The Joy of not being the best

Living in a city that is proud of having the best and the most wondeful is a bit of a double edged sword. Broadway is here so were have tons of top notch theatre. Carnegie Hall is here, so we hear the very best of classical music. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is just across town and it holds the best of in the world of art.

The negative side of all of the best and the most wonderful is that often there isn't room for the good and the quirky. This city can be a difficult one for the emerging artist. Other cities often take their own creative artistic output a little less seriously so there is room for the artistic to develop and emerge. Radio in Boston is way more delightful than the not very exciting radio scene here in New York.

The Brooklyn Museum is an easy subway ride away from my house. I went yesterday with a friend who was doing a staycation.The fact that the museum isn't in Manhattan means that it is free to not take it self all that seriously. The staff is just easygoing, guards might just chat with you. The chronically uunderfunded Brooklyn Museum is famous for it's collection of textiles, African artifacts and it's vast collection of decorative objects. Their collection of art contains some real treasures and some good works by lesser known artists.

The museum has brilliant curators. Art is shown along with decorative objects made at the same time as the art. Stellar art is exhibited along with less than fabulous pieces. The result is a thrilling experience for the viewer. Mediocre 18th century portraits are shown along side the brillinat work of Samuel Morse or John Copley. It becomes easy to see why they are so good. The curators lead you towards all sorts of big ideas about the nature of ar,t and they let you, the museum visitor, make all of the connections. The result is that a visit makes you feel like you have been on a really fun treasure hunt.

As you walk tyhrough the collections, you can almost hear the discussions between the curators,
"How about this tea cup?",
" No, that one picks up the pattern in the backgound of the painting"

Walking through the collections it is easier to understand artists working within the context of their own times and to understand how you look at their workl through the lens of the stuff of our own times.

I also love that my fellow visitors were not just your standard art lover. Many of our fellow visitors were elderly Russian couples, older Chassidic women and tons of first generation school kids who were clearly having a blast.

Hurray for Brooklyn!

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog