Reading: Artist of the Floating World

Moving: walked a lot

Garden: none of that either

Watching: Bill Viola

25 November 2002: Guggenheim

RDC's specific goal for this trip was the Bill Viola exhibit at the Guggenheim. That was fine. I liked the wordless narrative and all the various details you could see through repeated viewings. The main spiral was taken up by Moving Pictures, very little of which I liked at all. There was one other annex with regular paintings, whew, Gaugin (whom I dislike) and Chagall (who doesn't thrill me) and Mondrian (whose point I have never got) and some Picasso and Cezanne just to keep me sane. Some of the Moving Pictures (like Laurie Anderson's) were interesting, but mostly they needed a lot more explanation than I thought reasonable.

I like iconography and meaning in paintings. I like all the symbols of marriage and fidelity in van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. I like that Marchel Duchamp reproduced in painting the motion Eadweard Muybridge discovered with stop-action photography in Nude Descending a Staircase. But when a work is incomprehensible even with its explanation, I am perfectly assured it doesn't matter.

The bonus of the day was leaving. No, pardon me, the bonus of the day was the café, Le Pain Quotidien, that we found on Park on the way to the Whitney (which, like the Met and the Frick, was closed on Mondays). I had a plate with tapenade (an olive paste), basil pesto (speaking of pastes, and the tapenade was suspended in the pesto), shaved parmesan, prosciuto, ricotta, sundried tomatoes, and cantaloupe; RDC had just bread and cheese; we each had a pot of tea. The atmosphere was great, very frainch. It could have just been New York, but there were a lot of languages being tossed around.

Really we'd gone to New York to eat and see museums. We ate dinner at Brasserie 8 1/2: raw oysters to start and then lamb for me and a côte de boeuf for RDC. My lamb was yummy and reasonable, but RDC's prime rib, bone in, was unbelievably rich. It had been basted, or something, with marrow. For dessert I had a Ding Dong 8 1/2. (The 8.5 is from its street address, not any Fellini reference. The bar was very Sex and the City though.) This was chocolate cake with white chocolate mousse in the middle, smothered in a chocolate ganouche. That was some damn good food. And a lot of it.