Klosekraft

Weekend update

I had a great weekend, just the ideal mix of time alone and seeing friends, new places, old favorites, much-needed stuff done, great food. If I had sat down beforehand to design my ideal weekend, it wouldn't have been far off from this.

Some highlights:

Cultural:

• A free concert at Bargemusic, a boat-turned-performance-space that's moored under the Brooklyn Bridge, with  Becky and her friend Courtney, who was visiting from Philadelphia. They don't announce the programs for their free shows beforehand and it turned out to be a classical pianist with the most, um, expressive face I've ever seen on a musician. There were points when I thought he was going to start crying, he was so moved by his own playing. It was more than a little ridiculous, honestly. But the music was lovely and you could look past him and watch boats going by.

• The Obsessive Consumption show on its last day at the Jen Bekman Gallery. It was mainly works on paper with a couple of textile pieces. I had thought it was the other way around, but still liked it. She chronicles her relationship with consumerism by drawing everything she buys.

Food:

• Saturday morning, I took myself to breakfast at Eisenberg's, a New York institution I had never been to. While I ate my egg and cheese on a roll (breakfast of champions!) and drank my coffee, the guy behind the counter told me about his back problems and we talked about the Breeder's Cup. It was a nice way to spend 20 minutes or so, especially since it came on the heels of the one kind of bummer note all weekend — I went to my favorite early yoga class and learned that the teacher I really liked isn't teaching anymore and that her replacement is the sit-around-and-visualize-our-chakras type, while I like the kind of yoga where you sweat a lot and it hurts to raise your arms for three days afterward. 

• Tae and I had a fantastic dinner at Five Points and I meant to take pictures of the food, but completely forgot about it (beet salad and housemade ricotta cavatelli with butternut squash and mushrooms). She brought me flowers and when I referred to them as my 'break-up flowers,' corrected me to say that they were for no reason other than I'm lovely. Aw.

• Last night, Erin and her mom and I went to Di Fara's, frequently hailed as the best pizza in the five boroughs. I've been meaning to get out there for a couple of years at least and can't believe it took me so long. There is no ambiance to speak of (fluorescent lights, sticky laminate tables) and the air is so thick with greasy, sooty smoke from the ovens that our clothes and hair and skin reeked of it afterward, but there's a real sense that you're having An Experience, that you're watching a supremely gifted man at work. And the pizza...  I was ready to be disappointed by the pizza. I figured it would be good, but didn't honestly believe that anything could live up to the hype. It does though. It really, really does. It's the best pizza I've ever had. Any of the write-ups I linked to will give plenty of information about the man behind the pizza and so much more descriptive descriptions than I seem able to pull together now. I should add though, since I don't think any of them mention it, that the sauce is so good, I would happily eat it with a spoon. Or out of my scooped bare hands, if there wasn't a spoon handy.
  

Dom DeMarco stretching some dough:

In motion (love the cash register and that fantastic green on the walls):

And the pie itself [drool]:

Embellished doors:

Etc.:

• I gave blood, sort of spontaneously. I had a little time to kill and walked by a blood drive. I've been meaning to get back to donating regularly, so this was a good start.
  

• At Purl, I bought the most amazing yarn ever. I mean, the yarn itself is just brushed mohair (Promise in fuchsia), but the color is like nothing I've ever seen. I nearly yanked it out of Becky's hands after she unearthed it in the 40% off bin. I think I actually pulled a random skein out of the bin and offered it to her, saying something like, "Wouldn't you rather have this green one?" (She ended up buying a cream and peach skein, the polar opposite of this one, so I don't feel bad about getting all puppy-dog-eyes on her.) My god, I love this yarn. I can't take a decent photo of it, it's so intense and saturated.  It seems to generate its own light. This color is to pink what scotch bonnet peppers are to ketchup.

 

Field trip

Yesterday afternoon, I called a friend to tell her about my thoroughly crappy morning and she said that her mom was in town and they were heading to the way upper west side to walk around and I was welcome to join them. I hadn't seen her in a while nor been to that part of town in ages, plus she said the three magic words (Hungarian. Pastry. Shop.) that can get me to do anything. Although, actually, you really just need the first two. Or just the middle one.

We met at St. John the Divine, which was hosting some sort of incongruous afternoon concert, but is still quite grand and lovely, even with an odd smooth jazz soundtrack.

I was really taken with these lamps(?) incense holders(?) bells(?):

I guess they're candle holders, now that I look more closely.

Not coming from religious tradition that involves candles, I find them compelling and rather moving.

These were my favorites from a small group of illustrations on display:

We walked along Morningside Dr., through the Columbia campus, visited Grant's Tomb and headed back downtown through Riverside Park.

Then back uptown for Hungarian! pastries! I don't know what mine was called since I just pointed at it in the case, but it was three layers of crumbly walnut cake sandwiched together with tart raspberry jam and a thin, thin layer of dark chocolate glaze just on top. So good. And one of my favorite places in the city. I can't believe how long it had been since I've been there.

Thanks so much for all of the comments and private emails about my ridiculous break-up. I feel pretty much okay (because, really, who wants that?), but it's much appreciated nonetheless.

Right-o Guv'nor

I just can't seem to stop mangling British slang. I hope it's charming/not too awfully annoying.

I went out to Governor's Island yesterday. It's something I've been meaning to do all summer and this was the last weekend the city was running the free ferry. It's a fascinating place, steeped in the kind of New York history that I love. There's an 18th c. fort, gorgeous Victorian homes, loads of what I think were Army barracks (I chose not to take a map and just walked around, letting myself be surprised). No one lives there now and most of the buildings are not open, but you're allowed to walk anywhere and peek in windows and are actually encouraged to put down a blanket and picnic wherever you like.

It was a gorgeous day — I was going to say it had an unearthly beauty but it didn't, of course. It was perfectly, gloriously earthly, the best the Earth has to offer. The light and colors and textures and geometry really — as much as I hate this phrase (which is a lot), it's true — fed my soul and left me a richer person.

The island is in the East River, very close (like, 400 yards, I think) to Brooklyn and the southern tip of Manhattan, so an obvious place to station some military personnel to protect the city. It also means that you get these kinds of startling juxtapositions:

I'm pretty sure that these were military housing (there were garages, which was weird since the island is TINY):

Outside the fort:

I was really taken with the mechanisms for closing the gate to the fort.  Oddly enough, they make me think of the Shakers, even though they were pacifists who would have no need for a fort. I think it's the beauty of such spare, utilitarian items and the whitewashed brick and low doors.

As you walk through the tunnel, there's a small window that is well above your head, though it's  ground level outside. I loved the tiny square of grass and sky set into a huge, dark wall.

Just beyond the fort are a number of beautiful Victorian homes arranged around a large central green. These were officers' houses. They were all painted the same shade of yellow because that color of paint could be mixed locally at the time. One of them is open to the public and they were lovely inside; wide plank floors, huge windows, fireplaces. The commanding officer's house was much larger and brick and had columns out front. That kind of grand house doesn't appeal to me much. I liked the yellow houses much better, though my New York City apartment-dweller mentality looks at houses like this and thinks, who needs all that space?

I hung out under a tree for a while and knit. A friend who grew up in Brooklyn called while I was sitting there and he was telling me about field trips he took there as a kid. Also while I was sitting there, a woman came up and asked me if I lived on the island(?!). I don't know if she thought I was some kind of re-enactor because I happened to be knitting (an insanely crappy re-enactor, mind you, since I was listening to my iPod and not wearing anything that could possibly be considered historical garb) or if she was just a little bananas.

Then last night, I went out with a girlfriend for some fantastic vegan food. I had a salad of very thinly sliced raw daikon, carrot and zucchini with some kind of delicious dressing and a bowl of soba noodles in dashi with shitake mushrooms and seaweed and other vegetables. I'm not interested in becoming a vegan, but I have to admit that I feel awfully good after I eat a meal like that.

Then we went to one of my favorites places to go dancing. They pour strong drinks, play mostly Latin music and attract a crowd that loves to dance. I don't know how to Latin dance, but I can shake my hips to the beat and smile and at least follow a guy's lead enough to hold my own. I undid the vegan-food goodness with a couple of caipirinhas, danced enough to work up a respectable sweat and tumbled home in the wee hours. And I really got a kick out of this graffito on the bathroom door:

Golden Girls fans, represent.

And the rest of it

I did take a few non-tree trunk photos at Green-Wood.

A discarded saint:

Fake rose taped to headstone:

This name is great:

A beautiful smoke tree:

The saddest lamb of all:

Couldn't see the forest

I went out to Green-Wood on Saturday. It's interesting to me that every time I go there, themes emerge in what kind of things catch my eye. Sometimes I don't even notice it until I start going through my photos, but this time it was pretty clear: I was a little obsessed with the trees. The shapes and the textures were just stunning. There was a certain vibrant voluptuousness in a lot of them, a sense of arrested movement, like a lava flow or bowl of softly whipped cream or the body of some great beast. Wasn't it in Wicked that the enormous tribal queen turned into an elephant? Some of these trees look exactly like I pictured her body billowing out and the skin changing during that transformation. Then there are the ones with textured bark standing out in sharp relief, like twisted knit stitches in crisp, firm wool. The third picture down looks like a Picasso face.

I find it so inspiring to walk around and look at things (any things, really, anywhere) without an agenda in mind. It's amazing to me how much the eye will pull out of a landscape (or a cityscape, or a book) when you look at it with no preconceived ideas of what you're going to see.

 

Hiking Part II

This past Sunday, I went hiking with Zoe and our new friend Tom, who we met last time we were hiking. Tom put up some photos here. If anyone can tell me what those tiny blue flowers are, I'll be deeply grateful. I just love them.

Naturalism things of note:

We saw an indigo bunting, which was incredibly blue and beautiful and flew along with us for a hundred yards or so, flying ahead and waiting on a low branch until we got too close and moving on again. This isn't my photo, obviously, but this is what it looked like:

I found and ate some wild blueberries at the top of the hill. And shared. I didn't eat them all myself.

We saw a wild turkey running, which always cracks me up. They're so ungainly and they run slowly, especially for birds that can fly pretty quickly.

I saw some cool lichen-y, fungus-y things. I don't know how to tell the difference. I think of lichen being flat and fungus being raised, but I'm pretty sure it's not that simple.


I particularly like the combination of the chalky-white lich-gus and the greyish-brown bark and especially the textural justaposition, the way there's a quieter background texture and the fung-chen is composed of all of those individual pieces that move around into their own pattern. There's a way to knit this into something extraordinary, I can feel it. I just can't quite see it yet.

We were on the same stretch of the AT that we hiked before, but we deviated a little, going a bit beyond where we'd stopped before and also checking out one of the shelters. The shelter had a notebook for people to sign in and one through-hiker had left this clever little card. It had his website on the front and answers to some frequently asked questions on the back.

Renegade

I've been to the Renegade Craft Fair in previous years and I feel like this year was a vast improvement. The quality of the goods was much, much higher. I had never bought anything there in the past, guitar pick earrings and totebags with iron-on patches of Betty Page not being my particular poison. They had some higher-profile vendors, a lot of names I recognized from their online businesses. The location (in the McCarren Park pool) was much, much better than the dust bowl that is the rest of McCarren Park. I went as close to when they opened on Saturday as I could and there were already a lot of people there. By the time I left, it was slammed.

Like Gina, I take issue with anyone/thing referring to him/her/itself as 'renegade' (or weird. or crazy.). But that's a rant I can't get riled up for right now. Instead, I'll show off the loot.

The one thing I really wanted to get were some nice tea towels. The two on the right are from Rock Paper Scissors and the Little Red Riding Hood one is from The Black Apple. Plus, I got a copy of the Betsy Ross twirly skirt pattern that I've been meaning to pick up for a while.

However, my favorite find was a big basket of framed illustrations from Nancy Drew books. The seller's main gig is making purses out of hardcover books that are destined to be trashed. The friend I was with bought one of the bags, but for me, it was all about Nancy.

"Look! There's a witch!" Susie screamed.

"The lid on this mystery chest is stubborn," Nancy remarked.

"Help!" Nancy screamed. "Help!"

"All their faces have been blacked out!" Bess exclaimed.

I don't remember the one where she's attacked by the robot, but the others all look familiar. I looooved Nancy Drew when I was a kid. I'm tempted to read the books all over again, but I'm afraid they're not going to hold up to the passing of time.

Also, look how cute this girl at the fair is. I love the grasshopper on her belt:

This bodes well.

I love hiking. I love trekking through the woods and breathing in all of that freshly chlorophyll-scrubbed air (not quite as exhilarating as salt air, but it's up there), hauling myself up a big, steep hill and then plopping down at the top to eat something while looking out over a wide expanse of green. If I'm lucky, as I was on Sunday, there will be some interesting plant and animal life to check out: half a dozen or so buzzards riding the air currents just below us (I always think they're eagles at first because of the light heads), a tiny orange salamander with teensy neon spots, oodles of wildflowers (I need to get a good reference guide to them; the only ones I could identify were phlox, buttercups and honeysuckle: a truly pathetic showing for a would-be naturalist), spittle bugs, the first jack in the pulpit I think I've ever seen in the wild:

He's so dapper!

The boding well in the title is the ease of reaching the Appalachian Trail by Metro-North and the effect it'll have on my summer. Because as much as I love hiking, I haven't done much of it in the last few years because it's such a hassle to get anywhere without a car. But this is a nice, relaxed ride, under two hours, perfect for getting some knitting done, and drops off right at the trailhead. It's a nice section of the AT, challenging enough that I felt I was really getting a workout, but with enough less difficult parts to keep up morale. And there are enough variables to the trail at the point—different directions to head off, different destinations—to keep it interesting on multiple visits.

I tend to like the people I meet out in the woods too, like the couple in their 60s who were taking three months off to hike from southern Pennsylvania to the Maine end of the trail. Zoe and I ended up hiking the whole day with a very sweet young guy who was on the train with us. He hasn't been in New York that long and doesn't really know anyone and works with lawyers who think it's really weird that he wants to do things like hike and lives at the ass end of Jersey City with two roommates he found on Craigslist: women in their 40s who didn't tell him until after he moved in that they have TWELVE CATS. (He saw four when he saw the place and was like, well, that's a lot but whatever. Then he kept seeing more and different cats and finally was all, how many cats do you guys have anyway?) He wants to take advantage of being in New York, but doesn't really know where to go or what to do. We ended up feeling very protective and big-sisterly toward him and overwhelmed him a little with entreaties to find somewhere else to live and lists of ways to meet people and places to go and things to do. Twelve cats. I just can't get over that.

So I predict that I'll be doing a lot of hiking well into the late fall. And I couldn't be happier about it.

Go It, Charlie!

A sure cure for the blahs: going to see the Darwin exhibition at the natural history museum. What better way to cheer oneself up than by feeling intimately connected to every living thing that will exist in the entire history, present, and future of the earth? Hands down, one of the top five museum exhibitions I've ever seen. The AMNH tends to put on really smart, thorough shows. Another one of my top five was there too, a show on pearls that covered natural history, fashion, the chemistry of cultivating pearls, and the effect pearl collecting has on people and regions. It was stellar.

I was not prepared for greatness with Darwin. Biographical museum shows tend not to grab me; exhibitions are stories told with objects and very few lives are explained well by the kinds of things people leave behind. This was about Darwin, yes, but also about plants and animals, naturalism, exploration, the creative process, the way revolutionary ideas both galvanize and paralyze people, and the sheer wonder of looking around at the world. The show is very text-heavy, which worked surprisingly well. (You can read a lot of the text on the museum's site.) I wouldn't recommend it for younger than a high-school audience for that reason, though younger kids might get a kick out of the live animals and a lot of the specimens.

They did a remarkably good job of conveying his interest in naturalism when he was a young man—a sample passage from a letter to a like-minded cousin: "I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects,"—and following how the voyage on the Beagle turned him into a capital-S Scientist. He gradually became more accurate about taking notes and collecting samples and from that, began making connections between remains of extinct animals and living species or between similar species in different areas. I had always assumed that his trip took him to the Galapagos and straight back to England, but they actually circumnavigated the globe and were gone for five years, from when he was 22 until he was 27. He was only in the Galapagos for a single month out of that time, which is pretty amazing, considering that those species seem to inspire most of his later writing. Even as he was becoming more focused, he was still excited about everything. A passage from one of his letters mid-voyage read, "There is nothing like geology. The pleasure of the first days partridge shooting ... cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue."

The exhibition was perfectly organized. The curators did an excellent job of juxtaposing relevant information and knowing what visitors would want to know when. At one point, I read something about him collecting fossils and sending them back to England and the thought balloon over my head was still reading, "How would he have gotten all that stuff to England?" when I turned to the next panel and read about the vast network of British ships all over the world at that time and that sending and receiving mail and packages mid-voyage was actually really easy. That still boggles my mind a little, frankly. The world is BIG.

Then it went on to describe him coming back to England and spending a lot of time thinking and writing and becoming an esteemed member of the scientific community.  He was filling notebooks with his ideas about what he called "transmutation," which culminated in the idea of natural selection after he read Malthus's essay on population and what was essentially economic survival. This wasn't addressed in the exhibition, but I thought it was pretty interesting that he was inspired by socio-political theory when it's always been my understanding that Darwin himself warned against extrapolating his theories into the social realm. (I could easily be wrong about that, and there's also no reason why Darwin shouldn't have been inspired by an idea that he didn't agree with.)

He came across as not only a genius, but also an incredibly likable person. The show was full of details about things like the club he formed at Cambridge dedicated to eating animals "unknown to the human palate," (which served him well as he traveled and got to eat iguanas and rheas and armadillos) and the list of pros and cons he wrote when deciding whether or not he should get married—the "nice wife on a sofa" aspect of companionship won out over the loss of free time and spending money. There was a charming section about him proposing to his cousin, who he had always been close to, and the period of time where they were each trying to figure out if the other really LIKED them or just liked them in a cousinly way. There was a winning humility about him too—he wrote "I think" above the first tree of life he drew. The point where I truly claimed him as a kindred spirit, however, was when I read that one of his transmutuation notebooks had a list of books he had read and a list of books he planned to read; topics ranged from honeybees to birds of America to dahlia cultivation to biographies of Haydn and Mozart to classics. He had a note: "Read Aristotle to see whether any my views very ancient." The notebook I was taking these notes in contains my lists of books I've read and books I want to read.

He sat on his theory for decades, literally. He had a good life, with a wife he loved, ten children he adored, a wide circle of friends, interesting work, and it sounds like he didn't really want to rock the boat by publishing ideas that he knew would be taken as an attack on the church. He only did it when he heard that someone else was working along the same lines and he didn't want to be scooped. And, decent sort that he was, he arranged for the two of them to present their papers at the same conference. I skipped over a lot of the part about public reaction because it didn't particularly interest me (in sum: some people liked it, some didn't) and I was with someone who needed to catch a train. There was one extremely smart bit at the end though: a video of several prominent scientists talking about the different ways people use the word theory, that scientific theory is actually accepted as fact by the scientific community and doesn't mean that "the theory of evolution" is conjecture.

One of the docents told us that the exhibition is going to be traveling, definitely to Philadelphia and at least one or two other places. I can't recommend it highly enough. I walked out of there feeling amazing, with a renewed sense of wonder about the world, and a desire to read all of Darwin's books immediately.

(I took the title of the post from a cartoon one of his friends, a supporter in a beetle-collecting competition at Cambridge, drew of him.)

You never know what's going to grab you.

Every time I go to the Green-Wood Cemetery, something different catches my fancy. Last time, it was all about flowering trees and the inscriptions on grave markers. This time, it was a chance encounter with a snowy egret and a whole whack of mausoleums.

When I've read about the cemetery, the articles always mention several ponds on the property. Weird, I always think to myself, I've never seen one. Today, I went in an entrance I hadn't used before and found myself in the corner housing all of the ponds, including one that's covered in waterlilies and extremely popular with birds.

When I go there, I tend to wander around without a set plan. A trail might catch my eye, curving off in a state of disrepair, and when I get to the top of the hill maybe there are some lilies and when I go to check them out, I see a huge monument, and so on.

I'm fascinated by mausoleums, partly because a lot of them seem to be nicer than anywhere I'm likely to live while I'm alive [this may be a New-York-housing-market-induced point of view; a good friend told me about visiting the Southwest and constantly asking her hosts about buildings they saw. "No, of course no one lives there," they would say, as if to a child, "That's an abandoned gas station," and my friend would sit quietly and mentally compare it to her apartment, primarily in the gas station's favor.] and also because the scale of them brings up memories of books I loved as a kid, Mandy and The Secret Garden and any other books about imaginative children who stumble upon a hidden space to make their own.

Look at this. What red-blooded human wouldn't want to go in there immediately and have a tea party?

This one is decidedly more fancy, lovely but not really my style. The girl who would want this for a playhouse sleeps in a canopy bed wearing a Lanz of Salzburg lace-trimmed nightgown.

I like that this family decided to spend eternity behind an automatic garage door. (I love the tiled roof on the other one too.)

I know a couple of people who would have been seriously creeped out by this. I tried to peek in, but the opening was over my head.

Check out this tree. I'm assuming it's a variety of Japanese maple (though the leaves don't really look maple-shaped, do they?), but I've never seen one with all of that froth before. Love!

[Edited to add: It's a Smoke Tree. Thanks Charleen!]