Listics

From Madame Levy…

Roast
saddle of hare with port-glazed endive, green peppercorns and tarte fine of

celeriac

threw her
well-manicured hands up in the air last week and declared that today’s brainy
and powerful women can’t get a man

 

men, he
explained, prefer women who are malleable and awed

‘It took
only a few decades to create a brazen new world where the highest ideal is to
acknowlege your inner slut.’

From Halley Suitt…

This was a lovely place where I had a lovely meal.  I won’t even tell you what was great on the menu, since EVERYTHING was. 

I had rabbit … which I LOVE!

… in each other’s cross hairs?

Whose work makes me despair of measuring up.  Thanx for Chapter Ten and I hope you don’t pull it.

And thanx to RB, botanist in his own write, for pointing it out first to me today, although I certainly would have been there sooner or later, probably sooner

Ray pours heart and spirit into his poetry.  And he’s a thoughtful craftsman for all that.  I’m glad to see his creativity rewarded. 

A round of applause, and another round of whatever he’s drinking for Ray Sweatman!

Bruce said that it ain’t easy to create art.  Egon Schiele proves it.  The Neue Galerie is the most pretentious place that ever let me in the door.  It’s little adjunct lunchroom, "Cafe Sabarsky," also gets points for pretention.  I’ve searched the reviews and I can’t find a local who has anything negative to say about Sabarsky, so take this for what it’s worth….  I don’t think two wieners should cost ten dollars, even if served in a tomato sauce in which a week old potroast has been gently decomposing.  An avocado, crab, and tomato salad should have more than three neatly cut halves of cherry tomatoes, the avocado should be ripe, and if one is paying sixteen dollars, one might expect more than two tablespoons of crabmeat.  A $3.50 coke might reasonably be more and different from an eight ounce bottle, chilled, served with a little glass with the legend "1/4 liter" etched into the lip.   But heck, we’re on vacation, tourists in this large sophisticated city, so who are we to point out shortcomings?  As for portion size, if we ate smaller portions we wouldn’t be such fatties.  Still, there was a vendor on the sidewalk outside the Cafe Sabarsky who had wieners for sale at two dollars each, softdrinks at a fraction the price, and a Central Park atmosphere that was just as special as the Cafe Sabarsky room in the large house on the corner of Fifth and 86th that houses Neue Galerie.

"Less than Klimt."  Sounds like a ska band, and it’s all I could think of as I looked at Schiele’s drawings.  Art deco and Wiener Werkstätte  graphics usually delight me.  But viewing the Schiele exhibit today all I could see was his imitative side.  He had his chops, no doubt.  Trained with the best of them.  Mark Woods posts a beautiful Schiele, "Autumn Tree in Movement," today.  But as we wandered through the Neue Galerie, we were treated to dark depressing and derivative work, work that was less austere and beautiful than self absorbed and crippled.  Schiele had his cubist moments, ripping off Picasso and the boys, but his favorite source of inspiration was his Wiener Werkstätte mentor, Gustav Klimt.  A lot of Klimt’s work is highly erotic.  Schiele’s attempts to emulate that are self absorbed and boring.  He was an artist entirely of his period, he died young in the 1918 flu epidemic, and I think he never found his own voice, his own idiom.  By the twenties or the thirties his work might have flowered, bloomed, borne fruit.   Alas he died before he had a chance to do his best work.

Didn’t help that we followed the Schiele exhibit with a visit to the Guggenheim, then a visit to the Van Gogh drawings at the Met.

Who would have thought there were so many people heavy into hyphenation?  The Penguin illustrated edition of Strunk and White’s "Elements of Style" featuring artwork by Maira Kalman with accompanying song cycle by Nico Mulhy was unveiled tonight in the New York Public Library.

At a rehearsal last week, the tenor Matt Hensrud stood on the
elevated catwalk of the library’s reading room and sang mellifluously
of punctuation and orthography. "Do not use a hyphen between words that
can better be written as one word: ‘water-fowl, waterfowl,’ " he
intoned, his voice echoing in the churchlike acoustics. He was joined
by the soprano Abby Fischer for some tenderly turned philology: "The
steady evolution of the language seems to favor union: two words
eventually become one."

The word "eventually" in this line
soared with a long, attractive melisma of the sort Mr. Muhly grew to
love during his years singing in a boys’ choir in Providence, R.I. His
devotion to the Anglican choral tradition is everywhere apparent in
these settings, but so is his fondness for American Minimalism, as
churning viola figures cushion many of the passages, often bringing a
somber, plaintive tone to the music.

Who knew that tickets were required?  Beth and I were numbers nine and ten in the standby line, but alas, we got not in… can you say that?  At least one ticketed blogger, Ms. Hodder, was there however, so hopefully there will be a report on what must have been a lovely evening in a lovely venue, the Rose reading room…  all those long tables with lamps and heavy chairs, high ceilings, books lining the walls.

Tonight at the New York Public Library…. the Elements of Style Song Cycle.  I wonder if we’ll be able to get in?  I wonder what the scalpers will be getting for a ticket?  There must be thousands of people in the area who will NEED to attend this event.  We’re going early and I’m gonna blog it.

I’ll "use the active voice."

I’ll "be obscure clearly."

Jeepers, they sure don’t have this kind of thing out in the country.

I know what I’m doing to celebrate John Peel Day.  How about you?

How often do you hear a cut by an artist you never heard before and feel compelled to buy the CD?  Answer for me is like WAYYY seldom.  But, Harry offered this by Kelly Hagan, and I went to the CDBaby site (link to which Harry thoughtfully provided) and I heard the teasers from her CD, "Tell the truth and run…"  and, well… that’s where the story got interesting for me.

I placed an order for the CD and was delighted to receive the following email later in the same day.  Do these people get it, or what?

Frank -

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Shipping Address
================
Frank Paynter
[order details omitted…-fp-…]

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, October 10th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’.  We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369  email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com http://cdbaby.com