Bread, Books and Culture in New York City

It had been awhile since I was at a Wordless Music concert (I got slightly turned off them because the crowd was turning into such the hipster dating scene), but I'm on their mailing list and got notice of the free concerts they were organizing in conjunction with the Whitney Museum's free Friday nights, and of course pretty much anything free is enough to make me turn a blind eye to the sickening sight of artfully tousled-and-rumpled-and-mismatched bedheads nuzzling each other. And actually the scene at the Whitney for the first concert last Friday, featuring The Berg Sans Nipple (translation: mountain without peak), wasn't as hipster-rich as I had feared; indeed, I was sitting behind some old fogies who were clearly Whitney donors, gamely grinning as they listened attentively to the crashing, clashing music.

This event still being in the Wordless tradition of bringing different musical genres into conversation with one another, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble played a set of "classical" songs first, four by John Adams, from "John's Book of Alleged Dances" (1994), and four by Kevin Volans, from "White Man Sleeps," a composition with which I am very familiar since Kronos Quartet used some of the movements in "Pieces of Africa," which was played frequently at my house when I was a child. I wasn't very familiar with TBSN beforehand; I had one track, downloaded in March of last year it looks like, that I got from the Wordless Music series' now defunct (apparently -- RIP!) mp3 blog. I like it OK; it's not my favorite kind of modern wordless fare, I will admit. A little too noisily dissonant and out there in a way, without having any great hook to take the rest of us along, if that makes sense. Still, overall the concert was fun, I had a decent seat since I got there early; hopefully I'll be able to make it to at least one other of the shows that Wordless is curating this month. I especially would like to see Times New Viking...downloaded a track by them recently, "Mean God," that I love. So now it just remains to be seen whether I can haul myself out of the office at a reasonable hour on summer Fridays. For most it wouldn't be a problem but I probably shouldn't be too optimistic for my own chances...sadly.

So I've mentioned a couple of times that I got a new apartment, finally, and now I'm finally all moved in so I feel I should at least note the basics, since my previous place was giving me such a hard time that I was on the verge of drowning myself in the Hudson at times. Well, OK, it wasn't that bad, especially the second year, though I'm not having to live through another summer there (perish the thought). But now I finally have my own apartment, in a great part of town (east 57th, somewhat past where the nice galleries are but still). It is such a thrilling feeling. There was a New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast some time ago that captures the insane NY rental situation perfectly -- it's a take-off on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, showing a book cover with that title and then the qualification, "with adequate light and ventilation, no psychotic neighbors, near a grocery store, in a halfway-decent building in an o.k. neighborhood (not Queens, please god) for under $2000 a month." And that is what I have! Yes, I caved and used a broker (referred by a friend), and I'm definitely paying a lot more than I wanted to, but it's very worth it. I can *walk* to work. There are *good restaurants nearby.* A Duane Reade right across the street! (not that I ever go in that devil's lair of junk food temptation). There's only one other family on my floor, the top one, and, of course best of all, no roommate. Not that my roommates have ever been that bad -- I know I've fared much better than some people.

But to be able to get home, close your door, and know that no one else is there, no one is going to get irritated with you for staying up until 3 am baking bread and washing dishes, no one is going to brew her insanely strong coffee every morning so that you want to retch until your insides bleed, no one else is going to make you have to start passive-aggressive wars over cleaning duties and taking out the trash (of course, now there is no one else to take out the trash). My super lives in the building, though I quickly found that at least some of his help is not free -- $60 to install my a/c!!! The few downsides to the place are that it only has a kitchenette, including a mini-fridge; the bedroom is extremely narrow so I'm having a bed custom-built; the living room is on a pronounced tilt; and it is rather noisy becaue of the crosstown traffic. There's also no convenient laundromat nearby, I'm sure because most people have it in their buildings or they just take it out. Also there's no Fairway nearby, but I can't buy tons of food at a time anyway because of my tiny fridge, and it's not that hard to get to Fairway if I want to shop there. Anyway, I have a number of pieces of furniture to get yet, though I'm trying to keep things as minimalist as possible, but in any case I'm happy as a clam, this is probably the best thing I have going in my life right now. I can't wait to get everything set up so I can start having small groups of people over for dinner parties. Of course, I'll need to buy some decent silverware and dishes before that; currently the bulk of what I have was, um, requisitioned from my college cafeteria. Shhh...

My birthday was super low-key. I don't like telling people about it because then they either feel obligated to buy me something (usually a book I either have or would never buy for myself), or they insist on taking me out to drinks, my oh-so-favorite activity. I reluctantly gave in and told my boss when the day was, finally, or she would have made a big deal out of it; she did insist, not that I needed much convincing, that I take the day off, and the night before was the first night I slept at my new apartment, since I wanted to wake up on my birthday, in a new year of life, in my new apartment...even though I didn't even have my air mattress there so I slept on the bare wooden floor.

My parents being out of the country, having a good time without me in Germany and Italy, I got only one or two birthday calls, the first being an automated message from my dentist, which I found very amusing. Obviously I can't very well complain about people not calling me on my birthday when I don't make a big deal out of it myself (or even tell them when it is), and I'm not, I'm just observing. Moving on, the main event of the day was a trip to the Union Square greenmarket to get some fresh vegetables, bread, and cheese for a picnic in Central Park.

It was quite a nice outing. I've been working on a review of a cookbook that's all about quick, easy cooking with fresh ingredients, so I decided to test how easily I could make a salad in the park. It was good, actually, very simple of course, and I also had way more fresh sheep's milk ricotta cheese, honey, and bread than I should have, but you know, it was my birthday. The only bad thing was that I lost the cord to one of my sets of noise-cancelling headphones...must have fallen out in the grass as I was walking along in the park. Oh well, it's pretty easy to order a new one. In any case, onwards and upwards, older but probably not much wiser.

Sunday a friend of mine from work and I went to the New York Photo Festival. We were originally going to go on Thursday, then he got sick so we had to push it back. We saw pretty much everything that was on display, I think, traipsing around the cobblestoned streets of DUMBO with our passes around our necks, looking like fools like the rest of the festival-goers. One of my favorite curated segments was one of Martin Parr's, particularly Jan Banning's photos of office workers around the world, from the US to France to Yemen to India and numerous others between, all of them blurring together despite their varying skin colors and clothes, all bland in their ridiculous offices, the information about their salaries and perks posted below the photo to give the lie to their image of benevolence or pride. I also liked Ananké Asseff's photos of people in Argentina with their guns, so unselfconscious, deadpan, facing the camera as though it were perfectly natural that they should be this into having guns, unaware of how insane they look (OK, that might be me reading a bit into the photos...). I also really liked Tim Barber's building with a "mishmash kaleidoscope" of photos drawn I think entirely from submissions to his website Tiny Vices, which I am going to have to start watching now.

It didn't always happen but at the best points in that building, the positioning of photos beside each other made one think about how they communicate, how the meaning changes depending on context, since they are all from such different photographers and are of such different subjects -- when it works, it has the feel, kind of, of the Harper's Index logic of association. A riveting photo by Jerry Hsu of a boy with a shaved head and piercing stare, wearing a "stop immigration" tee, was above a shot by Jamie Warren of a Goth group; then at the top of the next column was a happy, white-bread family (I didn't write down the photographer of that one, sorry). And interspersed were many, many photos that didn't seem to have any logic for inclusion other than that they were so great (though I'm sure Barber could probably have explained why they were chosen and hung where they were) -- a close-up by Simon Berg of an egg being fried, near one by Robin Schwartz of a little girl hanging onto an elephant trunk. I super liked, perhaps predictably, Andrew Hines' photo of a duffel bag filled with fall leaves, near which was a lovely image of a spiderweb by Hannah Whitaker.
I was initially very interested in, and then was somewhat disappointed by, Lesley Martin's curated part, "The Ubiquitous Image." I'm very interested in the idea that we are all assaulted by images every day at an increasing rate, much more than people ever were in the past, and this has to have a major effect on the way we perceive the world, the way we then make pictures, the way we think. But the selections of photos didn't really get at this. Penelope Umbrico's collages of prints from Flickr (her "Flickr Suns" series and a similar one of flashes on TV screens photographed when they were put up for sale on Craigslist) were mildly interesting, and there were some photos by Curtis Mann, whose work I saw at a gallery in Chelsea earlier this year, but this set wasn't as hallucinatory or disturbing. I'm not sure what photos would have gotten the "ubiquitous image" idea across better, but that's why I'm not a photography curator...I just know that ast it was this really didn't carry much of a message for me. I wasn't all that into the segment titled "The Singled Person," at least as far as the actual photos being displayed by projector; the experience of sitting in the dark room with six projectors humming, everyone else around very quiet, just taking in the images, was kind of interesting though...and in Kathy Ryan's curated building, with the display called "Chisel," among the other photos of art were Stephen Gill's fascinating anonymous origami pieces on toilet and scrap paper, as well as the crumpled betting slips that he photographed before and after conducting "little autopsies" to discover the results. Finally, at the Getty satellite show of portraits I found much to like, particularly the smoky, sepia-tinted view of "Nataniele" by Erik Lee Snyder, and Kanako Soseki's "Outcast," which really resonated with me both aesthetically and emotionally. All in all, even if I wasn't completely blown away by everything, or even very much, it was still quite interesting to see a lot of contemporary photography all together, with the artists kind of taking the pulse of their art.

I can't remember exactly how I came across this concert, but I was beyond excited to find out that Colleen (the French artist I discovered at a Wordless Music concert last fall) was going to be playing a show with Lukas Ligeti, son of the wonderful Hungarian composer, at the Merkin Concert Hall. I like Colleen's music more every time I listen to it; I think I have all of her recordings, and they're just so gorgeous. The ones where she plays her viola da gamba are especially affecting. The show was lovely -- maybe not quite all I was hyping it to be in my head, and probably just because Colleen didn't play as much as I would have liked her to. Apparently there had been some technical difficulties earlier in the day and one of her pedals broke so she had to get a new one on the spot and naturally that was distressing for her, but she was charming about it and still played beautifully -- I mean, well, it was Colleen, so anything was going to be highly enjoyable.

I actually hadn't heard any of Lukas Ligeti's music before so had no idea what to expect, but I liked it pretty well. I was fascinated by his "Marimba Lumina," which did play some marimba sounds, but also was essentially accessing a computer database of music through lit keys that he touched with special wands, so it was techno/computer music like what many young composers and electronic musicians (Loscil and 65daysofstatic being two of my favorites) use, except the standing "marimba" and the motions needed to open the music files he was using made the whole process much more involving for the audience than watching someone sitting at his laptop (as Ligeti mentioned in his program notes). I considered buying a CD from him because he had a stack of his new one and it's not coming out for another week or so, but I didn't have any cash on me and didn't feel like going out to get some. I might buy it online later. Anyway, all in all it was a pretty cool concert and I'm definitely going to be back on a Colleen kick for awhile now. I was going to try to post a track here but I can't find any that are semi-legally available online and mine are all iTunes-protected (even though I have "Colleen et les Boites à Musique" on real disc; not sure what the deal is with those tracks). Oh well, take my word for it, it's worth getting at least one of her recordings, you'll be enchanted.

In keeping with their dark corporate overlords' increasingly penny-pinching ways, the magazine I review audiobooks for recently slashed the (already shockingly low) amount they pay for reviews, so I've reluctantly decided not to continue with the audiobooks, though I'll probably still do cookbooks since I'll always cook. I mean, I'll always want to read too, obviously, and it has been convenient to have the books on CD, but they're usually not books I really really want to read, and the review writing takes so *&%$^ long. The last one I got, which I just finished, was Isabel Allende's new memoir, The Sum of Our Days, and I have to say that I really didn't like it at all. She writes well, yes, but even though she has a somewhat interesting life, her stories are mostly about her friends and odd family and I don't know, it was just hard to care. I'm not a memoir hater -- in high school I had a whole year of a special honors English class where we read terrific memoirs and worked on our own (ha! at 16!) -- but this one just struck me as self-indulgent and bizarre. She's already written a memoir and a book about her daughter's untimely death (of porphyria and medical incompetence), and her novels have always had a strongly autobiographical tilt (deny it though she does), and I just felt that she didn't have enough good material to put into this one, like she was just writing it to write -- in fact, she admits as much at the start, talking about how she "has" to start a book every year on a certain date in January or it's bad luck. The book is written as sort of an update letter to her dead daughter; there are some interesting parts and, as noted, she does have a lovely way with words (of course, this was translated from the Spanish), but it still just struck me as unnecessary. Maybe I'm being too hard on it and her; it didn't help that the audiobook narration wasn't very good -- the reader didn't seem to have real Spanish fluency or even a knack for imitating the accent. When she spoke as Allende speaking it was a very stereotypical, heavy-handed "Espanish" take, which I guess might be true to life, I've never heard Allende speak myself, but I didn't like it. So that's that...now I am really going to have to get serious about making an effort to get back to reading on my own. First I just have to wade through my magazine stack...then I have to decide WHICH book I want to read out of the hundreds that I've been dying to crack open...but then, then it will be back to goodness.

Back when I bought my tickets to the Nrityagram performance at the Joyce (mentioned in this post from February), I bought a ticket to ABT's pre-professional/studio company's spring recital; I went to the performance Sunday (yay cheap tickets!). It can be exciting to see young dancers perform because there's always the chance that one of them is going to be a big star, and overall their abilities are usually quite impressive and worth seeing anyway.

I wasn't completely overwhelmed by anyone's talent in this performance, and I was greatly underwhelmed by the new choreography that was presented -- Brian Reeder's "Cake," about Marie Antoinette's life, that was fluffy and silly and to me (in contrast with the NYT critic's take) uninteresting, bordering on irritating. The evening's highlights pretty much all involved the pairings of Sae Eun Park and Isaac Hernandez, who even at their young ages seemed quite comfortable together, as though they had been partners for years. Hernandez was pretty skilled when he danced with the other young women, too, but Park was definitely the best of the bunch, and for lifts it certainly didn't hurt that she's a wisp; I could probably bench-press her with one hand. The recital planners clearly counted on all this because that pair together, and the dancers individually, were shown off more than any others, it seemed; most notably, they danced the Act III Pas from Don Quixote. Or maybe it just seemed to me that Hernandez and Park danced more than others because they were so much more magnetic on stage. In any case, that was fun to see. Mara Thompson was memorable as Marie Antoinette, too, the ridiculous choreography notwithstanding. I could go on at length about my skepticism with regard to the value of these kinds of studio companies for young dancers, and how it seems to me that rather than incubators they may tend to be stagnators, but I'll stop there. The dancers I saw were all obviously well-trained, eager, and fun to watch, even if it's all technical sparkle and little individual artistry yet (as the Times critic complained). I hope they go on to successful careers.

I've been much too busy and not getting enough sleep lately, and haven't had time to keep up properly here, but should note that I did make it back to BAM for another performance of Endgame, since I slept through it when my dad was here. And I loved it, of course. So poignant, shot through with black humor, utterly true and devastating. The audience laughed a bit too much, I think; the comic side of the play is brought out more than I'm guessing it sometimes is, largely because of John Turturro's deadpan delivery, but I think a lot of the people around me weren't soaking in the darker significance (which I, naturally, think is the more important one). Oh well...I hope I will get to BAM more next year, they do bring in such good international theatre and dance. I was considering becoming a member but there really just aren't enough benefits at the low friend level I would be at. Obviously it's good just to support the place, but earning what I do, there has to be more in it for me.

The other recent event of note was my last concert at the Met, by Arnold Steinhardt; it was a "masterwork" program so at least half of it involved him reading his interpretation of the music (Bach's Chaconne) from his book Violin Dreams...and with someone droning on in a dark auditorium, guess my body's response. Sadly I wasn't able to stay awake much even when he started playing. I felt terrible, but what could I do? Well, I need to get more sleep...that's a given. But as for real options, I don't know. If only we didn't need to sleep! That reminds me of my favorite Arcade Fire lyric (OK, the only AF lyric I really know off the top of my head)..."sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is...people say that you'll die faster than without water, but we know it's just a lie to scare their sons and scare their daughters..." Yeah. I try not to give in. But sometimes I have to. I just need to make sure it doesn't happen at things that I've paid to attend.

The amount of baking I've done lately is pathetic. I wouldn't even write the post that I'm about to if I had done more, but I just haven't had the time, or in some ways the inclination, since I need to eat less bread (sob!) and I don't know enough people who really seem to appreciate it when I give them bread. I mean, I don't need a card or a bouquet of flowers as thanks, but sometimes people barely thank me, and I'm sorry, that just bothers me.

So anyway, here I am with a reviewing project, a compendium of supposedly you-won't-believe-it's-gluten-free recipes. I sucked it up and bought the special ingredients necessary (xanthan gum, which sounds bizarre but is actually natural; special flours like rice and potato; potato and corn starch; apple cider vinegar; a bunch of other stuff) and set to experimenting. I was not very pleased with the results. Some of the loaves looked OK on the outside but none of them tasted right. They were all very spongy. I've never had anyone else's gluten-free bread but I can't imagine it would be any better -- it just can't be, that's why bread has gluten, to give it the bread structure we all know and love. I had a few complete disasters, like the flatbread and cinnamon loaf; the crackers were probably the best, especially since they had some cheese flavor. I don't know, I might be cutting down on bread in my diet but I would never replace it with stuff like this. I must pray that I never develop gluten intolerance. I don't know what I would do. I guess I could just bake for others, but I fear I wouldn't be able to resist sneaking pieces of the dough. With these doughs, it was easy not to tear off a piece to eat. The doughs were super wet and unappetizing; that was a major problem I had with the cookbook overall, it's supposed to be for beginners in gluten-free baking (and other cooking) but there's very little detailed description about what to expect from the doughs. There's more description in my bread books about what to expect from regular doughs, for crying out loud! Anyway, I'm glad this is over, even if I don't get back to baking as frequently as I was for awhile...baking good bread infrequently is better than having to deal with this stuff. Blech.

Monday night my dad might have left, but my schedule continued to be impressively packed. I can't remember exactly how I learned about this, but some time ago I found out that Shearwater, a group a quite like, was coming out with a new CD, and if I pre-ordered online via the Matador label site I could also get a ticket to a concert they were giving in a proper concert hall -- my favorite kind of show. So naturally I did that. Of course, I was an idiot and forgot to bring my confirmation email to the show, so I couldn't pick up my CD there, but they're supposed to send it to me. The concert was basically just the band playing the CD, anyway, and it was great. I am all for more people including harps in their orchestral rock arrangements. The harp is the most glorious instrument -- I'm sure I've blathered on about this before. Anyway the video that accompanied the music reminded me of rock operas that I half-watched as a child, at least in that there did seem to be something of a story threading through, and the band member being filmed (the drummer) looked pretty seventiesish. I don't know how to explain it more coherently, that's just how it struck me while I was watching, the way that the concert progressed. The music isn't seventies/eighties at all, of course, it's Shearwater's own brand of soaring strings, vocals, and trumpets that at times feels somewhat like other groups I've been listening to but definitely distinctive in other ways too. Good stuff. Quite brief, as well, just 35 minutes or so.

I recently acquired a couple other real, physical CDs that I couldn't download fully -- Wakey!Wakey!'s "Silent as a Movie" which I didn't realize was comprised of live sets so I thought by buying the CD rather than downloading those I could find online (and there are quite a few) I would be getting the real one...but not. Oh well, it's still a great CD, particularly LGA,

the song that hooked me in (so heart-rending and perfect), and when the person at the label sent it to me, he also included a CD by the Bloodsugars that I like pretty well, their first EP -- he wrote a sticky-note saying he sent it because it was sunny outside. See, these are the times when one remembers how nice it is to deal with actual people, the idea that there is someone thinking about things when I send an email into the void, if that makes any sense. Even more than getting the Wakey!Wakey! CD which I had been pining for, that made my day.

My dad came to visit this past weekend; it's kind of a tradition for him to come in the spring and my mom to come in the fall, I don't know why. I guess in the past I was often moving from one place to another and he always helped. I'm going to be moving this year too but not for another month...more on that later!!!! So this time he and I just got to hang out, which was great. I could and probably should write separate posts for everything but I just don't have the time and I'll get behind if I try, I know that much.

So I will just have to recap: the first night, we had a spicy dinner of Chinese-Indian food (another tradition, he and I always go to a restaurant with a different kind of ethnic cuisine for every meal), then went to the newish venue, which I am appalled to say I didn't know about, The Stone. I would have liked to have stayed for both sets, because the first, the group Victrola, wasn't that great and the other was by the New York Miniaturist Ensemble and sounded really interesting. But I got the feeling my dad was ready to go. I need to keep track of The Stone and go back soon, I just can't believe I wasn't aware of it before. After that, thanks to a suggestion from a friend at work, we went to ChikaLicious, where amazingly we didn't have to wait that long and had a terrific dessert.

The next day we hung out and went to my new apartment...yes, yes, I have it but the lease hasn't quite started and I'm not moving in until my other lease is up, I will write about it in good time. In the evening we went to a concert at Bargemusic, two elderly lady Russian/Georgian pianists playing Mozart and Schubert. It was quite lovely though I was very tired. Afterward we had a terrific meal at Boqueria; again we lucked out with getting in, since the Tribeca Film Fest was on and there were tons of screenwriter types around, but it was pretty late by the time we got there. It was supposed to be a light meal but there was so much that looked good on the menu that we ended up ordering quite a lot, and it was definitely worth it. On Saturday we spent some time looking at apartments that were for sale, and went to the Met for a little while, though I could barely stand up because I was so exhausted -- it was really bad, I don't think I saw much of the Courbet exhibit, so I will have to try to get back. I don't know why I was so tired, other than the usual reasons, but this really seemed over the top.

On Sunday, I was pleasantly surprised when he agreed to go with me to a friend's housewarming in Park Slope. He and I are both kind of antisocial, or at least we can be, much in contrast to my mother. We didn't stay long at the housewarming because the subway was being its usual annoying self and delayed us by at least 45 minutes, and I wanted to go to Prospect Park after. I had considered going to the Sakura Matsuri festival in the Botanic Garden again, but when we got to Prospect Park it was so gorgeous just there, without the extra walk and fee and crowd hassle, that we just wandered around its lush grounds.

Then we hoofed it to BAM to see Beckett's Endgame, starring John Turturro among others...and I am sorry to say that I couldn't stay awake for much of it. My dad pinched me every 10 seconds but to no avail. I was so dead tired, it was out of control. This show I have to try to see again, though, I don't care if I have to buy expensive tickets in order to do it -- I love Beckett, I could tell from what little I did see that the production is terrific, I can't let it go. Why must I be so tired?? Cripes. Anyway, it was still a really nice last day, capped by a dinner at Zoma, a semi-new Ethiopian restaurant in my neighborhood (and close to the "flophouse" where he was staying in central Harlem), which was quite nice. Wish my parents could visit more often.