Linda

More out of sequence posts - sorry.

Monday night, May 18th, I had dinner with a woman called Linda. Who is my brother-in-law's mother (got that? Her son is married to my sister!), and is now the only native New Yorker that I know! Well, aside from Zach my sisters husband of course. But he lives in Cambodia and Linda lives on Long Island.

I was instructed to have dinner with Linda by my mother, who has never met her, although the communicate via email and what have you. And hey, I'm in a strange city, it's always nice to meet someone who vaguely knows of you :-)

And Linda is lovely! She has one of those classic Jewish New Yorker accents - er, if there is such a thing, maybe it's just a classic New York accent. We had dinner at a not bad Italian restaurant near where I was staying on Manhattan.

She's a retired school teacher, living somewhere out on Long Island (or maybe it was the outer edges of Queens, now that I think about it, which is still on Long Island). I told her about all the tourist stuff I was was doing in NY, which she found very interesting, because it's all stuff she hasn't done herself. Which is often the way with natives to a city, you live it in it your whole life but never, say, go up the Empire State Building. Or, as she put it, never go north of 96th street!

I also recommended to her the ferry I went on that trundled around the island.

We had a great time, got on like a house on fire, and I saw her off on the subway at 72nd street and Broadway. I should send her a postcard from my continuing world-wide adventures!

And so I guess technically she's family now, although I have no idea how that works - mother in law once removed perhaps??? Any suggestions?

Overdoing the AAAaaaaaaaaaaart

Tuesday in New York. Tuesday last week. Yay, I'm now only eight days behind in my blogging! :-)

Tuesday last week... I did waaaaaay too much Art. The executive summary: I went to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, you know, the spirally one. And in the afternoon I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art! A gallery so large most people take a few days to look at it properly.

The Guggenheim was great, I really felt like I was in New York when I was there, since it is uniquely a New York building. It's actually not a big building, and was very busy indeed. I took the lazy route, and took an elevator to the top floor and walked down the spiral.

The main exhibition was, appropriately, about Frank Lloyd Wright, the chap who designed it. It being some fifty years since it was opened. They had lots of original drawings from the process of creating the museum itself. Plus lots of drawings and models from his other projects - most of them unrealised.

And, frankly, its a good thing some of his unbuilt projects never saw the light of day - some of them were uuuuuugly. Some of them were cool, but a lot of them looked like Modernist nightmares which would have aged terribly. Lots of spheres and planned cities and the like.

The Gugg also as a permanent collection of impressionist and post-impressionists pictures, which I found hard to process after the rest of the place. I did glance quickly through, but now I can't recall a single picture that I saw.

The Gugg, and indeed the Met and lots of other galleries I visited in the US - museums too - suffer a bit from museum-shop-itis. Many of them have a shop on each floor, or even one attached to every major exhibition. The Natural History Museum in Washington being a particularly bad offender!

Next I moved on to the Met, once I realised it was more or less around the corner... Getting to that side of town was fun, I got on a bus for the first time in NY, which took me through Central Park over to the East Side, Fifth Avenue and the like.

Then... The Met. I do have one great advantage when it comes to art - because I was an art school student once and I have seen so much art, I'm very good at dismissing whole areas and whole genres and periods very quickly. I have little time for 14th and 15th century European art, for example, or anything to do with iconography. I do try and wander through as many rooms in a given gallery as I can, just in case I stumble across something important.

At the Met, this helped me a lot, but I did still miss at least 40% of the place, including the gallery shop - where I usually stock up on dozens of cheap postcards :-)

I did however greatly enjoy the modern art section, they had some more Rothko's, and Pollack's and various other interesting American painters. I was also very impressed by their collection of suits of armour - although I don't quite see how they belong in an art gallery.

And indeed, here was something interesting I spotted in the modern art area:

They other exhibition they had on which I was keen to see was a retrospective on Francis Bacon, a very interesting and disturbing English artist. They retrospective was actually due to open to the public the next day, but there was a "members of the gallery" special preview on when I turned up at the door. And I talked my way in, merely because I was all the way from Australia!

It was very, very interesting to see so many major Bacon paintings in one place. Including, notably, one from the National Gallery of Victoria which I'd seen dozens of times before! Also very interesting was some of his source material and debris from his studio, including many photographs, some covered in oil paint. I do hope this exhibition tours a bit.

After that I think I went to visit Grand Central Station, which was another very impressive building. Then I joined my hosts, including my new little friend Yasmeen for Sushi. Yasmeen was very insistent that I sit next to her!

And I wonder why I was tired after my time in NY!