vip in the city, page 12

After a light dinner at the not-so-divey Dive Bar on W. 96th Street — hey, I wasn’t about to cross the picket lines at Saigon Grill — we headed over to Peter Norton Symphony Space for the taping of John Oliver‘s upcoming Comedy Central special (scheduled to air on April 20).

We both knew the drill and made sure to arrive early, queuing up for our spots in the cold outside the theatre. And it was a biting, bitter cold, too: the type that chills to the bone, and against which no amount of Starbucks skim chai latte could insulate us. By the time were given the go ahead to file inside, I was in serious need of some warming laughter.

Oliver rose to the occasion brilliantly, delivering the kind of sharp, smirking political commentary — offered in dry British tones, “with more authority than you’re used to hearing” — that makes him such a popular correspondent on The Daily Show. He proved a remarkably good sport, too: about fifteen minutes in, the AV crew lost power to the video screen on stage, requiring Oliver to backtrack and run through a rather lengthy segment of his act several times — with the exact same jokes and “spontaneous” inflection. No doubt a nightmarish scenario for any comedian, but Oliver’s chucklingly rueful gamesmanship earned him an enthusiastic round of applause at the end.

Giving full credit (or blame) to the “10-year old Indonesian boy” to whom he had outsourced his joke-writing, Oliver covered topics ranging from colonialism, how Americans view the rest of the world, the school track incident that led him to pursue a career in comedy over sports, his teary-eyed Pavlovian response to all images backed by cheesy 80s power ballads (looking at you, Divine Miss M) and, with fellow comedian Andy Zaltzman, offered a brilliantly loopy argument on how the erosion of civil freedoms is a valid homeland security strategy, as it eliminates the very thing which the terrorists find most hateful about our country, thereby making us less appealing a target.

Also, some trenchant observations about American culture, as epitomized by the existence of a market for the inflatable floating grill — a barbecuing device used for cooking inside a swimming pool. Oliver cited the ludicrousness of such an invention as definitive proof that in terms of the sheer force of consumerism, America has no peer. Take that, China!

The roots of conspicuous consumption may be traced to post-World War II-era prosperity. We — as Americans, and particularly as New Yorkers — live in a culture driven by “stuff,” where so much of our lives revolves around the acquisition of material things as markers of a certain type of success. I found this recent New York magazine piece particularly resonant: “The Upside of the Downside — Why the Recession May Restore the City We Moved Here For.”

Despite being aware of “how loaded we are, comparatively speaking, and not just loaded in that abstract compared-with-the-developing-world way… loaded compared with most of the people in this city,” I too feel the “psychic effect of living in a place that is so in thrall to money, so dominated by the monoculture of luxury that even if you’re not on the front lines, working for a hedge fund or whatever, the values encroach on your life.”

I don’t know. Maybe that MacBook Air commercial is just getting to me.

After years of protests led by the Open Washington Square Park Coalition, Justice Joan A. Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan approved Washington Square Park’s renovation plan in early December.

The work includes moving the park’s fountain, shrinking the central plaza and raising it to street level grade — transforming the park into a garden-style pass-through mall, surrounded by a four-foot fence, which critics claim will make the park less hospitable to spontaneous gatherings.

I remember a time when the “spontaneous gatherings” were mostly drug dealers, pouncing upon and offering their wares to every junior high schooler who happened to cut through the park.

The City Bakery, which opened on West 18th Street in 1990 and entered the pop culture pantheon with the Season 5 “Critical Condition” episode of “Sex and the City,” has been credited with introducing the city’s first designer hot chocolate. The über-rich, molten concoction — available by the cup ($4.50) or the shot ($2)… add another 50¢ for a homemade marshmallow — is made from a combination of milk, cream, and mostly European melted bar chocolate. No powdered cocoa here: it’s the drink that eats like a meal. The gourmet recipe has been named consistently among the city’s best — earning “four stars” from New York magazine and a mention in the recent New York Times piece on the city’s hot chocolate fetish.

During the entire month of February, as it had for the past 16 years, City Bakery held its own Hot Chocolate Festival, with a different flavored hot chocolate offered daily, in addition to the bakery’s signature blend.

Today’s flavor was “Darkest Dark Hot Chocolate.” Other offerings have ranged from the standard to the intriguing/pause-inducing, including Caramel, Cinnamon, Vanilla Bean, Ginger, Mango Tea, Banana Peel, Tropical, Lemon Licorice and Beer. There’s also a Chili Pepper — though for that flavor combination I like the new-to-my-neighborhood Jacques Torres’ “Wicked” hot chocolate, spiced with allspice, cinnamon, and ground ancho and chipotle chili peppers.

Then on to Aspen on 22nd Street for the Grand Marnier Après-Ski event.

I couldn’t have envisioned a more apropos venue than this Flatiron district restaurant-lounge cum retro ski lodge. Snowy forest photomurals — check! Lucite deer heads and white porcelain antlers mounted on wood paneling — double check! Central fire pit — you know it! Sexy snow bunnies wandered among the guests as a fake snow/foam machine whirred in the corner. I noticed bison sliders being passed around on trays, but in the spirit of après-ski, I made my way to the back bar where steaming cups of Grand Marnier-spiked hot chocolate were being ladled out.

As the boozy warmth spread through me, I wondered how well Aspen’s winter wonderland theme works the rest of the year.

At Carnegie Hall – not Lincoln Center, ahem! — for the New England Symphonic Ensemble program. It was an all choral line-up tonight, featuring Mozart’s Requiem, K. 626 as the highlight finale.

We had seats in the second tier center box, which was a perfect perch from which to take in the entire stage with its orchestra and hundreds of chorus members from five states. To start things off: George Frideric Handel’s “Sing Unto God” from his Judas Maccabeus, an oratorio written in 1746 — five years after Messiah. And then before the intermission break, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, which culls its lines from Act V of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

The man that hath no music in himself,/ Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,/ Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;/ The motions of his spirit are dull as night,/ And his affections darks as Erebus:/ Let no such man be trusted.

One distraction: although the program clearly requested that audience members hold their applause until after the final movement, we would invariably have to pause for the smatterings of claps at every break. Eh, whaddaya gonna do?

For the Requiem in D minor, a new set of choruses took the stage, many clad in navy choir robes. Mozart’s last composition is one of his most widely recognized works, not only for its music (which HYB posited as the only proof of the existence of God), but also for the mysterious circumstances surrounding the Requiem‘s commission, the debate over how much of the score is attributable to Mozart, and how much was later composed by his colleague Franz Xaver Süssmayr after Mozart’s death.

My first exposure to the score was in Amadeus. (Years later, though, my high school chorus learned excerpts of it for performance, including the rousing “Dies Irae“. And as I recall, the “Lacrimosa” was one of SS’s all-time favorite pieces of music.) That film went on to win eight Academy Awards, including best picture, and is responsible for cementing in many people’s minds several of the myths surrounding the Requiem (and of Mozart’s life, generally.) Foremost among these is the role of rival composer Antonio Salieri in commissioning the work, and ultimately hastening Mozart’s death.

As I sat listening to the eminently moving music, it occurred to me that Amadeus, which recently played in New York as part of the Milos Forman retrospective at the MoMA, was released in 1984 — which is to say: before most of the members of these high school and college chorus members were even born.

Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” was released the following year, in 1985.

I think that my parents have become those people for whom “antique” is a verb. Neighboring New Jersey is dotted with antique coops — sort of like antique “malls,” where individual dealers set up stands under one roof to showcase their wares. But instead of The Gap and Starbucks, there are stacks of old books and displays of furniture and assorted knick knacks. Today we visited shops in the sleepy towns of Mount Holly and Somerville.

Is the impulse to go searching for treasures hard-wired in us from our hunter-gatherer days? People spend entire weekends tooling around and shopping for antiques; it’s probably a more pleasant experience when one is not operating on a couple hours’ sleep.

And though I’m forced to self-edit my possessions due to Manhattan apartment space constraints — and therefore I tend to finish these forays empty-handed — I do appreciate the idea of these old things, which in other contexts might be considered trash, being re-purposed and re-loved.

We hopped the special events bus from Port Authority to East Rutherford, New Jersey where we had tickets to see the Harlem Globetrotters tonight. The game was taking place at IZOD Center (ne Continental Airlines Arena ne Brendan Byrne Arena), as it will be known for the next five-years under an October 2007 naming rights agreement with the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority (NJSEA).

The event was part of “Curly Neal Weekend“; the day before, the Harlem Globetrotters retired the popular player’s #22 jersey in a ceremony at Madison Square Garden. With that, Neal became just the fifth Globetrotter in the team’s 82-year history to have his number retired, joining Wilt Chamberlain (13), Meadowlark Lemon (36), Marques Haynes (20) and Reece “Goose” Tatum (50).

I’ve had a soft spot for the Globetrotters since I was a girl; the Hanna-Barbera animated series (1970-1972) may have predated my time, but I fondly recall their appearances on Scooby Doo and one very special made-for-TV Gilligan’s Island movie. You know: the one where the Globetrotters represent the Castaways in a winner-take-Island basketball game against an evil corporate raider, who is represented by a team of robots? Um, yeah. Though it made for riveting drama in elementary school, I suspect that the movie may not hold up well under repeat viewing.

I don’t know what frame of reference kids today have for these talented ballplayers and their hijinks, but there were plenty of little ones in attendance tonight.

To kick things off, there were the Jabali Acrobats from Mombassa, Kenya: flipping, tumbling, limboing, jumping rope, and creating improbably precarious human pyramids. The troupe returned to entertain at halftime.

Globie the mascot, rallying the crowd for the team introductions:

Before the game, the Globetrotters thrilled the crowd with their signature circle warm-up, set to to the familiar whistling tune of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” After some rapid passing, the players each took a turn in the center of the circle to show off his impressive ball handling skillz.

What to say about the game itself? Over the years, the Globetrotters have played more than 20,000 exhibition games in over 100 countries, mostly against deliberately ineffective teams like the New York Nationals and tonight’s opponents, the Washington Generals. So technically this may have been a competition, but mostly we were there to observe the fun, games, and gags. The Globetrotters are miked during the entire game, so we were treated to running goofy commentary and trash-talking (all very PG, of course), plenty of slam-dunking, ball-spinning, dazzling dribbling, behind the back passing and alley-oops. There were breaks for audience participation and comedy skits; at several points, the game clock continued to tick down even when there was no actual basketball being played on the court. Details, details.

The Generals won their last game in 1971, on an overtime basket for a 100-99 score that ended a Globetrotters’ 2,499-game winning streak. No such luck tonight for the battered team. (The crowd was stacked against them from the very first moments: their coach was introduced as a Patriots fan, earning hearty boos in this arena adjacent to Giants Stadium.)

Throughout the evening, the Jumbotron broadcast a commemorative film, “Number 22 Counts Down His Top 22 Moments,” as fans cheered the familiar-looking bald man on the sidelines. I bet B that the Gilligan’s Island movie appearance would be #1; he believed that guesting on Scooby Doo would garner the top spot. Turns out we were both wrong — our picks were #4 and #7, respectively. Neal’s #1 moment was being inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame (as a team member) in 2002.

I guess that’s pretty good, too.

Check out the rest of the game photos on flickr.

On SYB’s actual birthday, we headed into Flushing for a Spicy & Tasty lunch. Only this time, unlike the last a couple of weeks ago, I managed to snap a few photos of the food. We love this place almost as much as Bruni does.

Sesame Cold Noodle. The first time I tasted a version of this dish was in the late-1980s, at my classmate DLW’s apartment on the Upper West Side. A few bites of those slippery noodles bathed in sauce that tasted like sweet, spicy peanut butter — which it probably was — and I was smitten. His mom, who had placed the order from their neighborhood Szechuan (now: Sichuan) joint was surprised by my unfamiliarity with this take-out staple. I tried to explain that it just wasn’t the type of Chinese food that came out of my Cantonese parents’ kitchen.

Spicy & Tasty’s version tastes nothing like Skippy®Creamy, but is just as addictive.

Our (mostly) meatless menu: Eggplant with Garlic Sauce and Mapo Tofu. ‘Til next time, Lamb with Chili Pepper…

And for dessert, we strolled around the corner to the Flushing Mall. Stepping inside this place is like a portal into another culture, with its maze of shops hawking gaudy fashions, cell phone accessories, Asian home furnishings, glittering jewelry, dry goods, CDs, DVDs and Daewoo and Haier electronics. But we were here for the popular food court on the lower level.

The set-up is reminiscent of the type of eateries found in Asia, worlds away from American suburbia where “food court” conjures images of Mrs. Fields, Cinnabon and Orange Julius (yes, it still exists! — just no longer in New York.) And this afternoon, as part of the ongoing New Year’s celebrations, there was even a concert, featuring erhu and pipa.

The bounty of regional specialties is served from stands that line the walls, fast food style: hand-pulled noodles, dumplings, congee, crepes, shabu shabu… We located the drinks and desserts stand and considered our options. Most of the food court’s posted menus don’t bother with English translations; this one did, but it provided precious little guidance.

I placed an order for “Red Bean Ice,” expecting a small dish along the lines of what is served at Otafuku. A minute later, I was summoned to the counter and handed this styrofoam bowl heaped with a mini-mountain of fluffy white ice shards, red beans, multi-colored flecks of agar-agar jelly and a scoop of red bean ice cream. Gadzooks, the whole concoction could have fed three or four, easily.

On a hot day — which, this being February, it most definitely was not — this super-sweet, frozen treat probably hits the spot.  One can also customize the ices from a fixins bar spread of day-glo colored toppings: candied fruits, tapioca pearls, various beans, condensed milk, syrups and jellies.

At the mall, having fun is what it’s all aboot!

At Grassroots Tavern tonight for SYB’s birthday celebration. CF and I headed to the East Village straight from the office and were among the first to arrive. Eventually, though, the revelers would total over 40 – all there to toast the man of the hour.

Grassroots Tavern is, not to mince words, a dive — “the only honest dive on one of Manhattan’s most gimmicky streets,” according to Time Out. Located in the basement of the landmarked Daniel LeRoy House, the bar has been around in its current incarnation since the mid-1970s, though its history as a drinking den dates to the 1940s. Cheap booze, low lighting, tin-pressed ceilings, battered wooden tables, dartboards (BYOD, though), an actual phonebooth by the front door and scary bathrooms…. the unpretentious vibe is a main reason that in 2007, Grassroots Tavern was named one of the 100 best bars in America by Esquire. There’s even a resident dog and cat prowling the grounds usually, though I didn’t see them tonight.

Worlds collided over mugs of beer, which was a fine thing… for the most part. And here, pitchers start at $9 – Bud, but still! – a price point rapidly going the way of the Noo Yawk accent. We sprung for the somewhat more upmarket Brooklyn Lager: it was a special occasion after all.

$1 baskets of popcorn were not going to tide us through this night. We weren’t nearly inebriated/college-aged enough for Mamoun’s next door, and the neighborhood’s tiny ramen joints probably wouldn’t accommodate our group of seven for dinner. We opted in the end to keep things simple by merely crossing St. Mark’s to Je’Bon — a newish noodle shop with a Thai, Japanese, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Cantonese menu. Usually I find such culinary schizophrenia suspicious, but the hour was late, and we were starving, so I was willing to make an exception here. And maybe it was the hunger, but my Pad Thai with Mixed Vegetable was surprisingly decent, and at just under $9, a bargain. I’ll remember this place for the next time I “trek through the tacky.”

Happy Valentines Day from the NYC Department of Health!

New York has been distributing free condoms since the 1970s, but last year the city revitalized its public health campaign by coming out with a distinct New York City-branded condom. Prior to the wrapper redesign, the city typically gave away 1.5 million condoms a month; in 2007, they doubled that number, doling out over 36 million LifeStyles condoms — a tribute to the lure of snazzy packaging.

This year, in addition to yet another new design, there’s also a new slogan — “Get some” — and a new media campaign by Yves Behar (founder of San Francisco-based Fuseproject) featuring web banners, posters plastered throughout the subway system, and television and radio spots in English and Spanish. In a classic screw-up, one of the print ads (.pdf) prominently features a not-very New York landmark: Toronto’s Gooderham Building, a.k.a. the “Flatiron Building” not located on 23rd Street between Broadway and Fifth. Is it not bad enough that the Canadian city so regularly stands in for New York on film and television?

To coincide with Valentines Day, street teams dispatched by the Department of Health were handing out free NYC condoms at hubs around the city. I met this cheerful volunteer at Wall Street and Broadway, where she had no difficulty whatsoever finding takers for her ample supply.

If you missed out, new round dispensers have been installed in 200 city venues, and are available through some 900 local businesses, clinics, and non-profit organizations throughout the five boroughs.

At the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater tonight for Rupert Goold’s justly celebrated production of Macbeth. The show makes its way to New York City for a (sold-out) five week run from England’s Chichester Festival Theatre and a sold-out West End run that earned Evening Standard Theatre Awards for the director and lead actor Patrick Stewart.

Anticipation has been high for the stateside transfer after the lavish praised heaped upon this production by the usually reticent British critics: The Evening Standard‘s Nicholas de Jongh pronounced it the “Macbeth of a lifetime“; The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer called it the “best Macbeth” he had ever seen – this from a man who presumably has seen a lot of Shakespeare.

What could I possibly add to all the rave reviews? Anthony Ward’s stark, grey-washed set generates a fitting level of eerie foreboding throughout as it multi-purposes as war hospital, a kitchen and a morgue. The visual projections on the back walls ranged from documentary footage of Stalin’s marching armies to dark, dripping blood, adding to the unsettling atmosphere. There were so many moments and performances to admire: Kate Fleetwood’s fiercely sexy take on Lady Macbeth… the innovative staging of Act III’s banquet scene: first as viewed through the guilt-crazed eyes of Macbeth, and then replayed after intermission from the perspective of his guests… the “weyard sisters” making their first appearance as preternatural field nurses, rap-chanting their “Double, double toil and trouble” spell amid zapping lights and booms of thunder (well, that may have been a little gimmicky)… the unbearably drawn-out, horror-stricken silence that follows when exiled future king Macduff (Michael Feast) is told the news of his butchered wife and children…

And of course, it hardly needs to be said that Stewart was sublime as Macbeth, making even the simple act of making and eating a sandwich completely menacing. And yet, for all his unchecked ambition and grand, brutal scheming, when he delivers the famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy in Act V, it is with the world-weariness of a soldier ready to head home.

This production deserves a wide audience, which it may get if speculation of a Broadway transfer proves true. If that happens, I would make but one suggestion: pipe in Alexander Courage‘s Star Trek fight theme music during the final Macduff-Macbeth showdown. Hey, it worked brilliantly in The Cable Guy.