Christmas in Richmond

We drove from New York to Richmond late Sunday, with Bianca and Chris, to spend Christmas with our other daughter Danessa and other son-in-law Bobby and their three kids. I cooked and performed the ancient art of turkey shredding and now we are laying around gorged. That's a universal tradition. We indulged in a more limited Richmond tradition Tuesday night and rented a limo for the nine of us to travel around and view the Tacky Lights (yes, the capital letters are appropriate, it is that established a tradition.) Some houses have over 150,000 lights worth of Santa, elf, deer, Peanuts characters, etc, etc displays, in trees, on lawns, blanketing front yards. Our driver who, impressively, says he researches the displays by seeking out the owners in the off-season told us that the most lights are 170,000, 65 percent of which were designed by the owner of the house, and that the guy's electrical bill for December is $15,000.

Tis the season.

Not On This Tour with Those White Pants, Buddy

Yesterday I went with my sister and her two little girls on the NBC Studios tour. Aside from another opportunity for the network to siphon more money from (mostly) out of towner pockets, it offers little beyond the opportunity to stare at the empty desk where Brian Williams delivers the Nightly News, at the empty Saturday Night Live stages, at the empty and tiny Conan O'Brien studio. You move through the corridors like so many cattle, your ticket around your neck in a badge holder. Our best moment was at the very beginning where the prepper, for whom English was a second language, ran through through the list of No's for the tour, ending with "no wah-pans." The people behind us, some distance from the speaker, said, "No white pants??" Yes, folks, that's right, it's after Labor Day and Blessed are the Placekickers.

Praise the Lord Dental

A pillar (of some sort) of the neighborhood is no more. Praise the Lord Dental has undergone a name change, a change of dentists and management, and -- perhaps -- a change of business. It may actually now be a dental office, for there were a number of people sitting in its storefront waiting room as I walked past with Sam a few minutes ago. We always had our doubts about Praise the Lord, which never seemed to be open except during the oddest hours, like nine o'clock at night, and even then never had anyone in it who looked like they might be waiting to see a dentist. These suspicions were only deepened once when our daughter and son-in-law walked by and saw a dumpster-like container parked in front and, because its top was slightly ajar, they could see inside it a pile of slot machines. Anyhow, just another mystery of New York that we will never learn more of beyond its wonderful name.

Annals of True Crime

That crime story rag the New York Times reported this week on two men who beat and robbed a 70 year old woman in a Bronx housing project one recent afternoon. They grabbed her wallet with $149 and fled. On the street they flagged down what they thought was a livery cab, one of the large, usually black sedans that cruise the New York streets, supplementing taxi service, especially in the sketchier neighborhoods of the city. Unfortunately for them, the Crown Victoria turned out to be an unmarked police vehicle responding to reports of the robbery. Asked for identification, one of the men accidentally pulled out the victim's wallet and she, from the back of the ambulance about to carry her off for treatment, identified them as her attackers. I've recently been summonsed for jury duty. If among the citizens selected for their case, I'm guessing we'll spend considerably less than the eight days the average trial consumes in New York.

The Classroom in Penn Station

By any standard I'm aware of, Penn Station is an atrocity, especially when compared to the temple of trains across midtown and to its former self (below). Chopped up spaces, low ceilings, every junk food outlet on the planet crowding its corridors, public areas apparently uncleaned since the Giuliani years...the list goes on. I read on line that Thomas Wolfe ("Look Homeward, Angel") called the original Penn the only man-made space that was large enough to “hold the sound of time." And today even Brangelina could walk through the place and look crushed in spirit.



But tonight, heading through the Long Island Railroad (LIRR) space to the subway after the Rangers exciting shootout win over the Penguins, I learned something. On the electronic message board, LIRR announced that in autumn trains on the lines sometimes travel at less than maximum speed because of the "slip-slide" (no Paul Simon reference here) effect. It seems that falling or windswept leaves when they land on the tracks and get crushed by trains slick the tracks with a substance called pectin and cause less adhesion between the train wheel and the rail during braking. The LIRR noted that "slip-slide" is very similar to a car's wheels skidding on an icy road and that it is taking a three-pronged, pro-active approach to resolving the problem.

Ah, "pro-active prongs"-- this decade's "synergy" or "parameters."

MoMA for Members

The MoMA opens its doors early once a month or so to members, supposedly for certain exhibitions only, but you really have the full run of the Museum from 8 AM to 10:30 when the hordes roll in. Recently we walked through "Joan Miro -- Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-37". Never one given to understatement, Miro was out to, in his own words, "assassinate painting." What he did in that decade was not assassinate but experiment, with collages, with heightened abstraction, with minimalism, with deconstruction, and at the end after -- in my limited eye -- some very successful experiments (Spanish Dancers, Dutch Rooms, and especially a painting called Mediterranean Landscape)



and some not at all successful grotesque distortions of human figures and genitalia, he returned to where he began -- and like Eliot -- knew the place for the first time. His Old Shoe painting is at once hallucinatory and glorious, with colors and distortions that almost cause the eye to ache. I could have stood in front of it for quite awhile but the doors opened and the mobs arrived.

Hooters Diplomacy

We were in midtown during the day today, something that doesn't happen very often, right near the Hooters location on West 56th where, on another of our infrequent excursions, this one in the midst of the UNGA, we saw its marquee message, "Welcome Foreign Dignitaries!" Can't help wondering how many of those welcomed dignitaries did sneak away from endless speeches haranguing the US and Israel, or maybe from Robert Mugabe blaming "colonial powers" for what his scorched earth policies have done to beautiful Zimbabwe, to oogle Hooters waitresses...in a dignitary way of course. Probably not all that many, but probably more than zero.

Jeter and Geranium

Friday afternoon I walked down to the subway from the hospice with Jeter in one hand and a potted geranium in the other. The patient I had seen since my first day at hospice died the day before, long past the time when any of us who knew him had thought possible. For that, having that unexpected extra time with the self-described "tough old bird," we are grateful. His things were still in his room and I had permission to take Jeter, the inexpensive collectible that was our first bond. The bat had broken off it and I told him I thought I might be able to fix it with super glue. It worked and he was grateful. Friday I knocked the bat with a newpaper section on the subway home and it immediately snapped off. Seemed right somehow. The geranium I bought him when he wanted more plants in his room and caring for it, he turned it in to a giant once I convinced him it was OK, in fact essential, to pinch off dead blooms and leaves. Another friend of shorter duration also died this past week. All these people who have passed through my life as they were leaving it don't haunt me -- they are too good for that -- but I can picture them better in my mind than I can picture most living people.

New Century Hat Trick

Back when I started going to hockey games as a kid riding the bus in to the Big Red Barn, aka Olympia Stadium, in Detroit, old men -- i.e. guys about a dozen or more years younger than I am now -- wore hats, the kind JFK had when he got harangued by Khrushchev at their first meeting. and tossed them on the ice when a Wings player scored three goals in a game, a mighty rare occurrence in those days. Last night at Madison Square Garden, Ranger captain Chris Drury got his third goal thirty-five seconds before the end of the game. But in 2008 -- and for years now -- it's a Cap Trick.

So Many Bicycle Stories...

so little protection. One from today -- I biked across Amsterdam Ave on the way to the Museum, admittedly against a light, and an SUV heading south on the one way avenue hit the gas hoping to run me over before I got to the other side. He missed; for those few seconds it was a personal perfect flashback to the hyper aggro-environment of DC.

This is a ghost bicycle, placed in NYC and, apparently, other cities at sites where a cyclist has been killed by a vehicle.

E Mails and Pee Mails

Life is a little different with Sam the male Westie. Get up in the morning, check, grind the beans, check, start the coffee pot, check, read the various e-mails, check. But then, walk Sam, who in the course of one ten minute tour around the block, catches up on his friends, alternately reading and leaving pee mails, usually about a dozen outgoings. Then, not surprisingly, he comes home and drinks gallons.

40 Years

Smell and taste are the memory senses. I was walking yesterday along 79th and passing a young Hispanic, Indian features like the Altiplano. Maybe him, maybe his clothes, maybe just some quirk from a nearby building, but suddenly and for only an instant I was back in the Chilean campo, entering invited the mud and thatch home of a Mapuche family, from the cold and damp outdoors to the smoke and scent of humans in layers of clothes in a very small space, a smell of stinging sweetness. All there again yesterday, after forty years and then it was passed and the museum was ahead.

Performances

Autumn sends us back to theaters and we've been to three performances in October. Bianca plays the Brazilian maid Matilde in the Sarah Ruehl play The Clean House, at Lincoln Center a couple years ago and now, in her production, in Richmond to enthusiastic reviews and audiences. I don't worry anymore about her onstage. I sit back, like the rest of the audience, expecting to be entertained, even transported, and when that happens -- as it always does -- I get this charge of pride and amazement, "that's my kid," the one I first saw with all that dark hair on her little head years ago in Pretoria.

Two operas as well, Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly, wonderful productions both at the Met. I put Giovanni in the top level of my favorites, along with Otello, Macbeth, Barber, Iphigenie en Tauride. Giovanni, an unrepentant piece of work as a man, shares with Macbeth the willingness to accept the consequences of his despciable actions. Amazing to the opera neophyte I remain is that Don Giovanni has no fewer than seven very major singing roles. The Uruguayan Ervin Schrott as the Don and Susan Graham as Dona Elvira were first rate -- particularly Schroot whose lust was in his acting as well as his singing --, but I thought the singers who did Ottavio and Donna Anna were even more powerful. Also, like Verdi in Otello, Mozart wasted no time in introductory niceties, throwing the audience headfirst into the music and the action with an attempted rape and a murder in the first ten minutes of the opera. Butterfly is obviously (even to me) a vehicle for the soprano singing the title role and, by that standard, this lavishly designed production by the late director Anthony Minghella excelled thanks to Patricia Racette. But I learned while watching it that while I can appreciate star vehicle operas (Norma is another) I prefer the Giovanni types, those with more ongoing engagement and dramatic conflict between and among characters. Think, besides Giovanni, Otello with major singing roles for Otello, Desdemona, Iago and Cassio.

Anyway, it's great to be in another season at the Met. Next up is Faust. Butterfly has been performed more than 800 times at the Met. A nice feature of the Playbill you get at each performance is that it states the exact number of the performance you are seeing and gives an overview of the opera's presentations at the Met.

Philippe de Montebello

Philippe de Montebello has been director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for thirty years and he is retiring at the end of 2008. Although we have lived in New York for only a bit over three years, it is hard to fathom the Met without him. IMHO he has created a 21st century museum, a place of light, open space and splendid exhibition halls, and at the same time enhanced immeasurably the collections that fill those spaces. The Met is a world museum. It draws from all the arts, from all the centuries, and from all continents -- OK, maybe not Antarctica. To visit there is to be inspired and close to awed by the endless ways man can pursue and has pursued beauty in art, even when the forms of that art depict anything but beauty.

de Montebello could not have done this alone, of course, as he freely acknowledges. So in a wonderful symbiosis, the Met is now opening an exhibition that his curators wished to do -- a collection of some of the finest works -- selected by the curators -- the Met has added to its collections in de Montebello's thirty years. That the curators wanted to honor de Montebello with this exhibition underscores what, to this total outsider's eye, seems to be his greatest strength -- while a man of strong opinions and tastes, he nonetheless put great faith in his curators and their estimation of valuable works the Met should pursue. In other words, he surrounded himself with very talented people and let that talent run to its full extent. My personal definition of an outstanding leader.

So last night we dressed up and went to the Sustaining Members preview reception of the exhibition. I write this before reading today's NYT review, but it seems safe to say that this is the one exhibition not to be missed in New York this year. The extent of its amazing range is evident from the anteroom, where Lucien Freud's in-your-face Naked Man Back View is kitty-corner to a 2nd century Roman rose-colored carved support for a water basin. It includes, three of my personal faves (they will change the next time I am there), Andres Segovia's performance guitar, an inch-high gold pointer, and a carved gold-handled knife from Turkey.

What takes the exhibit to an unprecedented level, however, is the accompanying audio tour. Always helpful for any exhibition, in this one, the audio guide has de Montebello discussing with his curators how a number of the works were acquired. None of this is written on the exhibition notes next to each displayed piece. In the discussions, de Montebello evinces no need to seem the all-knowing expert. The pointer, when first brought to him by the area curator, he misidentifies as a thimble. He freely admits to biases, not being fond of Tibetan paintings for one. But in the one he approved for Met purchase that is in the show he -- right on the tape -- asks the curator "and what do those tongues at the feet of some of the characters mean?" And she replies, "well, uh, those are actually lotus blossoms." Or, the curator of American textiles on her first meeting with the director and wondering what was in store for her when he asked wearily, "are there any American textiles except quilts?"

I rarely get carried away -- but today I'm carried away, by the man as a leader and visionary and by this extraordinary exhibition that makes those qualities so very, very clear.

A Miracle?

For more than two weeks now my wife and I have been using the same flattened Colgate Total 6.3 oz tube of gel toothpaste. Each time we press at any point along its length, somewhere, somehow, another bit of gel blurts out to be spread on the toothbrush. I'm starting to think this Colgate tube is like one of those incandescent lightbulbs, the one in ten gazillion that glows year after year, eight hours a day or more, a freak of nature or science. Or, like the more-or-less annual miracle tortilla in Mexico, is that the face of Jesus that I see forming on it in the white space between the "e" of "Colgate" and the "Total"?

Amy Rigby

Riding down from Riverdale in the Bronx after a hospice visit, under-dressed for the coming night and cold, by the Irish bars, by the Dominican bodegas, through the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods and lol nearly all the way to the sublime and comic Amy Rigby on repeat play on the iPod.

"What ever happened to Babe and Stud/Too much KFC and Bud"

Or, "Come here baby and scratch my itch/Or I'll show you one mean ass bitch"

Or, "Not now, hon, the eggs are fryin'/But you get extra points for tryin'"

In a just music world, Ms. Rigby would get everything she wanted, starting with the subject song of those lyrics.

And then, further on, just about to the Riverside Drive building where Ralph Ellison lived for years, on comes a song high up in the Personal Lifetime Top Ten, the Wicked Pickett and The Midnight Hour. One of those rare songs, like Time after Time, that's bulletproof against any cover versions; they all sound good, but none approaches Wilson.

Where the Bookies Dine?

Walking to the Museum along 79th Street, we pass a restaurant where the posted menu offers a "Pre Fix" dinner. Maybe Arnold Rothstein dined there while putting together his 1919 World Series masterpiece? And, speaking of the WS, could we possibly get rid of the Red Sox tomorrow night? At least the Dodgers are gone.

David Byrne, Biker

Turns out that David Byrne, who long ago left behind Talking Heads for many other artistic pursuits, but I'll always figure his reputation was already secured with Once in a Lifetime and Psycho Killer and Uh, Uh Love Comes to Town and And She Was, and Road to Nowhere and the list goes on for a good while, is a biker. And like most us who ride in NYC has had his share of narrow escapes. But he is also is a designer of bike racks and struck a deal with the city to add to the too small stock of racks in Manhattan with specially designed racks made of the same metal tubing as on all the others. They'll be on the streets for a year and then sold through his gallery. Mudflap Tammy, the truckers' goddess, is at 44th and 7th Ave. I've seen the abstract outside the MOMA and the dog in Greenwich Village and lashed my bike briefly to The Coffee Cup, outside a pastry shop across Amsterdam from St. John the Divine. There are half a dozen or so more. Thanks, David, for bringing a little flair and humor to a scarce necesity, always welcome here and everywhere.

The Guggenheim Reaches Out With Such a Deal

We got a letter yesterday from the Vice President of the Board of Trustees of the Guggenheim. He said he took "great pleasure in extending to (us) a personal invitation to increase (our) membership support of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum." (Emphasis his.) Lucky us! I felt all warm and fuzzy -- an officer of a great institution reaching out to me to give me the chance to spend more. That sure doesn't happen every day. We'd probably get rid of the federal deficit in one year if the government would just send out such warm personal invitations to taxpayers to pony up more dollars.

The only thing that would have touched me more would have been if I had been addressed by name in the "personal invitation" instead of as Dear Member.

The Debate

Right, the focus last night was on the economy and what did the candidates have to offer two weeks after the first "foreign policy" debate with Jim Lehrer spent about half its running time on the economy? Two weeks later and, oh, let's say, a trillion dollars less in retirement account values later? Nothing, nada, rien new. Good jobs, middle-class Americans, he's going to raise your taxes, he wants to give the richest 5 percent a tax cut they aren't even asking for, etc., etc. You know the talking points, you could give them yourselves. And why nothing new? Because the two of them are like everybody else in these panic-whipped and uncharted waters -- nobody has a clue how to stop the downward spiral. It will stop when, to use the old fire-in-the-theater analogy, the fire burns itself out, somebody discovers that the fire was a few guys smoking big cigars illegally in the building (and doubtless causing some collateral, but not permanent, damage), or the theater burns to the ground. And nobody has the least idea which it will be, but none of the firefighting tools -- including today's rate cut -- have worked yet.

You could almost hear the relief from both of them when Brokaw and questions turned to foreign policy -- ah, here's a subject I don't know much about, but at least my talking points aren't being rendered irrelevant on a daily basis by the stock market.

Since incumbents pay of course, the whirlwind is playing out in Obama's favor and this election is for all intents and purposes over. Gives him about 100 days to figure out what he and everybody else -- including of course me -- remain clueless about.

Autumn

We get up early to walk Sam and the last two mornings have been autumn, misty, cold, mostly empty streets, and gray wherever we looked. Both days have brightened, but the weeks ahead are in those dawnings. The days are starting to catch up with the calendar.

Happy Events

Two happy events of late, one in the stratosphere, one just nicely satisfying. The first is the first granddaughter, a skinny beauty, 21 inches long and eight pounds, with amazing long fingers and eyes that she likes to open one at a time, as if she's not quite sure she wants to be in this new place. She grips firmly with those fingers when offered a grown-up finger and we spent a lot of time this past weekend sitting with her in one or another's lap, just staring at this perfect new miracle. She had some oxygen level problems for a few days, but came home from the hospital earlier than expected and at one week got pronounced perfect by her pediatrician, with no need for another visit until the routine check-up at one month. Ellison Jane.

And the second, passing all the hurdles to become a tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History, then giving my first tour on Wednesday. At the peak there were more than 20 visitors following me around, most of them from Australia. Enthused at each stop, I talked way too long, lost track of the time, and had to end the tour before visiting all the halls I'd planned, but they left applauding and more excited about the museum. And that last is the point.

Four Things That Go Together

Although it is perhaps only the Argentine Finca Flichman 2007 Chardonnay, Oak Aged Three Months, and a September NYC night that feels like one in August that makes them do so.

1) The closest star to us is Alpha Centauri. It is four light years away. To travel there in our currently fastest spaceship would take 70000 years. There are uncountable billions of stars in the universe. Alpha Centauri and our sun are no big deal. To put it in baseball terms, they probably wouldn't even get drafted.

2) Lyrics from Orphans of God, written by Mark Heard, sung by Buddy and Julie Miller:

Like bees in a bottle
We are flying at fate
Beating our wings
Against the walls of this place
Unaware that the struggle
Is the blood of the proof
In choosing to believe
The unbelievable truth

3) I've been studying the early vertebrates in preparation for my test to be a Museum highlights tour guide at the American Museum of Natural History. There were some very scary monsters 400 or so million years ago. But tonight I wondered if we had been around to harvest them, instead of vice versa, they would have been as tasty as the shrimp in the pasta I tossed for dinner.

4) Today I was helping one of the hospice patients pay his bills. I'd write the checks for him to sign. He wanted to pay some of them by phone. So, laboriously with his arthritic fingers, he punched the too small buttons on his phone to reach the 800 Citibank number. He got through, listened, then hung up and handed me the phone to dial for him. "Wild Party Girls," he said. We laughed, truly, in the face of his proximate end, the mistake at once funnier and infinitely sadder because his partner of forty years, who sometimes exasperated him as in any couple so long together, died last month in a separate hospice.

Signs

In the Bronx on a car, seen while coming home from the hospice:

Just let me shop and no one gets hurt.

Handwritten with a Magic Marker on a sheet in the window of one of the three -- count 'em, three -- Chinese restaurants in the next block:

students special

welcome back

inside quickly

The Most Tasteless Photo Ever?

I realize the competition is very, very stiff. But here's my nominee. This evening, about an hour before dark, on the Hudson River Bike Path around 50th St., a young woman squats -- fully dressed, thank God -- above a large pile of horse poop left recently by one of NYPD's equine finest. Her boyfriend snaps.

The Hardest of Hospice

I get a lot from visiting patients at the hospice, but one thing I didn't count on was forming friendships with dying people. It seemed a recipe for making what can be hard also painful. But it has happened and it's a good thing. So now the hardest part is when people I feel an instant or growing bond with die sooner than I'd expected. It's happened three times now, once with a crossword solver who was so happy when I printed the Times Tuesday puzzle and left it with her and three days later when I went back she was gone. And now yesterday a man of humor and wide-ranging past who was there for only a month and getting comfortable with having me show up, even on his bad days. A connection had started, value on both sides, and just like that it's done for good.

Home

Summer 2008 winds down. The Red Sox make their last visit to The House That Ruth Built. This summer, thanks to friends, family, time and savings, we've been to Alaska, San Francisco, Seattle, Calaveras Country, Tuolumne Meadows, Central California, Myrtle Beach, Richmond, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland for the 40th anniversary of our Peace Corps group. Many of these places -- Alaska, for example, with the temperate rain forests of Sitka spruce and hemlock, the legends of Raven returning the sun to man, Alaskan Amber free at the brewery in Juneau, and the blue calves floating near Mendenhall Glacier, or Tuolumne where I was happy to trip in the dark over the same rocks in the same places as I did more than forty years ago and to think those rocks will be there for thousands of years ahead, or seeing the people now who were the people then from the PC years -- many of these places could not have been finer, but I landed at LaGuardia this morning, the Empire State Building away in the distance as we taxied, and what could I think but "home"? And to drive the point, as it were, home, we're getting ourselves a dog and thinking of redoing the kitchen.

Summer Outdoor Concert Season

It's been a so-so summer for outdoor concerts and Shakespeare in the Park. Hamlet was undistinguised and I didn't care about seeing Hair 40 years ago, so what does a revival matter? And while I'm at it, why is it that the greatest city in the world has no resident world-caliber Shakespeare venue? And why does the current director of Shakespeare in the Park, one Oskar Eustis, figure we need less of the greatest dramatist in the English language -- and perhaps any language, as an op-ed piece in the NYT noted a few weeks ago -- and more of everything else? As the song in Kiss Me, Kate goes he needs to brush up on his Shakespeare, both in doing more of it and, since he was the director of the Hamlet, staging it.

But for music, I've either missed (Flogging Molly), been out of town (Beth Orton) for some, or not much interested in most concerts. But I did catch The National and Bob Dylan on consecutive weeks at Central Park and Prospect Park. It took a while for The National to hit its stride, perhaps because -- as one band member said -- they woke up that morning in Cincinnati and would be in Norway the next day. On Abel, they missed the fine line between controlled pandemonium and over the top and a couple of the quieter songs seemed tossed off but once they did sync in, they sold me all over again, especially on Karen, Apartment Story, and Start A War. The songs all promise that a life gone askew ("You haven't seen my good side yet.") will get back on track ("I'll quit drinking/I'll be fun again.") It probably won't but the faith, however misplaced is what matters. In Central Park it was the kind of summer night that one dreams of in the middle of winter, warm, clear, low humidity, and even a few stars.

And at Prospect Park, the first time I can remember being there, another Olmstead and (I think) Vaux creation, I walked forever to find the Bandstand. After dark, the place feels as huge as Central Park, remote, and ill-served by the main subway lines. But I eventually got there just as Bob was kicking off with Rainy Day Women. Couldn't scrounge a ticket to get inside, so could only hear and, by standing on tiptoe and screwing my head about 165 degrees to the right, sometimes see Bob or some other band member on stage. Bob was Bob. Without the visual stimulus of seeing him, it sounded as if I'd heard better through the years (and I would just once like to be spared Masters of War and It's Alright, Ma) but the NYT review a couple days later raved and Bob was apparently more animated to the crowd than usual, using his fingers as six-shooters during the encore. He remains an applause slut, milking it forever before coming out for the encore and then, after leaving the stage for the last time, letting people cheer some more for an extended time in hopes of luring him back on, before finally after a couple minutes the house lights come up and we all go home.

Not getting a ticket did have its plusses, enabling me to see in the huge overflow crowd a three-legged dog, a guy dashing around waving his purple light saber, and a guy, saying "Coming through" or "hot coals," or "watch yourself," walking through the crowd -- and we are talking people nearly shoulder to shoulder -- with a lit Weber hoisted high over his head, the coals aflame. He walked right by a cop, who said nothing. Perhaps this is not unusual in the wilds of Brooklyn. Prospect Park had both more mosquitoes and more dogs than CP.

Daze at the Museum

Summer is madness at the Museum. Waves of day camp kids, more numerous it feels than the school groups during the other nine months of the year. And, of course, the weak, though strengthening, dollar brings many tourists from abroad. They are invariably polite, enthusiastic about AMNH and -- for Spanish speakers -- delighted to see my "Yo Hablo Espanol" tag. But on Wednesday it was a young woman from, to judge by the way she spoke English, the Scandanavian countries or Germany who walked up to information lectern and said, "Please, I want to see the human organs." Instead of sending her to 14th and Broadway (previous post) I pointed her straight on to the Hall of Human Origins.

It reminded me of when our Peace Corps group was recently arrived in Chile, still learning Spanish and more eagerly learning the joys of pisco sours. At a reception the PC director had to welcome us one of our group, needing a refill and a greater knowledge of Chilean slang (Spanish being a language where a perfectly innocent phrase in one country becomes a gross expression in another), asked the young woman server for "mas pico," which in Chile translates colloquially as "more prick."

Also recently at the Museum a little boy of seven or so and wearing a Red Sox cap approached me and asked, "Which way to the blue whale, please?" I said, smiling, "You don't get to ask that question wearing a cap like that." He snatched it off and solemnly repeated his question. His parents enjoyed it, part of the vacation fun, what the Museum is supposed to be and almost always is.

You've Never Seen It All in NYC

I was about five minutes late for a dr. appt and crossing 14th St. at Union Square when in mid-intersection a woman was standing with unbottoned blouse open on her substantial, but unattractive breasts while her greasy boyfriend (presumably) photographed the moment. Amidst some murmuring tourists, I went into the building where the dr. office had recently moved only to find her premises in a complete construction uproar, with no worker who spoke English (or Spanish) for that matter and no dr. or staff in sight. It was clearly time to go home and regroup. So I have, with a glass of Chilean chardonnay.

Goodbye, Poetry in Motion; Hello, Train of Thought,

This spring, after 15 years, the MTA ended "Poetry in Motion," its excerpts or full versions of poems displayed in subway car and bus placards right along with the ubiquitous "If You See Something, Say Something" and community college messages. They were always a brain oasis and with O Tell Me the Truth About Love and A Little Tooth gave Chris and I material for B & C's 7/7/07 wedding.

The replacement, Train of Thought, intended, per the MTA, to "broaden the scope and content of the areas and authors we bring to subway and bus riders" sounded more lecturing than promising, but they got the first one exactly right, with E.B. White on the three New Yorks:

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born there, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size, its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something ….Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion."

And this, from John Stuart Mill from On Liberty, is not bad either:

"The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by sufering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."

Train may not be as grand a fifteen years as Poetry, but it's left the station well.

How Hot Was It in New York Yesterday?

So hot that the slack-eyed visitors to Dali: Painting and Film at the MoMA were melting more than the framed timepieces, even in the Museum's maxed AC. Do not miss, however, the excerpts from the dream sequences in Spellbound and Destino, the finally finished collaboration of Dali and Disney that was meant as part of a sequel to Fantasia.

So hot that the effortlessly stylish got beat down like the rest of us. Eyeliner smudged, hair frizzed except on those smart enough to have a shorn summer cut, faces flushed, sweat lines stained all the usual unfortunate places on clothes, tank tops became stank tops. Stand clear of them on the subway.

Night returned some order to this universe, but in the day, heat, it's the great equalizer.

Mary Weiss at South Street Seaport

Almost missed this, not picking up the Times weekend listings until 6:30 in the sweltering evening on this 95 degree day. Part of the free NYC River-to-River summer concerts. South Street Seaport feels ersatz in the day, but it's a great summer night hangout, with lots of open air restaurants, plenty of beer stands (the Times had an interesting and accurate article about the openness of outdoor drinking around the city in summer, largely tolerated because almost everybody gets around in public transport, on foot, or by taxi and poses no driving threat to others), the three lighted bridges spanning the river, Brooklyn across the way, and the Watchtower providing time and temperature.

Mary's several hundred audience consisted mainly of three generations of white guys who no matter how prosaic our lives thought she was singing Leader of the Pack to us. Now as then she looked better than all of us put together. Slender and short, she wore tight jeans, white shirt with a knotted rep tie, a black vest, shades, all this set off by straight shoulder-length blunt-cut blonde hair. As effortlessly cool and concentrated on her music as her fellow New York contemporary Patti Smith is all posturing and political hectoring.

She called her old band the Shangs and played several of their hits and not-so-hits, including Out in the Streets, Train from Kansas City and -- dedicated to her late Mom -- I Can Never Go Home Again. But this was no solitary walk down memory lane. She also played almost every song off her album from last year Dangerous Game -- should be bought or downloaded -- and when she closed her encore with the back to back pairing of Leader of the Pack and the best off Dangerous Game, Don't Come Back, it was clear that the intervening years had only strengthened her voice and her person. Had the Leader not met his end in such untimely fashion, he would -- make no mistake -- have soon been handed his walking papers.

Afterwards I asked her about a new album and she said there is one in the works. Excellent news.

The last time I was at Seaport was two years ago to see Amy Rigby. Similar women, different, much different styles, equally satisfying, only that night Amy and we were dodging lightning and my sister was dying. I'll take tonight.

Two Years

Yesterday was the second anniversary of Annie's death. That morning seems a very long time ago, but Annie alive seems very near. I remember us almost daily on one golf course or another. Maybe that's a way toward recovery, recalling the life not its end.

Mr. November

The National, my current favorite rock band along with The Hold Steady, is selling Mr. November tees on its website, emblazoned with Sen. Obama's image. Mr. November is one of the highlights of the band's penultimate album, Alligator. All proceeds from tee sales go to the Obama campaign.

A couple of notes -- Mr. N in the song rhapsodizes "I used to be/carried in the arms of cheerleaders." Not a bad metaphor for the drooling treatment the Senator continues to receive from all but the rightest regions of the media. (The New Yorker cover, thank you, satirized the ridiculous exaggerations and lies to which the Obamas have been subjected. It was not to be taken seriously.) The Onion's print version this week has a take on the media slavering, anointing Time magazine for producing the ultimate puff piece on Obama.

I just wish The National had taken the Mr. November theme one step further by printing the song's repeated refrain on the tee. It's a way better slogan than Change You Can Believe In or whatever it's morphed into for the general election. And certainly describes what a lot of people feel the Bush Administraton has done to the country.

Memorial Day in New York

Memorial Day is the best holiday weekend in New York. It is not so much that people empty out of the city, although that does happen. But it's not like those left disappear. They pack the brunch places, barbecue in the parks (riding the bike on Monday through the Latino sections on the trail along the Hudson was tortuous with the numbers and, even more, the numbers that let their two year and younger children wander on the path while they chat away with their object of flirtation) or just spill out into the parks. But the difference really is the change in traffic volume. Streets are as deserted as they ever get in New York. And those people remaining again, they move differently as they flood into the streets, restaurants, and parks. There is no rushing pressure, no hassled or worn faces. Summer has now yet broiled us down. It's an emergence after winter -- particularly this year with the very cool April and May --, a stretching and a civic languor. It's a brief couple of days when New York is not quite New York.

A Bad Day at the Hospice

I biked to the hospice yesterday to find that three of the patients I visited had died. One was very unexpected; I'd left her a crossword from the Times to work on and said we'd do it together Friday if she had trouble with it. She was sitting up in her wheelchair then, she was eating heartily, she was having less pain. I told her I'd take her outside Friday if it was a nice day (and it was the best spring day we'd had in weeks.) I had an article for her in my backpack, walked into her room and it was empty. It made no sense. And then it made the sense that empty rooms there always mean. I have taken to spending a short time in the rooms where my patients last were, as a kind of chapel to say goodbye. In her case I got a better chance because her family was visiting and the social worker introduced us. "Oh, yes," they said, "the crossword guy. She told us about you." Days like yesterday need those kind of reminders that it is really true -- in our small way, we do make a difference. The families always thank you; the patients always thank you. It should be the reverse.

Fashism and Belief

A couple weeks ago we did two museum special events in the same day, starting with the preview of the Superheroes and Fashion at the Met, which to me felt minor, pumped up, and an ill-advised effort to MOMA-ize the Met. The superhero stuff was OK, especially those costumes, like Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man gear and Michelle Pfeiffer's Cat Woman, that had been used in movies, but the fashion clothes were ludicrous and mostly unwearable except on October 31. That night the new members reception at the Guggenheim highlighted Cai Guo Qiang: I Want to Believe. Visually stunning, at the very least, but in fact considerably more. He understands, and utilizes, violence and randomness in art, life and the planet. He understands too that they are the forces driving constant creation. He uses gunpowder in his works, large canvases that in fact are the residue of burnt gunpowder. Like Cristo he also utilizes outdoor locations for one time artistic events. The Guggenheim had a loop tape of a moving fireworks float that Cai had, apparently, driven through Times Square. He's also big on installations here, hanging tigers shot full of arrows; a hundred running wolves suspended in pack chase and finally crashing against a thick pane of plastic. The spectacular show centerpiece is eight compact Chevrolets, suspended floor to the 60 ft or so rotunda ceiling, with spears of flashing neon coming from each of them but the first one at floor level. All of this was exhilarating but exhausting. Where Cai, born in China, goes wrong, I think, is his embrace of revolutionary violence and particularly Mao's Cultural Revolution. Because far from the violent natural, the violence employed in the Cultural Revolution, or in any revolution or even that in the name of anarchy, seeks only to overthrow one system and implant an equally regimented other. No planned violence made by man can ever be nature. These are the sorts of conclusions reached when you get too involved with the American Museum of Natural History, when a million years seems an eyeblink and Cosmic Collisions the motif.

From New York to Richmond

LaGuardia, US Airways terminal, a storm moving in that will drop over two inches on the city, Manhattan through the gray in the distance across the runways and river, Bowie Heroes on the Bose. We were going to Richmond for Colin's birthday and Mother's Day. Flight got cancelled, terminal full of crabby people, crabby agents, all flailing and reduced before nature. We got out several hours later to Charlottesville, dumped the idea of USAir-paid cab ride, got a Ford Fusion for 30 bucks from Avis and headed 80 miles east on 64, giving a lift to another passenger. Many years since I'd been in Charlottesville. Today, at least, it managed the neat trick of being small and remote, yet filled with big box stores and slow-moving traffic. Sissy Spacek and Dave Matthews can have it. We dropped our fellow traveller at her mother's retirement community and, a mere six hours late, got close to the kids' place, stopping first at one of the BBQ joints we love. Sometimes all it takes to turn around a stupid day is a sandwich slathered in slaw and sauce, a cheap Budweiser, the unfamiliar language of NASCAR in the generational chatter, and -- best of all -- a Where's George bill handed back in change in a restaurant that doesn't take credit cards, but will accept an out of town check.

One Small Political Post

Someone should do the math on the popular vote numbers in the Democratic presidential contest in a slightly different way. Results from three states should be deducted from the running totals. Florida counts; both Obama and Clinton were on the ballot, even though they did not campaign. Michigan is the first state that doesn't count, of course, because Obama wasn't on the ballot. The other two states are the Senators' home states -- New York and Illinois. No way the non-favorite son/daughter wins -- or even gets particularly close -- in those no matter how much or how little campaigning is done. So throw out those three outcomes and where are we then?

The Democrats have to do something about Florida and Michigan. The states did a stupid thing by defying the DNC and scheduling primaries earlier than authorized. But the party would do an even stupider thing if it went up against McCain in two very battleground states with the Democratic state parties and, particularly, the voters feeling they did not have a voice in determining the party nominee.

A Day at the Met

On the third of three consecutive gorgeous early spring days, we had a fine day at the Met yesterday, seeing Lee Friedlander's richly textured and layered photos of Olmstead's parks across the US, capturing exactly in that medium what Olmstead sought in his own design, and then on to the huge and thoughtful landscapes of Poussin, almost four centuries old, and examining what always remains worth examining, man's place in nature and the sudden moments where light in life turns to darkness, with no warning or explanation, sometimes in Poussin's work through a venemous snake (Man Killed By a Snake and Orpheus and Eurydice). There were two grand quotes at the end of the exhibit, concerning Poussin's monumental final works, The Four Seasons, based -- for the first time in his career, I think -- on scenes from the Bible rather than myth. From Poussin himself, "It is said that the swan sings more sweetly when death approaches. I will try to imitate him and work better than ever." And from Chateaubriand, "Often men of genius announced their end through masterpieces; it is their soul that takes wing."

Attribution of works of art is a very living science -- more than a few of the canvases and drawings in the Poussin show had been attributed to him -- or removed from his catalogue -- in the last decade or two.

Venturing deep into the museum as we did in getting between the two exhibitions made me realize all over again what extraordinary work the retiring Phillippe de Montebello has achieved in his 30 years tenure. It is said that he often walks alone through the Met, visiting his favorite works. Well he should; it's a glorious place.

Night Life, Night Death

After a god-awful French film (La France) at the New Directors/New Films festival (widely varying quality, but often very exciting stuff, such as Red Road last year) and thoroughly blitzed by a marg on the rocks with salt at the well-named 125 Small Plates place in the previously Black Hole restaurant location at 3143 Broadway, I walked out on to a Broadway blocked off by police vehicles and yellow Incident Do Not Cross tape. There had been no screaming sirens while I was in the restaurant but also no indication of anything amiss as the 1 train I'd been on surfaced 45 minutes earlier. The strobbing red lights were up at 122nd at Manhattan School of Music, so I walked up, driven by the drink and the craven, but ubiquitous something-happened curiosity, passed an NYPD detectives van, and at the Manhattan School of Music was asked by a plainclothesman to turn left and walk up toward Riverside, past the glut of NewsChannel Blah Blah vans and away from the scene, which seemed to be across Broadway at the SE corner of 122nd. I asked him what had happened and a bit to my surprise instead of replying "Can't tell you," he said, "A cop shot somebody." Read about it in the Times tomorrow, or online tonight, but a couple hours ago, maybe as I was picking my way out of the dark Walter Reade Theater while the credits rolled, a cop, another person, and a bullet (or several) were converging in a moment none of them expected when the alarm went off this morning.

Footnote : Either the plainclothesman was wrong, or I misunderstood him. In fact, three kids accosted a Columbia graduate student from China on the median at Broadway and 122nd. One began attacking the student, who broke away across Broadway and was struck by a southbound car that had no chance to see him and stop. He was killed. We found out another day later that he lived in our building, making the whole tragedy even sadder. His attacker is fourteen years old.

Drive By Truckers

Last time three years ago or so and 3000 miles away with Annie at Tractor Tavern in Seattle. Tonight at the still-new Terminal 5 venue in Hell's Kitchen, a neighborhood that the hospice patient I visit said the new urbanites moving in want to rename Clinton because it sounds better for property values. Until precisely 9:38, 45 minutes or so into the set, I thought that the lack of smoky air and no sawdust on the floor, replaced by Sony projection TVs, had perhaps gentrified lead Trucker Patterson Hood as well, but then he hawked up and spit on the stage. Only once, compared to a dozen or so at the Tavern, but the bottle of Jack Daniels (or at least a bottle in the JD shape and label filled with an appropriately- colored liquid) got passed among the band members, so call them tamer, hardly tame. Though Trucker singer-guitarist #3, Jason Isbell, has gone solo, this is still an extraordinary band, capable of full on sonic assault featuring three guitars, bass, keyboards and drums. They play loud and they play Southern and they write very, very smart. They are also great value. One's $25 ticket got more than two hours of music, a time still slightly less than at the cramped Tavern where they played for three hours and had my ears ringing for two days. Hood writes mostly of his own demons, crediting rock and roll with saving him from suicide. But, hey, who's not got demons and the trick is to make them live for others, something that Hood, for me, does only intermittently, unlike, say, Leonard Cohen then and the National and Cat Power now. His anthem is "Hell, No, I Ain't Happy," but at this stage in his life, somewhere on the up side of forty I'd say, watching him on stage he seems happy indeed. My reservations aside, three very good things about Patterson Hood -- he lets the music speak for itself, avoiding the mortal sin of between song banalities or political rants; he has the good grace to thank his roadies and, several times, the audience; he has the audacity of assurance to spin a touching, long encore song/monologue called Sixteen Wheels of Love, about the late life love his mother found with a huge trucker named Chester. Co-Trucker Mike Cooley is more interesting in his writing, looking beyond himself to try and make some context of the South, of history, of music, of the working poor and where he connects with it. Check out, from various DBT albums, Uncle Frank, Carl Perkins Cadillac, and Marry Me, with the deathless lyric "Rock and Roll means well but it can't help tellin' young boys lies. " What this all adds up to, tonight reinforced, is a band matched by few and topped by none working today.

Illumination!

I now have an answer to my unspoken question whether there could be a more pointless reunion tour than the Eagles jaunt to the cash registers a few months ago. The answer, in fact, is a resounding yes as my Live Nation NY Concert update just delivered the unwelcome news that there will be a Crosby, Stills, and Nash concert sometime in the spring. That the only still musically breathing member of the erstwhile supergroup is not adding his Y to CSN says it all. Wasn't the fork stuck in the others some thirty years ago?

A Night at the Opera Even Groucho Would Have Loved

I had two warnings. First, it was Wagner. Second, the performance began at 7 PM when all the other operas in our season subscription had started at 8. Still, it was a shock to look at the preview e-mail from the Met and find the running time for Tristan und Isolde would be five hours.

We reached our seats only a couple minutes before curtain and when the lights dimmed, Met managing director Peter Gelb stepped from the wings to announce that the tenor Gary Lehman would be both making his Met debut and singing Tristan (which Mr. Gelb cheerfully and helpfully declared "impossible to sing") for the first time. Now I'm still very much in the beginning stages of learning about opera, but I know enough to recognize that double whammy is roughly akin to Billy Crystal making his Yankees debut in the bottom of the ninth of the seventh game of the World Series with the Yankees down by a run and two outs. Mr. Gelb made no mention of the unfortunate tenor who debuted in the role a few nights before (substituting for Ben Heppner who is ill at home in Canada, regarded as one of the few contemporary tenors up to the rigors of Tristan) and was subsequently hammered in the NYTimes review.

To a warm welcome, Mr. Lehman carried ably through the first act, where Tristan is less a presence than is Isolde, who was performed by the renowned Deborah Voigt, also debuting in the role. Problems began in the second act when Ms. Voigt fled the stage in the midst of their love duet. Mr. Lehman gamely carried on singing to an empty stage for a bit longer as murmurs grew in the crowd and, finally, mercifully, the curtain came down. There was some discussion in the seats around us whether this was illness or a diva act at having to perform with the debuting tenor. Majority view was illness, a conclusion supported by her also missing a later performance in the run. In her stead came Janice Baird, making it two Met debuts for the opera leads, and the performance resumed. We staggered out at 12:30, but Tristan adventures continued in the next performance when a scenery malfunction slid Mr. Lehman down into the prompter's box and gave him a head injury. He continued that night but was himself replaced by a third lead before, finally, in the sixth and final performance of the run Mr. Heppner and Ms. Voigt sang together.

It's enough to make one begin to think of Tristan und Isolde as the "Scottish opera." I do know that while my enjoyment of opera is growing, I'm clearly not yet at the Wagner level. Five hours, even without the evening's bizarre events, was a long haul for me.

It turned out to be quite a month for opera, with this gem from the Pittsburgh Opera. At a performance of Aida, the conductor wound up singing the part of Radames in the fourth act while continuing to direct the orchestra. The singer playing Radames -- who had warned management that he was not well -- finally could no longer carry on, although he silently continued to act the role. The company had arranged to borrow a singer from the Met, but his plane was delayed, and so the artistic director asked the conductor who had studied voice in Australia, to step in. NYT quotes: Antony Walker, the conductor, "It was quite a nerve-wracking thing to do, but I realized there wasn't much choice. " And Christopher Hahn, the artistic director, "The could be one for the history books." Amen to that.

Absolute Bagels

I am apparently the last person on the Upper West Side to discover Absolute Bagels on the east side of Broadway between 108th and 107th. But now that I have I'm there nearly every weekend, jogging the mile or so from the apt and then back with soft, chewy and just slightly sweet classics. They must sell thousands on Saturday and Sunday for the piles of each variety are constantly high and deep, but the turnover is so rapid that the bagels are always warm to the touch. On winter days the windows steam up and fathers wait patiently for their kids in strollers to decide what kind they want. I like to think of the place as a microcosm of NYC at its best -- a food most renown among one ethnic group, purveyed in a shop owned and staffed by two other ethnic groups and where, probably, one could place an order in any one of three different languages.

Jokes at the Hospice Volunteer Meeting

I have begun to volunteer at a hospice residence. Volunteers meet quarterly and tonight I attended my first. An elderly Jewish man, much experienced in sitting by patients at the hospice at end of life and the only other male there -- though my training class was almost half male --, said Metamusil plans to introduce a kosher version of its product during Passover. Its marketing slogan will be "Let my people go." This led to another volunteer telling of the bank robbery that went terribly wrong, with the nervous robber gunning down everyone in the bank except for three men. He stalked over to the first and asked, "Did you see what I just did?" The man stammered, "Yes" and was promptly shot. Same thing for #2. The third guy, having taken this all in, heard the same question and replied, "Not me, not a thing, but my wife over there, hiding behind that desk, saw it all." And on the subway home, reading the NYT Sunday magazine article that apparently found it astonishing that the wife of a Baptist minister, who home-schooled her children, and believes in the healing power of Jesus Christ could also be a wildly popular comedian with a You Tube viewed millions of times -- link below -- (and could I just add here that you don't have to be believer to believe that 'tude says more about the Times than the article sheds light on the comedian. It's finally her husband who clues in the writer, "Funny is funny.") Anyway, she, telling of her Baptist upbringing, repeats this oldie but goodie: Why don't Baptists engage in premarital sex? Because it might lead to dancing.


http://youtube.com/watch?v=anSpBUxsgAU&feature=related

Funny is funny.

Snow Day Jottings

February 22, often a good day for snows in NYC and, when we lived there, the DC area. Good defined as major storms, and today's will leave 6-9 inches in New York. It's coming straight down now after blowing in wind gusts earlier and from the window I'm watching it pile up on car roofs. Would get over to Central Park, but today gets busy in the afternoon, my first time with patients at the hospice, then Bianca's opening at 5:30 and finally Otello at the Met at 8 PM. If it's anything like Macbeth was, it will be powerful and seeing it sung will add new dimension to the play itself.

I've been thinking lately -- triggered to some degree by the hospice training -- about the transition from baby to child to adult and, if one lives long enough, for most of us, back again. I suppose it even started with riding a bicycle (the best way to get around NYC, but that's another subject) regularly again, meaning it started a long time ago for me, but it is the gift of time and choice, to do only what you want to do -- and your finances permit -- and to do it when you want to do it, with others or alone. It is, in short, play, including serious play. A city is a good place for play. This city is perhaps the best place for it, where children and adults who are out of adult uniform pretty much go about their fun unobstructed -- so long as the fun is not bizarre behavior -- and, even better, unnoticed. No one sees, no one expects. You have the run of the city.

Valentine's Day at the Butterfly Conservatory

The butterflies are back at the American Museum of Natural History and the link below takes you to the butterfly cam there.

Yesterday's visitors during my noon to two volunteer shift included a stylishly dressed, mostly in black, young couple, as if they'd just come from or were off to lunch at an upscale restaurant somewhere in the city. She Asian, he Hispanic or Filipino, not much taller than she was and, from overhearing, pretty knowledgable about butterflies. I didn't pay them much attention. Although it was a slow shift, there were still a few kids who wanted to watch the owl butterfly feed from the orange slice in my hand or have their photo taken in front of the huge Atlas moth spread across a plant trunk. The couple was standing near the glass cabinet where we keep the native species butterfly pupae so lucky visitors can sometimes see an adult butterfly emerge. The guy asked a co-volunteer if he would take a picture of them and handed him a camera. Nothing unusual; happens about a dozen times a shift, but rarely does the requester say "But just wait a second." More rarely still does he reach into his pocket and take out a ring case, still more rarely does he go down on one knee, open the ring case and ask his astonished and completely surprised girlfriend to marry him. In fact, in a shift that had already been spectacular for the wildly active blue morphos darting and flirting throughout the enclosure, I'd have been inclined to say it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment, except that the third volunteer on shift, a ten year volunteer at the conservatory, said later, "I'd only seen that once before."

Can't see their future, of course, but it got launched in great style.

Only?

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/butterflies/cams.php

UNO!

Well, it wasn't quite the Super Bowl, but we cheered at our big screen last night when Judge Jones picked Uno. The kids' beagle is here while they're at work today and sleeping on her pillow now. I've taken to calling her "Champ" for she can bay and jump around with the now best of show.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080213/ap_on_re_us/dog_show

Winter...At Last

The snow began sometime around ten this morning. I've been watching it through the apartment's windows since then. May go jogging in it later. The cars are starting to lose traction. It won't be much, an inch or two, and it won't last long, but at last it's the brief rationale for spending winter in the city, as the flakes muffle the street noise and for a just a bit cover all the less inviting street debris in white. My winter clearance sweater from Eddie Bauer -- $19.99, a great deal -- got delivered with the snow and I wore it and my Yankees knit cap (pitchers and catchers report to spring training this week. To paraphrase Barack Obama, who injected who with what is the past, Opening Day is the future.) to our neighborhood restaurant where Bianca and I had lunch, half a carafe of wine, adding to the trance of the tumbling flakes, and mocking the couple of passersby who bore their open umbrellas against the snow. Where are these people from anyway??

RIP Tom Lantos

The northern California Congressman, quoted here a month or so ago -- in the midst of his incurable cancer -- on what the United States had given him, died yesterday at 80. He knew a human rights violation when he saw one, regardless of its ideological provenance. The times need more like him; instead there is one less.

The Giants

New York might return to its normal snappiness sometime this afternoon, but for now -- on this unusually mild primary election day -- as the floats parade up Broadway toward City Hall, we are all still cheerfully in the clouds where the Giants put us Sunday evening around 10 PM when Plaxico Burress caught Eli Manning's 13 yard pass for the go-ahead and winning touchdown. Fox's high camera had the moment before it actually happened, the ball out of Manning's hand and Burress breaking free from his defender, the perfect pass headed straight for his break and time enough for the impossible thought "The Giants are going to win the Super Bowl" to lodge in my brain the instant before the ball settled in Burress' arms. It's still pretty amazing. Fox had a good producer too, who almost immediately cued up footage of Manning throwing virtually the identical pass to Burress in pre-game workouts.

And we'll be watching the Eli elude and Tyree catch play for years of YouTube and highlights, just like The Catch in 1982 when Montana to Dwight Clark beat the Cowboys in the NFC championship game.

A game for the ages, as -- in fact -- the Giants win over the Packers also was.

No Bernie for You, but Bizarre Even By NYC Standards

Earlier this month the NYT unfolded over three days this story -- two men propped their dead friend up in a computer chair and wheeled him along W. 52st Street to a check cashing business on 9th Avenue. There they left him in the chair on the sidewalk and went inside in an attempt to cash the deceased's Social Security check of some $300. That stretch of 9th Avenue is a snapshot of old and gentrifying Hell's Kitchen, new Thai and other restaurant locations sharing blocks with empty store fronts and shoddy drug and convenience stores. It is very crowded with both foot and vehicular traffic. You don't leave a dead person in a chair in broad daylight and not attract attention. And so it was this sunny January day -- passersby, a police officer having a slice of pizza next door, and the suspicious check store clerk himself all wondered about the guy in the chair. The arrest was made as the two friends were attempting to move the chair into the store to satisfy the clerk's request to have the check recipient present. Not quite sure how they planned to have him endorse the check.

That was day one's story. The next two days brought the names of the three friends and their sad, close to the edge lives -- drug problems, prison terms for petty larcenies and frauds, complicated health probelms, physical weakness that made it difficult for the dead man and his roommate to climb even one flight of stairs to their apartment. Neighbors, as they always are, were quoted, "good people," "kept to themselves," "down on their luck." They also said the dead man lived his whole life in the 52st St. apartment. I've been on that street on my bicycle. It's gritty now and probably always has been. It's Hell's Kitchen after all. But like that life that ended a day or so before becoming a very public spectacle, Hell's Kitchen will pretty much be over in the next few years of far West Side midtown boom, and its rough streets and (sometimes too) quirky characters will be smoothed out by expensive restorations to interiors of existing buildings or replaced by luxury apartment blocks like the bland one around the corner on 53rd.

Here just over two years and already joining the bemoan chorus of Lost New York.

"Everything in America is Bigger....Even Peas."

Who would ever have thought, even in the midst of global warming, that on January 7 in New York Harbor on the way to Liberty Island people would be peeling off outer layers of clothing, but so it was as the temps soared above sixty. You get your own taste of an Ellis Island experience as you wait to board the ferry -- first outside after buying tickets as you snake through the cordons and then inside the tent at dockside where the herders keep urging visitors to "move forward" or "fill in" and then when the gangplank comes down and everyone presses forward at once. But once we got to Liberty, nee Bedloe Island, so long as we avoided the concessions, it felt like we had the island to ourselves, especially inside the base of the monument, an add-on I just stumbled upon making the online ticket buy even though the informational brochures say you need two days advance reservation. Inside the base we walked through the chronologically-arranged exhibition that tells the history of the statue from conception to the bicentennial restoration to Liberty's status as universal commercial icon (a status amply exploited by the island's own concession store where we passed up the opportunity to buy a Statue of Liberty mask, a Statue of Liberty crown, and every other junk bit). The Statue is made of copper sheets, only two pennies thick, and still weighs 225 tons pounds. To have constructed it any other way would have made its weight unsupportable. The idea of the statue, originating with the French politician Edouard de Laboulaye, was in its own way subversive, to contrast the liberty just successfully defended in the U.S. through the North's triumph in the Civil War with the repression of the Second Empire in France. The designer, sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, modeled it in part on an earlier design for a statue in Egypt, in part on the Colossus of Rhodes, and in part on the face of his mother. He traveled to the US in 1871 looking for a site, giving posterity both the "peas" quote and the choice of Bedloe Island. The statue was build in France, disassembled, shipped to the U.S. and riveted together by immigrant workmen on site on the island. They worked without scaffolding and unlike that other nearby marvel, the Brooklyn Bridge, no one died in its assembly. The statue was meant to symbolize enlightenment but thanks in part to Emma Lazurus's "The New Colossus" poem came instead to mean "welcome" to the immigrants who came through the Narrows, past it and into New York Harbor. The museum has full size replicas of the Statue's face and one of the feet, showing the scale -- taller than me --, the relative light weight of the copper sheathing and the craftsmanship, including the thousands of copper rivets. It was an inspiring day, but most of all thanks to the display of excerpts from letters written to Lee Iacocca, chair of the restoration campaign. They contained small donations, no more than a dollar in some cases, and came from those who decades before had sailed past Liberty, built the new lives they'd sought and now wanted to give back to the restoration campaign. Most of the visitors the day we visited seemed to come more from out of country than out of city/state, perhaps a commentary on the weak dollar. As for us, we were tourists in our own city. You could do that for a long time in New York.

Tom Lantos

Tom Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced he will not run for re-election after he was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. Lantos, who often discomfited right and left alike with his unflagging insistence on respect for human rights anywhere and everywhere they are abused, will be missed. His press release announcing his decision is the best recent description I have read of why this country matters and why it continues to be the powerful attraction it is -- " It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country." Our challenge, Lou Dobbs and others aside, is not to close or further limit that promise and opportunity, but to extend it further, and most especially to those who currently hold the United States in deep suspicion.

Curd? Curd???

So Bianca came back from Wisconsin with cheese curds. Says it's delicious, blah, blah, blah. I don't do curd, any curd. Just look what it rhymes with. Give it an attractive name, I'll try it. Lots more like me -- look what happened when the Patagonian toothfish got remamed Chilean Sea Bass -- immediate overfishing and endangerment. I'll eat most anything once. Just don't call it curd or, for that matter, tofu.