living, thinking and writing
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| PRACTICE living, thinking and writing |
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Saturday, June 04, 2005 I love New York in spring I had been to NYC 4 times before I moved to LA, none of the trips was as good as the one I took last week to attend ICA. I’m lucky to wrap up my presentations on the first two days, and I was a free bird for the rest of days . The weather is the best of the year. After long rainy and cloudy season, sunshine and breeze came back to town.I walked around the town and felt very reluctant to go underground for subway. I just discover the joy of traveling alone: no need to compromise to group interests and wait long line for those landmark sites, and I can take as much time as I liked in museums. The trip is pretty much about museums, and it kindles my interests at modern art. My knowledge on fine arts had never gone over 1910, and most stayed in renaissance, impressionism, no more than cubism. I never knew it is so much fun in paintings from 20th-century avant-gardes such as Magritte, Munch, Klimt, Rousseau but I have not grown enough insight to appreciate Kandinsky and Pollock. I was very much captivated by Marc Chagall’s work, they are so imaginative and rich, with all the floating and upside downs that I can relate to my own dream scenarios. Hopper is another painter that I just knew and liked very much, and to my surprise, he is an American and had only one wife for 50 years. I like the way he conceived and portrayed America, silent and often static at an unexpected moment, leaving much space for imagination and speculations. Some of his painting reminds me a lot about Hitchcock’s movies, but with colors. I guess both Hopper and Chagall enthrall me for their abundant innuendos to Freudian notions that have universal appeal. Frick Collection is the only place I visited with classical works. A splendid Athenian white mansion facing east side of the Central park, with hundreds of paintings ranging from medieval age to Monet (only a few impressionisms, and no further), Frick has fiber collections than any museum I’ve seem in Los Angeles, including LACMA. There are Ingre’s Countess d’Haussonville, Vermeer's Mistress and Maid, a whole bunch of Gainsborough, and a Rembrandt’s self-portrait. My personal favorite in Frick is Bellini’s St. Francis in the desert. The color, the scene and the gesture feel so theatrically transcendental. MOMA is just great great place that I will go back again and again, I believe. Sitting in the middle of the midtown skyscrapers, the building has the huge glass window all around through which visitors get magnificent views of the urban landscape. MOMA has wonderful collections of cubism, surrealism, expressionism, abstracim, so do Guggenheim and Whitney. Before my plane took off, I rushed to Pier 54 by the Hudson River for the ‘Ash and Snow’ photo exhibit. Thanks to the almighty NYC metro, I was able to see these stunning pictures, hung in a intentionally-made crude and ragged hall enclosed by hundreds of shipping boxes, at the last moment of my stay. After my last presentation in the Sheridan at Midtown, I walked two streets downto the half-price ticket stands at Time Square trying to get a ticket to see Monty Python’s Spamalot. It’s sold out, so I went to see Dirty Rotten Scoundrels instead. Not bad, very hilarious. Using pop culture to mock pop culture, the show feels like a good sitcom, a smooth slapstick with nice music numbers. The next day is the Memorial day, I went to St. Johns Cathedral to see a concert featuring Tchaikovsky and Korsakov. I was stunned by the sound of symphony reverberant in the huge church, totally surreal. No wonder early music were only dedicated to God. East village is a new-found treasures in NYC. A lot like Adams’ Morgan at DC, the village demonstrates wider variety on cuisines. My friend, Chi, works for a Peruvian client recently; so we went to a Peruvian restaurant at the corner of 2nd Ave. and 7th street. Tried Ceviche for the first time, even better than sashimi. We also had a lovely outdoor brunch at Café st. Bart’s by Saint Bartholomew’s dome. A trip to NYC without going to Chinatown sounds incomplete, but the city is definitely has much more to explore. posted by lmeimei @1:45 AM| permanent link| | |
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