Never Too Much Whitman

"All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery, nor resist
it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the
surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
What is less or more than a touch?

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul."

Brick & Metal

Fairly Cliched Moody Shot W. Watertower

Gorilla?

So did they open up again today? Thought about heading over after work, but didn't have the heart. Thought of over-solicitous, chatty staff & muted music. Thought of the overbearing sounding managers/owners/whatever. Am in no hurry.

Adorn

More Trash

Spring Eating & Planting

Got to U.Square earlier yesterday. Bought rhubarb, asparagus, honey, eggs (chicken & pheasant), meat to make broth, spinach, radishes, & baby romaine. Also got various things for the garden, & have planted fennel, rhubarb, pea plants (a smaller variety, good for containers), basil, lettuces, sweet peas for the trellis, & rhubarb (because frankly, it's such a rip buying it, now it's achieved some sort of weird cachet). I had a bunch of herbs already, & will plant tomatoes in another couple of weeks. Today I was digging in compost, & generally mucking about. But I'm a slapdash & generally ignorant gardener, so am amazed when anything manages to survive.

Perfect brunch: turkey eggs fried in olive oil, with wholemeal bread & butter
rhubarb compote, with vanilla ice cream, & a drizzle of maple syrup

Last mention of rhubarb:
Being British, I grew up eating a lot of this. You develop a sort of love-hate relationship with this ubiquitous vegetable-fruit, and many people find it fairly disgusting. It needs to be correctly sweetened - enough to take away its tartness, but not so much that its weird, acidic rhubarby qualities are drowned out. It's delicious with strawberries, but very decent by itself in a crumble, or served plain, with cream/yogurt/ice cream whatever. Not my favourite of the less commonly served American fruits (OK vegetables), but it will be a while before BLACKCURRANTS swing around. Now there's something I need to try growing ...

Icies

What's more cheering than an icie cart?

Yablokoff

Fourth & Ninth

Is Your Bathtub Happy?

Hard to make out, & mixed in with a travel agent sign.

Stout, Pleasing Sign

Spring Morning

Who needs a weekend getaway when you've got Lowe's parking lot?

Shopping List etc.

For the last few Saturdays I've been getting over to the Union Square market later than I'd like. Usually I try to be there by nine, but I've been sleeping in a bit, & as a result, arrive there around ten to CROWDS (especially now that spring is here) & certain produce already sold out. I'd wanted to get rhubarb, to make a few batches of compote, but it was all sold out by the time I rolled in. I am resolving to do better. When I get up earlier, I really enjoy getting a start on the weekend. Anyway, I did pick up a few things: wild turkey eggs, cheese,venison sausage, mussels, spinach, spring onions (scallions), yogurt, & potatoes. Made moules frites tonight. Now that the growing season is taking off, I'll try & get to a greenmarket on a weekday too, though food co-op membership (bleh) makes that less of an imperative. Oh that Co-op. During my work shift this week, I conversed with a member of the Co-op Fun Committee. What a misnomer that one sounds to be ... dreary folk concerts & bridge nights ...
Today I took a look at Four & Twenty Blackbirds, the new bakery on 3rd Avenue & 8th Street. They've really done a great job on presentation. The place has a traditional looking storefront, in plain black & white, & a lovely bright space inside - very open & spare, with big wooden tables. The pies look great & are more imaginative than the run of the mill bakery fare. No prices posted though, which is always a bit ominous. I'm a terrible baker of cakes, but am pretty handy with pies. It would be nice to have a good bakery in the neighborhood though. I really don't like Ladybird (too cloying) & Sweet Melissa's & Almondine also disappoint. Sweet, bland, undistinguished. Really Park Slope bakeries are quite crappy in quality & not places one actually wants to sit in. Wish we had Cafe Pedlar or Bluebird. Even Bluebird's tiniest offering - thin cornmeal currant cookies - are superb. Four & Twenty looks promising anyway. I guess I'll have to order a pie & offer a verdict.

Gowanus Mirror

Beer for Brkfst

Luigi's

Luigi's Pizzeria. Fifth Avenue, between 20th & 21st Street. This place has quite a reputation, but I only went there for the first time last night. I will be back. More later, with picture. Suffice it to say, this place is exactly what you want in a pizzeria. I would change Nothing At All. Raced home with pie in mood of elation.

Bryant Park

Last week Roosevelt Island, this week Bryant Park. This is an absurd habit to get into, but it gives the morning subway ride a burst of energy. Instead of falling asleep over the crossword, there's a jolt of energy & light mid-journey. Bryant Park is great around 7:30 am. Green & fresh, the park is almost your own territory, with just a gentle stream of low-key commuters passing through, and a handful of dawdlers at park tables, enjoying that brief moment of liberty before routine finds them out.

Red Hook House

I wouldn't mind this one.

Coney Island Monuments

There's something about this place, a combination of its name & its modest appearance, & perhaps the woman waiting outside it, that almost breaks my heart. I wish I'd taken a better photograph, but I'm grateful that I got it at all.

Quentin Rd.

I took many photographs this weekend, most of them shots of faded storefronts, memorial chapels, & schnitzel emporia. What melancholy treasures. I usually post photographs the same day I take them, or at least within a day or so of taking them, but the Coney Island Ave./Kings Highway ones may keep showing up for a while. Not the best quality, but good enough to keep. Anyway, this one, of a store on Quentin Road, is decidely more perky & colorful than the rest.

Shatnes Laboratory

Gorilla Continued

Actually the workers didn't go on strike but quit. The place is still closed today (went by this afternoon with faint hope in my heart). A NY Times Diner's Journal article is posted up on the window. There's plenty of online chatter about this story, but nothing of substance. The Times article did, however, bring to my attention the existence of sprudge.com, "the internet's only coffee website". Faintly amusing. Anyway, I'm more than a little depressed by the Gorilla story. It's the only decent coffee place in that end of the Slope (not my end, at least) & the staff? Just fine.

Gorilla Strike

So the staff at Gorilla have been on strike for a couple of days, apparently out of dissatisfaction w. management. I'm keen to find out the latest, & hoping my favorite barista is surviving the crisis. Some people find the workers there rather too indifferent to their customers, but I've never found this a problem. Their mild hauteur & the volume of the music played there(good stuff) manages to keep away the stroller crowd quite nicely.

Across 110th Street

Heard this Bobby Womack song on the radio yesterday. Knew about the song, but not the original 1972 film of the same name, with Anthony Quinn & Yaphet Kotto. Kotto might be best known for his role in Homicide:Life on the Streets, one of my all time favourite shows. The whole movie can be seen on youtube, & there's some great footage of the city. This is a remix of the opening credits soundtrack. A good sound, with classic 70s orchestration.

Coney Island Avenue Twice in One Weekend

Pizza & Caviar

Malcolm McLaren

Plenty of obituaries of, and tributes to Malcolm McLaren in the press. At the Guardian, an interesting selection of video clips, including, of course, The Sex Pistols, & this entertaining (vogueing pre-Madonna)number of McLaren's from 1989:

Let Your Wisdom Ignite

Working on the Tracks

R.I. again

From Roosevelt Island, 7:30 A.M.

Why not get off the train mid journey?

The Girl Who Played With Fire

This is compulsive reading. Larsson has an intricate plot going here, and a huge cast of characters to work with. This is not a short book (650 pages or so), but you'll tear through it in two or three days. Scandinavian angst, & the Swedish criminal underworld, with a measure of twisted Highsmith thrown in.

May 6th!

And they're off...

Lit. & Phil.

I came across this 1978 Iris Murdoch/Brian Magee interview a couple of days ago. I like it for a number of reasons. The brisk opening music is ripe for satire, & Brian Magee seems to be exactly the kind of media intellectual Stephen Fry liked to spoof in A Bit of Fry & Laurie: accent, intonation, repetitions, hand gestures, it's all deliciously there. And what about Iris Murdoch - gruff voiced, and glowering, with the beautifully plummy "Yus, yus," as she agrees with Magee? What a surprise when she smiles! From this vantage point, it's funny, and endearing, but the conversation is also a genuinely interesting one, and the two are allowed plenty of airtime. It's a timepiece, and reminds me of what a lifeline television was to a teenager marooned in a dull provincial town, with little access to adequate libraries or bookshops. Even though there was plenty of entertaining dross to watch (and watch I did!) television in the 70's still had a mandate to Educate the Layman and Propagate Culture. There were plenty of good quality plays (earnest social realism, the pioneering drama of Dennis Potter), & plenty of talking head discussions & documentaries. I lapped this kind of stuff up.

South Slope

Review

In this month's Atlantic Benjamin Schwarz considers David Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem, and Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, works I've mentioned earlier on this blog.

"Of Time and the City is frequently described as “nostalgic,” and while that word fits the filmmaker’s yearning for an irrecoverable past, it doesn’t convey his profound ambivalence toward that past, his appreciation that “we love the place we hate, then we hate the place we love. We leave the place we love, then spend a lifetime trying to regain it.” In this way, Davies shares Kynaston’s insight, unsettling to both progressives and reactionaries, that, as I pointed out in reviewing Austerity Britain, the past was a better place for being a worse place: that the better grew out of the worse, the worse out of the better."

Red Paint

Crosby

Down by Valentino Pier