Jedediah Leland

[ljplicease]

I met Theresa and Amanda on the train down to New York City yesterday. We first went to the Whitney Museum of American Art. We started on the fifth floor and descended back to ground level seeing just about everything. Saw two paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, whom I still have a soft spot for since many of her paintings were of or at least influenced by the northern New Mexican landscape.

They also had two Jackson Pollock paintings. Apparently everything in my mind revolves around the idea of the disparate places I call "home", because I can't see or hear of Pollock without thinking of Blue Poles at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the controversy that surrounded its purchase by the Labour Government.

Jackson Pollock first became a household name in Australia in 1973 when the Australian National Gallery took possession of his painting Blue Poles, Number II, 1952. The controversy that surrounded the purchase prompted a national tour of the painting to introduce it to the Australian public. Since that time Blue Poles has been permanently on view at the National Gallery of Australia, excluding a short sojourn to the major retrospective exhibition Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1998.

NGA Website

In his documentary series Beyond the Fatal Shore about modern Australian culture, Robert Huges described the positive cultural effect of bringing art into the spotlight in Australia. Anyway, the Labour government apparently made off with a valuable painting for almost nothing because it has appreciated a lot since its purchase.

We were there for the last day of an Tim Hawkinson exhibit. I really liked the squished elephant made of aluminum foil and the mechanized signature-writing device (which did it's thing ad infinitum), but I wasn't as impressed with the hummingbird skeleton made of fingernail clippings. For some reason seeing finger nail clippings in a museum reminds me of Danny Slattery who allegedly collected them when we were in the fifth or sixth grade and he went on to do weirder things.

There was also something on the ground floor that reminded me of a slightly disturbing (although not completely "bad") dream. I can't remember who the artist was, nor find anything about it on the Whitney website.

After the Whitney we met up with Jon (or was it John?) one of Theresa's friends from Rochester for Sushi. Apparently a computer geek, er I mean computer science major. It was funny talking to him, because I too was once fresh out of college thinking that graduate classes would be great resumé material. The reality of course is that six months after you start your first real job nobody cares about anything that you did in college. I was disappointed that I never took a senior level course in concurrent programming (essentially parallel programming), but I can honestly say that there is very little of practical value that I could have learned from that class that I didn't in parallelizing Abstraction and working on Parallel Timing for The Company. Still I couldn't help but like the guy. He wanted us to score some weed in Washington Square. I kid. I think.

Then we went all the way up to 125th street for drinks with some more of Theresa's friends, mostly from Rochester. I was feeling really dehydrated and so sadly had water instead. Then we went back downtown to see the tail end of a concert that I liked a lot. I think we were went because one of the musicians was from the Boredoms, which is a band that Theresa likes a lot. Theresa: can you be my musical consultant now? I've grown really tired of my music.

I wanted to make the 1158 to Poughkeepsie, because missing it meant taking the 0120 hell ride instead so I had to bid my new friends adieu. I took the F train (which for some reason reminds me of F Troop) to the station at Bleeker street, only apparently you can only transfer to the down town 6 train there, so I had to emerge from the subway and search for the northbound entry. Tyler sent me a txt which read:

i think Phrog must live in L.A...the car i just passed has the license plate "H8 RADON"

that made me laugh. One of my quaker names was Radon (who lived in ManziMo), and Phrog accused me of cheating because he didn't get to the pentagram soon enough.

I also saw two great big subway rats. Somehow I expected them to be bigger and have red glowing eyes. e has talked about them to me before (usually to tell me how smart they are), but I have never noticed them before, although I usually use the subway during the day with lots of people around and she has been using the subway for longer and more often than me.

Anyway, I made it to Grand Central just in time, the train left like a minute or two after I got on. The train was full of drunken Yankee fans. I can't really stand Yankee fans to begin with, because I usually stop listening to someone as soon as they say "I am a huge anything sports related fan" but Yankee fans are even worse because they are the rich kids of sporting world and I will root for anyone playing against the Yankees. On the upside, apparently the Yankees had lost, but on the downside the fans were drunk.

So that was my day; a pretty good one. The weather was fine, and I have to say the weather man was (as usual) full of crap.

Comments

[hijinks-ensue.livejournal.com]

i would be happy to be your musical consultant, but i'd have to come clean and admit that jon is to blame for at least half of the "cool" music i listen to...

[plicease]

That is okay, you can take credit for being able to appreciate cool music :)