A day at the Met

Today the deluge. Pouring rain, cold and windy. A good day for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had no idea the Met is so expensive*. What a shock! But it was, of course, marvelous. And after hours of walking around looking at art, I feel just like these two people.

I saw STREET, by a British visual artist, James Nares, who has lived in NYC since 1974. If you're familiar with the Qatsi trilogy from the 80s, you know the idea: brilliant photography, slow motion, wonderful music, and no words. You become immersed in the beauty and tenderness of the human being.

STREET is an hour-long video cut from sixteen hours of high def shot from a car, panning through the streets of New York during one week in 2011. If you scroll to the end of the link, you'll see a couple of minutes of the video, but seeing it on a huge screen and watching the entire hour was so powerful for me that nothing else came close. It is a long love poem to the human race. Nares says this:

My intention was to give the dreamlike impression of floating through a city full of people frozen in time, caught Pompeii-like, at a particular moment of thought, expression and activity...a film to be viewed 100 years from now. --James Nares.

I added a few more shots to the album. Thanks for the comments. I'm living so intensely I hardly have time to comment, but I am reading every word, and I'm grateful.

______
*Devorah tells me the price we paid was only the "recommended" price, and if we had asked to pay less, they would have accepted less. I'm glad to know this. Somehow it hadn't come through to me. It would take some chutzpah to pay less, but if I lived here and couldn't see the work any other way, I'd summon it.