In Memorium: John Hoch. A dear, whimsical, talented friend died recently. He made this plaque for me. Get it?? John painted several murals in my apartment. I love this one with the falling book. I think it’s charming and it brings him to life for me.
Founded in 1871, The Salmagundi Club on Lower Fifth is one of the U. S’s oldest art organizations. It’s been in its current location since 1917. I went to the opening of the Audubon Artists Exhibition to see Lynne Miller’s new mixed media construction.
Lynne Miller’s Construction
FIT stands for Fashion Institute of Technology. The acronym is great but the name of the school is confusing, isn’t it? The outside of the Pomeranz building displays students’ murals. Inside, there are two terrific exhibits: Global Fashion Capitals and Fashion Underground.
Treats not tricks. Isn’t it a hoot the way Halloween enchants NYC? Going into stores and seeing clerks wearing horns and mustaches, watching a girl on 14th Street swinging an axe and hoping it’s made of rubber and part of a costume. Who can resist a kid carrying a pumpkin?
My late friend, Al Gescheidt, was crazy about cats and was the wizard of the dark room. Here are a few (clean) examples of his work:
Happy, catty HalloweenMy Halloween Costume
A friend and I swanned around the Art/ Antiques show at the Park Avenue Armory. After two glasses of lovely champagne I had the nerve to try on a $28,000 bracelet.
Steve Kulchek is interested in batting averages and I am interested in the folklore of baseball. Fashion note about the world series: in Kansas City the Mets wore dull gray uniforms. The Royals were in sparkling white and blue. In NYC, the Royals wore the dull gray uniforms and the Mets were in sparky orange (the Giants) and blue (the Dodgers) uniforms.
Steve was rooting for the Mets, of course, being a NYC guy. He plays shortstop on the NYPD team.
Welcome to the Belle Epoque on Irving Place. Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon is housed in The Inn at Irving Place. It serves lovely finger food and has a charming, old world atmosphere. Lady Mendl was Elsie De Wolf, an early interior decorator who worked for Henry Clay Frick Frick and Stanford White.
On Sunday I was a docent for Open House (www.ohny.org). It focused on tours and talks about New York buildings and sites. My building was the Judson Memorial Church, built by Stanford White in 1890-92 and situated at the south end of Washington Square Park. Since taking photos was allowed, people clicked away at the John LaFarge stained glassed windows. My favorites are the boys in the back room or the balcony, Peter, Paul and John.The rosettes that decorate the arches were later repeated by White in his design of the Washington Square Arch.
Judson’s Rosettes, repeated in the Washington Square Arch.
On Tuesday, I watched politicians congratulating themselves as Mayor de Blasio announced that Blackstone is buying the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village apartment complex, built in the late 1940’s. Blackstone will pay over five billion dollars for 80 acres that house thirty thousand people in eleven thousand apartments. Wow!
At the Arsenal, the Garden and Forest Book Club discussed Andrea Wulf’s book, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. Humboldt was an environmentalist, explorer, and naturalist. The list of his achievements is extraordinary and yet he’s forgotten. Wolf explains in her book that she want to re-ignite recognition of Humboldt. One of the fringe benefits of meeting at the Arsenal is getting off the subway at 57 Street and Fifth Avenue. MTA has done itself proud with murals of birds and other animals in the nearby Central Park Children’s Zoo.
On October 11 The New Century Jazz Quartet belted out original and standard pieces at the Emmanuel Baptist Church jazz vespers. It has built itself an enviable reputation in Japan and the States. The Quartet’s quintet of bass, drums, piano, alto saxophone and trumpet made the church rock.
Across the street from the Church, Brooklyn was revving up for Halloween.
Afterwards, we had dinner at Madiba a “South African Cuisine in a Brooklyn Scene”. The name is a tribute to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. The location was originally a garage and has been modeled after sheens which are South African dining halls. It’s a cosy atmosphere in a series of funky rooms. No, I didn’t have ostrich. We had lovely chicken wings and then crayfish.
Madiba
A friend and I thought Free Friday evening at MOMA would be packed. The plan: the Picasso exhibit on the fourth floor, supper in the fourth floor cafe and a Chech movie downstairs in the basement. The reality: the cafe was surprisingly empty. We sat on the balcony overlooking the sculpture garden three stories below, eating and drinking to abandon, skipped Picasso and proceeded to the movies.
Move over Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni,.The most boring movie prize goes to the 1962 Věra Chytilová. Does anyone watch the movies of Bergman, Antonioni any more?
Also featured was a ten minute 1958 feature by Roman Polanski.
Outside, on Sunday, it was a balmy, perfect New York fall evening. Within, we were wrapped in the cocoon of the Frick Music Room. Pallade Music is a Baroque Ensemble based in Montreal. The four performers play the baroque violin, the baroque cello, the theorbo and the harpsichord. The program was dominated by Telemann (1681-1767). Esteban LaRotta played the theorbo, a lute with a long neck extension, about six feet long. I wondered about the stories LaRotta could tell about getting the theorbo on and off planes and trains and in and out of cars.
Supper was at Persepolis, a charming Persian restaurant. I ordered an odd but delicious appetizer that consisted of cooked diced beets, yogurt, walnuts and raisins. Had someone given me that recipe, I would never have gone near it. Wrong, yet again, and the beets dyed the yogurt a lovely pink.
You can’t go home again. Right? I was a fan/camp follower/ groupie of Charles Ludlum’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. I even went to Ludlum’s funeral at St. Joseph’s. I have never laughed so hard in my life as I did at Galas and The Mystery of Irma Vep. The little theatre rocked with the screams of laughter. I’m not exaggerating. Ask anyone who was fortunate enough to see the great Ludlum and his partner, Everett Quinton in action. Penguin Reg Theatre is presenting Drop Dead Perfect at St. Clement’s with …. Everett Quinton! St. Clement’s is composed primarily of stairs. A friend and I climbed up the stairs to the theatre, climbed down more stairs and panted to our seats as the curtain was parting. Quinton is great in drag and a very funny man, but Ludlum was the engine. Drop Dead Perfect is a dim memory of what had once been briefly at Christopher and Seventh Avenue South.
I went to the Vittorio De Sica festival at Film Forum. Being cowardly, I didn’t choose to see Umberto D. again, a heart wrenching movie about old age in postwar Italy. It even includes a dog. Instead, I saw Max Opel’s The Earrings of Madame D…starring Danelle Darrieux, Charles Boyer and Vittorio De Sica. What a load of elegant nonsense. The three actors swan around for what seems like hours in gorgeous costumes and great jewelry. The late Roger Ebert lauded the film for its technical mastery. Mr. Ebert was a white male and his eyes seemed as teary as John Boehner’s as he described the lost and found and lost love motif. I’m a white female and reacted differently. I was angry with myself for having fallen in my youth for the myth that all a woman needs are looks and guile. Danelle Darrieux has outlived her princess heroine who dies young. (After all, what’s a woman worth after the age of thirty?) Ms. Darrieux is 98. She’s neck and neck with another Parisian inhabitant, 99 year old Olivia de Havilland, one of the few actresses who could play goodness well i.e. Melanie in Gone with the Wind.
The New York Academy of Medicine sponsored Andrea Wulf’s talk about her newest book, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. The naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), introduced many theories about nature, ecology and weather which have been incorporated into our modern sensibility. Wulf honors her fellow German by recounting his adventurous life, describing his accomplishments and name dropping. Among von Humboldt’s disciples were Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh and John Muir. Wulf is an engaging speaker and attracted a large crowd in the Academy of Medicine’s library.
N. Y. Academy of Medicine’s Library
I chose to go to MOMA’s blockbuster Picasso Sculpture on a rainy Friday, thinking the threat of Hurricane Joaquin would keep New Yorkers indoors. I hadn’t reckoned on the tourists, but it still wasn’t too crowded. MOMA allows photos. People were taking selfies with the sculpture. I chose to spare you. I’m throwing in the permanent helicopter.
Isn’t the family of man the most dysfunctional of all? At first, the Interfaith Service at the World Trade Center reminded me of Thanksgiving with everyone dressed nicely, on their best behavior and putting up with a loquacious and boring uncle i. e.Timothy Cardinal Dolan. There were lots of white men, a few women, one or two Asians, a token Black or two. The drama was that the faiths which usually are battling or ignoring each other came together to honor the dead. I was moved. Religion is once again sexy. And Pope F. has left town just as he was beginning to be too much.
I finally made it to the Whitney in its newish location, 99 Gansevoort Street.The Whitney claims itself to be the world’s leading museum of U. S. twentieth-century and contemporary art. I beg to differ. How about MOMA? How about the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art? How about ———. Fill in your choice. I think most of the Whitney instillations/ projects etc. could be carted away by a dumpster. What I do like is the breeze off the Hudson on the outdoor exhibit spaces and the NYC attitude.
Whitney ArtWhitney AttitudeI thought I was in Portland.
I went to the Arsenal in Central Park to the Garden and Forest Book Club to discuss Jack Nisbet’s David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work, An Illustrated Exploration Across Two Centuries in the Pacific Northwest. By a happy coincidence I had read most of the book while in Oregon and had been to the Oregon Historical Society to see a small exhibit about Douglas. Douglas (1799-1834) made a systematic collection of northwest flora and fauna, before dying at age 35. At the book club we discussed the practice of sending specimens from across the sea to another part of the world. i.e. the U. S. Northwest to Scotland. Nowadays there is controversy among gardeners and botanists about native plants and invasive (foreign) species.
Subway Stop: 5th Ave. & 59 Street
Symphony Space is, as every New Yorker knows, on upper Broadway. I love Broadway because it refuses to be gentrified, a fate that has befallen Fourteenth Street and Alphabet City. The Thalia is housed in Symphony Space. Years ago, the original Thalia was on slightly seedy Eighth Avenue. It was a movie house and was kicked out of the downtown neighborhood for showing dirty movies. So it moved uptown.The Joyce Theatre replaced the Thalia in what is now uber gentrified Chelsea. Meanshile, back at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia, we attended a jazz concert by middle eastern musicians, sponsored by Alwan. Amir ElSaffar’s Two Rivers Ensemble celebrated the release of its third CD, Crisis.With a mix of eastern and western instruments, the noted trumpeter, ElSaffar, and his ensemble expressed their anger about the current middle eastern tragedy.
I spent the weekend in Connecticut. Remember the Merritt Parkway? Think Howard Johnson Restaurants and other 1930’s icons.The Parkway has tree canopies, art deco bridges – in concrete. Don’t forget. It was built in the late 1930’s. To this day it has limited access which means no commercial vehicles, trailers, towed vehicles, buses, or hearses. It runs from the New York state line in Greenwich, where it serves as the continuation of the Hutchinson River Parkway, to the Housatonic River in Stratford, where the Wilber Cross Parkway begins. It’s a wonderful way to begin a country weekend near Ivoryton.
I went to the IFC Center to see Phoenix. It’s a German film that reminded me of that French oldie, Diabolique. Phoenix has a perfect noir setting: postwar Germany. The Jews who survived the death camps eye their German neighbors suspiciously and the Gentiles reek with guilt. The plot isn’t plausible, but Kurt Weill’s and Ogden Nash’s Speak Low is as haunting as ever. Originally, the IFG was the Waverley, well known and well regarded for funky films. It was the first movie house to show midnight screenings and audience participation of The Rocky Horror Show. Once an independent movie house, iit’s now owned by AMC networks.
Speaking of movie houses, have I told you about Portland, Oregon’s The Living Room? It’s the sort of theatre where they show arty flicks like Phoenix plus, and it’s a big plus, serve food and drinks to you while you’re watching the movie. There’s the Bagdad in Hawthorne. It’s a movie palace of old: miles of red carpet, Aladdin and His Lamp stairways and decor. Food and drink are also served. You will never find Phoenix at the Baghdad, but you will find Mission: Impossible.
Fat Afro Latin Jazz Cats. How’s that for a name? It’s the pre-professional youth orchestra of the nonprofit Afro Latin Jazz Alliance. It’s sensational. The musicians are dazzling and so young. Not one member is over eighteen, but they play like seasoned professionals. They were trained by Arturo O’Farrell, Jim Seeley, and Zack O’Farrell. In Brooklyn, Sunday afternoon they performed at the Emmanuel Baptist Church Jazz Vespers.
Steve Kulchek’s old basketball ankle injury kicked in so he went to Sports Medicine at the Beth Israel Mecial Center on 14th Street and Union Square East. He brightened up when he saw the wing was named after Louis Armstrong, one of his favorite trumpeters. I asked him why a hospital wing would be named after a musician. It’s an American curiosity, isn’t it? Is it our love of celebrities? We’re ahistorical but we need famous people. Can you imagine a photo of Lafayette eliciting the same response as Louis Armstrong? Never. Lafayette is dead and foreign. Besides, few people have heard of him. How about the picture of a saint? Can you imagine Saint Sabastian complete with arrows hanging in the medical center’s atrium?
In Memorium: John Hoch. A dear, whimsical, talented friend died recently. He made this plaque for me. Get it?? John painted several murals in my apartment. I love this one with the falling book. I think it’s charming and it brings him to life for me.
