I regularly trek all over Manhattan, but not until I read an article in the Times in this hottest of summers since my 50s did I pay much attention to the asphalt hierogylyphics below me. "Shallow Cover" is as good a metaphor for my approach to life as any: see as much as you can at least once, from local night spots (in my youth) to American landmarks to world capitals (Seoul and Beijing are next).
Christine and I ferried across the Hudson to Weehawken for her niece's wedding dinner at the end of June, right in the middle of Word Cup joy.
I spent the nation's semiquincentennial in Quechee getting to know Desi a bit better. Then obsessed by PAW Patrol, he already has left trucks and Darth Vader in the late-toddler rear-view mirror.
A late-August visit to the 223 Club in North Andover provided a brief suburban interlude
. . . complete with baleful goats.
Tom and I picked up fresh corn and too-salty chocolates at Boston Hill Farm.
Andy is everywhere. The memory of a pot roast my mother made with Cream of Mushroom soup still makes my mouth water.
Dagny and I took a liking to ginger beer, a first for both of us.
It turns out we share a passion for collecting natural things, too. Thanks, Joe, for providing PhotoPest with some relief.
He and Della shot some hoops while I shot video from the ground below, as instructed.
Back in New York, triple digit temps occasionally forced me to walk in the morning instead of late afternoon. Lap swimmers have a lane reserved at the Gottesman Pool in Central Park
. . . but this birdbath in the Conservatory Garden is almost as deep!
Yellow blooms flooded the park even if orange and blue were the most-worn colors of the season.
Andrew & Steven invited me to join them for a "Park-to-Park Pride Walking Tour" on Manhattan's Upper West Side co-sponsored by Landmark West! and the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project. We met the excellent guides at the Eleanor Roosevelt statue in Riverside Park. I will never forget the sign in Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo that explained the absence of a rhino with an unflattering allusion to one of the nation's most influential First Ladies. Just read Palimpsest if you don't believe me.
James Baldwin, author of Giovanni's Room, bought this townhouse on West 71st Street for him and his family in 1965. The current owners have refused to have a commemorative plaque affixed to the exterior, perhaps to deter gawkers like us.
The 167th Street subway station in the Bronx gives Baldwin and Audre Lorde, another LGBTQ icon, their due. They're included in "Beacons," a series of mosaics created by Rico Gatson.
I discovered them trying to see an exhibit at the Bronx Museum of Art on three different occasions. Checking out the newish Yankee Stadium was another compensation of two failed weekend subway trips. I haven't been there since Barnet, Anthony and I went to the Gay Games in 1994.
But mostly I meandered through Manhattan.
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| "Looking Towards the Avenue" by Jim Dine (1990) |
An official gridlock day declared during the World Cup made it possible to imagine midtown without trucks and cars.
I used to take Lincoln Center for granted but in light of what our Liar-in-Chief is doing to the Kennedy Center, it seems particularly precious. Plus, the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel at the Philharmonic has given it some real buzz for a change.
The amount of public art in Manhattan is truly staggering. Walking uptown on Fifth Avenue (not my usual direction) I noticed, for the first time, the scandalous Evelyn Nesbit, who has loomed above lower West 27th street for several years. Coincidentally, she figures in Ragtime, the best musical I saw this summer.
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| "The Gilded Lady" by Tristan Eaton (2022) |
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| "Vandal Gummy Bear" by WhisBe |
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| "Brushstrokes" by Roy Lichtenstein (2001) |
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| American Merchant Mariners' Memorial by Marisol Escobar (1991) |
Twenty-five years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, a phoenix truly has risen from the ashes. Despite the event's subsequent and sustained impact on my career, it really does seem so long ago, especially if you're awaiting a verdict from Guantanamo.
Once upon a time, there were Republican Secretaries of State who supported abolition and responsibly negotiated for the acquisition of new American territory. I didn't know that William H. Seward also served as governor of New York.
I'm not sure how I feel about retail wraps of building facades on Fifth Avenue since LVMH made them a thing at the corner of East 57th Street. Prada's shade of green is pretty soothing, though.
As Hudson Yards construction creeps west, ever closer to the river,
. . . St. Patrick's Cathedral and other gothic buildings look increasingly anachronistic--and ever more charming.
Air conditioning propelled me to museums and galleries almost as much as one terrific exhibit after another. "Musical Bodies" at the Met couldn't have been more engaging.
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| Rockford "Little Dick" guitar by Hamer Guitars (2008); Caricature by Johnny Johnson (mid-20th century) |
"Art of Freedom: The Life and Work of Arthur Szyk" at the Museum of Jewish Heritage illustrated how historical context informs attitudes about Israel and Zionism.
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| "Modern Moses" (1943) |
"Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds" at the Jewish Museum mostly focused on the artist's later works, created after he fled Nazi Germany and little-seen in the United States.
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| "Kettledrummer" (1943) |
"Declaring America: 1776 & Beyond" at the New York Public Library offered an idiosyncratic take on the semiquincentennial. George Biddle painted the rear of the Beaux Arts lamdmark building in 1920; the work hangs in the Salomon Reading Room, along with the rest of the library's ungetpatchka art collection.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a British artist of Ghanaian heritage, paints Black subjects from her imagination, typically doing ordinary things. Jack Shaiman showed her work across two galleries, in Lower Manhattan
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| "Three Yesses Closer to a No" (2026) |
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| "8 Spectres in Damask" (2025) |
. . . and in Chelsea. Her portraits exist independent of place and time, imbuing them with a languorous relatability.
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| "Wake-Keeper" (2026) |
At MoMA's superb Marcel Duchamp retrospective, visitors recognize even a "Readymade" shadow can be conceptual art.
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| "Bottle Rack" |
You've got to love the bike racks in front of the museum, too!
TaÃna H. Cruz, my favorite discovery of the Whitney Biennial, created "I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back" on a billboard outside the museum.
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| Untitled (partial, 1969) |
Unlike David Hockney and Julian Schnabel, whose shows were running concurrently at the same gallery, Thek didn't play the art game very well. After buying a house in Normandy, Hockney painted the full moon with his i-Pad during nine months of the pandemic.
I once tried to schedule my Pines vacations around the same occurrence, marveling how the aspirin-white light cast shadows on the beach just like a Cat Stevens song and illuminated the Enchanted Forest.
"Julian Schnabel: Italy Through Its Trees" certainly captured the colors of the Tuscan landscape I saw at the Boboli Gardens last fall, but the repetitiveness of his mostly plate-painting series seemed more like a cash grab than an artistic statement. He probably needs the dough to continue financing his side gig as a film director, particularly after his latest effort, In the Hand of Dante, couldn't decide if it wanted to be a gangster movie or a meditation on authenticity. Still, cutting some slack for the man who made Basquiat (with Bowie as Andy!) and especially Before Night Falls comes easily.
David Byrne, a Talking Head himself, decorated PACE's very cool stairwells.
Love & Fury: New York’s Fight Against AIDS vividly documented an era when luck, protest and behavioral change, not PrEP, were the only life-saving strategies for the men of my generation. Viewing the small exhibit, my first at Poster House, felt a little bit like waking up from a nightmare: relief that it's over, but still shaken.
Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen, another exhibit at the Poster House, proved to be just as powerful.
The Jim Crow era segregated more than public transportation and lunch counters. It spawned an entertainment industry that primarily catered to Black audiences weary of minstrelsy. But things were not always as they seemed on screen. Herbert Jeffries jumped at the chance to star in Harlem on the Prairie, an "all-colored" western musical, because he wanted Black boys in the South to understand they could ride the range, too. Jeffries, however, was actually an opportunistic man of mixed race who sometimes darkened his skin and the movie became such a hit that it received national distribution with a little help from Gene Autry, the (white) "Singing Cowboy" and Civil Rights supporter.
By the time Stepin Fetchit (who took his name from a race horse who won him some money) made Big Timers, he already was America's first Black millionaire, thanks to his successful transition from vaudeville to Hollywood. But he hadn't appeared on screen in five years because he hadn't been paid as much as white stars as well as pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for the negative stereotyping that resulted from his racist persona as the "Laziest Man in the World." In this musical comedy short, he dialed back the indolence, accepting a minor role as a hard-working hotel bell-hop so he could demonstrate his scatting chops. Nevertheless, producers gave him top billing; no word on whether or not audiences felt cheated.
If you ever go to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, late afternoon sunlight and a ferry ride to or from Manhattan immeasurably enhances the out-of-the-way experience.
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| "The Ring" (1945-48) |
When I say that Pope. L doesn't remind me of any other artist, it's a compliment of the highest order. The man really operated on his own wavelength.
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| "Death Queen Chaney"(1998-2008) |
Did you know that Alice in Wonderland visited New York City shortly before World War II? The Museum of the City of New York provides the whimsical evidence of the charming travelogue, which will eventually return to Gouverneur Hospital, its original home.
A gay photographer drew me to the Morgan Library to see his contact sheets but I ended up enjoying a gay poet's collection of drawings even more.
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| John Ashbery by R.B. Kitaj (1979) |
I wonder what both men would have made of this lone shoe in the park?
