Neptune Landing

        Each trip to New York stokes the imagination for this is truly a destination of fire. For visual art, we visited the New Museum, a freshly-constructed edifice that resembles surround-sound speakers balancing on each other's shoulders like cheerleaders. Located on the Upper Bowery, its new location was finished in 2007 and its top floor features the best canvas of all, downtown Manhattan viewed from an open-air balcony. Its other six floors feature gallery space, staff offices and the ground-floor cafe and bookstore. View of the New World Trade Center           The New Museum's featured artist is Chris Burden, a baby-boomer sculptor and performance artist who takes militancy and hypermasculinity to an uncomfortable level. His show, Extreme Measures, centers of engineering, collision and military planning. One of his pieces is a video of an irresponsible crane letting loose beams from hundreds of feet up. The camera takes the perspective of the falling beams as t

         For the holiday break, I've come to New York to reunite with Mauricio. We found a tiny studio apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park where the street cacophony has been lulling me to sleep. We've left the window open and you can hear the hum of traffic in these springlike breezes along with laughter and conversations among humans and among dogs. Even the hard landings of skateboards sound like the endings of cassette tapes. The street music is retro and comforting but probably goes down suburban ears like poison.  Dutch Facades near                                                                                                                          Tompkins Square Park          I know you're not supposed to willingly slumber in New York but I took an oversold, redeye flight where a young, handsome guy was having seizures two rows ahead of me at 3 in the morning. He ended up surviving but all the stewardesses crowded around him like mother hens. The he