First thing first Saturday in December we were over to SFO for offsite parking, through the effortlessly empty check-in and security by six with a somewhat shaky “breakfast”
before a seven a.m. flight
which took us over the site of our sad dogs and out
across the brown and snowless land to land
on a grey JFK late afternoon, be conveyed into Long Island City,
our pleasant base of operations thanks to our generous friend Ivana and her friend Pip
who have agreed to put us up/put up with us for the week.
Soon after arrival we located the G Train to Bed Stuy for the first of several dinners and chaos with Luz, Christine and Izel,; the next day, after the Times at breakfast and raking winter light, it
was back to Putnam Avenue to prep for the fifteen three-year-olds expected for the latter’s
third birthday, which initially involved ranging around grey Brooklyn for cake and balloons
until in due course a fine rising disruption ensued, crested with cake and ice cream and
eventually subsided into stories as bedtime approached [and was exceeded].
My seldom-seen far-ranging son Bryan [not shown] stuck around for most of it and
Monday we met up with him
for lunch at MOMA then
[Louise Bourgeois; Stephen Shore]
late afternoon at the Met, where my impression of Michelangelo’s unrelentingly masterful drawings was even less sanguine than Peter Schjeldahl’s but the World War One drawings, prints and ephemera began to look promising, albeit unfortunately just at closing.
BLM took off, never to be seen again until the following morning, and we enjoyed excellent Indian food with friends on the Upper East Side before dispersing into the night…
Tuesday we met Luz and Bryan for an early lunch, the latter on his way to Texas via La Guardia
while L and I continued to the Met Breuer for the deliriously spotty “Delirious”
which has a big bountiful 1963 Dean Fleming right out of the elevators but otherwise quite a lot of my less [or least] favorite work from the sixties and seventies [not shown].
The late Edvard Munch downstairs was revelatory, at times hilarious, and a floor below that
endless photographs from India were by then too much to absorb…
plus we had an old school Italian dinner scheduled with old school friends at Manducati’s Rustica around the corner from us in Long Island City, one of many [every night in fact] lined up
and in place weeks before leaving from the coast, forever getting us in well after our early-rising hostess had taken to her bed, which given the lengthy catchings-up was the case that night
as well and in rain at that, Tuesday.
…and only just begun, though awhile and many miles ago at this point…
More to come…
Love the images of NYC through screens and grids. The deteriorating tile work in what was maybe the subway also appealed to me. I came up from Princeton and only went to the Michelangelo drawings and envied how much more you saw. I did not read the Schjeldahl’s column so can’t quantify his sanguinity, and wondered about the definition of sanguine…even less. After looking the word up in the dictionary I am still wondering….but maybe you were making a pun about red chalk. I found the exhibition crowded, but interesting and I am a sucker for drawings…sanguine or not.
I meant “sanguine” in a mildly ironic context of “confident, optimistic, hopeful”, and definitely found the exhibit crowded…and strange; all those humans Intensely Peering! Mostly I liked the architectural drawings, and the one model…love the notion of punning on the red chalk, though that didn’t occur to me. I think you’d have liked Paul Kasmin’s carefully curated show of fifty + years of Hockney drawings, too. Wish I’d gotten a picture [wonder, now, if they did a catalog…]