November 16, 2004
TRUE LAYERS
I got a twinge of pain reading today's Times piece on Lee, Crash, Duro and Daze. It hurt most when Lee talked about how the old trains "rocked." I looked around the car I was riding and a sad little Chewels exploded in my head. Our subway is now an amusement park monorail.
Uptown, I saw old-looking graf on the outside wall of a building that began as William Randolph Hearst's carriage house, became a drug rehab center in the 1960s, and is now a Montessori school. New York City tree rings. I couldn't verify whether the graf was bonafide 70s bubbleform, but that's what the letters were telling me.
I had a similar sense of being in The Phantom Tollboth yesterday, when I visited the new old MOMA. Taniguchi's architectural redo is sweet, boxy '50s modernist nostalgia, the perfect drug for someone who grew up on Lincoln Center's travertine and is terminally nostalgic for a brief period of urban design. The new rooms are huge and light. This is apparently good for looking at art. Mostly I floated around in a Popeye Doyle haze, constantly looking for the join between the two buildings. As I walked, I kept listing to the right like a ship battling the wind, walking into bathrooms while looking for old paintings. (You know, when modernism was still about one surface.) Eventually, I found the Johns and Pollocks and felt a phony sense of stability.
Posted by Sasha at November 16, 2004 04:23 PM | TrackBack