3 posts from February 2007

see Midsummer pic at http://rackham.artpassions.net/

Ay me, for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth...
--Lysander

*

Lord, what fools these mortals be!
--Puck

*

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
--Helena

*

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom.--Bottom

*

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here,
While these visions did appear;
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
--Puck

My birthday present this year was yesterday's trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I took a few notes:

"On our way to the MoMA
to see Picasso
and Paul Klee.

Very cold in PA (23 degrees)
but less cold in NYC (30)

Inside the building:
Monet's waterlillies
vast, manypanelled work
lush blues, purples, pinks
everyone stares, gaping.

And Hemingway's hunger:
sometimes the pictures are livelier, he said,
when you're hungry.

Picasso's Musicians (including Apollinaire and Ernst)--WOW
also:  large women bathers
d'mademoiselles d'Avignon
cubist works
pink nudes
many, many

& Paul Klee's Cat & Bird
an orange and yellow watercolor
among many fine watercolor & ink paintings
among them a funny man with a very large eggshaped head

& Matisse's The Dance
also vast, joyous, blue and green and white
makes me want to hug everyone around me.

*

The Modern (Restaurant)

2 Cotes du Rhone
Thinking of the large Matisse, dancers
Picasso's funny players
foie gras of the people nearby

cherry blossoms and hot pink ladies/lillies

French, Spanish, German, English, Chinese in the galleries;
a petit Asian man described the Mademoiselles d'Avignon.

petit brot, panini

"Ann Arbor (Michigan) is like a little wine mecca..."

"They don't want you to write here..."

so I held a phone most of the time.
Silverness and fiberglass panels above me
the fat ones beneath.

Music.................................................

*

5pm Leaving New York via Holland Tunnel
after viewing shop windows of
Anna Sui
Kenneth Cole
Chanel
Ann Taylor
Max Azaria
Zara

Remembering the shininess of The Modern
& the fullness of people of The MoMA.

We bought postcards:
O'Keeffe
Klee's Cat and Bird
Robert Delaunay
Klimt
Matisse
Picasso's Musicians

Crossing the Hudson Rivers as sun sets
image of Washington Square arc and The Dancers burned in memory.