Saturday, September 17, 2011

Septemberish New York

One might well ask: so what is the great deal about living in this incredibly full metropolis when you can't/don't/haven't even tried to see and do 1/2000000the of everything? Well, I can tell you. It is that you could if you wished to. Concerts in the park, as well as in enclosed spaces (except I always love unenclosed spaces, such as Central Park, where the Philharmonic just played -- and we didn't go, but my husband was playing the piano, and what is better than that?)

Yes, to commemorate 9/11, there was Bach, there was Brahms, there was all of whatever anyone could do. We went out to our habitual Performers of Westchester, where my husband has been going for 32 years, and sat in someone's living room to hear a great group of musicians -- some Dvorak, a Bach Toccata, the Mozart C major String Quartet  and the G Minor Piano Quartet,  and as an encore, a movement from the Brahms F Minor Piano Quintet...

I did get to the Richard Serra Drawing show, a retrospective at the Met: and loved the severity and the sweep of it, reminiscent of Egypt - I remember going there first with  my son Matthew, and climbing up a little way of the pyramid of Cheops at night...

And you could choose what to love in the rearrangement of the fourth and fifth floors of the Museum of Modern Art, under the auspices of the newly-arrived Ann Temkin -- and now an enormous and welcome De Kooning. The Old Man and the Museum, runs a piece in the New York Times about Hemingway's choices of paintings, now in the Met...To go with this, The Sun also Rises is playing at the New York Theater Workshop...

Example of having to choose: between Hilary Spurling, such a great biographer, and Red Grooms' opening at on Wed. night -- right after my seminar, how in the goodness to choose?

All these events, and still the signage in Central Park changing seems the most exciting to me: because the new typeface is called Titling Gothic! On 1, 500 new signs! I was initially all excited, thinking it was Tilting Gothic, and I felt the joy of the signs all sliding on a tilt... a short=lived joy, but the enduring one is someone paying attention to fonts on any signs whatever.


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