Well, on Friday I decided I needed to go do the sort of thing you tourists come to do while they're in New York. I went to the Guggenheim. It was... interesting. Actually, the experience didn't excite me that much. If anything it was a little frustrating. I loved the inside of the building (I couldn't see the outside of it because it was surrounded by scaffolding for its refurbishment). But the artwork... well, they were very pretty, but I'm not at all well schooled in art, and a lot of them quite frankly looked the same as each other. I didn't really know what distinguished one Matisse from the other. And then there was the blue fibreglass plank on display. Is this suppose to challenge our conceptions of art? I just felt looking at these works was like trying to understand a conversation in a foreign language I didn't know. Like I said, some of them looked very nice, but you don't put works on display in a gallery just because they look nice. Quite frankly, there was at least one Picasso there which looked like it could have been done by a child in kindergarten. I couldn't say whether these works were good or bad, because I just didn't know (Rodney, perhaps you could help me out here).

Oh well, on a more pleasant note, that night I went to a FREE concert at NYU put on by the music faculty. They played Dvorak's Dumky Trio and a Brahms String Sextet in B flat. There's another free concert in a few days being performed by the Boromeo String Quartet which is conducting a workshop at the university, so I may go along to that as well.

Today I plan to go to a flea market in Hell's Kitchen, and a market in Chelsea. Then at 4PM I believe there is a poetry reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. So that's my plan for today, although things don't usually go to plan.