…just back in Benicia on a rainy grey December morning I find that even after brutal editing in the camera there still remain 388 pictures from last week’s trip to New York, so although I’ll only burden you with a fraction we’d better get started here with another morning so wet we nearly didn’t make our flight as the ride in to SFO took over two hours; 101 was flooded at Silver Avenue, but fortunately our flight was delayed by the weather…

Thanks to that our baggage made it on the plane, as did we, heading for the east coast sunset and a taxi to the most immediately urgent part of our mission, meeting the grandchild Izel Sandoval Fleming who’d arrived Monday morning and just gotten home…

…and then on to another part of Brooklyn, where our gracious friend Lydia had laid out a late evening dinner and lots of late night talk and catching up, leaving us to wake Wednesday morning without a plan so we took a bus to the A train and Chelsea in chill rain,

Walking west into wind and wet on 23rd which has no galleries, really, but looping up to 24th on 11th Avenue was Gagosian’s Takashi Murakami spectacle, “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow”…

From there we turned back towards lunch and a bathroom, checking in on Clemente at Mary Boone and more modest stuff down the block [stuff of a scale one or the other of us might approximate, given a venue, though not on the order of Trevor Paglen’s  “Code Names of the Surveillance State”, most salient in these distressing times, but, being a video environment, not shown here] and then …

Late afternoon lunch at the nearly deserted Bottino’s was followed by more object-oriented art looking, Chelsea galleries being universally dedicated to the purveyance of, above all, have-able things, numinous objects or not; Stella sculptures, a curious and powerful Iraqi painter [Ahmed Alsoudani at Gladstone] and south…

South, as I wanted to see David Zwirner’s new palace of hubris on 20th.  The museum-quality show of Franz West, to whose work I’d never paid much attention but not seen in person, did not only not disappoint but was revelatory while the Richard Serra drawings on the second floor yielded a rewarding bit of concrete poetry from the press release; “melting litho crayon into a brick”.  So THAT’s how he do it…[not shown, either]

Zwirner, still maintaining his original 19th Street space, had a big show of of big Neo Rausch paintings, restoring my faith in his  indelibly weird eastern European visions, after which we made our way into lower Manhattan’s own indelible weirdness for an annual resupply of discounted underwear and sunglasses at Century 21…

Wednesday ended up right back where Tuesday’d ended up, looking in on the kids and Baby in Bed-Stuy, this time ordering Mediterranean takeout…[not shown]

To be continued…

M