Wilfrid

Equally useful reports.

Now hilarious.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I am very amused that the commentary team have been calling the game for the Blue Jays all night. But 9th inning it's tied.

There if I need it.

That was a good game. Heads up dead ball call by the Dodgers. I don't remember seeing that before.

I went to refill one of my pepper cruets and the pepper container had got liquid inside and was just sludge. It doesn't really matter, but how?

And that is the best place to access it from.

Maybe just a half bottle then...

The Obituary looks good -- essentially a dry martini with a dash of absinthe. But is it worth buying a bottle of absinthe for? I guess I could make some Sazeracs. I have a big bottle of Peychaud's just sitting there.

This week, Ligayan on Korai Kitchen. A storefront in Jersey City that serves a tasting menu, two days a week only, to 15 people. Dinner ends after 11pm. No alcohol. The food looks lovely.

That is interesting, but long before the pandemic there were many restaurants -- especially Chinese and Indian -- which stood nearly empty night after night while filling take-out orders (not so much delivery back then). I always wondered how that model made sense, given the cost of the spaces they were occupying. Same today, for example at my local Indian, which rarely has more than one table occupied. The difference is the six or seven delivery drivers waiting to collect orders.

In sight of the end of Middlemarch. Henry James complained about it not being "compact" enough. Henry James. Sadly, the politicking around the Reform Act (1830? 1832?) has limited interest in 2025. But who could ever get enough of Dorothea?

I really wanted the book of the exhibit, but trying to control my book buying.

I saw Wayne Kramer Under Acme.

I did ponder that and you may well be right. I just don't remember exhibits of paintings regularly being so dark. And hey, MoMA has displayed those damn water lilies in bright rooms.

I lived on Avenue D for many, many years and that expression was way out of date. It's also worth noting that it's a relatively recent expression (circa 1980, per Wikipedia). Guess what the area was called before that? The whole expanse below East 14th Street was called the Lower East Side. (Repeating MitchW) That included the East Village, a term from the 1960s. Google Henry Roth's 1934 novel, Call It Sleep. It's referred to by everyone as set on the Lower East Side. It's specifically set on Avenue D, where Roth lived as a kid. I wonder if he ever used the term Alphabet City.

P.S. If you go on a Sunday, check out the oxtail patties at a stall in the Artisan Market in front of the museum.

Timed tickets only for the intended blockbuster, Monet and Venice, New York's biggest Monet show in 25 years (it says here). Negatives: It continues the trend of very dark exhibitions. You have to pass through three or four rooms with just about no lighting except for videos of water before you even get to the art. I hate this. A lot of the show is given over to representations of Venice that are not by Monet (Turner, Signac, Canaletto). Another big chunk is given over to Monet paintings that are not from his (one) Venice trip. One amusing revelation is that Mrs Monet seems to have dragged him to Venice to get him away from the damn water lilies. Positive: The nineteen Venice paintings by Monet are lovely. Most of them are in the last two rooms. But don't miss the large but much calmer show of photographs by Seydou Keïta, a Malian photographer active 1948-1962 (IIRC). The show has plenty of his contemporary vintage prints, but mainly focuses on the larger, crisper prints he* was able to produce when the technology became available (1990s). He's a portrait photographer, and I guess there were just a lot of wonderful faces in Mali. The women mostly wear forms of traditional dress with dramatic patterns. He often poses them against fabric backdrops, also with dramatic patterns. The effect, especially when his models are reclining, can only recall Matisse (and his odalisks), although Keïta is on record as saying the backdrops are random. This is a great show and I spent much more time there than with Monet. *I am now not sure if he reprinted them himself or others did it.

Eyes wide open.

Hannah, nobody calls it Alphabet City any more. Lower Eastside Girls Club: there's a clue in the name.

I don't see a thread for this place. I've never been. That will change on November 10 when they present a Bistrot Paul Bert dinner with Bertrand Aboyneau. I have never been to the Paris location, sadly, although I often re-read Aboyneau's book, French Bistro. I understand I am really setting myself up for disappointment here (but at least the price is fair).

Because it's pretty, Brebirousse from Formaggio.

Last Richmond. This painting at VMFA astonishes me. As the placard says, it's rare to even know who enslaved (or in the north indentured) Black individuals are in family pictures or scenes. Here we not only know who the nurse is, Leana, but she's painted with so much more love and humanity than the formulaic renderings of the children. Also a lovely diptych by Cherokee painter Katy Walkingstick that screams Tapies at me, which is a good thing.

I didn't go out of my way to see that, but there is a gigantic replica of it in the Black History Museum.

The cast is just so much poorer without Ego and Heidi.