They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway
Probably not the stretch of Broadway adjacent to where I am typing this, though the City That Never Sleeps was pretty much boogying the night away below my window last night: fortunately I had earplugs with me.
Had a long and convoluted dream that kept waking me up crying, for good and bad reasons, and I think probably had quite a lot to do with Wiscon and an international conference on women's history back to back.
Find that the coffee-shop on the corner is a bit limited in its offerings, maybe I will venture as far as the trad deli a block or so away tomorrow.
I have been imbibing the rich cultural offerings of New York today, subject to the limitations of what actually are open on Mondays. So I did the Guggenheim, which is amazing stuff from their own collections (last time I went they were refurbishing and only had a very small exhibit, and the time before it was a retrospective of Some Contemporary Artist). But this was the serious stuff collected by Solomon Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay and other collectors and was mostly late C19th-early to mid C20th stuff that I like, though a bit thin on women artists. (Is this odd, given the role of women in collecting, or had they bought in to the idea that women might be muses or connoisseurs but would never be artists?) I was particularly impressed by the stunning Kandinskys (which I don't think featured in the show of his work at Tate Modern some years ago?). What is the meaning of the one with the trilobites in the upper lefthand corner? Had he been studying illustrations of bacteria? (there was one that had shapes very like Lady Bruce's drawings of trypanosomes.) I also took a photo of Brancusi's 'The Miracle (Seal 1)', which is most extremely phallic
After lunch in the museum restaurant - alas, the cafe, with its advertised splendid views ovr Central Park, was closed - I caught a bus downtown to the Museum of Sex, because, well, I thought I should.
Which was pretty good, even if you have to go in and out directly via the shop. My one AAARGH moment was the reiteration of the Victorian vibrators/hysteria canard on one of the cases, it's the myth that will not die. And Sid was just a little disappoint that there was much less about him and his pals than there might have been.
It's presumably selections from their holdings, but I wonder to what extent a lot of the still extant materials had already been hoovered up by Prof Kinsey? Because when I visited the Kinsey Institute a couple of years ago it had some very tasty stuff.
There is a large section on animal sex: includes the sex life of the koala (apparently koala girl-on-girl is a thing?) but no wombatts. Also, the section on penguins was all about their lovely pair-bonding: was there not a manuscript by one of the Scott expedition recently discovered in which he was obliged to fall into the decent obscurity of a learned tongue to describe some of the things he saw penguins doing? (given that they already have a display about homosexual necrophilia in ducks.)
And then made my way back to the hotel to chill for a little. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2613322.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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