IPW

The Day in Brooklyn

Today we took a little trip to the Brooklyn Art Museum. An interesting trip made more interesting by a sudden cold snap that brought some snow overnight. Yesterday at this time (7:30pm) it was 50 degrees, 24 hours later it is 22. Brr. We took the bus down there since we are bussies, a newly coined term, unafraid to travel Brooklyn by bus. From our neighborhood, full of warehouses, workshops, industry, and equal parts hipsters and Latinos, down through the majority Hassidic neighborhood. I love this area, the Hassidic area, there is something so amazing about an essentially European culture living in a Brooklyn enclave. I love the Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint equally for the same reason. Greenpoint and the Hassidic section of Williamsburg have more in common than maybe even they know, but I will get into that later (though not in this post, rest assured it is a subject I ponder often and will certainly come back to). Moving South, we enter the mostly African-American neighborhood of Flushing, I think that's where it is, it might also be called Prospect Heights. Soon we are the only white folk on the bus which is a situation more white people need to be in in general. One thing that should be noted, the bus we were on was an express, skipping stops without a logical pattern, clear to none apparently since we were whizzing past people waiting expectantly at "local" stops in the sub-freezing weather. We roared past a good many, of all races and genders and backgrounds. They were all pissed off together. The driver seemed to be so used to passing these angry people by that he took absolutely no notice of them. We on the other hand were somewhat mortified to be safely aboard, comforted in warmth, helpless witness to expectant passenger's miseries. It was sort of classic NY, "hey if you can't read the bus schedule, it's not my problem".
The Brooklyn Museum was excellent. The building itself is impressive and houses a first rate collection of art and antiquities. It reminded me that Brooklyn was a substantial city of of its own for quite some time before taken over by New York. Big enough to have its own Museum building that rivals or surpasses the Met in size. We went first to see the exhibit by Edward Burtynsky (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/#burtynsky) Which was simply put, amazing. Beautiful landscapes of tortured landscape. The country's (the world's?) biggest tire pile, in the golden light of sunrise. Marble quarries that haven't so much obliterated the landscape as they have tragically bent it. Where there was once positive earth mass are now negative, gaping holes in the ground so massive that the earth-moving equipment responsible for the destruction look like metallic beetles at the bottoms or perched precariously on razor thin ledges over shear man-made cliffs. His photos are printed large format, as all photos are these days, but in this case it is necessary to show the scale of the images. For instance, if my favorite photo was printed small, the tiny blue port-a-potty at the bottom of the cavernous black walled pit of a granite quarry would only be speck, but in this case you see what it is and its surroundings are put into astounding perspective.
So we both were thrilled by the exhibit, Magda was inspired and intimidated which all great artists should be if they want to proceed. I on the other hand might have taken slightly the wrong point from the whole show. Instead of bemoaning the tragedy that man has wrought on the earth I thought, "Wow, cool." I honestly think that once we make ourselves go extinct, or it's done for us, there should be some massive traces of our existence for the next sentient beings to marvel at, traces for them to say, "Wow, cool". Just like we do when snapping pictures of the ruins of other cultures that over-reached and collapsed upon themselves, the Inca, the Maya, the Romans, the Republicans.
The rest of the museum was very museumy. I was impressed by one other exhibit (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/2005/barye/) A Frenchy Gentleman named Antoine-Louis Barye who seems to have exclusively sculpted animals battling each other to the death. I think he basically covered the food chain, the two strangest sculptures being a tiger eating a crocodile, and an Ape riding a Gnu. I did not make that up.
We left just as the temperature began to plummet again and made our way home where we have since gotten drunk on a bottle of wine and an odd drink we first had on Orcas Island a few years back called "The Stumbling Monk" equal parts Amaretto and Fra Angelico, added to extremely hot and frothy steamed milk. Delicious. Especially for a bitter cold day like this.