a very late entry on austin for day 7
Start the day out with a small walk along the river.
We pay our respects to Stevie Ray...
...take a look at some vistas...
watch some hot duck action...
...and after lunch at Guero's Taco bar (in which we overeat yet again, this time with pumpkin flan)
...we're still at a bit of a loss for something to do. So we head off to the Tesoros Trading Company on Congress -- one of the best stores anywhere for crazy tchochkes.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls...
After this, we'd decided to head off to the Austin Art Museum (Warhol) and the Austin Museum of Contemporary Art (random ultramodern stuff).
In this we find out we're morons. This day is the only day of the week the museums are closed the entire day.
I always love going to contemporary art museums, mainly because the reaction I have to each piece -- whether it's disgust, passivity, excitement, or happiness -- is always fresh. With more established art museums, I almost feel compelled to like the artist they're showing, mainly because the artist is one of the Great Canon of Artists from a Certain Period that You Should Really Know About. There are still some artists for whom I don't have this reaction -- Chagall, for example, or Pollock, or Picasso, my favorite -- but if it's fresh experience I'm after, I'm definitely going over to the contemporary museums if I can.
With contemporary artists, my reaction is fresh and uncluttered. I don't have that knowledge in the back of my head that says "Oh, this is Monet/Seurat/Renoir and therefore I'm obligated to like it."
But that's all irrelevant because we didn't get to see anything anyway.
So we start walking 6th Street east.
The King of 6th St.
...and since now we're truly at a loss for something to do -- and we're just boring enough that we really don't want to stay out too late for our flight early next morning -- we take off for the Alamo Drafthouse once again and we see Intolerable Cruelty. Which actually wasn't as good as either of us hoped.