Montreal and New York City

It’s summer and time to hit the road, air or water for some time off. For the next few months we’re going to recount some anecdotes and highlights from trips we’ve taken, hopefully to spur and inspire all of you to take a much-needed break. Those with a low tolerance for other peoples’ vacation stories, bail out now.

I took some time off a couple of weeks ago (one month on this job was killing me!), up to Montreal and New York City with my girlfriend. I’d never been to Montreal, but all that I’d heard made it sound like a very appealing city. Which it was, but I have to say I was surprised by the relatively minor cultural activities available, not just in the four days we were there, but from what I gleaned from local papers and the Internet the surrounding weeks. Given the size and population of the place, more than 3.5 million people in the Greater Metropolitan Area, I’d expected a greater number of touring bands, repertory cinemas and art museums.

The Musee des Beaux-arts, which is Montreal’s major art museum, was underwhelming, but that probably had to do with the temporary exhibit being a Walt Disney retrospective that we had no interest in. The Musee d’art contemporain featured a retrospective of Bruce Nauman’s neon and video work, though, and that was great fun. You never knew what to expect as you rounded each corner of the gallery, especially as you could hear the audio for his video installation“Clown Torture” emanating from a room well before you came to it.

The Biodome and Botanical Gardens were kind of interesting but didn’t really live up to their potential. Plus, there’s nothing else of interest nearby, and you’ll eat up a good part of your day taking trains and shuttles to get there and back.

The real delight, though, was the city itself. We spent most of our time just walking around. It’s an easily navigable city, and you can cover most areas of interest on foot with a few days of meandering. A Situationist-style derive is not always wise in an unknown city, but Montreal seemed pretty safe, relaxed and casual. So civilized, in fact, the non-aggressive panhandlers address you as monsieur or madame. The area of Mont Royal, where we spent most of our time, was especially interesting. We were only there a few days, but it seems that Montreal’s reputation as a hip, attractive place to live comes more from an overall joie de vive the citizens seem to possess, rather than an abundance of cultural events, as in New York, Chicago or San Francisco. The place reportedly has the second highest number of restaurants in North America, as well as plenty of bars and coffee shops; all of those “third spaces” where  some of us spend some of the best moments of our lives whiling away the hours.

Knowing the frantic pace of New York awaited, it was a bit sad to leave cozy Canada. But we did, on Amtrak’s Adirondack line, which takes you through the forests and mountains of lower Quebec and upstate New York all the way down to midtown Manhattan. An attractive route, but long at the scheduled 10 hours and even longer at the 12 it actually took, due to track maintenance and overzealous border officers. These were men who clearly enjoyed the intimidating, bullying stance they were encouraged to take in the name of national security.

So off of that slow train and on to the A train to Brooklyn where friends live. We got in too late to see any of the city that night, but by noon the next day, we were stepping out of the 86 Street subway stop to visit the Guggenheim and Neue Gallerie. I’d never been to the Guggenheim, primarily because they rarely have anything I’ve been dying to see, but this time, I wanted to see its renowned interior design. Turns out that was indeed the most interesting thing about it, unless you’re really into Kandinsky. Worth a visit for it’s queasily twisting spiral incline, it was curiously not as impressive as it was in Matthew Barney’s Creamster 3 film, in which he scales it.

The newish Neue Gallerie is an unbelievably attractive museum housed in an old mansion at 5th Avenue and 86th Street. It exists to exhibit a large collection of Austrian and German Expressionist work, but lots of their Schieles and Klimts had been moved elsewhere to make room for a Van Gogh exhibition, which was an awful shame because you can’t go to hardly any midsized museum without seeing that guy, and it’s not as common to see the Austro-Germans. Still, it was a great space, and they are justly proud of their recent acquisition of Klimt’s ”Adele Bloch-Bauerwhich,” which is pretty stunning up close.

For some reason, even though, I’d been to New York multiple times, I had never visited the American Museum of Natural History; I finally decided to go. This was my girlfriend’s first time in the city, and she had never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is an absolute must, one of the finest museums in the world. So she went to the Met, and I crossed Central Park (always a pleasure, even on a hot day) to look in on the giant blue whale and dinosaur bones.

I can’t believe I’d never visited there before! I loved that place. An initial sense of bemusement I felt toward the occasionally corny dioramas slowly faded, and I was amazed and delighted by the whole museum, especially the halls of Human Origins, Meteorites, Minerals and, most impressive, the Hall of Ocean Life.

It’s a humbling place. If a slow stroll through the Met re-contextualizes art history and makes us aware of how unique, radical and luminous certain works of art that we’ve seen repeatedly reproduced in books, postcards and posters actually are, then the AMONH reminds us of how infinitely interesting the world around and beyond us is, and how improbable and fortunate it is that mankind has discovered and learned all that we have about the natural world and the universe.

Most interesting, though, was Bang on a Can’s 26-hour free concert, held at the World Financial Center Winter Garden, next to Ground Zero. We stopped off at La Monte Young’s Dream House on the way, and that disorienting room of thick, abrasive sound was a great appetizer for what was to come. Arriving an hour or so into it, we ended up staying five hours, exiting around 2 a.m. after managing to stay awake for Brian Eno’s Music For Airports. That was made somewhat easier due to the clanking of a bottle rolling down the marble steps. It seemed to take forever to stop, and the kid who kicked it over, chased it down the stairs, causing an even greater commotion. The cleanup took forever and involved a trio of men with walkie-talkies, so the soothing ambient strains of Eno’s gorgeous piece were accompanied by chance and accident. John Cage would have loved it.