Manzanar War Relocation Center

moving on

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Catherine Opie show at the Guggeneheim with Diana, and then yesterday...

To the William Eggleston show at the Whitney with Prue.

I'm learning how to go to museums just for pleasure. To tell the truth, it took me a long time, but I'm finally getting the hang of it. It's a very different experience - in some ways diminished, in others enhanced. Without a sense of duty motivating me I want different things from art - I want to be engaged, I want to be entertained, I want to enjoy the experience of looking. I don't feel the need to persevere when I'm bored.
I'm tempted to ramble on now - about persevering through boredom. That's what separates the professionals from the amateurs isn't it?

Instead, I'll just say that I enjoyed both the Opie and the Eggleston exhibits. And that last night, I made baked apples and they turned out really well. I cored the apples and plugged the base of the hole with chopped raisins, then filled up the rest with brown sugar and cinnamon and butter. Baked the apples for half an hour and they turned out perfectly. Baking apples is easy and nothing to brag about but I came up with the chopped raisin plug myself and was kind of proud so I'm mentioning it now.

New York Navel Gazing

Last weekend I also made a trip to the Queens Museum of Art. I'd never been before (most likely because it is, as one might imagine, in Queens) to see a pretty interesting exhibit about Robert Moses curated by my once-upon-a-time undergrad thesis advisor, and the scale model of New York City pictured below. Since then, I keep telling everyone I know to go to the Queens Museum of Art to see the model...especially anyone who's only been in the city a few years, because the model can help you see the forest instead of the trees...it can give you a sense of the size of the different boroughs, where they are located, where population is concentrated. The model shows all five boroughs, at a scale of one inch to one hundred feet, and walking around I could find individual buildings at Columbia, and the street where I live now.


Looking from the Upper West Side of Manhattan south and east.


Looking from eastern Brooklyn to the west - Manhattan in the distance.


Looking from Queens south - with an excellent view of La Guardia airport.

Trivia: the General Assembly first met in the room that currently houses the scale model of NYC.

Second piece of trivia: Did you know that the Statue of Liberty faces Brooklyn? Or that this is because it looks in the direction of the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major battle of the Revolutionary War?