I'd talked to Jon the night before (I just got the phone bill--9 minutes to New Haven). He spent about 9 minutes rambling about this and that. I think this was due to the quantity of "medium-grade" champagne he'd consumed after the Harvard-Yale game. We'd made arrangements for today. Jon called again this morning and told us he and Tachyon had missed the train they expected to take and would be an hour later than expected.
My cotraveller and I got an early start, taking the subway to Grand Central Station and arriving about an hour before Jon's and Tachyon's expected arrival.
We decided to look for a shoestore in the neighborhood.
What we found instead were some fun things: The Chrysler Building, looking very art-deco pretty. Its deco eagles' wings and heads (were they actually eagles' heads? They were so high up!) giving it a rather ominous look. We found a gigantic baroque post office where we bought some postcard stamps. One of the machines ate my cotraveller's money. We stumbled across Rockefeller Center and its icerink. The tourists there seemed quite content to watch the big ice-grooming tractor drive around on the rink. We found some other things:
the Pan Am Building, Madison Ave., Park Ave., Fifth Ave., the offices of Conde Nast (Vogue, Glamour, GQ, et al.), no shoe stores, though. We headed back toward GCS to meet J and T. Jon was lurking by the information booth like he said he would be; I tugged on his coat and said, "Hi!" Tachyon was in the bathroom. When she finally appeared, she looked a little disconcerted and muttered something about "a problem." Turns out her zipper broke in the bathroom. The Great Safety Pin Hunt commenced. After consulting with a person at a newsstand, we entered a store that was wall-to-wall stacked-to-the-top shelves. Squeezing between our fellow shoppers and trying not to look guilty to the men who stood up on tables to make sure you weren't shoplifting, we made our way upstairs where we were informed that they were out of safety pins. Luckily, one of the men sensed that we were in Dire Straits and found an opened package and gave some to T. Yay! We were off to the Museum of Modern Art.
We sort of (what do you mean sort of?)...We started out going the wrong direction, which Jon sensed after about half a block. (I would never get my sense of direction straightened out in the concrete and steel canyons of Manhattan. It's tough to find your way around when you can't even see the sun in the sky and the nearest horizon is 40 stories up.) A very nice elderly woman (at least she was dressed as an elderly woman -- fur collar, fur hat) pointed us in the proper direction, stating that, "Whenever I'm in a strange town people help me out. I don't know why I can't do the same." Wow! Two reasonably considerate New Yorkers in a row! Could it be that the stories weren't true? Perhaps time would tell.
We did make it to the MOMA, but were waylaid at a corner where we ate hotdogs and falafel. I teased the vegetarian Tachyon that she could probably eat the hotdogs with no fear of eating anything meatlike. It was nice to sit on the side steps of a church on the corner and stuff my face with a hotdog and rest my feet (I'd been bitching about my feet to Jon during our entire trip to MOMA--I think he got tired of it).
Ok, in this paragraph, we really >do< make it to MOMA. It was rather crowded, but we got in with no problem and decided to save the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit for last. We started on the second floor for an overview of modern art as the MOMA knows it. You see, modern art to the MOMA is actually pretty old modern art, starting in the late 19th century and allegedly working toward the present. However, it is heavy on the past, most of the Good Stuff being painted before 1950. Some of the things I liked best: Picasso (you spend all that time in art history discussing the significance of "Le 'dmoiselles d'Avignon" (apologies for my spelling of the French) and there it is in the flesh (so to speak)! It was an interesting feeling to wander among the real-honest-to-gosh articles. A whole room full of Mondrian paintings! Wow! Fortunately they had a bench in the Mondrian room, so I could rest my feet ("Jon! My feet >still< hurt!" "Oh, shut up, Look Out.") and soak up the paintings. I liked the gigantic Jackson Pollack painting (slop! slop!). VanGogh's paintings have a life their own that does not come across in photographic reproductions. We found an art work that consisted of a room whose walls were divided into a large grid. 10 or so designs were selected (such as a diagonal from the upper left to lower right corner of a grid square or an arc from the top middle to the bottom middle and so forth) and were combined in pairs such that each possible permutation of pairs was presented. Each pair was drawn in chalk on the black walls. It made for an interesting display. I thought (and still think) Jon should write a program that would generate grids like that.
On the top floor was a design exhibit that was very nice. Models of various architechtural works (Wright, VanDerRohe, etc.), architectural sketches (Frank Lloyd Wright was a marvelous sketcher). An exhibit on "everyday" design (mostly furniture) was fun. "Hey! I have a chair like that! What's it doing in a museum?" Some chairs (Wassily, Barcelona, bent steel tubing with rattan seat and back--all by Bauhaus designers), a desk from the Johnson Wax Building that FLW designed, a bean bag chair (!). A really far-out '60's-modern computer terminal with that plastic space-age look. Somehow, I could picture Tachyon programming happily away at it.
Jon was right: We did get split up a lot and didn't get much chance to talk, but I had fun anyway. When we did talk, I was surprised to find that we didn't talk about Stuart very much. We also never made it to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit, as time ran short.
One funny thing about MOMA: It seemed that the whole museum consisted of art works that had been in the homes of the Very Rich (the Rockefellers, etc.). I guess when they redecorated, they donated the Picasso to MOMA, got a nice tax writeoff and that was that. I suppose some of them truly loved Modern Art, but I couldn't help but think of MOMA as a sort of Goodwill Store of the Very Rich.
We bid farewell to Tachyon and Jon outside the museum (after visiting the museum store and buying postcards and a nifty Mondrian poster) and descended into the subway, hoping they'd have a nice time with Mr. and Mrs. Wizzard.
One of the things I wanted to do while in NYC was attend a hockey game, so we took the subway to Madison Square Garden where there was a Rangers-Islanders game. We didn't really think there'd be tickets available (NY vs NY, you know) and there weren't, not even from people on the street. In fact, the people on the street were all asking if people had tickets to sell. Oh well.
Onto the subway again to the Village where we wandered around and had a mediocre Thai dinner. We decided to head back uptown to the home base.
We had to go to the hospital Emergency Room again, as our host had the only key to the apartment. We asked for Dr. A at the ER desk and he was paged by the woman there. After 15 minutes of waiting, the woman said he wasn't answering the page. We informed her that Dr. A was supposed to be working in the ER. "Oh! Why didn't you say so?" "Why the hell would we come to the ER if he was on the 16th floor somewhere?" She got our host and we got the key.
The walk from the hospital to the apartment was in what some would call a "tough" neighborhood (Broadway between 160th and 170th) and I felt a little conspicuous carrying a MOMA shopping bag, but we made it home ok. Boy, my feet hurt worse than ever.
Up Left Right Back Fwd Walk Top Search Comment