another eye opens

(click photos twice to enlarge)

We started Andy’s birthday celebration with a delicious dinner (and sparkling dessert) in the company of Ben, Randall, and Hugh at Gastroteca Astoria.

The celebration continued Friday night with a sunset bike ride down to the Village and a stroll through “Human Interest,” the Whitney Museum’s show with its intriguing array of interpretations as to what constitutes a portrait. Alexander Calder’s wire mobile of Edgard Varese. Diane Arbus’s baby picture of Anderson Cooper. Urs Fischer’s giant sculpture of Julian Schnabel as a burning candle. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Hollywood Africans. Duane Hanson’s Woman with Dog, so startlingly realistic that I seriously believed it was a little piece of performance art, someone sitting and reading letters all day with a dog at her feet.

Saturday turned to be a perfect day for a ferry ride to Gunnison Beach in Sandy Hook, NJ, bicycling to and from the Seastreak terminal on the East River. For dinner we met Cesar, Alison, and Bob for Ethiopian food at Abyssinia in Harlem.

Sunday afternoon I took Andy to the Metrograph Cinema to see the Madonna documentary, Truth or Dare, which he’d never seen. We enjoyed strolling through the Lower East Side and Soho, taking in the new storefronts and street art. We thought our T-shirts together could form the basis of a PhD thesis about the cross-pollination of comic books and gallery art in the late 20th century.