Jean Zimmerman

Category: Culture

  • The Halfway House Restaurant

    Once again Peter Zimmerman delivers a bulletin from the road. Thanks, Pete, we live vicariously through your travels. YESTERDAY (writes Peter) I stumbled on a great, old-timey eatery, the Halfway House Restaurant, located on Route 22A, about halfway between Bridport and Shoreham, Vermont, give or take a few yards. It opened in 1951, has somehow…

  • A Catskill Idyll

    I really ought to get out more. Even if out means going from a cabin to a cottage with an adjacent bungalow as I did this weekend. It was the gray, cool weather of late summer, more like fall. The Catskill Mountains. The cottage had a quaint disposition, the pet decorating project of antiquarian friends…

  • Pop Up Rules of the Game

    I wore my jacket for so many years the buttons started to blow. There was only one thing for it: pay a visit to Tender Buttons, just around the corner from Bloomingdale’s on New York’s Upper East Side. I collect buttons myself, the kind you happen upon at tag sales. None suited my jacket. Tender…

  • Kitchawan Dragonflies

    Are dragonflies magic? My favorite insect, I think. Humans have always had a fascination with them. We were creating amulets of the insects back in 1640 B.C. Egypt. They’re prehistoric. Ravishing to look at. Voracious hunters. Fascinating to artists, like Wenceslas Hollar, the great 17th century lithographer. A cloud of hundreds of dragonflies swelled over…

  • Taking Back the Streets

    When I was around 25, I used to walk to work each morning across 19th Street to a new job I had at a think tank that focused on women’s corporate advancement. Here I applied myself as an editor. The offices were not especially glamorous, but all the staff made an effort to look professional.…

  • Mementos in a Vermont Boneyard

    Peter Zimmerman continues his ramble through New England, shooting some images our way as he goes. TODAY I LUCKED OUT (writes Pete).  Not only did I have the Old First Church of Bennington, built in 1762,  all to myself, but then I had the audience of its pastor, the Rev. Kenneth A. Clarke, as well.…

  • Art for Art’s Sake

    When was the last time you thought about Art Garfunkel? His angelic tenor, his sensitive beak, his fallouts/reunions with Paul Simon, his blond ‘fro? Probably, like me, not recently. Which is why I jumped at the chance to see him solo in a tiny venue in the middle of New Jersey, in a performance that…

  • A Step Forward

    The last morning with the cast. The orthopedics waiting room was full of people bracing themselves with canes, crutches, wheelchairs. No scooters, though. The Bloke has been a loyal companion, but one I was glad to banish. And in a way it was sad to say goodbye to the graffiti. I was accustomed to that…

  • Beautiful Typologies

    Though I still don’t quite understand what a typology is, the form fascinates me nonetheless. Diana Zlatonovski makes typologies fascinating. This, for example, is a collection of sunsets she amassed on Flickr, drawn from the work of Penelope Umbrico. A curator of interesting objects and images, Zlatonovski compiles them into organized entities for our admiration/edification. She…

  • From Mormon Cupcakes to McCook

    My brother, writer/photographer/perambulator Peter Zimmerman, has been a peach about furnishing posts for me while I’ve been laid up with an adventure-prohibiting bum foot. Here he is again, sharing an album of views he’s enjoyed recently. AFTER BEING MIRED for eight long years in the New Age mecca of Sedona, Arizona (writes Pete) I hit…

  • The Big Melt

    The ice had all melted. I had come to the group show at MOMA P.S.1 in Long Island City, “Expo1,” to see the contribution of Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic artist responsible for the amazing waterfalls he installed five years ago around the island of Manhattan. This time he’d put a little bit of Arctic ice…

  • Digging

    I made a list. The things I’d do if I were going out and about this weekend. The free-of-leg-cast things. There’s the NYC Unicycle Festival, which kicks off with a 13-mile single-wheeled parade across the Brooklyn Bridge to Coney Island and which includes a bout of unicycle sumo wrestling. Then, the art installlation by Olaf…

  • Tomb With a View

    It’s really nice, sitting here with my leg up, to know that someone is out there having adventures. In this case it is my brother Peter Zimmerman, who is making his way through New England and closely observing as he goes. Pete, a writer and photographer, has a web site and a book about exploring…

  • Blurbs for The Asylum

    Blue Rider Press has come out with a book trailer featuring fashion insider Simon Doonan talking about getting blurbs for his his forthcoming book The Asylum. There is actually a series of very brief videos, including the blurb one but also one about designer Thom Browne and one about Michael Kors and one featuring “career…

  • My Gîte and a Whole Wheat Bread Recipe

    The peripatetic Peter Zimmerman continues to make his way through the north country, from which he sends this illustrated bulletin. Thanks Pete! MARGUERITE MARGO – no relation to Brigette Bardot – is a baking fool (writes Peter). I met her after exiting the highway to take a breather and stumbling onto her boulangerie (bakery) in…