We did better on the subway today. A few wrong guesses, but mostly everything was right on track. One thing I do not get is how so many women wear tiny spindly high-heeled shoes when they have to trek up and down the gajillion steps in the cavernous metro system. One time, we found ourselves stepping off a subway car only to go up four extremely long sets of stairs to get to the surface. We must have been close to the center of the earth. Subterranean homesick blues indeed.
The MoMA in Queens was the first official stop for the day. This museum has some of my favorite paintings, including Rousseau's "The Sleeping Gypsy," and various pieces by Picasso, di Chirico, and Salvador Dali. One of the featured exhibits was a retrospective of the work of Dieter Roth. I knew virtually nothing about Roth before, and now I think I know a bit too much. He was perhaps the most prolific artist who ever walked this earth. The exhibit just kept going on—room after room—crammed full of elaborate, messy pieces that both intrigued and repelled. One room was dedicated to Roth's experiments with decaying food. He used chocolate as a medium on a whole bunch of sculptures, and let bananas and sausage decompose under glass. The strangest of his pieces, called simply "Dung Bunny," was sculpted from rabbit droppings and hay. Let's hope this doesn't catch on at Cadbury.
Many of the stores in New York have their doors open and their goods spilling out onto the sidewalk, as if welcoming you inside. Lots and lots of bead stores. Men with tables full of knock-off designer purses on every corner, as well as bootleg movies that are still in the theaters. On our way to the CBGB club we passed through the East Village, and it seemed like the first place where real people actually live (not just Prada mavens and Trump clones). Beautiful murals, too.
I saw:
- the B&H camera store, which was huge and had metal detectors at the front door
- Queens!
- Madison Square Garden
- the New York Public Library
- a man with a sign strapped to his back reading "get your own personalized I.D. card" (sounded legit to me)
- some freaky ad campaign for a new music network, starring a certain Haymish Fuse, who has a lazy eye and a red-striped bowtie. A banner at the bottom reads, "boy bands still pose a threat to our society."
