Existential Sunday

How much longer will water towers be visible on New York City roofs?

The prevalence of Manhattan gas stations has declined precipitously within my lifetime, too. A stoned walk to Moynihan Station on Marathon Sunday prompted these existential musings.

At least Jesus is staying put.

Everything's a screen nowadays.

But the new, mirrored construction surfaces lack the unbreakable grandeur of 20th century skyscrapers.  

I wanted to check out some Amtrak-sponsored video art (how's that for an oxymoron?) in the Train Hall. For less than a minute every quarter hour, advertising yields to art, a meta ratio if ever there was one.  When viewed from the balcony, the scratchy black & white animations of Joshua Frankel's "Within the Crowd, There Is a Quality" mimic the activity of the commuters rushing to and fro.

En route to Hudson River Park, I discovered the High Line Moynihan Connector which opened in June.  Now you can walk from the station to the Whitney Museum of Art entirely above street level.  It's pretty fabulous.

New Jersey commuters benefit from the development effect of the High Line, too, with a two-sided art billboard facing both the entrance and exit to the Lincoln Tunnel.

It looks as if Hudson Yards is finished, finally.  You really do get the sense you are in a city of the future, not New York.

Except when you look down.  

Tennis anyone?  Or pickle ball?  I can't tell.

I'd only seen "Old Tree" by Pamela Rosencranz from a distance before.

Apparently the Vessel has become the back-drop for outdoor entertainment.  Boo!

Imagine the view from the top instead of eyesore at the bottom.

At this hour, mirrored construction panels on the Javits Center really do add something to a blah building.

Keys to the Kingdom

When Zoltan mentioned he planned to visit New York in April, I told him he could stay in my apartment for several days before I returned from Florida.  

Although he already had begun peeling the Big Apple,  I suggested he catch the Gerhard Richter show in Chelsea.  Audrey and I had been blown away by MoMA's major survey of the artist in 2002.  Zoltan liked the "mood" works best.

That reminded me he had been obsessed with this mood indicator on my refrigerator as a child.  I re-set it as soon as I got back to 47 Pianos.

1998

We made plans to meet in midtown and got a sneak preview of a new work going up on the High Line.

"Old Tree" by Pamela Rosenkranz

At the Whitney, the colors of this painting drew us both in, separately. I wasn't familiar with the artist.

"Out in the Country" by Gertrude Abercrombie (1939)

If I hadn't read a puzzling story by Rachel Cusk in The New Yorker earlier this month, I wouldn't have known Norman Lewis, either.  Mostly unheralded by the art establishment in his lifetime--he died in 1979-- Lewis was a rare Black abstract expressionist.  His later work moved toward the figurative; this disturbing piece obviously alludes to the Ku Klux Klan.

"American Totem" by Norman Lewis (1960)

I knew Zoltan would enjoy the incredible views from the museum's multiple roof decks. He graciously agreed to point at another landmark building in our meta photo shoot:  tall guy, even taller building.

In this shot, I'm pretty sure he's checking to see if his elusive friend Aaron had gotten back to him yet.

Among other things, Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century examines the plight of the American worker.  After people get fired, they typically pack personal items from their desks in boxes to take home.  In "Contagious Unemployment," Kline displays the contents of these boxes inside plastic containers that resemble viruses under a microscope.  Very high concept.

Has automation or AI made this bagged lawyer's work obsolete?  She's life-size, BTW, and not the only capitalist casualty on display.

A multi-ingredient IV drip enhances overtime efficiency!

I have no idea what Kline was aiming for in this piece but it photographed well.  Eerie video interviews of actors or avatars--I couldn't tell which--impersonating Whitney Houston and Kurt Cobain make the point that entertainers are just as affected by commodification as other workers, if not even more so.

The things you find out about people when you visit a museum together--apparently, Zoltan is addicted to shredding, and not the kind St. Vincent does on her guitar.  Who knew the detritus could be used to stuff a couch?

Even though Zoltan is happily employed and I'm retired, we share the same philosophy about the 9-to-5 grind, working to live rather than living to work.  That probably inoculates us from some of the threats that Kline so creatively exposes.  The wall behind us is covered in Patagonia-branded fabric.

After leaving the Whitney, we checked out Little Island, just across the street.  When Zoltan told me how lucky I have been to live in New York City all my life, I let him know it wasn't always this picturesque.

The waterfront was a lot more industrial when his mother and I used to ride our bikes on the elevated West Side Highway.  Audrey stood on a pier close to Little Island when I took this uptown view in 1979.

Zoltan treated me to dinner at Gennaro, my go-to Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side, where he ordered the risotto and oxtail.   He was pleasantly surprised when I told him to get a spare set of keys made so he could have a place to stay whenever this snowbird flies south.

All it takes for Uncle Jeff to give you the keys to his kingdom, is a nice bottle of cabernet sauvignon and some very tasty orecchiette with broccoli & provolone.  As I texted his father, "to be 33 and in Manhattan!"

Thanks again, Zoltan!

FLASHBACK: Boys Will Be Boys (1996)

In retrospect, it seems a little odd to have invited a couple of teenage boys to visit me when I was in the prime of life.  But there was an underlying agenda:  I wanted to mold their attitudes about what a gay man could be, just like Pedro Zamora had done on MTV's The Real World:  San Francisco.

Barb, my stepsister, agreed to inform her adopted son that I was gay before they flew in from Phoenix.  "Tell BJ he can bring a friend, if that will make him more comfortable," I added. Imagine my surprise when he showed up at LaGuardia with Nick, a kid who easily could have modeled for Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger.  We headed right for the Muller Cottage.  I figured the week before Pride would be relatively quiet.   It was . . . in the Pines where Nick may have gotten the shock of his life after asking BJ why I didn't have a girlfriend.  But fortunately, while we were playing paddle ball on the beach, a topless woman strolled past, heading west and sending the boys into a testosterone frenzy.  After lunch, Nick grabbed his videocamera and they went for a walk, returning breathlessly with guilty looks an hour later.  It took some prying, but they eventually confessed to angering a group of topless women playing touch football on the beach in Cherry Grove, one of whom charged them before demanding they delete the footage. She taught them their first LGBT lesson:  never cross a bull dyke. A gay uncle role model couldn't even come close!

A day later, after a gorgeous sunset, we caught an early train back to Manhattan.  To say they were stoked is an understatement. 

The boys saw the Twin Towers a little more than five years before they fell, en route to the Statue of Liberty.  Don't let Nick's choir-boy looks behind those Oakley sunglasses fool you.  He played highly competitive Scrabble, winning the best two out of three games. "Whiff" on a triple word score, opened by BJ, helped.  

We even ascended to the crown of Lady Liberty.  Several teenage girls standing in line welcomed BJ and Nick a lot more enthusiastically than the wimmin of Cherry Grove.  One gave Nick her room number at the Howard Johnson's hotel.  "In case you get bored."

As if their something-to-prove tour guide would ever let that happen.  BJ wanted to visit a music store so we stopped at Sam Ash near Times Square where he sat down at a drum kit and blew me away with the solo from In-A-Gadda Da-Vida.  Barb told me he was just as talented with computers.

New York City Subway

Empire State Building Observatory

BJ and I totally bonded over our love of music, although his taste was less poppy than mine. Streaming has stolen the IRL joy of visiting a megastore like Virgin.  You'd have to go to a distant continent to find one now.

I gave them the afternoon off before we went to see Miss Saigon.  They may have scored some weed.  BJ definitely bought some fuchsia hair dye.

No Supertalls spoiled the Central Park South skyline then.

A rainy last morning of their visit made the Metropolitan Museum of Art more tempting than it otherwise might have been for a couple of horny teens.  Each of them had been spending a lot more time than strictly necessary in my tiny bathroom with the water running and tissues spilling out of the garbage can.

I would have to wait 25 more years to catch another Winslow Homer retrospective at the Met because BJ & Nick were more interested in artifacts from ancient civilizations and the Middle Ages.

You can be sure I told them I screen-printed my t-shirt using an image from Art Spiegelman's Maus!

Nick now works for the Border Patrol, after several post-9/11 deployments overseas.  I never saw him again.  BJ, now Brett, is a family man in Prescott, AZ where he develops actuarial tables.  We finally caught up over coffee in 2019 after nearly three decades of silence.  I have no idea what either thinks of gay men, but I do know they had a faaaaabulous time!

 

More Barb & BJ:

Welcome Back To New York (2022)

Family  Reunion  (2019)

FLASHBACK:  The Lois Years (1975-1992)

FLASHBACK:  Andress Eagles