Latest old-guy thing to do is hang out at the art museum—the Minneapolis Institute of Art—while the kids are in school. It's free! Well, a cup of coffee at the café is about four dollars, but you can nurse it for around an hour while reading something you brought along. It's three miles from my house, so if I walk there, it takes nearly an hour and I'm ready to rest upon arrival. Have to fortify myself beforehand as walking slowly, then standing, repeat, repeat, repeat, beats up my arthritic knees. I spend about the same amount of time with the coffee as I do in the galleries, and I bus home. Kind of a funky neighborhood. Party in the bus shelter last night! Or, maybe, sometime earlier this week: the "public space" is probably not freshened up daily. You meet some characters when riding the #18 along Nicollet Avenue during nonpeak hours. Today, one guy agreed to pay another a dollar for a cigarette. The seller, having received in payment a fistful of coins, counted it out after the exchange had been made, then reported to his customer that he'd only given him 99 cents. The customer, grinning, replied, "A penny saved is a penny earned" and they both laughed.
I stumbled today upon Georgia O'Keeffe's "City Night." Since I never have a plan, I wander aimlessly and stumble on everything I see. This painting was familiar to me only because once, several years ago now, I helped chaperone a school field trip to the museum and our guide stopped in front of "City Night" for a short presentation that ended with her asking the kids how the painting made them feel. There were a couple sort of comical responses and then my step kid volunteered, "Small and lonely." One of the other more famous paintings in MIA's permanent collection is of a more comforting city street scene, Camille Pissarro's "Place du Théâtre Francais, Paris," shown below. Is there a word for "the little plaque to the side of the painting that describes it"? For this Pissarro, it says:
After a chronic eye infection limited the amount of time Camille Pissarro could spend outdoors, he began a series of views of Paris seen from hotel windows. Hoping to show the beauty of the bustling city, he painted this view down the Avenue de l'Opera and other vistas at different hours and seasons, and under varying weather conditions.
Waiting on the #18 at 26th & Nicollet, I found myself wondering about Pissarro's hotel bill, and whether another Parisian "vista" might have afforded a view of the oddly picturesque litter at a deserted cab stand.
Comments