Snake Season

Thom and I returned to the Pines after missing a week due to covid 19 quarantine.  Victor and Tommy invited us over for a belated celebration of my 67th birthday.

Tommy shot time-lapse video of the sun setting over the Great South Bay.  

After birthday cake, he also showed us mesmerizing images he shot in pre-covid New Zealand.

Later in the week, we served them Varick's chocolate peanut butter balls.

 Both Varick and Thom cooked up a storm

Have you ever eaten a sausage clock?

Thom adapted this burrata recipe from Better Homes & Gardens.  I got a free subscription after buying a floor lamp at Walmart.

Wine with that delicious lunch contributed to the spontaneity of a video we shot to commemorate Magda's & Joe's sixth wedding anniversary.  Randy & Thom knocked it out of the park with their infant and toddler impersonations.

Another house honored a Supreme Court justice.  Have flamingoes ever been used to such fabulous effect?

Returning to the Pines enabled me to swim for the first time in 6 weeks,  twice in the ocean and once in the bay.

Walks to Cherry Grove led to some interesting natural encounters, including a pair of brown snakes

. . . and a very bold buck.

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille."

Additions to my collection of clever (and sometimes X-rated) Cherry Grove house names.

Plenty of random images, too.

Looking forward to my 34th season!

But first, the roughest ferry crossing of the Great South Bay that I've ever experienced.

Trust Exercise (4*)

Torrid teen love under the abusive eye of a pedagogue.  A Chekhovian second act.  A WTF ending.  And a penetrating examination of male privilege from a woman who's clearly suffered under its hands.  Susan Choi has her cake and lets you eat it, all the while making the acutely insightful pages turn faster and faster.  A Rubik's cube for the Me Too era that I enjoyed immensely but can't quite put together.
 

Silver Lining

The Metropolitan Museum of Art typically admits 5,000 visitors per hour. During the pandemic they've reduced that to 2,000, reservations required. But the galleries were delightfully uncogested, a first in my experience. I felt like Angie Dickinson in "Dressed To Kill."  I'm standing in front of the first quilt acquired by the museum.  Elizabeth Horne Clarkson sewed it in 1830.

The quilt is part of the Met's 150th anniversary show.  A photo of Marilyn Monroe by Richard Avedon greets visitors to the gallery.

A 19th century Congo power figure stares her down.

"The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer" (1922) by Edgar Degas. Her tutu is contemporary.

Glazed Mexican pottery from the 17th century.

Palladian decor.

Before Gertrude Stein donated this striking portrait, Picasso was absent from the museum's collection.

El Anatsui collected a lot of alcoholic beverage caps to create "Dusasa II" in 2007.

Here's one of my favorite pieces, "Street Story" quilted by Faith Ringgold in 1985.

IMHO, "folk" art has been given short shrift far too long. Joshua Johnson painted Emma Van Name in 1805 but it took the museum more than 200 years to acquire this work by America's earliest known black, professional painter.

Andy Warhol screened Mona after the Louvre loaned the Met the DaVinci original in the early 60s. Little did anyone guess Pittsburgh's favorite son would be just as famous as the Italian master one day.

Max Beckman painted "The Beginning," an autobiographical work, in exile from Germany.

This silk textile, called Manhattan by designer Clayton Knight, captures the sophistication of the Art Deco period.

Tim, who works in the musical instruments department of the Met, showed me "Fanfare" an exhibit of brass instruments he helped design and install.  Tim also worked on "Play It Loud," a rock 'n roll exhibit I loved.  He actually mounted Joni Mitchell's guitar!

His  Boy Scout blue, tasseled in red, made it into "Fanfare," quite a coup in the museum world!

Afterward we went to the museum's roof to see "Lattice Detour" by Hector Zamora.  Meh.

I couldn't visit without taking a peek at the Gerhard Richter's disturbing "Birkenau."  

The gallery directly below exhibited Dutch masters. Vermeer's "Study of a Young Woman" (1665-67).



Rembrandt's "Portrait of Herman Doomer" (1640).

And "Moses Striking the Rock" by Abraham Bloemaert (1596).

I passed Egyptian and Roman art on my way out.  The pandemic must seem like a blip in time to these objects.