Water Lillies
On a recent afternoon, I made my triumphant return to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Approaching the palace from 85th street, I beheld a serpentine organism snaking up to the entrance, doubling, then tripling. Never had I been more excited to wait in a line! Because unlike the dour lines I have been standing in as of late (Trader Joes, I’m looking at you) the atmosphere in this line was like that of a concert—I remember those! The returning Met patrons were fucking PSYCHED. And the convivial spirit had a lot to do, I think, with the fact that most everyone in the line was a New Yorker—of course some Jersey and Westchester people, doyennes of the mid-week matinee, etc, but you get my drift. No Eurotrash in strange capri pants, not a selfie stick in sight. Just people excited to be back in the palm of capital B Beauty. A banner reading “TOGETHER” hung in big block letters outside and I’m not gonna lie I got a little choked up, as I did on the day of Andrew Cuomo’s last daily briefing, when he said he was proud of us for flattening the curve. I’m a sucker for easy sentimentality, especially in the guise of paternalism (it keeps my therapist rich!).
It feels weird to be recommending an institution as fusty and eternal as the Met. It’s like recommending joy or pizza (one and the same for some of us). After waiting in yet another line to pay for my ticket (pro tip: pay what you will online in advance), I had no urge whatsoever to venture to some less trafficked corner or try to find a gallery I’d never wandered into before. I didn’t want to challenge myself intellectually by gazing into Clyfford Still’s Rorschach blots or meditate on shards of pottery from Mesopotamia. No, I wanted play the hits, visit my faves.
Above all, I adore the Oceania room, just off the Greek and Roman galleries. An entire wall is glass and the ceilings are approximately one million feet high, but most of all I love those artists for their sense of humor. Divorced from their original context, I know there’s an awful lot I don’t understand about those pieces, their religious and cultural significance, etc. But with those giant eyes and penises, what’s not to love? After a lazy promenade, I paused to figure out where to go next. Turned out I wanted the easy stuff: I wanted water lilies.
I’m not an art critic or an art expert or an art anything other than an art fan, and even I know the water lily must rank as the lowest common denominator of an already tragically middle brow school of painting: Impressionism. But, like huffing the teacher’s Wite-Out in the back of 7th grade math class, it’s also a great gateway drug—cheap, easy, accessible. When I taught second grade, I brought my class on a field trip to the MOMA. We’d been studying Monet and water lilies in advance to get pumped, and I upon seeing it IRL, stretched across a giant white wall in a room all to itself, several kids screamed, like they had seen a celebrity. One girl ran up and pressed her nose to the very canvas, causing an aneurism for the guard on duty. That was the kind of ecstatic art experience I was looking for on Thursday, after having been way from a museum for more than six months. I wanted sunflowers, cala lilies, starry nights, water lilies, thick paint on canvases, sumptuous bright color.
The last time I visited the Met I was in my third trimester of pregnancy, when I was on a bucket list tour of culture and meaning because I thought of becoming a mother as a terminal condition. That has turned out to be true and not true. True, I hadn’t been to the Met since hauling my pregnant ass up those stairs. But two years later I returned. And on the day of this visit, the chronic pain that has been zinging in my feet since Theo was born wasn’t bothering. The sun was starting to take the golden filter of Edward Hopper but it was still hot like summer. After leaving the museum, I walked across the park eating an apple, and even stopped to listen to a guy playing saxophone under a bridge. I usually hate that shit but I couldn’t help but be caught in the thrall. I was feeling myself coming back to life, just for the afternoon.
So I guess I’m not so much recommending the Met as I am recommending the lush and resplendent, the decadent and the tawdry and the oh-so-easy, the pleasure for the sake of it, a bon-bons-and-soap-operas kind of afternoon, where you can get it. The world is on fire, not that you need to be reminded. The Met will shut down again. In the meantime, water lilies.
Might I also recommend for your consuming pleasure:
- The Vow: If they don’t release another episode soon I am going to lose it!!! I am obsessed with cults. My dream career (after spy) is cult deprogrammer, and this is far and away the best documentary on cults I have ever seen. The access and material is unparalleled, and the filmmakers slow time to show how you can go from being a contributing member of society to being branded by an actress from Smallville. And midnight volleyball. Just incredible.
The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr: Show me a better contemporary gonzo journalist than Ben Lorr, I dare you! This book is so riveting and there is a fact about shrimp I will never forget. The storytelling and characters in this book are among the most captivating I’ve encountered in a long time. Buy at once!
“The Work of Art” by Namwali Serpell: Speaking of art, this is a fun send-up of the art world, misguided petitions, and auto-fiction. Is there anything Serpell cannot do???
I May Destroy You: An incredible interrogation of all of our hypocrisies. What I love about this show is how no one is safe, nothing is sacred, and there’s empathy for and critique of everyone.
cardamom floss: Elevate your floss game, I should know, I forever have detritus the size of small vehicles stuck in my teeth.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel: Wasn’t sure I could read about a pandemic in the midst of one but the Georgia Flu makes covid look like a hangnail so I guess it was a comforting downward comparison?
Clean Hands by Patrick Hoffman: I LOVED this book and have placed it directly in the (hopefully) clean hands of many. A confection of a mystery novel and a mousetrap game all over NYC. The funnest.
The Real Housewives of Potomac Season 5: There’s no way I was going to let this list be all fancy floss and literary fiction. If you are sleeping on Potomac, what are you even doing with your life?! Gizelle Bryant’s eyebrows deserve a Peabody Award.
Where are you finding joy these days?
