At Ideya in SoHo for the Gothamist holiday party.
Did I really use the term “slow circling of the drain” while chatting with Editor and Co-founder Jen Chung? Good grief, talk about too much information.
At least the cubanos were tasty, and the mojitos strong. Perhaps too strong.
A little holiday shopping, a little holiday jazz. Rather unexpectedly, this turned out to be a very good day.
December 7, 2007. Yes, long overdue post, but this ties in with The New Group’s second show of the season (Mike Leigh’s Two Thousand Years) which I saw this week:
We were at The Acorn, front row center, for The New Group’s season kick-off production of Things We Want, Jonathan Marc Sherman’s bitterly funny new comedy. The play revolves around the plight of three very different adult brothers living together in their family’s 10th floor apartment, out of whose living room window both parents jumped to their deaths, in two separate incidents. (Granted, the real estate market can be notoriously tough, but you’d think they’d move. To a lower floor, at least.)
Ethan Hawke, about whom I have a lot of ambivalent feelings — loving him, in say, Richard Linklater’s Sunrise/Sunset movies, loathing his pretentious boorish tendencies in just about every other context — directs.
The cast is stellar: frequent Hawke and Sherman collaborator Josh Hamilton is eldest brother Teddy, who begins the play as a hyper-responsible devotee of self-help guru “Dr. Miracle” and his theories about the power of primes to impart life meaning. (Seven chakras, five senses, three words, one goal. Am I the only geek who wanted to point out that, technically, “1” is not a prime number? All right then.) In the year that elapses between acts one and two, during which (surprise, surprise) Dr. Miracle is exposed as a con artist, Teddy’s sanctimoniousness degenerates into a pool of selfish amorality and debauchery. Middle brother Sty, played by the consistently terrific Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent), takes the reverse trajectory: beginning the play as an awesome raging drunk, and maturing into a paragon of responsibility and compassion by way of Alcoholics Anonymous. Paul Dano (best known as the mostly mute brother in Little Miss Sunshine) plays the sensitive, youngest brother Charlie, in the process of recovering from the “heartbreakdown” brought on by being dumped by his culinary school girlfriend. And in the middle of everything — in almost every conceivable sense — is their coquettish downstairs neighbor/fellow-AAer Stella played by rising star Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of renowned On the Waterfront director, Elia Kazan. (Zoe made her Broadway debut in the current revival of William Inge’s 1950 melodrama, Come Back, Little Sheba, reviewed rhapsodically by The Wall Street Journal.)
Things We Want is former wunderkind Sherman’s first new play in nearly a decade, and since he has made no secret of his own troubled history with alcoholism and parental suicide, it is safe to assume that elements of this play are heavily autobiographical. The playwright has a definite knack for sharp comic dialogue, but here the occasional witty turn of phrase (and there are several) do not necessarily add up to fully developed characters, or plausible situations. The Times observed that “[f]or a certain breed of male New Yorker — a type often found at the Tribeca Film Festival or smoking between drinks on sidewalks near Lower East Side hot spots — Things We Want has to have the highest cool quotient of any show in town” and compared it “[i]n plot and sensibility…[to] a high-testosterone equivalent of Crimes of the Heart.”
The Voice critic was less charitable, calling the sight of Hamilton and Kazan in their underwear “the undoubted highlight of Sherman’s play.” (Well… it ain’t bad. Did I mention we had great seats?)
Back at the Met Opera tonight for the last performance of my winter season, before resuming with Tristan und Isolde in March.
We were there tonight for Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, an opera I’d not yet seen, despite its semi-regular rotation in the operatic repertoire. The eponymous lead soprano role in this 19th century Italian work is considered one of the greatest (and most difficult) in the bel canto canon — rife with the passion and melodrama for which opera is known. Norma tells the tragic story of a love triangle: the Druid high priestess has broken her vows of celibacy and borne two children with Pollione, the ruler of the opposing Roman army. After urging her Druid people not to war against the Romans, Norma learns that her lover has been unfaithful with Adalgisa, a young novice priestess — a betrayal which unleashes a torrent of emotions from revenge and despair to love and honor, all of which plays out against a background of war.
But somehow, we weren’t feeling it tonight. And after Norma sang her ”Casta Diva,” there seemed little reason to stick it out for the remainder of the evening.
Later that week, as I was puttering around in the kitchen, I once again heard the familiar strains of that beautiful aria coming from the television. I dashed into the living room just in time to catch the last seconds of a Jean Paul Gaultier Parfums commercial for “Le Male,” featuring the singular voice of La Callas, the most famous Norma of the 20th century.
No telling in what form the Bellini opera will return to New York: Renee Fleming recently abandoned plans to perform her Norma in a new Robert Wilson production for the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 season.
Three birthday celebrations in one week! This time SC was the honoree, and our destination was the Lower East Side. I learned later that day that in our trek through the New Museum galleries earlier this morning, we had somehow completely missed out on the drawers of candy up for grabs on the top floor during the opening; that’s what we get for bypassing the crowded bright green elevators, in favor of the stairs. (J & J, who were more thorough in their museum tour, brought me a souvenir bag later that evening, crammed with Jolly Ranchers, jawbreakers and other treats, so I was not deprived.)
Had we known about the candy-fest on the Bowery, we probably would not have felt compelled to stop in at Economy Candy on Rivington en route to meeting the rest of our friends down the block. This well-loved family-owned candy shop has been a neighborhood fixture since 1937. The shelves are crammed with almost every type of candy imaginable: a staggering variety of old-time favorites, European sweets and hand-dipped chocolate confections. Gummy brains. Wax lips. Candy cigarettes. Nerds. Pop rocks!
This was intended as a brief stop, but we each ended up laden with packages on the way to brunch. (The dark chocolate-covered pretzels proved irresistible to me this afternoon.) We did manage not to dip into our stash – for the most part – saving our appetites for Essex and its amazing $16 brunch deal, which includes 3(!) bloody marys, screwdrivers or mimosas. But who’s counting?
B ordered “The Southern” (biscuits, sausage patties & eggs with sausage gravy), which reminded me of the summer’s road trip breakfasts:
I went for the seared diver scallops, topped with potato pancake and poached eggs. Scallops again! Hmm, maybe this is how rumors get started?
Technically, the first snow of the season arrived on November 19, but that ephemeral dusting was so slight as to hardly register. The snowfall on Sunday morning December 2 was more substantial, and seemed to inaugurate the true start of winter.
Since its founding by the late Marcia Tucker in 1977, The New Museum has demonstrated a commitment to showing visionary, daring work by living artists. Over the next three decades, the museum would be housed in a series of roving spaces: a staff of three began with an office in the TriBeCa Fine Arts Building on Hudson Street, hosting exhibitions offsite at donated galleries at the New School, later working out of spaces on Broadway, and more recently occupying temporary quarters at the Chelsea Art Museum.
For its first permanent home, the museum commissioned a building with a relatively modest budget of $50 million by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based firm SANAA (an acronym for Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates). Prior to their hiring in 2002, SANAA had not yet built outside of Japan, which made the firm an unusual choice in this era of starchitects.
The results have been well-received: a seven-story stack of shimmering two-ply silvery grey boxes each teetering slightly off center, with three floors of exhibition space, levels for educational and administrative purposes, and a top floor offering open, spectacular views of downtown.
To commemorate the grand reopening of the New Museum, beginning at midnight on December 1, the museum was open to the public for 30 consecutive hours. We registered for tickets on Sunday morning, and at 10:00AM, we made our way through the falling snow to the Bowery to tour the new space.
The museum’s inaugural exhibition concentrates on works that are purposefully Unmonumental, the kick-off to a three part, five month long exhibition that explores sculpture, audio, and collage by some of the most prolific and relevant international artists today. Not particularly my taste: sculptures made from a bundled pillar of old clothes and stuffed animals (“Bale Variant Number 001”) by New Yorker Shinique Smith, a plywood box through which was threaded flea market belts (“Split Endz (wig mix)“) by Glasgow-based Jim Lambie, an arched sculptural stack of broken wooden chairs (“Myth Monolith (Liberation Movement)”) by Marc André Robinson… well, actually I did think that last one pretty cool, if precarious-looking.
The stark white galleries, hallways, skylights, and hidden stairways were a destination unto themselves, though: a marvel to be contained within the museum’s 71’ by 112’ footprint.
The view out through the metal mesh:
New Museum staircase:
For those who missed the grand opening in December (and who wish to bypass the usual $12 admission fee), the New Museum still offers free hours on Thursdays from 7:00-10:00PM.
For J’s milestone birthday, his dear wife had arranged a surprise gathering of friends and family at Fat Cat Billiards in the West Village. J suspected that a secret plan was afoot when PL requested his assistance with the family’s move from the Upper West Side to Edgewater, New Jersey that Saturday morning. (More defectors!) J gamely agreed, little knowing then that the request was, in fact, entirely serious. It must have been quite a letdown to arrive on the scene expecting a celebration and finding only heavy moving boxes. Worst surprise party ever!
The real festivities, of course, began later that evening, and did not involve manual labor. We paid the $3 cover for access to the subterranean pool hall/game room, with its décor reminiscent of a Disco-era suburban basement rec room… but in a good way. This isn’t one of those sceney pool lounge spots — just a low-key place to down cheap beer and shoot stick with friends. Dim lighting, live jam sessions, worn couches, mismatched tables, and strewn throughout: billiards and ping pong tables, shuffleboard, foosball, and board games galore. New York magazine named Fat Cat Billiards the city’s “Best Pool Hall” in 2001.
We arrived early to commandeer the seating area behind the bar — a space which we shared with the owner’s large, friendly dog. I’m still not sure whether he actually liked us, or the John’s of Bleecker Street pizzas we had ordered in.
Later that night, in the homier environs of the Upper East Side, we toasted the man of the hour over a beautiful Black Forest cake from SoHo’s Ceci-Cela Patisserie — a delightfully potent, almost victorious, confection of Cointreau-sponged chocolate cake, brandy-soaked cherries and airy layers of vanilla whipped cream.
In honor of HYB’s birthday (week), we ended up at BonChon Chicken in K-town tonight. The boys’ last run for newly trendy Korean fried chicken on the day before Thanksgiving didn’t work out when they arrived at 314 Fifth Avenue to find the place unexpectedly shuttered. Random closings occur not all that infrequently, apparently; Yelpers recommend that you call ahead for hours, despite what BonChon’s printed materials list as their hours of operation.
At 8pm this Wednesday, though, the bar restaurant was hopping. Although we were well prepared for a wait, the delay ended being rather longer than we expected, in part due to the infuriating flakiness of the hostess, who slipped in one newly arrived group ahead of ours. To be clear, I am aware of the practical necessity of seating by party size, and this was definitely just a case of poor management. We narrowly avoided a scene — those B brothers are feisty! — which got the evening off to a rocky start, but things could only improve from there.
I do like this chicken, but is it worth the hour’s wait for a midweek table? And the $40 cost for large (16-piece?) platters each of both “hot spicy” and “soy garlic” flavors?
The birthday boy thought not, but judging from the crowds that pack this place most nights, BonChon has no shortage of devotees. And wow, the “hot spicy” sauce is just that, in a way that sneaks up on you after just a couple of flats/drumettes/drumsticks. Alternating in pieces of the non-spicy soy garlic variety helps some to quench the fire, as do the accompanying cubes of sweet pickled daikon radish. (I’m not as much a fan of the Thousand Island dressed shredded cabbage.) Beer, too — in our case, a $25(!) pitcher of Killian’s Irish Red.
On the BonChon website, the chicken is promoted as food for “health conscious consumers“: “tasteful & nutritiously enriched” with “collagen ingredients promoting healthy and delicious texture and taste.” Seems I’ve heard this one before, and much as I’d like to believe it, I’m not entirely convinced.
Dubious health claims aside, I’m still looking to expand my K(orean)FC horizons. In July, The Voice‘s Robert Sietsema took a look at four Flushing franchises along the strip of Northern Boulevard between 150th and 160th Streets: Kyedong (150-54 Northern Blvd.), KyoChon (156-50 Northern Blvd.), BonChon (157-18 Northern Blvd.), and Cheogajip (160-24A Northern Blvd.). He rated BonChon a solid “B” — better than Cheogajip, but not as good as either KyoChon or Kyedong Chicken.
Hmm… Korean Fried Chicken Crawl 2008?
Sadly, I missed the big Winter’s Eve festivities in my neighborhood last night, which kicked off with the Lincoln Center Holiday Tree Lighting. It was such fun last year, but with the holiday season officially now in full swing, there just isn’t time enough for everything.
Tonight was to be something of an event: the gala premiere of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck‘s Iphigénie en Tauride. This new, much-celebrated Metropolitan Opera co-production with Seattle Opera is directed by Stephen Wadsworth (recently named the first Director of Opera Studies for the Juilliard Opera Center) and conducted by Mostly Mozart musical director Louis Langrée, in his Met debut. Americans mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and tenor Paul Groves, who opened London’s Royal Opera House season, took up the roles of Iphigénie and Pylade again tonight with the incomparable Plácido Domingo starring as Iphigénie’s brother, Oreste. (This Met production was also broadcast live on December 8.)
I knew nothing about Iphigénie en Tauride going in to the evening, though I had vague recollections of the Euripides’ drama that inspired it. Gluck’s opera premiered in Paris on May 18, 1779, but did not have its United States debut at the Met (in German) until 137 years later, on November 25, 1916. Since then it has only been staged five times, the last in 1917, so tonight was an occasion indeed.
We had planned on a special evening: the tuxes, furs and glittering jewels were out on display tonight, and how many opportunities do I get to don an evening gown, after all? Unfortunately, the lack of sleep these past couple of days finally took its toll tonight, and I ended up in the upper balcony, exhausted before curtain, and passed out in my seat by Act II. Now that’s embarrassing. No fault of the performances, though, which from what I recall were quite beautiful… and apparently very soothing.
As I slipped out during intermission, I passed Tyne Daly on the spiral staircase, whom depending on your reference point, is best remembered as Detective Mary Beth Lacey from 80’s cop show Cagney & Lacey or Maxine Gray from the 90s judicial drama Judging Amy. Did anyone else besides me have trouble distinguishing that latter show from Providence?
I missed the first of this season’s Town Hall film seminars tonight to attend the Prefuse 73 concert with B at the Bowery Ballroom. We were last here in April 2006 to catch fellow Warp artist, Jamie Lidell — an appearance which predated his breakout feature on Season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy.
After drinks in the lounge, we headed upstairs to stake out our strategic spots near the stage. First up: California-based duo Blank Blue. The band is a collaboration between producer Elvin Estela (a.k.a. Nobody) and vocalist Niki Randa, who first met in 2001 while working together at independent Long Beach record store Fingerprints Music. The adorably pigtailed Randa – over whom the guy next to me swooned, “Oh, I’m in lo-o-o-ove!” — celebrated her 28th birthday that night, with a Whole Foods cake presented to her by her bandmates.
Brooklyn troupe School of Seven Bells was up next. The members met in 2004 when their respective bands opened for Interpol on tour. Benjamin Curtis (then-guitarist of Secret Machines) joined with identical twins Alejandra & Claudia Dehezia (then of On!Air!Library!), who lend a bit exoticism, and considerable sex appeal, to the proceedings with their ethereal vocals. James Elliott (a.k.a. Ateleia) and drummer Joe Stickney round out the rest of the crew.
School of Seven Bells collaborated with Prefuse 73 on “The Class Of 73 Bells“ single.
Finally, the main event: [Guillermo] Scott Herren (a.k.a. Prefuse 73) – dubbed the “king of glitch-hop” (yet another of those genres I know hardly anything about) — was touring in support of his fifth full-length album, Preparations. The Brooklyn- and Atlanta-based producer (currently residing in Barcelona) has released music on several labels under various aliases, including Delarosa & Asora, Savath & Savalas, and Piano Overlord.
For this performance, a knit-capped Herren incorporated a live drummer to accompany his laptop renderings. B keyed me into the points in the set when Herren reached back into his old catalog, though I probably could have surmised as much from the crowd’s wild reactions.
The night ran late, which set the stage for what was to be a very, very long week.