Found Around NYC...

Park Avenue and Other Things I Love About NYC...

My sabbatical in this city is nearing an end.  Time to think about what I love best about this city...

For starters, it is full of talent and intelligence (or people with such traits). There are so many cultural offerings that it is never boring.  Museums, museums, museums.  One can live here and make a small comfortable world within the large city and neighborhoods are easy to define as one's own.  It is very navigable above ground.  The itty bitty dogs think they are people and try to make eye contact with people.  Central Park is the big pearl of the place, the pulsing heart that gives life and real ground to a concrete city. The big ideas, especially the one of the Mayor to plant a million trees here.

Then the living is easy and the doctors are great and elders can easily get out and about and around.  The restaurants are divine and I've barely touched the surface but I have my favorites on Madison I love and others that I just want to return to time and time again.  I've forgotten how to cook with all of the options for food delivery and deli food to pick up.  I love shopping in little spurts and the amount of walking you do in a regular day and the 92nd Street Y with all of its offerings.   

I enjoy the areas in SoHo and around Union Square and some of the little restaurants in that area.  It is a part of the city where I love to ramble.  The graphic design and visual art talent that simmers all the time and breaks out in splashes is about as robust as the big ideas that bubble all the time.

The plays,the shows (Wicked and The Drowsy Chaperone - top favorites), the opera, the music and Carnegie Hall, the architecture like Gehry's new building and living in itty bitty spaces. The galleries and the little nooks and crannies and little shops. For one who loves to dress in uniform, the black pants, shoes and coats were easy to adopt.  I love not seeing fast food restaurants everywhere or big mega stores.  And I like, especially, the way that people are direct and to-the-point.  It is not abrupt and people are friendly here, just as I've found them to be everywhere I've lived.  It is a full of people that look at everything with a wide-angle lense.  It is a gumbo city of a lot of people from everywhere else with a few spicy locals that keep the flavor.

The purse thing that I observed from the sidelines...those who buy on Canal Street from the venders tucked away selling knock-offs or black-market goods to the ladies who lunch at places so they can show off their new bags that cost zillions and they tip hefty sums to clerks who call them when the latest bags come in.  If I stayed a little longer I might have given in.  You know this is the purse fashion capital of the world and designs that make it here then go to be sold everywhere else.  I guess in other places people can mark status with cars or homes but here those elements that flash discrimination or money aren't as easily discernible so purses become the accoutrement tattoo.  And Park Avenue.  I love Park Avenue.

Well, I could go on and on. 

Van Gogh: Go See...

Vincent Van Gogh's paintings became the epitome of modern international art early in the 20th century, over a decade after he committed suicide.  His influence on German and Austrian expressionism is the subject of the Van Gogh exhibit at the Neue Galerie at 86th and Fifth Avenue.

Van Gogh's self studies and his sunflowers are less on view than the impact he had on others.  To prepare for the exhibit, I read The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh edited by Mark Roskill.   A few weeks ago I was surprised at how tourists flocked in front of Van Gogh's Starry Night at the MOMA and were more interested in capturing the painting on digital than they were in just taking it in with regular ol' eyeballs.  At the Neue Galerie you can't take photos but the collection of his works and the way they have been selected and curated is excellent.  This is a must-see exhibit.

Van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo, who supported the artist,  "Cobalt is a divine colour, and there is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around things."   Van Gogh painted halos to also give a sense of the divine and you can see both the cobalt and the halo in this painting which is one of the ones on exhibit.  He painted many self portraits (at least 35) and sunflowers.

While there you can also see the most expensive painting, Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, purchased last year for the Neue Galerie.

Top Shows...

For a tepid year with no blockbusters among the 35 Broadway shows, the Tony Award Nominations list only inspires me to think of seeing two shows/plays that I've yet to see: Angela Lansbury  in Deuce (up for best performance by a leading actress in a play) and Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, a three-part trilogy in 8 1/2 hours, up for Best Play.

Grey Gardens is up for Best Musical and Journey's End is up for Best Revival of a Play. I've written about Grey Gardens but not about Journey's End which my husband especially enjoyed.  It is set in the trenches of WWI and seems very apropos with an unpopular war raging at the moment.

Friends up to visit recently have gone to see Mary Poppins.  Disney on Broadway is becoming quite a machine to contend with... The Little Mermaid is the next show up and previous Disney releases include Tarzan, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.   When 80 percent of Broadway shows not recouping their investments, perhaps the Disney machine will recycle old stories on a new stage and we will reimagine Broadway as a continuum of the Disney story machines.

Also coming next season:  Grease and Young Frankenstein.  My top recommend is still Wicked. 

The Off Broadway Lucille Lortel nominations are out if you want to check for more theatre ideas. 

Also, American Idol Winner Fantasia is making her Broadway debut in The Color Purple.

To get tickets, I use these places: Broadway offers and  Telecharge.

Central Park in Bloom...

Two weeks ago I had to take photos in Central Park on an assignment.  There were only daffodils blooming.  There wasn't a leave sprouting on a tree and the buds were barely visible.  It was a drizzly, 40 degree day and I had to try to find pictures that looked like Spring in Houston. 

Today the park was in full bloom.  Last week the first warm weather arrived and people were out in full force in the park.  What a relief and release valve this urban park is for these urban dwellers.  Then everything bloomed, seemingly all at once.

Most of the comments I heard during the week were utterances of amazement of how spring just popped out in one bloomin' week, in one fell swoop.  It seems so true.  The tulips started to open on Park Avenue and the trees broke into blossom and all during this week, too, I was shooting on assignment. 

I was blooming, too.

Vertigo...

Looking for the sun.

A straight-up view on a lovely blue-sky spring day, looking for the sun and shadows to guess the time.

I found as much art to the forms and lines of the built environment as I found in the galleries. 

The Holiday Glitter...

Why didn't I see all the holiday glitter in NYC last year, my first holiday season here?  Probably because I was deep into my final weeks of my classes for a master's in media studies and adjusting to the move with teenagers who don't like the concept of a new home in another state.

I've made it a point to stroll Fifth Avenue and see the tree at Rockefeller Center.  The New York magazine's Holiday Guide features more things in Bright Lights, Big City that I think the family would enjoy.  First on the list: The Museum of Natural History which I've yet to enjoy.  According to the magazine's listing, "a team of 40 volunteers begins in July to create some 500 origami figures for (the museum's holiday tree). This year’s safari theme means lots of lions and tigers and bears as well as two nineteen-foot barosaurs near entrance."

Britney's Chest Heaves...

As she breathes, in wax, at Madam Tussaud's on 42nd Street.

Hanging upside down as though she were on stage entertaining (rather than in the tabloids becoming more famous for her personal life escapades), perhaps the motion of simulated breathing adds something to the surreal effect of getting this close to fake real stars.

If only the skin didn't shine it might look really realistic rather than waxy.  Ms. Spears, now known more for her motherly and wifely trials and tribulations.  Brad Pitt is there, too, but not in a movie star setting.  Mr. Dad besides his Brangelina baby-in-the-crib.

New York City at its dolled-up finest, where the real is built.

Miss Cellania and New York City...

Miss Cellania is a fellow blogger and she comes up with the most incredible posts.  All I want to do here is give you a link to her post on New York City.  Enjoy!

Chris Hoch: New Star of Spamalot...

Chris Hoch assumed the role of Sir Lancelot in Monty Python's Spamalot just a few weeks ago and he's a smashing, rousing tempest in the Knight sky.  It is one of the best performances I've seen by an actor, truly.

What is best about his performance is you get to see him in a multitude of characters.  His French needs a wee bit of work when he plays the French Taunter but his turns as Lancelot, the Knight of Ni and Tim the Enchanter were brilliant.  When he didn't get the rousing applause I thought he deserved (and this was the second time I'd seen the play), my son thought it was because the audience might not have realized he was playing all three parts.  Just wait.  You can almost see him embracing the roles and finding his comfort level minute by minute.

Hoch has a host of credits but his Spamalot role great place to showcase his varied talents.  He's the star in shining armour when he goes gay, his best turn at showing the full scope of the character. 

He only made his debut in 2002 and Spamalot continues to please ever since its opening in 2005.   Although guys especially loved this musical, my girlfriends and their daughters have loved it as has my daughter. 

The Foxes: Cunning, Stunning with Fashion...

With a wonderful eye for fashion, Mrs. Marta Sahazgn de Fox, wife of President Vicente Fox of Mexico, wore a black dress with embroidered flowers in the style echoing that of the Mayan textile designs, on exhibit at 680 Park Avenue at the Americas Society of Cultural Affairs.The Foxes appeared at the opening of the Maya Textile Art display, sponsored by Banamex.

In town for the opening of the United Nations sessions, they arrived late at the function.  Park Avenue was totally blocked.  President Bush and his entourage whizzed down Park on their way to a function.

Police barricades, ambulances on the ready and police cars stand guard and at the ready here and there throughout NYC.

And, by the way, Presidente Fox did not wear his signature cowboy boots.  Just so you know. 

Fox emphasized items that he thought were important accomplishments from his six-year term such as internet access in the schools throughout the country. He has put a big focus on education. The 9/14 Wall Street Journal article, Fox Reviews His Leadership of Mexico, had some items he didn't mention: foreign direct investment is up from $75.2 billion in 2000 to $114.3 billion today; foreign debt down from $84.6 bil. in 2000 to $41 bil. today.  Still a problem: 1.25 million jobs needed to meet the demand of an expanding labor force, wrote the WSJ.

This exhibit builds upon the Sacred Treasures of the Mayan Kings on display at the Metropolitan Museum. The Maya Textile Art presents textiles from Chiapas, Mexico, and Guatemala.