Now I Have A Slightly Better Understanding of Monopoly

I spent Saturday exploring a large swath of the ritzy upper east side: 5th Avenue, Park Avenue, Madison Avenue, Lexington Avenue, ... from 59th to 88th. Lots of fancy galleries/stores selling artwork, jewelry, and clothes. Eight hours on my feet.

For breakfast/lunch I had good potato knish (can't find those on the west coast!) and a good panini sandwich made from roast beef, cheese, onions, spinach, and various other minor toppings. I hadn't seen this before: it looks like a very thin (pressed) grilled sandwich. In my case, the bread was pita.

In the upper east side I saw a number of fancy architecture and nice buildings in assorted styles. Notably, I went to a small museum, the Society of Illustrators. Two rooms. It was amazing what kind of things people can draw! Lots of illustrations of various famous people. Okay, I'm not feeling very verbal right now, so I'll make my descriptions short or non-existent. Let me just say Bryson probably would've liked one of the rooms, all pictures by various artists that involved frogs. A frog pilot. The dancing figures picture from Matisse but with frogs. The New Yorker logo but as a frog.

Also notably, I was going to visit the Seventh Regiment Armory. Basically, it is a fortress like old building with a colonial inside that used to be a national guard station. But the main drill area inside was being used temporarily for the SOFA 2004 exhibit. (SOFA = Sculpture Objects and Functional Art) It was stunning the objects people can make with glass, metal, wood, and clay. I was really impressed by some pieces by Stephen Knapp. Basically, he used lots of pieces of glass (prisms, lens) attached to a white surface to make some amazing light patterns. I don't think those pictures on the web do him justice.

Other amazing things there: embedding a flower made of different colors of colored glass in a large glass block; something that looked like a quilt but was made out of basswood (a soft wood) and silk dye; a piece of glass art that Edison would like, around 3 by 5 feet, decorated with swiggly silver lines and some pairs of lines were connected by little pieces of what looked like colored glass, from which little slinky pieces that glowed at the end sprouted. When you looked closely, you realize the whole thing is a circuit! The swiggly silver were the plus or ground lines. The little things that looked like glass were actually semi-translucent chips. The slinky tubes were optical fibers.

Also notably, I spent some time at the Frisk Collection. Fairly nice. Had some nice Turners. I was impressed that for the portable audio devices they gave us for the audio tour they asked what language we wanted. By the time I was done with this I was all museumed out. So I skipped the Asian Society museum. Then I read about the American Art museum and decided it was so cool I had energy again. But it just closing so I didn't pay to go in. All this without even making it to Museum Mile.

Other neat observations: the french embassy cultural services building was designed to look like it was from the italian (!) renaissance; there is a private residence directly on the corner of the block across the street from the Met[ropolitan museum of art] (!); I wandered by to see Trinity Church and happened to notice an open door. Wandering in, I found I could hear a bluesy Sinatra-era concert. (The program on the desk by the door revealed it started a while ago, so no one was manning the door anymore.) I listened for a while before getting scared away.

After spending so much money on museums and previous dinners (why can't museums be free like in DC?) I went to a inexpensive chinese noodle-type place for dinner (Chinam 28). Had a nice three meat dish with string beans, mushrooms, onions, and yellow squash (I think). During dinner, I had a Tsing Tao, a weak Chinese pilsner that reminded me of bud. (Ah, the joy of popping an imported label on items to make them more tempting. I hear bud is popular in Thailand.)

Current rant: This could be because I've been flipping though various dining alone/dining solo books at bookstores, but Chinam 28 is the first place I've seen that really doesn't know how to treat single customers. Anytime during dinner that my beer glass was getting low they'd come over and pour from my bottle into it. I can this myself. Anytime that a dish (e.g., rice) was empty, they'd come over and take it away instantly. Anytime I tried to pause during dinner to read a bit, they'd come over and ask if everything was okay. It felt like they wanted to hurry me out. But the place had space and there was no need. Then after dinner, they didn't bring the check at all for ages while I was reading. I had to close my book and look bored for a while before they came by. They should just bring it at some point, and I'd pay it when I was ready. There is no need for me to have to be bored in order to get my check. But the place was good; I'd eat there again.