Saturday: Poland, Some UES, North Central Park, Sushi, Startup.com

This photos go with this post.

It was 2-something pm by the time I got lunch. Partially this was caused by a late start and partially caused by a bunch of false-starts in trying to find a place to eat. Surprisingly I wasn't that hungry despite forgetting to eat dinner Friday night. Eventually I found myself at Little Poland, a diner-style restaurant, serving relatively authentic Polish food. How do I know? All the staff were speaking Polish. I had a very filling pile of food: four periogies, a meat (and rice?) stuffed cabbage, a piece of keilbasa, and a pile of cooked cabbage with some chicken and other items mixed in.

Then I took a train uptown, to the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a decent enough museum with a fairly nice modern art collection, and a number of paintings I enjoyed because their color use for shadows was so perfect they really conveyed the feeling of depth. I also discovered an artist named Alexander Calder. He does a lot of work in mobiles -moving metallic sculptures- and with wire in general. The wire sculptures of his which impressed me the most are like this. All these sculptures are three dimensional. When you move your head, they actually seem appropriate. It's actually really creepy approaching these from straight ahead because first you identify it as a figure, then suddenly you realize it has depth and you don't immediately understand why.

There was also an exhibit by Ed Ruscha. He has done some really neat work involving words. In short, he made paintings of words. Some actually look computer generated; others look out-of-focus. It's quite impressive but hard to describe, although the New Yorker does a decent job. You can also find some images of his artwork by searching google, although his best stuff (and in fact most of his stuff) isn't there.

Oh, and you can even buy Love Rugs at the museum store.

Then I headed further uptown, to the part of museum mile I'd never visited. I saw the outsides of a bunch of museums but it was too late (sigh, late start) to go into them. Some I put on my list to visit and some I peeked in and decided they're probably not worth visiting. Took pictures of some of the nice museums and buildings and some typical upper east side shots, such as this nice picture of an upper east side street. Also, I happened upon yet another strange statue, two (of the few) wooden buildings in Manhattan, and the remains of old armory and the nearby school that was built to match it. (Who would want to go to school there?)

After all this, I spent a good hour hiking over and through the northern half of Central Park. Very lush. Hidden ravines with streams. Giants rocks upon which to climb. And lots of field space. I mean lots. In the north meadow alone there must have been eight softball fields, with outfields, so everything was still very green. In the middle of the excursion, I came across two things I missed while on the west coast. One was something we used to call helicopters because of how they fall. The other was fireflies (which for obvious reasons I don't have a picture of). During the end of this part of the Central Park excursion, I walked for a while around the big reservoir in the center of the park. One could get an interesting contrast between the tall buildings on the east and west side -mostly brownstone and sandstone- versus the tall buildings on the south side -mostly modern black and steel and glass. The trail was nice, though crowded. Apparently I found the place where lots of new yorkers jog. Well, at least where lots of young, trim, female new yorkers jog.. ;)

After some transportation difficulties, I ended up walking along the far edge of the theatre district at which time I came across a sushi place called Momo. It looked reasonable enough and so, remembering how sometimes I missed good meals by thinking that a better restaurant is just down the road, in I went. It was pretty good sushi: nothing exceptional but reasonably fresh and nicely presented. Drinking a Sapporo, I wondered what happened to my old quad-mate Dave. Maybe I'll track him down. (Oh, and sorry no picture of Momo. I tried. I really did. But my camera was insistent that when it says replace the batteries it means it. Happily, I did go back a few days later -before I actually managed to post this- to take a picture of it.)

Exhausted from all this walking, I located a blockbuster and headed home. At home I watched Startup.com, though was interrupted in the middle to chat with my apartmentmates and their friends for a little while before returning to the movie. It was okay; here's the review I put in my notes: "The tale of the govWorks. Kind of like watching a car accident in slow motion: vaguely mesmerizing, somewhat disturbing, and one isn't sure where things went wrong (or even if it started out all wrong). One wants to look away (yes, that is true for this movie, sadly) but still wants to see how it ends. And despite the slow-motion, somehow the end happens all too fast."