MoMA for Members

The MoMA opens its doors early once a month or so to members, supposedly for certain exhibitions only, but you really have the full run of the Museum from 8 AM to 10:30 when the hordes roll in. Recently we walked through "Joan Miro -- Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-37". Never one given to understatement, Miro was out to, in his own words, "assassinate painting." What he did in that decade was not assassinate but experiment, with collages, with heightened abstraction, with minimalism, with deconstruction, and at the end after -- in my limited eye -- some very successful experiments (Spanish Dancers, Dutch Rooms, and especially a painting called Mediterranean Landscape)



and some not at all successful grotesque distortions of human figures and genitalia, he returned to where he began -- and like Eliot -- knew the place for the first time. His Old Shoe painting is at once hallucinatory and glorious, with colors and distortions that almost cause the eye to ache. I could have stood in front of it for quite awhile but the doors opened and the mobs arrived.

Hooters Diplomacy

We were in midtown during the day today, something that doesn't happen very often, right near the Hooters location on West 56th where, on another of our infrequent excursions, this one in the midst of the UNGA, we saw its marquee message, "Welcome Foreign Dignitaries!" Can't help wondering how many of those welcomed dignitaries did sneak away from endless speeches haranguing the US and Israel, or maybe from Robert Mugabe blaming "colonial powers" for what his scorched earth policies have done to beautiful Zimbabwe, to oogle Hooters waitresses...in a dignitary way of course. Probably not all that many, but probably more than zero.

Jeter and Geranium

Friday afternoon I walked down to the subway from the hospice with Jeter in one hand and a potted geranium in the other. The patient I had seen since my first day at hospice died the day before, long past the time when any of us who knew him had thought possible. For that, having that unexpected extra time with the self-described "tough old bird," we are grateful. His things were still in his room and I had permission to take Jeter, the inexpensive collectible that was our first bond. The bat had broken off it and I told him I thought I might be able to fix it with super glue. It worked and he was grateful. Friday I knocked the bat with a newpaper section on the subway home and it immediately snapped off. Seemed right somehow. The geranium I bought him when he wanted more plants in his room and caring for it, he turned it in to a giant once I convinced him it was OK, in fact essential, to pinch off dead blooms and leaves. Another friend of shorter duration also died this past week. All these people who have passed through my life as they were leaving it don't haunt me -- they are too good for that -- but I can picture them better in my mind than I can picture most living people.

New Century Hat Trick

Back when I started going to hockey games as a kid riding the bus in to the Big Red Barn, aka Olympia Stadium, in Detroit, old men -- i.e. guys about a dozen or more years younger than I am now -- wore hats, the kind JFK had when he got harangued by Khrushchev at their first meeting. and tossed them on the ice when a Wings player scored three goals in a game, a mighty rare occurrence in those days. Last night at Madison Square Garden, Ranger captain Chris Drury got his third goal thirty-five seconds before the end of the game. But in 2008 -- and for years now -- it's a Cap Trick.

So Many Bicycle Stories...

so little protection. One from today -- I biked across Amsterdam Ave on the way to the Museum, admittedly against a light, and an SUV heading south on the one way avenue hit the gas hoping to run me over before I got to the other side. He missed; for those few seconds it was a personal perfect flashback to the hyper aggro-environment of DC.

This is a ghost bicycle, placed in NYC and, apparently, other cities at sites where a cyclist has been killed by a vehicle.

E Mails and Pee Mails

Life is a little different with Sam the male Westie. Get up in the morning, check, grind the beans, check, start the coffee pot, check, read the various e-mails, check. But then, walk Sam, who in the course of one ten minute tour around the block, catches up on his friends, alternately reading and leaving pee mails, usually about a dozen outgoings. Then, not surprisingly, he comes home and drinks gallons.