Tag: Food & Wine

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"Don't worry; we're not in bikinis!"

“don’t worry; we’re not in bikinis!”

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.


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Delic appetizers @ upper east-side Brazilian restaurant Buzina Pop. Chi chi atmosphere that is also very comfy. Excellent music, of course! Slightly weird service though.

Update: I’d stopped here on my way to the Guggenheim for another Works & Process, this one on composer Charles Wuorinen. It’s his 70th birthday; he’s the composer commissioned to make the upcoming opera version of Brokeback Mountain. Anyway, choreographer Sean Curran‘s modern dance troupe was performing to one of Wuorinen’s pieces. Curran’s dancers and his choreography are excellent; Wuorinen’s music interesting — very severe and unsetting… more soon…

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Last Days of Summer

Today’s such a nice day in NY (70s, woo hoo!), that, although I have an absolute load of work to do inside, I couldn’t resist spending at least a little of the afternoon in the park. I then realized I’d taken a bunch of pictures in Central Park and elsewhere in the city about a month ago and, because of my trip to North Carolina, hadn’t ever had time to post them:

Boaters on the pond.

Water kind of looks a bit Monet, no?

I stopped for a glass of wine in the boathouse bar and sat next to a family of tourists. After the waiter withdrew the cork from their Chardonnay bottle, the woman took it from him, wiped it gently with her napkin, and took a pen from her purse. “Mommy, what are you doing,” the little boy asked. She explained she was saving the cork, as she always does for special events. She still had the Cabernet from the night their father proposed, the Chardonnay from the first honeymoon meal, the Merlot from the family’s first trip to Disneyland, etc. all meticulously labeled and in a glass jar on the fireplace mantle. I thought it was so sweet.

By the way, the Boathouse has an excellent “house” Sauvignon Blanc. It smelled of a dewy morning meadow. I almost didn’t want to drink it…

At the fountain, a man participating in Burning Man festivities (whom I’d recognized as one of my fellow participants in the Judson Movement Research festival) giving a man and his child some bubbles to play with.

They gave me some spicy red Mardi Gras beads, which went well with my scarf.

And this is in the Mall area across from the fountain where they have that retro disco roller derby thing on weekends. This guy’s always there. I love watching.

More disco rollers, or roller-skating disco dancers, or what have you.

Is anyone else kind of annoyed by this new breed of park transportation: the rickshaw bicycle cabbies? They’re everywhere in the park; they come up speeding behind you, nearly run you over. And for the most part, the guys just sit stationary in the tourist areas, waiting to find a customer. If they’re meant as a replacement for the horse-drawn carriages, then I’m all for it (while those are quaint and all, I’ve seen more than one horse go down, especially in the heat, and I think they’re abusive to the animals), but I still see the horse ‘n buggies aligning Central Park South.

Here’s a pic of the Brooklyn Book Festival (sorry; I’m really behind on my posting – -this took place about a month ago).


And here’s Charles Bock reading from his Beautiful Children at the festival. Charles Bock was the Where’s Waldo of my book-reading-going this summer. The man was at practically every literary festival, read on his own several times, had a full-page interview or review in every newspaper… I’m very happy for him though. His book is a poignant expressionistic tale of the underbelly of “the fabulous Las Vegas,” the real Vegas. And I find him very encouraging to new authors. He always mentions how long it took him to write his novel and get it out there (10 years); that it’s all-important to get it right even if it does seem to be taking forever. Art isn’t something to be rushed. He said he revised countless times before even looking for an agent. When he finally had it down as it was meant to be, he found an agent and publisher pretty quickly. I think I’ve done the exact opposite. I started sending it out after I finished my first draft. I have an agent, but am still revising five years later… So, listen to Charles Bock. Obviously.

Here’s a picture I took sitting outside in City Hall Park at night awaiting Ofelia Loret de Mola’s site-specific dance Available Spaces, the last of the season. I get tired of writing about dance all the time, and go to far many more programs than I can review without getting seriously burned out, but here’s the NYTimes review of that. It was basically a Mexican, Halloween-style carnival. I went at night; Roslyn Sulcas, who covered it for the Times, during the day. If you’re interested, the set of photos I took of that begin here.

Okay, back to work. Happy Friday, everyone.

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At molyvos awaiting fall for dance

At molyvos awaiting fall for dance

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.


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What kind of person orders a second glass of wine during a Recession?

Anyway, FFD was good / decent tonight. I especially liked: Houston Ballet’s production of Tchaikovsky Pas De Deux — wonderfully lively dancers (Sara Webb and Connor Walsh) who brilliantly brought both Balanchine and Tchaikovsky to life; BeijingDance/LDTX’s Cold Dagger, which I found nicely enigmatic and visually arresting in places; and The New 45 by Richard Siegal / The Bakery, a company I will most definitely be looking up the next time I am in Berlin. Full review coming soon…

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NY in the Summer

The other night, despite my headache, I went out to Lincoln Center to see Midsummer Night Swing — not to participate, just to check out its new location at Damrosch Park (it’s usually held on the Lincoln Center Plaza but with all the construction, they relocated it for this summer). I think it’s actually a much better location than the Plaza. There’s much more space to set up food stands, sell drinks, and there’s even a nice little gelato place in the front. And there’s tons of space in the park’s wide walkways — far more than on the crowded Plaza — to dance without having to pay the $15 to go into the bandshell’s dance floor (which is probably why they don’t normally hold it here).

Anyway, Dance Times Square (Tony Meredith and Melanie LaPatin’s studio) is going to be hosting this Thursday’s lesson and performance. According to the schedule the dance is Swing. Go here for the full schedule.

Also, in preparation for spending the rest of the summer revising my novel yet again (hopefully for the last time) and working on some other smaller things, I’ve been going to readings, many of them outdoors. Here are a few:

A discussion by debut novelists (from left to right) Charles Bock (whose book, Beautiful Children, I’m reading now), Stefan Merrill Block (whose book I want to read next), Sophie Gee, and Ceridwen Dovey moderated by biggie Random House editor (and novelist) David Ebershoff, in the Bryant Park reading room.

Gee had an interesting idea: she’s an English professor at Princeton and teaches 18th Century lit, which most of her students, she said with humorously self-deprecating woe, take only to meet their period requirement. Tired of getting dead stares and snickers when she exclaims how fascinating is some of the literature, like Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock, she decided to rewrite the story, for contemporary audiences. Definitely want to check it out.

Jonathan Miles reading from his debut novel Dear American Airlines at The Half King in Chelsea. He is surprisingly soft-spoken and with the acoustics in the pub it was very difficult to hear him. I used to love going to readings there but they’ve got to either turn down or off the pub music while the reading’s going on or get better padding for the door separating the bar from the restaurant reading area (and then prevent people from constantly leaving and entering). I personally think they should just open everything up, turn off the music and put the reader’s mike on all speakers; let the damn boozers listen to a 30-minute reading for cry-eye!

Junot Diaz (Pulitzer prize winner for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”) and Aleksandar Hemon read together at Central Park’s Summer Stage, and the place was very happily packed. This area’s normally used for bands, so very exciting for a couple of writers to fill it up. That was an excellent reading and discussion (albeit, at a little over two hours in length, a bit short). I think all writers going on book tour should take reading lessons from Diaz; he’s by far the liveliest I’ve ever heard. In response to an audience question about why some authors get so much public attention and seem unfairly more popular than others, he said you can’t worry about how the work is going to be received by the public as you’re writing it; you don’t write for the present, you write for the future.

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Rained out at the ballet.

Rained out at the ballet.

Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.


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Failing to consult weather forecast means having to wait out thuderstorm with ridiculously overpriced meal at lincoln center cafe.

Update: Okay, don’t EVER go to the Lincoln Center Restaurant on the ground floor of Avery Fisher Hall (Panevino is it’s name, just to make clear it’s not the Grand Tier Restaurant in the Met I’m talking about). If it’s thunderstorming, just run across the street with your Playbill on top of your head to Fiorello’s or Josephine’s or, like Barbara did (in comments below), Starbucks. I had to run to Magnolia’s afterward to get the taste of desiccated Orta out of my mouth. (Menu said it — ‘it’ being a type of fish I can’t seem to find any mention of anywhere on the internet — was supposed to be pan seared but I know pan seared — not from cooking myself lord forbid but from dining out — and this was not it. It was dried straight through; pan seared is seared on the top and bottom leaving the moisture and flavor inside.) The ladies beside me (who’d just enjoyed ABT’s Don Quixote) were having equally desiccated chicken. They had never heard of orta either. And my fava bean puree was not a puree; it had the consistency of lumpy mashed potatoes, and was completely flavorless to boot. The Chianti was okay but I could have done without the dishwater soap-stained glass. When I finally got home (ended up getting wet anyway), I had a very upset stomach for the rest of the night. Always say no to Panevino, even in an emergency!