After settling in at home from our summer travels, Gail and I visited CJ in Brooklyn in mid September. Our plan was to attend a dance performance Friday night, do something outside the city on Saturday, and attend the Medieval Festival in Manhattan on Sunday. We did all that and more and tried out new restaurants.
We stayed in the Days Inn on 39th Street. There are eight parking spaces between the hotel and the street. We were lucky to get one of them when we checked-in.
We met up with CJ near the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House, and had dinner at Black Forest Brooklyn.
The dance performance was at the BAM Fisher building. The work was
portrait of myself as my father by
nora chipaumire, an immigrant from
Zimbabwe. She used her work to address the question of what does it take to
make a black African man (and father) in the wake of colonialism, tribal
traditions, Christianity, and liberation struggles. She featured four alternative
activities:
fight, flee, fuck, or die.
Her work was, while sometimes confusing, thought provoking.
I thought that she left out an important potential activity, cooperate.
On Saturday morning, we picked up CJ in our car, and headed to the Storm King Art Center, which is up the Hudson valley from NYC. There, on 500 acres, are over 100 outdoor modern sculptures, and one model of an Easter Island statue. We spent the whole afternoon wandering among the fields, trees, ponds, and sculptures, but did not see them all.
