vip in the city

Sunday Jazz @ MoMA Summergarden

Arrived at The Museum of Modern Art Summergarden just before doors opened at 7:00PM for the 8:00PM concert. By then, there were a couple hundred people ahead in line; luckily, that night the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden was set up to accommodate over 800 people. We ended up with seats between one of the reflecting pools and Donald Judd’s Untitled (1968). Despite the oppressive heat of the waning day, by concert time, the garden was standing room only.

On the program was a jazz performance by Steve Coleman and Five Elements. The alto saxophone, trumpet, trombone, bass, drums and vocal ensemble played an impressive 90-minute suite as night shadows descended upon the space. I would have enjoyed the concert much more had we not been beset by infuriating rudeness on all sides: in front, one man decided to use the Judd sculpture (a series of large, open, painted green rectangles) as his personal shoe rack, until ordered by one of the guards to kindly remove his socks(!) and sneakers from the artwork, thank you; to our right, a pair of eurotrashy women co-opted the section’s one walkway for their personal lounge area, laying fully supine on the marble tile next to the water, while everyone else was forced to navigate precariously around them to pass; and in the row directly behind, a French couple prattled loudly and obliviously through most of the performance with complete lack of regard for those around them who were there to listen to the music. Mon Dieu!

EH was friends with the singer and introduced us to her after the show. After parting ways with the others outside MoMA, we got to introduce AC (aspiring dentist, whom I met that night) to the joys of late night burgers at Burger Joint, one of my favorite no-longer-secret places in New York – now almost entirely ruined, thanks to write-ups like the one in GQ Magazine, naming theirs among one of “The 20 Hamburgers You Must Eat Before You Die.”

Aristide Maillol’s The River :

Bastille Day 2006 Redux

Although Friday July 14 was Bastille Day, the French Institute Alliance Française (FI: AF) held its annual fête on Sunday afternoon, July 16, this year.

The French Institute and the Alliance Française de New York (Nouveau York?) originally operated as two separate organizations, but merged in 1971 to form the largest Alliance Française in the United States; their Haskell Library is the most comprehensive private collection of French volumes in the nation.

No waiter races this year, but there was plenty of good, French fun to be had. We arrived in time for the “Fun with French” comedy/musical performance of stripe-shirted Jacques and Marie. The stands lining East 60th Street offered crepes, creme brulée, eclairs and vichyssoise – somewhat classier that the standard street fair fare of sausage and peppers and deep fried funnel cakes.

Children gathered at the (ineffectually sloped) sand pit for rounds of pétanque — the French version of bocce.

While the American origins of vichyssoise have been debated by culinary historians, its creation is generally attributed to French chef Louis Diat, who created the soup for the opening of the Ritz-Carlton rooftop restaurant in New York City. In his 1961 “Gourmet’s Basic French Cookbook,” Diat recounted that as a child in France, his maman would serve him warm leek and potato soup for breakfast, which she would sometimes cool with milk. So while Diat was certainly not the first to combine leeks, potatoes and cream in a soup, he added the innovation of serving it chilled, and dubbing it with its current name, after his birth town, Vichy.

Interestingly, the quintessential French dish coq au vin was, according to popular myth, invented by an Italian. Sort of. The legend goes that when Caesar conquered the Gauls, the inhabitants of the area – now modern day France – presented him with an old rooster as a sarcastic tribute. Instead of being galled at their impudence, Caesar ordered his chef to stew the tough bird in wine and served it to the Gauls for dinner. In urban dictionary parlance, this would be known as “flipping the script.” Or the bird. Nowadays, of course, the dish is almost always prepared using a poule/chicken instead of an old coq/cock.

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I indulged in some overpriced but refreshing lemonade (rather: citron pressé) at the fair, unwittingly opting to pay the 50% premium for quality. Hours later, in the much needed oasis of air-conditioned cool at the TimeWarner Center, I paid for more quality lemonade from Bouchon Bakery.

La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres. (Alas, the flesh is weary, and I have read all the books.)
– Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)