THE GIRLS

My original trip to New York was to cat sit.  It started out with a different cat, who unfortunately died, but these two took up residence.  

Despina is the black and white one, in the back in this picture.  She pretends to be the sweet one, but she's got her own dark side.

Julia is the one in front.  She is the troublemaker who wants to be sure you are up in the morning, which she accomplishes by making lots of noise, and if that doesn't work, she starts knocking your stuff off whatever place you put it the night before.  You only have to hear your watch or glasses hit the floor to know you're going to have to get up.

Yes, we are sitting on the table.  Where's the food?

Oh, YOU wanted to use the iPad?

I don't think so. 

I have powers and I will use them. 

It's my intention to learn to play the viol.  I've already got the catgut.  

I'm learning the Scarlatti Cat Fugue.  

VIGNETTES

F

I love to buy glasses when I come to NY.  Couldn't really justify it this time, but I love looking.  This window could be my logo.  

Of course you should be able to have someone deliver warm cookies to your home until 3 a.m.  

What's more NY than the subway?

Political statements abound

Can't decide on a color?  Just have the whole thing chromed. Look at me! Look at me!  LOOK AT MEEEE!!!

Looks nice with the Empire State Building sticking out of his head. 

Decorating with plastic bags

Oh, yes, I live in this cool place in NY. 

Lazer Glass at American Craftsman in NYC. 

NO COMMENT. 

How cool is it to see someone you know on a poster on Broadway in the Big Apple?   Laura Rubinstein-Salzedo. 

In front of a coffee shop.   What dog ripped the one on the left out of the wall.  Yikes!

HAPPY WANDERERS

It's nice to have a day in New York which is not scheduled. I think that is one of the nicest things about having someone to stay with. You can stay long enough to have a few relaxing days.

Martha has a strange collection of phones and intercoms and various devices in the house, all of which seem to be ending their natural lives. Since we have been here we have replaced a corded phone, the landline, and then we have installed another cordless phone and answering machine with three handsets.

Martha and I spent several hours today learning to program the new cordless phone, but I think we finally both got the hang of how the menus work.

John and I went out on a sort of random walk this afternoon, had lunch at a very cute place called Hampton Chutney, which has really interesting sandwiches and the only coffee they serve tastes a lot like pumpkin spice latte.  As we were walking along Columbus, we saw these signs in a storefront soon to be a bookstore.  

Then we walked up to the New York Historical Society.  

This small museum currently has a wonderful new, short-time exhibit called Chinese in America.

It has a lot information about the lives of immigrant Chinese. I really wish this exhibit could travel to California because a lot of the stuff displayed is from California and that was the main point of entry for Chinese into the United States.

After we came home we were planning to have a festive dinner out tonight, but Martha didn't feel up to it, so we had a festive dinner in, delivered by Ozen Thai restaurant.  

That's our big day.  

Tomorrow I hope to go to the Craft Fait at Lincoln center because I'm interested in seeing how many vendors aren't there from last week, and how many new ones show up.  

COMMUNISTS, CUBANS, AND CONCERTS

 The Folk Art museum in Manhattan is about the size of a small Rite Aid. It has a big collection, but they can seldom show very much of it. They had 125 of their best pieces out last month and that is now going on a traveling show, which I hope will come to California. Today they were exhibiting two outsider --primitive, naïve -- whatever you want to call them, artists, Ralph Fassanelli and William van Genk.  Both were social activists, concerned about common people, and like many people in that time period embraced, and later let go of, communism.

Fasinelli's paintings look a lot like Grandma Moses. 

There are many details put together in kind of flat ways.  He was very political, however and his work has a great deal of printing, writing, and drawings about current events. There's one entire painting about the Nixon second administration. There's another about the Rosenbergs. And others that are somewhat more generic and multinational. All of them are very interesting and made you want to look at them for a very long time.  

The others, by van Genk, are about the same subjects, because they were both interested in politics of the day and they lived more or less the same time.  Van Genk, however was most likely schizophrenic. His work is all over the place.  Lots of tiny tiny details.

Lots of printing, lots of writing.  His work was so dense that you would have had to spend an hour just to get through one piece. And they were quite large. 

He was also very attracted to travel so he frequently drew freehand maps of the places he was, and he made lots of collages. When you look closely at the collages you saw that things you thought were cut out of a magazine or something were actually hand drawn or painted, then cut out and pasted onto the canvas. He also loved trolley cars.  So he had made models of various trolley cars out of things like cereal boxes cut up in exact size pieces. It was very fascinating.

We finally got our meal at Cafe con Leche, our favorite Cuban restaurant.  We got there a little on the late side for lunch, meaning the sweet plantains were kind of overcooked and on the greasy side.  Not that we didn't eat them.  

I finally made it to the Apple Store to find out what happened to my photostream.

 Basically, photostream is only supposed to last for about 30 days, but on older devices it hangs around on the device until there's an upgrade or you get a new device.  

I think I may be able to retrieve it from the iPad that never finished the upgrade.  

We went to a concert tonight of a group called Repast.  Martha's gamba teacher was playing in it, so we got comp tickets.  It was a lovely concert at Baruch college.  They had a wonderful soprano, Laura Heimes, who sang parts of a Bach and a Handel cantata.  

Getting there was a comedy or errors.  John and I wanted to leave at 6:45 for the 8 pm concert because we often have to wait for both the crosstown bus and the 6 train.  Martha insisted that leaving the apt at 7 would be early enough.  Well, we waited 10 minutes for the crosstown bus, another 10 for the 6 train, which is a local and takes forever.  Then, because we had gotten at the very front of the train so we could leave the train at the end of the station, and because the gate at the end of the station was closed when we got to that station, we had to walk all the way back, and come out on the street an extra two blocks from our destination.  Because Martha never comes out that entrance, she, who was the only person who knew where we were going, got turned around and couldn't figure out where we were.  

AND THEN, when we finally got to the college a mere five minutes after the concert started, they had the elevator under repair, and we had to wait for an usher to take us on a circuitous route through the sports department to finally arrive at the concert hall.  By the time we finally arrived, we had missed the entire first piece.  And, of course, there's always the pleasure of making your grand entrance late.  

However, I am proud to say that when the concert was over, John and I made up for our tardiness by being the first in line for the free wine and cheese.  

YOU TAKE THE LOW ROAD AND I'LL TAKE THE HIGH LINE

The High Line is an abandoned railroad that used to run north and south through Manhattan. In 2009, after years of work, it opened as an elevated park-walkway.

In the years it was abandoned, various weeds (volunteer native plants) grew up, and they are now cultivated, trimmed, and cared for by

volunteers,  which makes quite a lovely garden. Just like our traffic circle, LOL. It's about 20 blocks long, most of it in the midst of a huge construction area that will be part of a new subway line, and will include other features that will make everything in the area level with this former elevated line.  These are the subway cars sitting below the High Łine.

It's a nice walk, particularly on a nice day like today, with panoramic views of the Hudson and NJ across the river. 

Our second stop of the day was at Barbuto, a wonderful restaurant Verna introduced me to and which is located in an old garage in the West Village. We had the chef's signature dish, pollo al forno, which was as good as I remembered it.  We also had a cauliflower salad with very thin slices of cauliflower, (I thought they were sliced on a mandoline, but since there was no blood in the salad, maybe not) raisins, pistachios, and scallions. This is going to be a go-to winter salad for me. 

Our third stop was at a bakery for a giant, though not all that good, chocolate chunk cookie and coffee.  We should have had the macarons. 

 We followed that by going across the street to Murray's Cheeses where we bought some Brillat Savarin (triple cream Brie) and crackers for later tonight. We scarfed up 1/4 pound of cheese in about 5 minutes.  

I have a couple of little chores to do while I'm here-- get a new watch battery, go to the Apple Store, because it's easier to do here than drive to the mall at home.  I think that may be my big excursion for tomorrow.  

Martha bought a new set of phones, which we will probably set up tomorrow.  

We are going to a concert by the Repast Baroque Ensemble tomorrow night.  They were supposed to practice here this morning, but didn't.  Jory Vinikour came over to practice the harpsichord this afternoon, and he will be coming again tomorrow as well, so we will once again be barred from the bedroom.  We were going to go to Jory's concert tomorrow night, but then we got comp tickets for Repast, so that sealed our choice.  

LUTES TO LOOT

We started out the day today by going to a concert of the Juilliard baroque group called  Juilliard 415.  I had hoped Laura Rubinstein-Salzedo might be playing in this group or in one of these groups, but she wasn't.  She's the only person I know at Julliard.   It was a nice concert, though some of the musicians were not as good as some of the musicians we here at Sac State.  Perhaps they are freshmen  at Juilliard.  Martha had planned to go with us but as it turned out she didn't feel up to it this morning after her trainer came, so John and I went by ourselves.  The concert was in a beautiful church called Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, which has wonderful mosaics in the front of the church.  The harpsichord they used for this concert wasn't very good. 

It was beautiful and sunny when we left, but by the time we came out of the concert it was very cloudy, and John said it was supposed to rain today. So we took the subway back to the apartment and got our umbrellas, thus guaranteeing that it would not rain for the rest of the day.

(It's 11:45 pm as I'm writing this, and it has just now started to rain.)

  I got a text from Lynda this morning asking me to go check out a store called American Craftsman and take some pictures. Tim has work in this store.

So after going home to pick up the umbrellas, which we never again used, we went to the American Craftsman store and I took a few pictures.  

This store has a lot of handcrafted work in it, and it is obvious that the owners really like art glass.  That is the major component of the merchandise in the store.

This building grows out of the facade of the old building that was here. 

Here's more of a close up.  I took these using the panorama function on the camera. 

After lunch at the Crown Deli which was kind of so-so, we walked past where they do the David Letterman show.

People were lining up to either get tickets or to get good seats because they already had tickets. We walked around the block for something, and when we came back there was a marching band out in front, playing, and by the time we walked around the band some cop was telling them they had to quit.

After that little excursion I went back to the Museum of Art and Design to go to the Loot show, and John stopped and bought some groceries and went back to the apartment.

The show was quite fabulous, with jewelry makers from all over the world. Much of the jewelry was enormous. However it was very hard to try to take any pictures because they had guards standing all around

It was quite exciting to walk in, because you saw a counter around the middle of the room, with the vendors standing inside, and all of them were skinny, stylish, black clothed good looking women.

 I think most of them were actually the artists, but some of them were museum employees who were filling in if the artists had to take a break or whatever. These two artists let me take their picture.

I made fish tacos for dinner tonight, but the sauce didn't turn out very well because I forgot that Martha just doesn't have some of the things you just expect to have at home, like lime juice, and her aide bought the tortillas but she got flour instead of corn, so the whole thing was just kind of weird. 

LAZY CALIFORNIAN'S DAY IN NEW YORK

A walk down Broadway looking for a blow dry. Everything closed. Bit the bullet and bought Martha a new dryer, which was cheaper than anyplace I could have had my hair done. It just looks awful because I can't get any curl with no heat. 

Back to apartment to take hair dryer home. Jory is there practicing harpsichord, so we listen for a bit from the living room, torture the cats a bit making them chase reflected lights 

Back to museum of Art and Design to see the Loot show which started today -- but today was grand opening for the big donors, not hoi polloi like ourselves. 

We spent the rest of the day exploring Central Park, which was fun and relaxing. 

Everybody's taking selfies.

She has a tool for taking selfies.  

On a park bench. 

Tonight we went to a wonderful concert by the Imani wind quintet at the church at the corner from Martha's apartment. They played Mendelssohn, Elliot Carter, Wayne Shorter, Stravinsky, and Simon Shaheen.  The picture I took of them didn't come out very well, but this one is from their website.  They are a good-looking group, too.  They've played together for 18 years.