I know New York, I need New York, I know I need unique New York.

So here I am, in the place that I was born. A place that for me exists in isolated pools, like actors in a Tennessee Williams play. Actions are separated by the spotlight of memory, fragments of a story that never concludes. Here is the old school, I recognize the street still. It's where I saw that dead cat. There's the bottom of the hill where I got into that fight. My house, the field, the marsh, the docks. Suddenly all these things are interrelated, but by a geometry that my memory perceives as foreign. Wasn't this all larger? Didn't these places exist side by side? The fragments are forced to fit a form that hasn't seen their shape in over twenty years.

So there's that. I'm also learning about the mobile home park, now parks, that my family has been running here for as long as I've been around. On this earth. I've never paid much attention to them before, but now I'm being exposed to all the ins and outs, ups and downs, politics and peccadilloes that come with a business dealing mostly with retired people. Fun!

Trip to NY was good, though. Although it's getting harder in cities to tell where the real city is where people work and live, and where the constructed city is, that people come to see and take pictures of. I thought about this in Little Italy as we sat outside a little restaurant run by little Italians who pretended to speak only a very little English (but you could tell they were faking). Across the street, above another little Italian place (because all Italian places should be little, right? It lends to their carefully constructed authenticity.) between two buildings hung a clothesline with the days laundry in a very quaint scene of slummy nostalgia. It might have been real, but then, why were there lights placed in that alley? It seemed subtly lit from the street. But maybe this was accidental? I couldn't tell.

The Met was the highlight. Modigliani! Balthus! Plus a bunch from that surrealist gang that hangs out at the corner 7-11. Dali and his crew. I don't talk to them much. Picasso was there, too, as usual. He makes an appearance everywhere, struts around the gallery. You know. The usual modernist boys. Then O'Keefe comes in. On the arm of somebody, I forget who. Some photographer probably. "Lookit her there, man", I slur to the guy next to me at the punchbowl as I overfill my fifth cup, "thinks she's all that. Thinks... hey, wher'ya goin'?"

It's funny how much I used to be into her, I mean, she was my favorite. Now her work seems kinda flat, kinda illustrative and a little... passé. What changed? Are my tastes more sophisticated? Doubt it. Maybe the times have changed to make some work seem deeper, more relevant, and other work that used to occupy this position less so. Of course, Rothko is forever. I should get a tattoo of a Rothko. Hehe. Art humor. I kill me.

The big Mo D(it?) ruled my visit this trip to art land. I don't think I've ever seen any of his work up close, but man, did that guy know color. And really subtle compositions. But mostly the tenderness, the care that's apparent in the way he handles the brush, puts the paint on the canvas, and in contrast the isolation of his subjects, and their dead-eyed stares. So modern! So good though, too.

Anyways. Museums! You love 'em, right? Some Egyptian stuff, some medieval stuff. Like I said, all day there. Also: NY marathon finish. Ground Zero. Subway (yay!). Alice in Wonderland statues in Central Park.

Back home on Wednesday.