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New York again
Jan. 11th, 2012 10:26# My friend J and I have had an ongoing debate about the relative merits of In 'n Out, Five Guys, and Shake Shack in terms of which has the best burgers. We were stymied in coming to a consensus by the fact that I'd never been to Shake Shack in Manhattan, which deficiency we remedied on Friday. J has actually modeled his burger recipe on Shake Shack's; both his version and the original are darn tasty. Five Guys clearly wins on fries, as we noted, but throw in the fact that Shake Shack has Abiita root beer (and actual beer) on tap, and custard, and there's no real contest.
# I went to the Met (the suggested student rate of $12 is, I think, reasonable, though I suppose I could have given less) after J went back to the UN archives. I make it a point to stroll through either the Roman or the Egyptian galleries every time; this time I wandered through Egypt to the Temple of Dendur, and took note of all the stuff in the cases from the Eighteenth Dynasty and later that don't just look bloody "Aegean," they look Minoan (the dolphin vessel) and then Mycenean (the ceiling paintings from the 1300s BCE). This is a problem, I find, that I have now; I always want the museum cards to go into more detail. And the other, more crucial thing is that rigidly dividing up stuff in museums even by civilization or by contemporary national boundary means that the interactions between cultures and regions get marginalized or just left out entirely. The map is not the territory; sometimes it's not even a good map.
The Temple of Dendur is still one of my favorite places in New York, of course.
The real draw of the museum for me right now--I actually bumped into one of the people from my classical Japanese program last summer in the coat check line--is the exhibit on Japanese storytelling, which is rich, intense, and pretty darn fabulous. It's an exhibition of emaki (picture scrolls), illustrated screens, playing cards, and other items that have been used to tell narratives visually since the late classical period in Japan, and it's amazing. The two standouts of the show, for me, were the illustrated Tales of Kitano Shrine, which is a medieval embroidering of the classical stories about Sugiwara no Michizane: you can tell it's medieval because in one of the scrolls a wandering monk goes down to visit Emperor Daigo and retinue in Hell, but before that there's an absolutely fabulous painting of the waters of the Kamo river (which would have to be a bloody millennial flood to reach the site of the classical palace!) flooding the palace while Michizane in his guise of Raijin terrifies those who did him wrong. Stellar, and on view all together for the first time ever. Several of the other illustrated scrolls are amazing too, particularly one of the chigo (monk falls in love with a beautiful young acolyte) tales, which leads me to wonder just how many times those jerks up on Mt. Hiei marched on Mii-dera and burned it down. Needless to say, there are several screens showing episodes from the Heike, which were also awesome. The other best thing, though, aside from the fact that the exhibit (welcomely) sidelines the damn Genji emaki, is that it concludes with an extraordinarily well-preserved demons' parade scroll, which is delightful. I just wish the cards had pointed out more explicitly just how much of all this is a medieval invention or innovation. That said, I was pleased at how much of the handwriting I could read, even without having kept up my kuzushiji practice much at all, particularly since Japanese people around me remarked at several points that they couldn't read any of it. Several of the scribes whose manuscripts are on display had extraordinarily clear handwriting. Others, not so much.
# I went down to meet my friend M at the Strand, which is quite a brilliant bookstore but not one for keeping older books in stock, and then we went to Family Recipe. Verdict: delicious, innovative, and not too unreasonably priced. The portions are small, but if you eat slowly, and order at least two courses, you'll get enough to eat, and the food is really, really good, and so is the sake selection. We'd talked about seeing a movie, but there was nothing at all showing in the 8 o'clock hour in lower Manhattan, so we wound up retiring to a bar, which had something to do with my taking the wrong subway back to Penn Station, and thus not catching the earlier train to New Jersey, later on.
# I went to the Met (the suggested student rate of $12 is, I think, reasonable, though I suppose I could have given less) after J went back to the UN archives. I make it a point to stroll through either the Roman or the Egyptian galleries every time; this time I wandered through Egypt to the Temple of Dendur, and took note of all the stuff in the cases from the Eighteenth Dynasty and later that don't just look bloody "Aegean," they look Minoan (the dolphin vessel) and then Mycenean (the ceiling paintings from the 1300s BCE). This is a problem, I find, that I have now; I always want the museum cards to go into more detail. And the other, more crucial thing is that rigidly dividing up stuff in museums even by civilization or by contemporary national boundary means that the interactions between cultures and regions get marginalized or just left out entirely. The map is not the territory; sometimes it's not even a good map.
The Temple of Dendur is still one of my favorite places in New York, of course.
The real draw of the museum for me right now--I actually bumped into one of the people from my classical Japanese program last summer in the coat check line--is the exhibit on Japanese storytelling, which is rich, intense, and pretty darn fabulous. It's an exhibition of emaki (picture scrolls), illustrated screens, playing cards, and other items that have been used to tell narratives visually since the late classical period in Japan, and it's amazing. The two standouts of the show, for me, were the illustrated Tales of Kitano Shrine, which is a medieval embroidering of the classical stories about Sugiwara no Michizane: you can tell it's medieval because in one of the scrolls a wandering monk goes down to visit Emperor Daigo and retinue in Hell, but before that there's an absolutely fabulous painting of the waters of the Kamo river (which would have to be a bloody millennial flood to reach the site of the classical palace!) flooding the palace while Michizane in his guise of Raijin terrifies those who did him wrong. Stellar, and on view all together for the first time ever. Several of the other illustrated scrolls are amazing too, particularly one of the chigo (monk falls in love with a beautiful young acolyte) tales, which leads me to wonder just how many times those jerks up on Mt. Hiei marched on Mii-dera and burned it down. Needless to say, there are several screens showing episodes from the Heike, which were also awesome. The other best thing, though, aside from the fact that the exhibit (welcomely) sidelines the damn Genji emaki, is that it concludes with an extraordinarily well-preserved demons' parade scroll, which is delightful. I just wish the cards had pointed out more explicitly just how much of all this is a medieval invention or innovation. That said, I was pleased at how much of the handwriting I could read, even without having kept up my kuzushiji practice much at all, particularly since Japanese people around me remarked at several points that they couldn't read any of it. Several of the scribes whose manuscripts are on display had extraordinarily clear handwriting. Others, not so much.
# I went down to meet my friend M at the Strand, which is quite a brilliant bookstore but not one for keeping older books in stock, and then we went to Family Recipe. Verdict: delicious, innovative, and not too unreasonably priced. The portions are small, but if you eat slowly, and order at least two courses, you'll get enough to eat, and the food is really, really good, and so is the sake selection. We'd talked about seeing a movie, but there was nothing at all showing in the 8 o'clock hour in lower Manhattan, so we wound up retiring to a bar, which had something to do with my taking the wrong subway back to Penn Station, and thus not catching the earlier train to New Jersey, later on.