Urban Renewal
I’ll Take Eat Manhattan
Oh, New York! You are so many things. Home to titans of industry and crooks of commerce. Babel-y tower of languages. Citadel of culture.
And capital of culinary delights. I am not a “foodie.” I arch an eyebrow at a $40 hamburger, a wine “redolent of volcanic ash and persimmon,” a 15-course tasting menu. But the city that never sleeps is also city that is ever eating, replete with 24-hour temptations.
Late night at Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street in The Village.
There are respectable late night snacks: a glass of chianti and a bowl of piquant olives at the corner wine bar or even a cheese-slice nightcap, appropriately folded and savored on the sidewalk.
But the seductions don’t end with that last bite of chewy crust. The late-night walk to your hotel is a gauntlet of temptations. Glowing bodegas promise cornucopias of junk food to accompany a late-night Seinfeld binge. Here are pint after pint of Ben and Jerry’s and Haagen Dazs. There are untold varieties of sweet and salty, crunchy and gooey.
Earlier that day, you wandered the museums among the Vermeer’s and the Rembrandt’s. Now the florescent aisles of IN&OUT Deli Grocery or Fresh Food Super Deli seduce you, their brands singing out like poetry: Shiela G’s Chocolate Chip Brownie Brittle, Doritos®️ Flamin’ Hot Cool Ranch®️, Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk®.
Resistance is futile. But even if you avert your eyes, steel yourself and turn the corner, you’ll likely contend with the come-hither glow of a Halal cart, that miracle of efficiency that offers a Greek-diner-menu’s worth of delights from a closet-sized kitchen: kofta, felafel, kebabs and gyros of all stripes.
And there is bound to be one more pizza joint in your path, arraying its wares like a column of Roman legions preparing to attack your waistline.
Be wary. Be strong. Your hotel bed awaits, and with the morning comes the promise of a new day—starting perhaps with a nice warm H&H bagel with lox and cream cheese.
NYCB: Peck and Ratmansky
The New York City Ballet is back. As someone who has only a glancing familiarity with its work, I say this with just a smidgen of authority. I am in the middle of a binge. I recently saw two performances in New York, and I’ll see two more in Chicago next month. Luckily, my experience is guided by the superb writing and expertise of Jennifer Homans.
Justin Peck’s Copland Dance Episodes.
In a recent New Yorker review of Justin Peck’s Copland Dance Episodes, Homans argues that the company has “emerged from its post-Balanchine sleep.” Now that I’ve seen the explosive sunrise of Peck’s newest work, I heartily agree.
Set to several pieces of Aaron Copland's hyper-American ballet music—Appalachian Spring, Rodeo, Billy the Kid—Peck’s new, full-evening ballet is quintessentially, electrically modern: no women in homespun or men sporting cowboy hats and Colt 45s. Instead, Jeffrey Gibson’s curtain of day-glow colors yanks you into the modern era like a test pattern by way of Andy Warhol. It looms as the orchestra plays the noble Fanfare for the Common Man, then rises to an array of 36 dancers, shrouded in translucent white tulle and holding statuesque poses. For a moment, the stage resembles the Greek and Roman courtyard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The statues slowly exit, returning to the hootenanny strains of Copland’s Rodeo: the shrouds are gone and the pure white stage is spangled with Gibson’s multicolored costumes. Through 22 selections of Copland’s music, the movement is vivid and kinetic. A love story emerges—Alexa Maxwell and Roman Mejia—but Peck prefers working on a large scale. There are occasional dazzling solos (KJ Takahashi’s series of pirouettes that gradually crawl to a stop as if his battery is dying), but Peck prefers to work in trios, octets and masses of dancers that create dazzling stage pictures. It’s also full of playful wit: watch this riffing session that turns into a sort of children’s “can you top this” game.
Alexei Ratmansky’s Solitude.
Alexei Ratmansky has created several dances for the NYCB already, but Solitude is his first as the company’s Artist in Residence. It is a sobering antithesis to Peck's American carnival. A Russian who has strong ties to Ukraine, Ratmansky channels the grief of war and calamity into the grief of a father over the death of his young son. (As he explained in a CNN interview, the dance was inspired by a real event captured by a news photographer). The father (Joseph Gordon) kneels motionless next to his son’s body, holding his hand, through the entire first half of the dance. The ensemble seems to dance his anguish and the anguish of war itself. They move with the cold geometry of the military, but the order is periodically broken by a single dancer breaking out in a flurry of emotion. In the second half of the dance—set to the transcendent Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th Symphony—Gordon enacts his grief in an impassioned solo.
The NYCB performs these pieces in New York through March 3. And it will perform two different programs, including George Balanchine’s iconic Serenade at Chicago’s Harris Theater March 20-23.
More Food Stuff
Dwight Garner writes a mean book review (and yes, sometimes they are mean). But any angry author doubting his erudition need only to consult Garner’s Quotations, a collection of random literary morsels drawn from his personal “commonplace book,” a record of memorable quotations he has encountered in his extensive reading life. He is a walking library.
He also apparently makes a mean peanut butter and pickle sandwich. After writing a New York Times food section piece that celebrated this delight, New Yorker editor David Remnick called him and told him, “That sandwich is the most goyish thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Dwight Garner among friends.
His passion for PB&P is one of many stories in Garner’s latest book, The Upstairs Delicatessen, a distant cousin to Quotations. It is a journal of his eating, cooking and shopping habits, peppered generously with literary quotes on gustatory and other pleasures. To whet your appetite, here are some choice cuts:
—”It is tuna’s bad luck that we find them so tasty. As Lorrie Moore wrote, in her collection of stories Bark, ‘If dolphins tasted good, . . . we wouldn’t even know about their language.’”
—Samuel Johnson: “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing..”
—Calvin Trillin: “A pasta dish is likely to be satisfying in inverse proportion to the number of ingredients that the menu lists as being in it.”
—”Salty, fatty, crispy, and spicy: the basic food groups, essential building blocks for happiness, more all-American than apple pie.”
—Muriel Spark: “It is my advice to anyone getting married that they should first see the other partner when drunk.”
Pilsen
When I wasn’t wandering New York City in search of new varieties of junk food, I had a chance to explore Chicago’s Pilsen, a predominantly Latinx community with a rich history and vibrant arts community. You can read more about it at WTTW’s excellent website. My ambling walk of Pilsen took me past dozens of the community’s murals. Here’s a sample.
The Hum
Annie Dillard and friend.
After these many immersions in the pleasant calamity and chaos of the big city, I feel ready to slow down, to quiet down. I’m grateful for a dear friend who passed along this reminder. It’s from Annie Dillard’s essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk.”
“At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence.”
Thanks for reading. Have a good week.