Jack 11

Jack turned 11 last week, cashing in on his neglected party, i.e. never happened, last year - Carolyn's first year as art coordinator- by a blowout trip to Harry Potterland at Universal. But lets start at the beginning...

 

Facebook, alarmed at the decline of personal, emotive content, now triggers flashbacks - "where were you five years ago" - engineering the way we relate to one another much like Hallmark invented Mother's Day and all the other national hamburger/pancake/donut/etc celebrations these days.

But raising children has its own built-in nostalgia, with inevitable before and after photos, tracking, as a friend put it, the melancholy nature of time. 

 

Evoking a yuletide atmosphere, this place will be probably enhanced when visited during a SoCal winter, with its snowy rooftops, Scottish wool scarves and sweaters & capes and hearty pub fare of stews and prime rib, roast chicken. Curiously, the romantic meaning of England always seems tilted towards Christmas, in terms of seasonal place - from CS Lewis & Tolkien to Downton Abbey - conjuring Dickens of A Christmas Carol for a new generation of admirers.

 
Dinner was at the "cook in front" place, ie teppanyaki,

 
followed by chocolate cake with whipped cream filling and buttercream icing topped with fresh fruit, ending, as he put it, "the best day of my life."

NYC Food & Art

We ate our way through the city, pleasantly discovering a renaisannce of baked goods & pastry, such as

Breads Bakery, an Israeli take on pastries, such as pain au chocolat and their signature babka -

 Eric Kayser, the chain boulangerier of Maison Kayser of Paris with the reputation of the city's winning baguette, has several shops in NYC now.

 

Eataly, Mario Batali's emporium of regional Italian food was a busy maze of morsels and, like many spots, introduced gorgeous products with little table space to enjoy them - reminding that we were in a metropolis' real estate - hard to park a car or sit a body -rather than suburban LA.

Then there was Ippudo, the Kyushu-style, cloudy pork broth ramen foodie spot, raising cheap comfort food to a level of global destination. The chicken and pork buns were to die for.

 

Ramen is a Japanese way of preparing what is originally Chinese, unlike soba or udon, becoming a craze. In my opinion, LA has a more vibrant ramen scene, where you can still find dives, as well as trendy spots like Tsujita. 

Museums & Architecture

After a satisfying bagel with inch thick cream cheese, we walked along the Park to the Natural History museum(AMNH); a dead zoo, more or less, but forever loved by the boys as the site of Night at the Museum. Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the opposite side, these 19th century behemoths are cultural temples, similar to the old banks downtown, impressively flanking the great park; the Frick museum down the road originally a home.

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Museums are sometimes mentioned as secular sacred spaces with their trophies & icons, but Teddy Roosevelt's aim as New York governor - whose statue graces the AMNH front steps - was to, in a sense, curate nature; forever since US national parks registering as our cathedrals, landmarks.

The IMAX film exhibit linked Roosevelt's profound encounter with nature to the deaths of his mother and wife, both dying in the same house within hours.  Afterwards, a pivotal camping trip with naturalist John Muir would turn the Sequoias, Yosemite Valley, and Yellowstone into national treasures - nature as momento in an act of mourning, bequeathing a national estate to future citizens.

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The day before, Debby and Udo guided us through the brand new opening of Fulton Station in Wall Street,

almost as controversial (for $ and design) as nearby Oculus,

the expansive new transportation hub for Wall Street which felt like a modern Grand Central Station, in its cavernous public space.The Empire State Building for its interior splash and outdoor vistas:

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 The Fulton subway station had beautiful tile mosaics of the inventor's steamship,

 

reminding of the beautiful metro stops in Paris.

 

Magnolias were blooming in the park.

- - a view from the museum restaurant facing the park, after an energetic tour of the Italian renaissance - the museum's strong suit - by Nadja, starting with a neglected Della Robia glazed relief: 

 Managed a quick visit to MOMA to show the boys the modern masterpieces,

 

 

as well as this great exhibit of SANAA, the renowned Japanese architectural firm, which won the Pritzker a few years back for their design of Lausanne's EPFL library.

 Models of the firm's global work were on display.

Museums and buildings all done in one packed afternoon!

Medieval New York

NYC Holy Week on a Pepperdine boondoggle. JD Rockefeller Jr had portions of European abbeys reconstructed in upper Manhattan in a medieval environment, far removed from downtown noise - a beautiful retreat marking a liturgical calendar - called The Cloisters.

  Surrounded by cobblestone, the site is a remarkable throwback to the middle ages: herb gardens, cloisters, chapels and extensive collection of illuminated manuscripts.

JD Rockefeller Jr was an early liberal, theologically speaking, supporting Union Seminary and the building of St John the Divine Cathedral, which celebrates a wide variety of religion in its chapels, ever expanding and purposely never complete.
Michael really wanted to see the Cloisters and the boys, hopefully, made connections to visited sites in Europe, like Mont St Michel in Normandy, where the water ebbs and flows according to tide, illustrating the creation act:

 “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

Oceans have been domesticated as wonderful vistas for play in modern times, registering as chaos, formlessness, before industry tamed them; the abbey here - the earth itself - becomes an elaborate life raft; the liturgical calendar a cathedral in the shapelessness of time.

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 We decided to attend St George's Episcopal for Tenebrae, though perhaps too spent after heavy sightseeing to appreciate the tragic quiet of the elders robed in black,

 
carrying a black-veiled cross.

 

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Two days earlier, we attended Bach at One, a world class Bach program begun 5 years ago at Trinity Church in Wall Street.

or more precisely St Paul's Chapel,

where we heard the choir practice.

The church next to the Twin Towers, achieving miracle status for surviving 9/11, was a triage site and memorial retold in this moving children's book

On March 23, 2016, we were treated to 3 cantatas sung feet away in the first Episcopal church in America, where George Washington prayed at his private box following his inauguration nearby.

 Church and State fused in a new way now, starkly remembered inside and at the nearby 9/11 memorial of water flowing in a grave-like pit - not a spring of life, let alone fountain of youth. Certainty here is of loss; eternal hopelessness anchoring the names etched along a communal tombstone,

 

an overall vector unlike the gravestones of adjacent St Paul, pointing upward; worship alive next door.

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I leave with this 1956 shot of Manhattan, reminding me of similar scenes of LA's city hall of my childhood, and the bright yellow of forsythia, reminding of Ithaca grad school days. April is the Spring!