Chrissy and I went to New York last week, for legitimate theater and really super-crowded art shows. We saw Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett in The Mountaintop, a fantasy about Dr. King’s last night in the Lorraine Motel. Jackson played MLK doing a Samuel Jackson impression, and Angela Bassett a foxy maid at the motel sent to tempt and comfort him on his last night. The next night we saw Relatively Speaking—three one-act plays by Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen—a rollicking delight, Woody Allen’s farce snowballing to epically outrageous hilariousness; then we saw the powerful family drama Other Desert Cities with Rachel Griffiths, whom I can’t believe isn’t from southern California, Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, and a radiantly burned-out Judith Light; and our final play, Seminar, with a crusty Alan Rickman sexually and verbally amusing and abusing himself and his students.
MoMA is like a zoo, with kids snapping photos of their buddies next to Starry Night and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I spent much of the afternoon arguing with my dear old buddy Michelle about whether de Kooning was misogynist or not. As someone who slices up photos of hairy butts and makes flowers out of them, I thought the notion preposterous. He adored women, and that’s why they’re all exploded, slashed and fragmented, the center of the canvas, like he wanted to dive into them and be surrounded by those big balloon boobs. It’s the way that someone engaged with paint and expressionism would inhabit and represent beauty and desire. Where she saw rape, I saw love.
And I just love Michelle.
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Nemr Poochie and Inna joined us for a foot-fatiguing day-long march through the Met. We saw a fabulous Renaissance portrait show, with countless Boticellis, well okay, like 5, and delightful portraits by Bellini, Dontello, Masaccio(!), and a portrait bust of baggy-eyed and full-chinned sex bomb Niccolò di Leonardo Strozzi by Mino da Fiesole.
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The Guggenheim has a retrospective of just about all of the work ever made by Maurizio Cattelan, called “All.” The pieces are hung from the central rotunda of the museum by ropes, a dizzy assemblage of witty fabulosity experienced as your spiral up and down the ramp. He says he’s not going to be making sculpture anymore, and I am going to really miss this guy.
Nemr’s living in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, right across the street from Thighs ‘n Pies. Or Pies ‘n Thighs. It’s classic southern food the way you rarely get it in the south, fresh, inventively prepared, not cooked to death. I snarfed everything that came close to the table.
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