COMMUNISTS, CUBANS, AND CONCERTS

 The Folk Art museum in Manhattan is about the size of a small Rite Aid. It has a big collection, but they can seldom show very much of it. They had 125 of their best pieces out last month and that is now going on a traveling show, which I hope will come to California. Today they were exhibiting two outsider --primitive, naïve -- whatever you want to call them, artists, Ralph Fassanelli and William van Genk.  Both were social activists, concerned about common people, and like many people in that time period embraced, and later let go of, communism.

Fasinelli's paintings look a lot like Grandma Moses. 

There are many details put together in kind of flat ways.  He was very political, however and his work has a great deal of printing, writing, and drawings about current events. There's one entire painting about the Nixon second administration. There's another about the Rosenbergs. And others that are somewhat more generic and multinational. All of them are very interesting and made you want to look at them for a very long time.  

The others, by van Genk, are about the same subjects, because they were both interested in politics of the day and they lived more or less the same time.  Van Genk, however was most likely schizophrenic. His work is all over the place.  Lots of tiny tiny details.

Lots of printing, lots of writing.  His work was so dense that you would have had to spend an hour just to get through one piece. And they were quite large. 

He was also very attracted to travel so he frequently drew freehand maps of the places he was, and he made lots of collages. When you look closely at the collages you saw that things you thought were cut out of a magazine or something were actually hand drawn or painted, then cut out and pasted onto the canvas. He also loved trolley cars.  So he had made models of various trolley cars out of things like cereal boxes cut up in exact size pieces. It was very fascinating.

We finally got our meal at Cafe con Leche, our favorite Cuban restaurant.  We got there a little on the late side for lunch, meaning the sweet plantains were kind of overcooked and on the greasy side.  Not that we didn't eat them.  

I finally made it to the Apple Store to find out what happened to my photostream.

 Basically, photostream is only supposed to last for about 30 days, but on older devices it hangs around on the device until there's an upgrade or you get a new device.  

I think I may be able to retrieve it from the iPad that never finished the upgrade.  

We went to a concert tonight of a group called Repast.  Martha's gamba teacher was playing in it, so we got comp tickets.  It was a lovely concert at Baruch college.  They had a wonderful soprano, Laura Heimes, who sang parts of a Bach and a Handel cantata.  

Getting there was a comedy or errors.  John and I wanted to leave at 6:45 for the 8 pm concert because we often have to wait for both the crosstown bus and the 6 train.  Martha insisted that leaving the apt at 7 would be early enough.  Well, we waited 10 minutes for the crosstown bus, another 10 for the 6 train, which is a local and takes forever.  Then, because we had gotten at the very front of the train so we could leave the train at the end of the station, and because the gate at the end of the station was closed when we got to that station, we had to walk all the way back, and come out on the street an extra two blocks from our destination.  Because Martha never comes out that entrance, she, who was the only person who knew where we were going, got turned around and couldn't figure out where we were.  

AND THEN, when we finally got to the college a mere five minutes after the concert started, they had the elevator under repair, and we had to wait for an usher to take us on a circuitous route through the sports department to finally arrive at the concert hall.  By the time we finally arrived, we had missed the entire first piece.  And, of course, there's always the pleasure of making your grand entrance late.  

However, I am proud to say that when the concert was over, John and I made up for our tardiness by being the first in line for the free wine and cheese.