My Hobbies

If you check on the My Stuff page, you'll find out that I started going to museums before I can remember.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Art history is a really serious hobby of mine. I belong to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I visit very often. Over the past several years, I have gotten to know some of the lecturers and have learned to appreciate things like French Furniture during the reign of Louis XIV and Sevres porcelains. This has been a very good year. I finally figured out the differences between Japanese and Chinese Art in an exhibit called Waves. The Leonardo da Vinci drawings were worth every nanosecond of the 2 hours I spent waiting on line.

On the left is a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture displayed on the roof.

The MET had its beginnings in the late 1860s with American poet William Cullen Bryant and artists Frederic Church and John Kensett proposed an art museum for New York City. These artists were associated with the Hudson River School of Painting and did all of their work in the Catskill mountains. Their landscapes are as great and mighty as anything painted in Europe. Bryant, as a quick aside, wrote his great poem Thanatopsis when he was 19 years old and lived from pre-Revolution to past the Civil War. They got a charter on April 13, 1870 and even with no money and with no artwork their idea grew into a institution that is in the same breath with the Louvre and the Hermitage. It is a good thing that great ideas do not always need seed money. The collection at the MET now numbers about 2 million pieces of art. American Art and Literature are really important to me.

Museum of Modern Art - MOMA

The Museum of Modern Art is another favorite place. Its temporary location in Queens is just that Temporary. I went to see the Ansel Adams exhibit and left spellbound. What Adams did is what I call 'chemical' Photoshop. He experimented with different developing processes, chemicals, and papers to produce some of the most awesome photos I have ever seen.

What I have on the left from MOMA's website does not do justice to his work.

In 2005 the museum goes back to 53rd street to what will be the largest museum of contemporary art in the world.

Jazz

I really like classical jazz. The greatest classical jazz station maybe in the whole world broadcasts from Newark, New Jersey, WBGO. As a member supported station, WBGO plays 'real jazz right now' Every summer the station helps sponsor jazz events in the metropolitan area. This year I went to hear the Lincoln Center Jazz Band led by Wynton Marsalis, the jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, and on the right the great saxophone of Sonny Rollins.

Swimming

I really LOVE to swim. Lots of people go for drinks after work, I head straight for the pool.
Swimming long distances every day is like a walk in the park for me. I am very lucky to have access to the New York University Sports Centers and two swimming pools. You can usually find me at one of them almost any weekday evening.

This is Coles

What I Drive

Everybody who has a website says something about what they drive and I do have a license, except I ride. I ride a Cannondale Adventure 700 hybrid. Not having a road bike does slow me down a bit - hybrids weigh more. However, I can handle anything from bad pavement to sand, to potholes, to beer cans with no problems. I'm strictly a weekend warrior and I hang up my bike by early November. To my way of thinking, group riding with the New York City Cycle Club is safer and more fun than going alone.

During a ride through Brooklyn, I caught the Empire State Building framed with the arch of the Manhattan Bridge..

This is my Cannondale and I am somewhere in the middle of New Jersey.

Running

I really like running and if you viewed my Adobe page, you saw East River Park. I've been running there for a very long time. The park is basically 65 acres and is finally undergoing major renovations. When I'm not swimming, I'm usually running in East River Park.

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