Weekend Update

Haven't posted one of these for a while, but this was a good weekend for a general update entry.

Friday -

was a quiet night in. Kind of perfect.

Saturday -

we slept in then went for a fantastic brunch at City Bakery. It was the last day of the Month of Hot Chocolate there. Mmmmm... The food there, while kind of pricey given that it's a serve-yourself buffet, is exceptionally good. Also, as Cory observed, if you don't have kids, it's the type of place that is apt to reinforce your attitudes toward childbearing, whatever they happen to be: it will appeal to you if you want to have kids (so many hip, elegant, interesting-seeming young families) or if you want NEVER to have kids (they are clearly a handful and a half, and it turns out they make a certain amount of noise).

Then I met Terry at MoMA, where we walked through the Martin Kippenberger exhibition. It was very very good - an ambitious retrospective of a wildly prolific artist who burned out and died way too young.

He comes through as a sort of Picasso-obsessed Duschamp disciple by way of Gerhard Richter with a heavy dose of cult-of-my-own-personality Warhol thrown in for good measure. But more original than that slapdash description implies. Also fascinating to me is that he came from a theater/acting background. You should see the show go if you have a chance.




One little note here: kudos to MoMA for overhearing what I (and surely several others) had been saying for some time and offering some audio tours online as podcasts. But why only some of them? If they're already set up for it, I'd think that all the tours (the current ones, at least) would be uploadable. I see why they'd be reluctant to post images of all the works, but it would be quite the useful convenience to be able to download the recorded tour ahead of time, maybe even listen to it between visits. They could restrict some of them to museum members, and make it a selling point. There's got to be somebody at MoMA whose job it is to follow blog alerts - got an answer for me here? Art partisans want to know.

Then Terry and I went to his studio and looked at some of his recent work. Some really good stuff. He's in the process of setting up his website - I'll be sure to link to it when it's running - and looking to get some gallery exhibitions going. If you've been to my place in the last couple years, you probably know that he's responsible for the big multi-panel piece I have up. I'll be shooting that for Terry's site, and maybe I'll post some of the images here too.

We went out and had some food as we watched Duke win a perilously close and hard-fought game against unranked Virginia Tech. Then we headed down to the Village to see Gomorrah, an Italian film which was the darling of all the New York critics last week, about the Neapolitan crime organization Camorra. Problem was, it was sold out. Sad. This is what happens when a movie gets to be the critical fave du jour. SO - we made a call and bought some advance tix at Lincoln Plaza so we could see a later showing uptown. It was good; maybe not really worth the hype, but I was in an especially Italian mood.

Have I mentioned that Cory and I are taking a trip to Rome? Well, we are. I reckon I'll be more than usually enthusiastic about things Italian for the next little while, at least.

Sunday -

I woke up early for some reason and went to the gym for the first time in over a week (I had been sick, and then had a procedure done on my tendonitis-ridden elbow) So that felt good. Then I moved Lola and ran some errands, made a good breakfast, read part of the paper, did a bunch of housework, listened to some great music, talked on the phone a LOT, including the all-important call to my sister, whose birthday was Friday (hey - I called her a bunch of times before I managed to get her on the phone). Also got to watch a good chunk of a Red Sox pre-season game: Beckett and Wakefield both looked strong, so that's good news. Whipped together what was actually a pretty fab dinner (ziti with a chicken, mushroom & artichoke cream sauce), watched a great episode of the Simpsons, did a little reading (including some out-loud Julius Caesar vocalizing - told you I was getting enthusiastic) and went to bed not too too late.

And that was my weekend. So there.