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Anyway, here's the artist's conception of the way the hotel looks.

Pretty impressive, eh?
A free-standing building with a big neon sign on top and colorful awnings.
Check out that giant, white awning covering the front door at the lower right.

If only.

We drove past it a few times, because all they have is a teeny-tiny sign
and about ten feet of street exposure. Here's what the front door really looked like:

You can't even make out the name, ...but,  ...what the hell.
I'm in a good mood, and we should all give the gays a break.

So, we're checked into the second-most expensive hotel room ever,
(Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas holds the title)

We did a ceremonial shot of Chinaco Anejo.
You didn't think we'd forget the Chinaco, did you?

And now, for the first time in our lives, we're going to do New York.
We took a quick NY taxicab ride to "the Village," Greenwich Village.
(For the newbies, it's pronounced "gren-ich.")

We just started walking.

Block after block - mile after mile of little shops, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores,
and every small business you could think of, block after block - mile after mile.
It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. I have samples coming up - wait for it.
Besides that, we had some great conversation, we were laughing and making jokes,
it was an exciting start to an exciting vacation.

But the walking got to me after a while.
I told a while back I was out of shape, ...so,  ...Mrs. BartCop & I joined a health club and we've
been 15-20 times on the treadmills and bikes and rowing machines, so I thought we could walk.

No...

We walked and we walked.
We got a week's worth of geography in just a few hours.
All the time, Ray was answering questions about Manhattan, the other boroughs, the subways,
New York cabs, local government (Ray's into  bartcop.com ) so we were absorbing more important data
than Spock failed to record on "City of the Edge of Forever."

As we continued to walk, my dawgs started to bark.
Maybe CAL and Ray have built up some immunity, but we did some walking.
In New York - you don't drive.
You take a bus or a subway near where you're going - then you finish it.

In New York, "next door" means within a mile, and "nearby" means the subway don't even go there.

So we end up at the Chat & Chew.
I know, Chat & Chew won "worst restaurant name" the last three years running, ...but the food.

Sidebar:
Never trust anything you read on the www or see or read in the whore media, but trust this:
New York is the king of food.
Don't worry, I have my case laid out in dozens of photo exhibits, but that's a fact.
Vegas can't touch New York for food, at least not in my price range.

The Chat & Chew was the only normal restaurant we'd see this trip.
CAL said she'd heard good things about the Thanksgiving Dinner Special.
I, of course, immediately flashed back to Thanksgiving 1999 debacle at the Rio in Vegas,

The Chat & Chew turkey dinner was spectacular.
I know - you're thinking it was only turkey with all the fixins, right?

Lemme tell you, this turkey was sliced paper-thin.
Where have you ever seen paper-thin turkey before?  Ever?

The potatoes were real, the stuffing was crunchy-perfect, the cranberry was tangy
and under the cranberry, there was some kind of veggie mix that broke the bank.
I don't even like vegetables, but this was tastier than Angie Harmon in a two-piece.
I can't even telkl you what they were - a bunch of stuff - but it had some sauce or
something on it that made those veggies taste better than the turkey.

CAL said there was lots of places in New York that served food this good.

I didn't believe her.

Time Capsule Funny
from BartCop Volume 140 - Judas Maximus
 

Do you all know Monica Lewinsky has a degree in psychology?
Did you know Laura the Unloved ...does not?

ha ha

Monica is more qualified to help disturbed people than Laura the Home-Wrecker.

ha ha

The NY story has 130 pictures and dozens of words.
If I don't post it right away, it'll never get finished, so wish me luck.

The New York story II

 The first thing I noticed was her well-toned calves and her firm...

 Wait, wrong story - hold on...

 Here we go...
 So we left the Chat & Chew and started walking again.
 We walked everywhere.  After a couple of miles, we stumbled into The Cedar Tavern.

 It was more noisy than Ward Connerly finding out a negro made it into UCLA.
 We couldn't hear each other speak, so we continued The Death March.
 After another couple of miles, we found The Reservoir, which was better.

 They had no real tequila, of course, so I think I had a beer.
 Right after the bartender served me, I noticed they had Long Island Ice Teas - on tap.
 I had no idea they could pre-mix that and have it taste OK, but then again, I didn't try one.

 So we headed Back to Bataan, where we eventually found Union Square Park.
 It was one of the coolest stops of the whole trip.  It's hard to describe, expecially for a quarter-wit,
 but there was maybe 100 people on this corner of the park, and they were just hangin'.
 There were some teenagers trying to do tricks with their skateboards. There were kids and old people
 and cops and black folk and Asian people and they were just hangin' and doing nothing.
 By now, it must've been midnight, and there was a crowd of people doing nothing.

 I thought how hard it must be for someone to grow up with that kind of excitement,
 then move to a small town where nobody was hangin' anywhere but the damn Dairy Queen.

  Sidebar:
 Do you know who Bob Simon is?
 He might still be, but he was a foreign correspondent for CNN or CBS, and in 1991,  he was
 covering the Gulf War a little too closely. This bonehead drove a jeep out into the desert, toward Iraq,
 looking for a story like he was Lois Lane with Jimmy Olsen's signal watch - and he found a story, all right.
 The Iraqi army grabbed his dopey ass and slapped him around a little bit and threw him in an Iraqi prison.

 Seems like they kept him for 60 days or something, then let him go. Then he whined about how unfair
 it was that he, a semi-partially-respected "journalist" was held by the Iraqi hun. In truth, the nut was
 lucky to get out of that alive and then he goes on 60 Minutes to whine like he was Terry Anderson.

 The reason I bring him up was he walked right past us on the street with a woman.
 I'm sure it was him, I pointed him out to Mrs BartCop and CAL, and they agreed.
 I don't even need to "swear to Koresh" on this one because if I was going to lie
 about spotting a celebrity, I'd think of somebody good, not Bob Simon.

 There was only so much excitement my knees could take, so we took a taxi home.
 That was a helluva first day in THE city.

 Back to New York...

 Saturday we woke up and looked out the window.

 New York is nothing if not busy.
 It's the only place I've seen that's as busy as New York is Las Vegas.

 Time to take a quick shower and hit THE city.
 The water looked clear in the sink, but it's brown in the tub.
 CAL told us NY has a great water supply, it's just that the pipes in the 100-year old
 buildings are all rusted to hell, so the clean water comes out in brown chunks.

  Eeeuuuuuuuu......

 Waiting for a cab, I noticed how many rollerbladers there were.
 Rollerbladers, small dogs and gay men.
 They were everywhere.

 We hopped in a cab and I said, "Guggenheim Museum."
 The cab driver went ape-shit.
 This was Saturday morning, and the streets were less-than totally gridlocked,
 so the cabbie (Solomen Teddesse) was driving down Sixth Avenue doing 45 MPH.

 Dodging and weaving, it was the thrill ride Dave always talks about.
 (It was one of the most exciting rides ever, but more on that in the Thursday section.)

 Soon, we arrived at The Guggenheim.

  Sidebar:
 Old-time readers might remember when we went to DC in 1998, we travelled with
 a world-class architect. When we told him a month ago that we were going to NY,
 he mentioned that the plans for the Guggenhiem were either drawn or stored in his apartment.
 (He studied under Frank.)

 Do you know what the crazy feature of this museum is?
 You take an elevator to the top floor, then you get in a golf cart and let gravity deliver the goods.
 All you do is go in circles, and hit the brakes when you want to see something.
 That's pretty damn impressive.

 So we get to the front door and we see the inevitable sign:
 This museum is under renovation.
 The spiral part is closed, ...but
 - the Maplethorp Exhibit in the square part is open!

 Perfect!
 Just what I came to New York to see - a Maplethorp exhibit.
 They also had some Thannhauser exhibit, but who ever heard of him?
 It's a conspiracy to deny me a good time, I told myself.

 Broken hearted, we started walking towards The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 The Met was showing the "Jackie's Dresses" exhibit - yawn.
 (That was the gig where Pickles snubbed the women of Washington by not attending.)
 It said "Two Hour Wait" for Jackie's dresses, and I don't have two hours to waste.

 Mrs. BartCop remembered that they had some Vermeer's, so we began the search.
 Vermeer is Ruebenesque, so we like him.

 Walking thru the halls of the exhibit, there wasn't a sound, which was odd since there were
 a hundred people in this little 40x40 room. They were all so silent and well-behaved.
 Let's hear it for the mellow people of New York!

 My favorites were:

 Jacob Vosmaer's "A Vase of Flowers."

                  Damn, look at him go!

 Paulus Polter's "Cattle & Sheep in Stormy Landscape."

 This is real good when the picture is bigger.

 Vermeer's  "A Glass of Wine."

 Nice stuff, eh?
 That's good for what it is, but nothing beats the Impressionists.

 The Impressionists - the rule breakers.

 You got your Monet, who's a low-rent Van Gogh.
 You got your Manet, who took fewer chances than Monet.
 And then you have your Vinnie Van Gogh, ...the Jimmy Page of leaded paint.

 Van Gogh is the only oil man who ever made me cry (until last year)

 Check out his "First Steps (After Millet)"

           Click for a great, detailed enlargement

 You can't see much in this photo, but when you're a foot away from this masterpiece,
 you see the emotion in the father - reaching out with such anticipation for his daughter's
 first steps - coaxing her to come to him.  You also see the baby's eagerness to please Daddy.
 That kid isn't stumbling, she's taking off.  She knows she's going to make it to Daddy.
 You see how Daddy has dropped his important farming to share this victory with his daughter?
 Look how straight his arms are - he really wants her to succeed.

 Son of a bitch, this is a great, great work of art.

 I have no idea how Vinnie could grab a brush full of emotion and slap it on a canvas.
 But then again, I don't understand how Jimmy Page can made a steel string vibrate with emotion, either.
 How unreal to get an emotional punch in the stomach from a painting that's 111 years old.
 If you want to start a fight with me - call Van Gogh a bum.

             Wheat Field with Cypresses

 This is what happens when you eat the lead paint - genius!
 I should go to art school just so I can learn the words to describe this stuff.

 I could go on and on, but the Internet's not that big.
 If I could ever get the Trip to DC Pt 2 finished, I could tell the tale of the time
 I came face to face with  Wheatfield with Crows.

 It's the greatest painting ever done.

 Christ, I have tears in my eyes just typing the words as I flash back.
 Until October of 1998, I had no idea paintings had that kind of power.

 I gotta move on, cause I could stay here forever.

 Before we left the Met, we checked out some lesser artists, just for laughs.
 Gaugin and Seurat are pikers.
 They made me laugh out loud, causing the guard to "shush" me.

 Cezanne isn't bad.
 His 1880's work was Van Goh-wannabe, which really was his best work.
 His pre-1880 work was nothing to write home about, then he had his spurt of mediocrity
 until about mid-1890, (which isn't a bad run) but then he completely turned to crap.

 He painted a picture of his wife that should be burned.
 I'll bet she hated it as much as me and let Paul know about it.
 Maybe that's why his career went to shit in mid-1890.

 Show me anything Cezanne did, pre-or-post 1880's, that's worth a cheese sandwich.
 Maybe museums hang the weak stuff as a donation to his family.
 I'm sure they get paid by the painting.

 Wait, there was another great painting:
 It was "Florinda" by Franz Xavier Winterhaller.

 Portrait of the Empress Eugénie Surrounded by her Maids of Honor,
 1855, oil on canvas,
 Musée National de Palais de Compiégnie.

  ha ha

 That's not true!
 They're lying!

 That's "Empress" Eugenie, ...semi-sorta, but not quite because she's still a virgin.
 The only way that title is truthful is if you own a Wabac machine.
 The view you're seeing is that of King whatshisname, hidden, leering thru the bushes
 as he decides which virgin he's going to force into womanhood that night.
 This is a gaggle of young maidens in Spain, being spied on by the suddenly-one-handed king.

 See the lady in white, middle of the left side?
 As Paulie would say, "Honey, this is your lucky day."

 Well, the King chose to have her that day.

 Later, ( I was reading real fast) when Eugenie's daddy found out what the King had done to his baby,
 he made a deal with the Turks or the Arabs or the Visigoths or somebody to come up thru Morocco
 and overrun Spain, and they did, and that bit of Monica affects western Europe to this day.

 Men are so stupid!
 (Chris Farley pulling on his hair...)
 

 "Nations go to war over women like you, it's a form of appreciation."
        -- Sheena Easton/Prince
 

 Oh, well,  I could do, "Art with BartCop," forever.
 But we had a great time checking out the art in New York.
 

 So, we continued to walk the streets.
 By now, my dawgs were barking worse than the metal detector on Columba Bush.
 We got to the MOMA and they had some problem, so we didn't go inside,
 but across the street they had a string of vendors selling art, cokes, falafels, hot dogs,
 and all kinds of things you wouldn't find in Oklahoma.

 There was a table behind which was seated an elderly Japanese calligraphic artist.
 He said he'd write anything in Japanese for eight dollars.
 Hey, I got eight bucks.

 Do you know Japanese?
 Do you know what this says?

 Click  Here for Trip New York 2001 Page 3