and so to New York

Five or so hours on a bus and we were in NYC, which is, in fact, My Happy Place.  No wonder I can't do self-relaxation routines: soho exudes a different kind of peace to that of imagined autumnal forests and babbling brooks.  My luggage had expanded by this point to a dimension that forbade subway travel (bad packing the night before I left, compounded by a spree in Philadelphia, sparked by a shoe store, that saw me leave as the semi-ironic owner of a pair of shoes that cost $12 and are constructed out of brown floral netting, that then spiraled out of control, all the way along South St, to incorporate a 3/4 length leather jacket ($99, thus inevitable and I feel excusable...), a pair of polka dot rainshoes and mother-of-pearl earrings emblazoned with cherries) and so required waiting forty five minutes to catch a taxi, and the same to actually drive to our hostel.  I don't recommend arriving in NYC during Friday night peak hour on the eve of a long weekend.  We made it, dumped our stuff, and turned around and in 15 minutes on the subway returned to where we had started out, to meet up with other painting conservators  and an evening of martini, mexican food and an insight into the innards of NYC galleries. 

Saturday was Met day!  Having fortified ourselves with breakfast, bottomless coffee that resembled coffee in the sense of being a warm brown liquid but little else, and a walk across Central Park (which I do recommend in Fall) and make-up coffees, that this time contained taste and some measure of caffeine, if not that imparted by the happiness of espresso.  We arrived at the Met at about 10.30, and left at about 4pm.  In between, we examined art, lots of art.  I went to the Met twice last time I was in NY and both times got suckered into the abstract expressionist corner, and not much further: the rest of modern, and the post-impressionist and inevitably the impressionist, because you can't really escape them and I felt strangely obliged to look at them, even though I'm quite, quite over the impressionist gaze and all the social and scientific advancement it heralds.  So this time I was determined to at least pay a cursory glance beyond this happy corner of the museum.  So I promptly got suckered into the abstract expressionists.  At the moment they have an exhibition of abstract expressionism from a private collection that has just been donated to the Met, and surely solidifies its claim to have probably the finest collection of American art during this period.  It wasn't just that she had bought large works by all of the key artists, but that she had such an eye for excellent examples - even a Phillip Guston that I didn't hate.  So then I felt obliged, as I was nearby, to go sit with Jackson for a bit, and then Jasper, and Wassily.  After that I summoned my legs to offer me carriage out of that part of the museum, and to contemplate its vastness.  We took a look at the exhibition of some of the panels of Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, which are remarkable, and then I scampered through the museum in a general state of overstimulation.  The ancient near east collection for instance, or all of European art, with its endless depictions that jolt you between Jesus' birth, resurrection, babyhood and death every time you turn your head.  My favourite are the ones that represent the ascension, because the hovering Jesus in a contrapposto and flowing robes always makes me think "Dancing Jesus".  This is my problem with a lot, if not most, of European art, between say 1550 and 1850: it's completely insane.  I'm sure when a lot of people talk about "good art", as opposed to "contemporary art", and mean painting that depicts things with as high a degree of verisimilitude as possible, and for an obvious reason (commemoration, adoration and so on), they mean this kind of painting, but when you look at it en masse, it's completely whack.  The outstanding artists are all the more incredible for depicting crazy stuff in a way that seems rational.  I don't mean crazy stuff as in the depiction of christianity, I just mean the manner in which it is done: entirely still figures in flowing robes of the most glorious hues, gathered around a stricken corpse with the most incredible musculature, a few stray animals, perhaps a still life in one corner, a skull in another, a peacock above, all in an unearthly landscape: the whole scene is a pastiche of symbolic elements that read a coherent narrative to those in the know, and are an effective didactic device to a largely pre-literate age, but when you encounter them now, in a room full of similar works, after eight other rooms thus overbrimming: whack.  Hence my interests in the modern, the glued and the abstract. 

Exiting the museum, we went in search of martini, followed by an unfortunately fruitless search downtown for "that polish place I ate in last time I was here and I think is on the next  block... no the next... maybe over an avenue...". Eventually the quest was abandoned in favour of roast chicken, which was consolingly excellent.