Summer Happening Continued

So after Figment there was....

PS 1

MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, has a campus just inside of Queens on the 7 train. This art museum is known as PS1: Contemporary Art Center. It gets the name because it is housed in an old (abandoned?) school that lends an interesting dynamic to the museum itself. Not only creepy, it seems to ask whether it is a museums job, or art's for that matter, to educate the masses. And this brings me to a conversation with Cyrus on truth in art and museums and propriatizing and..... well it's thoughts still unformed for me.

Anyway, on Saturday nights PS1 hosts large parties with admission to the museum. I went with Cyrus and we got in and went straight to the art. And by going straight I mean we waded through hundreds of yuppies and hipsters drinking beer out of plastic cups and sitting an the hammock-like benches around the open area. At one point we got root beer floats and sat above the crowds, watching as people we knew and didn't danced around to a Russian band. The lead singer, a balding man in his 50s, swirled with one hand one a metal pole, the other alternating holding a cigarette or microphone.

The art itself was not really my thing, but quite interesting. There were a few exhibits I enjoyed. One was a ghoulish collection appropriately sequestered in the old boiler room of the school. Another was found on the top floor of the building; I entered to find a room packed with people lying on the ground or sitting on benches angled backwards, and when I sat and looked up I realized there was no roof, just perfect blue clouded sky. There was a tongue-in-cheek exhibit called "The Donner Party" which was a clever play on "The Dinner Party" I saw earlier this year at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

After some art appreciation, Cyrus and I met up with our good friend Anna. She had brought along Jennifer, from Brooklyn, and Fifi from England. Fifi was hysterical, telling us stories of how she'd impersonated a police officer to get her troublesome middle-school-aged neighbors to stop picking on a little girl. Cyrus and I then went out to find dinner at a cute little authentic French restaurant, complete with snobby French waitress. (Pictured: Cyrus, Jennifer, Fifi, Anna)

Beer Garden

We have been taking turns in our group of putting together outings, and Sandy took a turn with the Bohemian Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. It used to be, I am told, that there were dozens of beer gardens of the European variety all over New York, and that this one is the last one standing. It had a castle-like feel, complete with heavy wooden doors. If only there had been a moat to keep out those people from New Jersey and Long Island that I would have wanted to keep out. When we first arrived, the place was full of Frat boys and girls who were not completely dressed, and by the time we left the Frat boys had been replaced with hipsters, and those same girls were still there. The food was definitely authentic, I got goulash with dumplings and some beer, and the waitress staff seemed to be the gruffer sort of East-European woman, not the sweet milkmaids with braids. (Pictured: Sandy, Cyrus, Me, Michael)