The City Is Back

 The City Is Back. Or at least it seemed so yesterday on the upper east side as I made the long trip from Brooklyn to the Met to see the Alice Neel Retrospective. It's a well deserved exhibition with a few reservations from me. As some might recall I was not a fan of hers as a person and have written a few times about why so I won’t bring up my antidotes about her again.

The Met was far from empty and as I waited on line in the magnificent hall the buy my $1.00 ticket I had a nice conversation

with a young attractive African American man from Washington D.C. who was visiting the museum for the first time. He was smart, studying to be a lawyer and was hoping to move to Man hat taaaa and as I said he was attractive and it was easy to chat with him as he asked me intelligent questions on the Mayoral race and what did I recommend he look at on his first visit to the Met. I should have said more, done more but I didn’t.

I made my way upstairs and found a long line waiting for me to get into the exhibition. After about a 20 minute wait I made it into the show and was greeted with the portrait of my old friend Margaret Evans pregnant with her twin girls to be. I made a comment to the guard that she was a friend and that she would have 2 little girls. He was not impressed, and I decided that I would keep my comments on all the ghosts that I would soon be looking at to myself.

I wouldn’t mention to the complete stranger standing next to me that this art critic in his underwear who I didn’t like was murdered, and that his fellow critic in the portrait who I didn’t care for much either was I was told a virgin till the day he died. He once invited me and John to dinner and ordered in Chinese food, the one thing that endeared him to me.

Or that the portrait (which is a favorite of mine) of my late friend Robert Smithson who died young in a plane crash shows young Bob in 1962 his cheek covered in acne. In 62 I was an even younger 15 and still in high school. It would be 7 years until we would meet and become friends. So many ghosts. The city is back.

The painting that caused me the most emotional upset was of John lying nude and starring at us, me. I remember how excited he was when returning to our loft on 27th street after a morning of Alice painting him. He refused to allow me to go with him on those outings up to Alice’s upper westside apartment where he posed unashamed in his vast nakedness. When I finally saw it for the first time I was shocked, and now it is in the Whitney’s permanent collection for all time. Sylvia Sleigh wanted me to pose for her in the nude, but all she got from me was a pose in my swimsuit that summer in the backyard of Betty Parson’s Summer house. I now hang in the Philadelphia Museum of Art for all to see.

The exhibition is nicely installed but I found her still lives and landscapes to be dull, pretty but dull but I did like her scenes of New York City and those marvelous portraits of her upper westside neighbors and children are spell minding and stunning. But it’s those blunt portraits of hers that command the viewer’s gaze, Warhol bare chested showing off his horrible scars from his being shot and nearly killed, the still shocking portrait of Joe Gould with his many penises, and her strong scenes of death and despair in the hospitals of depression New York.

It is a popular show, so go knowing that, and be prepared to wait on a line, maybe strike up a conversation with a native New Yorker or a visitor. The city is back.

Returning to Brooklyn there were people on the streets without masks including myself smiling like I was until I had to take the dreaded subway another thing I hate about New York. And it was more crowded then I have seen in the recent few times I’ve ventured into Manhattan. The crazies are back also. A deranged woman screamed and cursed for most of my ride finally I moved as far away from her as I could. She had the entire row of seats to herself. She looked deranged and like she would gladly push someone on the tracks if she got the chance. The city is back.