Today I got off to a slow start. My fourth day in New York, and I’d already worn myself out. So I took the morning off, reading and relaxing. I ventured out for lunch, stopping by a Korean place I’d seen the night before in the East Village. I liked it – I got the stone bowl bi bim bop, which is one of my favorites.
After that, I headed uptown to the Whitney Museum. I got on the 6 train, which was the straight shot subway ride. Alas, there was a power outage or something uptown, so that line was shut down for a while, so I took another line up towards Carnegie Hall, and then had to suffer the horrors of having to walk through Central Park to the Whitney. That’s sarcasm, by the way – walking through Central Park is one of my favorite parts of visiting New York. I was comparing it to Golden Gate Park in my head, and realized the thing that made Central Park seem more impressive to me. In Golden Gate Park, there are numerous places where you can be walking through the woods, and there’s very little intrusion of city life. In Central Park, the city is always there, asserting itself by the skyscrapers rising in the distance above the trees. It’s intimidating in a “You can never escape” sort of way, but also makes the park seem like a powerful gesture of defiance. And being the anti-authoritarian I am, I like gestures of defiance.
Anyway, I eventually wound my way to the Whitney. I’d read someplace online about an exhibition by Tim Hawkinson there that sounded intriguing, and my interest was only whetted when one of Dan’s friends yesterday had raved about it. I’ll let this review describe it, but I liked it. His sense of whimsy is infective, and his creations of electromechanical contraptions out of found junk is inspiring to a geek like me. I particularly liked his “Secret Sync” set of sculptures, where he built a set of clocks out of seemingly ordinary objects, like a Coke can where the can rotates such that the opening is the hour hand, and the pull tab is the minute hand, or a hairbrush with two almost-invisible hairs marking the time.
The rest of the museum wasn’t as inspiring, alas. The other major exhibition was by Cy Twombly, whose work I just don’t appreciate. It just looks like scribbling to me. I’m sure he had a big message, but it’s not satisfying.
As far as the permanent collection, I liked the Calder collection, because Calder is just neat. They had a videotape of the Calder Circus, a set of wire figurines that he’d made and used to put on shows towards the beginning of his career, with trapeze artists flipping from one swing to the next. I also liked a work I saw by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, called “Oriental” or some such (seen at right). I’m not quite sure why; I think I liked the way it evoked shapes without quite making them explicit.
Afterwards, I walked back along Madison Avenue downtown. Madison Avenue is ridiculous. Every single high end designer I’ve heard of, and many I haven’t, had big stores along there. I’m blanking on the names now, other than Prada, but it was highly impressive. A one stop shopping expedition for the fashion-conscious. Except that I’m not willing to spend that kind of money on clothes, so I just walked on by.
I wandered over to the Times Square area to try to get rush tickets to Shockheaded Peter. Like Patti Lupone a couple days ago, Shockheaded Peter had been in San Francisco and I’d missed it. But tickets are expensive. I knew rush tickets went on sale at 6pm, and I got to the theater at about 6:10. All gone. They explained to the woman in front of me that people had camped out since 3pm to get the tickets. I’ll either have to pay up, or wait a long time. I’ll have to think about it.
I decided to head back to my place to figure out what to do next. I tried getting to the most direct subway line at Times Square, and got caught in a massive crowd of people. It was awful. They had closed one of the walkways, so you had to walk through a crowded platform to get to the other line, and people were crowding onto the platform from both ends, so it was pretty much a disaster. A few cops showed up and eventually stood at the top of the stairs to the platform, blocking anybody from entering so that those of us trapped on the platform could escape. I took another way home.
I thought about getting tickets to the newest Neil Labute play, in the East Village, but I was pretty much dead on my feet at that point, so I just headed back and took the evening off. I have to pace myself if I’m going to make it through three weeks of this vacation.
