So, Friday was a lovely Brooklyn-based day of fun. In the afternoon I went to the Brooklyn Museum, which is a wonderful old building fused with some new, glass modernist sections. It works very well, and it's a lovely space. They are currently showing an exhibition of works from the last ten years of Andy Warhol's career (and life). It was interesting stuff, showing how he moved away from the pop-art creations that had made him famous through expressionist stuff (which went over my head) to film and television output. His television programs seemed to consist of him talking to famous people of the time and his friends, and filming inside the nightclubs they frequented. All hideously self-indulgent, but a fun look at hipster fashions of the time. Which are pretty close to hipster fashions now, in fairness.
The other floors of the museum displayed an American fashion exhibition, which had some beautiful pieces, and an extensive African art section. I need to go back to have a better look at their painting collection, though I did see the marvellous Rodin sculptures in the entrance hall and plaza.
On Friday evening, I went to Prospect Park to watch the Low Anthem and Swell Season play a free gig as part of Celebrate Brooklyn! - a series of events to raise money for the local area and draw attention to it. I met some very friendly women in the queue - two psychologists who lived on the Upper West Side and a chatty girl from the Dominican Republic who lives in Spanish Harlem. She has offered to show me her neighbourhood, so I may well take her up on that. The Low Anthem were great, as usual, and Swell Season (which is one of the guys from The Commitments and the girl who was in Once with him) were gentle and easy to listen to. Lovely stuff.
Saturday brought more art in the shape of MOMA, which was mind-boggling in its scale. I tend to think of Modern Art galleries to be like Tate Modern, but this went a little further back than that. If I have any advice, I would suggest starting on the 5th floor and working your way down. The 5th and 4th floors are the painting floors, and they have some really wonderful (and well-known, perhaps unsurprisingly) stuff. I went with a Chinese girl I met on the walking tour last week, as she gets in free for working for the UN. We went to a Matisse exhibition (she had never heard of Matisse), then wandered through the paintings floors, with me explaining who some of the artists were (she hadn't heard of most of them) and who Marilyn Monroe was (there was a Warhol portrait). I suppose you take for granted that people will know these things, but she grew up in rural China, so it's not that surprising that her knowledge of Western culture would be limited.
After taking a break for lunch (beef gyros from the food stand in the market outside), we visited the photography, architecture and design floors (which was fantastic), then a Picasso exhibition and the very beautiful and peaceful sculpture garden. What a brilliant place. Shame it usually costs $20 a visit.
Sunday was my day of rest, and then today I decided to walk to midtown. This took three hours of walking in a (mostly) straight line. There I watched Rosemary's Baby at the free outdoor cinema in Bryant Park (which also has petanque and table tennis tables - must remember that). It was rather lovely, marred only by a snogging couple on one side of me and a bickering couple on the other.
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