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Paul Klee at the Jewish Museum
Sunday, April 12 2026
location: Room 401, Night Hotel, Upper West Side, New York, NY
This morning after checking out of our hotel room, we walked to a nearby bagel place and got coffee and everything bagels with different tofu-based schmears (it was not a great vegan cream cheese and prices were high, and perhaps that was the reason for the distressing few people "on line" in front of us — most of them dads with kids in strollers or little purebred dogs). Then Gretchen drove us through Central Park to the Upper East Side, where our next destination was the Jewish Museum, where we would be seeing an exhibit of the paintings by the Swiss artist Paul Klee. As Gretchen was parking at a convenient spot on Park Avenue, I noticed that the car she was parking in front of was a Cadillac with a NY license plates with the number "45MAGA47." Gretchen was grossed out but then intrigued, and looked inside through the window to see what personal effects a person driving such a car would have. These included a plastic water bottle (that checked out), and a cross hanging from the rearview mirror.
It turned out that the Jewish Museum doesn't open until 11:00am, and we'd arrived a half hour before that. Gretchen waved at the woman she saw inside the locked museum wondering if perhaps we could get in early (with Gretchen, no rules are fixed). She directed us to a staff entrance but then just wanted to know if Gretchen was the rabbi she was waiting for. Gretchen said she might've known a rabbi with that name, but obviously that wasn't going to get us into the museum early. So we walked around the neighborhood, which was entering peak springtime just as had been happening down in Takoma Park last weekend.
The Klee exhibit took up a whole floor, though the Jewish Museum is much smaller than the other museums we'd visited recently. Paul Klee himself wasn't Jewish, but the Nazis hated his art so much that he was, in effect, an honorary Jew, and this caused him to flee back to his native Switzerland in the 1930s as the Nazis rose to power, gradually going through all the stages of fascism we see playing out in the Trump administration (fascism really does follow a playbook). The blurbs on the wall for each work were well-written and not needlessly cluttered with jargon and other crap that museum verbiage often contains. Much of the writing was about how much the Nazis hated Klee's work and how he responded to that (both in terms of what he did with his life and through art). I've never been a fan of extreme artistic abstraction, and Klee's work often abstracts visual representation down to simple lines and angles. But I've always been a Paul Klee fan. Interestingly, though, I tend to like works that Gretchen doesn't particularly like (these usually had bolder colors and contrasts), while she likes paintings I didn't much like featuring muted pastels and uncertain drawing.
While at the Jewish Museum, we went up to the sixth floor to see an exhibit of hanukkiah (menorahs for Hanukkah) to see how they compared to the ones I make from copper pipe. We both agreed that they were all uniformly uglier than mine. This led me to wonder why other people haven't made copper pipe menorahs like mine, since they more or less design themselves due to how copper fittings connect together. In the gift shop, we saw yet more ugly menorahs, none of which were for sale for less than $600. We thought if one of my menorahs could somehow get into that gift shop, it would sell immediately.
For lunch, we wanted to go to a nearby vegan fast casual placed called Vegan Grill on 2nd Avenue. Gretchen found a parking spot nearby on 3rd Avenue, but it was a little small even for our little car. Meanwhile someone parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant in front of that spot was taking their sweet time to get going (as they always do!). While I was trying to direct Gretchen into the spot and she kept failing to make tight enough turns, some random guy on the sidewalk nearby couldn't stand it any more, so he came out and started directing Gretchen instead. It was a very New York moment, what with the guy in front of Gretchen refusing to get going the whole time. And just as Gretchen was about to fit in the tight spot, the car in front of the hydrant drove off.
As Gretchen always does, she ordered much more food at Vegan Grill than we could possibly eat, including a greasy faux-chicken curry with rice, buffalo cauliflower, corn "ribs," and, for me, a faux fish sandwich with mushrooms, jalapeños, and avocado. Gretchen had a Zoom meeting about the beagel rescue next weekend that she wanted to participate in, so she started watching it a quietly as possible during our lunch. She then continued watching it as we walked back to the car and then as she drove us out of the City.
It was a gorgeous day and we didn't need climate control, so when we arrived at the Plattekill rest area on the Thruway for a bathroom break and to switch driving duties, we decided not to charge up. We ended up making it home with more than 20 miles of range still in the battery. This was the first time we'd ever driven an electric car to NYC and back without recharging. Meanwhile, an intermittent grinding sound coming from the front passenger-side brake was getting more and more persistent.
So after getting home and after I'd done a little more work on the Chamomile Wall, I decided to pull the front passenger-side wheel off the Bolt. But I didn't want to do that without having new brake pads handy to install. This caused me to drive to the Advance Auto get those pads (as well as some groceries at the nearby Ghettoford). Interestingly, the cashier at Advance initially couldn't find the Chevy Bolt in his database anywhere, but then he looked up my car from its license plate and learned it was a 2017 (not 2016, as I'd told him) Bolt, and at that point it showed the brake pads in stock.
Back up on Hurley Mountain, I was dreading removing the Bolt's caliper, assuming I'd be dealing with the same rusty bolts that had caused me so much trouble recently with the Subaru. But the bolts holding the front calipers had big 21mm heads on them (the Subaru's had been secured with 17mm bolts) and it didn't take much force with a breaker bar for them to start turning. Once I had the calipers out, I found that the pads had worn very unevenly, with the outside pad experiencing little wear while the inside one was completely worn away to metal. I tried replacing both, both there was no way to do so with enough room between the pads for the rotor. So I ended up just replacing the inner, most-worn pad. I noticed that the new pads had little protuberances on their backs that was eating up some of the gap needed for the rotors, so perhaps I could grind them off. In any case, this suggested that I'd ended up with the wrong pads. Despite all this, when I put the caliper and wheel back on, the grinding sound was gone, which was all I really wanted.
By then it was evening, and I wanted to do some of the drinking that my booze rules allow for.
The car with the "45MAGA47" plate behind our Chevy Bolt (which has a bumpersticker reading "Keep the Immigrants, Deport the Racists"). Click to enlarge.
The kind of Paul Klee painting Gretchen likes (I found it online and did not photograph it). Click to enlarge.
A Paul Klee painting I liked. Click to enlarge.
A Paul Klee drawing of a crawling figure. Click to enlarge.
A Paul Klee drawing looked like Hitler, but I think it was called something like "Drinking Companion." Click to enlarge.
Overlapping pis. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen contemplating a Paul Klee painting. Click to enlarge.
Another a Paul Klee painting I like. Click to enlarge.
This Paul Klee painting resembled stained glass. Click to enlarge.
The figures in the drawing all seemed to have had their single eyes added later. Click to enlarge.
A selfie I took while in the bathroom at the Jewish Museum. Click to enlarge.
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