Back to NYC

NYC is, arguably, the capital of the world, at least until Beijing takes over. Our good friends James & Lisa, artist and novelist, respectively, had never been there and were eager to experience it. I, on the other hand, had visited many times and Frieda had grown up there. Consequently, we had for some time entertained the fantasy of going with them and showing them around. So when Lisa recently signed with a NY agent who inked a 2-book deal for her, it gave us the incentive we needed to plan a whirlwind trip.

We took the red eye on Jet Blue Sunday night and arrived early Monday morning. It required an hour and a half to get through the traffic from JFK to the 26^th floor penthouse apartment we'd rented on W. 52^nd. It would've taken longer but the driver knew all the back streets. After checking out the spectacular view, I fell into bed and took a nap. The rest of the crew, too keyed up to sleep, took a taxi to Trader Joe's to buy supplies. When they returned we had a light lunch and then headed over to the Neue Galerie on the east side of the Park near the Guggenheim where James, very much interested in the Vienna Secession and Klimt in particular, wanted to see “The Woman in Gold,” a painting notorious for its history and 2006 purchase price of $152 million, a record at the time. Both he and Lisa were quite taken with this painting, a portrait of Klimt's friend, patron and, perhaps, lover Adele Bloch-Bauer, but there were other Klimt paintings and items of interest as well. It turned out to be a better experience than any of us had anticipated. After the tour we found our way to the Fledermaus Cafe, a recreation of a Viennese cafe of the era in the museum, where I had a Milchkaffee and strudel and James had a Klimttorte and we all discussed our favorite exhibits. 

Refreshed, we took a leisurely stroll across Central Park, past Cleopatra's Needle, to the West Side and, as Lisa is a Beatles fan, Strawberry Fields. The weather was overcast and cool but at least dry. The Dakota, where Yoko still lives, was sheathed in scaffolding, apparently undergoing some maintenance, perhaps a facade scrubbing.

 

Tuesday Frieda brought pastries up from a little shop downstairs and then we headed off to the MOMA where we went directly up to the 5^th floor to see all the heavy hitters. It was awesome to see so many major masterpieces of modern art, paintings seen dozens of times in art books over the years, now right in front of you in all their life-sized immediacy. An item like “Starry Night,” for example, which you're used to seeing the size of a playing card, is suddenly a yard square, with the frenzied brushstrokes still roiling the surface. In another room one of Monet's “Water Lilies” paintings 7 feet high sprawled 42 feet along one wall, so gigantic you felt you could just walk into it and get lost. There were stunning works by Picasso like “Seated Bather” and “Girl in a Mirror,” and the mesmerizing 7 by 10 foot “Dream” by Henri Rousseau. And then there were provocative works by artists not so famous, like James Ensor's “Masks Confronting Death.” Altogether a dazzling surfeit of riches. I kept running from one to another like a kid in a candy shop, unable to impose any order on my viewing. When I got to the end and ran into Frieda she said she'd had the same problem, so we went back through in the opposite direction pointing out things that maybe the other had missed. After finding James & Lisa we all went down to the 4^th floor where the more contemporary stuff was. After the 5^th, it seemed a bit vapid, as if all the exploration we had seen on the 5^th had left the Western imagination exhausted, there was nowhere else interesting to go other than novelty for its own sake and the tedium of shock. Or maybe it was just we who were burned out, like after tasting a lot of wine your palate goes stale and you just can't tell what's good and what isn't anymore. 

  We walked down 5^th Avenue past St. Patrick's Cathedral to Rockefeller Center, stopping at a street vendor for a knish along the way. Then we headed for Grand Central, stopping again for pizza at Brother's on 46^th between 5^th and 6^th where they sold 2 slices and a soda for $2.99. At Grand Central we had a devil of a time trying to get a cab: there were plenty of them but they were all occupied. After almost resorting to Uber we finally found one to take us to the Folk Art museum which was showing a number of outsider artists, including Joe Coleman and Adolf Wolfi. From there we walked down Columbus past Lincoln Center to our apartment. 

After some relaxed conversation over champagne about our day, we set off for Becco's in the theater district where we had a reservation at 7:30. It was good we did as the place was jammed, even though it was Tuesday, and the food was exceptional. Afterward we went next door to Don't Tell Mama for drinks and some informal cabaret. I had an excellent vodka stinger, a charming after-dinner cocktail that put me in a good mood, but Frieda found the main singer's voice annoyingly nasal. Also, Lisa was starting to come down with a cold, so we left earlier than I would've chosen to.

 

In the morning James & Lisa headed off to see Lisa's agent while Frieda and I walked to a restaurant in the Time Warner Building called Landmarc for the most amazing pain perdu I'd ever had: deliciously moist and eggy on the inside, crisp and sweet on the outside. It was marvelous. Her nephew's wife had turned her on to it on her last visit. Downstairs at Whole Foods we got some Petit Suisse, a yogurt-like cheese treat common in Europe but hard to find in California, even at Whole Foods there, and after dropping it off in the refrigerator at the apartment, grabbed a cab to go meet James & Lisa. We picked them up near the Flatiron Building and had the driver drop us all at Washington Square Park. The plan was to amble through the West Village to Chelsea Market and the High Line, but the women got too chilled by the wind whipping down Greenwich Avenue so we cut the walking tour short and caught a cab home. After talking things over, James & Lisa headed for the Met, which was on their list. We, on the other hand, were tiring of museums and it seemed to be warming up so we strolled along Central Park West some distance and then cut over to Broadway where, eventually, Frieda found a cafe she remembered atop the Fairway Market. Burgers were decent there and I had a milk shake to compensate for the great one I had earlier intended to get at the dairy store in Chelsea Market. Then we walked over to the Magnolia bakery to get some cupcakes, a favorite treat of her nephew's wife. We were planning on having dinner at their place and thought that would make a nice dessert.

James & Lisa got back to the apartment shortly after we did and, after an appropriate exchange of information about our respective afternoons, we all walked over to the nephew's place on 61st. After dinner James & Lisa headed back to the apartment while Freida and I strolled up 52nd to a Cuban cafe called Victor's where we had the best mojitos we'd ever tasted. We had 2 apiece and only stopped because the place was closing. 

 

Thursday we went up on the roof where you could look in the opposite direction from the view we were used to in our apartment, toward the Hudson. We would have had lunch up there but it was too cold to stay. After pastrami sandwiches from Artie's deli, we packed our bags. The car picked us up at 3 and took 2 hours to get through horrendous traffic to JFK airport. Every time I go to NYC, or anywhere else, actually, that I've been before, the traffic seems worse than the last time. The world seems quite noticeably now to be filling up with more and more people, moment to moment. 

Good Mornin' Y'All

Jackson Square

Frieda and I spent the MLK weekend in New Orleans. She'd been there a couple times during her college years but it was new to me. I'd avoided the deep south to that point. But Tennessee Williams said the US has only 3 cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, all the rest are Cleveland. So I felt obliged to check it out while avoiding the craziness of Mardi Gras.

We arrived Thursday night around 7 and cabbed to our B&B on the northwest edge of the French Quarter. Our greeter, who seemed a bit lit, warned us not to cross nearby Rampart, which separates the Quarter from the Treme district, or venture onto Bourbon Street after dark, stipulations that made me a bit apprehensive, but hunger inspired me to lead the charge into the crepuscular streets in search of the restaurant, called Eat, where we had an 8 o'clock reservation. It was only a couple blocks away. From Frommer's we knew it lacked a liquor license so we picked up a six pack of Stella at a tiny grocery on the way. It turned out to be a small, quiet place tucked into a corner with a friendly waiter who, for no corkage fee, gave us cold glasses and stashed the rest of our beer in the fridge until we were ready for it. We shared some gumbo and slow-cooked pork with collard greens, a delicious introduction to New Orleans cuisine. On the way back to our B&B we encountered a parade of bicycles, including some bike rickshaws, all decorated with neon glow sticks and meandering through the nighttime streets to the accompaniment of music and shouts of “Happy Thursday!” Every night's a party, apparently, in New Orleans.

 

Royal Street

Our host brought us warm croissants in the morning and then we set about exploring the Quarter in earnest. Our B&B was on St. Ann and following it southeast into the glare of warm morning sunshine took us right past Jackson Square to the banks of the mighty Mississippi. A long line had already formed at nearby Cafe du Monde for beignets but the croissants had pardoned us, allowing us instead to take in the river views before circling back to the church end of the square and listening to a brass band that had set up to play dixieland. A small crowd had formed and a couple of people were dancing by themselves. Already it was clear that New Orleans was about food and music (possibly also parties and parades), and maybe liquor, as I suspected those solitary dancers might have already had a tipple or two. In fact, as I looked around I noticed more than one person with a suspicious plastic cup in hand, despite the early hour. Not to be outdone, we ducked into a bar adjacent to the square where I tried a Pimm's Cup and Frieda had a Bloody Mary. Fortified, we started walking again, wandering the quieter, northeast end of the Quarter the rest of the morning, acquainting ourselves with it. When we eventually did get peckish we headed southwest for Johnny's on St. Louis and stood in line for a couple po'boys. I had roast beef and Frieda had shrimp. Both were exceptional. Thus prepared, we ventured onto Bourbon Street for the first time which, in the early afternoon, was tacky but innocuous. The sound of live music drew us into a bar called Fat Catz where The Daywalkers were playing. They had a washboard player who really tore it up so we had a couple of beers and listened for a while. 

 

Early in the evening we strolled over to Frenchmen Street, in the Faubourg Marigny, a district adjacent to the Quarter on the northeast side. Unlike California where anyplace with live music charges a cover, here there were many live music venues that were free or at most had a one-drink minimum. We stopped in a place called Bamboula's and listened to Chance Bushman's Rythmn Stompers. Every so often Chance would jump up and start tap-dancing on a little square of flooring he'd brought along for the purpose. When we tired of that we wandered down the street to The Spotted Cat, a well-known music venue, but there were too many people smoking inside and I wasn't used to that as it's been illegal for years in California, so I didn't want to stay, even though we had some good seats at the bar. Frieda got a bit annoyed as she wanted to hang there, but I led her back up the street to a place called BMC where Big Al and the Heavyweights were playing and it turned out they had an amazing harmonica player who reconciled her to the change of venue, so we ordered drinks and stayed for an hour or more, while the band never took a break. But then they started inviting people from the audience to come up on stage and play tambourine or washboard and it got a little cacophonous and chaotic so we bailed. We threaded our way down Decatur past all the panhandlers and lowlifes to get back to the Quarter. I needed a break from the crowds and craziness so we ducked into Pere Antoine's on Royal, which was nearly empty at that point, for some gumbo. While we were there a number of parade floats inexplicably slid by. New Orleans does seem to love a parade. By the time we got back to Cafe du Monde the line had evaporated, and so we finally had the famous beignets, a square donut smothered in powdered sugar that has become emblematic of the city (every park bench has a dusting of white powder on the pavement in front of it).

Street Musician

 

Saturday morning we headed for Canal St., the southwest border of the Quarter. Beyond Canal you're out of the Quarter and into a city that could be Cleveland. There we caught the St. Charles streetcar that runs past Emeril's restaurant to the Garden District, the old American Quarter, full of ostentatious mansions, including Anne Rice's old place. It was a spacious and somnolent contrast to the crowded and vivacious Quarter. We wandered around on a guidebook tour, ending up at a cemetery with white above-ground tombs, then rode a packed streetcar back to the Quarter. Frieda bought some beads on Bourbon Street (the town was already gearing up for Mardi Gras although it was still a month away) and I bought her a t-shirt at Preservation Hall (which does charge a $20 cover).

For dinner we had reservations at Vacherie, a sister restaurant of Eat. We ordered crawfish cornbread, broiled oysters, and breaded pork chops with collard greens, plus a bottle of Malbec. Our food was a long time coming. The waiter apologized and offered us free drinks by way of compensation, so we ordered Sazeracs, a signature cocktail of New Orleans that we hadn't tried yet. We weren't that crazy about them but of course couldn't let them go to waste. The food, however, when it finally showed up, was excellent, and between the Sazeracs and the Malbec we got fairly loaded. So, even though it was after dark, we defied the warnings and headed for Bourbon Street where we found people who made us feel sober. I saw a guy who looked like a zombie shuffling down the street. There were guys pulling down their pants and mooning the crowd, there were gals in nothing but their underwear, it was a crazy scene. But it wasn't threatening. A few people bumped into me and politely apologized. Everyone seemed in a good mood, no one was belligerent. For a while we just stood aside at an intersection and watched bemusedly as the besotted parade flowed by.

Backstreet

Sunday morning things were more sedate, although the line at Cafe du Monde was outrageous. The weather held to sunny and warm. We roamed the French Market buying t-shirts and trinkets for friends. We had brunch reservations at Sylvain where the food and the Bloody Marys were excellent but it was crowded and we were seated between 2 large, noisy parties. The rest of the afternoon we just wandered around in search of nooks and crannies of the Quarter we hadn't explored yet. In the evening we returned to The Spotted Cat to see Kristina Morales and the Bayou Shufflers. The place looked a lot better in old episodes of Treme, where the front wall is paned windows. Now it's just raw plywood, and the furniture looks like it was rescued from a dumpster. Kristina Morales had a powerful voice, but the band didn't generate the excitement of the ones we'd seen on Friday. We left before the first set was over and went down the street to Bamboula's where a guy was playing who looked and sounded like B. B. King. We were getting hungry but there were no seats available so we ordered Margaritas, stationed ourselves in a central position, and scanned for likely departures. It was looking pretty hopeless when a stranger came out of the restroom and asked if we wanted a table, he and his wife were leaving. Naturally we were delighted as he led us to a table right in front of the stage. We ordered pulled-pork sandwiches which were delicious. We stayed for a while after finishing them but again the band, although good, didn't wow us like the bands we'd seen on Friday so we carried forward the guy's favor by offering our table to a threesome of women who seemed, if anything, even more grateful than we had been, and then again negotiated the gauntlet of beggars and homeless folks on Decatur Street to get to Cafe du Monde for a dessert of beignets and coffee.

French Market

 

Monday morning, MLK day, the Quarter seemed almost deserted as we took our last circuit, returning to Johnny's for po'boys to take with us to the airport. Before leaving we finally ventured across Rampart into Louis Armstrong Park which in the daylight seemed perfectly safe and actually rather nice. We circled around past Congo Square, credited with being the birthplace of jazz, and saw a Mardi Gras Indian in full regalia standing by a van. We waved farewell to him before hailing a taxi and heading out. So long New Orleans!

The French Quarter certainly had a novelty appeal to me. It's charming, quaint, amusing, unique, and worth a visit. But I wouldn't want to live there. For one thing, superstition and religion play too prominent a role in New Orleans cultural heritage, not to mention the after-aroma of slavery. Of the 3 American cities, I'd pick San Francisco as the most congenial and beautiful. Frieda found New Orleans a bit more sympatico than I did. She said she could live there for a year. I don't think I could last that long. But we may go back for another visit.

Gore Vidal and the Fate of Fate

Julian

50 years ago Gore Vidal, whose brilliant career was celebrated in a recent documentary film, published an unlikely best seller called Julian, a novel based on the life of the 4^th century Roman emperor who attempted to revive paganism or, as he preferred to call it, Hellenism.  For those who, like Vidal, view Hellenism and the Greeks as the essential and vital strand, the core of Western Civilization, and the Judeo-Christian strand as the Johnny-come-lately interloper, the perennial thorn in the side and obstacle to cultural self-realization, Julian may only be seen as a quixotic hero.  Still, it’s hard to credit Vidal’s contention, through the character of Julian, that Hellenism was more rational than Christianity.  The latter, after all, made exhaustive attempts to render itself at least somewhat coherent, whereas Hellenism was always quite heterodox, more of a mythic atmosphere than an internally consistent belief system: different towns and different people worshipping different gods in different ways.

In rereading Vidal’s novel this time I decided to accompany it with one of his primary sources for the history of the period, Ammianus Marcellinus, the last historian of the Western Roman Empire.  The 4^th century, when Christianity was striving to gain control of men’s minds and the empire that had endured for half a millennium was coming apart at the seams, is a fascinating, pivotal era: corruption and greed were endemic, decadence rife, and the barbarians closing in on every side.  Julian was certainly the central figure of this period and his attempt to restore Hellenism might have succeeded had he not been skewered with a spear while fighting the Persians near Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, (now Iraq, that cemetery of so many dreams).  Marcellinus is clearly a partisan of the old gods, yet takes pains to suppress this partisanship and, cognizant of the new religion’s ascendency, avoids saying anything overtly critical of Christianity.  Nevertheless, he provides a pagan perspective that is contextualized by an awareness of Christian doctrines.  Every once in a while it’s intriguing to listen to someone who’s been dead for over 1600 years tell you about the world he lived in.

Ammianus Marcellinus

What you notice reading Marcellinus is that ancient societies were saturated in fate.  The belief in fate was of a piece with the importance ancient men assigned themselves, a part of their position at the center of the universe.  The belief in destiny is another aspect of their conceit, their delusional vanity.  Greek tragedy depended on its immutability.  The arts of divination and astrology plumbed its nuances.  Much of the actual practice of paganism had to do with efforts to divine the future and virtually everything in nature, the flight of a bird, the appearance of a meteor, the shape of the entrails of a sacrificial animal, was seen as having an occult meaning.  Legions of soothsayers were employed to divine these secret meanings and reveal what everyone wanted to know, namely, what was going to happen tomorrow, next week, next year.  In this sense, the world was experienced as full of import.  Things were not merely what they appeared to be, they were also full of hidden significance.  Reality was overwhelmed by the imagination.  Compared to this all-encompassing superstition, Christianity seems relatively rational.  Marcellinus calls it “a simple religion,” and it is, compared to the diffuse, unstructured complexity of Hellenism, which was pluralistic and tolerant and had no creed to swear allegiance to.  Hellenism had an inchoate quality, like childhood.  And this, perhaps, was what made it such a fertile milieu. 

Constantine

In the period before Constantine the Great, Christianity was one of a number of competing monotheistic cults whose relative orderliness may have been called up as compensation for the chaos of the times. Mithraism, whose adherents were baptized in the blood of a bull, was popular in the army. The cult of Dionysus emphasized the imbibing of wine and the notion of a world savior. Christianity was opportunistic and syncretic, picking up elements of its doctrines and practices from these competitors. The effect of these cults was to concentrate the mystery of divinity within a set of rituals, draining it from the world at large. In paganism the natural world was permeated with meanings, chock full to overflowing with them. These meanings were all imaginary of course, completely spurious, but nevertheless subjectively the world felt numinous and full of purport, whereas in Christianity transcendent meaning was restricted to the church and its rituals and could only be experienced through the mediation of a priest while the natural world was seen as fallen and thus emptied of purpose, since the divine no longer infused it to the degree it had in pagan experience.

It took a long time for pagan numinousness to be scrubbed from the world.  In the early days of the scientific revolution science and magic, astronomy and astrology, chemistry and alchemy, were all mixed up.  People were interested in astronomy because they thought it would enable them to do astrology better; that is, enable them to predict the future, and not just the astronomical future.  But nowadays science and magic have separated into 2 distinct entities.  Science has become serious business while magic has become entertainment, and consequently the pagan notion that the natural world is full of hidden messages, occult significances, has come to seem a child’s game.  I still hear people say “it wasn’t meant to be” or “everything happens for a reason,” but such statements sound like leftovers from an archaic, pre-scientific mindset.  In the scientific universe there is no author, no plan, no destiny.  There are merely competing natural powers, like gravity and centrifugal force, working through time.  These workings may resemble fate, but they do not constitute intentionality, and they are not oriented around human desires.  Fate now appears as a shelter and refuge from this terrifying specter of randomness.  The old fated world lacked the scary freedom of our fateless one.  Now the tragedy is not, as it was in Hellenism, that you cannot escape the rule of fate, but rather that there is no fate. The world has been drained of transcendent intentionality, and thus, in Hellenic terms, rendered meaningless, and Christianity, it turns out, was just a phase and instrument of that process.  Perhaps the proto-science of Epicurus couldn’t really take hold until Christianity had purged the material world of pagan animism.

It was against the background of Hellenism that Thales of Miletus, around 600 BC, became the first human to emerge from the mists of mythological thinking and see the natural world as explicable without resorting to the supernatural.  It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this achievement.  It is monumental.  But neither the Greeks nor their heirs the Romans were able to take the next step of establishing the experimental method for determining scientific truth.  Hellenism, it would seem, lacked an essential element for that.  Perhaps because educated men were not supposed to work with their hands? 

Gore Vidal

Vidal, our American Voltaire, loved to sound the call to “Ecrasez l’infame!” His wit and irreverence are sorely missed. He suggested that we would have been better off had Julian succeeded, because his success would have precluded the darkness of the Middle Ages. But perhaps Christianity was a necessary phase, scrubbing animism from the physical world, freeing educated men to apply their hands to physical experiment and, with its concept of the equality of souls before God, undermining the ancient institution of slavery and laying the groundwork for a more compassionate civilization.

June in Oregon

Food Carts

Our initial idea to celebrate the solstice was to fly to England and join the massive gathering at Stonehenge, and then drop in on Wimbledon, but we dilly-dallied too long and our house-sitter got booked and could only give us 5 days, so we decided to fly to Portland instead. Despite decades living in northern California, neither of us had ever visited Oregon. 

Portland has a reputation as a hip city, Eugene’s big brother. At least 3 TV shows are set there: Portlandia, Leverage, and Grimm. (Disappointingly, we didn’t see any “wesen,” the creatures featured in the latter.) We stayed on the northwest side at a place that gave us free tickets for the streetcars and we took them everywhere. The 1^st afternoon we took one to Powell’s Books (the largest independent bookstore in the world) and from there circled through Chinatown and Old Town on foot but found both lacked the vibrancy of the Chinatowns in San Francisco or New York. Back in the Pearl district, kind of a mishmash area, also with little foot traffic, we split a good burger at Deschutes Brewery. Portland is much taken with the connoisseurship of beer and most of the brewpubs serve flights, as wineries do in our neck of the woods.

Pioneer Square

Next day we took the streetcar downtown, a more architecturally unified urban area, and had lunch at a pod of food carts near O’Bryant Square with every imaginable ethnicity of food.  We walked it off along the river before wandering over to Pioneer Square for lattes at the Starbuck’s on the corner.  We were waiting for an old friend of mine who recently moved to Portland.  A racket from the bandstand made conversation difficult when he arrived but it was no quieter inside so we just had to make the best of it.  We talked about the book he published a few years ago on Buddhism and Wagner for a couple hours, until we all had to go.  We had to meet another old friend I’d met years ago on my post-graduation trip through Europe.  We met him and his wife at a restaurant down by the river.  He had reserved a table outside with a view of the marina at a place called Thirst.  We chatted for a couple hours there about our adventures since we’d last seen each other, and then they went home to suburbia while we headed to Bridgeport Brewery, an important location in Leverage that was within walking distance of our hotel, to taste another flight. 

  

Oregon Coast

In the morning we taxied over to Enterprise, picked up a dark red Subaru Legacy that I ended up quite liking, and headed for Cannon Beach, the beginning of our road trip.  The annual sandcastle competition was that day (the solstice) which we thought was a lucky fluke, but it turned out to be unlucky because it generated a massive traffic jam.  We got so frustrated that we gave up on visiting Cannon Beach altogether and after we finally got free of the crush, headed south, feeling stressed and cranky.  We stopped for an overdue lunch in the next town, Manzanitas, and the food improved our moods.  Farther south we discovered that Oregonians, in addition to beer, love coffee.  Every town we went through had several drive-thru espresso stands, including many examples of a chain called Dutch Bros., an innovation Frieda greatly appreciated since she rarely gets a sufficient number of lattes.  This may have been her favorite feature of Oregon.  

Florence

We discussed whether to try the local road to see the Three Capes but decided against it when Tripadvisor advised that it was closed at about the halfway point.  Continuing south on 101 we had a bit of a scare when she began calling ahead for reservations and hit a rash of no vacancies.  It was, after all, Saturday night, and we hadn’t made one because we weren’t sure how far south we were going to get.  Finally she found a place in Florence, next to the Old Town there, and we arrived around dinnertime and went to Mo’s on the riverside for some clam chowder. 

Florence had some minor charms but overall I have to say we were disappointed in the Oregon coast. You can see more drama and beauty from the roadside in 4 miles of Big Sur than in 400 miles of the Oregon coast. And let’s not even bring up the Amalfi coast in Italy. If you have the time to pull over, take side roads, and hike, you can probably find some awesome vistas, but we didn’t have that kind of time. From 101 what you overwhelmingly see are trees, millions of trees filing past.

Redwoods

The following day we continued south toward Crescent City but before arriving turned off for Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park.  First we walked the Simpson Reed and Peterson Trails, and then motored over to Stout Grove, the last 3-4 miles on an extremely dusty dirt road.  These were all recommendations of the first old friend we’d seen in Portland, who lived for a couple of years in Crescent City while writing his book.  The redwoods were awesome, of course.  Crescent City, on the other hand, was a dump.  I couldn’t believe my friend had tolerated it for 2 years.  The downtown area was a ghost town, with no one at all about.  We couldn’t find a decent restaurant anywhere and ended up at Pizza Hut for lack of a better alternative. 

In the morning we took 199 back through the redwoods and angled north to I-5.  We got into Eugene about lunchtime and stopped at Tourist Information for a walking tour which directed us to a good lunch at a place called Steelhead Brewing.  Eugene was, of course, smaller and sleepier than Portland, and it was summer so the university students weren’t around.  The residential area between downtown and the river was delightful, and the river walk more bucolic than the one in Portland.  We finished our explorations in the late afternoon and headed north to Salem where we got a room at the edge of a vast wasteland of chain stores that was like anywhere and everywhere in the USA, less than an hour from the Portland Airport.  

Drive-through Espresso in Eugene

It was fun to get a taste of Portland and Eugene, we loved the streetcars and the brewpubs, seeing old friends, and the people were friendly but, wherever you go in the States, so much is the same.  We came away feeling it’s hardly worth the cost of travelling in the States because, with a few exceptions, everyplace is so similar.  Once you get past the expensive airfare and the ordeal of the long flight (admittedly grueling, in coach from California), the costs in Europe are equivalent and there’s so much more novelty, variety, and history there.  In the States most of the beauty is natural.  If you want to see man-made beauty you have to go to Europe. That said, I still think San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but a lot of its appeal derives from its site, and the topography.  It has a unique character.  By contrast Portland has a kind of sawmill quality.  It feels more provincial, more homey

April in New York

Erhu serenade

We’re back from a long weekend in NYC for the wedding of Frieda’s oldest nephew: it turned out better than I expected.  For one thing, the weather was fabulous.  Early Friday morning we Super-Shuttled from JFK to our hotel on Grand Street, where Chinatown is slowly absorbing what’s left of Little Italy. We picked it because it was near the wedding venue.  Too early to check in, we dropped off our luggage and ventured into the teeming, grimy streets, wending our way down Mulberry through the bowels of Chinatown to Columbus Park where some guy bent our ears with an erhu.  When we’d had all we could take of that we headed back on Mott, checking out all the exotic fish the vendors were hawking.  The city seemed old and dirty, a warren hemmed in by brick, concrete, and iron.  Much of New York is downright ugly, but if you want the status of an insider you must not merely embrace this but celebrate it as part of the hard-edged, macho aesthetic of the place.  There was plenty of construction going on but it seemed less about building anything new than about staving off the processes of decay.

Erminia

After a nap to recover a bit from our red-eye flight, we dressed for the Rehearsal Dinner and took a subway uptown.  The peeling, probably lead-based paint and the accumulated ground-in dirt of decades gives these subterranean chambers a forbidding, feculent air, but the only actual problem we had was getting oriented upon exit and locating the restaurant, a little Italian place called Erminia on 83^rd.  Gavi di Gavi was flowing freely inside so we soon felt social, and the food was excellent as well.  We met the bride’s family and grew convivial with her uncle and his husband.  They were from Palm Desert and were staying at our hotel.  Afterward they offered to share a taxi for the return trip.  Back at the hotel they suggested we go out for a drink, so the 4 of us ambled up Elizabeth into Nolita to preview the wedding venue, a restaurant called Public.  It had crowded bars on both sides too noisy for easy conversation, so we moved on to a quieter place called Jacques where we sipped cocktails and chatted about their extensive travels while perusing an incessant parade of stylish revelers passing by on the sidewalk. With so many colorful, energetic people filling the streets at all hours, the excitement of the city can’t be denied. 

Columbus Circle from the Time Warner lobby

Next morning, the day of the wedding, we took a subway uptown again and got off on 72^nd, near Strawberry Fields in Central Park, which was jammed (it was Saturday and the weather was superb, sunny in the high 60s, though the trees had yet to leaf out).  Escaping the milling crowds and circling bicycle rickshaws, we strolled south along Central Park West.  David Brooks, the political commentator, passed us headed in the opposite direction.  At Columbus Circle, an awesome arc of glossy towers, we went into the Time Warner building, thinking we would pick up something to eat and take it back outside, but after sampling the view from the 2^nd floor lobby we changed our minds and instead wandered up Broadway to have panini outdoors at a little café next to the Folk Art Museum.  

From there we headed for the nephew’s apartment, behind Lincoln Center, and borrowed his X-5 to drive over to Jersey and pick up Frieda’s mother for the wedding.  We were putting her up in our suite for the night.  Our intentions had been to return to Manhattan via the Holland tunnel but traffic was horrendous so we took the Lincoln instead and then drove downtown along the West Side Highway.  The traffic was still intense, maybe on account of it being the first beautiful spring weekend.  It seemed a 10% increase in the number of cars would have been sufficient to gridlock the entire island.  Later we heard someone who had stubbornly insisted on using the Holland tunnel did not make it to the ceremony, there was a major clog on the New Jersey side.  As it was we were supposed to be at the venue by 5:30 and got there about 5:45, still prior to the 6:00 ceremony, but we had to sit at the back. 

Public

Public was composed of three rooms, a small bar on the left, a main dining room in the center, and a combo bar and dining room on the right. The street end of the room on the right had a garage door that opened to a loading dock with a chain railing and narrow stairwell. Maybe it had been a factory at one time. With the tables and chairs removed, this area became a dance floor and stayed cool if you opened the door. Traffic passing in the street could ogle the dancers and vice versa. After the ceremony the bar opened in there and ran until 8 when dinner was served. The place seemed as noisy as when we’d previewed it and I had a hard time having a conversation with the person across the table. Dinner was followed by dancing until about 1 AM.

The High Line

 

Sunday Frieda spent the morning taking her mother back to Jersey, dropping the nephew’s car off at his garage (he and his bride had spent their wedding night in the honeymoon suite of another hotel), and riding the train back to our hotel.  After a local lunch we took the subway over to W. 14^th to take a walk on the High Line, the elevated park that meanders for a mile along the west side, then ambled through the Meatpacking District, an area of gentrified former slaughterhouses laid out on cobblestone streets, and got some ice cream at Chelsea Market.  The weather was again stupendous and hordes of people were everywhere.  In the evening we had dinner at Amazing 66 in Chinatown, and when we came out around 9:30 the sidewalks, normally choked with people during the day, were strangely empty.  Threading these dark, spooky, silent streets to the edge of Little Italy we found, in front of Ferrara’s, bright lights and a lively crowd, and joined it for espressos and desserts.

The West Village

 

Monday the nephew phoned to suggest we meet for lunch at Café Cluny, on W. 12^th, so we took the subway to 4^th for a leisurely stroll north through Greenwich Village to Abingdon Square.  The weather was still good but high clouds were moving in; rain was forecast for Tuesday.  We were leaving from JFK in a few hours and the 2 of them were leaving for Madrid at about the same time from Newark.  They looked appropriately happy, the wedding having gone off well.  I had the best burger I’d had since the summer of 2011 in Clear Lake, Iowa.  Afterward we walked around the neighborhood a little with them and saw the actor Willem Dafoe on Charles Street helping a couple remove a large package from the rear of a minivan.  An odd coincidence as I saw him the last time I was in New York, only that time outside a restaurant in Soho.   He did a double-take on our double-take, realizing we had recognized him.   

Like Rome at the height of its Empire, New York is a cosmopolitan, international city filled with the babble of many different tongues: Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, and others I couldn’t recognize.  German seemed particularly prevalent in the West Village.  The Germans have a talent for sniffing out all the best places, and the money to hang out in them.