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Puzzled by Service Changes?
Wednesday, May 8 2002I was running low on my favorite tea, Red Label , which I buy at an Indian supermarket in Jackson Heights, Queens. So today Gretchen and I went on a little adventure to Jackson Heights, mostly to hit the Jackson Diner, but also to get tea and see the MoMA museum at PS1 along the way. I noticed that every subway station along the way had its own squad of police officers standing around looking simultaneously both serious and bored. Such public shows of police presence were a feature of post-September 11th New York, but they've been in decline since them. Perhaps there's a fresh new terrorist threat that only law enforcement knows about.
We got off the 7 Subway in Long Island City and went directly to MoMA, but found that, though open to the public, it didn't have any active exhibits. All the galleries had been cleared of anything that wasn't built in or nailed down. The staff, consisting largely of hip urban youth of indistinct ethnicity, was all there, but they didn't have much to do except keep us from going in the wrong places and taking pictures in off-limit areas. The only really interesting work still intact was a tiny example of video art hidden in a postage-stamp-sized hole in the floorboards near the main desk. I heard it a long time before I saw it, and only noticed it when I looked down to examine the quality of the floor boards. PS1, as the name implies, is a repurposed public school, and the patter of millions of tiny and not-so-tiny feet have definitely taken their toll. Anyway, over beside a heat radiator, I kept hearing a woman calling out to me, and then what should I see shining from a large imperfection in the flooring but the yellowish light of a color cathode ray tube! As I drew closer, I could see that within this light was a tiny naked woman, filmed from above. She was waving her arms and pleading to me (yes, me) about something or another. The installation gave the illusion that I was looking down through the rotting floorboard to the next room down and some woman had caught me peeping at her. As soon as I noticed the installation, a number of middle-aged women, curious as to what I'd found, gathered around to marvel. I wonder how many people pass over this tiny installation without ever seeing it.
Our favorite part of the museum was the rooftop porch and an adjacent room with a steeply-sloping ceiling. From the porch, we had an excellent view of Midtown Manhattan. And in the adjacent room, we indulged a fantasy which imagined us checking out the place as though a real estate agent was showing it to us. Oh, the miracles we could have worked on that place! In fact, I don't about Gretchen, but I'd be willing to live in that room and have my world be a permanent MoMA installation (in exchange for free rent, that is). Mind you, Long Island City is hardly my picture of ideal New York neighborhood, but it would be a reasonable sacrifice on my part for the cause of Art (the kind worthy of the capital A).
Then there was the Jackson Heights part of our adventure, particularly the phase when we were in the Jackson Diner. That place has an amazing short liminal phase between anticipation and the point where you say, "For the love of Vishnu, why did I eat so much?"
On the way home, we stopped at Union Square to see a matinee of Human Nature. There were only about a dozen people in our theatre. My big draw to Human Nature was that it came from the same people who made Being John Malkovich. Human Nature was great, but it was no Being John Malkovich. At times it had the same feel, but I was hoping for a similar mindfuck and Human Nature didn't quite come through. Perhaps the theme of feral humans animals isn't shocking enough for me; my brother has been preoccupied with that idea since the 70s, and by now it tires me, as do most concepts obsessed upon by my brother. Then again, perhaps those table-manner-savy white mice moved a little too much like the dinosaurs in Walking With Dinosaurs.
On the way home, Gretchen saw one of the MTA "Puzzled by Service Changes?" posters. It was the kind having the little round colored balls with the letters and numbers of the various subway lines, each divided by thin lines into jigsaw puzzles. This particular poster happened to be housed in an uncharacteristically unlocked frame. Gretchen has wanted one of these posters for some time, and this was her chance. We were on the 4 line and would be switching to the 2 at Nevins Street, so just before Nevins she fished the poster out of its frame. Mind you, there were plenty of people standing around when she did this, but she did it with such matter-of-factness that no one really noticed. Well, there was this one black woman across the aisle from me who sort of freaked out about it, but she was laughing more than frowning. With her matter-of-fact white girl expression (and shielded by her sundress), no one was going to give Gretchen any shit about her larceny.In the evening I received a number of emails, including one which stated that my mortgage had already been approved. 
Man waiting for the 7 train to Manhattan from Long Island City, Queens.
Pigeons swarming for unusual provisions in Long Island City.
Art in the basement bathroom (with Gretchen) at PS1.
Art in the basement bathroom at PS1.
Stairwell patterns at PS1.
Stairwell patterns at PS1.
Gretchen isn't thinking, she's using her Motorola cell phone in the PS1 rooftop porch.
Me against Midtown, taken from the rooftop porch of PS1 in Long Island City, Queens.
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Midtown, from the Chrysler Tower (the pointy building on the left) at 42nd Street
to the Citigroup Center (the angular-topped building on the right) at 53rd Street.
Click for a bigger picture. 
The Queensboro Bridge.
Click for a bigger picture.
A sticker in the room adjacent to the roof at PS1.
Stickers in the room adjacent to the roof at PS1.
The room adjacent to the roof at PS1.
Sally and Edna doing the usual this evening.
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