{"id":3919,"date":"2012-04-14T10:17:36","date_gmt":"2012-04-14T18:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=3919"},"modified":"2012-04-14T10:31:47","modified_gmt":"2012-04-14T18:31:47","slug":"nyc-2-museums-ground-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/14\/nyc-2-museums-ground-zero\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC #2. Museums. Ground Zero."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been kind of strung-out on computer programming for the last month. Turning some of my old stuff into ebooks. I keep meaning to write up a detailed \u201chow to publish an ebook,\u201d\u009d but I keep learning new stuff. So many gotchas.l<\/p>\n

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I\u2019ll be announcing my new ebook, Collected Essays<\/em>, on Monday or Tuesday, and it\u2019ll be available via several channels on my Transreal Books <\/a>site. But today is Saturday, and not a good time to launch a web product. Today I\u2019m mainly posting more photos from our trip to Manhattan early in March.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned, we were on the 34th floor of a hotel on 8th Ave near Times Square. The window actually opened, a little bit, and it was so awesome to look down at the people. Great morning shadows of the cyclists.<\/p>\n

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And the skyscrapers at night. Another world.<\/p>\n

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The Met has a renovated section of art from the Arabian countries. Wonderful stuff. One of my favorites was this calligraphic emblem called a \u201ctughra<\/a>,\u201d\u009d from the court of S\u00c3\u00bcleyman the Magnificent, 1555. The pieces of it stand for parts of S\u00c3\u00bcleyman\u2019s titular name. But the details make it rather conspicuously difficult to forge.<\/p>\n

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Interesting Babylonian art near the Arabian art wing of the Met, too. R. Crumb used to draw flying vulture demonesses. Maybe he\u2019d done some actual art-historical research.<\/p>\n

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Naturally we hit the MOMA as well. Nice atrium. Great to see the golden oldies of modern art upstairs. For some reason Picasso\u2019s \u201cGirl Before a Mirror\u201d\u009d is in storage. The biggest draw right now is van Gogh\u2019s \u201cStarry Night.\u201d\u009d Kind of a weird 21st century crowd in front of it, all foreign tourists, and every single one is holding up a camera or cell phone to get a picture of the actual painting in actual real life\u2014photography is allowed, and by now everyone finally understands not to use their flash. But weird to have this anenome mass of arms with cameras on the tips. SFictional.<\/p>\n

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The really great new thing at the MOMA was a retrospective show of Cindy Sherman\u2019s work. I looked it over first with Sylvia, then with our cinematographer friend Eddie Marritz. We liked her early work \u201cUntitled Film Stills\u201d\u009d almost the best, the way Cindy looks so neutral in the images, like stills from European <\/em>films, she said. Lot\u2019s of exhibition eye-candy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t think I mentioned that in this gallery where I did my reading, the Soho Gallery of Digital Art, they had about thirty computer display screens on the walls. So they can put up any show at all with an hour or two of fiddling with the central controller machine. I\u2019d emailed them a link to my paintings site, so they had a lot of my paintings \u201con\u201d\u009d the walls. Was nice to see them.<\/p>\n

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Yet another museum to mention is the Whitney. They had the Biennial show. Like so many Biennials, this was \u201cthe worst one yet.\u201d\u009d Nobody takes the time\/trouble to develop any craftsmanship anymore. Piles of garbage on the floors, YouTube-level videos of like a woman chewing food and spitting it out. An artist sleeping on a bed installed in the Whitney galler. Six art-school-hallway-type paintings with unmixed colors right out of the tube painted in *wow* squares along the edge of the cheapest possible pre-stretched canvases. It’s all about the accompanying rap. The best thing I saw at the Whitney was a pile of blue-painted wood things leaning outside. (Droned the old man.)<\/p>\n

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The good old Empire State building is still there, so 1940s, such a dowager. Looking at it near the city-block-sized Macy\u2019s. You don\u2019t specifically find what you\u2019re looking for in a store that big, everything is scattered around. Eventually you happen on what you need. Or on something like it.<\/p>\n

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We went down to Ground Zero, former site of the World Trade Center. Out in California, I\u2019d had the mistaken impression that they were still stalled in arguments about what to build. But they\u2019re moving right along. Lots of cranes, and there\u2019s a new tower growing up.<\/p>\n

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The memorial in the central area is deeply moving. They have two square holes in the ground, exactly matching the footprints of the fallen towers. In each hole, water flows down the sides, across a flat part at the bottom, then down into a black pit.<\/p>\n

Kind of like the course of life. You come from who knows where, sparkle in the sun, end up on a level plateau, then disappear into darkness.<\/p>\n

All the names of the dead are cut into the heavy metal railings around the edges. This is one of the the most moving monuments I\u2019ve ever seen, along with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in DC.<\/p>\n

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And how are you supposed to feel about it? Sorrowful, certainly. Wistful for the more peaceful times before. But\u2014vengeful, angry, bellicose? That\u2019s natural too. But you don\u2019t want to take it out on a whole country or a whole region of the world.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t see why President Obama doesn\u2019t get more credit for finally tracking down Osama Bin Laden. It was good to get that done. A step towards closure.<\/p>\n

And the rebuilding at ground zero is wonderful to see.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Manhattan is, at some meta-level, a living organism. Energy flows down the long avenues in the morning, with each crossing lit by the rising sun. It\u2019s a hive, Manhattan, an anthill, an indestructible giant paramecium. Long may it wave!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been kind of strung-out on computer programming for the last month. Turning some of my old stuff into ebooks. I keep meaning to write up a detailed \u201chow to publish an ebook,\u201d\u009d but I keep learning new stuff. So many gotchas.l I\u2019ll be announcing my new ebook, Collected Essays, on Monday or Tuesday, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3919"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3929,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3919\/revisions\/3929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}