Weiner Dogs and Woody Allen

This is why I love living in New York.

Despite weather forecasts that threatened the region with the remnants of Hurricane Lili, yesterday's weather was beautiful. So I decided to take myself to Washington Square Park, where something very special was going on.

Yesterday marked the date of the autumn Dachshund Fest. Hundreds of dachshunds and their owners gathered in the north end of the park (as the southern end was dominated by some very hopped-up nannies who were getting ready to march to City Hall to demand labor standards). The event culminated in the group gathering together to hoist their weiner dogs above their heads to sing the Dachshund song.

This, friends, is why you never leave the house in New York without a camera.

Not content to end my day with that, I paid a visit to the Met. As I was walking to the 19th-Century European wing, the family of three a few paces in front of me stopped to admire the sculpture courtyard below. It was Woody Allen and Soon-Yi, with their young daughter. They wound up in the same room as me a couple of times in the Impressionism section, and plenty of people noticed them, too. Nobody seemed to care all that much.

In three and a half years, that was my first celebrity-in-the-wild sighting. At least the first one that I noticed.

And tourism in this town is flagging? Come up and visit, people! All this happened in a span of four hours. Imagine what you could see in a weekend.

Robyn

Jeffrey's Visit and British PSAs

I think this may be the longest I've gone without a web update. So for the three of you who follow this semi-regularly, I apologize.

If it makes you feel any better, the last time I wrote in my personal, handwritten journal was January 28. You, dear reader, are my number one priority...after boyfriend, schoolwork, job searches, feeding myself, bathing, friends, the Onion, bunnies, U2, Virgin radio, the Winged Nike of Samothrace, baked beans, and dictionary.com. But you're right up there.

But I feel I have a valid excuse for my negligence. Jeffrey and I have been exploring London. We've done neat-o things such as Westminster Abbey, the Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, the Tower of London, and the British Museum. As an added bonus, John Ciocci was in town as well, and we spent Wednesday night taking strange pictures with Roman stautes at the aforementioned British Museum. Is it wrong that my favorite part of the British Museum is the corpses? I'm utterly fascinated with them -- how old they are, how well preserved, how they were found, and what was found with them in their tombs (if they had tombs, unlike the poor neolithic schmuck who was bashed in the head). I even bought a book about what preserved remains tell us about history. Understand please that I abhor violence and destruction, but once it's established, I love watching forensic science shows about how they solve the mystery. I think it's neat.

Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this.

I also truly loved the National Gallery. Art museums are such geeky fun. Going to a major art museum for the first time is great, especially if you just go without a guide and set off to conquer as many rooms as you can until you get too tired to continue and need to sit down and eat Indian food. Every corner is a new surprise. Ooh! The Supper at Emmaus! Ah! Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding! Golly! The Wilton Diptych! Neat! Some painting I don't know with some dude's severed head!

There I go again. All apologies.

Speaking of gruesome, the public service announcements here are way brutal to the point of being traumatizing. I remember when I was four years old and having to run out of the room when some of the drinking and driving PSAs in the eighties came on, and having watched British TV for a week in the hotel, I'm having severe flashbacks. One features a family of cartoon zebras who are about to have a baby, and the baby dies because YOU didn't give enough to the Baby Fund, or whatever it is. I was too horrified to catch the name of the charity. My favorite features a live action dad inflicting all manner of abuse on his cartoon son, who bounces off walls with little damage to his person -- until real dad throws cartoon son downstairs, who turns into a real kid lying unconscious at the bottom. Message: "Real kids don't bounce back." Robyn's reaction: "Good God, Jeffrey change the channel." There's a billboard of this ad campaign outside my dorm now. I'm thrilled.

Also, the ravens at the Tower of London are super neat.

And to think I thought I wouldn't have enough to write about.

Robyn

Philistines 'R Us

I finally went to the Museum of Modern Art today. Maybe I'm ignorant, though I like to think I'm a fairly well-educated person. I just didn't get it.

I think I may be spoiled by the Met. The Met is fairly cheap ($5 for students), extremely large, and consequently, guaranteed to have something for everyone. It is also the museum that I visit the most.

The MOMA, by contrast, is $8.50 for students (that's a lot of Ramen Noodles, friends), three floors high (one of which is entirely dedicated to a single exhibit), and can be torn through in well under an hour. The most famous painting in the collection, Van Gogh's The Starry Night is on loan. Plus, I'm afraid modern art just doesn't thrill me.

I'm sure I'm missing something. Modern art comprises so very many movements and genres that it seems unfair to toss off the lot of it. But golly gee, if I'm already paying so much to get in, I'm not about to shell out another $4 for the headset that will explain it all to me. I'm all for letting the viewer draw their own conclusions, but if you're gonna present me with a plain white canvas as a finished work, may I please have a dinky little write-up of some kind by the artist's name telling me why? Just a clue? No? Okay. I'm obviously a flaming philistine.

If anyone feels like they could take me to the MOMA and help me try to see what I'm missing, I'm completely game. Let's just please go on Pay-What-You-Wish Night.

Ignorantly Yours,

Robyn

If the economy of New York City is flagging, it sure as hay ain't my fault.

Today was a bona fide tourist day. It's good to have such a day once in a while, because it reminds me what a neato place I live in. But it's tough on the wallet.

First, it was off to the Met for my Painting and Sculpture in New York class. Today was 19th Century European Paintings Day, which in art-nerd-speak translates to Super Fun Happy Good Day. After viewing many a Degas and Monet, I was delighted to discover that my professor and I share the same favorite painting -- Jules Bastien-LePage's Joan of Arc. We both agreed that it was one of the most overlooked, underrated, and downright purtiest things in that wonderful building, and then we giggled, because that's what art nerds do.

Jeffrey's mom is in town, and they explored the American wing while my professor and I were giggling over French impressionists. Then we dined on overpriced Indian food that did ridiculous things to my stomach.

I went to the top of the Empire State Building tonight, which is something that I haven't done since junior high. I had tried a couple of times over the summer, but wasn't too keen on waiting in line for an hour.

But tonight, after going through the newly-installed metal detectors, we saw that there was NOBODY there. Deserted. We went right up to the window, right to the elevator, and right up to the observation deck, where we finally found other people, although not much. Prior to September 11, a nice Friday night like this would have found the place thronged with people.

And the southern view...

I read a lot of magazines after The Thing That Was Bad, and I remember one quote by a little boy who said that it looked like New York had lost it's two front teeth. I haven't had many opportunities since then to see the skyline from afar. Sure enough, there's a gaping hole in the southern skyline. In the dark, the space is filled with an ethereal glow from the lights at Ground Zero. It's a sad, sad sight.

But the rest of the city looks fabulous. I was very happy to see that the northern view is dominated by my favorite building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza (or the Big Pretty Building). Big, white pretty building with millions of orange lights as a backdrop, blue bridges, light vestiges of clouds beneath you. It's a lovely place. I'll miss it a lot come spring.

Time to write a paper and play with my new, pretty, overpriced snowglobe.

It's fun to be a tourist sometimes.

Robyn