Category Archives: Culture

November 16, 2013 · 10:09 pm

The Myths of Time

I love that building, said my friend John, a publisher with a reliably elegant sense of taste. It was designed by Louis Kahn. The Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Connecticut, is housed in a sleek shell of matte steel on Chapel Street, the bustling main drag of the town. It was the architect’s last major commission, completed after his death in 1974. It’s an interestingly modern container for the almost exclusively older works of art within, lovely canvases of fetching ladies, bewigged lords, and big-eyed colonial children with their colonial pets. Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue in Congreve’s Love for Love, completed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1771, is a good example.

You’ll also find lots of animals, horses and dogs mainly. My old friend Betsy, who lives nearby, told me she has spent serious time sunk in an overstuffed leather chair in the high-ceilinged gallery admiring the zebra painting. A rather famous zebra painting, made by George Stubbs in 1763, when a zebra would have seemed about as exotic to Europeans as a unicorn.

We couldn’t help but be stopped just inside the glass doors as we were coming in by a much more modern work. What is that? I said to Wendy, puzzling it out. A minotaur? A centaur?

No, she corrected me, a centaur is a man on top, horse on the bottom. This was a horse on top. I liked it a lot, it was so rough and raw, like something you’d see in a dream.

Turned out that Foal, sculpted of painted bronze, was one of seven works by the British artist Nicola Hicks which had been installed as a special exhibit in the Yale Center. The mythic is central to her work. As part of the show Hicks selected pieces from the museum’s collection to serve as counterpoints to her own. The British tradition of animal imagery intertwined with the contemporary creatures in a dynamic, charged way.

The painting chosen for the display that I found most affecting was William Barraud’s A Couple of Foxhounds with a Terrier, the Property of Lord Henry Bentinck. Hicks has said she recognizes Baraud’s profound understanding of how the “social structure” unites the animals depicted. It’s about the independent dogness of dogs, despite the humans that may believe they own them lock stock and kibble.

One sculpture reflected on Aesop’s fable about a donkey found in the forest wearing a lion’s skin, which ultimately results in the donkey being exposed as a fool.

Nicks’ Who was I Kidding, created of plaster and straw, shows the poor donkey with the skin thrown across its back. It bears some resemblance to another Stubbs canvas in the museum, A Lion Attacking a Horse. The horse in that conception feels not shame but blind fury.

Later, over tea, I noticed that Wendy had bought a postcard at the gift shop. She had out her small, purse-size sketchbook and a pencil.

Wendy’s a musician, an actress, an astute psychotherapist. She was drawing the donkey, tracing the gentle lines of its hanging, shamed head. She had taken the experience with her, as we do all myths that have power.

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Filed under Art, Culture, Dogs, Fashion, History, Jean Zimmerman

November 15, 2013 · 4:29 pm

Transcription Soup

A keyboard has no scent.

And yet manipulating the keys brings forth aromas, incredible sights, acoustical marvels. The sounds of conversation.

I promised Gil that I would do a fair amount of transcribing for him. He’s conducted many interviews as part of a book collaboration he’s involved in. None of this background is accessible without a keyboard to yield up the brilliant things that get said.

So I listen to the tape. I screw up my forehead and try to make out the words that are muddled – some of the interviews took place in a noisy restaurant. I shake my hands out, massage my fingers when they get sore.

And then I take a break. I make soup.

The ideal recipe, with a gigantic spoon, a spoon out of a Grimm story cottage.

Soup is the antidote, of course, for many ailments. But it’s also a good balance for tasks like transcribing, where you’re using your keyboard and your fingers and there’s a wee of drudgery.

I use a whole soup fowl if I have one, though disjointed pieces will do. Bring them to a simmer in your biggest pot and skim off the scum. Add carrots and celery. I use the last of the celery from my garden, which never stalked up but is fresh and good.

The piece de resistance: chicken feet I bought from a farmer.

Not pretty, these gams, but they really boost the broth’s flavor.

Turnips, parsnips, parsley, leeks. So simple. Salt, in the palm of my hand.

Julia Child says to bring the stock just to a “smile,” and to simmer for three hours or so.

In which time I will have tip-tapped each key hundreds of times, to deliver a three-hour back-and-forth conversation.

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November 13, 2013 · 9:04 pm

Forever Twenty-One

Icy New York City, hot colors, textures, tastes – drinking it all in with a 21-year-old, on break from scholarly endeavors, who needs a pair of boots.

Not those boots.

Who needs a cookie.

The crumbliest, crunchiest, richest cookie in Manhattan, from Levain bakery on West 74^th Street. Chocolate, a zillion calories. Would make a good lunch. Highly photogenic, too.

What she doesn’t need: forced bulbs from a fancy shop.

She creates blossoms of her own in her mind.

Needs no silly store slogans.

A suit of clothes suitable for a different girl.

And no other body than her own, please.

No plastic toys, either, no matter how quirky. These flap!

Life itself is a sweet, quirky game.

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November 12, 2013 · 11:57 pm

An Evening of Stand-Up Tragedy

The art of complaint never sounded so un-peevish. Almost noble, actually. We went to hear Tony Drazan perform his variety of standup, a part scripted, part improvised monologue, at Nuyorican Poets Café on East 3^rd Street. Known for its poetry slams, the institution has been there since buying the rundown building for $10,000 multiple decades ago. It can accommodate all kinds of talents, and Tony is one of them. No matter that it was the coldest night yet this fall – that wouldn’t hold back New Yorkers. A motorcycle roared past us down Avenue B, and a guy walked by with a surfboard perched on his shoulder. Comedy should be easy. Or would this be comedy? Time would tell.

We started out at a ramen joint around the corner, Minca, on East 5^th Street. A waitress named Kyoko in a Hello Kitty sweatshirt served us steaming bowls of pork broth with all the fixings.

What makes me happy in this world? A bowl of soup with charshu. Slow-roasted pork, to you. I am a hungry simpleton when confronted with ramen, and I also like hot plain tea.

Tony sat down for a pre-show cup and laid out some of his strategy for these stand-up routines. He performs once a month. It’s not his “real” job, he’s a screenwriter and film director with lots of credits. He’s a hockey dad, with a nine-year-old son, Leo.

He told us some of the things that had happened at past gigs.

“I used to stop and apologize and say I don’t know what I’m doing here. It would relax me.”

Around us, the young men have van dyke beards and deep black eyes, the girls have long black hair, and it looks as though everyone’s related. Above us on the wall, some intriguing artwork. We’re looked down upon by kings.

At Nuyorican Café, people started showing up. A cognitive scientist named Amol Sarba fixed a black contraption called a halo around Tony’s head. Its low-level electrical charge is supposed to boost brain function, and the process recently had a write up in The New York Times. Sarba told us he himself wasn’t convinced until he tried a video game he’d never played before after wearing the device and “absolutely crushed it.” Tony got interested when he heard that traffic controllers and jet jocks were trying out the device. “Don’t let this discourage you,” he offered to audience members as they settled themselves.

Bare bones, this was, ancient brick and a graphite-colored curtain, with a mike stand in the center of a faded oval rug. That was the space. Two dozen people trickled in, some all the way from L.A. Many of them knew the performer. It was intimate. You could almost forget Tony was wearing jumper cables.

He commenced. Talking about good intentions gone bad. He wandered. Circled around to the point. To another point. “This is about survivor envy,” he said. Not survivor guilt. A friend, a music composer, got sick with cancer, fell into a coma from November to March. Woke! Rapidly regained his strength. And as strange as it sounds, “I was envious that my friend had survived brain cancer.”

Sarba stepped up to remove the headgear. “I’m trying to be more game in my life,” Tony deadpanned. Lenny Bruce was brave, but Lenny Bruce never wore a rig like that on his head during a performance.

More meandering. Probing. Tony’s father, before he died, “had primary progressive aphasia – he couldn’t find the word. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s – he could always recognize me as his asshole eldest son up until the end.” Back to the recovered friend: “He woke up and started pulling out the tubes. He felt renewal in his life and that’s when I began to feel jealous. Somehow he was the better for it. He came out stronger than me.”

In the audience, there was a shift. I was thinking of a phenomenon from a number of years back called the Apology Line, open for business 24-7, which allowed callers to leave a message in which they detailed all they were sorry for. You could also call and listen to other peoples’ woes.

Tony spoke, a stand-up, sit-down tragedian, about having always believed that bad experiences shape you. He lost his mother when he was ten, he said, and that loss always gave him the sense that “any special achievement I had was because I had survived her death, was honoring her death.” He picked up women by confessing his tragedy.

“Does this make any sense?” he asked us. The anecdotes twined around, curled, unfurled, from Long Island to Beverly Hills to Manhattan. Dark. Funny. To now, when he admitted to feeling paralysis and sadness even as he was performing. He stood, moved the chairs around from place to place, sat in one, sat in another one. He picked up an enormous piece of paper with scribbled notes, folded and refolded it and consulted it now and then – part performance, part origami. Told us about a Barney’s Warehouse Sale in Santa Monica where he had his first of many panic attacks. The thread… it was so loose, so elastic, but might it not break? The audience roots for the performer to tell his story as he needs to tell it.

Looking for answers, he visited a sikh internist, a cardio guy, a homeopath, an autoimmune specialist. Most recently came Tai Chi, the horse stance, internal energy training. More loss. More venting. Not everyone can make a complaint emerge this fresh. Make it not just a run of the mill kvetch. And, at the end, something new:

“We’re all vulnerable. It occurred to me that my old way of being was misplaced. I didn’t need to be a champion for any of it.”

Silence. In the end there was only the sound the heat made in the metal ducts.

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November 11, 2013 · 4:42 pm

The Natural Loveliness of Brahms

“It’s relaxing but it’s also uplifting,” I heard a woman say to her companion after the music ended.

I’d just emerged from a chamber performance at the Brooklyn Public Library, that Art Deco masterpiece on Grand Army Plaza which dates back to 1941.

The sense I think I shared with the mass of humanity swirling around me in the lobby was that we felt a whole lot better coming out of the concert than we had going in. Music as magical curative.

Vista Lirica is a New York-based chamber ensemble with an environmental focus, which means they play fantastic compositions by nineteenth-century Romantic composers in which nature’s power and emotionality take center stage. Mankind is a small though crucial part of the spectacle of the whole natural universe.

I knew Beth Levin, the pianist, but this was the first time I’d seen her perform with her cohort in Vista Lirica – Frank Foerster (viola), Eric Grossman (violin/viola), Neil Rynston (clarinet) and Lawrence Zoernig (cello).

Odd things happened on the way to hear this beautiful music. The Brooklyn Bridge, under repair for at last another year to the tune of five hundred million dollars, wore a diaper to protect motorists from tools and other falling debris. You’d think it was a baby, but it was born in 1883.

Then, as the concert started at the library, there was a commotion in the back of the house. “Tell them to stop playing!” someone shouted. No one knew what to do. It was midway through Mozart’s Trio in E flat major. Turned out later there was a group of developmentally disabled adults in the audience. The musicians continued playing. All was well.

And then there was the piano tuner. A man was seated just down the way from me in the front row, with a pink bush of a beard and gnarly bare feet.

One side of his baggy tee read “Quiet Please.” The reverse: “Piano Tuning in Process.” He looked as if he wasn’t unfamiliar with a cardboard box for a domicile. He caused some alarm at intermission by jumping up on stage, removing the top of the instrument to get at the action and attacking the job with a furious intensity, all the while muttering under his breath.

The concert spanned four centuries. There was the Mozart trio. A Bernstein sonata. “La Danza Implacable” by Jorge Lopez Marin. And lastly, what I found irresistable, Johannes Brahms’ Quartet in g-minor for piano, violin, viola and cello. Clara Schumann was the pianist for the very first performance of the piece, back in 1861.

Musicians play music with their faces. Beth played vigorously, rapturously, looking somewhat stricken for most of the Brahms. The violinist appeared to be grappling with the secrets of the universe. The cello player was soulful, the viola player looked as if he had finally accepted his fate.

I might have been overinterpreting, remembering my cello fail in middle school, when I mounted the stage to find I had absolutely no idea what notes to play.

Or maybe I myself felt stricken by the romanticism of the Brahms. Owing to the natural bent of Vista Lirica, I felt myself muse on environmental themes as they played. Storms. Falling snow. Green hillsides.

What was that movie about the chamber ensemble? My mind drifted. A Late Quartet. The one with Catherine Keenan, Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman. I am fascinated by the way musicians signal each other with a slight tip of the chin or significant glance when they are ready to go into the next bit. Movement? Perhaps that’s the word for it. Anyway, I wish I could communicate so deftly.

The Brahms Andante con moto in particular held me in its sway.

Shadows, spider webs, a rainbow.

Later, I asked Beth about the Andante, what makes it so special. “Well, the Andante is usually moving,” she said, “often minor key. The composer goes so deep. But in this one the middle section gets jubilant, like a dance.”

Still attired in the fuschia top she wore on stage, the perfect garment for a Romantic pianist, Beth was surprisingly shy-seeming after her thunderous stage presence. She’s somewhat reserved, she told me, both before and after she performs. Was it hard to go on playing after that noisy interruption today? “Once I played and hailstorms came down on the roof – it was Schumann! Keep playing, I always heard, so I did.” And what about that colorful piano tuner? “Oh, that’s Ben,” she said, adding that she’d been startled when she first met him and he tossed his sandals aside before getting down to business. “When Ben shows up at a concert,” she told me, “I know he’s going to want to tune my piano.”

A concert soloist when she is not with the chamber group, Beth spent two weeks recently in Germany – two recitals and sightseeing. She payed homage to Bach at his grave in Leipzig.

And the music that was mesmerizing me with its spider webs and rainbows, how did that happen, I wondered. Approaching the Brahms, she said, she and the other performers “talked about nature, not in rehearsals but afterward, when we were sitting around.” She smiled. “Brahms was probably walking through the forest half the time when he was writing.”

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November 9, 2013 · 5:20 pm

Squeezing the Juice From the Season

There is nothing like a Saturday morning in November to make you stand up straight and take clear-eyed notice of the world. Of the crisp air and fresh colors, the sweetly rotten smell of leaves being pulverized underfoot.

Both Gil and I could easily stay home and work all day, bent over our books, leaning into our computer screens. But we were drawn out into the Saturday sunshine. drive, he sd, as poet Robert Creeley wrote.

We remarked as we spun along the little roads on every jolt of red.

Some unexpected graffiti on the side of a concrete shed oddly did the opposite of marring the rural scene. It underscored fall’s beauty with its blast of a message.

Down the road from the Cabin we passed an arch of shrubbery above a stone gate that opens into a mysterious vacant pasture. I never get tired of looking at it.

And I never get tired of visiting Thompson’s Cider Mill, where Geoff Thompson combines up to twenty varieties of fresh apples into a juice that is pure nectar. He makes his cider every weekend, and every weekend it is a different brew.

When you buy apples at Thompson’s, you get to see each one’s heritage marked above the bin. The history of apples is vast and rich, and here you can taste history–when you bite into an heirloom Newtown Pippin, say, first grown from a chance seedling in the mid-18th century.

Out of the wealth of choices we’ve taken most of all to the Jonathans, which are grown right in this orchard and are sweet and tart, firm and compact.

If you come on a Saturday morning you can watch the thoroughly up-to-date press do its business, mashing the fruit into not only a liquid but also a paste that will later be tossed to the pigs at a local organic farm. Keats talked in Ode to Autumn about how by a cider-press, with patient look,/Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours. This is where those oozings happen. Geoff handed around small plastic cups to catch some of the new cider as it ran out of the press.

We sipped. “Perfect blend,” said Geoff. I agreed. “Wish I could figure out how to do that every time,” he said with pleasant self deprecation. This mill does make the best cider in the land, and that’s not opinion but fact. They also have on hand my namesake fruit.

Next stop, the Hastings Farmer’s Market, overlooking the Hudson River. A produce stand at the end of the season has its own distinctive merits. No sweet, fuzzy peaches, perhaps, but turban squashes and sugar pumpkins and the dark leafy kale your doctor wants you to eat more of. The singer Milton was performing his song In the City when we arrived.

I like the song. It does capture the effervescence of New York. Though it seemed less relevant today with the trees aflame in the cool, cool, quiet air.

The woman who worked the booth for Cowberry Crossing was off on a coffee run, so Reese and I together worked out the numbers for a pair of pork chops and a bag of chicken feet. Inaccurately, it turned out when mom returned.

He was a great little salesman anyway. I am devoted to using chicken feet to make stock – you need a soup foul first, then throw in the feet in addition – and I used to have a chicken farm down the road where I could buy them in five-pound freezer bags. I’ve gotten a little squeamish about how the toes resemble an old lady monster’s, with manicure-worthy nails. But they make such a velvety broth, it’s worth the psychic discomfort.

Over at Do Re Me Farms, they still had some green beans, zucchini and cranberry beans.

It was wicked cold behind the cash register, and everyone was shivering.

Mushrooms, a variety, were my choice. To add to a risotto or simply.saute and devour.

There was less produce than usual, more maple syrup, cider, pickles. Here they make a big thing out of offering pickles on sticks to children, like sour lollipops.

Painted Goat Farm is an artisan cheese producer located upstate in Garrattsville (now that is a true New York name). They offer goat cheese both fresh and aged, along with goat meat and what they call goat confections. They were out of the aged and I didn’t care for any goat confections, so I took home the fresh with garlic and chives.

The farm’s herd now stands at 85 – the females are “drying up” at the moment, I was told, and will give birth in February, when the babies will drive the count up to over 100. I’d like to pay them a visit then. If I had any kind of farm it’d be a goat farm. I love goats, both how satanic their eyes look, and their pure and total determination.

Natasha and Pierre on Broadway

Well, yes, only in New York, sure. An electro-pop opera in a night club. In a tent. On a parking lot. In Times Square.

On line outside Kazino supper club, on a Wednesday night, we wait in the cold.

There are many sweet and stylish young couples.

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 takes place two centuries before us. A young theatrical wizard named Dave Malloy concocted the musical production. Will there be relevance in the enterprise?

A handsome man in a Tolstoy tee shirt waits for admission.

The company’s names appear on sheet metal inside the entryway. You know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

Inside, cocktail tables. Grey Goose available at $240 the bottle. Hot pierogies materialize, and short glasses of pink borscht that look like votive candles.

A big babe of a man called Royce strides around acting the hostess. Cossack hat, fur slouched over the shoulders, in a leopard skirt. Welcoming everyone.

There are voluptuous wine-colored curtains all around, hung with “vintage” paintings, including one of Napolean.

The actors prance onto the floor, belting it out. Suddenly, the show has begun.

There’s a leading lady straight out of Julliard, who really knows how to warble.

Tolstoy would say the actresses are “nude” because they have bare shoulders. They range the room along with the dashing young actors; the scene changes from the opera to a drawing room to a gypsy lair. Lovers Natasha and Andre are parted when he goes off to war, Natasha is seduced by Anatole, then finally forgiven by Pierre. A simple plot delivered with much gnashing of teeth, tears and sexy dancing. The audience is given egg-shaped shakers to accompany the musicians.

The finale has Pierre singing a haunting tune to the Great Comet of 1812, represented by one of the night club’s old-fashioned chandeliers. It’s goose-bump-making, breathtaking.

Did I mention the play’s based on War and Peace?

Only in New York. And Moscow.

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November 5, 2013 · 3:12 pm

Sullivan Street Curative

I woke with a touch of labyrinthitis.There are scientific explanations for this condition, all pertaining to the inner ear and “unilateral vestibular dysfunction.” But what it amounts to, what you feel, is dizziness. Vertigo in the extreme. I sat on my living room couch and watched the room whirl around me like a merry-go-round. Not fun.

When the show had subsided and after I conked out for a while, it was time for lunch. I steeled myself to go downstairs to the kitchen. An omelette. I gripped the counter. I was doing it. And the room stood relatively still.

There is not much in the way of medicine to treat labyrinthitis. You can take the pills more often prescribed for seasickness. I don’t have those in the house. I ate my food and watched the walls throb.

What I did have was bread from Sullivan Street Bakery. We go to the establishment on 47^th Street (not, improbably, Sullivan Street) in Hell’s Kitchen to stock up on baked goods whenever we’re in Manhattan. We often bring back what’s called a filone, which the bakery describes thus:

Large, tube-shaped loaf, baked dark to very dark, generously coated with wheat bran; open, irregular crumb structure and waxy-looking webbing. Mature fermentation; because of the unique baking method, flavor is nutty and sour with a slightly bitter aftertaste.

The bakery is famous for founder Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread, which you can attempt to make at home if you’re not near enough to do a drive-by like we do.

The bread is superior to any other – chewy, crusty, earthy, flavorful. I always think it’s the kind I’d want in my larder if the Barbarians were at the door. Why would we need bread at that time? For nourishment!

I buttered a slice of toasted filone and took bites in between spearing garlicky mushrooms. The room threatened to spin. But it hove to a stop when I swallowed.

Maybe I’ll sit very still and fill my mouth with bread all day.

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November 3, 2013 · 3:23 pm

Chocolate Poems

“Where are the reptiles?” the adolescent boy asked the guard at the door of the convention center.

“The what?”

Both heads swivelled to look inside at the crowded arena.

“The reptiles – are they here?”

No. The reptile show was last weekend. Here at Chocolate Expo there were only the chocolate fiends.

At two minutes to eleven, the lines stretched down the steps and around the sidewalk. “My friends are at the Marathon and here I am at chocolate world,” the girl behind me said wryly. “Stupid chocolate,” said a husband. “It’s gonna be fun, honey,” insisted his wife.

It was the annual gathering of people intent on buying and selling cacao-based products in all shapes, sizes and flavors – the more novel the better. I thought I’d see what the fuss was about.

I love chocolate, of course. Gil says my three major food groups are chocolate, coffee and milk. (That puts mocha at the top of the pyramid, I guess.)

In the convention center, people jostled to get free tastes. It seemed to actually be about half chocolate and half every other kind of artisenal food product, from honey to wine to dill pickles to maple syrup. I was surprised to find Cap’n Crunch gelato.

But there was also every kind of truffle under the sun.

Alicia at Two Chicks with Chocolate fed me a taste of rosemary lemon truffle, handpainted with colored cocoa butter, one of 60 different flavors, and I was on my way.

Pumpkin was big in everything. I saw chocolate-dipped waffles.

Chocolate-dipped fruits of all kinds.

Kids and adults alike with sticky hands, sticky faces. There was an awful amount of plastic wrapping, it seemed to me.

Chocolate culture is very high–low. I saw the most exquisite Indian truffles, created for the New Year, Dawali, by Aarti at Le Rouge in the shape of a “diya,” or lamp. Truffles with ganache came in exotic flavors with amazing “mouthfeel,” as the technical term goes. I tried the Kiser Pista Ganache, made with saffron.

Ethereal, I thought. So I couldn’t resist making off with a single specimen, the Paan Bahar truffle, made with betel leaves and rose petals.

More spirituality lay around the corner, where half-pound, solid chocolate Buddhas were cheerfully peddled at Oliver Kita Fine Confections, by a salesperson who told me, “Most people break them up to share when they chant with friends.” Okay.

Chocolate has only been the recognizable treat that we go crazy over for a relatively short chapter of human history. The Aztecs downed it as a cold, bitter, spicy brew – Montezuma alone was said to drink 50 cups a day. It became a sweetened beverage in the 17^th century, flowing from the cacao plantations of South America to France by way of Louis XIV’s Spanish bride, Princess Maria Theresa.

She gave the Sun King a chest of chocolate in 1643 for an engagement present, and his avid consumption of the beverage was said to fuel his ability to pleasure his wife twice a day even into his seventies.

Chocolate then emigrated to London, where chocolate houses became the fashion. Sir Hans Sloane, an esteemed physician, declared that milk afforded the delicacy special creaminess. New York philanthropist and bibliophile James Wadsworth, in the nineteenth century:

Twill make Old women Young and Fresh

Create New Motions of the Flesh,

And cause them long for you know what…

If they but taste of chocolate.

Samuel Pepys noted in 1657 that it was available.

“In Bishopsgate Street in Queen’s Head Alley, at a Frenchman’s house, is an excellent West India drink called chocolate, to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time, and also unmade at reasonable rates.”

Michael Pollan writes in his book In Defense of Food about a group of Americans being shown the words “chocolate cake” to discover their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. The response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.”

Everyone, no matter how-guilt-ridden, knows that chocolate is the love food. Someone should write a love poem to it.

I did feel love in the air today, at least love of chocolate, so it’s sort of a closed loop.

A company calling itself Rescue Chocolate offered vegan, organic, fair-trade, kosher chocolates, with all profits to be donated to animal rescue groups.

I thought I’d purchase one but the line was too long.

Masks, with a chocolate base, from The Chocolate Box NYC. Everything about their decoration was edible.

The proprietor, Sabrina, looked more like a ballet dancer than a candy maker.

Less artistic but just as tempting, hand-dipped Twinkies from a booth that won an award from Hudson Valley Magazine for its pies last year.

The Twinkies are one of their best sellers — since the confection was off the market for a while it drove up the demand. “We ran out last year, Gina Solari told me. “Anything Nutella is also a best seller,” she added.

Sick of chocolate, finally, incredibly, I retired to the stage area with two non-cocoa nourishments, strong coffee and a lemon-and-sugar crepe.

In the distance, convention-goers slurped up Cap’n Crunch gelato and sugar-dipped waffles. I recalled one of the most striking film food scenes in recent memory, in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated Spirited Away, when the 10-year-old Chihiro’s careless parents sit down at a counter restaurant for a snack and get turned into munching, slobbering, devouring giant pigs.

A chef-lecturer delivered informational nuggets about the subject at hand. Chocolate falls to the ground in South America, she said, after the monkeys have eaten the fruit around it. It’s a seed. She confided in the people whose sweet tooth had driven them to the convention center even before lunch on a beautiful Sunday in fall. “I know I’m probably wrecking your world, but white chocolate is not chocolate. It’s fat and sugar. You could call it fat-sugar!”

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November 2, 2013 · 10:01 pm

Victorian Waltz and Tea

Writing a novel in which Gilded Age debutantes dance with their swains in the gaslit ballrooms of fashionable New York made me want to get some nineteenth century dance moves under my belt. Or, rather, under my crinolines. So I brought my best Tigger kicks in to Manhattan for an afternoon of 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

Susan de Guardiola, our elegant yet earthy instructor, came down from Connecticut. She generally teaches what she calls Jane Austen classes – picture Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice, sashaying down the line, all aglow.

I always preferred Matthew Macfadyen in that movie. Does he show up at any of Susan’s classes? She teaches not only English country dancing but about 12 other kinds and is a true authority in her field, with a website called Capering& Kickery that gives all kinds of background on Victorian and Regency-era dance.

“If everyone’s good enough,” she told us at the start, “we’ll progress to jumping.” Such, I will tell you now, was not to be. It was baby steps for many of us, even as we behaved very well and tried very hard.

The last time I waltzed was in seventh grade cotillion, wearing a micro-mini dress and short white gloves. I loved it. But that was a long time ago. And a far cry from a tiny dance floor in the back room of a tile shop, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Today, some women wore black dance shoes and a man came in wearing a steampunk-style leather top hat. You don’t see that every day on the streets of New York. “Shall I put my hair up because I’ll get all hot and sweaty?” asked a curly-haired woman. “I usually do,” said Susan.

This class was offered under the auspices of the New York Nineteenth Century Society, an outfit that takes seriously its mission: it “unites historians, scholars, artists, philosophers, dreamers, and impresarios inspired by the 19th century.” Recently they had a Nineteenth Century Extravaganza, for which everyone put on their full Victorian regalia. Next up is an archery event. Yes! Perhaps I’ll attend. Savage Girl is an expert archer, as were many young ladies of the late 1800s.

“The 1880s, 1890s were the root of modern ballroom dance,” said Susan. It turns out that the waltz changed seven or eight times in the course of its development, becoming faster, closer, more stylized. The dip back we expect from the female partner now didn’t used to exist.

“I’ll tell you the secret of this kind of dancing,” said Susan. “It works if you do it on the balls of your feet.”

“When this waltz gets going,” she said, “it flies around the room.” She might have been a tad optimistic.

This was a lesson in shoulder blades. The man should place his hand on the woman’s left shoulder blade (“that’s the sharp thing sticking out of her back,” said Susan) though in Victorian times when everyone wore corsets and your posture was therefore better, your partner could put his hand farther down your back. The woman holds her left hand against the man’s right shoulder, above his chest, to help push him around during the turns.

We learned the gavotte glide, a slide to the right followed by a turn, and we learned the importance of leading with your toe, Victorian style. Susan suggested we lean in and not worry about the various “bits” of us that might touch. We passed partners around the circle, dancing with utter and complete strangers, experiencing waves of cologne, perspiration, different kinds of breath, good and not-so-good manners. Everyone tried hard. I got one partner, Jake, a couple of times, and we shared laughs over each other’s clumsiness. He suggested we hold a hand behind us, as I might do holding a bunch of petticoats.

Jake high fived me when we came to a halt semi-successfully. Very Victorian.

Lesson over, Gil and I proceeded outside, where a young dancer waiting for a tango class advised me that rubber soles such as the ones I had on might cost me an ankle. “I hope you keep it up,” she told me and Gil kindly. “Maybe I’ll see you on Dancing with the Stars.”

On the street, I asked Susan how to improve. “Practice five minutes every day,” she said. “Go to a supermarket and practice down all those wide aisles.” You don’t need to do it all at once. “Sleep on your lesson,” she said, “and you will do better the next day.”

We hadn’t had enough Victorian flavor so we went afterward for high tea at a place called Lady Mendl’s Tea Salon. It was on the first floor of a Gramercy Park hotel, The Inn at Irving Place, carved out of two adjoining brownstones that date back to 1834. Washington Irving was said to have spent some time in a house down the street, enhancing the old-fashioned aura of the neighborhood. The online reviews I read said a man would not be welcome at the establishment, so of course Gil wanted to go.

Lights were turned down low and the whole effect was gracious and mellow and ladylike, even if there were a few male interlopers.

We chose our freshly steeped tea from a menu of 27 varieties. The “Lady Mendl,” which I selected, was hot and heavenly, especially after waltzing for two hours.

Darjeeling scented with bergamot, it was named after Lady Mendl herself – none other than the society woman Elsie de Wolfe, one of the first people to make her fame as an interior decorator. It’s said she had the expression “never complain, never explain” stitched on her throw pillows.

There was an amuse bouche consisting of a butternut squash tart with crème fraiche. Tea sandwiches. We were rolling. Everyone in the room appeared happy, or rather, high. High on hot, fragrant tea.

We reminisced about the banyan I made Gil one Christmas. Banyans are the “exotic” silk robes colonial men wore when they were at home at leisure, with their temporarily unperiwigged pates covered in caps.

There were, of course, scones and clotted cream. I ate some of the cream on a spoon to make sure it was property clotted.

As if that wasn’t sweet enough we had millefeuille cake with more cream, and chocolate-covered strawberries. In my opinion the strawberries are a specious addition, since a century ago you couldn’t get the kind of giant fruit they dip now. Not that I’m complaining.

“It’s good to do something you don’t ordinarily do,” I opined with Victorian superciliousness. “It makes you grow.”

“It makes you groan,” said Gil, ready to go back to the Cabin, put his feet up and his banyan on.

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Filed under Culture, Dance, Fashion, Fiction, Film, History, Jean Zimmerman, Music, Publishing, Savage Girl, Writers, Writing

November 1, 2013 · 1:54 pm

Author Page Debut

I wanted to let everyone know that I have set up an author’s page on Facebook, where you are welcome to go to discover news about my books both forthcoming and previously published, and also bits and pieces about the literary life, book goings on, tweets, interesting historical phenomena and other things that pertain to my life as a writer.

Please do stop by and “like” the page, and leave a comment – I’d love to see you there.

For the Facebook page, and just because I hadn’t done so in a while, I came up with a new author photo. I wanted the picture to be less posed, more natural than my past ones, and to have some kind of a natural context.

Maud Reavill was prevailed upon to record her mother’s image for posterity. I stood in front of Columbia University’s St. Paul’s Chapel, designed in 1907 by I.N. Phelps Stokes, he who I profiled in my book Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance. It’s an exquisite Italianate structure, one of Stokes’ finest accomplishments, and the first non-McKim, Mead and White building erected on campus. It’s just as beautiful inside as it is on the exterior, but the light inside didn’t favor a shot. I wrote about the chapel and getting my picture taken earlier this year.

The bricks are old. I am not.

Freaky Filmography

There’s only one Halloween night, but you can scare you’re self silly any old time. It’s as much fun to scare as to be scared, said Vincent Price, who should know.

These are eight movies that had me literally hiding my eyes for large stretches, beginning with when I was a child and probably too young and vulnerable to be watching anything so chilling.

They all bespeak the creepiness of tight spaces, of claustrophobia. I guess that’s what horrifies me, and maybe it horrifies you too.

1. House of Wax.

An indelible experience, watching Vincent Price go mad in my grandmother’s rambling old house, the image of wax figures coming to life in a dank, dark cellar. It appeared on TCM the other day and I could barely be in the same room as the TV.

2. Funny Games.

In this 2007 version (a shot-by-shot remake of Michael Heneke’s earlier German film, by Michael Heneke, which Gil much prefers) with Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Brady Corbet and one of my faves, Michael Pitt, two very cleancut young men come to the door of a cabin and take the family hostage. Don’t do it! Don’t let them in! A friend of ours still hasn’t forgiven us for exposing her to this nightmare.

3. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I’m in college, very blasé, watching the new flick from a seat at the front of a crowded auditorium. Just as Leatherface appears on screen with his saw, two students leap up onto the stage, their own chainsaws revving.

Hearts stopped.

4. The Last House on the Left. The first and best of the home invasion flicks, shot with terrifying hand held cinematography, in which teenage girls undergo unspeakable terrors. By master Wes Craven.

5. The Strangers.

More home invasion, from 2008. Do I detect a theme? Except here we have teens in masks terrifying other teens. Liv Tyler attempts to fight them off.

6. Games, from 1967, with James Caan, Simone Signoret and Katharine Ross, a period piece which involves kinky “mind games,” an ultra modern living environment and a dead body encased in a cast.

When I was an adolescent this messed with my head big time. What I remember most is murdered people stashed in a crawl space and telltale blood dripping through an immaculate white ceiling.

7. The Descent, 2005.

There’s a deep, twisted cave into which a group of reunioning young women have spelunked. It’s dark and dank. “Hey, there’s something down here,” says Holly. Yes, there is.

8. Saw.

I have almost successfully blocked out the one that started them all in 2004. It may be trite to cite Saw in a list of the best. Still. I can’t imagine how people watched any further movies in this franchise. It was so awful! And so great.

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Filed under Culture, Film, Home, Jean Zimmerman

October 30, 2013 · 7:44 pm

Historical Pork

I brought the porker totem home to a curious canine, though Oliver didn’t seem to feel the swine deserved an aggressive posture.

And though I debated on the drive back, porker clunking in the trunk, what Gil’s reaction would be – would he object to the creature because of its cost or size or general mien – he too was delighted by it. One of his favorite song lyrics, he said, was Dylan’s “I’m no pig without a wig/I hope you treat me kind.” Hard to hold anything against a grotesquerie that cost 24 dollars.

We decided the painted plaster pig with the voluptuous nose must have at one time enticed customers in a store or eatery. The woman in the antiques shop felt sure he had a former life as a piggy bank, but no piggy bank is thigh high. I snapped him up quickly, before anyone else could. If anyone else would.

My eye for art is my own. I’m the one who finds things at estate sales after all the “good stuff” has been bought, after everyone else goes home. In our storage locker the other day I went through our collection of two-dimensional pieces, some by friends, that the Cabin walls can’t accommodate. Space is extremely limited and 250-year-old logs hard to pound nails into.

I did hang a Currier & Ives print, an antique spoof showing a nineteenth century woman with a braid dangling to her knees, a cigarette and a riding crop. “The Girl of the Period” reads the legend on the only slightly stained image. The friends who gave me this know me well.

I do like things that are a bit stained, worn, faded or torn. Things that have the spirit of the vernacular in them. That show the human hand. It’s not outsider art when it comes from your own relative. One vintage artwork in my house was the creation of my great-grandmother Lockie Hillis, three landscape postcards she collected on a trip to the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, which she mounted in a wood-burned frame (she herself burned the wood).

I greatly appreciate handmade signs, but I’ll only collect them for free. Our best sign, hanging outside on the porch wall, we collected off a telephone pole next to a cornfield on a midwestern two-lane.

The one above the fireplace makes an ironic comment on Oliver and the other beloved dogs that have lived with us.

Another perhaps more frightening comment, the mask hanging above the wooden sign. Leather of some kind, it comes from Mexico, and has dropped a few eyelashes since I picked it up 30 years ago. Gil has been known to put it on for Halloween and terrify small children.

The Cabin makes a perfect backdrop for a painted work like the one my artist friend Sandra bequeathed, titled “Cairo in the Garden,” named for a beloved tabby we owned with seven toes on each paw.

We don’t frame it because it doesn’t need a frame to show off its fresco-like charms.

Back to the pig without a wig. Where to exhibit his bulbous corpus? I think he needs to stand by the door, sticking out his tongue in welcoming us. Or by the hearth, though I wouldn’t want his fat to singe. Perhaps the kitchen would be the most logical, given the amount of bacon this household consumes. In a corner, where we can observe him observing us.

While I consider it I’m going to give my attention to a National Audobon Society “miniature chart” showing Twigs of Common Trees.

Here we have 62 ink-drawings of buds, bark, leaf scars and pith. The total effect is exquisite and I’d like to do the impossible: find it wall space. I fished Twigs out of storage and Gil said, You want that? Yes, as a matter of fact I do.

What this jolly pig reminds me of most of all is old-fashioned signage, when shops had a giant shoe or pair of eyeglasses out front, bespeaking loud and clear what they had to offer. That’s a history dating back to the middle ages, but you still find pigs today decorating barbecue joints. That might be this one’s origin. Oink.

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Filed under Art, Cooking, Culture, Dogs, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography, Writers

October 29, 2013 · 10:05 pm

Eat, Fly, Nest

“Birds like movement and sound – so bubbling water attracts them,” says Cary Andrews, the ornithological expert speaking on bird-friendly gardens at the Croton Free Library in front of an audience of two or three dozen intent locals. If you don’t have an exotically lovely koi pond, she says, a bird bath will do, or even a strategically set up plastic gallon jug tipped just so. Watch out for frogs, though, some of whom “can take out a hummingbird.”

In my bag, I carry a palm-sized nature guide dating to 1949, which I’d rediscovered in a box of old books earlier in the day.

The flyleaf is inscribed, “To Zan, from Mother, April 18, 1952.”

This is the last in the Green Living Series for this year offered by the Croton Conservation Advisory Council – earlier talks had focused on invasive plants and biophilia, or the love of nature – and Gil and I want to get some information on setting up a feeder. What we get is a lot more global. Water, food, nesting. The best plants so the birds can thrive. But also much larger questions of habitat, creating it and preserving it, and the survival of all the species, not just everyday sparrows.

I am tempted as the lecture begins to hand my book over to the cutest little four year old girls, who keep giddily crawling back and forth in front of the podium until they are stilled by their chaperone. I am eager to hear about migration of another kind, from our speaker, birds flying all the way up from South America, drawn by the Hudson. Birds love water – robins, report Cary, like nothing so much as a sprinkler going back and forth, plus it loosens up the turf “so they can get their worms.”

The talk includes great photos, still there’s something softly magical about these illustrations from sixty years ago.

The tufted titmouse, one of my favorites since moving to the Cabin, is a bird I’d like to attract. Now I’m hearing about raspberries that ferment when overripe so that they’re called drunkberries. Birds enjoy them. And among other pleasant digressions, Cary mentions that she’d like to organize a “garden tour of pink trees” in spring. And that she was once distracted when looking out a conference window by 10 cedar waxwings feeding on red berries. And that she and her bird-crazy neighbors put in their bird-friendly plants and tease each other: “You stole my birds!”

“Fifty percent of the wren’s diet is spiders,” I learn. Insects. They are more important than I knew. All those downed, rotting trees around the Cabin, they are gold. Bark crevices are what bugs love. And birds love bugs. And cats love birds.

No! Don’t go there. It turns out that cats are responsible for decimating billions of birds in the U.S. each year. Cary quotes a controversial University of Wisconsin study. And the bells assigned them by well-meaning owners help not a whit. They’re much worse than the hawks circling far above.

The bugs birds eat, especially the larvae babies require, grow on native plants. “Go native!” says our speaker, who admits that though she is a bird person, she was only recently educated about setting up her own bird-friendly garden. Smart and mildly self-effacing, she grants the audience “permission to be messy”: leave brush piles alone, stalks standing, the lawn grown out a bit more than most Americans think is decent. Even some weeds are good. The thistle. Even crab grass. Throw your Christmas tree to the side of your yard and a bird might take up occupancy. (We have one of those.) I also know for a fact that the fir trees close to our outside wall makes the bluejays happy.

This “tightly woven relationship between plants, insects and birds” sometimes leaves humans out in the cold. Poison ivy, for instance, is a delight for birds, it seems. Cary advocates preserving it where possible. This is the true bird’s eye view.

A few more nuggets before we dive into the cupcakes on the library table. Deer have been seen swimming from New Jersey to Staten Island. No joke. Hummingbirds will on occasion use spider webs to build their nests.

The robin’s nest found in Cary’s friend’s yard incorporated a length of her young daughter’s hair ribbon.

I start for home. In the back of my vintage bird guide I discover the following note, handwritten in neat pencil:

July 25, 1959.

Today for the second time,

a small red bird perched

on the picket fence outside

my window. He warbled

a few notes and then left.

I found out that it was a

cardinal through this book.

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Filed under Art, Culture, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writing

October 28, 2013 · 9:15 pm

Children’s Books That Make Us Us

Most of the elegant exhibition vitrines at the New York Public Library’s show The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter stand at a height conducive to adult viewing. And wonderful as the show is, it’s really not a place for children – with the exception of a few nooks along the way offering copies of Goodnight Moon for young ones to handle – but a place for us well above knee height to get sucked back into our literary pasts.

The winding display was chock full of books and objects from the Library’s massive collection, and it ranged over the history of juvenile literature. There were picture books from China. There were vintage, quirky numbers, like The Cries of New-York, detailing children selling “various kinds of cherries” on Manhattan in 1816.

Another book, from 1727, represented the oldest known copy of the most important English-language primer, with an array of four-syllable words, fornication surprisingly found alongside exhortation.

I was interested in Instructions on Needlework and Knitting, from 1847, published in London, whose valuable pages had an actual doll’s dress sewn into the book.

But I found myself gravitating to my tried and true, the darling books of my own important and valuable childhood, when caring people made sure my library was stocked with the perfect pages to make my imagination fly.

All my old favorites were here in some form or another. I saw sketches by Hilary Knight as he worked up to a published Eloise, with the scamp lying on her stomach facing her turtle Skipperdee or making an island in the “bawth”. The collaboration between Knight and Kay Thompson was “intense, exhilarating,” I learned.

Harriet the Spy, 11-year-old brilliant tomboy, was represented along one wall with a pleasantly tattered copy of the book that could have been my own. That book taught me a lot about what it would take to grow up smart and sly in the world of adults.

The Phantom Tollbooth depicted a land I felt transported to when I was about ten, and going back farther, the Dick and Jane readers drew me in and gave me the creeps simulaneously.

I had forgotten about Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak’s A Hole Is to Dig, and the pages on display at the Library touched my heart.

Harold and the Purple Crayon. Timeless. Ferdinand. Charlotte’s Web: “Some pig.” “Terrific.” E.B. White wrote it while reporting on the founding of the U.N. for Harper’s Magazine, and it was no doubt shaped by a concern about who would save the world. The world he created was of course much more real than a big room full of serious old men.

I walked about adrift in nostalgia for my books, my bookcases, my bed where I read my books, my family’s club chair where I slouched with my summer pile from the library. “Libraries raised me,” said Ray Bradbury. I remember poring over tales of the creepy Loch Ness monster and the equally terrifying but also funny abominable snowman. I can relate to Eudora Welty’s memory:

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

I think that when reading I imagined myself to be Mary Poppins in another life (not the children who were her charges) and so I was fascinated to see P.L. Travers’s very Mary-like green-cloth umbrella with a parrot-head handle, and the Dutch wooden doll that served as the model for the magical nanny, which her American editor gave the library in 1972. “My favorite of all!” exclaimed the mom of two girls, who commenced to sing A Spoonful of Sugar.

I turned the corner and bumped into another historical nugget, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee parasol handle that Lewis Carroll bequeathed upon the former Alice Liddell, now “Mrs. Hargreaves,” in 1891. The original Alice. She held that ivory in her hand.

More heirlooms, including all the original Pooh dolls from the Milne family, which have resided at NYPL since 1987.

I was invited to craft an original story in a Mad Libs vein, with a digital setup on the wall. After I plugged in words, the narration involved a witchy persimmon and an oak turned into a sorrowful seed, reinvented from Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. Anderson said, “Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.” All fun, but where are the fairy tales? Where are MY fairy tales? The ones I read and reread until the paper book jackets tore.

Oh, there, finally. The Blue Fairy Book. A first edition of the Andrew Lang collection, which had something like a dozen volumes.

Mom, Dad, Grandma—and I think it might have been Grandma—thank you for giving me The Blue Fairy Book, the Red, the Green, and the others, volumes I would crack open to release their dreams, their mystery and passion. Beauty and the Beast, which I read in The Blue Fairy Book, still gives me a shiver.

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Filed under Art, Culture, Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Poetry, Publishing, Writers, Writing

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