Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   a cold day for walking around in Manhattan
Thursday, January 16 2025

location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY

Today Gretchen had arranged with me to join her on a romantic day and overnight in Manhattan. We dropped the dogs off at Ray & Nancy's place and drove down to New Paltz to catch the bus at the park & ride. First, though, we went by a nearby Dunkin Donuts to pick up vegan coffee drinks Gretchen had ordered to drink on the bus. We sat in the rearmost seat near the bathroom and played the New York Times Spelling Bee separately, but updating each other occasionally on our respective progress. This was one of those rare overnight trips where I didn't bring a laptop computer. Indeed, I traveled so lightly that all I took was the clothes I was wearing, my wallet, and my phone. We didn't even have a way to charge our phones.
Once at Port Authority, we walked many block southeastward to our first destination of the day, Candle Café. The weather was extremely cold, at least by the standards of New York City, but we'd dressed accordingly. I was wearing thermal long underwear under my trousers and four layers on my torso (the topmost being my hoodie). Gretchen had thought I should bring a real coat, but those four layers were adequate; the only places on my body where I felt cold was on my thighs and face. (I wasn't wearing gloves, but I kept my hands in my pockets like a two-headed Alanis Morissette.)
Candle is part of the old-school high-end Manhattan vegan restaurant scene. It used to have several locations, but now it's down to just one: the more-casual Candle Café, which also now offers a vegan Thai menu in additional to their more traditional eclectic menu. We both ordered off the Thai menu; I had the golden curry and Gretchen got the drunken noodles. I also ordered a cappuccino, because I can always drink one of those. The food was amazing, though the cappuccino had been sprinkled with cinnamon, which is not something I prefer (though I can tolerate). In addition to us dining there were a couple single women, one of whom seemed to be vegan but wasn't sure the restaurant was (it was). When asked how things were, she also said the food was "alright," which was not what one usually says. Meanwhile Gretchen and I were talking about issues like the recent allegations against Neil Gaiman. Yesterday she'd told me that these seemed to be giving him a new fanbase: incels in the manosphere, one of whom placed an order for several of his books at the bookstore yesterday. (While we're on the subject of incels, Gretchen and I saw two or three Cybertrucks on the streets of Manhattan today, and Gretchen always wanted to know what the drivers looked like. Sometimes their tint was too deep to see, but when she could see, she was pretty sure no stereotypes were being broken. She also started referring to the vehicle as a "Cybercar," since it doesn't look like a truck to her.)
We caught a subway on the 6 line north into the Upper East Side and walked from a subway station to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most of the people one sees walking on the streets of Manhattan are a diverse group in their twenties and thirties. But on the Upper East Side, where apparently the rich who don't move to Florida go to die, most of the people looked to be older than us, though many of them appeared to have had work done. (It's a much more subtle kind of work than one sees in Los Angeles, but if you're old anywhere and have more money than you can possibly spend, it's apparently common to blow some of it on trying to look like a teenager.)
The exhibit that interested Gretchen the most was a collection of late Medieval art, most of it paintings and altarpieces, from Siena, Italy. It was full of the kind of paintings I used to marvel at in a tattered art history book my mother had gotten at some point. Such paintings nearly always depict Jesus, usually as an infant with his mother or up on a cross as an adult at the start of a particularly bad weekend. There are usually halos around the heads of the holy, any babies look like shrunken adults, and perspective is an ad-hoc mish-mash. As with recent image generators using artificial intelligence, there seemed to be a widespread failure to accurately depict hands, though at least artists kept the number of fingers equal to or below five. There was lots of great material to look at, though I was most interested in things most visitors hadn't come to see, such as how wooden panels had been kept connected together and to what extent they had decayed over the years.
Next we walked through an exhibit of art by African Americans inspired by Egypt, an African empire that even Europeans count as a cultural ancestor. Later we wandered into one of the main perennial galleries to look over the most impressive collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings one can see anywhere. This had us wondering what the entire collection of the Met is worth, and later we found an answer: about 100 billion dollars, which seemed low to us.
In the past, I've acted a bit like an impatient child when Gretchen has taken me with her to museums. Don't get me wrong, I do like some things about museums and can even have a fairly good time in one. But I don't have much tolerance for the slow walking that typifies the museum experience. Physically, I start feeling it in my lower back. And it's also easy for me to get bored and start wishing we were doing something else. Today, though, I had to repress all my negative feelings, because part of Gretchen's birthday present this year was for me to visit museums and not complain. And this time, the exhibits were good enough that this was easy for me to do.

When we finally left the Met and filed out into the bitter cold, we started walking back southward in the direction of where we'd be spending the night, at a hotel in the Lower East Side. The Upper East Side is miles from the Lower East Side, so at some point we'd be hailing a cab, getting in a subway, or perhaps even get a rideshare bicycle (just kidding on that last one; remember, I didn't have gloves). Then Gretchen saw a municipal bus drive past with "East Village" as its destination, and she wondered if taking the bus might be fun. Buses are slow and at the mercy of surface driving conditions. But at least they're warm. So a block or so south of the Met, we climbed aboard. (Paying for such rides is super easy, as one of Gretchen's credit cards is registered in the MTA and all she has to do is tap it once for each of us.) What followed was a very pleasant ride. It was slow, of course, but we didn't have to be anywhere. And our seats were higher above the landscape than any other transportation mode aside from an airplane, so we had a great view. I'd been in Manhattan subways and taxis more times than I can count, though this was the first time I'd ever been in one of its municipal buses. We rode the bus until the bus driver announced that this was the last stop (with a tone that suggested she was half expecting us to object). From wherever the ride ended, Gretchen navigated us further southward. Eventually we crossed Houston and, within a few blocks, were at our hotel, Indigo. We checked in and were soon in our room, 813. We had a west view from our window and could see the Freedom Tower and the top of that wacky new residential spire along the High Line that looks like an incompetently-stacked tower of children's building blocks. [REDACTED]
After a couple hours of downtime, it was time for us to go to our dinner reservation at Soda Club in Alphabet City. On the walk there, we passed the dog park in Tompkins Square Park and stopped to marvel at the chonky black pit bull and another lankier dog who saw us standing along the fence and decided to rear up on the fence to say hello. His human parent yelled at him and at first we thought she was telling him not to socialize with us. But when she came over, she explained that her dog had been playing keep away for a half hour now in an effort to stay in the dog park as long as possible, where he was having fun chasing rats and didn't care that it was brutally cold. The woman took advantage of the distraction of us fussing over her dog to sneak up and put a leash on him.
Soda Club is a member of a group of vegan businesses called Overthrow Hospitality. It turns out that Gretchen is even an investor. Entering Soda Club from the street was like descending into a dark, cheerful cave. The lighting was at about the lowest setting allowed by law, and, as we waited for our table to be prepared, we read the menu by the light of actual candles. Gretchen had talked with the guy who owns all the restaurants before we came and was hoping we'd get VIP treatment, but it was clear that our waiter had no idea who we were when he introduced the restaurant as "entirely plant-based." Soda Club's name must be a relict of an earlier use for the space, as "soda" has little to do with what is served there. Their specialty was gourmet pasta preparations paired with a vast wine selection. After much deliberation, we opted for a six-course pasta tasting for two, which cost $150 and came with a bottle of wine. Soda Club has a generous wine tasting policy, and we sampled something like four different wines before settling on a chilled red. (Gretchen had initially wanted an "orange" wine, but neither of the ones we tried appealed to her. Once we were done sampling all those wines, Gretchen already had a good buzz going and wouldn't be drinking much of that bottle that came with our meal, so I ended up drinking nearly the whole thing all by myself. Gretchen had swapped out one of the default pastas in the tasting series with something else, but somehow that did communicating to the guy who plated our meal, so we ended up getting seven different pastas to taste. Some were better than others, though they were all at least good. More importantly, there was enough food (something that often isn't the case when one orders a "tasting" option, which is why I'd initially been resistant to the idea, to the extent I could be on Gretchen's birthday when it was what she wanted to do).
I forget what all we talked about, but I remember our conversation being great fun, with me feeling nicely loose and unfiltered from all the wine I was drinking.
On our walk back to the hotel after our meal, I had us go into a few bodegas and a drug store to see if we could buy a USB cable so we could charge our phones from a USB port back in our room. But the prices just weren't low enough and $10 (the cheapest price we found) just seemed too expensive. There were a bunch of hundred dollar bills blowing around on the sidewalk somewhere along our way, and we would've had unexpected riches had they been real. They looked pretty convincing in the darkness, but felt like regular paper when we picked them up. One found its way into my wallet and I hope I don't accidentally try to spend it.


A big altarpiece from Siena in the Met exhibit today. It's maybe ten feet tall. Click to enlarge.


Portraits of various saints in the Siena exhibit. Click to enlarge.


The backside of two paintings. The one on the left has the decorative embossing that usually is done made into halos and borders. But the "painting" is just blobs of colors. Click to enlarge.


A sculpture in the exhibit of the art of African Americans inspired by Egypt. Click to enlarge.


Another sculpture in the exhibit of the art of African Americans inspired by Egypt. Click to enlarge.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250116

feedback
previous | next