I'm going to wrap up the Bowery Walk 2007 with a few more posts today, but my thoughts are already turning to the agenda for the weekend. In looking over the copious amount of cultural activities that interest me, I'm pondering the creation of a strategy to deal with this culture of abundance. In Texas parlance, I'm fixin' to come up with a way to help me decide which exhibits and events I need to see.Last night I thought about attending some of the 30 art receptions in Chelsea, but I elected to stay home and read Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a novella from 1893. I believe I made a good decision for myself to stay home with this tale of a beautiful girl from the Bowery who turns to a life of prostitution. Though not a contemporary work, the tale is nevertheless "edgy," in the same way we overuse the term today.
With nervous worries down on Wall Street, I think we need to study the Bowery in some depth.
Often, a day in the life of New York City all seems too much - too many exhibits, concerts, lectures, too many fruits in the produce section of the grocery store and handbags on Canal Street, too many people talking to themselves or standing on the sidewalk impeding the flow of pedestrians, too many festivals, too many loud sounds, and too many ultra rich passing by too many people who spend a higher fraction of their income on rent than anywhere else in the country.
I haven't yet sorted out the weekend, but as I am most fluent in visual culture, I would like to visit Chelsea and/or the Bowery galleries to comment on a few exhibits and/or the Georges Seurat drawing exhibit at MoMA. The Seurat exhibit is a no-brainer - he's a fabulously talented flaneur.
Next on my reading list: Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel by Edmund White (September 2007). The novel imagines the final year of author Stephen Crane, who died from tuberculosis in 1900 at the age of 28, as he dictates a novel he originally planned as a companion to Maggie about a teenage boy prostitute walking the Bowery and nearby streets.
As a professional streetwalker myself...er...uh...that's not exactly what I meant, I'm beginning to see the weekend agenda fall into place.
For WOTBA's developing November agenda wish list, please consult this website's sidebar.
Image: The Burden of Choice. Rough sketch of one season of the "The Four Seasons," a sculpture in Worldwide Plaza near 50th St. and 8th Ave.
Oh! And the poet Billy Collins is reading at The Bowery Poetry Club this Sunday! Now that place is cookin'!
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