Jean Zimmerman

Category: Culture

  • Lowdown on the High Line

    New York City’s High Line park is totally overexposed. I’m going to expose it further. I walk with three menfolk from the top to the bottom of this new icon of the Manhattan landscape, stunned by the native plantings that seem to find city soil the best fertilizer in the world. I spent a day in…

  • By Heart

    Driving west on Route 6, towards the Catskills, a summer weekday morning, and that old Talking Heads song comes on the radio: I’m writing ’bout the Book I read I have to sing about the Book I read I’m embarassed to admit it hit the soft spot in my heart When I found out you…

  • A Farm Grows in Brooklyn

    Or sometimes Queens. We had to find our way through a coffeehouse and the winding corridor of a building before getting to the unmarked elevator that led to the roof. Then we knew we had hit pay dirt, so to speak. Brooklyn Grange is the largest rooftop farm in the country and perhaps the world.…

  • Serene and Green

    I wondered how it would work, so I went to find out. A literary event in a clothing store in Yonkers, New York. A literary event that had nothing to do with fashion, actually: Reeve Lindbergh, the author of family memoirs, essays and children’s books, would be reading excerpts from the latest volume of her…

  • Strangers on a Carousel

    I get to see the carousel horses at Binghamton. The Triple Cities, actually — Johnson City, Endicott and Binghamton. A part of the world that strikes me as sort of a blank, a cipher. Some houses crumble and gape, seemingly lost in time.   Others are spruced up as garishly as 42nd Street tarts. Of…

  • The Incomplete Fetch

    Gil and I have a conversation about Oliver, who has the entrenched habit of greeting whomever arrives at our front door with a shoe in his mouth.   Gil: We used to have a purebred dog who looked like a movie star. Whenever we took her out, her adoring public would gather around to ooh and…

  • Links in the Chain

    A handful of links for a rainy day. A beautiful look at hand paintings by Moscow-based artist and poet Svetlana Kolosova. Info about the Biblewalk and Living Bible Museum in Mansfield, Ohio. Job appears real! Amazing self-portraits by writers. Henry Miller drew his in 1946.   The story of how the Kindle came to be, from…

  • Rock Paper Scissors Book

    Kids write books. They just don’t appear on Kindle. And they couldn’t. They’re hand-wrought. Messy. One of a kind. We took our nephew Jasper to a book-making class for children today at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s Design Center in Harlem. Jasper is a lefty — is that why he has a creative streak, or is it…

  • The Highest Bidder

    “There have been horror films set in storage facilities,” says Gil. “I can only imagine,” says Maud. Gil likes to run the cart through to our storage locker, especially if he’s got Maud for a passenger. We’ve kept about half our belongings in the deep freeze since moving to the Cabin. Too. Much. Stuff. “Every…

  • Prayers and Limits

    Rainy day rush hour on 9A, the four-lane that runs through Manhattan and north past the Cabin. Traffic has us crawling. But the radio is loud, with Phosphorescent singing Ride On/Right On. E-Z lyrics: Let’s go for a ride, hey you turn me right on 
Let’s get on the bike, hey you turn me right…

  • For Art’s Sake

    The art of the perfect egg cream. At Veselka Coffee Shop in New York City’s East Village, Eddie explained that we came in at just the right time, because his is the real deal. None better. How long did it take you to reach perfection, I asked, watching him furiously stir the seltzer, vanilla and…

  • Out of Africa

    Maud is back from Malawi. Wearing a chichinge, a wrap skirt of block-printed African cloth. Her resilient muscles are only a little sore, and she seems impervious to jet lag after 20  hours in the air. Maud and her group from buildOn, working with hundreds of village men, laid a foundation and raised a quarter…

  • Playground Nightmares

    As if those clanking swing chains weren’t somehow spooky enough, and those boink-y critters that tended to throw you off when you least expected it, here we have, from Russia, some playground elements that are worthy of a horror film. Do. Not. Go. To. These playgrounds. Ever. For more images, see 11 Terrifying Images of Old…