In keeping up with our resolution to see more art this year, I wanted to spend last Saturday at one of the major museums. When I brought up MoMA with the girls, I was surprised to hear that neither of them really remembered which museum I was referring to. Had it really been that long? I remember chaperoning a field trip during preschool 2 years ago, but maybe that really was the last time. Once we got to MoMA, each of them remembered certain things like the sculpture garden and the helicopter suspended from the ceiling, but this visit really was a new experience for them and one where Claudine has been asking to go back soon ever since.

The Inventing Abstraction Show, which runs through April 15th, really is worth a visit (no photography allowed at the show so the photos here are from other exhibits). I do have to admit that years of art history study in high school and college, particularly the ones where weekly museum classes were mandatory, may have desensitized me to artwork from certain periods. I think because the association with certain artists and works were closely tied with school and curriculum, I was never too interested in seeing another Monet or Kandinsky. I think a certain amount of distance cures that because the Abstraction show which focuses on art and musical works produced in a 15 year period from 1910-1925 was truly fantastic. I was particularly enamored with the Malevich paintings, whose work I had always loved, but it’s been quite a number of years since I’ve seen his graphic paintings up close. As in many cases with abstract artworks, print or web reproductions don’t really serve the works justice.
 
Mark was thrilled because the show drew the connections between some of the early 20th century composers to the artists of this era. Original scores of compositions from Schoenberg and Varese were displayed and pieces played in listening rooms or through speakers directly overhead the musical scores. There was a certain first time thrill to seeing these scores in person from composers that we had studied and even modeled some of our compositions after.
 
But the one thing that made the museum visit completely engaging for the girls? Getting those handheld audio tours, something that we never thought to do. MoMA had fun kid-specific audio commentary for select artworks in their permanent collection and so it became like a scavenger hunt to find the kid icons on the plaques of as many artworks as they could find. The audio tours kept them completely engaged and provided a structure in which to view the art and they even enjoyed the regular adult tours for the special exhibitions. Long after Mark and I were “done” with the museum, the girls wanted to keep going. It sort of became a game for me too as I started anticipating or guessing which of the artworks in each gallery room might have kid commentary.
 
I feel like this was really the first museum outing where we spent 4-5 hours taking our time to really look at the art. The girls admittedly weren’t too excited when I announced that we were going to MoMA that morning, but it turned out to be such a great day with a leisurely lunch at the cafe. Such a far cry from spending an hour chasing after your toddler making sure she isn’t touching anything she shouldn’t be touching. I think we have finally arrived at the age where the kids are perfect museum companions.
 
Incidentally, the couple seated next to us at lunch was a grandfather and his grand daughter, probably around age 8 or 9. It was clear that they were having a museum date, just the 2 of them. One of the sweetest things I’ve seen in awhile.
 
ps. that yellow glowing square up there in the first few photos? Can you guess what it is? I bet you can’t. It’s pollen from hazelnut. Crazy.

Things are good (but what is up with it being mid-February already?). I can’t help but want time to slow down, but also speed up so we can get past this bump of work craziness. I’ve been designing a lot along tight deadlines the past 6 weeks. I’m grateful for the work, but I’m feeling like my brain needs a rest soon or at least switch gears for a week or else I think my head might explode.

So I took a break and a walk by myself today around the East Village towards Chinatown. After the snow over the weekend, the weather has been milder with super sunny days. It gives a glimmer of hope that spring is imminently on it’s way. The light at 5:30pm tells me this too.
 
I tend to cocoon myself in our apartment when I have a lot of deadlines. I’m all wrapped up in my own head space and it’s easy to forget that there’s a world outside of my own. A long walk makes things right and the world opens wide again, especially in a neighborhood that I have a lot of history with and have lived in the past. It makes me think about stuff that happened 25 years ago on the same sidewalks where I’m walking and it also makes me think about my girls who might spend time of their own here someday as teenagers just like I did. That time, really, is not that far away.
 
I find that I’m looking at a lot of things with this past/future lens lately now that the girls are of this age. They were watching some teen sports award show on the Cartoon Network last night, a show that they talked excitedly about for a month and voted for winners online. I didn’t even think they knew anything about teen celebrities (well, Claudine did admit that she voted for people at random and didn’t know who anybody was). I sat down with them for a bit to see what they were giddy about and laughing over as they watched the show. When I got up I said to Mark as I passed him in the kitchen, “It’s kind of like the MTV awards”. This made me pause, then smile. I remember how I excited I was watching the MTV video awards when I was a kid. And then I got it.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in of a more collectively happy, giddy place than Prospect Park after a snow storm Saturday afternoon. Maybe it’s because we haven’t had snow in 2 years since that Winter of Snow, but everyone was laughing and sledding and having a grand old time. It was constantly like, “oh look! A dog is going down the hill on a sled!” and “Hey, look at all those teens piled onto that one sled!”, and all the while you couldn’t stop smiling at everything happening around you, particularly because it’s probably one of the few times you’ll see all the adults acting as snow giddy and silly as the kids. NYC got just enough snow (around 8-12 inches) that it turned the city into one giant playground without much of the headaches that our northern and eastern neighbors experienced. It made one birthday girl very happy.

The cemetery. Not the first place to come to mind when thinking of an outing to take the kids on a weeekend, but why not? Especially when you have one as beautiful as the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. I believe it’s one of America’s oldest cemeteries and perhaps, one of the most beautiful. Some notable people are buried here: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, the Steinways, Peter Cooper (the Cooper Union founder where I went to school), members of Theodore Roosevelt’s immediate family, and most recently just last year, two time Pulitzer Prize winning American composer, Elliot Carter, who Mark and I both admired during our music studies in college.

I think the girls were a little confused when we got off the bus and I told them that we were going to the cemetery, but you gotta love kids. For the most part, they just go with the flow no matter how random. Soon enough, however, they discovered why I love this cemetery so much. At nearly 450 acres, it’s easy to meander and get lost through the narrow cobblestoned paths that cut into the hills. They started foraging for leaves, stray flowers that got blown away from their graves and other little nature treasures. They went on a quest to find the oldest tombstone they could find and stopped at mausoleum entryways to bow down in their own little ceremonies. We talked about what cemeteries were and why we needed to respect the land and the graves.
 
I’ve never been to Greenwood in the winter and it was sort of fitting that it was a gray, slightly foggy day. It rendered everything a bit colorless and desaturated except for the gold, moss green and amber hues found in the ground and the few surviving leaves on the trees. There’s something beautiful about the starkness of dark, bare branches against a white sky, isn’t there? (hey, trying to see some positives in this bleak weather). And something peaceful about the weathered statues and the graves below. We vowed to return in the Fall when I’m sure the landscape is spectacular, though the cemetery did suffer severe damage to nearly 300 of their 7,700 trees during Hurricane Sandy. Some of the damage has yet to be cleared away.
 
By the way, do teenagers still hang out in cemeteries or is that just a thing that new wave goth kids did in the 80s? (we have a lot of cemeteries in NYC).
 

Photo of me and C taken by Megan McCormick. And yes, the symbolism of that last grave site is quite something.

I don’t know why we don’t eat in Chinatown more often. Believe it or not, it’s been well over a year since we’ve eaten at any Chinatown restaurant which seems so utterly crazy since dumplings and dim sum are probably Mia’s favorite food (Claudine, not so much). We do eat plenty of dumplings and have even made our own quite a few times, but dim sum only seems to be a once a year thing for us. Why is that?
 
But sometimes when you have a craving there is no stopping it, which is what happened last weekend with soup dumplings. We decided to go to Shanghai Cafe again on Mott Street above Canal because we almost always get a booth and they have noodles in soup which Claudine loves (there is very little else on a Chinese menu that she likes). Like other restaurants in Chinatown, Shanghai Cafe has a reputation for some pretty bad service and if you read any online review you’ll see what I mean. It almost makes you not want to go. I guess I always temper my expectations and know to just eat my meal, pay and not linger, but maybe that’s because I just know that’s what you do. The waitresses are not your friends. They do their job and you do yours, which is to eat your food.
 
Can I tell you a little story? Back when I was working in an office and did such things as go out to dinner meetings with my coworkers, I would always secretly cringe when anyone suggested Korean barbeque. Not because I was doubtful that my coworkers would like Korean food, but because these dinners would inevitably end up being long, leisurely affairs. That’s fine in other restaurants, but not in ones in Chinatown or Koreatown. If my coworkers unanimously agreed on Korean, I would try to steer them towards the few restaurants downtown which were definitely more hip and had a more Americanized vibe where you could linger for awhile, but they always wanted to go somewhere in Koreatown because it was more authentic. Keep in mind that this was 10-15 years ago so Korean food as a cuisine, even in NY, wasn’t quite mainstream.
 
Being “The Korean” in the group, I always ended up having to recommend a restaurant which basically consisted of me searching online for reviews or reading Zagats like anybody else because I didn’t really eat all that much in Koreatown. I also always ended up ordering for the table because, well frankly, the waitress would always look at me when she came by for our order. This was fine and all, but I’m not fluent in Korean and so I would stumble through the order as best I could and then she would realize that I was a non-fluent Korean speaking Korean-American and I could just sense the air of disapproval even if she didn’t say a thing. She didn’t have to. This little exchange and slight shift in the power balance between me, the non fluent speaking Korean, and the waitress, a very fluent Korean, was always unnoticed by my dinner companions, but I will tell you that it most certainly transpired.
 
The meal itself was always enjoyable and I’d even forget for an hour that I was wearing the badge of shame as the non-fluent Korean in the restaurant. That is, until the end of the meal. See, this is where the dinner starts getting really stressful again, but this stress is only apparent to me. Usually when I’m out eating at a Korean restaurant with my parents, we pay and leave as the waitress is clearing the table after our meal. Dinner can be done in under an hour. But my friends and coworkers all want to stay and talk and linger and drink and talk some more. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but not at most busy restaurants on a Friday night in Koreatown. Let me tell you…I have been in some stressful situations in my life and trying to subtly nudge my coworkers to move our party elsewhere for an hour while the waitress keeps walking back and forth after putting down our check has got to be up there in the 10 top most stressful moments.
 
“Well, why didn’t you just say something?”, you might be wondering. And yes, you’re right, but how can I explain that at that moment, blurting out that the Koreans don’t want you to linger in their restaurant isn’t the easiest thing to do, especially when it’s loud and your coworkers are all in a heated conversation about a client or you know, Ally McBeal. It isn’t easy I tell ya. And maybe, just maybe for making me feel the Shame, I was subversively trying to get even with the waitress who you could tell was getting increasingly agitated by the table of Americans and the one non-fluent Korean-American who wouldn’t leave the table even though they finished their dinner an hour and a half ago. Because really, it was me she was glaring at, not them and I knew what she was thinking. “You know the drill! You eat, you leave! No lingering! Why you not tell your American friends that?”
 
There are always these differences that exist between cultures. Maybe a simple awareness of them, which is not always apparent I know, would go a long way. It goes both ways too, of course. Take my dad, for example. He never understands why dinners take so long to serve at non-Asian restaurants. He’ll inevitably mumble about how he’d already be done with his meal if he were at a Korean restaurant while waiting for his entree. He also doesn’t understand the bread thing. “Why they bring so much bread all the time? I finish bread, but they bring more. Why so much?”
 
Incidentally, the service at Shanghai cafe when we were there last weekend was quite good. I don’t know if the owners started reading those reviews or we just caught them on a good day, but our waitress was super nice, smiled at the girls and was overall really pleasant. They even thanked us for coming as we headed towards the door. Thanks Shanghai Cafe. We’ll be back, sooner rather than later.

So far we’re making good on our resolution to see more art. I have only been to the New Museum once since it moved to the Bowery around 5 years ago. I used to go more often when it was located in Soho on Broadway when I was in art school and graduate school in the 90s. It was much smaller then – 2 floors in the Astor Building – but now the New Museum is a 7 story building with a skyroom on the top floor with views of lower Manhattan. This is where they hold activities for kids on First Saturdays for families. The monthly event is free, but keep in mind that you only have access to one of the gallery floors during free hours, but the Museum does have free admission to the public Thursday nights from 7-9pm.

This is our first time at the museum as a family and I think the girls really enjoyed themselves. Like with some of the other activities we’ve been to in the city lately, the girls always seem to be among the oldest in the crowd now, but ironically they might be at the perfect age to really get the most out of these art outings. In this particular instance, they made observations between 2 images by drawing comparisons and noting shared elements as well as the differences, both conceptually and visually.
 
Now that the girls are at an age where going to museums are actually very enjoyable (oh, you know what I’m talking about – taking a toddler and a preschooler to an art museum could very possibly turn into the 9th circle of hell if all the cards fall in the wrong place), I’m going to seek out more of these family art days at other museums. Most of them are free and that is one of the reasons why we live in NY, isn’t it?