BFT

You can never see New York City. Best not to try. You just pick some things and go there and do them while all the rest of it goes on about you. It is easy to lose your focus.

I spent the day with a friend running around to museums. He'd just gotten off work at 9:00 a.m., so breakfast included two beers. For him, not for me. We went to ICP and saw the Avedon exhibition, then ran by MoMA, but my friend did not like the look of what was there, so we skipped on up to the Met. For some reason, we started off in the Egyptian wing. Neither of us chose to go there, really. We just went. Then onward to the mezzanine bar overlooking the park for a bottle of wine and some gazpacho. And then everything was fascinating for awhile. We discovered that we were both losing our once-frantic passion for the Moderns and both now marvel at the old masters. We stood before the paintings of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries with the same interest once possessed for Cezanne and Mattise and Modigliani. Don't get me wrong, we both still love those painters, but there was a lot going on in my humanities classes that I wasn't paying close attention to.

He wanted to show me the Bacon exhibit, and that is where the energy began to run out. Francis was not a happy man, I take it. If the paintings didn't give you a clue, the writing on the wall was explicit enough. I'll take my Bacon in smaller doses. The fashion photography exhibit fell flat after the ICP, and then we were on those magnificent steps of the Met. I would rather be among the museum crowd than just about any other.

The fuel exhausted and my boy long overdue for sleep, we parted on the park's edge at fifty-ninth. What to do with my night, I wondered.

Back at the hotel, I fell asleep. Woke in time for dinner and a walk around Radio City Music Hall, the Rockefeller Plaza, looking at the crowd of tourists who were there. I thought of options, but was too tired. The city at night alone. I've done that.

As I've said so many times before, it is difficult to photograph with a companion. Your attention is diverted. You are necessarily distracted. You cannot do what you need to do. So, camera in hand, I took a few photos here and there, shooting like Robert Frank or Cartier-Bresson, never bringing the camera to my eye, just shoot toward the most interesting thing in line of sight. Since I've gotten here, I've tried talking to people and asking them if I can photograph them, but truly, they all look stilted, like some weird photo album of the SoHo family picnic, people flashing those smiles learned from high school proms and reality TV. And so, for this trip, anyway, I've developed an appreciation for those deadpan looks of the passerby, un-posed, transient. I like the inwardness there.

I will walk now from my hotel up the East Side toward the Whitney. They have a Hopper in Paris exhibit. After that. . . I don't know. It's such a BFT.