A belated birthday weekend outing to the Jersey Shore. We started out at The Borgata (thanks, ML and LL!) where Mom won $18 on her first pull of the slot machine, and true to her word, quit while she was ahead.
Eventually, we made our way to the Boardwalk, which was (for better or worse) significantly more populated than the last time we were here.
Check out the full flickr set here.
Today at lunchtime, we headed west to the World Financial Center to catch the live performance of “Swoon!” by Melbourne-based performing arts company Strange Fruit. The unique troupe specializes in large-scale, acrobatically choreographed pieces performed using 12-foot high flexible poles.
Over 20 awe-inspiring minutes, the expressive quartet emoted a story of “love, loss, joy and freedom,” as they dipped, twirled and swayed high above the enchanted onlookers (and a few flummoxed passersby) on the plaza, with the Hoboken skyline as a backdrop.
Check out the full flickr set of their performance here.
Inside the glass and steel Winter Garden: Summer’s Palate – yet another food festival: this one showcasing the signature dishes and desserts from the WFC’s seventeen restaurants and cafes.
Johnney’s Fish Grill crab cakes:
To ring in her third decade, AH had scheduled two weeks worth of celebrations in two states – the first of which was taking place tonight at Sincerely, the weekly Sapphic mixer at Dirty Disco on 14th Street. The club opened last Fall and is apparently too cool for a sign.
By the time we arrived, a few hours into the festivities, the guest of honor was in such a state it called to mind for me the anecdote about Dylan Thomas’ final visit to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. According to legend, the Welsh poet collapsed at his favorite haunt on November 8, 1953 after uttering his famous last words. He died at St. Vincent’s Hospital the following morning. Wikipedia disputes the veracity of the story, putting the drunken declaration on November 3, a few days before the man’s demise. Either way, Thomas’ world-class boozer status is never in doubt.
On the way home — after we saw AH safely into a car — I met a burlesque dancer for the second time in my life.
On historic Stone Street with its 1830s Greek Revival buildings, rebuilt after The Great Fire of 1835.
And just down the block, tucked beneath the scaffolding enveloping Delmonico’s Steak House: another random sighting from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
An iced coffee would have been divine right about now… if only the financial district Starbucks would get with the program. (We tried.)
Governors Island was hosting its first ever Figment festival, a “one day celebration of art and creative culture.” The free, volunteer-driven event was envisioned as a scaled-down, East Coast Burning Man, with attendee participation highly encouraged in the form of costumes, games, music and dance performances.
Knowing how these things can play out, we would have set out for the ferries much earlier in the day, but I was determined not to miss another clinic session after last week’s medical emergency. By the time we arrived downtown at the Battery Maritime Building, the line for the ferries was literally thousands long – thanks in likely part to the beautiful weather and The New York Times piece from two days earlier, promoting the festival.
After wiling away about half an hour – during which we made a couple of new hoop friends – we did a quick calculation and concluded that it would be logistically impossible to get through the line, onto Governors Island and back to Manhattan on the last ferry at 5:00PM.
We had no choice but to abandon this mission. Prudent call, as we learned the following day; thousands were turned away when capacity was reached.
Since we were determined to make it onto the water that afternoon, we made the executive decision to sail into Staten Island instead. But what to do there? I recalled a conversation with CF in which she mentioned her husband’s favorite family-run pizzeria from childhood. After some key Google searches (via HYB — thanks!), we had it: Denino’s Pizzeria & Tavern on Port Richmond Avenue.
I hadn’t been on the orange ferries since last summer and on the Staten Island buses, well… ever, so this was quite an adventure.
We found the nondescript brick-faced restaurant off the S44 route with little difficulty, strolled into the dining room and were seated almost immediately by the cheery hostess. After the DiFara’s ordeal, such ease was extraordinarily refreshing. The second pleasant surprise came with the menu prices: $13.50 for the sausage and mushroom special pie? $3.50 for a half pitcher of soda – a half pitcher of domestic draught for just a quarter more?
And what of the pizza itself? Standard sauce, gooey cheese… the sausage was generous without being overwhelming, the mushrooms not too weighed down by water. I love mushrooms on pizza, but so often they compromise the integrity of the crust. Not here: Denino’s was hefty, yet crispy – the result of seven decades’ experience honing the temperature at which to bake the dough. The pizzeria’s rightful claim to fame is emblazoned on their takeout boxes: “In Crust We Trust.” Time Out New York named their pie the second best in the city in 2006 (behind you-know-who.)
For dessert we did as the locals do: crossed the street to Ralph’s Famous Italian Ices, which has been serving Staten Islanders since 1928. Under the bright blue and white striped canopies, a trio of teenage girls efficiently doled out frozen concoctions in scores of flavors: water- and creme-based ices, nonfat frozen yogurts, hard and soft ice creams, smoothies and the occasional “Ralphaccino.”
Lemon and peach water ices — flecked with real fruit. Another bargain at $2.00 apiece:
At the Village Theater on Bleecker for “Escape from Bellevue,” an autobiographical “rock ‘n’ roll odyssey” written and performed by Christopher John Campion, front man of the New York-based indie rock band Knockout Drops.
Campion was the star of the evening: the trajectory of his tale is familiar to anyone who has ever watched an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music“: from rise to fall to redemption. With admirable charisma, he wove together highly personal stories of the band’s origins in Long Island, his series of failed romances, his Manhattan rock star lifestyle, and the increasingly frequent drug and alcohol binges that ultimately threatened to destroy his life. In between vignettes, there were hard-rocking songs by the band – amplified at near-painful volumes – and a few prankish video and animation shorts.
Comedy is tragedy plus time: the show’s title refers to Campion’s three hospitalizations at the infamous Bellevue mental hospital — the second of which ended (crazily, allegedly) with his being the first man since 1963 to smooth-talk his way out of psych ward confinement. In his retelling, the episodes play out like a series of high-spirited highjinks before the inevitable sobering reckoning; one cannot help but sense how things could have taken a much more dire turn if not for the timely intervention of concerned friends and family.
On the strength of this show, Campion was signed to a book deal with Penguin’s Gotham Books. Look for Escape from Bellevue and Other Stories, coming to bookstores in 2009.
Back to P.S. 1 for Week 2 of the 2007 Warm Up series. This time around, I accompanied J for an architect’s view of the Ball-Nogues “Liquid Sky” installation and the whimsical poster series curated by Israel Kandarian.
We arrived in LIC, bracing ourselves for a crowd similar to the one I encountered last week, but this afternoon the scene was remarkably sedate. What’s this? Hardly a line outside, where last Saturday it wrapped around the block… no crowding at the bars, and actual floor space visible in the courtyard outside the museum…?
It seems almost every other hipster was at the 77BoaDrum show at Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in DUMBO, where Japanese band Boredoms staged a 77-minute, 77 drummer performance, in celebration of 7/7/7. The Times was somewhat unimpressed by the stunt, but no matter: the line for the free show stretched over half a mile long. New York magazine summed up the overwhelming response in the week’s “Approval Matrix” feature — That’s NYC: A million fun things to do; a million people who want to do them.
Decisions, decisions. I had to bow out of JL’s belated birthday celebration at Bon Chon – Korean fried chicken: it’s the Next Big Thing! – due to pre-existing plans in Greenpoint the same evening. Not that my presence is actually all that much in demand; July happens to be a popular month for birthdays – second most in fact, just behind August. In any case, I was hoping to cruise by still on the goodwill generated by my birthday gift to JL of some two decades ago: ZZ Top’s Afterburner – on cassette, obvs – during our first summer at CTY (read: geek camp.)
Unbeknownst to me, the Reuters boys had already begun the festivities several hours before my arrival with German chocolate cake. I turned the corner on Manhattan Avenue to discover a couple of serious Żubrówka-fueled photo shoots already in progress.
The boys agreed to take a break at the spin-off location of the much-loved Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, which opened last month on Commercial Street in the space that once housed our favorite Greenpoint Jamaican (then later: not-so-Jamaican) café Bleu Drawes.
Instead, we found two rather forlorn looking girls and a man who I assumed was their father, sitting on the benches outside the shuttered storefront. No ice cream today. The man confided that he’d never actually seen the shop open for business. With no operating phone it’s difficult to confirm, but New York magazine reports that a sidewalk crêpe cart – ooh, crêpes! — is in the works for summer’s end, so we’ll just have to keep coming back to check.
On Franklin, our ears were met with a tinny tune on incessant loop, which could only signify one thing. Not Mister Softee, (R.I.P.) but his fiesty Brooklyn cousin: Kool Man.
This being Brooklyn and not the UK, there would be no 99s for AC. And while the menu was more familiar to me (soft serve cones, Klondike bars, Popsicles, and good ol’ American Bomb Pops), the tune emitted from the brightly logoed truck was not quite that earworm of a jingle that I recalled from all my own childhood summers, but rather “Turkey in the Straw“… with a pounding back beat, which somehow, among the warehouses, felt just right.
Back to Cantoon Garden on Elizabeth for another helping of the Braised E-Fu Noodle with Black Mushroom with a side of the baby bok choy. Is it possible that the dishes were even larger than the last time? This is what the platter looked like after we had both eaten our fill:
On the way back to the Canal Street Station, we stumbled across one of the new(ish) R2-D2-wrapped mailboxes that the United States Postal Service rolled out in March to help commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) — the second highest domestic grossing film of all time. (#1 is either Titanic or Gone with the Wind, depending on whether the adjustment is made for inflation.)
The whimsical tribute to the 2003 Robot Hall of Fame inductee is appearing in 200 cities nationwide to promote the USPS’s new Star Wars -themed products: a set of fifteen first class stamps and three Express Mail envelopes — none featuring the much-maligned Jar Jar Binks.
It was J and J’s first Independence Day on the Upper East Side, and we decided to take full advantage of their new strategic location to view the Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks.
We made our climb up the stairs stealthily so as not to draw the attention of the other residents, who would no doubt be competing with us for standing room atop the building. When we emerged on the roof, we were surprised to find it empty of all but one other couple – no doubt due to the chilly rain, which had just begun to fall shortly before 9PM.
Or maybe because you can’t actually see the fireworks from this vantage point. D’oh! We made this realization after huddling under our umbrellas for about ten minutes, as the sounds (but not the sights) of the pyrotechnic show began somewhere south and east of us.
Plan B: to the streets, where thousands of other would-be spectators were converging along the East River. A few blocks north, we joined a small crowd gathered on the cul-de-sac by The Belaire from which we could almost – almost — make out the fireworks being shot off beyond the Queensboro Bridge.
Plan C: We were going to have to cross that bridge over the FDR.
Which we did, catching the tail-end of the spectacular half-hour show.
