Monday, November 06, 2006

A bit harried

Whew, sure have been busy.

Jesse was up here for dinner last Wednesday, amid his fall visit to the USA. In response to my request for British foodstuff oddities, he brought me a few items. The highlight, I'd say, is a can of "All Day Breakfast," which is a tomato-based concoction containing baked beans, pork sausages, mushrooms, bacon slices and -- wait for it -- an omelette. The picture on the label shows a fat little sausage and a half-moon omelette floating in tomatoey beans. Eeew. Well done, Jesse.

This weekend I went to NYC to visit Alex again. It was good; taking advantage of his free museum admission, we went to MoMA and the Brooklyn Musuem (which had a fabulous exhibition by sculptor Ron Mueck, who started his career with the Muppets. (His stuff doesn't translate to photos well.) MoMA also has a couple theaters that you can also get into free on Alex's card, so we saw Midnight Cowboy, which was quite impressive.

We also verified David Byrne's claim that this arch in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn

does in fact contain a large number of cool puppets. Byrne was himself varifying the claim of a friend that this was true -- I think it's just the sort of thing that doesn't seem like it should be true. But I'm glad it is. The New York Puppet Lending Library takes up the leg of the arch, and they have a small performance space in the top, no joke.

I also did a lot of eating this weekend, including my quota of three Doughnut Plant doughnuts. (Vanilla bean, strawberry jelly with vanilla bean glaze, and tres leches cake style, in case you were wondering.)


In the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, there was a posed picture of the main movers of the Bush Administration -- W, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, etc. looking at the camera steely-eyed and purposeful. The galleries were extremely crowded, and the picture was exerting a forcefield of political distortion in the room. Unlike the other photos, it had created a little half circle of empty space. As people stood and looked or milled past, everyone was forced to acknowledge it. A man sighed loudly. A woman rolled her eyes. Another woman made a sarcastic remark to her companion about how the crew really looked like they had it together. There was visible displeasure on the faces of many of the people walking by as Bush suddenly intruded on their pleasant afternoon of art photography.

Not exactly an unbiased sample of the voting public, but hopefully a similar dynamic of repulsion will be at work in the elections today. I've got my races I'm paying particular attention to, and a few of us will be gathering at John's place to watch returns. Fingers crossed.