vip in the city

Sunday Jazz @ MoMA Summergarden

Arrived at The Museum of Modern Art Summergarden just before doors opened at 7:00PM for the 8:00PM concert. By then, there were a couple hundred people ahead in line; luckily, that night the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden was set up to accommodate over 800 people. We ended up with seats between one of the reflecting pools and Donald Judd’s Untitled (1968). Despite the oppressive heat of the waning day, by concert time, the garden was standing room only.

On the program was a jazz performance by Steve Coleman and Five Elements. The alto saxophone, trumpet, trombone, bass, drums and vocal ensemble played an impressive 90-minute suite as night shadows descended upon the space. I would have enjoyed the concert much more had we not been beset by infuriating rudeness on all sides: in front, one man decided to use the Judd sculpture (a series of large, open, painted green rectangles) as his personal shoe rack, until ordered by one of the guards to kindly remove his socks(!) and sneakers from the artwork, thank you; to our right, a pair of eurotrashy women co-opted the section’s one walkway for their personal lounge area, laying fully supine on the marble tile next to the water, while everyone else was forced to navigate precariously around them to pass; and in the row directly behind, a French couple prattled loudly and obliviously through most of the performance with complete lack of regard for those around them who were there to listen to the music. Mon Dieu!

EH was friends with the singer and introduced us to her after the show. After parting ways with the others outside MoMA, we got to introduce AC (aspiring dentist, whom I met that night) to the joys of late night burgers at Burger Joint, one of my favorite no-longer-secret places in New York – now almost entirely ruined, thanks to write-ups like the one in GQ Magazine, naming theirs among one of “The 20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die.”

Aristide Maillol’s The River :

There's 1 comment so far ... Sunday Jazz @ MoMA Summergarden

Qsoz
July 24, 2006

Mon Dieu! indeed.

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