Refuge for the cosmopolitan planet

By Molly Cooper

I love New Haven. Really. But even this burgeoning metropolis is not always the cultural epicenter of our wildest dreams. With classes barely underway, there's no better time than now to check out some real urban culture. The greatest thing about New Haven is that it lies halfway between Boston and New York.

If I were able to go to New York this weekend, the first thing I would do is go to the "Under the Big Top" exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York to see all the old circus paraphernalia and ephemera. (But that's just me. And I like circuses.) If I didn't like circuses quite as much as I do, I might spend the afternoon at the Museum of Natural History looking at diamonds. Since the New York Historical Society would be just down the block, I might (if my mind were as inclined towards poetry as it is towards trapezes and cotton candy) pay a quick visit to the desk which Clement Moore used to write his magnum opus, "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."

I will grant that not everyone shares my personal taste. If you perfer, you could go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the tribute to Gianni Versace or the not-to-be-missed exhibit of Jackson Pollock's early sketchbooks and drawings which closes in a few weeks. You could also stop in at the Museum of Modern Art to see the new film by Steve McQueen, or an exhibit featuring various printmaking techniques of artists from Toulouse-Lautrec to Andy Warhol. Or, if you are more inclined towards flowers and trees than art, you could head for the Bronx Botanical Gardens, where there's a full acre of glassed-in, heated Ecuadorian rain forest and African desert.

So, say it's Saturday night and you're still in New York. You've got a place to stay for the night. Possibly at the YMCA. So you decide to go out. If you really like Sebastian Bach and managed to miss him when he came through New Haven last week, you could catch him at Coney Island High playing with Richie Scarlett of the Ace Frehley Band and Jimmy Flemion of the Frogs. If you're more interested in jazz, you could stop by the Village Vanguard to see Roy Hargrove, or the Blue Note to see Ruth Brown. All next week at the Blue Note, jazz fans can catch Jimmy Smith and Brother Jack McDuff, two of the greatest electric organists of all time. But if it were me in New York on Saturday night, I might stop in at Brownies to check out the Bush Tetras. Or maybe you don't want to go into New York. Maybe you're intimidated by the disembodied voice of Eartha Kitt when it oozes out of your taxi's rear speakers. Maybe you want to watch a hometown baseball team that never wins or hear people talk with comical accents. Like my friend Buddy, for example. He's always had a thing for Boston, and he loves those Kennedys, so I know his first stop when he hits Beantown this weekend will be the "Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy: First Lady" exhibit at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Buddy is a pretty cultured guy, so he has already been to the "America Draws" and "Chinese Furniture of the 16th and 17th Centuries" exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts, and would doubtlessly recommend them highly. Since Buddy has already seen most of the major exhibits around Boston, I know his next stop will be the less-known Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), where he could gape at all the rare pieces on display in the "Awash in Bad Art" exhibit.

If there's one thing Buddy loves, it's music. On Saturday night, he'll probably be at the Middle East to see Purple Ivy Shadows. If he's still there on Sunday, he'll go back to the Middle East and check out Les Savy Fav, who just released a single on Sub Pop Records. But that's just Buddy.

Back to A&E...