I guess it's time for my semi-regular Monday afternoon weekend wrapup post. (Hey. How creative are you feeling right now?)

The weekend was nice and low-key. B. came in from Connecticut late Friday night and met me at my office in Manhattan before we took a car home through the snowy mess that was post-post-rush-hour traffic. (Nice perk, when I can get it. It's the one thing that makes working till/past midnight a pleasure.)

On Saturday, we were slow to get going, but eventually went to our neighborhood diner for lunch, and then to the Guggenheim, where we checked out the James Rosenquist retrospective. My verdict? Completely kick-ass exhibition. The Guggenheim was a great place for it -- it was great to look across the rotunda and see several layers of colorful paintings stacked atop each other. My favorite individual work was his painting F-111, which I'd seen once before in Atlanta. Here it was displayed on all four walls of a small room. Each of the two times I've seen it, it was mind-blowing...like the second half of the twentieth century boiled down into a single painting eighty-six feet long. The exhibition had some other neat things I hadn't seen before, like a couple sculptures, and some really stunning paintings. One in particular (which I can't find a picture of online, unfortunately) was like a Rothko -- there was more and more going on in it the more I looked at it. And to see his early work, like the abstract "Astor Victoria" (image lifted from this review of the exhibition) was a revelation. Very cool. (Here's an interesting interview with Rosenquist, too.) And as always, we had to check out the museum store, which had such interesting things as a nifty mousepad with the building's skylight on it and a Kasimir Malevich Constructivist teapot and cups.

After brief forays into a Barnes & Noble and a Best Buy, we headed back to Astoria and had dinner at a newly opened restaurant in my neighborhood called 718. The food was really good, the presentation was lovely (without verging into "Tall Food" territory -- dontcha hate it when you have to dismantle your entree before you can eat it?) and the atmosphere was very pleasant and welcoming (though I would have swapped the muted techno for some Brazilian jazz...both B. and I were thinking the Getz/Gilberto album would work well here.) They have tapas in the evenings till late, so I'm thinking that it might be fun to become a regular. I think I'll make a point of stopping by for at least a glass of wine and a plate of tapas once or twice a week.

We arrived home to find, oddly enough, a bag of microwave popcorn stuffed into my mailbox. (No address label, no note of explanation, and it wasn't a sample. Go figure.) The popcorn inspired us to watch a movie -- on the program that night was "Desk Set", a not-bad Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn flick that I have an absurd love for and watch at least twice a year.

And yesterday I put B. on the train back to CT, did a wee bit of Xmas shopping, ran out of abbreviations, and spent the rest of the day vegetating @ home.

Comments

[Valerie]

sounds like you had a nice weekend.

[Vidiot]

'Twas indeed, thanks.