Wilfrid

I will offer more detail on Partage when I get some downtime, but it’s really very good. And one of my appetizers last night will be in the running for dish of the year. Imagine a small crunchy sphere balanced on top of a torchon rabbit loin. Bite into the sphere and it’s stuffed with assertively flavored eel. Combine that flavor with the milder, perfectly cooked (not at all dry) rabbit and the results are incredible. Another dish that made me think of Wylie’s foie and anchovies although I very much doubt that Partage’s young French chef, who has been to NYC rarely, was influenced by it.

Oh, complicated story. No big deal.

Or indeed giant. Yes, so many memories.

Then Market must have been more busy in the past but it's certainly no ghost town now.

The physio is working for the shoulder, which is good because I can’t help being aware that the cost of each session is a fancy restaurant dinner. Not like four star. If only it was beer and a shot.

This is not a health issue, surely, it’s a running down of the restaurant reviews. I mean, there are understudies.

I was chatting with someone about my SF trip last night and they asked me if all the stories about a closed and deserted downtown were true. I didn’t see that. Maybe there were closed storefronts but it was just like 2019 for me. Busy downtown on workdays, sad in the Tenderloin. And my phone says I walked 20 miles; it was just normal SF for me.

Viva las really bumpy plane ride like several hours in a car with no suspension. Two drinks in, $50, but at least the second one didn’t come in a plastic glass. Looking down the barrel of something like a Bobby Flay burger (yes I could go off-Strip but I’m on past-midnight time and have an early start tomorrow). I guess I could pay $80 for a Gordon Ramsey beef Wellington. I could also eat “his” fish and chips in Times Square. I do have a good restaurant for tomorrow night, Partage.

Nobody done Cafe Carmellini yet? Looks like my kind of old school, stiff, snobbish place.

One amusing thing I forgot to note was that their current walk-on music is "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate, a hit some twenty years before Ana was born. :pop-music-stopped: We got another burst of it while Ana sought help with the reverse headstock.

My first residence in New York, Sondheim lived on the same floor while having his Turtle Bay place renovated. So I didn’t really need his number. But my fun story, same place, after I moved in I had a lengthy voicemail (land line) from Tony Franciosa, thinking he was speaking to a producer or agent about an opportunity. And it was so much his voice. It never occurred to me to record it as we didn’t expose everything on line back then.

That new Penn Station with its bars and dining options is a new Penn Station.

Watching Meet the Press this morning, I composed a (non-political) clerihew. Justice Stephen Brier Decided to retire. He did not approach the decision cynically. He just felt he was getting a bit too wrinkly. (I considered a limerick beginning “There was a young lady called Ronna” but abandoned it.)

Just finished “Paul Laurence Dunbar: Life and Times of a Caged Bird” by Gene Anthony Jarrett. From 2022, this is the first detailed biography and it’s remarkable to have a legendary figure brought into sharp focus. A bitter-sweet read; the unbelievable accomplishments before his death at 33 plus the TB, alcoholism and violence. For me, it also served as an introduction to his wife, Alice Dunbar Nelson, who had her own extraordinary life.

This would be a great show to pair with “Unnamed Figures,” which states its theme much more directly. Oh it just closed, here’s the catalog. https://shop.folkartmuseum.org/unnamed-figures.html Here’s a dose of the Gugg rhetoric. Mind my Foucault.

This one fills the rotunda. I had put off seeing it after witnessing a curious panel discussion in the Gugg theater some weeks ago. Connections had been made, not unreasonably, between the exhibit and Kayla Farrish’s brilliant dance piece “Put away the fire, dear.” The panel discussion featured the curator and two other women of obvious intelligence and sincerity talking like critical theory textbooks while Kayla wriggled on her stool like someone who would much rather be dancing. But of course it’s fine when you can just enjoy the art. Does all this talk about the erasure of the subject pussyfoot around the show’s real theme which is the erasure of the black subject (plus indigenous, Arabic…)? And isn’t part of the meaning of the show’s title that this is exclusively a show of artists of color (and mainly women)? Never mind, there’s good Faith Ringgold, Kerry James Marshall, some contemporary artists I didn’t know and a huge dose of Ming Smith.

Well I have never been there, as far as I recall, despite many shows at Theater Row and visits to Chez Josephine across the street.

As mentioned in other threads I did travel to SF to see Kayla’s astonishing “Put away the fire, dear.” And now I win the chance to see a solo performance by her next week in Chelsea. https://www.estrogenius.nyc/event-info/jasmine-hearn-kayla-farrish-maia-melene-durfe-carolina-marin-estrogenius-2024-expansion-at-the-cell-2024-03-29-19-00

Oh, okay.

He wrote about The Who?

Interview with Pete Townshend in the Times kicks off with author Rob Tannenbaum describing him as one of rock’s greatest *singers.* Really? Then the director of the new Tommy credits him with using “repeating musical themes, which Lerner and Loewe and Stephen Sondheim also did.” Yes, it probably begins with them. Even though Lerner was a lyricist. Then I stopped reading. Whatever happened to editing?

Also, “Alright Now” is the soundtrack for some kind of breathing or asthma med. Not quite as funny, but odd.

I wonder if Steppenwolf ever imagined that “Born to be Wild” would end up as the music on a TV ad for diapers?

But for so many years I thought I was done. Okay, I like this artist, I like that song, that album is okay (but I won’t play it more than twice). I didn’t expect to be crazy fanboy ever again.

They are so adorable. As I said to @small h I never imagined that at this stage in my life I would be absolutely crazy about some random band again. What a gift.