WHY WE CAME HERE

Mrs. C and I subscribe to the digital edition of the New York Times. One morning in early January she read an article and passed it to me, https://tinyurl.com/4s5amvuy (I hope it’s not behind a paywall). "Ï’d really like to see that!” she told me. I asked her what she had on in the middle of February. Nothing special, so I opened my laptop and here we are.

Armia Khalil is an Egyptian immigrant, a sculptor and a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 13 years. How he became acquainted with a Met curator who took an interest in his work and ended up placing this in a current exhibition is much too long a story for here. I commend the Times article to you. The sculpture is titled “Hope — I Am a Morning Scarab.” The scarab beetle was a symbol of hope for the ancient Egyptians and one appears on the top of the head.  

Other than that, I still can’t eat much and am pretty weak thanks to Thursday’s restaurant. La Guardia Airport was socked with fog yesterday and our flight was canceled. We’ll get home today through inconvenient routes and times, but we’ll get there.              

Live From New York, It's Monday Afternoon

I have so much material between the STL Theatre Crawl and this week in NYC that I don't know what to do. Go back and forth, I guess.

There are several interesting shows going on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The blockbuster is Heavenly Bodies, couture from top French and Italian designers based on historical garments of the Catholic Church. Some large number of popes and cardinals are rolling over in their graves as I write this.  And so many more images from the show to edit whenever I find time.

Another is called Visitors To Versailles, about the vast numbers of common people, diplomats and nobility who came to the royal court during the reigns of Louis XIV, XV and XVI, along with what they found there. One of them, below, was Thomas Jefferson. At the bottom, Le Roi Soleil himself, Louis XIV.

Got to edit more Crawl stuff. A bit more in Manhattan Tuesday morning and then out to my sister's home in NJ in the afternoon.

   

New York Cuisine

The street food carts used to advertise kosher products, not halal, but I guess that reflects who's running this business these days. Are Sabrett franks and Hebrew National kosher hot dogs around any more? Yes, I see a small Sabrett sign in the third photo. And you can still get a knish if you need one.

These are shots of the line of food vendors on Fifth Avenue in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's a bit of a clash with the high culture inside.