Having coffee this morning with a girlfriend, I was describing the meals we ate while away, doing my best to assert and affirm the reality that America can – in fact, does – serve up good food (good goffee – at Stumptown – is also available, you can forget Starbucks crap). The trouble was, it took several moment to think past the first night’s meal in the East Village. Terrible, isn’t it? I’m already forgetting the specifics; the generalities may topple next.
So in order to try and combat any sort of travelling amnesia I’ll try and write about some places in a way that distills them down into usable fragments. Poetic snippets, if you will.
New Museum
A name, familiar
(why only mentioned
last month)
pops out from the unfamiliar
J G Ballard
or, specifically his
Advertiser’s Announcements
are displayed along a wall
in a semi-darkened showroom
Surprising any notion
(underdone, innocent, or both)
one had about his art;
begging the question
how much art
is underdone
within ourselves.
We walked out onto the roof
and breathed in the thundery city –
sultry, threatening
and utterly invigorating.
Central Park
Stand on the ‘Imagine’ mosaic
is to tempt the ire of strangers
wandering around Strawberry Fields,
as if a sacrilege had been committed
and Yoko herself might materialise
to discipline the offender.
But tred over it people do;
tour groups come along every few minutes.
Their leaders hold up different coloured umbrellas
so no-one gets lost:
not even the message
or information
they repeat verbatim, all day,
to the tourists
on their secular pilgrimage
within the boundaries of green turf
and 843 acres
of possibility.
*New Museum photo above with me in it is courtesy of Wonderwebby.
I really don’t know how many more New York posts I have left in me, and I’m not sure how many more you all are interested in either, before you get totally turned off or bored. If you want me to keep going, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll move on, after I write about BlogHer.
I was going to write about my book/literary experience there, but I’ll be writing about that elsewhere, as it turns out. More details later.
Happy weekend, all. I’ll be at my local bookshop celebrating National Bookshop Day tomorrow. I’ve picked up a cold so I’m a little on the poorly side. Medicinal whisky time? Yes, perhaps.
