Currently browsing 'paradise'
Fanciest so far
My love for diner coffee has reached an all-time-high. I am pathetically in love with diner coffee. I now find myself critiquing the cups they are served in, and am forever spoiled by this cup here, served to me in a diner in Murray Hill, Manhattan. Look at that saucer!
I know, I know, the heroin in this love affair is the temperature… Nobody else gets it anymore. Diners are the last bastion of hot, unrushed coffee. But it’s also the ceramic cup, the dainty spoon, the cream, the cozy atmosphere… I’m in love!
Give me some Arabian Formula
C-mixto spotted this uptown pharmaceutical in a local b odega. Who needs illegal over-the-bodega-counter viagra when you can down some Arabian Formula? Not only will it rub your genie the right way, it will turn your woman into a groveling harem sex slave. Available in any fine bodega that also carries beet dietary supplements (because in the Heights, beets cure everything).
a festival of lights
Watchers: Thanks to yahoo news some of us were alerted to the magnificent annual Geminids meteor shower. Who knew that once a year, the twilight sky is streaked with the orange, yellow and green remains of the extinct comet, Phaethon?
I stumbled upon this fact at 12am, Dec 14th, 10 minutes before the supposed peak for NYC viewing. That didn’t stop this superhero: I rushed outside in my pajamas, in clumsy snow boots, a puffy winter coat, winter hat and (what else?) my tri-corder (iphone). Sky gazing is a great way to reconnect yourself with a certain peace: to witness the vastness of the universe, its glories and mysteries.. it humbles you and reminds you that you are something outside the persona of your offices, families, friends… The fact that this meteor shower happens during the month of Chanukah, the Festival of Lights, and Christmas and the Winter Solstice, the Return of Light, makes this spectacle even more special. Take your little watchers outside for a real holiday gift next year: it’s only going to get stronger and more visible with every year. And if you have a cool iphone Star Maps application, you can aim your tri-corder into the sky and sing out the names of each star to your tyke like a soothing lullaby.
More diner talk
I’ve been enjoying more of our classic NYC Greek diners. What pleasure to know that even though there may be an abundance of Starbucks, I can still roll the die in passing them in faith that the NYC Greek diner is still a steady part of our urban landscape and I will find one to enjoy a good cup of coffee.
We already talked about part of the secret to their great cup of joes, Cecilwares Fe 100’s. But here are more reasons I’ll take my coffee there over other places:
- sitting at the counter top is like being in someone’s living room. There is a feeling of hospitality. The people behind the counter are like mother hens to your needs.
- the cups are a heavy ceramic that retains the heat of the coffee. The feel of the china in your hands is real, not a flimsy disposable cup, a plastic nothingness that separates you from the world and implicates you as an eco-sinner. That ceramic cup is endless. It’s always hot, and when it is not, you’ll get a refill.
- the experience seems tailored just for you. You don’t have to speak a stupid branding language, you don’t have to order like a robot.
- they can make the cheapest bean taste good.
So ode again to the Greek diner and its coffee.
Pelvic Thrusting Your Message: Gozando en la Habana
No disrespect to Miami as I know there can be some political charge and subtext behind this song… “Celebrating in Havana, Crying in Miami.”
This Reggaeton beat is infectious and it becomes a pulse of the Havana night when you hear it on the Malecon while people celebrate. Poignant to hear this live, blasting with its back turned to the US interest section/Embassy, the mass audience facing the embassy singing towards it.
You’ve got style, Miami
Major check off urban odyssey bucket list: sing this song into the Miami skyline in your bikini.
Gazi, Athens, Greece 2007Cities, and the people that make them
“The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real), begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.”
-Lawrence Durrell, in Balthazar
More recommended books for urbanites (and anyone fond of beautiful prose) are those in the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. It is a collection of four books, set in the city of Alexandria on the eve of the second World War. You are there, inside the tangled lives of a handful of inhabitants of Alexandria, transported by fine prose and sensual details. Through the lives of the book’s characters you feel the pulse of the old, harsh city. Though clearly fixed in its time and place, it is also timeless-the Alexandria of these pages is a city of mixed religion, ethnicities, heavy with history, burdened with the entanglements of friends and lovers. I am still reading through the quartet, enjoying every word, every line.
Et en Arcadia
The most memorable moment of our recent Sicilian odyssey did not happen in a city, but between cities. We were on one of those two hour car drives, this time our destination was ceramics from Caltagirone and chocolate from the city of Modica. We were winding our way through the Sicilian countryside. Our cars followed a well paved highway. We were surrounded by fields of golden wheat, distant hills with olive trees, and flattened sun-dried grass with bundled haystacks that looked like round suitcases left long ago by the Cyclopean race. The highway served as an unlikely wormhole through an Arcadian landscape; we passed through it encased in our vehicles. For a long while the only reminder of human contact with the land was passing trucks. They swayed with heavy loads of agricultural bounties I imagined harvested from these golden fields. I was entranced by paradise. Et en Arcadia – continue reading …
Odyssey Music
Have to give credit to (you know who you are, but do you want me to tell people who you are?) for getting me into Sigur Ros. Most of my novel was written listening to Track 8. It is so very odyssey. Ignore the images- just listen and think of your own.
BTW- they cut off the best part at the end, if you make it there. Gotta learn how to upload music….
