At halftime in the first game of the NBA finals the Spurs are up 5 over Cleveland.
Today was … the MOMA.
Jyoti isn’t a great fan; she says she likes the architecture but not the art. I took the subway on down then walked over a few blocks. Once inside I got a ticket — $12 for a student — and got an audio guide. I saw the outside sculpture garden and then looked at the massive Richard Serra “sculptures” on the 2nd level. Alas, no photos allowed.
And then I got myself into the free 1:30 “lecture” / “tour” — this time it dealt with post-1945 art, and it was rather well done. The vocabulary was no problem for me, but I can imagine that the lecturer — a volunteer, perhaps a local grad student — was leaving a few folks behind. Plus she pronounced “homage” as “ah-mage.”
Once the tour was over I went through the rest of the 4th floor (where the lecture had taken place) on my own — it had the post-WWII stuff, then went upstairs for more Serra (the audio commentary by Serra was *great*) and then back to the 5th floor for the rest of the paintings and sculptures — the pre-WWII stuff (Picasso, Impressionists, and more). Then down a few floors for more art, including photographs and the “Comic Abstraction” exhibition. There was also a nifty selection of modern design as well as architectural stuff (models, drawings) — when you see the utopian, social-critique nature of “modernist” works, so highly urban but still interested in landscape and gardening, interested in form and function and housing for the masses, then you can understand postmodernism as a reaction: more about personal interaction with space and not with function or “form.” Less utopian.
On TNT tonight they had “Mean Girls” showing and so I found myself staying in to watch it — I saw it a few years ago, before Berlin. It’s hilarious, a great social critique, though it does become sentimental at the end. People ask “what happened to Lindsay Lohan?” but that’s the wrong question. When people are thinking of the “sweet” Lohan, who wasn’t in trouble, they were thinking of the characters she was playing — it wasn’t Lohan, it was the roles. And when they see “her” “in trouble” now they are looking at her in the press, not her roles. The problem is comparing her characters with her behavior, and we simply have little to no “unmanaged” pre-17-year-old Lohan public behavior to compare/contrast with her partying, boozing, etc.
But this is uninteresting. Back to the basketball game for me. And Jyoti’s cookies and cornbread.
