Day: February 20, 2005

Four of us arrived at the Museum of Modern Art this morning at 10:15 am, placing us about 1000th in line.  The place was closed for a few years while $858 million was pumped in for renovation and expansion.  Before the renovation MoMA was white walls, bright lights, crushing crowds, one amazing painting out of every 20, $10 to get in.  After the near $1 billion project?  White walls, bright lights, crushing crowds, one amazing painting out of every 20… $20 to get in.  We made it into the museum by 11:15 but claustrophobia made us all anxious to leave by 12:15.  One native Manhattanite said that it was the most crowded place he had been inside during the preceding 12 months.

Personal favorite exhibit:  Bell 47 helicopter, as seen in the TV show MASH, hanging near some open stairs.  Strangest architectural detail:  glass half-walls throughout the museum topped with strips of stainless steel.  These are apparently too fragile for anyone to touch but because MoMA most resembles the line for Space Mountain at Disneyland it is hard for people to avoid putting their hands on these rails.  this necessitates the museum keeping dozens of security guards busy at all times walking around telling people not to touch the rails.

[Tip for tourists:  If you can plan at least one day ahead you can buy timed tickets on the MoMA Web site and avoid waiting on line in the cold.]

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We’re just back from seeing the movie Hotel Rwanda at the Angelika in Greenwich Village.  The (true) story is about a Belgian-owned hotel in Rwanda where about 1000 people take refuge from the mass slaughter of Rwanda’s 1994 civil war.  As with Schindler’s List there is a background of killing but hardly any of the people featured in the movie are killed.  Perhaps this is the only way to make a commercially successful movie about genocide.

[Note to business folks who might be thinking of investing in Africa…  the one person in the docudrama who was both competent and honest emigrated to Belgium.  This was a sad echo of Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari travelogue in which any African who developed the skills necessary to help Africa immediately emigrated to Europe.]

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