(no subject)

[mojosmom]

I arrived mid-afternoon on Sunday, but just a tad before the hotel check-in time. (I stayed at the Hotel Newton on Broadway between 94th & 95th. I highly recommend it if you are going to NYC on a limited budget. Though the rooms are small - and what hotel room in NYC isn’t? - they are nicely appointed, clean, and the staff was friendly and accommodating.) Since the room wasn’t ready, I left my luggage and walked around the area a bit. As a result, I’d barely been in NYC an hour and I’d already bought two books (Here). After going back and getting settled in the room, I went to a flea market to check out the offerings from Chuu.com. It was fun browsing, but I didn’t buy much (just some textile fragments from them, and a couple of scarves from another vendor). Then I went down to the TKTS booth in Times Square and got a ticket to Mortal Ladies Possessed, a one-woman show based on several short stories by Tennessee Williams. Oddly, it was part of the Brits Off Broadway series (the actress and playwright are both English). I enjoyed it quite a bit, and afterwards went back to the Upper West Side for dinner at a Turkish restaurant.

The weather was gorgeous, warm and sunny, and remained so the next day, so I walked several blocks to the Silver Moon Bakery for breakfast, as they have an outdoor seating area (tons of NYC restaurants do). It was a mite crowded, so I ended up sharing a table and conversation with another woman. She’s a singer (Celtic music, some standards, lieder, interested in getting into opera), so we had a nice chat about music. She wants to start a salon, where friends can gather and share their music and musical ideas.

This was all quite a coincidence, since the next item on my agenda was to head to the Jewish Museum for their exhibition, The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons. It traces, through documents, drawings, and artifacts, the salon, from its beginnings in 17th-century France to the mid-20th-century in the U.S. It’s also very much a history of the Jewish people in the diaspora. There was also a great exhibit of the work of Maurice Sendak, Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak, which was both fun and thought-provoking. That was a long visit, so I had lunch and headed back to the TKTS booth. Unfortunately, though I got a ticket for Thrill Me, a musical based on Leopold and Loeb, when I got to the theatre, there was a notice that that evening’s performance was canceled. So back uptown for dinner at a Japanese restaurant.

Tuesday was quite a busy day. After breakfast, I went down to Greenwich Village specifically to release a book. Then I went to the Center for Book Arts for their exhibition, 30 Years of Innovation: A Survey of Exhibition History at The Center for Book Arts, 1974-2004. As is only to be expected, there was some very nice work! Then over to the Nomadic Museum at Pier 54, for Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow exhibit. The museum is “nomadic” because it is a temporary structure built specifically for this show, and it is as interesting as the show itself. After a late-ish lunch, I went to Brooklyn, to the Botanic Gardens, where I released another book. Much was in bloom, and I especially enjoyed the Japanese Garden, the Herb garden, and the Shakespeare garden. Then to dinner with a friend.

Wednesday was another packed day. To begin with, I went to the Museum of the City of New York for two interesting exhibitions. The first, Glamour: New York Style featured gorgeous clothing from the first Presidential Inauguration, through Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s famous “Spirit of Electricity” gown, down to masks from Truman Capote’s equally famous Black-and-White Ball. In a very different vein was Tolerance and Identity: Jews in Early New York, 1654-1825, the latter date marking the establishment of a second synagogue in the city. It’s a good thing Stuyvesant, who wanted to turn away the first Jewish immigrants, was overruled. Can anyone imagine New York City being what it is today without the influence of several waves of Sephardic and Ashkenazic immigration?

On to lunch at Takashimaya, an extremely high-end Japanese department store where I go to admire, not buy. But they have a nice little tea shop and café.

Then to the New York Public Library for more exhibitions and yet another release. Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era was a magnificent exhibit. The NYPL clearly has a fabulous Special Collections Department, if the books on display here were anything to go by! I could have spent a great deal more time there; the show was much larger than I’d expected. But I also wanted to see I am the Rose: Passover Imagined in the Collections of the New York Public Library. The occasion for that exhibit was the presentation to the NYPL of a unique artists’ book, the Rose Haggadah. For fifty years, the Rose family has commissioned Passover-themed artwork from prominent artists, and these have been collected into three volumes. We are talking the likes of Frank Stella, Larry Rivers, and even, unexpectedly, Al Hirschfeld! This exhibit also included a great many other Passover-related manuscripts, books and prints. The contents of the exhibit were awesome; I was a bit disappointed, though, with the lack of explanatory material.

And then, I met greedyreader at the Gotham Book Mart, a wonderful haven for booklovers. It’s a delightful store, with both new and used books, and yes, I did manage to buy something. We then wandered over to Rizzoli’s, home of gorgeous art books, esoteric CDs, and lots of books in Italian. So I bought one.

We headed uptown to a fabulous Greek restaurant, Symposium, still as good as I remember from my college days, for a Bookcrossing mini-Meetup, that turned out to be not so mini! I had such a great time! I’d met some of these folks before, and I loved seeing them again, and of course it was splendid to meet new people! We had a a big long table, and moved around and swapped books and ate and drank and chatted, and oh, it was too bad the evening had to end. Annulla brought me a couple of books (acquired in the usual “box of books runs into annulla” way) on which I can practice my bookbinding skills. One is a book that I have since discovered was “the most popular novel in America until Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. Charlotte Temple, by Susannah Rowson, first published in 1791, went through over 200 editions, and is still in print. Unfortunately the title page is missing, as is any page with publishing information, so I can’t tell when and where this edition was published. However, I do find the signatures of “Rhoda Mershon” and “Benjamin Mershon” in the book, and a Google search finds a Rhoda Mershon who was the daughter of a Benjamin Mershon married one Samuel Breasley or Brearley in Hunterton County, NJ, on December 8, 1783. I wonder if it was her book?? The other is a siddur, The Form of Daily Prayers according to the custom of the German and Polish Jews. With a New Translation in Prose and Verse by Henry A. Franklin, published in Frankfort-on-the-Maine. There is what appears to my untrained eye to be a Hebrew inscription on the fly-leaf. The back cover is missing, and it is missing a few pages, but the front cover, though a tad battered, is gorgeous! It’s faux ivory, metal work and velvet, with a central decoration of the tablets of the Ten Commandments; the spine piece is also faux ivory; they are joined by velvet. It’s not worth a great deal (I found a copy on abebooks for $52), but I may take it down to the Asher Library at the Spertus Institute to see if they can tell me anything more about it (particularly what the writing says).

The next day was Metropolitan Museum of Art day. Oh, gosh, where to start? The Chanel exhibit was glorious. I want all of it (well, just about -- the Lagerfelds, mostly, leave me cold). What an extraordinary talent. You could take any one of her dresses or gowns, from the ‘20s, the ‘30s, whenever, and wear it without hestitation today. I was able to join a guided tour of the Japanese galleries, where there was an exhibit of art from the Kano school. I then went to the Chinese galleries, for a splendid exhibit of calligraphic works. Then I just sort of wandered, looking at all sorts of gorgeous stuff. What a great museum the Met is!

Then I moved to the dorms for reunion (during the course of which I released a couple of books, of course)! We started (unofficially) with a cocktail party at the home of one of my classmates. The official stuff started on Friday, with a student dance performance, the Annual Awards Luncheon, a faculty lecture in the afternoon (very depressing -- Randall Balmer on “Evangelicals in the Political Arena”), and a panel discussion with members of the class of 1950. Later, the class dinner, followed by a chocolate and champagne bar under a tent in the courtyard. On Saturday, some of us stayed late at the breakfast solving the world’s problems, and later there was a performance by Paul Taylor’s “Taylor 2” dance company. Another lunch, and then “Athena Through the Ages: Six Decades of Barnard Women Tell Their Stories”, assisted by The Moth: Urban Storytelling. Jazz and cocktails preceded a gala dinner that night.

Reunion ended Sunday a.m. with a champagne brunch, but I skipped that in favor of an earlier breakfast and a trip to MoMA. It was my first time at their new building, and I love it! The gallery space is large and bright and airy, but I especially like the way, in building around a central atrium, the architect has cut in to walls so that you can see across, down, every which way, to see what’s happening elsewhere. And, oh, the collection! Being me, I started with the Prints and Illustrated Books galleries, moved on to Drawings, then Painting and Sculpture, and the Contemporary Galleries. It’s nicely curated, very rationally divvied up, with decent wall text and brochures available on the exhibits at the entrance to each gallery. Very nice indeed. If you have a large chunk of time, definitely worth the $20 admission fee (so what would you spend at a movie?). I must say, though, I was glad that one of my classmates was passing out Corporate Guest Passes!

I left there a bit sooner than I otherwise would, as I wanted to get to the Neue Galerie, which specializes in German and Austrian art. There was a photography exhibit, Portraits of an Age: Photography in Germany and Austria, 1900-1938, and it was interesting to see the changes in style and emphasis. I was bowled over, almost literally, by the gorgeous, gorgeous Wiener Werkstätte pieces. I am so crazy about Josef Hoffmann, I can’t tell you. Now, here was the shock. When my mom was a child, she and her mother went to Europe. I now have a couple of Wiener Werkstätte pieces they brought back, nothing fancy, a small wallet, a leather cigarette case, an evening bag. So I’m looking in the vitrines and nearly passed out because sitting there was the duplicate of the wallet and the card says, “Josef Hoffmann and Dagobert Peche”. So it seems I really do own something by JH! I can’t believe it!

Then back to check out of the dorm, and head to the airport to catch my plane. It was an hour and a half late departing, due to bad weather in Chicago, but by the time we got in, the weather had cleared and all was fine. I had an excellent time in NYC, but it was nice to be home with the cats.

More Books Read

Comments

[jas330.livejournal.com]

Wow -- you seem so cultured and apparenly you're Jewish, which I've managed to miss until just now.
I'm glad you are back and seem to have enjoyed youself.

[whytraven.livejournal.com]

Wow! Cool! :-)

[thebiblioholic.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you had a great time. I should do more, seeing as I live in NYC. You know how it can be, one doesn't always get around to taking advantage of the city they live in, since there's no sense of urgency.

It was great meeting you and the rest of the bookcrossers who showed up at Symposium. I managed to offload a heap of hardcovers, though I did come home with several books. My daughter snagged two books too.

Which TUrkish restaurant on the Upper West Side did you go to? I love Turkuaz on Broadway at 100th Street.

[mojosmom.livejournal.com]

Which TUrkish restaurant on the Upper West Side did you go to? I love Turkuaz on Broadway at 100th Street.


That's the one! And the Japanese one was the one you recommended.

[skyring.livejournal.com]

Boy, you know how to "do" a city! I so envy you the time spent in those two great art galleries. After I look in a good gallery, I emerge seeing the world through fresh eyes, and everything is different.

[greedyreader.livejournal.com]

I had an excellent time in NYC, but it was nice to be home with the cats.

And give your feet a rest, I am sure.

[enigmacat.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you had fun - it was great to meet you!