Tag Archives: Via Quadronno

NYMysteries  Sept. 2 – Sept. 8

A lovely Sunday: Film Forum twofers: Purple Noon and Strangers on a Train. Alain Delon was gorgeous in the 1960s French version of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley mystery. The Hitchcock was like a much loved story being told to children, this time the children were 50+ and packed the Film Forum. I assume that most of the audience had seen the movie a million times. There were giggles and guffaws when Robert Walker was his most awful Bruno self. Afterwards, a bar on Second Avenue and Thirteenth street to celebrate an Australian friend’s birthday, followed by supper of pork pie, tomatoes.

On one of those ghastly NYC days with humidity 1000 %, a friend and I dove into a movie house with a.c. like a refrigerator and saw Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. It was serious and entertaining. The KKK was presented in its ridiculous outfits. I appreciated the scorn Lee heaped on them and the way their racial slurs were ridiculed. 

A shout out for Via Quadronno on East 73rd Street. Ever other Monday I have an early lunch of their beautifully cooked asparagus and divine olive oil. 

 

Early lunch at Via Quadronno

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A friend and I took a short walk in Riverside Park. He very patiently explained to me the mysteries of Instagram. Here’s an effort.

Riverside Park

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Graphic Lessons: What do a teacher, a nine-year-old and an eighteen year old have in common? Murder. Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a  dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old, the only witness to the stabbing and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man..

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie. 

Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the  prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner being stabbed while Kulchek was buying cigarettes? Escaping an attempted car bombing?  His hated boss, Captain Dick Holbrook, being a trustee of the Windsor School?  Losing his girlfriend to Holbrook? 

March 25 – March 31

Via Quadronno: a slice of northern Italy on 73rd Street and Madison. We tuck ourselves into a little table parked under a bookcase. I had beautifully cooked and served asparagus and a boiled ege. My friend had minestrone and a panino American style i.e. more prosciutto than you’d have in Italy. I looked at his food hungrily then consoled myself by sopping up the oil in my plate with toasted bread. He handed me James Rebanks’s THE SHEPHERD’S LIFE Modern Dispatches From an Ancient Landscape and told me to speed read it for our Arsenal Book Club on Wed. Reading a book about shepherding in the English Lake District? I assumed the prosciutto had gone to his head. I was wrong. Rebanks’s story of home and staying there is compelling. It’s about preserving a way of life that is difficult to sustain and as moving as the old movie about Lassie. Rebanks is on Twitter: Herdwick Shepherd.

I confess. I read The Nation recently. I was waiting in a doctor’s office. Did you know that The Nation like Ted Turner Classics has a wine club? Did you know, courtesy of The Nation, you can go on an Alaskan tour with Ruth Messinger?

An artist friend and I wandered through the Whitney’s Grant Wood exhibit. We admitted grudgingly that Wood was a superb craftsman. In addition to being an artist he was a silversmith and he had a streak of whimsy. Maxfield Parrish and Norman Rockwell came to mind.

An Altar to the Home, Grant Wood
A Screen, Grant Wood

Are they American Regionalists like Wood? His art celebrates the American farm. His attention to detail is extraordinary. There’s a uniformity of expression and of gender. The men are big, usually in overalls and engaged in the manly arts of mechanics. The women are small, usually in an apron and engaged in the womanly arts of polishing the furniture. We walked down the outside stairs from the eighth floor cafe to the fifth floor exhibit. Wonderful views of lower Manhattan and the Hudson.

A view from the Whitney

 

 

 

Graphic Lessons: Recent thirty-five-year-old widow Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a stabbed and dying man in the school kitchen, deals with the only witness to the stabbing – a troubled nine-year-old, develops a crush on a NYPD detective and her dog dies.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie.

Graphic Lessons: Something’s eating at NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek: a failed marriage? surviving a car bomb? his girlfriend marrying his corrupt boss? screwing up an important case? It doesn’t matter because he’s relentless.