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History, Food, and Music
Mar. 19th, 2023 08:42 amI had bigger plans for Saturday, starting with meeting up with a high school friend. Ellen was a year behind me, but she hung out with a bunch of people my year and endured a lot of what would have been early college planning for her, as well as playing tons of word games in the library. We had planned to get together last summer, but she got COVID. So it had been a while since I’d seen her and I was particularly happy to have this opportunity.
New York Historical Society: We had agreed to meet up at the cafe attached to the New York Historical Society. It had rained Friday night, but the rain had stopped by late morning. I enjoyed a leisurely stroll through the Upper West Side to get there, but ended up having a hard time finding the cafe. It turns out that my phone was off by a block about exactly where it was, but Ellen had gotten there early and was able to direct me. It took ages for me to get a cup of tea, but I eventually did and we were able to enjoy our drinks and chat for a while before going into the museum.
The main reason I’d wanted to go there was to see their current exhibit I’ll Have What She’s Having about Jewish delis, which is closing in early April. I can’t say I learned a lot, but it was reasonably interesting. We both particularly liked looking at prices on the old menus. And the television / film clips they showed (including that iconic line from When Harry Met Sally) were also fun.
We finished with it in time to join the highlights tour of the museum. This started with the 4th floor, where there’s a reproduction of the Oval Office and an exhibit about presidents. That didn’t particularly excite me, since I live in the D.C. area and I’ve seen the presidential portraits in the National Portrait Gallery a few times. We went on to look at various other exhibits, however, including the gallery of Tiffany lamps. I particularly liked the dragonfly series. (I have a thing for dragonflies, in general, by the way. I have a vase with a design of them and several items of dragonfly jewelry.) But, anyway, I really need to go back some day and spend a couple of hours just in that gallery.
Another unique collection at the museum is John Jacob Audubon’s original watercolors of North American birds. To preserve the works, only one at a time is shown, under low light conditions. The bird of the month was the Kentucky warbler. The exhibit includes the plate used for printing the folios and several copies of prints, as well as the watercolor.
As I already said, there’s lots more to see. I was particularly intrigued by this image which shows a health care worker as a heroine of the pandemic.
All in all, the tour was a good way to get a quick look at some of the collection and I thought the museum was worth a visit. We did also do the obligatory browse through the gift shop. Back when I was working, I would probably have bought a scarf. as they had some nice ones. But neither of us saw anything we absolutely had to have. And we had dinner plans!
Chama Mama: When we were planning what to do, I looked for restaurants reasonably near the museum and saw that Chama Mama, a Georgian restaurant I’d been wanting to try based on another friend’s description of his birthday dinner there, has a branch on Amsterdam Avenue and 78th. I got some cred with the waiter by asking if they had tarragon lemonade (a unique Georgian soda, which I love) and explained that I had been to Georgia and that I frequently eat at Supra in D.C. Anyway, we followed his guidance and got quite a feast. We started with what they call “taste of Georgia,” which is an array of spreads with bread - eggplant, beet, kidney bean, some unnamed wild plant, and something else I’ve forgotten. Khachapuri (cheese bread) is an essential of Georgian food and we got the Imerui Khachapuri. We also got khinkali (dumplings). And for the main course, I got a dish of cauliflower in garlic sauce, while Ellen got chicken in walnut sauce. We also got some amber wine. Everything was delicious. It was definitely extravagant (and pricy), but well worth it.
NY Phil and MTT: The primary reason for the trip had been to see Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the New York Philharmonic. He’s a marvelous conductor and, given his health, I doubt I have many more opportunities to see him conduct. The renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center only opened in October 2022. The acoustics are wonderful - which had not been the case at its predecessor. (Avery Fisher Hall had once been described as “a very fishy hall.”) There are, oddly, some seats that are behind the orchestra, which looks weird to me, but I had a seat at the back of the (normal) orchestra section.
MTT was conducting two pieces - his own Meditations on Rilke (which consists of 6 songs) and Schubert’s Symphony in C major, D.944, Great. One of the reasons I love him as a conductor is his talks about the works he is conducting. In this case, he talked about his father telling him that Schubert’s music is like cowboy music. He then told a story about his father going to California with friends, all of them hoping to find work in Hollywood. They ran out of gas and money in a small town in Arizona (“not even a one-horse town. There might have been a burro.”) He went into a bar which was looking for a piano player and they asked him to play some honky tonk song, which he could do after they hummed a little of it. That led to an imagined episode years later in a small Western town in which an old guy named Izzy plays the piano at a honky tonk bar, but every now and then slips into some Mahler or Berg and everyone just nods and says, “yeah, that’s how Izzy is. He’ll get back to our music.”
Anyway, the concert was extremely enjoyable. Some day I need to write about what goes through my head when listening to “classical” music - well, really, any instrumental music or even just music in languages I don’t understand. It’s a very different process than listening to popular music where I do understand the lyrics. I haven’t figured out how to articulate this yet, however. At any rate, MTT’s talk definitely enhanced my listening experience. I felt deeply privileged to be able to experience such a fabulous performance. Bravissimo!
New York Historical Society: We had agreed to meet up at the cafe attached to the New York Historical Society. It had rained Friday night, but the rain had stopped by late morning. I enjoyed a leisurely stroll through the Upper West Side to get there, but ended up having a hard time finding the cafe. It turns out that my phone was off by a block about exactly where it was, but Ellen had gotten there early and was able to direct me. It took ages for me to get a cup of tea, but I eventually did and we were able to enjoy our drinks and chat for a while before going into the museum.
The main reason I’d wanted to go there was to see their current exhibit I’ll Have What She’s Having about Jewish delis, which is closing in early April. I can’t say I learned a lot, but it was reasonably interesting. We both particularly liked looking at prices on the old menus. And the television / film clips they showed (including that iconic line from When Harry Met Sally) were also fun.
We finished with it in time to join the highlights tour of the museum. This started with the 4th floor, where there’s a reproduction of the Oval Office and an exhibit about presidents. That didn’t particularly excite me, since I live in the D.C. area and I’ve seen the presidential portraits in the National Portrait Gallery a few times. We went on to look at various other exhibits, however, including the gallery of Tiffany lamps. I particularly liked the dragonfly series. (I have a thing for dragonflies, in general, by the way. I have a vase with a design of them and several items of dragonfly jewelry.) But, anyway, I really need to go back some day and spend a couple of hours just in that gallery.
Another unique collection at the museum is John Jacob Audubon’s original watercolors of North American birds. To preserve the works, only one at a time is shown, under low light conditions. The bird of the month was the Kentucky warbler. The exhibit includes the plate used for printing the folios and several copies of prints, as well as the watercolor.
As I already said, there’s lots more to see. I was particularly intrigued by this image which shows a health care worker as a heroine of the pandemic.
All in all, the tour was a good way to get a quick look at some of the collection and I thought the museum was worth a visit. We did also do the obligatory browse through the gift shop. Back when I was working, I would probably have bought a scarf. as they had some nice ones. But neither of us saw anything we absolutely had to have. And we had dinner plans!
Chama Mama: When we were planning what to do, I looked for restaurants reasonably near the museum and saw that Chama Mama, a Georgian restaurant I’d been wanting to try based on another friend’s description of his birthday dinner there, has a branch on Amsterdam Avenue and 78th. I got some cred with the waiter by asking if they had tarragon lemonade (a unique Georgian soda, which I love) and explained that I had been to Georgia and that I frequently eat at Supra in D.C. Anyway, we followed his guidance and got quite a feast. We started with what they call “taste of Georgia,” which is an array of spreads with bread - eggplant, beet, kidney bean, some unnamed wild plant, and something else I’ve forgotten. Khachapuri (cheese bread) is an essential of Georgian food and we got the Imerui Khachapuri. We also got khinkali (dumplings). And for the main course, I got a dish of cauliflower in garlic sauce, while Ellen got chicken in walnut sauce. We also got some amber wine. Everything was delicious. It was definitely extravagant (and pricy), but well worth it.
NY Phil and MTT: The primary reason for the trip had been to see Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the New York Philharmonic. He’s a marvelous conductor and, given his health, I doubt I have many more opportunities to see him conduct. The renovated David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center only opened in October 2022. The acoustics are wonderful - which had not been the case at its predecessor. (Avery Fisher Hall had once been described as “a very fishy hall.”) There are, oddly, some seats that are behind the orchestra, which looks weird to me, but I had a seat at the back of the (normal) orchestra section.
MTT was conducting two pieces - his own Meditations on Rilke (which consists of 6 songs) and Schubert’s Symphony in C major, D.944, Great. One of the reasons I love him as a conductor is his talks about the works he is conducting. In this case, he talked about his father telling him that Schubert’s music is like cowboy music. He then told a story about his father going to California with friends, all of them hoping to find work in Hollywood. They ran out of gas and money in a small town in Arizona (“not even a one-horse town. There might have been a burro.”) He went into a bar which was looking for a piano player and they asked him to play some honky tonk song, which he could do after they hummed a little of it. That led to an imagined episode years later in a small Western town in which an old guy named Izzy plays the piano at a honky tonk bar, but every now and then slips into some Mahler or Berg and everyone just nods and says, “yeah, that’s how Izzy is. He’ll get back to our music.”
Anyway, the concert was extremely enjoyable. Some day I need to write about what goes through my head when listening to “classical” music - well, really, any instrumental music or even just music in languages I don’t understand. It’s a very different process than listening to popular music where I do understand the lyrics. I haven’t figured out how to articulate this yet, however. At any rate, MTT’s talk definitely enhanced my listening experience. I felt deeply privileged to be able to experience such a fabulous performance. Bravissimo!
