Wednesday, 3/24

Meeting Alan again was a real treat, and we had a lot of fun seeing actually three special exhibits with him. First, Tim Burton. Amazing! I had no idea he did so much painting and drawing. Some walls were practically covered from floor to ceiling with his work. Burton draws you into his wacky, dark, subversive, devilish, crazed universe and you never want to leave! There was Edward Scissorhands and stuff from Ed Wood and Mars Attacks! Oh, my. I am now on a personal Tim Burton film festival, starting with Big Fish.

Then, we took a break and had lunch in the fun MoMA cafe (great arugula!) A woman across from us took our picture. She had a tattoo of a wrist watch where a watch would be. Her tattooed watch had the word "now" on the face.

The other exhibits: Marina Abramovic who is a performance artist. This was a retrospective of many years of her work, with videos of performance pieces. Marina herself was there and was performing a piece in which she sat at a table continuously throughout the day (I don't know how she did that, frankly). There was a chair across from her on the other side of the table. Museum visitors would line up (sometimes waiting for hours) and take turns sitting in the other chair, and she and they would simply gaze at each other. Quite stunning! In another part, there were two nude women standing and facing each other closely in a doorway from one exhibit room into another. Museum visitors could walk between them, or there was another way to get into the next hall as well (thankfully!). There was also a piece which had a massive pile of cattle bones. A lot of jarring images.

And lastly, William Kentridge, a South African artist who does fairly dark, political work, largely dealing with Apartheid. The best parts were his animation pieces which he makes by making charcoal marks and then erasing them and changing them, filming each change. These were shown in small darkened rooms which you could watch as you walked by. Really interesting!

Then, we parted with Alan and dashed off to the TKTS booth in Times Square to get same day theater tickets, and we got tickets for Avenue Q! Then, we actually returned to MoMA and saw more stuff (we really couldn't get enough!) We had street gyros on the way back to the hotel.

Avenue Q was really fun. It features puppets (which resemble muppets) and is not for kids at all! A lot of the songs deal with things that we all think but don't talk about (eg, racism, sex, porn)! And so it is a quite therapeutic experience to have all of that on stage.

Next (whew!) we sauntered off to Marie's Crisis Cafe (really a bar). Two separate friends suggested (no, insisted!) that we go there. It's a piano bar in Greenwich Village where show tunes are featured. What a fun time! Some songs were sing-alongs, and sometimes people did solos. When we left, the piano player and the coat guy gave us hugs!

written by  dafna33 on April 4, 2010 from New York, United States
from the travel blog: New York City 2010
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