Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Seventh Extinction
If you watch enough daytime TV, as I inadvertently did today working on my mother's taxes and other paper work, you can scarcely help but say "Bring it on" about the Seventh Extinction. There was the button-cute young couple raising their sextuplets (and older twins) before the cameras of -- I think -- TLC. There was Maury, where -- to hoots and cheers of the audience -- men, and today a woman, are tested for truth by DNA and lie detectors. Maury, who looks positively scary, perhaps too much Botox or tanning beds, opens the verdict envelope with the same zeal as an Oscar or "survey says..." Family Feud host. Dr. Phil is still peddling his tiresome shibboleths. And I didn't even get -- thank God -- to the tsunami of Judge So and So shows or The Hot Hormones (oops, I mean, Real) World. And we have the audacity to mock dinosaurs' intelligence.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Hawaii Who Knews?
1. That traveling to the world's most active volcano on the Big Island would feel like driving deep into the temperate rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula.
2. That the current eruption on said volcano has been going on more or less continually since 1983.
3. That the Hawaiian alphabet has no letter S.
4. That for many years the largest ranch in the United States, the Parker Ranch, was in Hawaii and Spanish-speaking cowboys managed the vast herds of cattle.
5. That humpback whales regularly entertain near the shores of Maui from November through about March.
6. That the ski season runs from January to February.
7. That the southernmost point of the United States is -- duh -- South Point on the Big Island.
8. That the bright idea of importing the mongoose to control rats did not work so well because the mongoose is diurnal and rats mostly nocturnal.
9. That the governor is an Republican woman, wildly popular in the state, who campaigned as an outsider and wears stylish glasses.
2. That the current eruption on said volcano has been going on more or less continually since 1983.
3. That the Hawaiian alphabet has no letter S.
4. That for many years the largest ranch in the United States, the Parker Ranch, was in Hawaii and Spanish-speaking cowboys managed the vast herds of cattle.
5. That humpback whales regularly entertain near the shores of Maui from November through about March.
6. That the ski season runs from January to February.
7. That the southernmost point of the United States is -- duh -- South Point on the Big Island.
8. That the bright idea of importing the mongoose to control rats did not work so well because the mongoose is diurnal and rats mostly nocturnal.
9. That the governor is an Republican woman, wildly popular in the state, who campaigned as an outsider and wears stylish glasses.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The Perfect Pisco Sour
You have found the perfect pisco sour when you feel totally normal as you are drinking it and then when you go to stand up you find you no longer have legs. The Pio Pio Restaurant, a Peruvian place on the NW corner of Amsterdam and 94th and one of six in the group in the city, comes as close as I've found in New York to that ideal. Their chicken empanandas are also the real thing, right down to the bit of hard boiled egg and olive inside each one.
http://www.piopionyc.com/
http://www.piopionyc.com/
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Awards Shows? Who Needs 'em?
With the Sopranos long gone, there is only one television moment in the year, aside from our weekly in-season engagement with Lost, that we need to watch, tonight's Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, where a man named -- honestly! -- Fred Bassett judged the toy group and where Best in Show went to the oldest winner in the 133 year history of the event, a Sussex Spaniel named Stump. He was the people's choice, like the unforgettable Uno last year. Best in Show the movie has nothing on the real thing -- and what dogs they are.
Monday, February 09, 2009
"Say Goodnight, Gracie" "Goodnight Gracie"
A moment this morning walking Sam first thing that channeled that old joke, ancient joke by now, from George Burns and Gracie Allen at the end of their early TV variety show.
Sam met a puppy that was being walked by a young woman. They stopped to say hello and sniff while we owners smiled at each other but kept murmuring to our dogs, as is New Yorkers wont. After a minute or so I said, "Let's go home, Sam. Say goodbye." And from the young woman, "Goodbye."
Sam met a puppy that was being walked by a young woman. They stopped to say hello and sniff while we owners smiled at each other but kept murmuring to our dogs, as is New Yorkers wont. After a minute or so I said, "Let's go home, Sam. Say goodbye." And from the young woman, "Goodbye."
Sunday, February 08, 2009
John Updike
So last week I went off about writers and others who stretch, bend, or otherwise warp their personal histories and work to chase success. A couple days later John Updike died, maybe the 180 degree opposite of that ethos.
Some things, quotes and comments, written about him in his obituary or appreciations -- Updike on his protagonists, "(they) oscillate in their moods between an enjoyment of the comforts of domesticity and the familial life, and a sense that their essential identity is a solitary one -- to be found in flight and loneliness and even adversity. This seems to be my feeling of what being a male human being involves."
Updike in a mid-60's interview: "I like middles. It is in the middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity relentlessly rules." Those last four words .
On his protagonist, Bech knowing he is "a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust." And out of that terrible knowledge comes, I figure, the search for God and, therefore, a way to survive that moment when one begins devolving back to that fleck. The AMNH experience has made being a fleck easier to accept somehow.
Phillip Roth on Updike, "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be ...a national treasure..."
Updike on the great pleasure of being able to write for a living, "To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible...still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act... To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another."
Updike talking to the New Yorker after 9/11 of his conviction that America and its core values would prevail, that "with all its failings, this is a country worth fighting for. Risk is a price of freedom,...mankind's elixir, even if a few turn it to poison." And then that fleck spoke of the towers collapsing and the universe, "(the collapse of the Twin Towers) took your breath away, and shattered your sense of a kindly universe, at least for a while...(but) I tend to give the universe the benefit of the doubt, since it's the only one we have." (Well, of course, that last is questioned by some cosmologists.)
Forty-five years before 9/11, Updike took a walk in my other great post-work enthusiasm of , Central Park: "On the afternoon of the first day of spring, when the gutters were still heaped high with Monday's snow but the sky itself was swept clean, we put on our galoshes and walked up the sunny side of Fifth Avenue to Central Park." He then chronicles what he sees there, ending thus,
"Two pigeons feeding each other.
"Two showgirls, whose faces had not yet thawed the frost of their makeup, treading indignantly through the slush.
"A plump old man saying 'chick, chick' and feeding peanuts to squirrels.
"Many solitary men throwing snowballs at tree trunks.
"Many birds calling to each other about how little the Ramble has changed.
"One red mitten lying lost under a poplar tree.
"An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore."
A great omnivorous voice.
Some things, quotes and comments, written about him in his obituary or appreciations -- Updike on his protagonists, "(they) oscillate in their moods between an enjoyment of the comforts of domesticity and the familial life, and a sense that their essential identity is a solitary one -- to be found in flight and loneliness and even adversity. This seems to be my feeling of what being a male human being involves."
Updike in a mid-60's interview: "I like middles. It is in the middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity relentlessly rules." Those last four words .
On his protagonist, Bech knowing he is "a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust." And out of that terrible knowledge comes, I figure, the search for God and, therefore, a way to survive that moment when one begins devolving back to that fleck. The AMNH experience has made being a fleck easier to accept somehow.
Phillip Roth on Updike, "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be ...a national treasure..."
Updike on the great pleasure of being able to write for a living, "To condense from one's memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible...still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act... To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another."
Updike talking to the New Yorker after 9/11 of his conviction that America and its core values would prevail, that "with all its failings, this is a country worth fighting for. Risk is a price of freedom,...mankind's elixir, even if a few turn it to poison." And then that fleck spoke of the towers collapsing and the universe, "(the collapse of the Twin Towers) took your breath away, and shattered your sense of a kindly universe, at least for a while...(but) I tend to give the universe the benefit of the doubt, since it's the only one we have." (Well, of course, that last is questioned by some cosmologists.)
Forty-five years before 9/11, Updike took a walk in my other great post-work enthusiasm of , Central Park: "On the afternoon of the first day of spring, when the gutters were still heaped high with Monday's snow but the sky itself was swept clean, we put on our galoshes and walked up the sunny side of Fifth Avenue to Central Park." He then chronicles what he sees there, ending thus,
"Two pigeons feeding each other.
"Two showgirls, whose faces had not yet thawed the frost of their makeup, treading indignantly through the slush.
"A plump old man saying 'chick, chick' and feeding peanuts to squirrels.
"Many solitary men throwing snowballs at tree trunks.
"Many birds calling to each other about how little the Ramble has changed.
"One red mitten lying lost under a poplar tree.
"An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore."
A great omnivorous voice.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Quick Hits
1. At the Met Saturday night, the most moving scene I've yet witnessed in opera. Orfeo ed Euridice, a black set, its front obscuring the staircase as Orfeo leads Euridice up from the underworld, the stage nearly dark but for the spotlight on the couple as Euridice slows their ascent to beg Orfeo to look at her. She cannot understand his distance and he, because of his promise to Amor, cannot tell her why he will not look. Stephanie Blythe, all in black for her pants role, her physical size conveying Orfeo's stymied power, sings Euridice to climb. She, Danielle de Niese, the perfect complement all in white, sings confused, lost and in love. In the duet aria, Blythe breaks Euridice's heart by not looking, breaks Orfeo's heart by not looking, and -- unable to endure the pain -- breaks the audience's heart when he looks and Euridice dies again. If de Niese did not sing so well, Blythe's tragic mezzo glory would not have been nearly so powerful. But she did, and I just wish my mind had been a DVD to etch it all for the rest of my life, replayable at any moment.
2. It's NYC on a Sunday morning, warming up after frigid days, it's Central Park West, I'm standing at a CP entrance, counting visitors with a Conservancy-provided clicker. A clanging fills the air -- it sounds like a bargain basement church bell, or an all-clear after an office fire drill. Two minutes later it sounds again, another two minutes, again. I have no idea, until walking down to the next entrance for the next count, I pass a 50s GMC pickup, customized with a cab on the truckbed and "since 1941", the sign on the side of the truck informs me, a cutlery sharpener is calling to potential customers. I see the whetstone behind the cab's windows. I see two men inside, one calling to a coop doorman, obviously acquaintances from his rounds. Multi-million dollar coops and a peddler, and since it's "since 1941" presumably a successful one, side by side. I can't even remember the last time I saw a knife sharpener plying his trade, probably my small Peace Corps town nearly 40 years ago.
2. It's NYC on a Sunday morning, warming up after frigid days, it's Central Park West, I'm standing at a CP entrance, counting visitors with a Conservancy-provided clicker. A clanging fills the air -- it sounds like a bargain basement church bell, or an all-clear after an office fire drill. Two minutes later it sounds again, another two minutes, again. I have no idea, until walking down to the next entrance for the next count, I pass a 50s GMC pickup, customized with a cab on the truckbed and "since 1941", the sign on the side of the truck informs me, a cutlery sharpener is calling to potential customers. I see the whetstone behind the cab's windows. I see two men inside, one calling to a coop doorman, obviously acquaintances from his rounds. Multi-million dollar coops and a peddler, and since it's "since 1941" presumably a successful one, side by side. I can't even remember the last time I saw a knife sharpener plying his trade, probably my small Peace Corps town nearly 40 years ago.
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