the met

Yesterday, I played tourist. I've hardly been to any of the museums or tourist sights this time so I decided a Saturday afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be fun. As did about five million others. But the place is so huge that the crowds don't so much matter. I went to the Met the first time I was here in 1999 and I knew that it was amazing but I had forgotten the feeling of being overwhelmed by how amazing. I was walking around sighing and gasping in some rooms. There was a beautiful and fascinating exhibition called Venice and the Islamic World which was perfect because I love Italian Renaissance art and I love Islamic design.

Then I went into the permanent collection of Renaissance work and worked on my fetish for religious iconography and portraiture. Lots of sighing and gasping here. Room after room of astonishingly exquisite pieces. I didn't want to leave, and must have spent close to an hour in this state of bliss. After I broke away, I wandered randomly through some of the other sections. Like at MoMA or the Louvre, there are so many major pieces of work that a kind of blurring factor happens and you just can't process it all. So after about three hours in the museum, I found myself gliding almost complacently through rooms full of Picasso and Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio. And this is only the European painting section. After the blur factor took hold, I started amusing myself taking sneaky photos of people in the galleries. It's kind of a cliche to go to a museum and photograph people looking at the art but it's fun.

On Friday night, I realised I hadn't been to any performances of any kind either, so I took myself to a contemporary dance piece in an old church in the East Village. Some of it was quite impressive - not much, I have to say - but I don't really know much about dance so it's hard to judge. There was a lot of running in circles around the stage, a lot of writhing around on the floor like a cockroach trapped on its back, and occasionally one of the performers would verbalise into a microphone. The one male performer's main role seemed to be to wheel a big pot plant around the stage a few times and then stand and reflect on it. But I did enjoy the experience of it. It struck me as very New York.

Very not New York, I imagine, will be Kansas where I go on Thursday to visit my friend Jorge, which I'm really looking forward to. I'll be sure to wear my Dorothy shoes.