Daily Office Friday
¶ Matins: This morning’s Friday Front, at Portico.
¶ Sext: Come Back, Little Sheba, for all its antiquity, was as fresh as paint and as strong as smelling salts. (Report on Tuesday) Now I’m off to the Angelika for In Bruges, and my first trip downtown since before the holidays. For the movies, at least.
¶ Vespers: After the movie, which was great, and lunch at Jacques Downtown, I screwed up my courage to Do Something New. Instead of heading home, I headed east — one block, to the new New Museum. It opened late last year, but was much too hot for the likes of me.
Oremus…
§ Matins. In The New York Review of Books, Benjamin M Friedman makes it a great deal easier to assess the legacy of Alan Greenspan.
§ Sext. I did see There Will Be Blood at the multiplex in Union Square. But 14th Street is where downtown begins — so it doesn’t count. How curious it is, to reverse the sentiments of Edith Wharton’s childhood New York — when her aunt, the model for Mrs Manson Mingott in The Age of Innocence — was regarded as a Wild Woman for bushwacking all the way uptown to 59th Street! (Or was it 57th?)
When I speak of reversal, of course, I speak for people of my age. Healthy young people, my daughter far from the least among them, have reverted to the old ideas. Uptown is a deserted wilderness; for all that it might be the most densely-populated Congressional district in the United States, it is devoid of interest. Reply by mentioning the Frick and the Metropolitan Museum, and the retort will be: “Exactly.”
The exciting mosaics in the basement men’s room at the New Museum. I’d have gone for a more expansive image, but someone walked in and I didn’t want to seem too perverted.
§ Vespers. Don’t ask me why I prefer this museum to the MoMA and the Whitney. I visited it exactly once at its Broadway location in SoHo. But I remember the exhibits very well. And I remember doing a lot of reading at the exhibits. May I venture to suggest that the art at the New Museum is more likely to involve text than art at the other two places? No, I may not. I rarely visit them, either.
But I’m thinking of joining the New Museum, if only at the Cheapster level. If I had to choose one word to describe the works on display in the current “Unmonumental” show, it would be “amusing.” I was as amused as a kid in a sandbox. More anon.