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Metropolitan Life

A few local shots over the past month ...

This is Museum Tower going-up in December.

Seguey tour at Market and Pacific.

Welborn at Hall Street, late afternoon.

American Airlines Center ...

Downtown from one of the bridges in Oak Cliff ...

... but as my friend Zhang Yu in China would say, "Yeah, but where are all the people?"

In Praise of Older Women (Who Haven't had "Work" done.)

Spending a leisurely Sunday afternoon with the Times online, I clicked on an ad for Alexis Bittar and found this amazing video of a photo shoot with Lauren Hutton.

She's older now, obviously, and gloriously has had little or no "work" done. She simply has stayed in shape and taken care of herself and looks ravishing.

In his blog, Mr. Bittar says:

As you all know, I’m a big fan of using a mature woman in our ads. For political fashion reasons, I think it’s important to never have enough images of mature women in the market place. As I look at advertising I’m amazed how so many advertisers use models between the ages of 18-24. But the consumer in higher luxury stores is 35-65.  I feel the message that’s being given to women is that they should try no matter what to try to look 18 It seems like a setup. The most impressive women I know have moved well beyond their teens. They are able to offer a faceted view of their lives and the accomplishments which contribute to their beauty.

Too bad it isn't the dominant opinion. So many nights I see these women parade their Joker faces all over town and I think ... well ... what were you thinking?

But alot of times they just hear that they look fabulous because all of their friends are doing the same thing and they reinforce each other's behavior. In essence, the empress has no face. Or at best she's just a visitor in someone elses.

Last month's Architectural Digest featured a home that had pictures on the wall mimicing famous Andy Warhol paintings of famous women, only if they had had work. There they were; Marilyn and Liz with jutting jawbones and ripcord necks, big poochey lips, golf ball cheekbones and bug-eyes, colored contact lenses enhanced by raccoon makeup. It said it all.

So, a toast to The Natural Woman.

 

From the Department of Ornithology

 

Last Saturday I spotted the elusive Gull-Winged Mercedes.

This was fortuitous but not altogether surprising, as they are usually only sighted on weekends during beautiful weather.

Known nesting places are usually raked-gravel mews behind absurdly high thick hedges in the better zip codes, and they are known to winter mostly in temperature-controlled storage.

Like eagles, they do not flock, but they can be seen in the company of birds with similar plummage. Actually, their owners usually do most of the preening.

While most people will be familiar seeing them in the background of Ralph Lauren print ads, they also can occasionally be seen roosting in close vicinity of five-star restaurants, golf and yacht clubs, and the front valet lot of the Meyerson.

Dreamtime

After what has arguably with few exceptions been the dullest forty-five years of car design, finally some cars are coming around that get my blood pumping.

I nabbed this pic from the Mercedes Facebook page (figured they wouldn't mind)  ... but it doesn't near do it justice. Someone keeps pulling up in front of the restaurant in an SLS AMG just like this one, and the valets do their duty and park it as conspicuously as possible so that mere mortals can bask in its glory and walk away swearing a new purpose in life.

If car companies designed cars like this all along they wouldn't be mere bankrupt companies, they would be nation states.

Step up!

Wisteria

This is Kinda Cool

I was downtown Monday doing downtown things, when I happened upon this amazing twenty-story billboard on the face of the Bank of America Plaza celebrating the coming All Star Game coming to Dallas soon

However, I was wrong ... its really THIRTY EIGHT stories tall. That's pretty amazing.

Winter Nights

The cold weather returned.

 

Friday people came to the restaurant barely dressed and ventured out into blowing snow flurries as they left.

 

I have hardly left the house except when necessary for work.

 

For one of my Sunday projects today I baked a cake. A Chocolate Cappuccino Cake. There is so much coffee syrup and chocolate in this cake, it used up all of my stores of both, and I had a lot. I just finished icing it and I’m not sure it is chocolatey enough.

 

At the club Wednesday night I was talking to a woman and it was the usual bar chit-chat, and she asked me what I did for fun. Loaded question that it was, I decided to keep it simple and just say, “Read.”

 

“Oh? What are you reading now?”

 

“Hemingway.”

 

In any other circumstance that would sound pompous, and maybe it does anyway in this dull environment, but my simple challenge is that everybody should be taking in a little Hemingway as a side salad to their Lady Gaga.

 

Chiefly I have been bouncing back and forth between his Toronto dispatches during the Greco-Turkish War, “A Moveable Feast”, and “The Nick Adams Stories.”

 

I picked up the latter for a buck at the Borders at Lemmon and McKinney in the West Village, and at the time I began to grab four more for gifts, then I thought better of it, and it was a poor decision because now I wish I could give out copies to everyone.

 

As the cold plunged well below freezing outdoors, and with Joe Henderson playing the Billy Strayhorn songbook in the background, I settled into “Big Two-Hearted River”, which is nothing more than a description of a hike across the wilderness, setting up camp, cooking dinner, sleeping, waking up, catching grasshoppers for bait, then fly fishing for trout the rest of the day. That’s it.

 

No reflections or great revelations or metaphorical flights.

 

I can say now that I could probably get a good start at fly fishing just from reading that story. Nothing is left out.

 

Of course, the story has immense undercurrents within the context of the stories which surround it, as Nick has just come home from the Great War and is literally getting as far away from it as possible in every possible way he can conceive. Absolute absorption in hiking and fishing is part of his cure, and you are right there with him.

 

Later he breaks up with his girlfriend for inchoate reasons he cannot voice, gets drunk one day, then the next evening he snakes a friend’s girl at a midnight rendezvous in the woods just because he can. The sex is hot.

 

He was in his mid-twenties when he wrote all of this.

 

Cripes!

This just in ... Autumn 2009

 

Death by Cheeseburger

This rather artless illustration speaks for itself.

I happened to start making Death Cheeseburgers this summer because it was quick and didn't heat up the kitchen and addressed all of the major food groups.

Of course, there is nothing deathly about them, except if you happened to expire afterward, you'd go out happy.

Its all very straightforward and simple. You get some hamburger meat and add some salt and pepper and a little Italian seasoning and a dollop of sour creme ... mix and form into patties. Dimple in the center so the patty will stay flat while cooking. Roll the patty in a small plate of pepper so that the edges are blackity-black. Stack between wax paper and refrigerate.

I have eschewed hamburger buns in favor of toasted slices of sourdough.

Cook your selected patty on the George Forman grill for 8 minutes.

In that time, toast your sourdough slices, then spread the bottom one with Grey Poupon dijon mustard. Sprinkle with chopped green onions. Spread the top half with mayonnaise, and then arrange beaucoups of classic hamburger dill slices, the kind they use at Sunday picnics and mid-century drive-ins. Salt and pepper.

Slice tomatos and onions thinly and at the peak of freshness. Get crisp lettuce.

When the patty is finished cooking, set it on its own plate to cool and add a slice of good cheddar to melt on the top as it cools.

Assemble the final burger by stacking the patty on top of the dijon/green onion slice, then a good squirt of ketchup on top of the patty, then a few tomato slices, salt and pepper, lettuce, white onions, top half.

Voila!

Yes there is lots of salt and pepper. What of it?

As far as ingredients go, of course you can do whatever you want, but this down-home burger will do YOU in a pinch!

Time Travel

Daydreaming on a pretty day ...

Like most people I have always been fascinated with the concept of time travel. In essence, we are all time travelers, going relentlessly forward. String theorists tell us that we ever-so-slightly, by the virtue and assistance of standing on a traveling spatial body, also go in different directions and even pass through different dimensions. 

The Earth, and by extension the solar system, galaxy and universe, are all cogs in a gigantic clock. Our days are marked by our planet's single rotation. Our years counted by our journeys about the sun. For a thousand years we have known that the movements of the heavens were as predictable as, well, the sun rising and setting.

If I chat with my friend Darcy in China, even though we chat in real time, I am in fact chatting with someone who exists 13 hours into the future, and he is communicating with someone who existed 13 hours into the past. And vice-versa.

I'm sure some day we'll discover that some extra-sensory experiences are caused by occasionally grazing these blurred boundaries.

When I was twenty-one, my best friend and I went to the Bahamas for Spring Break.

Nowadays cheap airfares have made it common for college students to meet up in Prague and bicycle to Florence, or travel the old Spice Route ... but at that time, no students really went to the Bahamas ... they went to Fort Lauderdale or beaches on the Gulf ... we were being very exotic and different. The only other people we met there were Europeans or much wealthier East Coast Americans. We were the only students there all week.

Now, by flying in a fast jet from one destination to another, literally from a past time zone to a future one, by the Law of Relativity our time-line physically slowed ever-so-infinitesimally, so already there was weirdness afoot.

One day we took a boat to an out-island for a day of rest and relaxation. We hadn't taken the iconic pic together on a pale pink beach against a turquoise ocean to show to friends, and i-phone cams still thirty years away, I handed the camera to an old man and asked him to snap a shot.

He gingerly held the camera up to his face to focus, and then said in a hoarse and trembling voice, "Ohhhhhhh boys! Look at you! You're so young!" And he snapped the picture.

It was so unsettling I never forgot it, like a voice from the future calling across the years.

I see the picture through his eyes today and now I get it:

I am the old man!