Kunichika woodblock print 
silkscreen by Nigel Robson |
 My first visit to Tribeca Grill was sometime during my first year in New York, in 1992 or 1993.
I was overly impressed that Robert DeNiro owned the restaurant that I WAS EATING IN. I really thought DeNiro might be standing quietly at the end of the bar, notice me and my friends and raise his glass to us in a subtle Robert-DeNiro-kind-of-way.
Tribeca Grill’s longevity is not unheard of in New York restaurants, but against the odds. Many restaurants that were once white-hot dissolve into the ether of the forgotten. Good restaurants too—not just the trendy ones. A New Yorker’s memory is short.
Each annual update of Zagat’s contains a tribute page of once-loved restaurants that bit the dust in the last year. Oh yeah, I remember that one . . . too bad, but where are we going to eat tonight?
Celebrity-owned restaurants have an especially high mortality rate. Remember Planet Hollywood? Remember Britney Spears had a restaurant for five minutes? Five points if you can think of the name.
Gene and I ate at Tribeca Grill for the billionth time recently. The place has become a standard for us. Not trendy anymore, like its sister restaurant next door, Locanda Verde, but comfortable. The brick walls emit a homey warmth and the upside-down sombero chandeliers, well, what can you say about the audacity of lit-up, upside-down sombreros?
I ordered an red-wine braised octopus salad and herb-roasted monkfish with lobster ravolini. Gene had the charcuterie plate as an appetizer and the alaskan halibut as a main course. A booth and a bottle of wine made our late, romantic Sunday night dinner perfect.
Will Tribeca Grill still be there next year? The year after? I hope so.
 At some unidentifiable point, after I lived in New York City a long while, I started talking about leaving. I would say, if it weren’t so cold in Wisconsin in the winter, I would have already moved back to Milwaukee.
The sore point and source of my complaints always boils down to the stupidly high cost of living in Manhattan—from housing to groceries to taxes to well, everything.
But when I step outside my apartment in the summer and stroll by the North Cove and the World Financial Center plaza, I know I live in the best place in the world. I think how, if I woke up in a foreign city and found this view, this cove, this plaza outside my hotel window, I would be satisfied that I had landed a great vacation spot.
Nothing puts the unpleasantness of cost-of-living conversations behind me better than the Frank O’Hara quote embedded in the metal fencing alongside the cove:
“One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. —Frank O’Hara
There is another famous quote, by John Lennon I believe, in which he says, everyone always talks about leaving New York, but no one ever really does. That isn’t true; I know a lot of people who have left New York, some with eventual regret and some none at all.
But I fall into the category of people Lennon is talking about. I won’t leave New York City. Unless I can’t afford it anymore.
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 Attitudes about race from both sides of the fence expose themselves in Race, David Mamet’s play at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway.
The structure is simple: a single set with four characters and an unseen fifth character, a red-sequined dress that the audience only sees on the cover of their Playbill.
The action takes place in an austere, book-lined room in a law firm. The law partners, one black, one white, played by Dennis Haysbert and Eddie Izzard, are deciding whether to take the case of Charles Strickland (Richard Thomas), a rich, white man accused of raping a black woman in a hotel room.
The lawyers’ approach is rational: can they win? What isn’t the client telling? Why did he dismiss his first lawyer? Or did the first lawyer dismiss him? Then back to the question, can they win?
The young and pretty junior lawyer who witnesses their debate interferes in the action making a seemingly novice mistake. Susan’s actions take the play from the surface racial questions to unmasking the deep prejudices within all four characters.
Afton Williamson gives a powerful performance as Susan, the role originated by Kerry Washington. The demure Susan of Act 1 morphs into an angry, vengeful, yet naive, character at the play’s end.
Henry Brown (Dennis Haysbert), is a world-weary realist yet commands the stage in a way his partner should have but couldn’t. Partner Jack Lawson (Eddie Izzard of whom I am a big fan), performed well as the hyper, type-A, star lawyer but didn’t have the presence of the other three actors.
Finally, Richard Thomas (Charles Strickland) will forever be John-Boy Walton to me and I apologize to Mr. Thomas for that. But John-Boy has made good on Broadway and doesn’t give away his guilt or innocence.
Like all Mamet’s work, the play is powerful and lingers in your mind long after the curtain has gone down.
 Tough New Baggage Fees Airfares are up 22% over last year. Tickets to Europe are higher still, up 29% over 2009, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A surf session on Travelocity confirmed the tough news for travelers. The best fares I find to London in July or August are well over $900 before the taxes and that jazz heaped on. London is a better bargain pre-Memorial Day or post-Labor Day, that’s a given, but I thought I might find something around $700. Rome, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin are all just as pricy. One can tell I have not been to Europe in the summer.
So we all get raked for summer tickets, plus those undecipherable fees that are not worth deciphering because they are not going anywhere just adding huge percentage to the total price paid. But the airlines are no longer stopping there.
First the airlines charged for a second bag. Okay, some people really travel heavy. But now all checked bags come with a fee. Did you think anything could be more annoying than fees for checked baggage?
How about Spirit Airlines’ audacious charge for carry-on bags? $20 to $45 to put an item in the overhead bin, space made scarce by the airline jamming extra seats in the plane. How will they execute the charge? What if I swear my bag will fit into the space under my seat and then I put it into the overhead bin anyway?
A part of me thinks Spirit will can’t make these charges stick and they will roll back the fees. But another part of me thinks other airlines will watch with fee-envy and start charging themselves. Its like the ATM fees. Once Citibank caved, Chase, one of the final holdouts, had to have some of the pie. Another WSJ article offers insight into that math behind the baggage fees.
The news is not all bad—hotel room rates are the one bright spot this summer. I am thinking Las Vegas, where once you get there the hotel rates are dirt cheap. In the city that is all about its hotels, rates are down 18% from a year ago. On the low end, four nights in July at Circus, Circus will average $39 a night. But why not seize a rare opportunity? Those same nights at the elegant Bellagio will only set you back an average of $202 per night. But if you’re going to spend $202, why not go all the way and go for the Wynn at $252 per night?
I would, but that darn baggage fee . . .
 The Cherry Blossom Blink and you miss them.
Cherry blossoms bloom for only a week, but that week bestows upon me a glorious view from my apartment window in Battery Park City.
Americans associate cherry blossoms with Washington DC and the annual Cherry Blossom Festival at the Tidal Basin.
Most of the thousands of cherry blossoms the Japanese gave the United States in 1912 were planted in DC.You also can find cherry blossoms in several other areas of the United States, including San Diego, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. And some ended up here in New York, and a few outside my window.
But this 18th floor window isn’t the first to afford me a view of cherry blossoms. Growing up on an army base in Japan, I could see a single cherry blossom tree from my window. The small tree didn’t hide the chain-link fence and the gravel field beyond, a field of broken tanks, row after row of tanks waiting for repair. Continue reading Sakura (Cherry Blossoms) Bloom
 Met friends at The Crosby Bar for brunch Sunday.
Checked out the online reviews first, of course. Every reviewer ranted about the cocktail prices that apparently go boldly where no others dare to go. Some just raised an eyebrow and some ranted on. They are right; starting at $18, cocktails at the bar-restaurant in the new Crosby Hotel will turn Joe Six Pack into Joe One Tap.
Fortunately for us, G. and I are on a cocktail-hiatus but we still approached with trepidation. I picture crowds lined up outside, squeezing in to wait for their table to be called, and oh the noise, said the Grinch. As happens so often, I was wrong.
G. and I arrived first, so we have time to look around. The spacious room is half empty. The hostess is polite and doesn’t make us wait until our whole party arrived to be seated.
The decor cannot be labeled; it’s retro, it’s modern, it’s homey but not cluttered. I am so tired of the minimalist gray and black decor that screams I am trendy. Candy-colored fabric covers the booths in front, earth-tone fabric lines the back area. A Fifties-style cluster of neon-colored lamps hang from the middle of the room, but the lamps against the walls are old-fashioned wrought-iron.
The ladies room is worth a visit, even for aesthetic reasons. Two winding floors down, the restroom is larger than some studio apartments, with a pink chairs and marble walls. Two little girls with their mom dart from one thing to another, awestruck at the pink chairs and other pink accents among the gray marble.
The food? Okay. Pretty good, even. Worth the price? No, but it’s great to spend a relaxing couple of hours with good friends in a great atmosphere. The Crosby Bar may draw Beautiful People, but the comfortable atmosphere allowed no Beautiful-Person chill to enter the air.
I saw the play The Diary of a Teenage Girl Sunday night. The teenager, Minnie, has a lot to tell dear diary—far more than the typical teenager. That is, I hope she has far more material than the typical teenager. After sleeping with her mother’s boyfriend, what worse choices could she make? Quite a few, it turns out.
Minnie dives into the seedy side of 1976 San Francisco with confused exuberance. She lacks boundaries; her mother, just an old teenager herself, lives to party. In her own way, mom worries about Minnie, but not enough to take action.
Based on the graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, the play’s tagline is “a story of female sexuality and unabashed optimism”. I don’t know about unabashed optimism, but Minnie’s optimism is certainly rebounds time after time.
The play, staged at the Three Legged Dog, an ultra-modern space in Tribeca, literally happens all around you. The audience sits on carpeted steps and leans back on green cushions in the bowl-shaped theater. Center stage is only one step down from where I sat. At times, the actors performed only inches away from me. The five-actor team used the raised perimeter of the room and the multiple entrances to create a surreal effect.
The warm brown theater “walls” with painted cream-colored arrows and flowers were the screen for the video and images that played through most of the show. Video appearing on all four walls added to the sense of being inside cartoon pages. Videos of the actors made you feel like you were seeing their home movies. The images, sometimes a pencil drawing, sometimes abstractions like water, added to the sense of a diary.
The play is engrossing and well worth seeing. Even if you were a different kind of kid, this show will take you back to those wonderful, horrible years of being a teenager.
 Sometimes a picture or a chart puts a concept into better perspective than a hundred articles do.
Common supplements are represented by larger and smaller colored circles, placed higher or lower depending on the scientific evidence of claimed benefits. The snapshot illustrates the relation of one nutrient to another in an easy-to-grasp visual display.
I love this chart and the style of it a lot; I studied it the way I study maps, which is, much longer and much closer than the normal person.
If you like this chart or “infograph” as it is called, check out a few more for the health conscious and hypochondriacs alike. If you like the concept of great visual display of information, read the blog devoted entirely to infographs. (Name me a subject that doesn’t have a blog devoted to it.)
Now I must run out and buy a boatload of green tea.
- MORE RECEIVE HELP TO AVERT FORECLOSURES
- FED’S MINUTES SHOW A RISE IN CONFIDENCE IN ECONOMY
- FACTORIES GET SET TO HIRE
- CONSTRUCTION OF SINGLE FAMILY HOUSES UP 1.5%
- A STIMULUS PLAN SUCCESS STORY
These five headlines all appeared yesterday in the front section of the right-leaning Wall Street Journal. All of the them in one day. All of them positive stories about economic recovery, one year after the stimulus package was signed.
You might have to believe the stimulus package is working.
What would the headlines have read without the stimulus:
UNEMPLOYMENT HITS 25%?
GET READY FOR ANOTHER RUN ON THE BANKS?
We’ll never know for certain. That’s the tiny peg Obama’s opponents are hanging their hats on.
All the angry anti-Obama talk is just rhetoric, sound bites with no substance.
Any Republican or Obama opponent who comes forth with a clear, logical point of view will earn my respect.
Anyone out there? Hellooooooo?
 Another season and another slate of racers.
TAR seems to be going for the celebrity angle this season. One couple are Big Brother reality veterans and one racer is the Miss Teen South Carolina whose babbling onstage played for millions on YouTube. One dude, Joe, could be a Jon Gosselin double.
The racers must get to LAX on public transportation, a jaw dropping task. “Who takes the bus in LA? Public transportation to us is not using the valet parker,” said Carol, the blonde lesbian. She will be the quotable one this season.
The teams disperse and start asking people on the street how to get to LAX. The black lawyers say, “oh black person, good,” and rush up to a car for directions.
The gay brother knows Miss Teen South Carolina’s public flub by heart and repeats it to the camera and again to another team within earshot of Caite. I start rooting for her.
The real dumb one is the chick from the Big Brother House, whose shining moment was explaining that she doesn’t understand what people mean when they talk about time, using phrases like “quarter til”.
TAR replays both girls’ low moments during the show.
It is predetermined only three teams will get on the first flight. Four teams on the Metro think they’re first and wonder which team will not make the plane. Four teams riding the same bus think the same, but they really are first. Like every season, all the racers are cocky until the first Roadblock.
As Brandy predicts and hopes, the first plane is delayed in Dallas, the transfer city. All teams fly to Santiago, Chile via Miami on the same plane.
The cowboy team get the wrong currency in LAX. They ask for “the Brazil money”. They feel foolish when they get kicked off the local bus in Chile and must re-exchange their money.
In Santiago, teams take buses 60 miles to Valparaiso, the San Francisco of South America. A few stray dogs are caught on camera.
We hear the first of a million cries of “Rapido!”. Big Brother girl covers her eyes in the taxi. The two detectives tell the cab driver, “drive it like you stole it, my brother!”
“Balance of a Cat, Courage of a Lion”
The first Roadblock requires balancing 120 feet above the ground and walking a cable the length of a football field.
On the wire, Miss SC proves herself. She is fearless on the cable wire. Big Brother girl moves across the wire handily too.
Brandy is quaking on the cable walk. She takes a long time to get across, but she will be the first of many who get in trouble on the wire.
A couple of people fall off the cable and hang by their belts. The safety specialist has to come to rescue contestant Adrian. He bravely starts again, even though it is already clear he and his wife will be eliminated. He falls again and my heart goes out to him.
After the cable walk, teams take 120-year-old “Funiculars” down the mountain. The Funiculars look like school buses with one side on stilts.
The guy mocking Caite admits he underestimated her. Except she and Brent will incur a 30-minute penalty for skipping the Funicular. Read your clues closely, everyone.
Painting Houses
The streets of Valparaiso are full of brightly painted homes. Each team must select four paint cans of a single color, grab a ladder and find the house with an exterior of that color and finish the paint job.
Father-daughter team Steve and Allie trespass inside someone’s house and start painting away. The guys inside laugh at them and say in Spanish how bad they paint.
Dan and Jordan drop a brush and fear it will incur a penalty. They are correct; they get a 15 minute penalty. The guy who keeps saying “snap!” is getting annoying. He should get a 15-minute penalty just for that.
“We’re looking for the Martha Stewart sea foam green circa 1997,” Carol says, “Before jail.”
The first Pit Stop is Palacio Baburizza, 90-year-old chalet. Jordan and Jeff, the Big Brother team, come in first. Jet and Cord, the cowboys, come from far behind–last actually–to finish third. They have shown they are “not just some hicks from Texas” (except in the area of currency).
The detectives who were going to win every leg came in ninth.
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Flamingos, Baltimore Zoo 
photo by Kate Mortell
Ruahine Mountains, New Zealand
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My first visit to Tribeca Grill was sometime during my first year in New York, in 1992 or 1993.
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