Let The River Run

OK. The subject of this post has little relevance to the content, but Geoffrey will love it. I caught up with Geoffrey's brother, Richard, on Friday night. He's bought a cute little apartment on W21st St, and is doing very well for himself in the publishing field.

Before I get into my list of things I've done and seen, there are a couple of omissions from past posts worth mentioning. Sometime last week I visited the Museum of Sex, and (separately) the Museum of Film and Television. The MoS was small, but very cool. Nowhere near as smutty as the name suggests, the museum presented a history of sexually explicit (or not so explicit for that matter) material in popular culture. On the occasion I visited there was a temporary exhibition entitled "Beefcake", exploring the material that was huge in the days before hard-core pornography existed. Think Steve Reeves.

The Museum of Film and Television is not a museum in the traditional sense, in that there are no galleries. Instead, there are five or six screening rooms, and an schedule of programs that are screened, changing from day to day. Admission entitles one to wander from room to room watching whatever is being screened at the time. I saw the pilot episode of Seinfeld, and two excellent museum-produced documentaries. The first was a compendium of famous Superbowl commercials, like the Orwellian 1984 ad directed by Ridley Scott which screened once to herald the introduction of Apple's Macintosh. The other documentary was a collection of short snippets of Peter Sellers' TV appearances. It started with the Goons, but later included telemovies, his hilarious appearance on The Muppets, with various interviews and commercials in between. Great stuff. This is the type of museum that would make living in New York such a dynamic experience.

On Saturday I went to the Museum of Modern Art, which was unbelievably good. I don't think I have seen so many famous paintings in one permanent collection. I saw Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad, which some people believe may have influenced the design of the Bates family home from Psycho. Other highlights were Rousseau's The Dream, Magritte's The False Mirror, Lichtenstein's Girl With Ball, and Wyeth's Christina's World. The last painting looked familiar although I can't recall seeing it before. I did overhear several people commenting on how famous it is.

In the afternoon I wandered around Greenwich Village, eating at the famous Cafe Reggio (featured in Carlito's Way and In Good Company), before visiting Washington Square park, and wandering through the neighbourhood's shops. Later that night I headed out to Splash bar/nightclub. Despite it's popularity, I wasn't that impressed frankly. It's definitely New York's Wickham Hotel, which would be fine with a large group of people. Not satisfied with the music, I went to the Roxy, which I visited the weekend before, and which I've discovered can be relied upon to deliver the goods.

Sunday was always planned as a slow day. I went to the matinee performance of Doubt, the new Broadway play that is receiving rave reviews, awards, and accolades. The play Doubt recieved the 2005 Tony Award for Best Play as well as the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Obie, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, New York Drama Critics Circle, and Outer Critics Circle Awards. The actors have also been similarly awarded for their performances. It is unbelievably difficult to get tickets to this show. No half-price tickets, and if you want more than one ticket, with a good view, forget about it. Set in a Brooklyn Catholic school in the 1960s, the story concerns the school headmistresses investigations into whether one of her male teachers, a priest, may or may not have interfered with a student. At only ninety minutes, with no intermission, Doubt is the shortest Broadway production I have seen during my visit to NYC. But the performances were quite superb. The morally complex story is packed with tension. The suspense builds and builds, before the actors really let loose in several chilling confrontations.

On my last two days in New York, I visited two of the biggest attractions the city has to offer. On Monday I went to the American Museum of Natural History. This place was amazing. They had literally everything you could possibly expect to see in a museum. From (real) dinosaur skeletons to the Star of India emerald to a gigantic 34 ton meteorite (that is supported by steel columns drilled directly into the bedrock beneath the museum's structure). I left the museum with an Ikea-ache... the sort of headache I get from visual overload whenever I visit the Swedish superstore.

On Tuesday I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was chatting to some departing guests at my hotel the day I arrived, and they told me you could spend two days in the Met and not see everything. And never has a truer word been spoken. Like an art-world cousin to the AMNH, the Met is a horde of national treasures all in the one building. Flanking both sides of the main entrance are two wings respectively dedicated to Greek & Roman and Egyptian art.

I started with the Greek & Roman Art wing, where the collection rivals the stuff that I saw in Greek museums. Statue after statue. Did you know that Ancient Greeks used burial tombs, kind of like the sarcophagus used by the Egyptians? I didn't, but they're there! There are other wings - not just rooms or halls, but wings - dedicated to Assyrian Art, Pacific Art, African Art, European Art.... the list goes on. Mum would be very impressed that there was even a section exclusively holding Cypriot Art.

Of course, the Met is also home to some exceptionally important paintings. When I had dinner with Dan the night before, he tipped me off regarding the Met's impressionists collection. While MoMA has more pieces that I recognise from popular culture, relative to the size of collection on display, the Met is just overflowing with the volume of work on display. If I recall correctly there was one room filled with Van Gogh, and another just holding Picassos... and mostly big works too. The Modern Art section was definitely my favourite. I wandered through the extensive European and American wings, and while impressed with the volume of works on display, I'm not as familiar with the artists of the period. Mum and Dad, you'd love the rooms dedicated to iconography art. Carmel and Veronica, there is more than one wing filled with antique furniture.

Back across the other side of main entrance is the Egyptian wing, which I visited last, and where I found sarcophagi after sarcophagi, arranged in such a way you could be fooled into thinking they're for sale at Sarcophagi 'R' Us. Then there are the tombs that have been tombs reconstructed within the museum, and which you can walk through. I passed room after room of various artifacts, more sarcophagi, death masks, staffs, and ancient Egyptian bric-a-brac, before arriving at the Temple of Dendur. This is a whole temple - two buildings to be precise - that stand in their own huge hall complete with fountains, water course, and reeds. Oh yeah, there are a bunch of other statues in the room which are probably priceless and worthy of consideration just on their own.

So I left the Met with another Ikea-ache, but somewhat satisfied that I had managed to cram in quick glances and a walk through of one of the most significant museum collections anywhere. I almost forgot to mention my visit to the rooftop sculpture garden. As the Met is located within the rectangle of Central Park, the garden had unbelievable views of Manhattan's skyline rising from jungle of the park. There are so many published photos and films that depict this view, but it was still very impressive in real life... even if was more than 32 degrees with a humidity approaching saturation point.

And that brings me to the end of my trip to New York City. All my life I have wanted to visit. And after two weeks I felt I had seen a lot of the sites that always held an interest, but done so at a pace that was agreeable to me. The city is dynamic and welcoming, and I felt that by mastering the subway my stay was that bit closer to living like a New Yorker.

I've praised the subway before, but I don't think I mentioned the heat down there. If it is 32 degrees on the street, it could easily be close to 40 just a few metres below. One of the things that makes New York look like the New York of popular culture, is the steam that constantly rises from sewer grates, manhole covers, and the train ventilation shafts (like that which Marilyn Monroe stands above in The Seven Year Itch). In the case of the latter, the 40 degree heat below the surface can easily explain the rising steam. But I still don't know why the sewers and manhole covers can let out steam. I'm sure there is a perfectly simple reason, but from a visitor's perspective it looks like the city is a living breathing thing. A huge machine below the surface that is fed by the city's momentum, and in turn keeps the city alive, much like Fritz Lang's vision of Metropolis eighty years ago.

And so it was fitting that I made my way to JFK International Airport via the subway. The airport itself is huge, but different to others I have been through in that it is a series of smaller buildings that serve only a few airlines each. It was cool seeing the old Pan Am (now Delta) and TWA (now disused) terminals, having read about the rivalry between the two companies during those early golden years. Scorsese's Howard Hughes bio-pic The Aviator touches on this. I find it quite ironic that both companies no longer exist, as gigantic as they once were.