Yes NYC!

This weekend started for us on Friday evening when we went to the Whitney Museum (they’re open until 9 p.m. on Fridays and you pay what you wish) to look at an exhibit about Picasso and his influence on American artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollack, Jasper Johns and many others. This was interesting but then we found an Edward Hopper show that really fascinated us. Rosy liked his early works and I’m really into his photographic way of seeing people and light like in New York Movie or of course Nighthawk. Pictures of these works just don’t bring out the true colors. As an addition there were works by artists that were influenced by Hopper, such as the great “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” by Nan Goldin, a sideshow with music with pictures from the Lower East Side and East Village with pictures like this one showing the people in their houses and bars at that time.

On Saturday we took our first normal Yoga class, using muscles that we didn’t know we still had and sweating not only because of the warm and damp weather. Afterwards we wanted to watch the Dog Halloween Parade but as it had rained it was rescheduled to Sunday and we can only see the pictures now. So we took a walk through the Lower East Side, the East Village and Chinatown and I had some chances to take pictures. Later we drank some bubble tea.

In the evening we went to see a film and were surprised to see an audience of 100 people with only 5 women. And no, we didn’t go to seen Jackass or some thriller. We saw Shortbus, a sexually explicit comedy set in New York that has a good review in German here and that we share. Well after we entered the cinema we were relieved to seen that most of the men weren’t singles. We were in Chelsea so it was natural to seen many gay couples, especially as the main couple of the film is gay. It’s a great, strange film if you’re ok with hardcore-sex on screen.

On Sunday we visited the cloisters together with Alexander who has a good report on it. It is really strange to see a museum built like a convent with religious art from all over Europe in Manhattan. It was really like a small vacation.

When we came back and walked home we saw that we had just missed a group of rather well-known senior citizens playing around the corner: The Rolling Stones. Normaly they play stadiums with at least 30.000 seats but for Bill Clintons birthday they had promised to give a show at the Beacon Theater with only 2000 seats. Martin Scorsesse was filiming it (so that explains why they were setting up recording equipment the last week) and Christina Aguilera was also on stage according to fans.

We decided to stay home in the evening and rented the movie “You’ve got mail” as it shows many of the places in the Upper West Side that we pass each day. If you want to see how it is to live in our neighborhood then you should watch this film.