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The most impressive work of art I encountered on last week's visit to New York City was the view of the midtown skyline from the Queensboro Bridge. The view familiar to drivers approaching from New Jersey might almost be mistaken for the skyline of another city. Seen from the upper roadway of the Queensboro, Manhattan is literally in your face. You don't tunnel under a river and come out the other side; you drive right down into it. It's like driving into a vision, thanks partly to the Gothic magnitude of a bridge whose spires seem to be limned with gold-leaf. As I drove in, longtime Queens resident Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five were playing "West End Blues," and I was thinking that the Chrysler Building, still the most imposing skyscraper in the city, went up around the time Louis Armstrong was building his stunning solo. In fact, both these classics saw the light in the same year, 1928. On this fine day in August, New York was looking as dry and clear, as sharp and brilliant, as the sound of Louis Armstrong's trumpet.
Access to music is one of the great advantages driving in has over public transportation. Sure, you can have music in your ears on the bus or the train, but it's not the same. There, it's in you, in your head. In your own car, you're in it, it's your element. If there's a delay getting through the Holland, you can listen to John Coltrane playing ballads (no fireworks, you need to stay calm). For me, jazz is and always will be the music that best expresses the spirit and pace of New York.
What Is Going On?
As often as I've driven in to New York, I've rarely needed to use a parking lot or garage. I always go with a pocketful of quarters. Turning right on Seventh Avenue at 18th, I spotted a one-hour meter on the shady side of the street, only a few steps from the entrance to the Rubin Museum of Art, which opened at 150 West 17 Street in October 2004 as, according to the brochure, "the first museum in the Western World dedicated to the art of the Himalayas and surrounding regions." Until last week, I had never heard of the Rubin. One of the pleasures of New York is the fairly certain knowledge that there are hundreds of places you never heard of where you can open a door and walk into another world. You don't have to have a weakness for Himalayan art to enjoy this museum. First there's the subtle, beatific drone of the music, then the spacious mellow hardwood foyer designed by Milton Glaser, and the inviting cafe, but more than anything it's the visitor-sensitive intelligence of the place. You are invited in and guided by simple questions ("Where Is it Made? How Is It Made? What Is It?") that assume you may be new to this form of art. Besides being contained on ordinary exhibit cards, the questions are cast on the floor in letters of reflected light, the first and most prominent being "What Is Going On?" The answers provided by the museum are lucid and unpatronizing. You are even invited to play curator at one point by writing in labels of your own for some of the works you've seen.
The second floor introduces you to Himalayan art; the third floor is for "Perfected Beings, Pure Realms." There's a whole floor of "Flying Mystics," and two more featuring a special exhibit, "Holy Madness:Tantric Siddhas." The whole arrangement makes you feel that you've embarked on a pilgrimmage, an idea encouraged by the grand, curvilinear, stainless steel stairways designed by Andrée Putman. Most of the paintings are in mineral pigments on cloth, the colors both subtle and rich, the blacks deeply black. One small, elaborately detailed sculpture turned out to be a 900-year-old "souvenir" a pilgrim had brought back from N.E. India. For me, some other highlights were "Circle of Bliss" (mineral pigment on cloth from eastern Tibet); "Holder of the Wind" (a 15th century embroidered textile of the Buddha); and a large 19th-century Tibetan work, "Wrathful Offerings," which was the piece I spent the most time with, thanks mainly to the playful menagerie at the bottom.
Coming outside, I noticed people enjoying the perfect weather at a sidewalk cafe nearby and wondered how many of them knew Tibet and the Himalayas could be found on the other side of the street. Admission to the Rubin is only $10 ($7 for neighbors, students, seniors, and artists); the museum is closed Tuesdays and free admission is offered on Fridays between 7 and 10 p.m.
East Third Street Secrets
My next destination was a store called Good Records, which is at 179 East Third between Avenue A and Avenue B. For the fanatics forever in search of vinyl buried treasures, Good Records is "infinite riches in a little room," an inviting, relatively new arrival in an area that has seen a number of good record stores come and go (among them the Shrine on 9th, Stew's on 7th). But like just about any block of the city you care to explore, this one is worth a close look. On the north side of the street, for example. many of the doorways and stoops have been decorated with impromptu mosaics, truly primitive work compared to the Himalayan art of the Rubin. In a city where art seems to be in the air you breathe, it seems perfectly natural that someone gathered up bits of broken vases, fragments of china and pottery, and glued them into place, like pieces in a ceramic patchwork quilt. For the entrances to 179 and 189 East Third, sea shells have been added to the mix to help spell out "United We Stand" next to the iconic image of a Manhattan skyscraper. And across the street is one of those small neighborhood parks New York surprises you with, a communal Plant-a-Lot Project built around two weeping willows and beautifully laid out with plants and benches: a shady, sylvan spot in which to eat a lunch bought at a nearby deli. On my way back to the car, I took a look inside the Most Holy Redeemer Church, another pleasant surprise. When you walk through an entryway that seems only slightly more imposing than any other entrance or store front on the street, you don't really expect to find a space with cathedral dimensions, lofty arches beautifully patterned and painted in red against the blue-sky vaulting. The church dates back to 1843 and was built by German Catholics. Quite another sort of secret place can be found at number 189, by the way; it's called the Apocalypse Lounge and is said to feature shadow dancing and live spiders.
'Secrets' in Astoria
What lured me to Queens was the Frank Borzage retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, which stands next to the massive Astoria Studios, now a National Historical landmark. Astoria was Hollywood East in the 1920s and 1930s when D.W. Griffth, Rudolph Valentino, Louise Brooks, and the Marx Brothers all made films there. Three-quarters of a century later movies are still shot there, among them Scent of a Woman and The Age of Innocence. As for Secrets, the film I came to see, it was made in 1933, stars Leslie Howard and Mary Pickford, and only a director as accomplished and sensitive as Borzage could have dug into such unpromising material and come up with riches. The story follows a couple from an amusing courtship (they elope on a unicycle) to an old age in which they stage a second elopement (in a stolen car) to the consternation of their bossy, patronizing children.
A New York Scene
As often happens in New York, especially (for some reason) at film museum screenings, there was a scene. It was played out by a couple in the audience. The husband had just taken his seat in the middle row of the auditorium when his unseen wife began shouting at him all the way from the lobby. She was apparently having a problem with a suitcase too big to bring into the theatre. The husband shouted back, "Leave it at the ticket counter!" After some more shouting, the wife finally made an appearance. Looking even bigger than her voice, she was about to lay into her husband when she noticed that a woman in the same row seemed to be looking askance at her. "Don't shake your head at me, lady!" "I was not shaking my head at you!" "Don't tell me that! I guess I know when someone's shaking their head at me." By this time, the audience was laughing, and before you knew it, so was the couple and so was the woman who may or may not have been shaking her head. Pure New York, where there are scenes and secrets and surprises on every street, all the city's "a stage and all the people players."