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a half hour at the Met
Thursday, March 21 2002
Today started out as a reasonably warm and sunny one, and Gretchen and I headed into town for one of our getting-out-of-the-house adventures. These normally involve Indian food and a visit to a museum, and today was no exception. Today's Indian food was had at the Taj in the miniscule Indian restaurant district along 6th Street in the East Village. By the time we got there, it was already mid-afternoon, so the lunch crowd was gone and we had the place nearly to ourselves. It took me a little while to grow accustomed to the sour curry-and-soggy-basement funk of the dining room. I had the feeling that most of this fragrance had its origins in the tea-colored water bubbling in the goldfish aquarium.
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Lunch was excellent and cheap, coming to about $12 for the both of us. Gretchen left our waiter $20 and told him to keep the change. It was such a large tip that he was confused and needed to consult with his colleague.
For the museum part of today's adventure, we were going to see some specific exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art up on the east side of Central Park at around 82nd Street. At the last minute Gretchen suggested we take a bus up 3rd Avenue instead of the subway beneath Lexington. I thought this was crazy talk, since surface traffic in Manhattan is so slow, but after a moment's consideration, I realized it would be interesting to see the neighborhoods gradually change northward.
Jesus, though, the bus really was slow! What with the stoplights and traffic issues, it seemed to crawl along no faster than someone on foot. It did, however, provide me plenty of opportunities to shoot pictures out of the window, something I can't normally do from a subway. At 42nd Street we really should have done as Gretchen suggested and hopped out to look at the Chrysler building and then climbed back on.
After our hour-plus bus ride, we walked over to the park through an upscale Upper East Side neighborhood that seemed to contain more French flags than Old Glories. The Met itself, one of the few large buildings in Central Park, had a lavishness of detailing I haven't seen since the Paris trip. It wasn't anywhere near as extravagant as the Louvre or Notre Dame, but in the context of the featureless boxes of Midtown, it was impressive nonetheless.
Unfortunately, what with the slow bus ride and the leisurely lunch, by the time we arrived at the Met, the place was only a half hour from closing time. So we ran past the people collecting money (as once mocked on a Simpsons episode, they have a "pay what you choose" policy) and upstairs to the most important exhibits we'd come to see. The first of these was a collection of the works of two Renaissance painters, Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, the second being the daughter of the first. Their work was so amazingly consistent in style that it was nearly impossible to distinguish them. Artemisia, though, had an unusual obsession with the theme of Judith sawing off the head of Holofernes. This exhibit had at least five paintings on this theme, some extremely gruesome. As a teenager, Artemisia had been raped by one of her father's associates, and (according to Gretchen) it's likely that she found painting images of empowered women therapeutic.
The next exhibit only took us about three or four minutes to fully appreciate: Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn's Nudes. Penn was a famous fashion photographer, but these were all the headlessly-cropped black and white pictures of the bodies of conventionally-proportioned women, complete with saggy thighs and droopy breasts. (I find it interesting that one of the few photos of a thin woman's body is the one featured on the Met's website.)
Security was rather lax about the enforcement of closing time, allowing people to wander back into the galleries to find restrooms and wayward companions. In this way, we managed to get a look at relics leftover from Romanized Egypt. They were strange hybrids: traditional Egyptian coffins featuring formal Roman-style portraits on the head ends.
Taking advantage of the crowds vacating the museum, a group of young acrobatic street dancers put on a performance outside the museum. One of the men took off his shirt and revealed a body rippling with tiny muscles I didn't even know existed. Clusters of muscles on the sides of his rib cage looked like outstretched hands. Taking advantage of these muscles, the young man was able to walk completely down the Met's front steps balanced upside-down upon his hands.
Walking across Central Park to the West Side on foot, we found a chill had crept into the air. So we abandoned plans to walk around further and ducked into the subway. There were problems on the IRT and we were forced to return to Brooklyn on the F.
A bus stop somewhere on Third Avenue in Midtown.
A Midtown street vendor.
Along Third Avenue.
Dreary Midtown high rises along 3rd Avenue.
Outside Dylan's Candy in Midtown.
A sculpture in the central hallway of the second floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Midtown skyline, viewed over the south end of Central Park.
On the 2 Train in Manhattan.
The Jay Street F Train Station in Brooklyn.
Gretchen points out that the sum of listed ingredients in a chapstick only come to about 50%. "What is the other half?" she wanted to know. "I don't know, pork perhaps?" I responded.
Looking backwards from the very front of the front car of the F Train, somewhere in Brooklyn.
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