Celebration & Reflection

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PRIDE AND MEMORY

This is the weekend that Gay Pride parades take place in New York, San Francisco and other cities, cause for celebration.   But, it also seems fitting to mention the relatively new New York City AIDS Memorial.  Located in the West Village at the intersection of W. 12th Street, 7th Avenue and Greenwich Avenue, it was just dedicated in December 2016.  Over the years, more than 100,000 New Yorkers have died of AIDS.  

The former St. Vincent’s Hospital (1849-2010), located here, had the first and the largest AIDS ward on the east coast.  It’s a hospital with a laudable history as it treated survivors of the Titanic shipwreck (1912) and victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (1911).

The memorial is situated on St. Vincent’s Triangle and consists of a circular water feature in the center framed by an open slanted metal canopy whose grid incorporates a symbolic repeating triangle pattern.  Inscribed in the pavement are words from Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself.”  The imagery is powerful, the place peaceful.

  

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Guesswork:  A Reckoning with Loss by Martha Cooley

I was immediately immersed in Cooley’s memoir and caught up in life in the small Italian village she and her husband retreat to for a caesura, a pause in their lives, of 14 months.  Cooley is on sabbatical and has a novel to complete, but she views this as unplanned time and space to reflect on the deaths over the past decade or so of eight dear friends.  Many of them died of illness too soon and others died by their own hand.  Alongside this reflection on lives lost, runs the thread of her mother’s fragile health and impending demise.  Her mother is approaching ninety and has been blind since Cooley was a child, but her blindness is an undiscussed, even un-referred to topic which puzzles this daughter.

The memoir is a series of richly detailed short essays which started life as journal entries.   You learn about the feral cats and the resident dogs in the village and about il professore who owns the nearby castle and is the closest thing to village royalty.  You get a sense of Cooley’s Italian husband and their warm and mutually fulfilling marriage.  You also share in her self-questioning and her doubts about her writing and her accomplishments.

Cooley is also a poet as well as a novelist and her writing is very lyrical.  She is attuned to nature’s creatures and to the sounds, or lack thereof, that comprise the fabric of this stretch of time.  I liked her inclusion of Italian words and phrases (some not translated) and of lines of favorite poets (T.S. Eliot, e.g.).  I admired her candor in describing relationships, particularly with her mother, calling it one of her FFFRs, fraught female familial relationships.  A lovely book in so many ways.

Note:  All photos ©JWFarrington except that of Martha Cooley from her publisher’s website.

On Screen & On the Page

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FILMS AND BOOKS. From a daring adventurer (Gertrude Bell) and a fictional newly minted doctor, Ally Moberley, to a grief stricken father and son and devastated parents to murder and Belgian emigres, I’ve covered a lot of ground in my recent filmgoing and reading.  Much of it has been in international settings too: Persia and the Middle East, England and Japan and also Paris.  A lot of heavy stuff, but some of it (the latest Maisie Dobbs mystery) just enjoyable. A real potpourri!

FILM FARE

Letters from Baghdad

Gertrude Bell was a most remarkable woman. She, more than anyone else including T.E. Lawrence, was responsible for carving out the borders of what became Iraq and for establishing the Iraq Museum to house its antiquities. She traveled on her own to then Persia and other countries in the Middle East becoming knowledgeable about the lands and the native peoples. And she wrote several books.

After WWI, the British government hired her to work with them, the lone woman among powerful senior officials. Many of them had little regard for her initially, but she worked closely with Sir Percy Cox, High Commissioner for Mesopotamia, who was both mentor and protector. Brusque, arrogant and strong-willed, hers was a challenging personality. Thwarted in love, she maintained her close ties with her parents and wrote them wonderful letters.

What is amazing about this film is not only what it reveals about this accomplished, but less well known woman, but the fact that it makes use of very early archival films and is based on her letters and diaries and a biography by Janet Wallach.   The film is in black and white and Tilda Swinton is the voice of Gertrude Bell. Besides portraying a fascinating woman, it’s an absorbing history lesson.

Dean

This is a sweet film written by and starring Demetri Martin. It’s a portrait of male grief as a father and his adult son mourn the loss of their wife and mother. Both are somewhat lost souls, the son more so than the father. The father, affectingly played by Kevin Kline, decides to sell the family home, a decision upsetting to son Dean. Dean is an illustrator, formerly engaged to Michelle, who escapes NY for a job interview in Los Angeles. It’s not really his scene, but he stays with a friend, parties, and is attracted to Nicky, a charming young woman.

The film could have been tighter and shorter, but is worth seeing for how this father and son communicate or don’t. It’s different than how women do it. One final note, the drawings are clever and funny or morbid and all done by Martin.

RECENT READING 

Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss

This historical novel from Britain is best read slowly. Set in 1878, it concerns the intertwined lives and separate careers of architect Tom Cavendish and newly minted medical doctor, Ally Moberley. They marry just before he goes on assignment to Japan to oversee building a lighthouse. She, fascinated by diseases of the mind, starts work in an insane asylum in the English countryside. In alternating chapters, Moss presents what each of them is doing. They write letters, but their time apart is long and their young marriage fragile.

Moss’s writing is sensitive and nuanced and she is skilled at capturing the vagaries of weather and scenery and how they echo or inform Ally and Tom’s perceptions of themselves. I found the novel both moving and poignant.

 

The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal

Set in Paris and translated from the French, this is a beautifully written short novel about the death of a young man and all the steps from his accident to the transplantation of his heart. Covering the details of the accident and all of the people (doctors, nurses, technicians) whose lives and actions touch him afterward, it is intense, graphic, and matter-of-fact all at once. The sentences are long and almost unending as they unfurl, and the paragraphs few.

You, the reader, become acquainted with Simon’s parents in their moment of extreme distress and are privy to the medical policies and procedures that lead from them agreeing to donate his organs to the steps involved in making a match, to how the eventual heart transplant is carried out and to whom. I found this a hard novel to read despite its evocative writing.

In This Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear

The latest installment in Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series is set in London just at the start of WWII as England declares war on Germany.  Private investigator Maisie is recruited to investigate the death of a railway worker who also happens to be an immigrant from Belgium.  He came over as a youth during the previous war and stayed to make his life in Britain. Other deaths, presumably also murders, occur and the search for answers widens.

The slate of characters, Maisie’s office staff Billy and Sandra, her friends Priscilla and Lady Rowan, and the detectives and inspectors, McFarlane and Stratton, are familiar from earlier books, but Winspear is good at providing a bit of backstory for new readers. These are mysteries that unfold slowly and precisely, made enjoyable by the force of Maisie’s personality and her fond adherence to the precepts she learned from her mentor Maurice. Good choice to take to the beach.

Note:  Header image at Brooklyn Botanic Garden ©JWFarrington; all other images are from the web, courtesy of PBS Learning Media, French Embassy, and Moss and Winspear’s own websites.

Brooklyn Bound

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BROOKLYN BOUND

Last week we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. We first took the subway from Christopher Street to Chambers St. and changed lines exiting at Clark Street in Brooklyn.   We walked down the hill to the Brooklyn Bridge Park for a pit stop, but also checked out the Manhattan Bridge from underneath and stood on the riverbank and gazed across the water.

The Brooklyn Bridge is an icon, solid and robust with its gray stone arches. It’s easier to walk than the Golden Gate in San Francisco because pedestrians and cyclists are on a separate level above the cars. It was a sunny, coolish day, and we spent about 40 minutes in all walking it, given that we had to stop to take photos along the way.

  

                                                      Back in Manhattan we walked past City Hall, stopped in that park, and then walked past the new Lower Manhattan transit center, past Ground Zero, and then went left toward the Hudson River. Ultimately, we walked the entire way back from Chambers Street to our apartment near Pier 45. Very good exercise!

The next day we took the Metro again, this time to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, another place we hadn’t visited.  The lilacs were done, the cherry blossoms long past, but the roses were in full bloom! The Stanford Rose Garden includes many different species and colors of roses from historic ones to more contemporary tea roses.  It was a riot of color.

To be different, the C.P. suggested we take the shuttle train from the garden stop to get the C train. We waited a bit for the shuttle and then waited some more for the C to Manhattan. Two stops later, the train halted—signal problem ahead. Five minutes later it was announced the signal problem was also a switch problem with a switch stuck in the middle. No A or C trains were going north to Manhattan with no indication of how long the delay would be.

Realizing this was a problem, we exited to the street and were able to get Uber within about 10 minutes. We saw more of Brooklyn than we had intended and it cost a lot more, but we were back in the hood in about 30 minutes. Thus we had our own experience with deteriorating service on the subway!

Note:  All photos  ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).  Header image taken in Stanford Rose Garden.

West Village: Eating Ethnically

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ETHNIC EATS.  We like to eat and we like variety.  We’ve returned to some of our favorite dining spots, but have also been on a quest to try new places.  Here’s a round-up of some recent meals in the West Village.  Bon appetit!

Nisi  

On Bleecker Street, Nisi’s front window has a view of an attractive round table set with a white and blue patterned teapot. Inside, one wall is lined with shallow bowls facing out and the other is a lattice of clear blue bottles. The cuisine is Greek and we shared a green salad to start along with some very tasty large shrimps in a tomatoey sauce. They were listed as shrimp, but I’d call them langoustine, given their size and the presentation head and all. Following that, we dove into the lamb kebab and the half chicken with lemon. Portions were generous and both came with Greek fries. Plenty to eat in a most pleasant atmosphere.

Surya  

Also on Bleecker Street farther down is this delightful Indian restaurant. Here the Chief Penguin and I enjoyed a mix of old favorites and new dishes. The vegetable samosas were sizable and quite good. Even better was the spicy cauliflower in a rich tomato sauce. Next up, he sampled a special chicken dish while I loved the shrimp in a coconut curry sauce with strips of red and yellow peppers. All served with oodles of steamed rice. He had to have their garlic naan and I found the pappadum irresistible. Definitely worth a return trip!

Mole  

This West Village Mexican place has some of the best guacamole around! It’s chunky and fresh and you can even order it spicy with bits of jalapeno. Served in a wide stone bowl, it’s so good it’s hard to save room for anything else. But we did! The Chief Penguin had his standard, a quesadilla, and I tucked into the chicken enchiladas with red and green sauces. The red was rich and complex; the green piquant with some sourish high notes. They came with rice and refried beans, but the enchiladas themselves were enough for me.

Hudson Hound

Situated on Hudson Street with outdoor seating, the Irish Hound is rustic wood inside—old style wooden booths and a few tables with shelves of metal implements and wavy glass bottles lining the wall. It feels cozy. We sampled the excellent homemade hummus along with the grilled Caesar salad. The salad was perfect for sharing and attractively presented on a large square plate. We each ordered the half chicken with two sides. The roast chicken was some of the best I’ve eaten, adobe spiced with thimbles of three sauces—gravy, a green salsa, and their creamy yum-yum sauce. Lots of choices of sides, but I opted for the grilled asparagus and the sautéed spinach. Plenty of food and not for the faint of appetite.

Highlands  

Continuing our international culinary tour, we next visited Highlands, a Scottish gastropub on Christopher Street. It’s always been crowded when we’ve passed. Using Open Table, we were forced to book an early time and were the only ones in the dining room for a short while until another group of seniors arrived. Our waiter was a wiry young man with a wry sense of humor.

Being a traditionalist, C.P. ordered the sausage roll to start while I was intrigued by the description of the short rib crostini. It was sublime comfort fare—cubes of short rib on top of melted cheese and horseradish on toothy toasted bread.  Added to that was a mini cup of jus flavored with crumbles of blue cheese—heavenly! For mains, we sampled the gnocchi with wild mushroom sauce and the chicken Parmesan salad. The latter was more chicken than greens, the chicken having been breaded and fried just a bit. Another restaurant worth a return visit!

Niu Noodle House  

For a change of pace, we decided to go Chinese, and Niu on Greenwich Ave. was most satisfying. The panfried chicken, shrimp and chive dumplings were served straight from the stove while the pork buns were appropriately soft and tasty. For an entrée, we shared the spicy beef with mixed vegetables (green pepper and onions). We went for medium spicy rather than extra spicy and it was spicy enough for our palates.

Note: All photos from the web except for the Nisi table (JWFarrington).