of art and feet

Sunday started as more Sundays should: with cinnamon pecan brioche french toast covered with fruit. Good fruit, not just three pieces of banana atop a melon mountain. I didn't know whether to eat it or marry it. I ate it. And coffee, lots of coffee. With the Sunday paper. Strange to have the team-of-Egyptians-to-drag-it-home paper on a Sunday rather than a Saturday - and you really need all weekend to get through those things.

Then, off to the Met again, their permanent collection of nineteenth century stuff mostly - Cezanne, Van Gogh, most excellent. Courbet and Manet are two painters that did so much to kick modern painting into gear, yet their work doesn't do much for me in the pigment - does anyone else feel that way? More Renoirs to heap scorn on. V. good Monet - surely an artist that has truly suffered at the hands of reproduction, so much of what you see its just 'yep, that's Monet' but then something will come at you and swipe your knees out from under you (the massive waterlilies at MoMA, the lilies at the Met). Endless Degas - kind of similar to Monet in that regard - though I very much like the whole room of small Degas bronze figures. But I feel like that Ballerina, the one that's about a metre tall and has clothes on, is stalking me, she's everywhere I go. And speaking of that - Rodin? Does every gallery in the world need to have the same pieces? 'tis very odd. Though he clearly knew what he was doing (or his estate does) - pick a medium that is both reproducible, too big to put back in the cupboard, and can handle being exhibited all the time.

Monday I awoke feeling rather shabby, due to a cold, but also to email giving me the appointment that I have long been wanting at the MoMA archives - which is the one that I was worried I wouldn't be able to get, for those that heard the fretting earlier in the year, which is most of you I think. So that will be tomorrow and Thursday. I went in search of soup. Most galleries are shut on Mondays so that ruled that out, and was probably a good thing as I didn't really want to go anyway. Was attempting to do some reading of a productive nature but my fuzzy head prohibited that. So I went and read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead at Barnes and Noble, and discovered that it is well worth the Pulitzer it was awarded. Read it! (Sim - she's the author of 'Housekeeping', that we had to read for American Accents)

Then I trundled off uptown to hear a panel of speakers discuss book design, which is something that some of you might consider uninteresting, and you know what? You're wrong! The panel was Dave Eggers , one of my favourite authors, and the reason I'd paid attention to the advertisement, along with Milton Glaser, the guy who among other things, designed the 'I heart NY' logo, which for its simplicity and newfound veracity, I love, and the third was Chip Kidd, who designs for Knopf. So they all chatted about book design, the involvements of authors in the designs for the covers, funny stories and so forth. Very engaging. Kidd was incredibly funny which was great, and I'm sure I'll be recycling his anecdotes whenever I'm in a bookshop with someone and see one of the covers he spoke about, but I really enjoyed Eggers stories of how a small publishing company tries to do things that are a bit different - particularly because they work with a printing firm in Iceland.

Today I woke up with a newfound love of cold medicine (I've never really taken it before, normally I just drink a lot of juice, which never works, but makes me feel like I'm trying). After baptising myself with coffee at Breakfast [and its been so long since I last doused myself with coffee, dammit], I headed off to the Frick Collection, dragging J&T behind me, they weren't very enthusiastic, and I wasn't either, as the collection was largely complete by 1919 it doesn't have anything that I was particularly interested in, so I felt that I was going because it was Good For Me. So I was pleasantly surprised when I loved it. It is housed in the Frick's house, so it is largely as it was when the house was lived in, and tries to keep to his arrangement of his collection, so it doesn't have any particular organisation according to chronology or nationality, and mixes paintings with sculpture and the decorative arts. They give you an audio guide , which is done by a number of different people, so you get all sorts of different accents, and lots of background information, I loved that they included some of Frick's instructions to his architect and interior designer, instructing them that the house, that was to cover most of a block on Fifth Avenue, should be 'simple' - which is so often a feature of eighteenth-century European style mansions... but you can see what he meant in that the house is only a couple of stories and has a lot of natural light thorughout. And excellent carpet, I wanted to take a nap on it. That could have just been the cold. I wanted to take a nap on the subway as well. I don't think Frick and I would have totally agreed on what direction his collection should have taken, he installed some unfortunate rooms of Boucher and Fragonard - if you take a particularly large chocolate box and turn it inside out, and stick your head inside, you will get the general idea, lots of cherubs, and people gaily walking through gardens in puffy outfits. But then some of the best Vermeers and Rembrandts that there is. And an excellent Cezanne. And some nice Whistler. He made his money from coke, and clearly a lot of it. [that's the coal kind of coke, not the dealing kind]

Winter is definitely here, with the kind of wind that laughs at your feeble clothes, goes straight through your bones and then rubs up against your soul. Because it is t-shirt weather up here on the fifth floor I hadn't been quite expecting the change, so didn't take the full complement of accessories with me, and so had acquired new gloves and a scarf before many blocks were out... I can't quite comprehend that I'm going to be in wilting-heat before too long.

Then I went to Chelsea to see the private galleries there - such a strange 'hood - all car repair shops, self-storage units, and then gallery after gallery, pretty much matching with their polished concrete floors and white walls. Some amazing stuff up though, the Gagosian Gallery has an exhibition of late Andy Warhols, which made me experience a wave of angst that he got shot when he did, as he was on a roll when he died. Then I saw another Callum Innes exhbition, excellent, and then a Henry Darger, for something a bit different (they guy spent years holed up in his house drawing illustrations for an elaborate childrens book that he created, and was only discovered after he had died). And then Ray Johnson. And then I needed to go find snacks, and reassure my feet that this won't be happening forever.