“Lake Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1992″

Isn’t this insane? This is from an exhibit at the Met selected from photographs Lee Friedlander took during a decade spent looking at Frederick Law Olmstead’s public and private parks. I’ve always had a thing for Olmstead - considering that I grew up in Buffalo and Boston and make my home in New York City, this is no surprise; these were the cities in which Olmstead created his greatest “landscapes of illusion”. His parks have dominated my personal landscape, and as an adult, have helped me survive urban living. I’ve written about my love of Prospect Park, and I know that Olmstead loved it best of his creations, and I believe that Friedlander loves it, too:

“Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, 1989″

About taking these photographs, Friedlander wrote that even with work that was “ok or even good”, he felt that it was “still a touchstone or a fast glance at the real thing itself”, and exhorts you to go, be in and look for yourself.

Seeing his photos had the desired intent: I want to get on the Q train, drop my bag at the cook crush’s, and head out on foot to pound out a run around Prospect Park, thankful for its design and smarter for a fresh view of it.

My friend Cynthia was commissioned to design the windows at Hermès:

As you can see, she is adorable. I had not seen her artwork before, and although I had every confidence that it would be as special and unique as she, and that she would bring to it even more care than she does her other job (and as the woman who, in my book, rates as World’s Best Waiter), I was completely blown away by how wonderful it is:

As an exhibit, the installation is called “Dodging the Shadows of the Sun”. It is global and specific and strange and familiar. Paintings that look like block prints, wallpaper that looks like painting, animals that look like humans, masks that make mannequins seem alive. India, Japan, Africa and New York. Evocative of travel and repose.

And at the risk of turning art into commerce, the windows lived up to their commissioned purpose: when I looked at them, I felt rich and elegant, and at the same time felt impoverished and provincial and that I needed to buy all of the objects the windows showcased so that I could be rich and elegant. In particular, I had a moment with the gold sandals (Hermes sandals, from Hermès - I just got that):

I’m wondering how many dinner parties I would need to cook for her as a barter for one of the paintings.

1) Every day there are a handful of “comments” posted to this site that are actually porn spam. I have a filter that keeps them from appearing, but they are saved for me to review in case amidst all the junk is a real person’s comment. Some of the spam is quite interesting (although not interesting enough to earn my approval) and I’m fascinated by the way the standard layout of these messages changes over time.

The latest style is an intro sentence and then literally hundreds of rows of presumably effective porny-sounding search terms. (My filthy vocabulary has been enhanced enormously through the exercise of marking these comments as spam.) As I scrolled down this morning, I noticed the term “Gwyneth Paltrow Bikini Pics”.

Although I promised the cook crush I would lay off the Liz Lemon/Tina Fey “really?”, I am prompted by this to ask, really? Bikini pics of Gwynnie are so sought that this is a popular search term? Really?

2) The andouille sausage from Whole Foods is actually pretty tasty, which is more than I can say for their hot Italian sausage. I cooked one up last night to have on crostini with ricotta and baked grape tomatoes, with oysters, as an evening snack meal.

3) My new favorite thing to consume is “The Killer”, a juice (green apple, lemon, ginger and cayenne pepper) from Liquiteria that is served hot. I enjoyed one tremendously while I watched Atonement, which is not nearly as boring as I worried it might be and has stunning costumes and art direction, although it wasn’t cathartic sobfest I had hoped for.

4) It is cold as a witch’s tit out there, and I can’t find my winter running tights. It is late in the season and I thought I could get away without them but it is bracingly cold out.

We had a teeny Oscar party that included beverages in honor of the movie that I thought was the best to come out this year. I love some muscular, chewy, idealo-socialist literature, and I thought that this was one of the best novel-to-film adaptations I’ve seen. It captures the essence of Sinclair’s novel and then improves upon it with the creepy soundtrack and thrilling camera work.

What was most remarkable about TWBB was the way it elicited the swooning revulsion I feel when I see real violence. When two men square off and fight with their fists, really with the intention of truly hurting each other, it causes intense nausea at the same time that it is magnetic, as though there is a preservational measure to not looking away. The violence in TWBB - between men or objects or colliding natural forces - was every bit as intense as it is in real life.

We also had some Juno Alaskan Smoked Salmon Dip, which was tasty on carrots and very easy to make. It consisted of 1 pint Greek yogurt thinned out to dip consistancy with equal parts lemon juice and half-and-half, a 1/4 pound smoked salmon minced into a fine pulp, and a tablespoon of fresh dill fronds.

On Sunday I visited a labyrinthine installation project by British artist Mike Nelson located in a disused Essex Market building. The space is one of several indoor markets opened in the ’30s as part of a campaign to reduce pushcart traffic, one of four such buildings grouped around Essex and Delancy streets on the Lower East Side. Although the market buildings on the Northeast corner of this crossroad are currently home to bustling retail and dining options, Building D, on the Southeast side, has been closed off since 1995. Building D originally housed the meat market.

For this project, Nelson shaped a path for the participant-viewer through Building D that feels like a funhouse, with dead ends and multiple routes through a series of rooms. You have to try every door, double back, enter from a different angle to be sure you’ve seen it all. Some spaces appear to be authentic architectural remnants of the building when it was alive: a meatlocker, a walk-in fridge, a Chinese restaurant covered in soot, a boxcar bar. Other rooms are architecturally anonymous but have been laced with artifacts to create creepy, gestural tableaux resonant of the history of the neighborhood - a tattoo parlor, a fortuneteller, a pawn shop - making you question whether the rooms even existed before the project, what was urban archaeological treasure found on site and what was brought in to orchestrate a sense of place.  

Allegedly, there was nothing in the building when he began the project and hence the name, A Psychic Vacuum. This volume of space, built to house the bustle of commerce around one of our most primal needs, had been left devoid of all life and meaning except that implied by its very structure, which had itself been forgotten by the sands of time. He rushed to fill this vacuum with fabricated memory. 

I loved walking through this exhibit. It is open Friday through Sunday until October 28th and lovely photos of it can be found on f.trainer’s photoset on flickr.

Starting in the late ’80s, Pete Jordan (aka “Dishwasher Pete”) spent the better part of a decade travelling the USA working as a dishdog in an attempt to have paying jobs washing dishes in each of the 50 states.  The pearl diver lifestyle suited him - few responsibilities or commitments, hours of solitude, tons of free food and mostly easy work.  He got through 33 states before he hung up his apron and relocated to Amsterdam to study urban planning. 

While on his quest he published a dishwashing zine - remember what we used to do before blogs? - and became a reluctant celebrity of sorts.  In addition to appearing on a few This American Life episodes, he has written a book recollecting the various stages of his journey and maturation and outlining the dishing lifestyle as a unique niche within the more general restaurant lifestyle. 

Dishwasher would have captivated Thoreau and Marx and would have challenged Veblen to reconsider his notion of who constitutes the leisure class.  He sneaks in some dishwashing history and making unpreachy observations about materialism and the value of effort.  He riffs, consciously or not, on the master-slave dialectic. And he’s a damn good story teller.

Consider buying his book.  I’m sure he could use the money.