New York - Day Two.
Jan. 13th, 2007 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sechan19We were indulgent this morning and lazed in bed until the late morning. Once up and on the move, we walked over to Central Park by way of a cute, little, hole-in-the-wall coffee shop that made decent butter croissants. Our walk through Central Park took us over an hour, as we strolled our way along its labyrinthine pathways - past beautiful rocks, through numerous and beautifully acoustic tunnels, along the banks of a cattail-studded pond, and around a strange obelisk. I took pictures of blooming Forsythia and of a trumpet-playing busker in one of the tunnels.
Our first stop was the Neue Gallerie, where we viewed a few absolutely gorgeous paintings by Klimt and I became annoyed with the audio guide - which relied mainly on leading-by-the-hand formal analysis and contained only rudimentary facts, although it was designed to keep the visitors looking at the works for a record two minutes. (Most museum-goers spend around fifteen seconds with a work of art before moving on.) There was an exhibition on Viennese design that was intriguing and featured a number of design styles that were clearly ripped off by Frank Lloyd Wright. (There was one photograph of a dining room that could have been straight out of Robie House, except for the fact that it predated Robie house by about ten years.) Mom and I took great pleasure in mentioning this to a group of women who were commenting on the similarities. It's been my experience that people often notice the Wright style in his predecessors but also tend to assume that Wright came first, which he did not. It's one of my life's missions to make sure that people understand the man was a hack, and sharing that information today was highly satisfying.
Once out of the museum, with a copy of Siddhartha and a book by Kandinsky in hand, we walked down Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitian Museum of Art, which I had - amazingly - never been to. We ate lunch in the cafeteria and then set out to view the museum's Asian collection. My god, that place is huge, and confusing, and currently under construction - a fact that made easy navigation a veritable impossibility. Eventually, by a sheer quirk of fate, I think, we found the Japanese galleries, and before I realized it we'd been there for over an hour.
The Japanese galleries had a splendid layout and a wide-ranging array of artworks. I was delighted by the opportunity to compare Heian, Kamakura, Nambokucho, Muromachi, Momoyama, and Edo paintings, and to watch the use of color in painting fade out and back in to Japanese works. A screen painting by Ogata Korin showed the abstraction of Japanese art that was to have such a major impact on later European painting, and a scroll by Kano Tan'yu was practically a rip-off of an earlier work by Sesshu Toyo (although the placard only managed to comment on its debt to Muromachi period painting). At a museum store station, conveniently located in one of the foyers outside the galleries, I picked up a large (and heavy) book on Japanese art that I think will be a tremendous reference work. Now, if I can just haul it home.
There was an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy, which I love, and I was enthralled by an example of Grass Cursive Script from the Song Dynasty that clearly revealed the development of Japanese hiragana from Chinese kanji characters. I totally geeked out on it, taking pictures of the characters and giving Mom a mini-lecture on Japanese phonetic script development and how cool these little calligraphic examples were. She sat through it quite magnanimously.
We managed a few of the Chinese galleries (including the Yuan galleries, which featured works by Ni Zan, Wu Zhen, and Zhao Mengfu among others), the Korean galleries, the South and Southeast Asian galleries, and the Assyrian galleries. Then we hightailed it out of there - partly because we couldn't look at any more art and partly because we needed to get changed for our evening play.
We hoofed it (and I do mean hoofed) back to the hotel, crossing Central Park in record time. We relaxed a moment or two and then got changed and flagged a cab. While we waited for our cab, another driver tried to horn in and snake the fare, but we refused his services and waited patiently for our man to pull over. Afterwards, he thanked us profusely for waiting and treated us very fairly. (I know people complain about unscrupulous cab drivers, but I've been very fortunate up to this point never to have encountered one - and the New York cabbies are nice to boot.)
The play, The Vertical Hour, was written by a British playwright named David Hare and starred Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy. It was very good, despite a number of flaws (mainly concerning the author's complete and utter lack of understanding about academia and his therefore unbelievable scenes of professor and student interaction), and succeeded at showing believable characters in an intriguing situation that provoked, and continues to provoke, serious thought about a variety of things (that I can't be any less vague about, sadly - I'm still processing my reactions to it). Most striking in the play was its depiction of each character's inability to take their own advice, such a classic human quality.
I was burdened by a moron on my right, a man who complained that he wasn't expecting so much dialogue, preferred the kind of action found in Miss Saigon (one of the worst plays ever written) where a helicopter landed on the stage, and made mooing sounds after the show was over and people were filing, patiently, out of the theater. His date didn't seem to sense anything amiss, and I felt very badly for her. I fervently hope she was just being polite, and that she was planning to dump him at an opportune moment. Bleck.
After the play, we stopped off at the Art Cafe Restaurant for late-night diner fare. I had a Chicken Parmigiana Sandwich that was tasty and filling. Mom ate a lighter salad. With that meal under our belts, we wandered out into the night to find a return cab - never an issue in the City That Never Sleeps.
Tomorrow we'll hit the MoMA and the Onassis Center.
Our first stop was the Neue Gallerie, where we viewed a few absolutely gorgeous paintings by Klimt and I became annoyed with the audio guide - which relied mainly on leading-by-the-hand formal analysis and contained only rudimentary facts, although it was designed to keep the visitors looking at the works for a record two minutes. (Most museum-goers spend around fifteen seconds with a work of art before moving on.) There was an exhibition on Viennese design that was intriguing and featured a number of design styles that were clearly ripped off by Frank Lloyd Wright. (There was one photograph of a dining room that could have been straight out of Robie House, except for the fact that it predated Robie house by about ten years.) Mom and I took great pleasure in mentioning this to a group of women who were commenting on the similarities. It's been my experience that people often notice the Wright style in his predecessors but also tend to assume that Wright came first, which he did not. It's one of my life's missions to make sure that people understand the man was a hack, and sharing that information today was highly satisfying.
Once out of the museum, with a copy of Siddhartha and a book by Kandinsky in hand, we walked down Fifth Avenue to the Metropolitian Museum of Art, which I had - amazingly - never been to. We ate lunch in the cafeteria and then set out to view the museum's Asian collection. My god, that place is huge, and confusing, and currently under construction - a fact that made easy navigation a veritable impossibility. Eventually, by a sheer quirk of fate, I think, we found the Japanese galleries, and before I realized it we'd been there for over an hour.
The Japanese galleries had a splendid layout and a wide-ranging array of artworks. I was delighted by the opportunity to compare Heian, Kamakura, Nambokucho, Muromachi, Momoyama, and Edo paintings, and to watch the use of color in painting fade out and back in to Japanese works. A screen painting by Ogata Korin showed the abstraction of Japanese art that was to have such a major impact on later European painting, and a scroll by Kano Tan'yu was practically a rip-off of an earlier work by Sesshu Toyo (although the placard only managed to comment on its debt to Muromachi period painting). At a museum store station, conveniently located in one of the foyers outside the galleries, I picked up a large (and heavy) book on Japanese art that I think will be a tremendous reference work. Now, if I can just haul it home.
There was an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy, which I love, and I was enthralled by an example of Grass Cursive Script from the Song Dynasty that clearly revealed the development of Japanese hiragana from Chinese kanji characters. I totally geeked out on it, taking pictures of the characters and giving Mom a mini-lecture on Japanese phonetic script development and how cool these little calligraphic examples were. She sat through it quite magnanimously.
We managed a few of the Chinese galleries (including the Yuan galleries, which featured works by Ni Zan, Wu Zhen, and Zhao Mengfu among others), the Korean galleries, the South and Southeast Asian galleries, and the Assyrian galleries. Then we hightailed it out of there - partly because we couldn't look at any more art and partly because we needed to get changed for our evening play.
We hoofed it (and I do mean hoofed) back to the hotel, crossing Central Park in record time. We relaxed a moment or two and then got changed and flagged a cab. While we waited for our cab, another driver tried to horn in and snake the fare, but we refused his services and waited patiently for our man to pull over. Afterwards, he thanked us profusely for waiting and treated us very fairly. (I know people complain about unscrupulous cab drivers, but I've been very fortunate up to this point never to have encountered one - and the New York cabbies are nice to boot.)
The play, The Vertical Hour, was written by a British playwright named David Hare and starred Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy. It was very good, despite a number of flaws (mainly concerning the author's complete and utter lack of understanding about academia and his therefore unbelievable scenes of professor and student interaction), and succeeded at showing believable characters in an intriguing situation that provoked, and continues to provoke, serious thought about a variety of things (that I can't be any less vague about, sadly - I'm still processing my reactions to it). Most striking in the play was its depiction of each character's inability to take their own advice, such a classic human quality.
I was burdened by a moron on my right, a man who complained that he wasn't expecting so much dialogue, preferred the kind of action found in Miss Saigon (one of the worst plays ever written) where a helicopter landed on the stage, and made mooing sounds after the show was over and people were filing, patiently, out of the theater. His date didn't seem to sense anything amiss, and I felt very badly for her. I fervently hope she was just being polite, and that she was planning to dump him at an opportune moment. Bleck.
After the play, we stopped off at the Art Cafe Restaurant for late-night diner fare. I had a Chicken Parmigiana Sandwich that was tasty and filling. Mom ate a lighter salad. With that meal under our belts, we wandered out into the night to find a return cab - never an issue in the City That Never Sleeps.
Tomorrow we'll hit the MoMA and the Onassis Center.
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Date: 2007-01-14 02:04 pm (UTC)And the last time I was there, I was also quite pleasantly surprised not only with their range of offerings in the bookshop, but also the relatively reasonable prices. I made off with the thick, heavy, hardcover and largely-in-color "Images from the Floating World" by Richard Lane for only $20. :)