into structurally unsound buildings to photograph their interiors, surprised that some still seemed to have people living in them or people who had been recently evicted. His photos document empty Coke bottles in a kitchen, a child’s bedroom containing deflated balloons and an artist’s loft with some sketches strewn on the floor. He photographed the foremen and their crews, too, known as “house wreckers,” looking weary but determined.

The exhibit’s title, which Lyon chose in the ’60s, is the eerily prescient The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, and the exhibit hints at the irony that a grand neighborhood was destroyed to build the Twin Towers. For me, the exhibit illustrated the line between preservation and renewal. The photos, posted mostly without commentary, seem to speak obliquely against renewal. (Lyon is more direct in his convictions, claiming in a recent interview with The Village Voice that the U.S. is committing “architectural suicide” through renewal.) But renewal seems to be an unstoppable fact of New York as a whole and Lower Manhattan in particular. One fact I learned from the exhibit, for example, is that West, Greenwich and Washington Streets are all built on garbage. They became streets when they were surveyed as such in 1723. Prior to that, they were all underwater.

I viewed the Larry Clark exhibit this afternoon in its final day at the International Center of Photography. At 16, Clark started taking amphetamines with his friends in Tulsa and documenting their lives in photos: needles, sex, guns, violence and despair. In the ’80s and ’90s his subjects were the new generation of teens in Tulsa, skateboarders and child prostitutes in New York City, and other disenfranchised youth, a theme running through his films as well. Kids details the sex, drugs and alcohol fueled escapades of a pack of bored Manhattan kids, and Bully (which I watched the last 20 minutes of at the exhibit) is about some equally aimless teens in Florida who decide to kill a bully in their group.

Critics have branded Clark’s movies (and probably his photos) as voyeuristic and sensational. I can see how you could indirectly credit Clark’s photos as inspiring certain images in the fashion ad world of the ’90s—heroin chic, Calvin Klein’s “rec room” print ads and Abercrombie & Fitch’s sexually explicit catalogs all come to mind. But where these photos are clearly posed and commercial, Clark’s photos are matter-of-fact and unsentimental, journalistic even. The early Tulsa photos encapsulate the trappings of boredom and poverty (both emotional and monetary) that these kids can’t seem to escape. In one laser-printed caption, Clark quotes a friend from his Tulsa childhood. This man, now an adult, says he had always heard that no kid wants to grow up to be a drug addict; but if addiction is all that surrounds you and there’s nothing else to do, than why not?

On what’s apparently a slow news day, the New York Times ran an article today on the front page (but below the fold) titled “With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour.” Written by Randy Kennedy, it reports on a fascinating idea: DIY mp3 audio guides for art museums¹.

Generating such guides locally are Art Mobs (a project assembled by students and teachers at Marymount Manhattan College), which has issued several downloadable guides for individual paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Wooster Collective, which issued one for the Basquiat exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The tone of most of the recordings is personal, sassy and direct. One of the Art Mobs’ commentaries on Pollock’s Echo: Number 25 claims: “The process of creation for Jackson Pollock was one big drunken orgasm.”² Hey, that’s great. I may not agree but it’s certainly more entertaining than most of the “official” prerecorded tour guides you can purchase at an art museum. The last time I listened to one of those, it was so stifling, I mashed a bunch of the buttons simultaneously in my anguish. The thing started tossing out commentary for an exhibit that was apparently closed or on another floor of the museum, yet it was somehow more revelatory when paired with the art I was looking at just then.

I think mp3-based commentary would also be useful for audio tours of, say, large outdoorsy tourist areas, such as Central Park. (“...and that’s all you need to know about Belvedere Castle. OK, now hit pause until you get to the bronze statue of the characters from Alice in Wonderland.”) The audio track could combine directions with descriptions and history of what you’re looking at! I would have given a kidney for something like this last year when I was lost in the sprawl of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, tromping over the dead in search of Julio Cortazar’s tombstone; when I found it, I wished I knew more about his life. (The free maps they give you at the cemetery are blisteringly concise in these matters: the complete biographical description for Julio is “author.”)

July 19 Update: The July 2005 issue of Playlist contains an article about mp3-based audio walking tours. Companies such as locally based Soundwalk even specialize in New York City audio tours.

¹ This reminds me of an idea Roger Ebert offered early in 2002 in a column for the now-defunct Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, called “You, Too, Can Be a DVD Movie Critic.” It encouraged people to record alternate audio commentary tracks for DVD movies. Of course, the core of this idea has been around since at least 1988, when Mystery Science Theater 3000 debuted. [back]

² As a pre-emptive strike, my audio commentary on that painting will begin with a quote by author Amy Krouse Rosenthal: “I hate it when people say, ‘Oh, a Jackson Pollock painting—I could have done that.’ Bullshit. The point is, you didn’t. Someone thought of it and did it first. Hey, you could build a house if you really wanted to. But the thing is, will you do it or will you just sit there on the couch?” [back]

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this afternoon for the Diane Arbus retrospective, Revelations. It was crowded, but there wasn’t as much clotting around the “greatest hits” photos as I thought there’d be. Among those, you've got Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, the two girls in corduroy dresses and white tights, their dark hair pulled back in white headbands. They’re looking straight at the camera, one slightly smiling, one slightly frowning, and as NPR commentator Madeleine Brand points out, “the more you look back at them—the more you stare—the more you realize how different they are from each other.”

That’s a doubly appropriate statement because it’s really what Arbus’ photos are about: a differential, the one between her subjects and those who view her photos. Her subjects, particularly in her square-format photos of the 1960s, lean toward the outsiders she increasingly associated with: circus performers, nudists, transvestites, giants and dwarves. Her photos of slightly more “normal” people, such as babies and pro-Vietnam War demonstrators, take on a grotesque or sinister edge. She even photographed Sleeping Beauty Castle during a trip to Disneyland and managed to make it look foreboding.

The exhibit even reveals to what degree Arbus strove to add such elements of strangeness to her photos (versus any strangeness that may have been inherent in the subject). For instance, I was intrigued by a proof sheet from the famous Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962 which shows the boy looking normal and preening for the camera in every shot but the one Arbus chose to print.

If you aren’t already too sick of hearing about and seeing photos of The Gates, check out some excellent panoramic QuickTime VR photos that Jimi took and posted today.

I was wondering how long it’d take for someone to post this: a photo of Central Park taken from space on February 12, the first day of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s project, The Gates, and the same day I was there. Cool!

I walked over to Central Park today to see the first day of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s project, The Gates. It consists of 16-foot-high square steel archways, 5,700 of them, erected over the Park’s public walkways and mostly set at 12-foot intervals. Suspended from the high horizontal bar of each frame is a freely hanging nylon panel, which, like the steel frame, is orange.

If you’re unfamiliar with Christo’s work, he’s best known for his “wrapped” environmental art. He once enveloped the Reichstag in Berlin with fabric and has skirted whole islands with pink plastic. The works are only ever up for a brief time, after which they’re disassembled and disposed of or recycled. (The Gates is up for 16 days, a long time compared to many of his other installations.) Christo’s style of constructing his art is also unusual. If he’s to be believed, he funds his projects completely out of his own pocket and through selling sketches and other such drafts of his projects; he doesn’t profit from his finished art by selling it or staging grand opening-style events; and he won’t hire volunteers to erect the art—even if they’re not professionals, they’re all paid by him for their work. Fascinating, when you consider that, according to the New York Times, the project cost $21 million.

Entering The Gates off Central Park West, I felt regal, walking under these giant, incongruous things, the fabric snapping in the wind. That quickly changed when I hit the crowds, even more than I’ve seen in the Park on a busy Summer day. Vantage points like the Met’s rooftop deck and Belvedere Castle were packed with people catching birds’ eye views. Everyone and their brother brought a camera. New Yorkers are by no means a group of gawkers, but they love their Park, and I got the impression a lot of them turned up either out of a sense of duty or to make sure there was no funny business going down.

Listening to their comments was as interesting as the art itself, although being New York, it was mostly complaints:

• Irritable woman maneuvering stroller, to her husband: It’s a logistics problem, it’s not an art problem.
• One beat cop to another: Two weeks of this day! I can’t handle it! My legs hurt, my hips hurt.
• Guy 1, exiting the Park with Guy 2 [grimly]: Are we done with the orange?
  Guy 2 [solemnly]: We’re done.

But when you initially see The Gates, the scope is impressive. Before you know it, you’re immersed in Gates, winding throughout the park, and everywhere you turn. You can’t miss them, even from several blocks away. Christo pointedly avoids the word “orange” when describing The Gates, opting instead for the Martha Stewarty “saffron.” But they’re orange, buddy, and bright, institutional orange at that.

For me, the color conjured traffic cones, netted plastic hurricane fences, lifejackets and Putt Putt. It got me wondering why the artist chose that color, and I think, first, that it’s an effective, shocking contrast to the grim winter surroundings. The project was purposely launched now so that it could be seen through the barren trees, but it also serves to enliven the cold, gray environment.

After basking in the orange for awhile, I went back uptown on the subway (orange seats!) and walked by Riverside Park, thinking of a second reason why orange is so effective. For a few seconds, Riverside looked foreign to me, with nothing but dark tree branches and no color at all. It reminded me of those optical illusions where you stare at a brightly colored illustration, then shift your glance to a blank white surface; suddenly, you’re seeing something that isn’t there, an image that was lingering on your retina.

I finally got around to seeing the new-and-improved Museum of Modern Art today. Although I purchased a membership back in mid December, I’ve received neither my card nor the list of specific benefits I was promised, so I didn’t know what to expect. A shame, really, because one of the benefits of membership is bypassing the line of 500 tourists patiently waiting to photograph The Starry Night and talk loudly about how small The Persistence Of Memory is.

So I waited in line in the gray cold for 20 minutes, only to find out when I got inside that I actually needed to go to “that desk over there,” where I waited in line to discover that, no, I wanted that other desk, where I was curtly informed that my “temporary membership card,” otherwise known as a grungy folded-up receipt in my wallet from mid-December, “expired” today—whatever the hell that meant, seeing as I’m pretty sure when I forked over a stack of greenbacks to become a member for a year, that meant I’d actually be a member for a year.

Anyway, what it boiled down to was, I got in free, a nice savings over the $40 it would have normally cost me.

The newly expanded building really is a site to behold. Yoshio Taniguchi, who designed the renovation and expansion as his first project outside of Japan, is said to have told the board of MoMA in 1997: “Give me money, and I’ll build you good architecture. Give me more money, and I’ll make the architecture disappear.” Taniguchi won the design competition and his version of the museum opened on November 20, 2004.

You can see what he’s talking about the moment you enter any of the galleries. The art takes center stage; there’s no architectural detail competing for your attention. The galleries have extra-high ceilings, light wood-paneled floors, white walls, and many galleries are subtly lit and opened up by sheer floor-to-ceiling windows made of tinted glass. You can look out and see the buildings of W. 53rd and W. 54th Streets at eye-level, eavesdropping on the interiors of apartments that you’re not likely to afford in this lifetime. Occasionally, in halls and especially in the stairwells, which, like the galleries, are also wide, open and sumptuous, there are large rectangular portals in the walls, where you can see people walking in other galleries or up other flights of stairs.

The collection itself, of course, is top drawer, and in two hours, I only managed to check out a small fraction of it. What I saw included the Picasso & Friends gallery, the Brancusi sculptures, most of the Post-Impressionistic stuff, and the Mondrian section. A highlight for me was La Bohémienne Endormie by Henri Rousseau, for the mysticism and the narrative.

Tired, hungry and unable to find the exit, yet lulled into a warm sense of well-being by the architecture (companies that build obnoxious megamalls would be wise to retain Taniguchi), I eventually escaped and, disappointed by the neighborhood brunch options, went uptown to that old reliable, the French Roast where I got the Belgian waffle with fruit.

I’m quite excited, as Andie would say, about the membership to the Museum of Modern Art that I purchased today. It’s the first museum membership I’ve ever taken part in, and at $75/year, it took some consideration. But seeing as how it pays off after visiting the museum four times (MoMA’s $20 admission price is the highest in the nation for a public art museum), I couldn’t resist. I figure I’m at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at least that many times in a year; it stands to reason I’ll attend MoMA just as much now that it’s “free” to me, just as the Met essentially is with its pay-what-you-want admission.

There’s other MoMA member benefits, including discounted admission tickets for guests (half-price, I think), invites to members-only receptions and previews of major exhibitions, a 10% discount in the physical and online MoMA stores (including an additional 10% off during special seasonal shopping days, such as today) and discounted admission to artist talks, art history courses and films.

Quite a bargain, I think. Now I just have to make the trip to tour the museum itself, which I haven’t done since before it reopened this fall after extensive renovation and expansion—at 630,000 square feet, it’s about doubled in size. Looks like a visit might be in order for when Mom and Dad visit for Christmas!

This evening, Tina, a friend from Cleveland who now owns her own design studio in New York, invited me to her sister’s husband’s art exhibit, The Smile Project, at the Green Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The project involves two squat, bulbous robots, Neil and Iona, that interact with each other and the audience, by moving their heads, swiveling their bodies around, cycling an animation of a mouth on the TV screens that serve as their heads, and occasionally speaking. They were wired to a computer off to the side and naturally I was interested in how they worked from a technical standpoint, but the artist was in demand, conversation-wise, and I never got to speak with him.

It seemed timely to see a robot exhibit since I had just read about the MIT engineers who developed a prototype robot that walks on water, much like a water spider. I mentioned this to several people in the gallery, but no one seemed as excited about it as I was. I did get to speak a lot with Tina’s friends, most of whose names I’ve forgotten, but it was a funny coincidence that her friend Ben was a web designer, so we could talk about shopping cart systems and CSS.

We hung out for awhile, drinking Bud from cans and wine from those red plastic cups. I briefly met Tillamook Cheddar, Brooklyn’s most famous dog-artist, outside her new store, which is right next door Green Gallery. She had her own photographer, who was crouching on the sidewalk talking sassy fashion shots, but was a bit standoffish to anyone else who wanted to pet her. I think the fame has gone to her head.

Afterwards, we went to Sea, an Asian restaurant designed to resemble equal parts ’60s bachelor pad and Buddhist temple. It was just about too hip for me, but I was impressed by the reasonable prices (at least when compared with Manhattan)—bottled imported beer was $4 and my sautéed eggplant and tofu dish, seasoned with garlic and sweet basil, was $7.

I was initially alarmed that one of Tina’s friends who joined the dinner party was wearing a watch that appeared more expensive than the entire contents of my closet and also had a sweater tied around his neck like he was Gatsby or something. But it turned out he’s a real estate lawyer, so I unexpectedly had a lot to talk to him about. He was funny too; after we’d been seated for dinner, the first thing I made sure I asked him was what his favorite lawyer joke was. An oldie but a goodie: “What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start.”

I hardly had a chance to speak with Tina, so I agreed to make the long haul up Long Island to visit her next weekend and catch up. Our group split early, but I had a voicemail on my cell from Andie to hang out with her and her posse back on the island. Waiting for the subway, a frizzy haired gentleman was bobbing his head, tapping the time and vigorously slapping out a sweet version of the T. Rex power ballad “20th Century Boy” on his acoustic guitar, for which I dropped a dollar in his case, the first time I’ve appreciated subway music enough to tip.

After receiving further instructions on the night’s festivities via my cell at Union Square, I went up to Brother Jimmy’s where Andie, Katie, Erika, Sam and Carolann were enjoying post-BBQ beverages at a sidewalk table. Eric joined us a bit later and we all partook of a fishbowl filled with a potent, pineapple-based alcoholic concoction, as well as a small, rubber alligator.

We slept in this morning, then at noon, Andie joined us for brunch at the French Roast on W. 85th St. and Broadway. Afterwards, Andie went back for a nap and my parents and I walked crosstown to Central Park, then the Met, where we caught the Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy exhibit. It was O.K., but the most fascinating exhibit was adjacent the August Sander photographic exhibit in the Howard Gilman Gallery, dealing with photographic indices.

It included, for example, Walker Evans’ amazing Labor Anonymous, originally published in Fortune in the mid 1940’s. Recalling similar photos he took from 1938 to 1941 on New York subways, Evans sat adjacent a blank wall outside a Detroit factory and surreptitiously photographed employees as they exited. [The portraits reminded me of Sophie Calle’s The Hotel (1986), photos of the anonymous personal belongings she came across in hotel rooms when she was a chambermaid in Venice, and The Shadow (1981), where she hired someone to photograph her without her knowledge as she went about her workweek.] Also included in the Gilman Gallery exhibit were Thomas Struth’s meticulously composed photos of deserted New York City streets. From numerous anonymous photographers, there were groups of objects — postcards, hats, ledgers, matchbook covers featuring photos of buildings, and other assortments never meant to taken out of their utilitarian context.

We enjoyed sightseeing in Central Park again on the way back and stopped at a Radio Shack on Columbus to buy some cables for my old stereo receiver that my parents brought up.

For dinner, we met up with Andie again and went downtown to the Belgian restaurant, Markt, at W. 14th St. and 9th Ave. We took a scenic walk there that ended up paralleling a stretch of the High Line, which I’d been wanting to see since moving here.

Dinner at Markt included a selection of Belgian beers, tomato and basil steamed mussels, lobster bisque and beet soup and hearty entrees.

Andie bid us farewell on the way home for drinks with the cousins, and my parents left after we returned to the apartment.

I closed the evening by assembling one of the banks of modular metal shelving that my parents brought up, and put my entire CD collection on it.