Saturday

Y'know how you don't realize that other people's families are different when you're a little kid? And you think that everyone has a crazy uncle Eddie from Biloxie or that Saturday is Ethiopian Cuisine night and no one is allowed to bring Play-doh in the car on penalty of all your toys being taken away? (None of those apply to my family, tho I suspect that I would not be allowed to bring Play-doh into the car). Well I thought that everybody's family went to museums every Sunday and nobody's parents liked anything but oldies and classical music and that everyone's mother enjoyed listening to gergorian chant when she cleaned. But apparently, my family is somewhat unique in our dedication to high culture.

Anyway, my parents love NY for its fabulous cuisine and teaming street life, but mainly for its millions and millions and bjillions of museums. Besides the famous ones (Met/Frick/Guggenheim), we've been to the Museum of the Drug Enforcement Agency (right below Times Square, like one big PSA- "drugs are bad, drugs fund terrorism, drugs make the babies cry (literally- one of the rooms was a mock hotel room where a man was making crystal meth and a baby was crying because his father was too busy with the meth to pay attention to his tiny baby woes)"), the Museum of Television & Radio History (we watched a Rat Pack documentary and a couple episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents), and the Brooklyn Museum (remarkable because... well, it's in Brooklyn. Manhattan usually has the cultural stranglehold on the museum crowd).

While my parents would be content to live in the Met for the rest of their lives (a la Claudia and Jamie) , we had decided to explore outside the city on this visit. Because there must be something outside the city, right?

I had remembered a New Yorker article years ago about a "museum" that was acres and acres of open land with sculpture just hanging out all together in the great wide open. Sounds hippy-dippy awesome, right? I couldn't really remember anything else about it, so I just mentioned it when my mum was leafing through a trip-a new york guide book. The gods of serendipity had her leaf right to the page on the Storm King Art Center. (a few years ago they had a Calder exhibit where Southern Cross was moved from Calder's collection for the first time so it was a hooge deal- hence the new yorker article).

So we pile in the car and wind our way upstate (past Bear Mountain Bridge again) to frolick amongst the art. The only flaw in our plan was the 90 degree heat. And before you say, "But Julia, you guys lived in Australia for all those years. 90 degrees should be nothing!" Bite Me because that was a) years ago and b) Australian heat is totally different from muggy opressive American Heat. Australian heat is like standing too close to a fire. American heat is like being covered in damp flaming towels and blankets. So there.


But it was amazing. You drive in and there's some Calder just hanging out in a field, realistic sculpture standing a few feet from kinetic abstract stuff- it's just amazing. Our tour guide was a trip too. Usually I count on docents to be all high minded about the art, trying their best to jsutify what the artist was thinking and feeling no matter how bird-in-space-y it is (come on- no one likes bird in space. what the hell?) But this woman had no such pretensions. She would go up to a piece, tell us the name, talk about what the name meant (getting super pissed if the name was just a nonsense name designed to let the observer make up his/her own mind about the piece) and then move on. She really like the stuff that looked like stuff, and didn't like the stuff that didn't look like stuff. While I appreciate that she feels secure enough in her job to openly criticize the art, by the end of the tour I was ready for it to be the end of the tour. But she was right to point out that one of the sculptors liked to paint his sculptures with a color called "shrimp" (remind me to type up the shrimp story which will explain why my parents and i couldn't stop laughing after she said this)

But since I'm getting tired, the rest of my post will be in short observations

- One Kevin Kline is enough. Two Kevin Klines is too much, especially if one is stuck in a tour with one. The less famous one.

- Linen doesn't breathe. I didn't know this, and I was so hot that I thought I would die and consequently freaked out my parents.

- Due to my precarious state of well-being, it is very easy to freak my parents out. I should be more sensitive to this.

- Because Momo Taro (or Peach Boy) is the only sculpture you can climb on, we all had to climb in the hollowed out portion of the left granite chunk and pretend to be Peach Boy for the camera.

- Because I was delirious with heat stroke, I imitated this sculpture for the camera. With the legs of my jeans pulled up to the knee. Not rolled, just pulled, so the ankle was around my thigh. Lemme tell ya, those pictures are fetching.

- This was pretty neat to see from the tram.

- I'll add more later.


There is nothing - NOTHING- in Garrison, NY, no matter how many people tell you to go there. Cold Spring, NY, is much more deserving of a lunchtime visit. If Cold Spring is a puddle of acitivity, thenGarrison is a spit from a dehydrated child. But it has a pretty view of West Point. Also, we saw lots of prisons from the road and I thought about all the people who have traveled from my workplace to those prisons. it didn't make me feel anything in particular, so I guess i'm getting jaded.

Anyway, I'm tired and I will make this a prettier entry later. Also, I shall write about Sunday. oooo sunday- day of deception, more food than you would need to feed the Israeli army, and the surliest bunch of new yorkers to ever interact with the public. Anticipate!



(This post was written with the help of David Bowie's Queen Bitch. I love the Bowie so.)