day 14: new york II
after our long night we slept late on this sunday morning; we could not forsake our bed till past eleven. linda made blueberry muffins for us, but unfortunately was not feeling up to accompanying us through manhattan.

we came up from the subway in times square again, but this time we cut through the noontime crowds and walked up the avenue of the americas (aka 6th street) toward the american folk art museum (r’s favorite painting, entitled ‘bareknuckle brawlers’ is a fine example of early american folk art, tho not in the museum’s collection). it was sparsely attended but featured some intriguing displays. what is so intriguing about folk art is it’s adherence to utility. m loved the works memorializing the deaths of loved ones. there were remembrance rings and paintings and pottery. one death urn featured a poem by the artist m especially liked (she has left all capitalizations, spelling and punctuation exactly as it appeared on the urn):

On yonder distant
knoll
Daisies bow to the
breeze.
Evening sun is setting
the lonesome Dove
coo”s from the trees.
Shadows pull down
the curtians of time
Perhaps it’s your sunset
Or maybe its mine.
“Corps,” “corps” does the
Ravin call.
Then Twilight takes over
Its, all, its all.”

there were several focused exhibitions in the museum including the strange works of the lonesome, hermetic artist harvey darger. darger, in his secretive, private life wrote over ten thousand pages of a history of his own invention involving the oppression of a childlike race by a force of men dressed as confederates, cowboys and other soldiers. he glued pieces of paper together to make large mural-like paintings illustrating the scenes and characters of his story. they have and eerie innocence about them, a grave delicacy. also on display were intricate kaleidoscope quilts that not only boggled the eye but the mind as well with their detail and fine stitches. r was taken with a set of hand-carved wooden busts of all the presidents, adjacent to replicas of the statue of liberty and buddha.

we came out of the museum and bought two hotdogs from a stand across the street. we sat in a courtyard with the pigeons and did the best we could with a limited number of napkins.

the small museum had taken only an hour to navigate through, unlike its neighbor, the massive museum of modern art. our strategy was to start at the top and work our way down. as we rode the escalators up, r turned to m and said ‘i think i’m about to be very confused.’ the top floor was reserved for special exhibitions, and our visit coincided with a comparative retrospective of the works of two latin american artists: mira schendel from brazil, and león ferrari from argentina. m liked the work of these artists especially, coming as it had on the heels of deconstructionism, a literary theory put forth by the likes of derrida, barthes and kristeva, and concerned heavily with notions of semantics and signification, with an exploration of the particularization of language, the possibilities inherent in the act of writing, etc. after looping the entire three-room exhibition before m had even gotten through the first, r returned to say, ‘i don’t get it.’

as we made our way down to the lower floors, r was able to find some works with which our many museum visits during this trip had familiarized him, and he was proud to be able to identify magritte (his new favorite), pollock, picasso (of whose work the museum had an armful, especially, to m’s delight, the demoiselles d’avignon, which has a heavy, magnetic allure about it) and cy twombly. happily, we came across several pieces by louise bourgeois, including one called fillette, a fairly large, roughcast sculpture of a phallus that was held by the artist, with a mischievous smirk on her face, in robert mapplethorpe’s famous portrait of her.

we had made arrangements to meet linda for dinner at indigo restaurant, right off the 30th ave subway station in Astoria. they featured ten dollar pitchers of stella artios, an easy way to endear the place to r. the open-air patio provided excellent atmosphere, and we were soon listening intently to linda’s stories of r’s extended family. in lieu of ordering entrees, we decided to share a sampling of appetizers, including steak quesadillas, spring rolls, spinach artichoke dip (extra chips cost three dollars), and fried calamari.

on the way home we picked up a quart of ice cream to go with the brownies linda had made while we were out (what a hostess!!!), and we had our dessert as we watched demented adult cartoons, which, we think, kind of freaked linda out. in the end, it seemed to have more of an effect on her cat, as cody continued to harass us long after linda had gone to bed.