New York, New York
New York Diary: iPodding the Met
With portable MP3 players containing thousands of songs, it’s now possible to have your day around town scored by multiple composers, Mancini, Rota, or Alison Krauss. ROSECRANS BALDWIN heads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and lets chance handle the mix.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- The 2010 Tournament of Books (The Rooster)
- The 2010 Tournament of Books Long List (The Rooster)
- Untraditional Traditions (Of Recent Note)
Also by Rosecrans Baldwin
» SEE MORE
- Field Notes From 89th Street (January 5, 2010)
- Happy Challah-days (December 16, 2009)
- Joan Didion Crosses the Street (November 18, 2009)
Also in New York, New York
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The song ‘Listen Up’ by Oasis goes great with Dutch landscapes, but I was an idiot a month ago and wouldn’t have guessed. A recent class on French wines told me as much. The instructor, a large man with a long nose, stood behind a lectern massaging his waddle and explained to us, his students for the next three hours, that we were there because we wanted to know how to pair wine with food. Not true, I thought. I was there because I had a gift certificate to his school soon to expire, and ‘Wines of France’ sounded more appealing than ‘Couples Are Garlic Lovers,’ which I already knew, or ‘How To Do Things,’ which seemed kind of vague.
For three hours I drank small sips of wine and listened to stories about grapes. Our teacher told us about his hundreds of trips to small caves in Burgandy and Alsace, drinking and spitting with virile Frenchmen who smelled like diseased blankets. He was a big fan of champagne, and Paris, but there were times when I don’t think he was a big fan of us. He would stare over our heads, and fondle his chin, and mourn for our presumed prudish ways. ‘When you find yourself in Paris,’ he’d say, with a tone suggesting we would probably be turned back at the city limits, ‘and it is a nice day, and you’re outside with a pretty girl having perhaps moules aux herbes frâiches at a decent bistro, and you find for some reason you cannot spend money on a bottle of champagne, well, that would be sad…’
My lessons were tested when I celebrated my birthday recently by taking myself out for lunch. A longstanding tradition (I have practiced it for exactly one year), this time I brought the Times as my companion to Beppe, an excellent Tuscan restaurant on 22nd street. I can’t remember now exactly what wine I had for lunch, but it was a flavorful white that tasted like a Sauvignon Blanc, and it was a great match for my artichoke ravioli. I ate and drank and did the crossword, and congratulated myself for both finishing a Wednesday puzzle in one sitting and selecting a good meal. I decided to prolong the celebration and spend the afternoon at the Met.
It was on the steps of the museum, while I packed my iPod away into my bag, that I thought of extending the theme: wine and food can obviously go well together, why not art and music? I remembered an interview with Edmund White from years ago where he talked about the music he liked to listen to while he wrote, specifically Schubert’s Trout Quintet. A girlfriend in college wanted to send a copy of Danny Gatton’s Redneck Jazz Explosion (specifically the song ‘Song of India’) to Haruki Murakami because she felt it was the perfect soundtrack for his detached, jazz-loving narrators; she read his books with the song on repeat, and it worked.
I made a plan. I programmed my iPod to select randomly from its 1,710 songs, representing most musical genres. (Leaving it on random meant, of course, that it could play every track from Duke Ellington: Live At Newport in sequential order, but the risk was low.) I paid my way into the museum and pressed play. During the first song, I wandered aimlessly, with no strategy for where to go. When the song stopped, I did too, and then spent the span of whatever song the iPod chose next enjoying whatever piece of art was closest. Next song started and I wandered off again, stopping when the fourth song began. And so on.
* * *
‘A Drop in Time’ by Mercury Rev
‘Joan of Arc’ by Jules Bastien-Lepage
I’ve seen this painting many times before (it hangs in a busy, central corridor of the museum) and it always takes me by surprise. Usually I’ll have forgotten about the ghosts, and noticing them a few seconds after stopping, I’m regularly pleased, as if I was let in on a secret.
It is a moving work of storytelling, dramatically evocative, striking for the magnitude of its style (haunting, also flamboyant and full of hope) and presumed rhetoric.
And like the Saints hovering in the background, the Mercury Rev song is wispy and didactic, though it’s a weak drink next to a huge meal, too flippant and flowery for the painting. I wish I had something much grander and opulent, sentimental, Wagner or Rachmaninoff, or even New Order or U2.
* * *
‘Music for Twin Peaks Episode 30’ by Stars of the Lid
‘Epitaphios of King Stefan Uros II Milutin’ Embroidery, Serbia ca. 1300, from the current Byzantium exhibit
I have seen many red carpets before, but never an epitaphios. It shows Christ as if he’s just been buried, surrounded by angels. He looks at peace, despite the stigmata. And though the Stars of the Lid song was written with other inspiration in mind, here it works very well: the song’s wooly ambience focuses my attention on the epitaphios’s more ethereal aspects, especially the message sewn into the piece with silver thread, ‘Remember, O God, the soul of your servant Milutin Uros.’ I am not religious, but I’m frequently envious of other people’s faith.
Great duet. I leave wondering if a) I’m getting more from the art with music than the people around me listening to informational guides, and b) whether the artist meant to give Jesus four toes on one foot.
* * *
‘Used to Lov U’ by John Legend
‘The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon’ by Pissaro
How I came to own this John Legend song (some mix tape, some time?), God knows, but it has a line that deserves a reservation on the next lunar time capsule: ‘Maybe I should rob somebody, so we could live like Whitney and Bobby.’ Legend sounds like a more sincere Kanye West, with the same type of gutsy, underdog whining, but like West’s recent debut, the track waters down after a few listens.
If I make a huge amount of money in my life, I’ll buy a few Pissaros to hang in my parents’ retirement home. More than that, I can’t see what they’re good for.
* * *
‘(Please) Lose Yourself in Me’ by My Bloody Valentine
‘Still Life with Apples and Pears’ by Paul Cézanne
From Lillian Ross’s Portrait of Hemingway:
‘Still Life’ is almost too good—you want to pass by and see something new. But Cézanne’s apples and pears are so personally his, after a short while they become yours too, you know them, what it is to be an apple or pear, you know the table, you know the smell of the room.
‘(Please) Lose Yourself in Me’ is a terrible way to introduce someone to My Bloody Valentine. It’s too long, unconfident, and weakly melodic compared to their best songs, which, like ‘Still Life,’ are fruits belonging to other worlds.
If it has to be pop, I want something campy or punk, a Riesling to Cézanne’s studied masterpiece. I come close to hitting the ‘next’ button on the iPod, but I’m a scientist, I hold back.
* * *
‘Nocturne No. 2 in E Flat’ by Chopin, played by Claudio Arrau
‘Coat Hanger I’ by Jasper Johns
I am ready to retitle ‘Coat Hanger I’ as ‘A Drawing of A Coat Hanger Done in Black Crayon, Or, Meaningless’ when the ‘Nocturne’ begins and, in a few seconds, elicits an unseen measure of despondency and sweetness from the art (or, perhaps, from me). I’m stuck in place and blown away. Some consolation in loneliness, some otherwise unavailable knowledge of oneself? The good lover, Arrau opens up aspects Chopin and Johns I hadn’t seen before, and turns my opinion. But could well-played Chopin do this for anyone? Was the music so persuasive I could come around to liking Jackson Pollack, if viewed with headphones?
Unfortunately I was interrupted when two elderly woman came up next to me, and one, noticing I was scribbling in a notepad, asked me what I thought about the art. I explained that, because of the music, I’d gotten a lot out of it.
‘Well I just don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Not only could I draw that, but I’d throw it away! I’d say to myself, well I can do better than that, and put it in the trash!’
‘But you have to admit,’ the other said, ‘it is a very good coat hanger. I don’t know about his other stuff, but he can draw a coat hanger very nicely.’
I said she had a good point.
* * *
‘Listen Up’ by Oasis
‘Landscape with a Village in the Distance’ by Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael
A woman caught me air-guitaring in one of the museum’s empty rooms and left after giving me a funny look. What can I say—I was moved.
‘Listen Up’ is one of Oasis’s best songs, and, perhaps more than ‘Wonderwall,’ its most self-defining. Guitars like bears standing at the mouth of a river, big-crash drums and a catchy hook. Liam Gallagher’s whines are ideal for the lyrics’ last-man-standing self-confidence: ‘One fine day / Gonna leave you all behind / Wouldn’t be so bad if I had more time.’ (The song in fact used to be called ‘On My Own.’)
I hadn’t seen ‘Landscape’ before, but I took to it instantly. It is a thrilling painting, especially the tree in the foreground, nearly on fire from the light in its branches. The solo figure in the middle ground is an easy match to the lyrics (‘No, I don’t mind being on my own’) but it’s the picture’s vibrant darkness that’s more at home with the song’s survivalist excitement.
William Grimes, the former restaurant critic for the New York Times, once described (in Leslie Brenner’s The Fourth Star) the paper’s one-to-four stars rating system:
So, Oasis and Van Ruisdael, a four-star pair.
* * *
‘Where Are My Panties?’ by Outkast
‘Nude Before a Mirror’ by Balthus
I ended my roaming with these two, laughing, glad that chance likes a good panties joke as much as the rest of us.
The picture shows a young nude woman holding up her hair while staring at herself in a mirror, perhaps wondering where her underwear has gone.
And, the first lines from the Outkast skit: ‘What time is it…7:48? Where are my panties? Oh my god, where are my panties?! Damn—where—I don’t—He going to think I’m a ho. Fuck that, I liked it.’
For three hours I drank small sips of wine and listened to stories about grapes. Our teacher told us about his hundreds of trips to small caves in Burgandy and Alsace, drinking and spitting with virile Frenchmen who smelled like diseased blankets. He was a big fan of champagne, and Paris, but there were times when I don’t think he was a big fan of us. He would stare over our heads, and fondle his chin, and mourn for our presumed prudish ways. ‘When you find yourself in Paris,’ he’d say, with a tone suggesting we would probably be turned back at the city limits, ‘and it is a nice day, and you’re outside with a pretty girl having perhaps moules aux herbes frâiches at a decent bistro, and you find for some reason you cannot spend money on a bottle of champagne, well, that would be sad…’
My lessons were tested when I celebrated my birthday recently by taking myself out for lunch. A longstanding tradition (I have practiced it for exactly one year), this time I brought the Times as my companion to Beppe, an excellent Tuscan restaurant on 22nd street. I can’t remember now exactly what wine I had for lunch, but it was a flavorful white that tasted like a Sauvignon Blanc, and it was a great match for my artichoke ravioli. I ate and drank and did the crossword, and congratulated myself for both finishing a Wednesday puzzle in one sitting and selecting a good meal. I decided to prolong the celebration and spend the afternoon at the Met.
It was on the steps of the museum, while I packed my iPod away into my bag, that I thought of extending the theme: wine and food can obviously go well together, why not art and music? I remembered an interview with Edmund White from years ago where he talked about the music he liked to listen to while he wrote, specifically Schubert’s Trout Quintet. A girlfriend in college wanted to send a copy of Danny Gatton’s Redneck Jazz Explosion (specifically the song ‘Song of India’) to Haruki Murakami because she felt it was the perfect soundtrack for his detached, jazz-loving narrators; she read his books with the song on repeat, and it worked.
I made a plan. I programmed my iPod to select randomly from its 1,710 songs, representing most musical genres. (Leaving it on random meant, of course, that it could play every track from Duke Ellington: Live At Newport in sequential order, but the risk was low.) I paid my way into the museum and pressed play. During the first song, I wandered aimlessly, with no strategy for where to go. When the song stopped, I did too, and then spent the span of whatever song the iPod chose next enjoying whatever piece of art was closest. Next song started and I wandered off again, stopping when the fourth song began. And so on.
‘A Drop in Time’ by Mercury Rev
‘Joan of Arc’ by Jules Bastien-Lepage
I’ve seen this painting many times before (it hangs in a busy, central corridor of the museum) and it always takes me by surprise. Usually I’ll have forgotten about the ghosts, and noticing them a few seconds after stopping, I’m regularly pleased, as if I was let in on a secret.
It is a moving work of storytelling, dramatically evocative, striking for the magnitude of its style (haunting, also flamboyant and full of hope) and presumed rhetoric.
And like the Saints hovering in the background, the Mercury Rev song is wispy and didactic, though it’s a weak drink next to a huge meal, too flippant and flowery for the painting. I wish I had something much grander and opulent, sentimental, Wagner or Rachmaninoff, or even New Order or U2.
‘Music for Twin Peaks Episode 30’ by Stars of the Lid
‘Epitaphios of King Stefan Uros II Milutin’ Embroidery, Serbia ca. 1300, from the current Byzantium exhibit
I have seen many red carpets before, but never an epitaphios. It shows Christ as if he’s just been buried, surrounded by angels. He looks at peace, despite the stigmata. And though the Stars of the Lid song was written with other inspiration in mind, here it works very well: the song’s wooly ambience focuses my attention on the epitaphios’s more ethereal aspects, especially the message sewn into the piece with silver thread, ‘Remember, O God, the soul of your servant Milutin Uros.’ I am not religious, but I’m frequently envious of other people’s faith.
Great duet. I leave wondering if a) I’m getting more from the art with music than the people around me listening to informational guides, and b) whether the artist meant to give Jesus four toes on one foot.
‘Used to Lov U’ by John Legend
‘The Garden of the Tuileries on a Winter Afternoon’ by Pissaro
How I came to own this John Legend song (some mix tape, some time?), God knows, but it has a line that deserves a reservation on the next lunar time capsule: ‘Maybe I should rob somebody, so we could live like Whitney and Bobby.’ Legend sounds like a more sincere Kanye West, with the same type of gutsy, underdog whining, but like West’s recent debut, the track waters down after a few listens.
If I make a huge amount of money in my life, I’ll buy a few Pissaros to hang in my parents’ retirement home. More than that, I can’t see what they’re good for.
‘(Please) Lose Yourself in Me’ by My Bloody Valentine
‘Still Life with Apples and Pears’ by Paul Cézanne
From Lillian Ross’s Portrait of Hemingway:
As we walked along [through the Met], Hemingway said to me, ‘I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.’
‘Still Life’ is almost too good—you want to pass by and see something new. But Cézanne’s apples and pears are so personally his, after a short while they become yours too, you know them, what it is to be an apple or pear, you know the table, you know the smell of the room.
‘(Please) Lose Yourself in Me’ is a terrible way to introduce someone to My Bloody Valentine. It’s too long, unconfident, and weakly melodic compared to their best songs, which, like ‘Still Life,’ are fruits belonging to other worlds.
If it has to be pop, I want something campy or punk, a Riesling to Cézanne’s studied masterpiece. I come close to hitting the ‘next’ button on the iPod, but I’m a scientist, I hold back.
‘Nocturne No. 2 in E Flat’ by Chopin, played by Claudio Arrau
‘Coat Hanger I’ by Jasper Johns
I am ready to retitle ‘Coat Hanger I’ as ‘A Drawing of A Coat Hanger Done in Black Crayon, Or, Meaningless’ when the ‘Nocturne’ begins and, in a few seconds, elicits an unseen measure of despondency and sweetness from the art (or, perhaps, from me). I’m stuck in place and blown away. Some consolation in loneliness, some otherwise unavailable knowledge of oneself? The good lover, Arrau opens up aspects Chopin and Johns I hadn’t seen before, and turns my opinion. But could well-played Chopin do this for anyone? Was the music so persuasive I could come around to liking Jackson Pollack, if viewed with headphones?
Unfortunately I was interrupted when two elderly woman came up next to me, and one, noticing I was scribbling in a notepad, asked me what I thought about the art. I explained that, because of the music, I’d gotten a lot out of it.
‘Well I just don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Not only could I draw that, but I’d throw it away! I’d say to myself, well I can do better than that, and put it in the trash!’
‘But you have to admit,’ the other said, ‘it is a very good coat hanger. I don’t know about his other stuff, but he can draw a coat hanger very nicely.’
I said she had a good point.
‘Listen Up’ by Oasis
‘Landscape with a Village in the Distance’ by Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael
A woman caught me air-guitaring in one of the museum’s empty rooms and left after giving me a funny look. What can I say—I was moved.
‘Listen Up’ is one of Oasis’s best songs, and, perhaps more than ‘Wonderwall,’ its most self-defining. Guitars like bears standing at the mouth of a river, big-crash drums and a catchy hook. Liam Gallagher’s whines are ideal for the lyrics’ last-man-standing self-confidence: ‘One fine day / Gonna leave you all behind / Wouldn’t be so bad if I had more time.’ (The song in fact used to be called ‘On My Own.’)
I hadn’t seen ‘Landscape’ before, but I took to it instantly. It is a thrilling painting, especially the tree in the foreground, nearly on fire from the light in its branches. The solo figure in the middle ground is an easy match to the lyrics (‘No, I don’t mind being on my own’) but it’s the picture’s vibrant darkness that’s more at home with the song’s survivalist excitement.
William Grimes, the former restaurant critic for the New York Times, once described (in Leslie Brenner’s The Fourth Star) the paper’s one-to-four stars rating system:
Let’s say you’ve just gone to a movie and you’ve got reservations for dinner afterward. If you go to a one-star restaurant, I would say your conversation is mostly about the movie, punctuated by remarks about the food being pretty good. Two stars, the movie conversation gets interrupted each time new food comes. At this point, about one-third of the conversation is about the movie, two-thirds is about the food. Three stars, you’re not talking about the movie anymore…And at a four-star restaurant, your eyes are sort of rolling into the top of your head, and you’re thanking God for putting you in this place at this time.
So, Oasis and Van Ruisdael, a four-star pair.
‘Where Are My Panties?’ by Outkast
‘Nude Before a Mirror’ by Balthus
I ended my roaming with these two, laughing, glad that chance likes a good panties joke as much as the rest of us.
The picture shows a young nude woman holding up her hair while staring at herself in a mirror, perhaps wondering where her underwear has gone.
And, the first lines from the Outkast skit: ‘What time is it…7:48? Where are my panties? Oh my god, where are my panties?! Damn—where—I don’t—He going to think I’m a ho. Fuck that, I liked it.’
—Published April 29, 2004
