PareaGrooveBlog

Abruzzo is famous for their marvelous Montelpuciano, a nice balanced red that is reliable and reasonably priced. In a tasting master class hosted by Vinous, an online source for wine info, both for the professionals and amateur oenophiles, not only were the red Montelpucianos showcased, but so were the lesser known whites, the Trebbianos, as some vineyards had to pull back on their reds in 2021, which year was the focus of the tasting, due to the hot and dry conditions which are becoming increasingly common, and to which these established vineyards are adapting for continued success. These were surprisingly good, especially to one who leans to reds. What was most interesting about a couple of these wines was that they were not aged in steel or oak as it typical, but in terra cotta, in “amphoras” like back in the very oldey days. Two wines that did this actually showcased these Greek vase like containers in their names, and very prettily on their labels, Francesco Cirelli’s Trebbiano d’Abruzzo Anfora and La Valentina’s Montelpuciano d’Abruzzo Docheio. The wines in the tasting were all very good and very complex, and which we were all told would also age very well.

The evening started with a whiskey and soda at the 57th St. Nobu, a great place for a cocktail practically invisible mid block tucked into the base of a gray corporate high tower. At the cleverly carved dark bar, under aesthetically hung empty sake barrels, we tried a splash of Japanese whisky made surprisingly from rice. The fountain pop sized pour of soda and the bourbon-like flavor of the booze came together to taste deceptively non alcoholic. The sweet drink was a nice start to a sweet evening at the Fall for Dance performance at City Center, which is an annual series of “programs” which combine masterful dance performances by troupes across the world with remarkably affordable tickets. This night’s programs included pieces from three troupes, one from Winnipeg, Canada, one from Long Beach California, and one from Parma, Italy. Each was a masterpiece, the first lyrical and lovely, with all the dancers making emotionally infused contact with each other in an astounding soft flow throughout, one performed between two men in absolute silence, but with so much communication between the two that music was unnecessary, and the last, a large troupe of perfectly athletic and energetic dancers so creatively bouncing off of each other, leaping from their shoulders and from the floor, such constant motion that was incredible, but also wonderful to witness how our bodies can move when they’re in peak shape. My favorite move by the last troupe, which got one of the many audience laughs, was when the slight young woman, in an incredible pas de deux, seemingly lifted her large muscled partner who was face down splat on the floor by a pull on the his t-shirt, how he used his arms and legs to seemingly rise at her pull was both adorable and astounding. We left lifted by the show, not just delight, but deeper than usual happiness for having been there. Seeing beautiful young people in beautiful shape delivering such beautiful work, all for the sake of beauty, human brains and bodies committed to creation, was a real relief, and for a moment a reminder of who we are as humans, even tonight as news comes in about the wars ripping through so many parts of our world, and about so many human brains and bodies committed to destruction. Art is important, and on some days more than others.

Movie star Matt Damon impressed as he joined his colleagues from Water.org and Water Equity on a panel with New York Times writer Charles Blow at a Ford Foundation event for Climate Week, which along with the UN General Assembly, is right now filling hotel rooms and restaurants and traffic-causing cars all through the City. I didn’t know that this very busy creative and family man also devotes a great deal of his time and effort to these two organizations devoted to bringing affordable water access to under-served communities across the world. Water is obviously crucial to life, and he pointed out so much time is spent acquiring it where it is not so available, time that could be used to better pursuits, like education, lucrative work, and just living a life we here in the West take for granted. He presented beautifully, and interestingly, very humbly, some of his experiences and called for people to donate to this important cause. The Ford Foundation building is quite grand, near Grand Central, with a stories high atrium abundant with plants and full trees, and the place for a little after talk reception where I tasted a very nice French Gamay, rare to find, and quite a lovely accompaniment to the engaged conversation which was enjoyed alongside the passed snacks.

“Grounded” at the Metropolitan Opera was certainly worth the watch. A new opera with avante modern music, where nearly every musical phrase ended elsewhere than was comfortable, but still worked beautifully. It’s about an uncomfortable topic, ripped from the headlines as they say, the ethics of fighting war with drones. The lead character is a woman fighter pilot and she is the “man” in the story, with a traditional role reversal, and yet also a mom and a wife. The leads were great, empathetic and sometimes funny actors and of course excellent singers. The Met opened their season with this wonderful new piece, and great energy, great dresses, and some celebrity spots abounded. At the VIP drinks prosecco was passed and a full bar offered my favorite, a Boulvardier, though I have to say since they changed the Campari recipe the cocktail doesn’t quite meet the past peaks it once did. I also had the opportunity to meet the two wonderful women who run BAM, Brooklyn Academy of Music, they make and nurture art from the start, something that impresses even as much as the fancy actors that were also crammed into the little roped apart drinks grab.

A pretty end of summer day prompted an impromptu jaunt across the river to one of those bedroom community suburbs NYC is somewhat renowned for. The Garden Conservatory organization opened to the public the “Mountsier Garden,” a two-acre backyard in Nutley, NJ crammed with lush bushes, trees and flowering plants with little brick paths winding through and interspersed with cute statues and small more ancient obelisks, we were told was designed over thirty years by the renowned Richard Hartledge. At the entrance we learned five hundred people signed up for the experience of wandering through this small park, which would explain the numerous cars lining the tree-lined street in front of the house, which somewhat cramped the bucolic nature of the neighborhood. The main house was originally built in the 1890s with another two little houses on the property, one seemingly devoted to being a big kitchen. You could make out the ancient brick in the older building but on top of all three were new siding as well as new windows with those large brimmed frames. The gentlemanly owner of the place mingled about with his little dog, which though very friendly, felt compelled to mark his territory repeatedly in front of us, as if you to say you can look but don’t forget, this is Mine. My friend who is smart about such things noted to our host that all the plants were of the easy to grow variety, which elicited a nose wrinkle from him. It’s an old tradition of the wealthy and the somewhat wealthy to open their gardens to us hoi polloi, and in the past that came with offers of lemonade and cookies. No longer, it seems, so we found some outside seating at Chris & Angies, a local diner with a Greek heavy menu that served delicious tzadziki in tiny shot-sized cups alongside several of its mains, and will add it on if you ask. In the evening, back in the City, I found outdoor seating again on this lovely newly Fall night which I read a comment was “9/11 weather,” a reference to how beautiful a day weather-wise that day was. I went back to a local place, Cibo & Vino, to again have one of the best pasta dishes I’ve had in a while, “cappellacci al funghi,” a mix of homemade cheese stuffed pasta puffs lightly dressed in cream and fancy mushrooms. We also split the roast chicken so we could feel a bit healthier, a suburban sized portion with a giant pile of mashed potatoes, kind of a bit too American for the Italian flair of the place, but well made. We paired it all with a very reasonably priced organic pinot noir from France. Several people on my feeds have been posting about their vacations to Italy, Greece, France and other more exotic places, and yet without going very far I could have a taste too.

A duck out of the fashion and art parties swirling around the City as the Armory, Clio, Art on Paper and other smaller shows launch alongside Fashion Week, led to a discovery of a cozy little Argentinian restaurant called Porteno, which is what the locals in Buenos Aires call themselves. Two large televisions playing the Argentine-Chile soccer match were seemingly background lights to the ten tables and bar filled with diners enjoying the surprisingly reasonably priced and surprisingly not beef based Argentine fare, that is, until a goal was made and seemingly out of nowhere nearly everyone shouted, cheered, and sang that sing-songy ayay-ayayoyayoyay that permeates soccer games across the glob, outside the US. A quick snack turned into a transportive moment, watching these happy fans take a moment away from their otherwise New Yorker lives to flash back to their home base and cheer their futbol team to victory. For a moment we felt like we were somewhere else, the camaraderie in the room was joyous. Then we paid up and stepped back out into the City, dodging the rush of traffic and wizzing bikes of Tenth Avenue, and the moment was a memory in an instant.

Arriving to Amagansett mid afternoon after intense mid summer traffic, more than three hours alone in a car wending my way through the final throes of Book Five of Knausgaard’s Struggle, I craved, and found, something collective and cool to do. I made my first visit to the church in nearby Montauk, St. Therese of Lisieux, and was delighted by the vaulted blond wood roof reminiscent of a boat’s insides, a polite nod to the fisherman who were Montauk’s early residents, and the gorgeous detailed stained glass in every window, rivaling the great cathedrals of Europe. It was a nice surprise. Even nicer was the concert, part of the Music for Montauk Summer Series. The musicians were astoundingly talented, with impressive and large bios, all played across the world in various symphonies, won presitigious music prizes, trained at Julliard and the like, wrote their own music, and hold professorships at renowned institutions. The audience was very small, of mostly locals, and grouped into the first few rows of pews. This concert, especially for its excellence, could have been promoted a bit better, but just arriving on the hour as it was starting I was happy for that as I got a great seat. They were done in about an hour, playing only movements from larger pieces, including one to showcase the brilliant clarinettist in a Mozart piece,one written by the violinist, and which showcased the rock star cellist in a new work. Introducing the performance a musician apologized for taking us out of a beautiful day after a week of rain, and at the most beautiful hour at this time of year, but no one minded judging by the cheers between pieces and the standing ovation to finish. Five young musicians, playing two violins, a viola, cello, and clarinet, on a summer evening a few steps from the beach, a nice start upon arrival, and to finish, a glass from a beautiful bottle discovered from the local store, another nice surprise, Natura, an organic Chilean Carmenere, bold enough to stand on its own, light enough to complement a summer evening.

The weather has certainly become summer and we’re enjoying it now as the sun shines and the heat hots. It feels like this week was our first summer week because Memorial Day was a rainy one for most of the East Coast. Lots of our beachy traveling plans were scuttled, which we could conveniently chalk up to Mercury Retrograde beginning, a three week period that astrologically predicts travel plans and electronics snafus. Whether astrologic forces are real or not, it’s fun to have some outside reason to blame for random mess-ups in our own lives.

People are talking about traveling, one of us talked about flying to Miami and wondered whether it was now okay to post about travel plans as during the pandemic people were hesitant to share about their trips for fear of COVID shaming. We determined that now it’s okay, and we agreed that we have all noticed an uptick in people posting their travel adventures which is creating a whole new kind of FOMO. One of us shared that he took his first walk outside his apartment since March, 2020. Granted he was the most extreme among us with regard to personally locking down, so we were all very encouraging and happy that he has emerged, finally, back into the world. He was surprised by some of what was challenging athletically and what wasn’t. He had worked out his upper body quite a bit, but going up and down stairs he found was disturbingly difficult. Even opening heavy doors that NY apartment buildings favor, was challenging. One of us shared that she was knocked down by such a door recently, and got her knee scraped up a bit, and we talked about whether she might have some legal standing to pursue a claim against her building, and whether it was worth the trouble.

Heavy doors and irresponsible landlords led to us talking about the corruption enmeshed in NYC real estate and how we really hope the next Mayor of NY would clear things up. DiBlasio seemed to be embroiled in the corruption and we, among most City dwellers, feel this has led to a demise of NY, including an uptick in aggressive, and large, rats and pigeons. The primaries for Democratic mayor are coming up in two weeks and there are so many candidates running that it is really hard to do voting justice, as we want, especially now when the stakes feel higher post COVID and economic hits. Also there are elections for District Attorney, and Comptroller and Manhattan Borough President, too many candidates to understand, but also we realize it is important to understand. So there was a call to find someone to speak to us about it. I had planned to go into summer schedule of every other week starting this week, but people really wanted to get together to talk about the NYC primaries. So I was charged with spending the next week trying to find someone to do that for us.

We then talked about touristic cemeteries. Someone said she had gone to visit Greenwood Cemetery near New York with a friend and that this turned out to be a very nice day out, and that the grounds were populated with children and picnickers. It seems cemeteries across the world are popular for this kind of thing, though personally, that would not be a top choice of mine as a fun thing to do. Of course, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, the day before Halloween, is celebrated by picnics by relatives’ gravestones. Our French friend talked about the Pere Lachaise Cemetery where some famous people are buried, including Jim Morrison of the Doors. We then talked about music lyrics we remembered growing up and how at the time, with our babyhood innocence, we didn’t realize the double entendres, or even the overt sexuality, that they entailed. But now we can, and it was fun to revisit. Do it to me one more time. Come on Baby Light My Fire.

We are opening, bit by bit. And yet we keep going. Our little community wants to keep talking. So this week we met, and a lot of the conversation touched back to reminiscence of this past year or so. We started by discussing our pandemic cooking skills that we developed over the pas year and change. One of us enjoyed that “Post Traumatic Personal Growth” that’s now being written about as a result of the lockdown and lost a lot of weight. She shared her favorite diet trick, that putting tomato sauce and spices on everything low calorie made it more edible.

We returned to discussing the artist talk we had the week before, about L.S. Lowry. A friend hailing from England explained the dark towers painted by Lowry were not meant only to be an emotional touchstone but were actually realistic because back then all the coal burning in England turned the white stone walls sooty black. Now, she explained, there’s a movement to clean all that up. We discussed how different artists were popular in the US and the UK and about the reasons why that might be, maybe many of them political. Someone brought up that was true even among US artists, and how the artist Andrew Wyeth is known to be more popular among the more politically conservative, for example.

We talked about weird things people want to do, like one explained he had his favorite pet rabbit stuffed after it passed, which I found a tad disturbing personally. Unsurprisingly, the taxidermist who did the job was a bit of a strange man, he reported, a hermit who lived near the cemetery, had long white hair, long nails and five large rottweiler dogs. As he explained, this man turned the cute fuzzy bunny into a “feral beast.” He then found the, uh, object, and shared it with us from his Zoom box.

We then talked about Zoom college reunions, Zoom talent shows, Zoom friend groups. We commented how we connected with people this last year we wouldn’t have seen but for Zoom, one saw an old college roommate from 1993. We talked about Princeton in particular of which one of our regulars in an alum, and how the school is very active with its reunion efforts and also how it expects to grow the campus and student body, which is somewhat impressive that this is happening over the COVID year. We talked about the evolution of school populations and how there was once a Jewish quota at many universities, and that there was once a Jewish quota even to employ doctors at hospitals. Someone explained that this is why the Mt. Sinai hospital in New York was created so that Jewish doctors could have a place where they would have admitting privileges. This of course led to discussing the limiting admittance of country clubs in the past and how Jewish people went on to open their own country clubs. We then touched on the disturbing uptick in anti Semitic crimes across the City and across the country, and that Jewish people are currently the victims of the highest number of hate crimes, and why this is not publicized, nor does it trigger the ire other hate crimes do.

We then talked about interracial, intercultural and inter-religion dating, and about dating apps. We wondered how dating would look as we moved into opening, whether it would be an intense free for all or more a search for connection. We talked about the fun things available to do now that we’re opening and we’re on the cusp of summer. I saw the Guggenheim exhibit the day before, but it was a bit too apocalyptic for my taste, it was a dark exhibit about racism with very little art, mainly a giant screen that hung from the roof down through twisting floors of the museum. Someone went to see the new Floating Island park that was just opened off the west side of Manhattan into the Hudson. Another mentioned a favorite bar in Riverside Park, Pier i, which has opened again and offers awesome sunsets. We talked about the next weekend and Memorial Day and whether anyone had plans. We talked about how time feels like it has flown. We reminisced about the last year and its challenges. Then we looked forward to all the great things opening and how showing our vaccine card and maybe the NY Exelsior Pass would be required. We talked about rejoining our gyms rather than working out at home, and whether we’d try to continue both, our own hybrids like the hybrids of the reopening businesses and their office plans. We talked about all the things we gave up over the year and whether we missed them and whether we’d reintroduce them into our lives now that we can, like that daily latte on the way to work.

Today we had another art talk. Our regular Dan graciously volunteered to gift us with a researched slide talk about the UK artist L. S. Lowery who is well known in his home country but somehow not in the US. As usual, we waited for about twenty minutes or so for people to join in before beginning the art talk. Everyone reported that they’re vaccinated and we commended our resilience on seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. “Herd is the Word” someone cheered. I mentioned for my hobby as an actor I’d had two Zoom auditions already, one paired with different actors in little boxes, one set up as a panel audition like in real life, an insight to the future hybrid of mixing Zoom, here with the audition, with real life, for which the performance was anticipated. And we talked about our friend’s ankle healing efforts and her challenges with the big boot she’s now wearing.

This art talk was especially fun. We’ve been meeting like this for over a year now and we’ve become comfortable with each other and with the format. So as Dan talked we all jumped in and gave our thoughts and observations and the conversation quickly became especially vibrant and engaged. We discussed the colors and use of light in the paintings, the people in the pictures, and what it might have meant with regard to the time and place of post industrial England. We learned Lowery was offered a knighthood and turned it down, how he never married, and cared for his mother over her long illness. We looked at several pictures, discussed his life, observed the details. And we ended with some erotic drawings and paintings he had done that were discovered after he passed, weird pictures now on line that previously required special permission to view from the museum that held them. We then veered away from Lowery and talked a bit about the impact of the erotic art, and somehow this led to talking about impact of sound and light on healing pain and PTSD and the new gadgets that are evolving to use it.