2 days ago
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
New York break: dasvidanya dzievuszki..
Back in September, Tory, chef (and now proprietor) at Madison's L’Etoile, said to me “you should go to my favorite place in New York -- the Russian Vodka Room.”
I have come to New York frequently over the past year, but I have never made it to the Russian Vodka Room. Until last night.
The room is small, dark, narrow. A jazzy guitarist is playing at the side, a guy at the piano accompanies him. A few men sit at the bar. They’re Russian. The waitresses are Russian as well. My friend and I find an empty table in the corner – there aren’t many, we are lucky. The menu is all about vodka. And pirozki. She and I split a carafe of the apple pomegranate infused vodka. Then the cranberry one. Then a carafe of the pear infusion. Carafe – it’s like wine, isn’t it? A carafe implies easy drinking, a sip, then another, ummmm, delicious! This stuff is so good! I haven’t had vodka in so long!
Next thought – this stuff is potent! The music continues, people come and go, my friend and I talk about old times, new times. We haven’t seen each other in years… She looks the same… another carafe? Sure, but add some food, the shots are going down smoothly, but they need something to arrest the easy flow.
The hours pass… the guitarist packs his bags. The men at the bar sigh in the Russian life-is-tough way… the couples, scattered around the dark room, are quietly mumbling to each other.. My friend and I divide the pirozki, then order some cheese and bread… the carafes appear, magically, the waitress seems to know when they need to be refilled. I’ve stopped counting.
Outside, the air is cool, refreshing. We take a cab… who can walk after that? The RVR, at 265 west 52nd. Go there, order a carafe. Or more. Tell the waitress “spasiba,” lean back, think sleighs and onion domes, birch trees and balalajkas. Dream in audacious ways, talk big, brag about your past. Break bread, drink vodka, feel the weight of the world on your Polish or Russian shoulder. Na zdrowie!
I have come to New York frequently over the past year, but I have never made it to the Russian Vodka Room. Until last night.
The room is small, dark, narrow. A jazzy guitarist is playing at the side, a guy at the piano accompanies him. A few men sit at the bar. They’re Russian. The waitresses are Russian as well. My friend and I find an empty table in the corner – there aren’t many, we are lucky. The menu is all about vodka. And pirozki. She and I split a carafe of the apple pomegranate infused vodka. Then the cranberry one. Then a carafe of the pear infusion. Carafe – it’s like wine, isn’t it? A carafe implies easy drinking, a sip, then another, ummmm, delicious! This stuff is so good! I haven’t had vodka in so long!
Next thought – this stuff is potent! The music continues, people come and go, my friend and I talk about old times, new times. We haven’t seen each other in years… She looks the same… another carafe? Sure, but add some food, the shots are going down smoothly, but they need something to arrest the easy flow.
The hours pass… the guitarist packs his bags. The men at the bar sigh in the Russian life-is-tough way… the couples, scattered around the dark room, are quietly mumbling to each other.. My friend and I divide the pirozki, then order some cheese and bread… the carafes appear, magically, the waitress seems to know when they need to be refilled. I’ve stopped counting.
Outside, the air is cool, refreshing. We take a cab… who can walk after that? The RVR, at 265 west 52nd. Go there, order a carafe. Or more. Tell the waitress “spasiba,” lean back, think sleighs and onion domes, birch trees and balalajkas. Dream in audacious ways, talk big, brag about your past. Break bread, drink vodka, feel the weight of the world on your Polish or Russian shoulder. Na zdrowie!
Monday, March 21, 2005
New York break: a Chelsea market inside a Nabisco shell
Ripping the gut out of an old Oreo cookie factory and fitting into it wholesale outlets geared toward foods and restaurant supplies seems clever. Now called the Chelsea Market, it does remind me of how a place with a sordid past (not the cookie factory but the Chelsea district) can be revamped and turned into a spiffy present. Or at least it’s getting’ there.
I have to say that the factory makeover itself is stunning. Since the place is off the beaten path, there aren’t many who come just to look. Most are serious about checking things off a list. But there is also that stray person who seemed to be in search of not food, but WiFi and he found it here, within the walls of the past cookie emporium (see photo below). I don’t question the logic of putting WiFi into a former Oreo cookie place. The greater puzzle was finding, on the walk over, a tiny grocery store, the type that looks too narrow to fit in two people standing next to each other, with a large sign posted over its door: WiFi available within. Why?
I have to say that the factory makeover itself is stunning. Since the place is off the beaten path, there aren’t many who come just to look. Most are serious about checking things off a list. But there is also that stray person who seemed to be in search of not food, but WiFi and he found it here, within the walls of the past cookie emporium (see photo below). I don’t question the logic of putting WiFi into a former Oreo cookie place. The greater puzzle was finding, on the walk over, a tiny grocery store, the type that looks too narrow to fit in two people standing next to each other, with a large sign posted over its door: WiFi available within. Why?
New York break: Melinda and Melinda and Manhattan
Such cinematographic nostalgia! Last night, I may as well have been standing in an advance purchase line to buy opening week-end tickets for Annie Hall or Manhattan.
Once inside, I am in for a shock: people in their twenties and thirties actually do fill moviehouses! Nice! (This is the age group that always laughs appreciatively at offbeat lines that have absolutely no appeal to younger audiences and aren’t forceful enough to stir the jaded “I’ve heard this before” set. It is also the most underrepresented age category in a Madison Westside multiplex.)
The movie? Woody Allen’s newest – Melinda and Melinda. It’s not really so new (content-wise) after all – someone remarked that Woody plagiarizes himself, and it’s true. The uncertain distinction between the comic or tragic, the certainty of death – all Woodyisms through and through.
This post isn’t a movie review though. There are plenty who have already written (not too kindly) about M & M (I would say that generally, it is regarded as merely better than his recent worst). It is a homage to viewing it in New York. To watching an audience, sitting tightly in a little basement theater, looking not unlike the characters on the screen – entangled in city life and in each other, neurotic, deliberately dressed, seemingly focused on their own personal successes. Since the movie jumps between two separate story lines, it isn’t hard to add this third one, of those at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema last night, so that I (as the non-New Yorker) am really the true outsider, the moviegoer, while they all played their parts, reacting to each additional twist along with those on the screen.
Authentic New York. If this is a mysterious (pretentious maybe?) label, wander into a moviehouse and stare at the audience. You'll see it.
Once inside, I am in for a shock: people in their twenties and thirties actually do fill moviehouses! Nice! (This is the age group that always laughs appreciatively at offbeat lines that have absolutely no appeal to younger audiences and aren’t forceful enough to stir the jaded “I’ve heard this before” set. It is also the most underrepresented age category in a Madison Westside multiplex.)
The movie? Woody Allen’s newest – Melinda and Melinda. It’s not really so new (content-wise) after all – someone remarked that Woody plagiarizes himself, and it’s true. The uncertain distinction between the comic or tragic, the certainty of death – all Woodyisms through and through.
This post isn’t a movie review though. There are plenty who have already written (not too kindly) about M & M (I would say that generally, it is regarded as merely better than his recent worst). It is a homage to viewing it in New York. To watching an audience, sitting tightly in a little basement theater, looking not unlike the characters on the screen – entangled in city life and in each other, neurotic, deliberately dressed, seemingly focused on their own personal successes. Since the movie jumps between two separate story lines, it isn’t hard to add this third one, of those at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema last night, so that I (as the non-New Yorker) am really the true outsider, the moviegoer, while they all played their parts, reacting to each additional twist along with those on the screen.
Authentic New York. If this is a mysterious (pretentious maybe?) label, wander into a moviehouse and stare at the audience. You'll see it.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
New York break: isn’t it a lovely day to get caught in the rain…
In New York, the sky looks yellow-gray on rainy days, misty and putrid, fouled up by rising fumes from cars, buildings and people, all releasing something horrid and stale. Rain here is dirty, not clean ((like in the Midwest)) (I had to say that). It’s brutal on the footwear because it makes the street debris adhere to it. And when you get splashed by a passing cab, you get splashed with God knows what muck lining the gutters. Yesterday, a sanitation truck went by brushing down the streets along the avenues and I wanted to ask – “why bother?” Now I understand – it’s to keep the streets less grimy for the splatter experience on rainy days like today. In all, I don’t like city rain.
On the other hand, it hardly interferes with anything that you may want to do. I would have taken the same jog, the same hike to this point or the next, the same everything, regardless of the weather. Except for one thing: I will not take out my camera in the rain. It’s the balancing act of working with it while holding an umbrella and keeping my purse from swinging freely into your camera arm – too much! Add to it the horror of fogging over my lens – forget it.
And so I have no pictures to post from today. None. The one below doesn’t count. It speaks to the place I went to so that I could convince myself that life is cheaper in the Midwest: it’s a trio of satisfied Starbucks customers. Me, I’m deeply satisfied with the beverage, less so with the cost of it, since currently a small latte here rings up at $3.37 (Madison: $2.85). Way to go, NY, keep the prices climbing, and the rain messing with my clothes and photography and I’ll thank my Midwestern stars that you’re a mere smudge in my life, no longer the prima donna that I’d kill myself for, just to spend time with and swoon over. You’re a drip and a drag.
[Did that sound convincing? No, it didn’t to me either.]
On the other hand, it hardly interferes with anything that you may want to do. I would have taken the same jog, the same hike to this point or the next, the same everything, regardless of the weather. Except for one thing: I will not take out my camera in the rain. It’s the balancing act of working with it while holding an umbrella and keeping my purse from swinging freely into your camera arm – too much! Add to it the horror of fogging over my lens – forget it.
And so I have no pictures to post from today. None. The one below doesn’t count. It speaks to the place I went to so that I could convince myself that life is cheaper in the Midwest: it’s a trio of satisfied Starbucks customers. Me, I’m deeply satisfied with the beverage, less so with the cost of it, since currently a small latte here rings up at $3.37 (Madison: $2.85). Way to go, NY, keep the prices climbing, and the rain messing with my clothes and photography and I’ll thank my Midwestern stars that you’re a mere smudge in my life, no longer the prima donna that I’d kill myself for, just to spend time with and swoon over. You’re a drip and a drag.
[Did that sound convincing? No, it didn’t to me either.]
New York break: Joe Junior
At times I feel that Central Park, before 8 a.m., belongs to the dogs. If there are leash laws, no one obeys them (are there leash laws?).
On my second day out jogging, I once again encountered an incident of the Dog That Has Tasted Freedom. This dog, by the name of Joe Junior, had an owner of Russian heritage.* He flew the coop and a distressed woman anxiously ran the paths of the park shouting “Joe! Joe Joo-nioh-r! You comb bah-ck heerrrr, n-ohv! Joe Joo-nioh-rrrrr!”
You had to wonder about her life, there, in New York with Joe Junior. Or, is it not her dog? Is it the dog of the fellow she met and partnered up with? Joe Junior doesn’t seem all that fond of her (“I’ve got to split and run from this woman who has usurped my sacred spot in the household”). Did she have a dog in Moscow? Does she miss Moscow? Her girlfriend, Katya, her grandmother, Ludmila? Is the guy worth it? Does he come with a Fifth Avenue apartment?
In the meantime, all the dogs are running crazily around, chasing balls and sticks, while she’s there anxiously searching for Joe Junior, and I am jogging, rain splattering all of us so that we huddle in our private spaces, concentrating on keeping the mud off our clothes and the dogs close to us, or, in my case, far, so that they don’t shake their wet hides anywhere near me.
* The accent is a dead giveaway. Being in NY reminds me how many people in the city speak with strong accents. No wonder no one here ever asked me where mine came from – it is imperceptible when measured against the accents of others, whereas in the Midwest, any variation stands out and so I am asked repeatedly about the origins of mine.
On my second day out jogging, I once again encountered an incident of the Dog That Has Tasted Freedom. This dog, by the name of Joe Junior, had an owner of Russian heritage.* He flew the coop and a distressed woman anxiously ran the paths of the park shouting “Joe! Joe Joo-nioh-r! You comb bah-ck heerrrr, n-ohv! Joe Joo-nioh-rrrrr!”
You had to wonder about her life, there, in New York with Joe Junior. Or, is it not her dog? Is it the dog of the fellow she met and partnered up with? Joe Junior doesn’t seem all that fond of her (“I’ve got to split and run from this woman who has usurped my sacred spot in the household”). Did she have a dog in Moscow? Does she miss Moscow? Her girlfriend, Katya, her grandmother, Ludmila? Is the guy worth it? Does he come with a Fifth Avenue apartment?
In the meantime, all the dogs are running crazily around, chasing balls and sticks, while she’s there anxiously searching for Joe Junior, and I am jogging, rain splattering all of us so that we huddle in our private spaces, concentrating on keeping the mud off our clothes and the dogs close to us, or, in my case, far, so that they don’t shake their wet hides anywhere near me.
* The accent is a dead giveaway. Being in NY reminds me how many people in the city speak with strong accents. No wonder no one here ever asked me where mine came from – it is imperceptible when measured against the accents of others, whereas in the Midwest, any variation stands out and so I am asked repeatedly about the origins of mine.
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