Lovers

This weekend has just been so good. Now it's Sunday and tomorrow is Monday. Typical. But anyway, working is the reason I'm able to be here in the first place, right? So Thursday I cleaned the apartment with fervor. Friday we ate bagels and left for the Morgan Library at 36th and Madison. There, we decided to view just the Bob Dylan Experience Music Project Exhibit. We loved it, positively loved it. Very smartly organized, and it was neat to see the roots of such a legendary icon. I learned a thing or two that I hadn't previously known, for instance that he and Joan Baez were a passionate item for a while (silly for me not to know that, I know. Especially given I've adored them both for so long and seen both in concert once each). Makes perfect sense. And I saw fragments of a documentary called Don't Look Back that I'm going to buy sometime. We listened to bits of different early albums, read old manuscripts and lyric sheets and notes. We spent an hour or so wandering through this. After that, we emerged back into the gorgeous weather (lovely, lovely day) and headed north to the MoMA. I know my intensity for visual art tends to wane at times, and over the course of several years I have tried to determine why. At one time I was on fire for art - for a longer time than not. But being in the MoMA revived every ache for art I've ever had, particularly seeing paintings such as the above posted (Rene Magritte, The Lovers). I suppose a lot of what I loved (love) about visual art is what can be expressed without lengthy verbal exposition or harmonies of sound - for instance, here. The title of the painting functions on plenty of levels to assist the viewer with the content of the painting, but I doubted, standing before it the other day, even the necessity of a title: I think the embrace hooded by sheets suggests enough itself. And the seeming rotation of the room is interesting, too. I can stand in front of splashes of color like with the Pollocks we saw, or the cubist works and I understand, but don't necessarily love it. Not anymore. But something like this painting, where human expression is illustrated without showing faces, without complicating the concept of love (not that this painting is even just about love to begin with) reminds me precisely what is to love about visual expression. Anyway, the whole MoMA experience was a positive. Craig is a fantastic museum companion. He isn't snotty about art, which is something I find myself not missing when it comes to the art experience (I dealt with my fair share of being a snotty art critic and exposure to others at Indiana - I think I exhausted myself of it then). Now I just prefer to love it if I love it or leave it if I don't. Seems like a fair enough approach. After spending good amounts of time at the MoMA, we ate lunch at PJ Clarke's, which appears in our Best Bars of New York book. Then we came home, rested, and dolled up to head to The Bitter End, where we saw Lauren play a couple of weeks back. The opening band was Derek James - they were really pretty good. That was the draw, for me - I looked up the calendar of events and found them (him plus band) and picked that as our activity for the night. After Derek James, a young girl held her CD release party - this was brutal to endure. She's teen talent, which I have nothing against, of course, but it showed. After her set, another woman came out, who was also decent. Basically, we spent our day off soaking in good (and semi-good) art and music. Yesterday we experimented with photographing ourselves for our passport photos. I thought we were going to strangle each other. We wanted to approach it from two different perspectives. But, the outcome proved to be successful, only, when we pulled together all of our info, photos and ourselves, hurried up 91st Street to the Post Office, we discovered our efforts were in vain: Veteran's Day - Closed USPS. We just forgot, I guess. So, yesterday we really didn't do a whole lot of anything. It was good, though. I managed to spill forth a short story based on some notebook writing I had done in 1996. It felt good - write, write, write. Today we're going to Eric's gallery opening in Brooklyn but hopefully will be home relatively early in the afternoon, in time enough for me to go at it some more - write, write, write. The practice is what I need most. I'm slowly, so slowly discovering elements that steer a narrative in the direction of being a narrative. It's weird to see my old writing, to realize how much more open my mind was then. But it's good to remind myself, too. I can't be afraid anymore. I am working on this for me, for nothing else. It's proving to be a happy journey. And a difficult one.*Here's to Sunday, the final day of my much needed and much loved time off.