culture diary, day 1

Saturday.
Morning. Thank you D for delicious iced coffee you made for me to bring down. It's delicious and what a luxury to have it already made.

Rework entry posted evening before. Much improved after numerous edits and republishings. Glad no page hits last night since initial entry was unsatisfactory (was more tired than I realized, plus am not ergonomically comfortable working at this computer). Listen to youtubes of Grapefruit Moon and Stella the Artist. Jumpstart next book to read, White Heat: the Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple. Very engaging, immediate prose.

Is it always 39 and overcast in Shishmaref?

Revel in disregarding customary rules and habits for a few days. Go about apartment in the nude. Breakfast on cold chicken leg, beet, and apricot. Boil eggs to pack as a snack.

Noon. Leave apartment. See that flowers in windowbox across the street that first registered as lavender are in fact purple and pink. No need to stop at library. Walk up Clinton the way I have done a million times before. Pass by ancient picturesque church with numerous placards announcing Fourth of July community cookout with "champagne, wine, and beer available." Bring your own meat to grill! Sounds like fun, though I won't go.

Pass by Cadman Park. Guy without shirt jogs past. Looks good.

Walk across bridge. Harbor water is a beautiful teal blue. All kinds of pedestrian/cycling conflicts. I'm in speedwalk mode to reach other end. Thread my way through a sea of clumping tourists taking endless photos of themselves against backdrop of where once there were towers.

Swipe old Metrocard - 20 cent balance. Add $8. Stand on uptown #4 next to sorta cute guy reading paperback of someone's memoirs of Northern Greece, an NYRB edition I believe. Scan subway ads. Spy familiar image, the iconic E.D. daguerrotype. Poetry in Motion. Small world. No, probably a tie-in with the NYBG exhibit.

How happy is the little Stone
That rambles in the Road alone
And doesn't care about Careers
And Exigencies never fears --
Whose Coat of elemental Brown
A passing Universe put on,
And independent as the Sun
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute Decree
In casual simplicity --

Squeeze into seat. Doors between cars burst open. Passengers held hostage by streetyouth acrobats. They stomp up and down crowded car doing somersaults, backflips, fast break dances, and interlocked, wheeling rollovers, coming perilously close to crashing into seated passengers at any moment. The guy with the Greek memoir laughs safely at the doors, while I flinch and draw back in my seat. The grimy performers are amazing but scary in such a confined space. It's like that dangerous knife game Marina does, pounding a knife fast between her fingers. They don't crash into anyone, but one of them seems to bang his head hard against the ceiling and passengers gasp. He laughs and says "gotcha" - it was a noisy illusion intended to disturb.

Definitely give them a dollar. Think that if they could do their act in a narrow hallway at MOMA in the buff they'd be rich and famous.

1:30. At the Met Museum. The dollar I gave to the performance art acrobats was kind of a big deal, I'm tight on funds. Think about taking it out of the "recommended" admission to the Met. Hand clerk ten-dollar bill. Consider asking for dollar back. Decide that's too cheap even for me. Even so (admission is $20) she tries to shame me. Says loudly and pointedly - ten, that's it? As if I've made a mistake. No comment. I'm an artist, long term unwaged. Maybe I'll return later in the week with another ten.

See Met Museum fashion exhibit American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity. Am simultaneously, or by turns, impressed and turned off. Mannequins clothed in beautiful garments are imaginatively staged in a variety of tableaux (such as Newport beach, swanky bohemian parlor, pond and woods in dead of winter) - with music, birdsong, film montages, painted sets, Tiffany lamps, badminton rackets, ice skates, riding switches, and other props. By the end of the show (sponsored by the Gap and Conde Nast) feel that I've been manipulated through a Sex & the City board game of girlie archetypes. Feel like rinsing head out with mouthwash. Plus it's vaguely offensive, not to mention discouraging. I'm built more like a "rounded French Venus" than a "lithe American Diana" that, as signage proclaims, a century ago summarily overtook and replaced French Venus as the iconic American ideal. I enter a dimly lit room staged as an elegant parlor, with slim, bewigged mannequins dressed in exquisite, ornate silk ballgowns. Make eye contact with a guard, an older black woman who stands unobtrusively in the shadows. Feel a little embarrassed to be there. Inner sarcastic eyeroll.

At the end is a mousetrap of a gift shop, with merchandising displays relating to the various archetypes - Heiress, Flapper, Screen Siren, Patriot & Suffragist. Don't see Bohemian, which I related to the most - figures - is it because it's the least valued in our culture?

Pass through Met's installation of its Picasso holdings, wares all on display. It's so comprehensive it's too much to take in (plus feet hurt). One room contains hundreds of small framed lithographs - one wants to linger, feels guilty not, but that quantity is impossible for anyone to take in, isn't it? I do get a little out of it, though. Blue Period preceded Rose Period. Disturbing semi-erotic self-portrait of Picasso being serviced by wraithlike whore - he stares not at her but at himself in a (presumed) mirror, maja-like. I read that Picasso's greatest dread was syphilitic blindness. Syphilis and gonorrhea - I am so pure of the driven snow that I actually have to google to come to any understanding. Which I did days before (what prompted me?). Wiki images of symptoms were so horrific I never got to the blindness bit.

Walk down Fifth Avenue. My feet gave out a long while back, practically when I set foot in museum. (Realize that Merrills are not a luxury for me, but rather a necessity. Skechers aren't cutting it.) Alongside verdant shaded park, fall in step behind a couple, a slim young woman in a slinky, seagreen ankle-length dress, straight blonde hair falling on her bare back. She murmurs charmingly in a European accent, Slavic I guess, and the older man (though not old) intently and nervously listens to her. This is a set up date, I think. Teenage girl walking in opposite direction gives seagreen mermaid siren the once-over and shoots her a dirty look. Siren is oblivious. I wonder if it's a sophisticated scam. She is smooth. Is she a call girl, or a trickster? Someone is watching.

All through the day - here in the city - unbidden, unwelcome jolts of psychic pain. I keep seeing them, the white men with their slim, petite Asian girlfriends, the affluent, good-looking white men with their slim, petite, intelligent-looking Asian wives and mingled progeny. So very many. More than I would have thought statistically prevalent. Or is it that I'm very sensitive? I notice every time. I don't understand.

Slavic to bed, Asian ideal to wed? Very discouraging, for this Slavic Venus who tried very hard to make something of herself. A long time ago, in college, I owned an Indian cotton seagreen dress, and was told that I looked good in that color. Chenille sleeping sweater aside, I didn't realize how coded a shade that is.

My feet seriously hurt. Board crowded M3 at 74th Street. Stand, then sit, then give up seat to elderly woman. She thanks me. The men sit and the women give up their seats, she says. Way of the world, I reply. The bus rolls past Saks Fifth Avenue and I think of Miss Dior.

Get off at 42nd, head to Grand Central. It must be at least 4 (I've been trying in vain to read people's watches on the bus) but at GCT I'm shocked to read the glowing antique clock. Is it wrong? It's only a bit past three. How is that possible when I left the apartment after noon, walked over the bridge, went to the Met, and wore myself out? No lines at the Met - that's why.

Pass by the Grand Central Market emporium and remember about the awesome ripe French camembert. It's gone up a dollar, and I have just enough to get it and, at the L'Occitane shop, a bar of refreshing verbena soap, a small luxury that will make my stay in the apartment feel even more like a lovely B&B.

On subway back to Brooklyn endure endless ridiculous suggestions of drunk (I suspect) woman advising Aussie vacationing couple about what they should do in NY. At Chelsea Piers you can do blah blah blah blah blah. Oh you should definitely walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. And then you should take the 41 bus to Prospect Park. It's not that long a ride, 25 minutes not even. And there you can do all kinds of things, rent a rowboat. Don't even bother with Central Park. The Aussie guy in shorts is polite and gamefaced, and his wife laughs and smiles politely at the blather. A homeless guy comes by with his shtick. They are ALL out today.

Look up at ads. Here's another Poetry in Motion, from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.”

Doors open at City Hall and a conservatively dressed elderly black gentleman boards. He looks like an old-fashioned doctor with his neat black bag. Doors close. For duration of ride he lectures to captive public about Hera and St. John the Baptist, and how he got beheaded for telling the Truth because no one wants to hear the Truth. He himself is oblivious to the irony of his unsolicited repeating of this particular tale. I think that no one is listening, but then a young straphanger with an Ivy League appearance, sensitive, preppy, intellectual, moves towards the man, stops, and appears to attend closely to him. At Borough Hall, I get off. Not sure about the preacher and his disciple.

Back at the apartment at 4:30. So early, too early for wine. Consider going to the movies, or out for a drink and coffee to write, but am too beat. Surf internet, then pour glass of wine. Jot down notes towards a post. Dinner is fettuccine with homemade pesto, and poached salmon. KZE streams. The cat really likes the music. She hangs in the room listening to it and she seems livelier and more animated than other times I've been here. She's blinked at me a few times approvingly.

Time now for a shower, and to embark on day 2, Sunday. Hitting send at 10:00 a.m. Many kisses, darling.