MASS MoCA with Edgardo & Marina
TRIP TO MASS MoCA: 1/1/06: Again they're up and ready (or it was TODAY, not yesterday, that this happened), and we leave at---no, this was later, and we left about 10AM, Edgardo driving, going up the East Side Highway to the Third Avenue Bridge and the Major Deegan to the Taconic, where we find they left all the maps behind, so we get off at Friendly's in Yorktown Heights for an enormous breakfast (they share a Lumberjack for $6.19) from 10:32 to 10:56, as it says on the check that I took as a souvenir, and we get over to Stockbridge to see his old workplace at Austen Riggs (where Rolf went!) and then to Tanglewood to wander through the snow to see the boarded-over Music Shed, then up route 7 to route 8 to North Adams, where we check to see that the Museum IS open tomorrow and have drinks and an appetizer platter in Latino Restaurant before going over to Porches to see that it's $100/room, so we take it, checking in and agreeing to meet at 7:30 for dinner, me finishing the puzzles in the Sunday Times magazine which they DID manage to bring along, and we go to Freight Yard Restaurant for great hoisin-tasting ribs for me and another shared entree for them, with beer, and back to sleep. Up next morning to a good breakfast from Porches, and to Mass MoCA for a rather disappointing set: 1) Mark Dion the funnest with his caged African Zebra finches and me, 2) Patricia Piccinini's humanoid pigs and piglets and other hybrids, 3) Rachel Berwick's silly Lonesome George with windy sails, 4) Nicolas Lampert with mechanized insects, 5) Joseph Beuys enormous "Lightning with Stag in its Glare," 6) Brian Conley's big red balloon emitting froglike sounds on deflation, 7) Motohiko Odani with "Rompers" with its fly-licking yellow-eyed alien, 8) Sam Easterson's animal-hookup videos most arresting on the tarantula, 9) "Life After Death" from Leipzig amateurish and boring, 10) Ann-Sofi Siden cornered Cathleen Chalfont and a sexy gigolo for her "QM (Queen of the Mud), I think I call her QM," and 11) a being-installed amusement park which wasn't amusing except for the captured smell from the Dodgem. We left at 1:15, Edgardo insisting on driving EAST through Connecticut to get into a heavy rainstorm so Some Island State Park was closed when we got there at 5PM twilight, and we got lost in the Bronx to go down Third Avenue until it changed into St. Ann which finally ran into Bruckner Boulevard where we filled up on gas (my treat a second time) and found the Third Avenue Bridge and the FDR Drive for a thankfully empty road to the Brooklyn Bridge and a parking place right outside my back door at 6:25PM, needing only two quarters for the meter, dinner at Park Plaza, and return to 333 Adams at 8:10AM next AM.