The World Examining Works

Marrakesh comes to New York

 

D+D Building on Lexington --all sorts of little black and white squares --even in the curtains (right). New York is tall and gray and white. Marrakesh is pink not a bit tall except for the Kotubia.

Rather elegantly dressed people with one splendid hat. Splendid hats aplenty in Marrakesh.

A lovely middle-Eastern feast: dried fruit and little pastries with almonds --it all makes me quite homesick for Morocco.

I think the little red decorative bits are lentils.....

And Maryam signing her lovely new book! How worlds collide.

Feast

 

On Sunday we went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens to the orchid show which you  must see. I wrote about it on my other blog, but these are different pictures, culled from the roughly 152 million I took.

A most unusual red Passion Flower. 

These are 'corsage' orchids --unbelievably showy and pretty and silly and girly and giddy --harking of proms long gone and cottillions (which I've heard of, but never been to...)

What on earth are the pink flowers on one of Patrick Blanc's 'walls' atop the pansy orchids?

A classic of yellow on green.

  Billowing frothy ferns to drown in

What is this? We name it the patriotic plant for its red-white-and-blueness.

Those pink things strike again

and again.

The blessing of heavenly blue

and a yellow that flutters like butterflies.

Outside the pansies and iris --much more austere --a palate clearing after the almost too much joy. I look at the label: I think Iris Pallida is the wan heroine of a Victorian novel. 

This looks a lot like England. ie pretty comfortable.

 

 

New Museum

 

 

Finally make it to the NEW MUSEUM on the Bowery.

The lobby is large and light and has a vast arrangement of pussy willow. ( The Metropolitan Museum and the Neue Galerie always have impressive flowers too).

The enviable polished concrete floors reflect so well. 

The elevator's chartreuse

The Bowery ( seen through the library window grille) is astoundingly clean and unlike its former not-very-regretted self.

The prisine library brims with info and clean-clean Apple techie stuff.

The stairs are long narrow eye candy

with little exhibits in nooks along the way.

These boards are maybe art work or pieces of frames awaiting fabrication -- the whole point of the exercise, I think. The distinction of art and not-art. Thank heavens I don't have to discuss that sort of thing.......that way lies madness for sure.

So, the exhibits themselves --the vast chalk board brims with ideas.  The water containers distill something....

A great deal to ponder

and ponder and maybe shed light on.

 

 

Others

 

Went to tea at a friend's house.

I like the blue in her fruit bowl. I like looking round other people's houses to see how they live, how they interpret the world. L. still had her Christmas tree up because she said it kept her cheery through dull January.

I tried to explain about Twelth Night and bad fairies and all the rest of it. If she enjoys the tree, all power to her. Her chessmen look Japanese and martial.

Her tray is bamboo and the (delicious) shortbread gluten-free.

What quirks we all have! What very small rituals make us happy.

I've just finished reading Tim Bonyhady's Good Living Street about his absurdly wealthy Viennese forebears who made fortunes from gas mantles and patronized Klimt  and the Wiener Werkstätte and ended up in Australia. Similar in some ways to Edmund deWaal's wonderful The Hare With Amber Eyes but in others very different. What a sucker I am for history and family histories in particular. 

Other than that, the day has turned chilly.

Excellent reading weather.

 

 

 

Seasonal: AKA Too Much

 

 

A treat, I think, to be alone for an instant and without any colors this in-your-face season.

However, this neo-hippie Cinnamonsnail cookie truck was just round the corner

as was this vehicle (what on earth do you call it?)

Santa's helper was putting up cool items like 'Marzipan Star' outside Donut Planet. I do not know if this is a donut or a drink.

So we decided to give a party and got out the old angels and the  petit chameau.

I discovered a Lenten Rose at Trader Joe's.

After the party there were many bottles waiting to be recycled

and birds to be observed.

Yesterday I ventured out of my neighborhood and went to the East 60's where women wear lots of makeup and there are glittering shops

a formidable lion

tourists transfixed by Bloomingdale's windows

and very cool decorations for an elf to observe.

 

Eye Candy

 

How deliberate an arrangement on a white car

 

the sidewalk

at the base of a tree

in the dog park water bowl

in the gutter

how unnatural the color of the berries --poison probably

and the street turned upside down

in the windshields

leaf collectors if there ever were

those wretched decorative cabbages --but nice colors with the leaves

 

 

Besotted with the Season

 

 

You will have to forgive my pumpkin mania

I wander about looking at people's front stoops....

and, lo and behold, positive still lives.

These are I'm-not-quite-sure-what-Berries, chopped from the little garden next to our building. The colors quite suitable though.

Liisa, DCW: This is the whole trees/bush.  Rowan and Mountain Ash are the same thing according to omniscient Wikipedia .... and I'm pretty sure this is it!

 

 

Hints of Things to Come

 

I really like this time of year, a time of gentle decay.

The dog wasn't quite sure what to make of  Vincent Desiderio's paintings at Marlborough Chelsea. I rather enjoyed his dark sensibility with hints of Fellini, Goya and Courbet.

The diner on 23rd Street  has decorated its window

and as for this house near the Bohemian Hall in Astoria, Queens

well!

Wowsers! I'm a little frightened already.

 

Another Monday

 

 

The first pumpkin of the season on a stoop on 15th Street. Very elegantly, colorlessly New York. I have been having a field day with fancy filters like Instagram, Camerabag, Hipstermatic and Old PhotoPRO -- all either free or very inexpensive -- and have concluded  that, though terrific fun, they are something to add to the gigantic pile of stuff marked 'timesucks'.

So, back to looking out of the window with my regular camera to greet the chill clouds of fall.

A science experiment --sort of. Put drop of olive oil in avacado. Add drop of balsemic. Balsemic sinks through oil. Eat science experiment.

Continue endless scarf in alpaca.

Contemplate miniature garden in tree pit by building. Remove Snapple bottle from the same. Have another stab at the 700 page biography of Patricia Highsmith I may be able to discuss on Thursday. Hmm....Walk dog.

Repeat from top.

 

 

Stuff We Keep and Stuff We Throw Away

 

 

A friend brought me this cotton boll from Alabama. I think it is very beautiful though I rather doubt I would have thought so if I had to pick cotton. I digresss.

On Saturday we were helping with a stall at a flea market and I was looking round our spare apartment for stuff to get rid of.

This character, Mr Samuel Worsley, who has lived in my desk for some years, had this  miniature done in 1821 . He seems to have lived in Orwell in Suffolk and looks a little like Wordsworth.

He was almost certainly married to poor Sarah ( above) who died aged 55 years. Where he looks bland beyond bland, she seems rather pinched and miserable. I cannot imagine how they came into my mother's possession unless they were relatives of some distant sort. However, I do not feel I can ditch them to the tender mercies of people who will feel even less connection to them than I do.

Item: two slightly sentimentally sweet French prints of children playing with animals. Kate Greenaway meets toile, much beloved by my grandmother.

I can't ditch those either.