Listening to myself think lately. It’s a weird mind I have. A mix of erudition and insight bogged down by laziness and self-loathing. Starting to think the therapist thing is not going as well as I thought. It’s making me more vulnerable. It’s not making me like myself any better, though I guess I could say that I at least saw the possibility of that. This weather is making me uncomfortable. I was out in the rain a lot today. I hate being in the rain. I went into a CVS thinking I would buy an umbrella. I stood in line as the cashiers handed out free garbage bags to a bunch of people who asked very nicely if they could just bum a few Hefty bags to use as ponchos. The cashiers unrolled one bag after another, handing them out as gifts for these people. Everyone was smiling, blushing, stupid cheeky grins. I decided against buying the umbrella. Instead I found a Morton-Williams store and wandered around its basement for several minutes, trying to find a sandwich. No sandwiches. The place seemed claustrophobic. I tried to imagine what had been in this space before. A night club? A brothel? A school for contortionist training? It seemed too small for a grocery store. And products didn’t seem to be where they were supposed to be. The meat was next to the beer cabinet which contained at its center a bucket of artisinal cheeses. I kept looking for sandwiches but kept finding incongruities. A bucket of black plums in the middle of the seafood display. A case of 2-liter Hawaiian Punch bottles in the ethnic food aisle. What is “ethnic” anyway? All food is ethnic food. All music is ethnic music. When I lived on the upper east side I had friends from the lower east side come visit. This was mid 1990s. As we walked around one of them said “Look at all these white people.” I replied “It’s just another ethnic neighborhood.” Another member of this troupe looked at me incredulously. All of us were white but he seemed shocked at the suggestion that white people represented an ethnicity, or an ethnic character. The fact that this rather quarrelsome individual chose to say nothing suggested to me that he realized I was right, or that I at least had a point and that he didn’t want to stir the pot on what was supposed to be my day. They came over to hear me play a piano recital in my living room. Ethnic food at this grocery store included Javanese sardines, Bengali fruit juices, and breakfast cereals from rogue nations. Yesterday I wandered through another grocery store with incongruities to spare. A wine bar at the center of the place was surrounded by coolers filled with meat and pre-made sandwiches. This was at Brookville Center, by the World Trade Center. The Morton-Williams was upper east side. I wandered through that wine bar space feeling like this and everything around it was some kind of mistake. Nothing around here felt like New York. An anytown shopping mall flanked by a World Trade Center Memorial that feels to me like it is flushing the souls of those who died that day down the toilet. I would like to think that the ridged glass facade of the lower floors of the Freedomm Tower are a shoutout to the look of the original Twin Towers but it is hard to imagine something that inspired getting through the acrimonious processes which culminated in the construction of that decidedly pedestrian structure. I don’t care for Banksy’s vandalism work so much I concur on his assessment of the Freedom Tower… though I can’t quote his comments off the top of my head. I learned last week that the site of the first pay telephone/pay station in New York City was right where the Twin Towers memorial is today. North Cove was flanked by mega yachts flaunting conspicuous concentrations of wealth. New York has always had its concentrations of wealth but the peasants’ attitude toward it seemed to be more aspirational and congratulatory in the past than it is today. Today wealth is like a race. The stampede of wealth today is a form of ethnic cleansing. It would be shrewd of somebody to open a bar or restaurant or any kind of shop across from 432 Park, and call that establishment “PEASANTS”.
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I am at a very loud bar. Conspiciouly loud considering it is not even half full.
The Arbus show at the Met Breuer was decidedly unimpressive to me. Small prints, average photos, redeemed by the room I think they called “Ten Photos from an Envelope” or maybe from a box. That room had her famous stuff, which made up for the averageness of the rest of the show. It’s her earliest stuff so I guess you can take that with a grain of pulp. I should try the show again, though. I might not have been primed for it.
The hall was, like the basement grocery store, claustrophobic, and not without its incongruities. The display was pretty tight. Boobs of one woman got in the way of the most notable (to me) shot of a naked overweight woman washing beach sand off herself at a Coney Island shower. Conversation about a bedroom renovation flowed through pictures from Central Park that looked like anything you might find at a thrift shop or estate sale. Adjacent to the main exhibit was a room with photos by Winogrand and other street photographers. The quality of the work in that room exacerbated the averageness of Arbus’ stuff, although to keep it fair these were the greatest hits of those types while most of Arbus’ stuff was early. Her name was at least redeemed by the “Ten Photos” room. There are phone booths in the basement of the Met Breuer.
