this morning, at my local neighborhood coffee joint, michael jackson's HISTORY was on maximum rotation. now, i was sorta digging on it, but isn't that strange? i mean, it IS the east village, you know. i'm sure there was a heavy dose of irony implied but with one's tongue so firmly in cheek, that just might slip past "unexpected" and back to "of course it is", rendering the effect no longer ironic. either way, i love the place.

last night, there was this great piece on frank lloyd wright on pbs. at the end, the camera tooled around inside the guggenheim. well, this was definitely filmed some time in late '96 or early '97 as the ellsworth kelly retrospective that i had seen on a visit here then was on the walls. the entire hour would have been worth it just to see those works on those walls again. kelly is my favorite living artist and the effect of that show in '96 on me cannot be overstated. in fact, i went to see it again at the MOCA in los angeles sometime in '97. it was still spectacular but there was something about all that color and form on those curvy walls that just go up and up that the space in los angeles just couldn't duplicate. when contemporary artists criticized wright's spiral design for the guggenheim in the late 50's as unsuitable for displaying their work, he responded that they would just have to make better art. indeed.