Well so I finally made the NY Times which had everything to do with my never ending role as a double decker tour guide for Gray Line which I have stuck to like velcro since September 11th, 2001 for then what appeared to be fear of the bread line. The article (the online and print editions differ slightly) can be read here http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/gray-line-tour-guides-threaten-to-strike/?hp (and I will let that speak for itself: enough said).
The night before the article came out I finally went to see Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” (having never seen the broadway version of “The producers” or the movie adaptation of the play based on the original movie the last of which I had seen).
I found the production excellent and the retake funny (though there were a few jokes one told by Frau Blucher{ the double entendre within whose name which this theater goer is still waiting to figure out}which were enough to kill a dead man again. The production is closing January Fourth and don’t wait to catch it in Vegas.
Next day was thanksgiving and joyous from the literary suprise I met my freind Tracey , her infant son Colin, and her freind Stewart (or Stuart) for the Macys Thanksgiving day parade. It was a logisitical nightmare getting all the forces together and we settled for balloon, band, and float watching on west 75th street between the Kenilworth (home of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones) and San Remo (home of Bono Vox, Billy Squier, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Martin, and Steven Spielberg:just to name a few) appartment buidings.
After which Tracey and I had brunch @ Nice Matin where last I had dined on the fortieth birthday of Dianne Kaston with the birthday girl, a freind of hers from Beverly Hills with a tremendous nose, and her nonagenarian father Henryk (perhaps the world foremost violin bow maker, a French chevalier, the man who had executed much of Salvador Dali’s jewels based on his art for him, and who was carrying a self portrait by Enrico Caruso in his breast pocket: not to mention having been the lead violinist for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and having played chamber music with Albert Einstein). It was scrambled eggs with fraiche and salmon time , it was orange buttermilk french-toast time, it was bloody mary time, it was mimosa time! Wow! All the while outside there was a giant St. Benard on a leash which when it wanted something barked at its’ owners who were sharing a table for two with a view and when summoned the man would come out and throw the big doggie who was suffering the affection of many a passerby a treat.
Back to the day before I finally was able to go through the Giorgio Morandi exhibition (the first full scale survey of his work ever in the united States) an art event which I was looking forward to in part because Morandi is so pivotal as a refrence point to the work of Robeto Azank an Argentine Still life painter for whom I have written two catalogue essays.
I was needing some coca- cola to get into the museum pay attention to something groove. Then when I did first I walked around the polygonal galleries of the Robert Lehman wing of the museum and read the wall texts while glancing at the pictures to the side. Then in the next turn after having had a dark chocolate candy bar with hazelnuts and currants (have to stay au courant- candy and Morandi) and two coca colas I went back at looked closer and read about Morandi’s works’ relationship to Cezanne’s and investigated. I was taken by one “natura morta” in partiular with included an elongated vermillion vase. Roberto Longhi, a freind of Morandi’s had said in 1964 (the year of Morandi’s death) to paraphrase……that the painters work was a testament to how much more important the inward journey is to the external ….. I like Morandi’s work but it sure can lack show business while celebrating a long reflective and passionate elegy to the comforts of resolve.
i then started in on the exhibit honoring the acquisitions made by the museum during the tenure of its outgoing head Phillipe De Montebello going back as far to his time as a curator of European painting in the sixties. I only got through the first few rooms before it was closing time and so I ask for you the reader to give me leave so that this itinerant blogger can add motion to the cosumptive legnth of this far gone furlong at a later time.
Also just before thanksgiving and soon to follow my forty third birthday I attended an art opening for a solo exhibiton by Tyrome Tripoli at the Y Gallery in the Jackson Heights section of the New York City borough of Queens. The centerpiece was a large moslty blue wallpiece incorporating wastebaskets. The piece was mostly within a blue chromatic range but also had a large piece of curvaceous industrial rubber which was reminiscent of some of Richartd Serras’s early work (though his pieces stand alone where this is appropriated within a larger work bringing a new range of textural body to Tripoli’s work).
This piece “Geyser” builds upon an earlier work combustion which employed milk crates and as a base with other plastic objects which built outward going space.. These vertical wall reliefs if you will are seemingly create a new dimensional pictorial format for tripoli (for more of this artists’ his work go to www.tyrometripoli.com.)
Among the artists who came by the exhbition on a rather cold November night was Javier Tellez who has represented Venezuala at the Venice biennale and had video of five blind men going up to and feeling the up an elephant and the drained McCarren swimming pool in the Greenpoint Williamsburg confluence of Brooklyn( among the participants being “A Gathering of the Tribes’ cigarette smoking on his couch Dr. Steve Cannon) in the last Whitney Biennial.
Tags: balloons, Bloody Mary, Brooklyn, brunch, Double Decker, Dr .Steve Cannon, Gallery Y, Giorgio Morandi, gray line, grey line, Henryk Kaston, Javier Tellez, Lee Klein, Macys, Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade, marching bands, McCarren Swimming pool, Mel Brooks, mimosa, natura morta, nice matin, Roberto Longhi, still life, thanksgiving, tour guides, Tyrome Tripoli, Venice Biennale, Williamsburg
