NYC Days 29 & 30: In Which I Do The Usual; Plus Week 4 Expenses

Click on images to view full sized.

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Most days I start out with a long list of possibilities to select from for that day's events and activities, only to ignore them all and do something else entirely. At some point during my day however (if I am not ensconced comfortably in a museum somewhere), I know I am going to need to rest and regroup, preferably in a location that has food, clean restrooms, and air conditioning. And preferably away from the heat, noise, hustle and bustle and humidity of the afternoon city. I have several favorite resting spots, and I thought I would write about them today. You never now when you might be in need of one yourself. Some are perfect as afternoon havens of rest and relaxation, others less so.

BROOKFIELD PLACE
I've mentioned Brookfield Place before on this blog, and I'm sure I will do so again because I use this as my personal 'cooling center' when I am in this part of Manhattan. PROS: It has lot's of public seating, food options aplenty, clean restrooms, free WiFi, air-conditioning, great views of the Hudson River, a weekly schedule of free music and arts events, and fancy shopping options if you need them. CONS: None that I can think of.

If you are visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, or One World Trade Center and need somewhere to rest and recuperate after, this is definitely the place to head to, and since it is right across the road from these hot spot visitor attractions, I'm surprised it is not packed. The fact that it isn't, suggests that most visitors don't know about Brookfield Place or its public facilities.

By the way, there is a long underground pedestrian tunnel that connects to the Oculus and the vast subway and PATH rail networks that are located there. The Oculus itself has dozens of options for shopping and eating, but no public seating apart from that provided by restaurants and cafes, which are generally reserved for paying customers.

Location: 230, Vesey Street, Manhattan.

Above and Below: Brookfield Place. A place to eat, shop, rest, and relax.

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ROCKEFELLER CENTER
PROS: Lot's of public seating, plenty of food options, restrooms, free WiFi, and air-conditioning. CONS: due to the volume of people at this location, the restrooms are generally busy and not alway in the cleanest condition. I'm sure the janitors are doing their best, but the constant flood of visitors seeking relief in the two large restrooms on the lower ground floor must make their task almost impossible. As for the views, there are none to speak of until you surface onto the plaza above.

Despite the caveats noted, this is a place where you can go to hang out for ten minutes or ten hours! I'm sure the location closes down at some point very late in the evening or in the early morning hours, but from what I have observed, as long as you are not troubling other people, you can stay as long as you want.

Location: On Fifth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets.

Above: 30 Rock, the building that hosts the Top Of The Rock viewing experience. 



Above and Below: A towering installation from Jeff Koons entitled, Seated Ballerina.

Above: This terrace double as an ice skating rink in winter and an outdoor restaurant over the summer. 

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TIME WARNER CENTER, COLUMBUS CIRCLE
PROS: This is my 'go to' place for the cooling air-con, clean restrooms, reasonably priced sandwiches and coffee (or higher class eating if that's your thing), and fancy fashion shopping options -- although I rarely if ever shop there. In fact, I have no interest in 'fancy shopping options' whatsoever, but that's another story. CONS: My main complaint about this location is the lack of available public seating options. To put it bluntly, there are no public seating options. Like the Oculus, the only available seating is provided by restaurants and cafes to paying customers. Out of interest, on its website, the Center claims to have "A prestigious collection of the largest Michelin-starred restaurants under one roof..." So if you are planning on eating a fancy meal there, make sure your credit card is well primed.

Personally, I think the owners of this building are doing the least possible to fulfill the requirements of their contract with the city. Often, agreements with city authorities to build massive skyscrapers such as the Time Warner Center come with stipulations for accommodating the public in some way. The owners are certainly doing this, but it is clear they don't want Joe Public hanging around, cluttering up the open spaces in their building -- especially if they are not there to spend their money. I go here for the sandwiches and coffee from the Bouchon Bakery Take-Out (not Michelin-starred!), and the restrooms, and for a much appreciated cooling break from the humidity, but that's about it. This is not a place to linger at.

I'm sorry, but I give up! I've been trying for far too long to load some images of the Time Warner Center in this slot, but I suspect a combination of aging iPad 2 and less than user friendly Blogger software has tested my patience to the effing limit, and I give up!

So instead I have loaded three other images: above is the delicious Juiciest Lucy Inside Out burger (I'm sure it's called something like that!), which I had at A.G. Kitchen at 269 Columbus Avenue, Manhattan. Well worth the USD$17.00 cost.

  Above: The Solders' and Sailors' Monument located at 89th Street and Riverside Drive in Riverside Park (on the Upper West Side).

And below, the scariest woman I have encountered so far on this trip! She resides in the Met Museum, and is not someone you'd want to bump into after the lights go out! You have been warned.

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ONGOING WEEKLY EXPENSES
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Museum Memberships $19.15 ($25.15)
AT&T SIM card $13.60 ($17.85)
MTA Pass $28.00 ($36.80)
Accommodation $152.00 ($200.00)
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Total Ongoing: US$212.75 (AU$279.80)
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ADDITIONAL DAILY EXPENSES
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Sunday 9, July | Expenses $32.50 ($42.80)
Monday 10, July | Expenses $118.65 ($157.10)
Tuesday 11, July | Expenses $78.00 ($101.30)
Wednesday, July 12 | Expenses $30.75 ($40.05)
Thursday, July 13| Expenses $47.65 ($61.00)
Friday, July 14 | Expenses $37.75 ($48.25)
Saturday 15, July | Expenses $30.00 ($38.30)
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Total Daily Expenses: US$375.30 | AU$488.80
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TOTAL EXPENSES WEEK 4: US$588.05 (AU$768.60)

*Figures in brackets are Australian dollar amounts.

NYC Day 28: In Which I Venture Across the East River to the Brooklyn Museum

Brooklyn Museum (click on images to view full sized)

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NEW YORK CITY: LOVE IT, OR LEAVE IT
You have to love New York City, because if you don't you are going to hate it. Take the weather for example. Yesterday had to have been one of the hottest and most humid of the summer so far. The forecast temperature was 93F, but once the oppressive humidity is taken into account -- and yesterday the humidity was oppressive -- the 'feels like' temperature, as they refer to it here -- makes the temperature feel much higher. This awful heat and humidity combination is another good reason not to venture down into the subway system if at all possible (see yesterday's post), since the temperature down there has to be at least ten degrees higher. And it definitely feels like it is 20 degrees hotter.

However, here we are today, and the temperature is at least 20 degrees cooler with a light but steady rain failing over the city, or at least over Manhattan. While the cooler temperature and the rain brings some relief to the city's eight million residents and tens of thousands of visitors, that relief is only temporary. In fact, brief as this respite from the heat will be, the light showers now covering the city's sun baked streets and buildings will only serve to increase the humidity once the water begins to evaporate, and thus the whole cycle of heat, humidity, and rain continues over and over again.

Nevertheless, as I wrote yesterday, Every cloud has a silver lining, and I had no intention of  letting a 20 degree drop in temperature go to waste. Heck, I was even prepared to brave the subway system on the basis that the temperature underground would have reflected to some extent the cooler weather outside, and happily that proved to be the case. It was therefore time to get off the island of Manhattan, and head to Brooklyn.

Above and Below: It all seems a bit fetishistic to me, but the exhibition featured numerous examples of clothing taken from Georgia O'Keeffe's wardrobe.

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In four previous extended visits to New York, I had never made it to the Brooklyn Museum, and today was the day I chose to change that sorry fact -- and I am delighted I did. Where the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, and many other similar institutions on Manhattan, are constantly packed with visitors, crowding and jockeying for prime selfie positions, the few people I saw at the Brooklyn Museum were quiet, reserved, and very well behaved.

And while the Brooklyn Museum's collection may not be as extensive as that of say, the Met Museum, there is more than enough to justify a visit to this wonderful location. The lack of crowds also seemed to cause visitors to slow down and savor the collection rather than feel they had to rush through rooms whose walls were crowded with works of art. The pace of discovery was certainly far more relaxed and reflective at the Brooklyn Museum than I have ever found it to be at the Met or MoMA.

Above and Below: Ram's Head... Full picture, info panel and detail.

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The big show now on at the Brooklyn Museum is the Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern exhibition which finishes July 23, 2017, so if you are going to see it, you need to be quick.

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) is one of the iconic figures in modern American Art, celebrated for her early abstractions, and paintings of flowers and animal bones. Yet even though her paintings are familiar classics of twentieth-century Art, and the circumstances of her life are well known, there is still much to discover about how she created her identity beyond the studio.

This exhibition takes a new look at how O'Keeffe integrated the modernity of her art and her life, exploring how she used clothing and the way she posed for the camera to shape her public persona. Though she dressed for personal comfort and ease, her wardrobe played a meaningful role in her aesthetic universe; she understood how clothes helped create and reinforce her image as an independent woman and artist.

Above: Brooklyn Bridge, 1949.

Above: The Mountain, New Mexico, 1931.

Above: Black Place II, 1944.

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Rejecting the staid Victorian world into which she was born, O'Keeffe absorbed the progressive principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which promoted the idea that everything a person made or chose to live with--art, clothing, home decor--should reflect a unified and visually pleasing aesthetic. Even the smallest acts of daily life, she liked to say, should be done beautifully, a philosophy reinforced by her study and appreciation for the arts and cultures of Japan and China. {Source: Exhibition brochure]

I enjoyed the exhibition as far as it went, but I would have liked to have seen more paintings and fewer photographs, of which there were many, and all of which seemed to feature O'Keeffe sporting her signature black and white ensembles. She certainly knew what her 'brand' was, and she rarely deviated from it throughout her professional life.

O'Keeffe is surely best known for her 1920s and '30s paintings that feature either the sun dried skulls of dead cattle, or the large, detailed images of flowers (and sometimes both themes combined together in unusual ways). Over the years that I have been familiar with her work, I have been happy to accept the idea that many of these paintings had other symbolic meanings, most of which had to do with sex and sexuality.

So it was informative to read that these theories had been promoted by Alfred Stieglitz (O'Keeffe's longtime friend, partner and husband). Stieglitz ...

...interpreted her art as having strong sexual and anatomical connotations, claiming her images were expressions of an essential and uniquely feminine artistic sensibility. O'Keeffe spent years denying these eroticized readings of her painting as well as the qualification of her identity as an artist with the word woman. In an interview in the 1960s, she offered a different account of how she came to paint her big flowers:

In the twenties, huge buildings seemed to be going up overnight in New York. At that time I saw a painting by Fantin-Lator, a still life of flowers I found very beautiful, but I realized were I to paint the flowers so small, no one would look at them because I was unknown. so I thought I'll make them look big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they'll have to look at them -- and they did. 

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Personally, I'm happy to accept O'Keeffe's explanation at face value, However, the subconscious mind is an amazing thing, and maybe it's a reflection of my own subconscious that I too can see the same things that Alfred Stieglitz saw in her work. Or maybe I just spend too much time thinking about the female anatomy in general! I suspect too, that Sigmund Freud would have been very interested in exploring O'Keeffe's subconscious on seeing these same works.

IF YOU GO
Brooklyn Museum
Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern
Now through July 23, 2017
Tickets: (suggested admission) $10 - $16; Members & ages 19 and under, Free.
Exhibitions: $6 - $20; Children under 12 free.
Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 11 am - 6 pm (except Thursday open until 10 pm)
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years's Day.

Note: The museum brochure clearly states the hours noted above. However, I was there on a Friday when the museum was open until 8:00pm, though I suspect this may be for the summer months only. Note too, that the museum offers free admission to all on the first Saturday of each month. See you there ;-)

Above and Below: Hilda Belcher's portrait of a young Georgia O'Keeffe, and info panel. 



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Friday 14, July | Expenses $37.75 ($48.25)
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Any questions or suggestions? How about complaints or compliments? Let me know via the comments box below.

NYC Days 26 & 27: In Which I Battle Hay Fever and High Humidity

Washington crossing the Delaware (click on images to view full sized)

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Wednesday 12, July | Expenses $30.75 ($40.05)

HAY FEVER BE DAMNED!
I did not bother to note in my last post that I thought I was coming down with something, and so it came to pass.

I went to bed last night feeling worse than I did before I left the house for the City Winery show, and this morning I awoke suffering from a full-blown allergic reaction to something in the New York air. Maybe my visit to the New York Botanical Garden, and Conservatory Gardens was not such a good move on my part. I spent the night trying to breathe with a succession of toilet tissue plugs pushed into my nostrils soaking up the gunk that oozed from somewhere inside my head. I slept on and off until 11.00am, and while the flood of snot, or whatever the stuff is, has eased for now (and is more white in color than green), I will be staying in today.

NEW YORK STEAK AT VICKI'S DINER
I was in no mood to cook for myself tonight, so I went to Vicki's Diner, and ordered a New York Steak with vegetables. Soup de jour was a good Greek vasolatha. The soup was lovely, but the steak was dry and over-cooked. I suppose I should not have expected much more from a short order cook, but we live and learn (mostly). Vicki and her head waiter are both Greek, although I couldn't work out if the waiter was her husband, father, or what. I do remember him from my 2010 visit, and I suspect that he has been working there for many years, as seems to be the case in many New York establishments.

Above: a small pot (it was too small to be called a bowl) of a traditional Greek bean soup called vasolatha.

Above: Apparently this a New York Steak.

Here are today's many and varied activities that I missed:

Jazz+Wednesdays @ The American Folk Art Museum
2.00pm—3:00pm. During the run of the exhibitions Eugen Gabritschevsky: Theater of the Imperceptible and Carlo Zinelli (1916–1974), the Bill Wurtzel trio will perform music that celebrates the creativity and expressiveness of the human mind. Limited seating available.

FREE: Spiral Music Series @ THE RUBIN MUSEUM, 150, West 17th Street.
6:00—9:00pm. Tonight… Indian raga blends with Andrew Shantz + Zac Colwell…

Wednesday Night Poetry Slam
9:00 PM. $10.00 - $20.00. At 236, E. 3rd Street
Hosted by Jive Poetic! Line forms outside a half hour before doors open at 9:00pm.

9:00pm—1:00am. Kennedy Administration
Club Groove, 125 MacDougal Street.

FREE: SUMMERSTAGE: Mon Laferte / Princess Nokia / ÌFÉ in association with the Latin Alternative Music Conference
5:00 pm - 10:00 pm. Rumsey Playfield, Central Park. Alt-Chilean songstress with NYC-underground tribal hip-hop and Afro-Caribbean electronica.

FREE: SUMMERSTAGE: Ladies of Hip Hop Festival with Special Guest Amirah Sackett
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm. Queensbridge Park, QUEENS. Showcase featuring all-female talent from around the globe uniting communities through dance. Featuring 7pm LOHH Dance Workshop.

Bryant Park Accordion Festival. Yes, this event has returned this year for another series of concerts on the Bryant Park stage. So far I have missed all of them!

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Below, for your edification, I have included some images by the wonderful Greek artist known as El Greco.

Above: The Vision of Saint John (1608-14) Oil on canvas by El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). Greek, Iraklion (Candia) 1540/41-1614, Toledo.

The painting is a fragment from a large altarpiece commissioned for the church of the hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo. It depicts a passage in the Bible, Revelation (6:9-11) describing the opening of the Fifth Seal at the end of time, and the distribution of white robes to "those who had been slain for the work of God and for the witness they had borne." The missing upper part may have shown the Sacrificial Lamb opening the Fifth Seal. The canvas was an iconic work for the twentieth-century artists and Picasso, who knew it in Paris, used it as an inspiration for Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

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Below: Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541-1609), ca 1600-1604. Oil on canvas by El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). Greek, Iraklion (Candia) 1540/41-1614, Toledo.

This intense portrait depicts Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541-1609), who was named cardinal and is dressed as such here. In 1599 he became Inquisitor General of Spain but resigned in 1602 to serve the rest of his life as Archbishop of Seville. The painting probably dates from the spring of 1600 when the cardinal was in Toledo with Philip III and members of the Madrid court. El Greco had lived in Venice and in the Farnese Palace in Rome, where Titian's portraits (such as those of the Farnese Pope Paul III) would have revealed to the Greek painter the psychological possibilities of portraiture.

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Dateline: New York, New York
Thursday 13, July | Expenses $47.65 ($61.55)

I awoke this morning feeling 100 percent better than I did yesterday. The flow of gunk from my nose had slowed to a dribble rather than a flood, and with or without the help of Zirtek, I seem to have turned the corner on this latest hyperallergic reaction to -- what? I have no idea what triggered this current debilitating episode of hay fever, but I'm happy to be over the worst of it. I was even thinking about where I might go today, until...

Until I went to the toilet, did my 'bizness', and went to flush the waste away only to find the water to the building had been turned off! You've got to be kidding!, says I to myself. But no, there was no water to be had. Luckily, I had some water chilling in the fridge which I was able to boil for a mug of tea (you didn't think I was going to waste it on the toilet, did you?), so I could at least enjoy a hot drink with my breakfast.

Now What? I hadn't showered for 36 hours, and I didn't fancy the prospect of descending into the hot and humid subway system unwashed and unclean, although gawd knows there are plenty of people in a worse state down there than I would have been. Just the same, I decided to wait it out, and hope the water would be back on before the end of the day. In the meantime there was nothing for it but to pull up a chair in front of the Edgestar portable air-con, and relax and continue reading Jim Thompson's very disturbing thriller, The Killer Inside Me, one of six books purchased so far during this trip.

{time passes}

Just after midday I tore myself away from my book with an, I wonder if...? To my delight, while the hot water was still off, the cold water was flowing freely which took care of a very foul looking (and smelling) toilet bowl. I decided that I should make the effort and head out for the afternoon, and what better place to go than back to an air conditioner Metropolitan Museum. I took a cold shower in water that was about one degree above freezing and walked to the nearby M4 bus stop. Now I know what you are thinking, dear reader. Why is this guy catching buses all the time, when the much faster subway system is available. Well, I'm glad you asked, so I will explain.

It's true that the subway system is fast and efficient. Unfortunately, the A-train which also runs close to where I am staying doesn't go anywhere near Fifth Avenue, where the Met Museum is located, and where several other major museums are also to be found such as the Guggenheim, the Museum of the City of New York, the Museo del Barrio and a number of others. However, to my great convenience, the M4 bus (once it reaches Fifth Avenue), runs all the way down that famous avenue, passing all those museums on Museum Mile, as that section of Fifth Avenue is known. Indeed, the M4 travels all the way to Midtown where it terminates at 34th Street/Penn Station.

The only real inconvenience with catching the bus is that it increases the length of time it takes to reach the museum I am heading to. Still, every cloud has a silver lining, they say, and since I tend to be an 'Always look on the bright side of life,' kind of guy, I have plenty of time to read my books, or just stare out the windows and watch New York City slide by in all it's raucous glory. Truly it can be said, that no two bus rides are ever the same. If nothing else, a ride of this type only reinforces the idea that driving cars in this city must be among the most stressful things any New Yorker can choose to do. Come to think of it, driving anything in this city has to be a major stressor. How there isn't an accident at every intersection I will never know.

Oh, and for the record, the M4 bus route passes up Madison Avenue, and runs all the way to Fort Tryon Park, Inwood, which, after visiting one of the museums on Fifth Avenue, also turns out to be a great convenience since I don't have to make my way across Central Park to Columbus Circle to board an A-train for the return journey to Washington Heights.

NYC Day 25: In Which I Go Zapping For Dweezils

Dweezil Zappa—What’s In A Name?
Billed as “Storytelling with Guitar Accompaniment”, and to be followed by a Q&A session, today's main event at City Winery gave fans of the great Frank Zappa and his son Dweezil, an opportunity to learn about both their musical careers and accomplishment at this event..

Dweezil Zappa was born on September 5, 1969 in Los Angeles—the son of Frank and Gail Zappa. It was inevitable that from the moment of his birth that his life would be filled wall-to wall with music (his father having listed his religion as “musician” on Dweezil’s birth certificate).

What's in a name, indeed? Dweezil Zappa and {Someone-or-Other} Kennedy who was the Mistress of Ceremonies, provided an entertaining evening of questions and answers related to Dweezil Zappa's life, his own music career, and the life and career of his much acclaimed father Frank Zappa.

Dweezil spoke about his early years learning to play guitar, and recalled a seminal moment when he was 12 and Eddie Van Halen visited the family home. Van Halen gave him a guitar and also taught Dweezil a few classic Van Halen moves, all of which made a huge impression on the young boy.

He also recounted tales that did not reflect well on Lou Reed (who is regarded as something of a Rock God in New York City). Apparently Lou, in what came across as professional jealousy in Dweezil's stories, had a habit of making disparaging remarks about Frank Zappa's music and compositions. According to Dweezil, Reed had even make the comment that Frank Zappa 'couldn't write a hit song if he was given a year on a Greek island to do so'.

Dweezil was not able to explain the reasons behind Lou Reed's antipathy to Frank's music other than professional jealousy, since Frank Zappa was light years ahead of Reed when it came to musical ability. That Zappa never had a 'hit' as measured by the Billboard charts is of course besides the point. Zappa senior had no interest whatsoever in achieving that sort of ephemeral success. In a strange, and ironic twist to these stories, Dweezil recounted that when Frank Zappa was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it was Lou Reed who was chosen by the organizers to deliver the induction speech. Dweezil did not say what his father, Frank thought about this.

Dweezil said that Frank recorded and released more than 60 albums during his career, but Frank's musical 'vaults', containing hundreds of studio and live concert tapes, had many more hours of music stored on them. What will happen to this music now is anybody's guess.

The most interesting and in some ways shocking parts of the evening were when Dweezil talked about the ongoing fight he is having with his family to be able to play his father's music. A fight that again proves the adage: You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family.

I don't think Dweezil explained fully why it was that the Zappa Family Trust wants to stop him from playing Frank's music. In fact, they have been going to extremes in their attempts, going so far as to issue Cease and Desist orders for example, stopping him from using the phrase "Zappa Plays Zappa," and worse. The Trust, which is administered (if I remember rightly), by his brother, Ahmet and sister, Diva, has even gone so far as to try (unsuccessfully), to stop Dweezil from using his surname, 'Zappa' in all promotional material! Seriously, WTF!

Throughout the Q&A, Dweezil played brief instrumental guitar licks to illustrate his father's compositional style and abilities, but these moments were probably the least successful aspects of the night, since the music really only comes alive when played with a full band. I must say I enjoyed the evening more than I thought I would, and listening to Dweezil's stories made me determined to listen to more of his and his father's music, and to catch Dweezil in live performance when the opportunity presents itself.

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Tuesday 11, July | Expenses $78.00 ($101.30)

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NYC Day 24: In Which My Day is Mostly Forgetable - But Not Completely

Closing time at the Metropolitan Museum
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Today was one of those non-event days. By the time I got my act together, and to be frank, I don't think I managed to even do that, it was well past midday. I planned to return to the Met Museum and spend a few hours in the larger galleries, but after a good hour or so on the M4 bus, and somewhat starved of food, on arriving at the museum I immediately headed downstairs to the cafeteria where I bought something to eat and drink. I then proceeded to update my blog with yesterday's events. By the time I had done this, I had little more than an hour to wander through a few rooms before it was time to depart.

Above and a detail below: Geometry, a fresco (transferred to canvas) dating from 1760.
Attributed to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Girolamo Mengozzi.

 

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Above and info panel below: The Patio from the Castle of Velez Blanco.

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Above and info panel below: When I saw the above pages from a book (dating from 1434 - 35) illustrating the four Gospels, I immediately thought 'Comics!'. In a time period when few people could read or write, the best way to teach the story of the gospels was to illustrate them. 

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Above: I don't know about you but this statue of Saint James The Greater looks like it could have been the inspiration for one of the characters out of a Pirates Of The Carribean movie. According to the info panel for this statue, Saint James The Greater ('greater' than who or what?), is even wearing a hat "...emblazoned with a cockleshell emblem." Am I right, or am I right?

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BOOK SHOPPING AGAIN

At something of a loose end, I jumped on the first available bus, an M3, going down to the East Village, and alighted at 14th Street, whereupon I made my way to that most famous of all New York City book shops, the Strand Book Store (at 828, Broadway and 12th Street). This was my first visit during this trip, and I'm quite sure it won't be my last. As always, I was quite overwhelmed by the vast array of books lining its "18 miles of books," as they like to claim (and I am not about to question that claim any time soon). In deed, I wandered between dozens of towering bookshelves and display tables groaning under the weight of the books piled on them thinking to myself, Where are you supposed to start? And where are you supposed to stop?

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Of course, I had to buy something while I was there, and in the end was able to restrict myself to just three books, The Killer Inside Me, by Jim Thompson, The Bell Jar, by Silvia Plath, and Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. All three authors and their books are highly regarded, and all have been on my radar for years, so the decision to buy was not hard. What will be hard, assuming I manage to read all six books I have bought so far, is whether to leave them behind in New York, or whether to take them back to Australia with me. Given that I returned home last year with a bag filled with books, I suspect I already know the answer to that question.

As a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick, the quote on the cover of Jim Thompson's book is of particular interest to me because it was Thompson who wrote the screenplays for two of Kubrick's earliest films, The Killing, and Paths of Glory. 

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Monday 10, July | Expenses $118.65 ($155.90)

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NYC Day 23: Sunday in The Park and Native-Canadians at SummerStage

Central Park's Harlem Meer at 110th Street.

Harlem Meer Performance Festival: Something Positive
The 24th annual Harlem Meer Performance Festival brings the best local talent in music and dance to Central Park! Enjoy jazz, Latin, world, and gospel music while admiring the lakeside views. All ages are welcome. Location: Charles A. Dana Discovery Center, Central Park (inside the Park at 110th Street between Lenox and Fifth Avenues).

I made it to the Harlem Meer event in time to catch the performance by Something Positive before a very appreciative audience of mostly local Harlemites, and visitors to the city, like myself. Something Positive are described as an "...ensemble of international dancers, singers, and musicians [performing] a mix of Afro-Caribbean traditional and dance music with a blend of poetry, storytelling, and theater."

The show encompassed all of the above description, and the ensemble of five or six dancers, three percussionists, the leader singer/storyteller and a chorus line of three women, kept the mood party-like throughout the performance by encouraging audience participation by teaching us chorus lines to sing, and by getting audience members to get up and join the dancing at appropriate times.

Conservatory Gardens, Central Park
From the Harlem Meer, I walked down to one of my favorite sections of Central Park, the beautifully maintained Conservatory Gardens. I find it impossible today to create a picture in my mind that depicts this area of the park as desolate, abandoned and dangerous. All words that once described the area before the Central Park Conservancy began to rehabilitate the area during the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Today the well manicured lawns, hedges, and vast swathes of flowering gardens are a delight to walk through and enjoy.

The Conservatory Garden is Central Park's six-acre formal garden. It is divided into three smaller gardens, each with a distinct style: Italian, French, and English. The Garden's main entrance is through the Vanderbilt Gate, on Fifth Avenue between 104th and 105th Streets. This magnificent iron gate, made in Paris in 1894, originally stood before the Vanderbilt mansion at Fifth Avenue and 58th Street. 

The Italianate center garden is composed of a large lawn surrounded by yew hedges and is bordered by two exquisite allées of spring-blooming pink and white crabapple trees. A 12-foot high jet fountain plays on the western end of the lawn, backed by tiered hedges and stairs that lead up to a wisteria pergola. On the walkway under the pergola are medallions inscribed with the names of the original 13 states. 

Above and Below: Conservatory Gardens in Central Park.

The northern, French-style garden showcases parterres of germander and spectacular seasonal displays of spring tulips, and Korean chrysanthemums in autumn, all within an ellipse of Japanese holly. In the center is the charming Three Dancing Maidens fountain by German sculptor, Walter Schott. 

To the south is the very intimate English-style garden. There are five mixed borders of trees, shrubs and perennial plants, and five seasonal beds featuring spring bulbs that are followed by annual flower displays. A slope of woodland plants lines the western edge of this garden. At the center is sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh's lovely Frances Hodgson Burnett Memorial Fountain, a tribute to the author of the children's book, The Secret Garden. The children — a girl and a boy, said to depict Mary and Dickon, the main characters from the classic — stand at one end of a small water lily pool.

From the Conservatory Gardens it was time to make my way towards the evenings main event, a celebration of contemporary Native-Canadian culture at the Rumsey Playfield, where three acts from north of the border were getting ready to rock the night. The event was just one of a hundred or so free concerts in the annual SummerStage [www.summerstage.org/] series of concerts that take place across all five New York boroughs. First up was Iskwé.

Promo image of Native-Canadian performer, Iskwé

Iskwé

Hailing from Winnipeg in central Canada, the wonderfully diverse Iskwé is of Irish and Cree/Dene lineage. Her full name, in Cree, translates to “Blue Sky Women”; Iskwé alone means “women,” and she chose this solitary moniker to represent both her culture and passion for shedding light on female causes and struggles. Strongly attached to her origins and spirituality, the skilled singer/songwriter instills her work with powerful elements of her heritage. Her voice is potent and luminous, her style a jazzy medley of trip hop and R&B. She attributes her inimitable sound to her “mixed indigenous and Irish ancestry,” as this cross-cultural experience had made an indelible mark on her life and music. A perfectionist with her work, her first album, the self-titled 2013 masterpiece Iskwé, took eight full years to produce. She subsequently released several singles to address the everyday atrocities that indigenous women must endure, including the heartbreaking 2015 track “Nobody Knows.” Her stage performances are bold and stunning; in tandem with her vital music, often she strikingly paints her face in the tradition of her Cree people.

A Tribe Called Red 

Oh, Canada! For those unfamiliar with “pow wow,” a chanting & drumming performed by North American Native people, Ottawa-based A Tribe Called Red will whole-heartedly introduce you to it – mixed with electronic rhythms, hip-hop, moombahton, reggae and dubstep, naturally. Their gloriously inimitable sound (which some refer to as ‘powwow-step’) has been transforming urban club culture in Ontario and beyond, helping electronic music fans to significantly broaden their horizons. The present roster includes DJ NDN, Bear Witness and 2oolman, and with their fantastically feral live shows/parties (replete with original, politically inspired visual art pieces and videos), they have been disseminating their message of aboriginal heritage embracement through wildly fun music.

The SummerStage performance space and part of the audience waiting for the show to kick off.

Buffy Sainte-Marie looks at things differently. Since her very first release in 1964, It’s My Way, this luminous singer-songwriter, a member of the Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, has viewed music as not just a means of personal expression, but as a way to effectively disseminate messages of peace to the global community. A prominent activist, pacifist, educator and visual artist, she split time in the ‘60s between NYC’s Greenwich Village, and Toronto’s equivalent, Yorkville. While performing next to the likes of Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, she naturally set herself apart from other “folk” musicians, with a sometimes ephemeral, sometimes booming voice rife with culture, history and visionary ways of viewing humanity and our relationship with the earth. A Juno, Golden Globe & Oscar winner, Sainte-Marie has been recognized as an innovator with her protest anthems (“Universal Soldier”), her startlingly honest take on addiction (in the much-covered “Cod’ine”), her incidental pop-crossover mega-hit “Up Where We Belong,” and her most recent album Power in the Blood, a beautifully unapologetic look at identity and our place in the universe.

Tonight's show marked the third time that I have seen Buffy Sainte-Marie in concert, and I continue to be amazed by the power of her high-energy performances. I've said it before, but I'm happy to repeat the observation that I'm sure is not unique to me: Buffy Sainte-Marie may be in her mid-70s, but you would swear she was thirty years younger, so dynamic is she as a live performer.

This is one singer that I am more than happy to see for a fourth, fifth and subsequent times if the opportunity presents itself.

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Sunday 9, July | Expenses $32.50 ($42.80)

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