Living the High Life on the High Line

It's 7:45 a.m., an hour at which I am never up. We should have been on a train to East Hampton by now, but I looked at weather underground and today's forecast for East Hampton is for fog, overcast, 90% chance of rain, followed by 90% chance of thunderstorms, 100% cloud cover. Since it's about 2-1/2 to 3 hours each way, and our friends promised us activities like being outside, grilling in their garden, going to the beach and swimming, it doesn't seem worth the trip. I'm very disappointed. Plus, I've been up for almost 2 hours, and it's raining here. We went out and had breakfast, but I'm totally at a loss for anything to do this early in the morning. IF I were at home, I could practice, but in an apartment...

On the other hand, because we were getting up so early, I didn't have time to post anything yesterday, so here are some pictures and stuff.

There used to be an elevated transit line that ran through the meat packing district, down near the Chelsea Piers. It had been abandoned for a long time, and in the way of the world, plants had started to grow up there. Some preservationists came up with the idea that it could become an elevated green belt, and they've made it happen. It goes for about 6 or 8 blocks, and is planted with what I suppose are native plants and grasses.I would also say that there seem to be a lot of things blooming that should have been blooming in the spring, had it not been so cold here. And then, there are views: Like the Empire State building.
When you look down from here onto some of the streets, you can almost imagine old New York. The Chelsea area has the typical hangers-on that sprout up around an arts area, cute restaurants, and the like, and foofy-ed up ground floor retail in the older buildings.
As you walk along this park, there are benches, some shady spots, but of course there may never be big enough trees for shade, so shady spots are something you find where other structures cross over the top. One of the nice shady spots is here where a building is over the top and creates great shade. And since this is a park, someone is selling food. And the food is GELATO. This is a little chain of gelato carts we've stopped at in various places around town. They have only a few flavors, maybe 10 -- but it is really, really good gelato. I'd say it melts in your mouth, but even bad gelato does that, but this gelato makes your mouth want to melt into the gelato and become one with the gelato. I am becoming one with the gelato, due to frequent exposure, but it's more melting into my belly fat.
And just one more picture. Maybe you can't tell from this, but the roof below (near the "lamb" sign) is covered with flowers. You will probably have to click on this picture to actually see the lamb sign or the flowers. But the flower roof is right near the taxi. The next picture is taken in the sort of underpass area where we got the gelato, and is just some sort of pretty glass that's part of a factory window. It was much more green up at the top of the window than it appears in this picture.

We dropped by the WTC site today, but someone gave us bad directions, so we missed the museum. I only sort of wanted to go, so that was okay with me. I needed to buy a bathing suit for the now-cancelled trip to East Hampton today, and we stumbled onto this store called Century 21, which bills itself as Manhattan's best kept secret. I dunno about that. There were mobs of people in the store. They were grabbing stuff as if cloth would never be made again. To go into the fitting room they had a hard and fast rule of 6 items. If you were trying on a 2-piece anything, that counted as 2 pieces. If you had more items, and women were in line with laundry basket-sized collections of clothes, you put them in the hallway, took the six items you wanted to try on, when you finished with those six, you had to leave, come out, pick up the next six, and get in line again. They ran it like a military camp. But in fact, it was efficient. Even though there were about 15 people in line ahead of me, I don't think I waited more than 5 minutes to get in. I suspect there were at least 40 fitting rooms, all slightly bigger than a phone booth. I managed to get a bathing suit for a mere $21, though.

Last night we all went to John's and my favorite restaurant on the upper west side, Cafe Con Leche. We had various dishes, including chicken in mango sauce, shrimp in mango sauce, chicken in coconut, and two different pork dishes, that were sort of carnitas-like. Sides were rice and black beans and plantains. We got both the sweet and the green plantains. The sweet are much better, though the green ones are nice with the two sauces on the table.

On the Sidewalks of New York

We've spent a couple of days just kind of knocking around. We've managed to see one museum each day, and then just let miscellaneous coffee shops and wandering take up the rest of the time. Of course, some of that time is because we have the daily rainstorm that you just hang out wherever you are til it quits, which might be a half hour or 45 minutes.

Another great thunder and lightning storm tonight. The other two Californians, Martha's niece Mary Ann and her partner Laurie, also like to sit at the window and watch the lightning and listen to the thunder just as we do. It's such an uncommon occurrence in California.

We had a little party tonight at Martha's, with the four Californians, plus Martha's niece or maybe grandniece, I'm a bit fuzzy on the relationship, and of course Martha. We polished off a bottle and a half of wine.

John and I went to a very interesting exhibit at the Whitney today. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room. They were both artists (husband and wife) and came up with this idea of making musical instruments. They don't by any means look real, but they don't look unreal either. For instance, there's a clarinet that is about twice life size, made out of maybe canvas or linen. All the keys are hanging from the clarinet, as in dangling, but the sense of clarinet is very strong. There were also a sort of a French horn, a viol, something the size of a string bass that was called a viola, a metronome, a couple of clarinets, and a saxophone. The instruments looked like they weren't quite fully inflated in some cases, and the stringed instruments had the necks at strange angles, or actually disconnected. I would have taken any one of these sculptures. They essentially seemed to have been made out of cloth that was greatly stiffened by being painted, but didn't get stiff enough to entirely hold the shape of the instrument.

We looked at a couple of other exhibits, but they didn't attract me so much as those did. By the time we finished it was pouring down rain, so we had lunch at the museum and then went over to the Met to see if there was anything we wanted in the gift shop. And somehow, along with a little Madison Avenue window shopping this took up the whole day.

We did manage to stop at my favorite glass shop in NY, Avventura. Click on all four pages of vases to see the kind of stuff they have.

I thought I'd share a few little insights I've learned in NY.
Collecting cans is a real hassle. At least in this neighborhood, the only way you can recycle cans is to take them to the grocery store. They will pay you for a maximum of 240 cans, or $24. The cans have to be whole and not crushed. So these people are walking around with these huge bags of cans in their carts (old lady shopping carts, not grocery carts). I think I once figured out that there were 13 cans to a pound, but maybe not, maybe it's 25. If 13 is right, they're getting cheated out of the price of the aluminum, because we get $1.87 a pound in California.

Red lights and don't walk signs are mere suggestions. No one pays attention to them. Mothers with small children don't even try to teach them not go walk against the light. Part of this is because most of the traffic goes north and south, and not much goes east and west, but the lights are somewhat timed to suggest that there is much more east west traffic than there is. Also, because the east-west streets are so narrow, usually there can only be one lane of traffic actually moving on the street, and it's one-way, so it's pretty easy to see that there's no one coming.

Buses are so cold that my glasses fog up when I get off the bus.

The difference between New Yorkers and tourists, in the main, is that the New Yorkers (I'm talking about people who are casually dressed, not people who are working) are wearing sandals and the tourists are wearing athletic shoes.

Street vendors apparently move their carts several times a day to take advantage of foot traffic.

Even the cop shop in Times Square gets a Neon sign.
And speaking of Times Square, my previous statement about the difference between New Yorkers and tourists doesn't apply so much here -- people wear really tacky stuff there.

The New Year's Eve ball is up year around.

Having a car with a siren doesn't really seem to get you through the traffic all that fast, even if it's a fire truck! We have never seen an accident in NY. With so much traffic, I'm wondering if the reason is that most of the drivers are actually professional drivers.

There are nowhere near so many tattooed people in NYC as in Sacramento.

A fabulous ceiling might be on the inside
of something rather prosaic.

Unfortunately, I lost several pictures from my smart card today. I have no idea why, but all today's pictures disappeared.

Hudson River and the Rockefellers

Today we took a trip up the Hudson River. This is so easy to do. You just get on a train at Grand Central station and in an hour or so, you're in this bucolic country setting. We took the train to Tarrytown, and from there we took a taxi to the visitor center for Phillips house and Kykuit, the home of the Rockefeller family, starting with John D.Rockefeller. For all his success later in life, he started out as a door-to-door snake oil salesman, who wore a card on his lapel saying he was deaf and dumb. His future wife, Eliza Jane Spellman (after whom Spellman College was named and founded) said that if he weren't deaf and dumb, she would marry him. I missed the part about what changed, but she did. She was a devout Baptist, so the riches and the devotion kind of had to go hand in hand and it wasn't always a perfect fit.
It's a beautiful place. The guide made a big point of saying it wasn't opulent, because Eliza Jane Spellman Rockefeller, being religious, would not have been happy having anything opulent. But everything was top drawer, of the finest materials, and classy (as well as classical). Almost everything was "balanced," almost symmetrical. For instance, outside the house, on one side of the porch, outside the ladies' sitting room, there is a female sculpture with one foot forward. On the opposite side, outside John D.'s office there is a similarly sized sculpture, which seems more masculine, in that it has quite square lines, and also has one foot forward. There are similar balanced things thoughout the house. There are also things which don't make sense.

For instance, there is a wonderful fireplace with carvings of Bacchus, wine, and dancing girls -- all of which would have been forbidden to Baptists during this period, but which seem to have been accepted because they were classical. Another room has a television set hidden in what looks to be a bookcase. I rather wondered if it had been a hidden liquor cabinet before it was a hidden television space. Our guide was unsure from whom the television set was being hidden. But it seems to be from the Nelson Rockefeller era.

The basement contains a collection of modern art. All the art that Nelson Rockefeller chose was Asian, but his (first) wife, Abby, liked modern art and, if I am remembering this correctly, she was a founder of MOMA. They had a really cool art collection in the basement, including about 6 tapestries that are copies of Picasso's. Here's an example I stole off the web. They had an absolutely NO PICTURES policy.

They wouldn't let us take pictures in the house, but we did get a few of the garden. They had some lovely sculpture, and some very Craftsman-looking structures, though the house was very classical.



Though we had taken a taxi from the train to the visitor center, we realized that it was almost no distance at all, so after the tour we walked back to the train. I thought it might take us about a half hour, but I vastly overestimated the distance. It took us about ten minutes. We asked our guide just before we left, and she said, "I'd tell you you could walk it, but it's so hot."

It's not hot here. It hasn't been hot since we've been here. In fact, every day has been wonderful. As I sit here typing this right now, I'm a bit hot, and that has nothing to do with the fact that Martha had a party tonight and I had about three glasses of wine, and I'm sitting here with my computer on my lap (which is hot.) Nothing at all.

When we got back to Grand Central Station, it was pouring rain, so we took the subway shuttle over to Times Square instead of walking -- which is, in fact, much nicer. We got off "our" subway, the 1 line, at Columbus Circle and bought a salad at Whole Foods to take to Martha's party, and by the time we got there, (Columbus Circle) you could tell that it had rained, but there was no water coming from the sky. Dumb luck strikes again.

Martha had her recorder group over tonight and they occasionally have a little potluck after the rehearsal. Typical New Yorkers, they mostly bring take-out from their favorite places, but one of their standout members actually knows how to cook real food. She brought a rhubarb pie with fresh rhubarb from a friend's garden. She also made pesto with fresh basil from the same friend's garden. Martha bought some cherries which purported to be California cherries, and were only $2 a pound, even though two weeks ago they had the last cherries at the farmer's market in Sacramento and they were closer to $4 a pound. They didn't taste like our fresh cherries, though, but that could be because they'd been refrigerated since May. However, that's the only produce I've seen here that is less expensive than in CA. And don't even talk about how expensive cheap wine is here. If they had any two-buck chuck (which they don't) I think it would be about $8, becuase NY state wants to be sure they protect their citizens from drunkenness by controlling the sale of alcohol. You can buy beer in the grocery store, however.

On the other hand, I saw a sign for gasoline today and it was only $2.68 a gallon which seemed like a steal. And our tickets to go round trip to Tarrytown (a 50 minute trip) were only $11 each. (That was the senior, off-peak rate.) If you did this commute every day on the Metro North, it would cost you $17 each way. I suppose that would be a good deal since it costs more than that to park a car in Manhattan.

Hair, There, and Everywhere

Today was a lazy day. We did some laundry, sat around and read the paper, ate bagels and played with the cats.

We had tickets to Hair. We got there and even though we had tickets, we had to stand in a really long line, simply because we were early. Unfortunately, after we had stood in this line for about 10 minutes, I decided to get the tickets out and realized I had left them at the apartment.

I tried calling Martha, but in a comedy of errors, she couldn't find a working phone to pick up. By then I had made my way up to the ticket window, and fortunately, since I had bought them with a credit card, they were in the computer and they gave me another pair. I think I would have had just enough time to go home and get them, and get back, but I would have had to be very lucky with trains, etc.

I thought the show was okay, and I liked the four songs I knew, but the rest of it just seemed like a lot of the same thing. I had a pretty open mind about this one, but I'm afraid the real fact of the matter is, I just don't care that much for musicals.

Martha is having a little party for her students tomorrow night, so we'll join them for that. We may take a little trip up the Hudson to see John D. Rockefeller's house -- if we get up early enough to do it and be back. If not, we'll probably go to MOMA -- the only museum in the world that is open on Monday.

Sorry there are no pictures today.

Coney Island of the, uh, Bodies

Saturday, July 25

We went to Coney Island today. We took the subway, of course, which is such a wonderful thing about NY. You can get on the subway and in 50 minutes you're at the beach! And you're not wanting for entertainment on the way. We had not one, but two mariachi serenades on the subway on the way out. This has got to be a good gig. These guys got on, they played for about 90 seconds, or maybe 2 minutes, and collected about $12 that I could see. They just walk from car to car doing this all day, or maybe until they get thrown off. The second group didn't fare quite so well, however, since everyone who was likely to pay had paid the first pair.

Our first view as we stepped off the subway was pretty incredible. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this! It's a huge area, with many individual businesses. Coney Island isn't a theme park, like say, Disneyland; it's more of a bunch of independent entrepreneurs vying to see who can come up with the tackiest establishment. The competition is fierce.


What a hoot! We'd never been there before, and I'd never been to a beach like this before. The people are wall to wall, surf to subway. There was a sort of pathway down to the water made out of some sort of woven material. At first I thought it was really nice, because it was something you could walk on without getting sand in your shoes. Later I realized that it's probably just there to maintain a walkway through the millions of people on the beach. They are camped out cheek to cheek exactly the way they are crammed into NYC. People who are right next to each other do the same thing they do on the subways: they create a mental image of privacy and act like there is a 15-foot perimeter around their space.

We walked along the beach, did the mandatory wading in the water -- which was relatively warm -- not Hawaii, but not Santa Cruz by a long shot. We had brought our airline blanket to sit on, so we squeezed our two bums onto this little blanket and sat clutching our valuables and watching people sunburn parts of skin that haven't seen sunlight since the Nixon administration. We, of course, looked super cool in our street clothes with our pants rolled up to wade in the water, and slathered with enough lotion to look like pastries mit schlag. And I still got the tops of my feet sunburned!

They were having a sand sculpture contest today, so we ambled by to look at the sculptures. Unfortunately the contest goes through tomorrow at 5 and most of them were in kind of starting stages. This was the most completed one. About the time we were looking at these, John said, "I think we should think about going back." This was about 2:35. I was okay with this idea, since I was getting quite a bit of sun, so, instead of arguing, I agreed.

We walked through the flea market on our way back to the subway, and I took a couple of pictures. He said, "you can go inside if you want" but believe it or not, I didn't really want to. As we were climbing the steps of the subway at 2:45, I felt some raindrops. By the time we stepped onto the train, the rain was coming down in buckets. I'm not good at listening to John, but today I was certainly glad I had.
By the time we got back to Manhattan, the weather was warm and lovely. We got off at Times Square and went over and got tickets for the matinee of Hair tomorrow.
Martha is back from her workshop today, so we all went out to dinner at a place called Acqua on Amsterdam. Sat out on the sidewalk and it was just lovely. The food was really good, too.

Greenwich Village & lots of walking

Finally, we got some walking in today. We went to Greenwich Village, just to look at the other tourists mostly, but we had to wade through a lot of locals in order to do it.
For one of the first times, John was disoriented when we got off the subway and insisted he knew which way to go, but in fact I really was the one who knew. And even though we all know I am usually wrong, he did what I said and we got where we were going. And on the way he lost a bet that I was wrong -- which cost him a gelato.
We went to Washington Park in the Village, which has been undergoing various renovations for at least seven years, since we've been coming here, but it seems to finally be finished. The park has a famous elm tree, which is supposed to be 400 years old, as someone was supposed to have been hanged from it about 350 years ago. Now why one can live to be that old in NY, and we can't keep ours alive in Sacramento, i have no idea. This has a trunk about as big as ours, but it is 10 stories high -- judging by the building behind it. You'd think just the bad karma of being a hanging tree would have killed it.
It was a nice day today, so there were kids having a great time playing in the fountain.

We took in a few shops, had lunch at Lenny's "the best sandwich in NY" and maybe it was. It was pretty damn good. We had turkey (of course) on Ciabatta bread. Frankly, I don't think you can go wrong with a sandwich if it's on Ciabatta bread.

Greenwich Village has lots of interesting little shops -- a very fine variety of erotica, and various head shops, but also this cool music shop called Music Inn. I had heard that this guy charges $5 to let you in the shop if you don't buy anything, but when we went in he was down in the basement, apparently hiding out from the girl upstairs who was failing to play chopsticks on an electronic keyboard. I can only assume he was asking himself why he had even gone into this business. The girl's boyfriend was saying "where did you learn to play the piano?" and the girl answered, "My grandmother played the piano, but she has dementia now." I was looking for some sort of cause and effect in that sentence, but couldn't find any.
By now we had walked enough that it was payoff time, so we found this great gelato place, which by the way is only a few steps away from a place that only sells cream puffs.
Here's a picture of the menu and a picture of the place itself. You can't go wrong in a place that has three flavors of chocolate.

In the category of "is this a great city or what?" I have the following for your consideration: You can see the New Year's ball in Times Square all year long. You can watch Fox News and see Arnold Schwarzenegger in Times Square, should you have any interest in either of those relatively disgusting options. OR, you can get an apology by proxy.
Think someone has dissed you, but they won't apologize? Just sit down with the nice lady with pink hair, tell her what happened, and she'll apologize. Next thing you know, they'll be selling indulgences. Or creating world peace.

Best of all today, I got to pick up my new glasses at Jeffrey's Manhattan Eyeland. Cute name, isn't it? They are really good opticians and very friendly, and they have the best selection of frames I've ever seen. And for the first time since I started going there, they had a sale!!! Even better. These glasses are replacing the ones that got run over by a car -- fortunately not while I was wearing them. They have transitional lenses, and they work pretty well. Not as dark as real sunglasses, but wonderful when you're going in and out of stores and such.

By the way, the reason my hair looks weird in this picture is because Despina slept on my head last night. She is a very finicky eater, and her friend Julia lives to take Despina's food away. So when I feed Despina, I have to lie down in front of her and create a human wall that Julia will not cross. Do you think this picture makes my butt look big?

Some miscellaneous musings on NY and a visit to the Brooklyn museum

Last night I had just finished practicing, and the door to the harpsichord room opened, and there stood someone I had never seen before. Apparently the look on my face said it all. The woman facing me said, "Did Martha tell you I was coming?" Obviously not. She is Kate, another of Martha's nieces. Kate was only here overnight, having just arrived by plane from Uganda where she was working last week, wisely using our tax dollars to either prop up or deny banks. She was on her way out the door when I got up this morning, but will be back Monday night.
Martha is a lovely person who has an open door policy for all of her friends to drop by, stay the night, move in, whatever. It's a good way for us outsiders to meet people.

Today after a leisurely morning of bagels and coffee, and finally a bit of much-needed practice for me, we went off the the Brooklyn museum. You can see by our ghostly appearance how we are wasting away in NY. We went to see a show called Yinko Shonibare, MBE. It's an exhibit of Victorian costumes, reconstructed in "African" prints, which it turns out aren't African at all, but are trade prints manufactured in places like England & the Netherlands for sale in Africa.

It was an interesting show. The most bizarre part was an entire room showing people in various poses of copulating, but totally covered in the Victorian/African costumes. I saw it as a lot of rape scenes, but that didn't seem to be particularly the intention at least not according to the printed materials.

The Dinner Party is a permanent installation at the Brooklyn Museum, so we went and looked at that. For some reason, when Billie & I saw it there several years ago, I thought it was a traveling show. I know it traveled for many years. It's still a good show.

I didn't finish yesterday's post, or at least I didn't include the last picture I wanted, because this program is kind of touchy, and I couldn't get back to the place I wanted to edit the blog after I had once clicked on a picture. I did discover that if you're just reading it, you can click on any of the pictures and they will enlarge.

Anyway, the other entertaining picture I wanted to include yesterday was this one of Naked Guy riding down the street on top of a stretch hummer. Of course, he was pretty far past us by the time I dug my camera out of my purse.

And of course, here are the Times Square Obama Condom distributors. Don't know whether they are giving away or selling them.

And finally, we decided to walk down about two blocks from Martha's to a little park and watch the sunset. On the way there was ample opportunity for dumpster diving, but without the necessity of actually finding a dumpster because stuff is just out on the streets. This caught my eye. If you can't read the printing, it says something like, "Don't take, this is infested with bugs, chinchers." (whatever they are.) So I didn't take anything. And here's a last picture, just because I think it's a nice picture.