By autumn's end, I already had been in Florida for two weeks. Florian captured this very meta moment at Wynwood Walls where I take nearly everyone who visits the Folly for the first time.
The Miami neighborhood offers a case study in gentrification: where hipsters once bopped, strollers now roam but it still remains Selfie Heaven, even for septuagenarians who should know better!
Photo shoots in Central Park can be just as creative, if less angular. There's a woman under that blue dress.
A traffic light on Park Drive intensified the fall foliage colors.
En route to Little Bear Ridge Road, I passed Yvette Mayorga's "Magic Grasshopper" which celebrated '90s nostalgia in Times Square. Oh to be in my forties again!
Something about this new tower on the East Side keeps catching my eye.
Larry Bell's "Improvisations in the Park" include "Pacific Red II" (2017).
I was passing through Madison Square on my way to pick up a coffee-table book about Salvatore Ferragamo only available at Rizzoli's.
Here's that skinny new tower again, from a different angle.
Florida weather began to look pretty tempting on a bitterly cold day at Columbus Circle.
But that's the thing about fall in New York: one day it's freezing, the next day it's not.
I never realized how good the people watching can be in Washington Square Park. You also can get high just by inhaling.
Thom told me a new walkway opened for pedestrians on the south side of the Edward Koch Bridge.
It offered views of Manhattan and Queens I'd never seen before.
Clouds enveloped the super talls near Columbus Circle while I biked to the theater district to see Oedipus, the best show I saw this season. Bye-bye Broadway until next spring.
Ghosts haunted the entrance to the Belnord on the Upper West Side for Halloween.
Thom and I celebrated our birthdays with a delicious but overpriced meal at Milo's and Hell's Kitchen afterwards. It finally made me an Alicia Keys fan.
I found myself back in Queens a week later for the Friendsgiving dinner that Thom hosted for our Fire Island Forever crowd after it had been postponed from Columbus Day due to bad weather. I made pumpkin cheesecake for the first time since 1988. My kitchen may never recover.
In between my endless blogging about my wonderful two-week trip to Italy just after fall began, I also found time to see several exhibits, including "Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity" at the Jewish Museum
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| "Hallelujah Suite [Psalm 150]" (1970) |
. . . "Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties" at Lévy Gorvy Dayan
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| Barbara Kruger (1987) |
. . . "Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, and The Ruckus Construction Co.: Excerpts from “Ruckus Manhattan” at the Brooklyn Museum
. . . and "The Mad, MAD World of Jonathan Adler" at the Museum of Art & Design.
I also trekked to Soho to catch "Law and Order" at Jeffrey Deitch, a gallery show of works by Sam McKinniss, a Brooklyn-based gay artist who paints from photos. I get why he chose Jeremy Meeks
. . . but even a very young Marco Rubio seemed a little out of right field.
On Wooster Street, everything looks artistic.
Would you believe it's a half-century since Patti Smith released the incomparable "Horses?" Franz Gertsch painted these oversize portraits from photos he took when she performed in Cologne four years later.
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| Patti Smith III |
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| Patti Smith IV |
Manhattan's holiday windows began their temptation early.
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| Marc Jacobs, Soho |
MoMA PS1 put a well-deserving Vaginal Davis on the museum map with an extraordinarily gender-bending retrospective
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| "Naked on my Ozgoad: Fausthaus - Anal Deep Throat" (Cowardly Lion detail, 2024) |
. . . and the august New York Public Library celebrated the centenary of The New Yorker, a slightly less august local institution, both of which have mightily shaped my perspective.
Knowing I wouldn't be around for Christmas as usual, I wanted to make Thanksgiving in North Andover something special for Dagny, Della & Desi. When Magda and Zoltan were growing up, they loved examining the contents of "my secret drawer" at 47 Pianos, which I filled with things children might find interesting, including some items from my own childhood. "Why not make it portable for the D-Kids?" I thought, and introduce them to Andy Warhol by collaging it in reproductions of his art from an old datebook? Voila!
My strategy worked, thanks to an old case Chris gave me last winter when he began scanning his father's old circus slides. Della grabbed a tiny microphone; the frozen minute and second hands on my first Seiko wristwatch fascinated Dagny; and Desi ecstatically chased a battery-operated VW Beetle that reminded Magda of Herr Cucaracha even though it only spun doughnuts backwards. I'm pretty sure the D-Kids will be just as excited by the arrival of "Andy's Secret Case" next year.
T Lo, their grandfather, surprised me with another blast from our past: the postcards I sent to him and Audrey when I toured Australia. He and I had recently turned 30.
Although Zoltan, 35, couldn't make Thanksgiving this year, he had been Down Under himself just the month before. He visited many of the same places I had in a kind of generational chime 40 years later. Unlike me, however, he actually got to see a koala in the wild.
Before departing North Andover, I took Magda, the D-Girls and Moofy on a hike Tom and I made previously. Neither Dagny nor Della stopped whining until we reached the frigid shore of Lake Cochichewik for a photo op with the always eager but now semi-blind Moofy. In dog years, he's even older than I am.
They even ascended to the top of Osgood Hill without complaint.
The leaves may not turn colors in south Florida but you do get about an hour more daylight and sunsets like these.
You'll also find elaborate Christmas displays on South Flagler Drive. Just don't look too closely at Santa's baseball cap.
There's truly fine dining available, too, at Oceano Kitchen where the shrimp risotto
. . . was MUCH yummier than the one I ordered in Milan.
That's to say nothing of the Folly's other advantages: an onsite washer/dryer, a car instead of a bike for doing my grocery shopping and, not least of all, enough space to host guests eager to escape winter's chill in the Palm Beaches, just like the manatees.
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