Leave it to good ol' Lincoln, Nebraska to be at the forefront of modern art.

Speaking of art, I've seen an awful lot of it in the last few days. Since Sunday Gia and I have toured the Brooklyn Art Museum, MOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (six hours there), and the Guggenheim. I had to send Gia off on her own today to tackle the Whitney and the Frick--I'm overloaded, plus they're expensive. It's been very cool, but hard to absorb the sheer enormity of exceptional work. Gia remarked that every painting we saw in MOMA's permanent collection was so famous, she wondered if they were famous just because they were in MOMA.

It was there that we spent a great deal of time at the Gerhard Richter exhibit--my favorite of the bunch so far. Throughout his 40-year (and ongoing) career he has done colorful, splashy abstracts as well as super-realistic work--yet distorted, like blurry photographs (most famous, perhaps, is his cover of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation album). He also did a series of monochromatic gray abstracts, just using different textures. It reminds you that you really cannot understand art like this by looking in pictures in a book, particularly the abstracts. The whole experience of it is seeing the brush-strokes and the thickness of the paint.

We've been so pooped after standing and staring all day long, that we haven't had much of a nightlife. The closest we've come to going out was Tuesday; we saw Monsoon Wedding (good!) after resting our tired toes and sharing tapenade at Halcyon in Carroll Gardens. Oh yes, and yesterday afternoon we bought shoes. Nothing says gal-bonding like shoe shopping in the rain.