TriumphAnt

No order / no rhyme / no reason

Some New York snapshots – textual and photographic (Unless otherwise noted, photos are family-taken.)

So when last I reported as one of a trio of intrepid New York City travellers, we had just avoided a LaGuardia airport ground collision between our landing aircraft and heaven only knows what and heaven only knows by how much (or worse, by how little). So, the pointlessness of dwelling on the “What if?” acknowledged, on we go.

Contrary to what I’d heard about New York livery operators, the cab ride into Manhattan was a pretty straightforward exercise that engendered no fearsome maneuvers whatsoever. Our hotel, called the Kimberley Suites, was located right downtown. (And downtown New York City is just about as DOWNTOWN as one can possibly be. Even the shorter buildings in Manhattan are still towering structures.)
But as we completed the drive in, I realized just what a musical medleyed property is New York – beginning with the city itself:

(“Start spreadin’ the news…”)

In short order, we traversed 42nd Street…

(“Come and meet those dancing feet,
On the avenue I'm taking you to,
Forty-Second Street.
Hear the beat of dancing feet,
It's the song I love the melody of,
Forty-Second Street.”)

and Fifth Avenue…

(“On the avenue…
5th Avenue…
The photographers will snap us;
and you’ll find that you’re
in the roto-gravure”)

and even came (on this drive anyway) within spitting distance of Broadway…

(“Come on along and listen to
The lullaby of Broadway.
The hip hooray and bally hoo,
The lullaby of Broadway.
The rumble of the subway train,
The rattle of the taxis.
The daffy-dills who entertain
Until the dawn:
Good night, baby,
Good night, milkman's on his way.”)

The nice thing about viewing the NYC skyline from the Top of the Rock (the NBC building) instead of from the Empire State Building is that you see the Empire State Building.

Having arrived fairly late in the day and looking for “food” in much the same way a sputtering Volkswagen is looking for “fuel”, we swiftly made friends with a newly minted concierge named Lindsay (I know “newly minted”, because her training supervisor was hovering directly over her shoulder while we talked to her) and set out where to find a moderately priced family restaurant close by. She suggested a Mexican restaurant just a half block away called Dos Caminos (Spanish, apparently, for “two ways”).

Now in Ottawa, “Mexican” is an occasional family Friday night choice and it means Las Palmas or Mexicali Rosa’s… the kinds of places that are owned by professional football players after they retire. (That’s not a snark. One of Ottawa’s most popular and most successful of the whole “Tex-Mex” phenomenon, The Lone Star, was founded by two ex-Ottawa Rough Riders. The entire team itself being an occupant of the “ex” column. But I digress.) Big, noisy, hardwood floors, chips ‘n’ salsa, ice-cold Corona served in a bottle with a wedge of lime stuffed into the neck… that’s what “family Mexican” means in our town.

So with that thinking in mind, off we went – blue-jeaned, t-shirted, sneaker-footed, to discover that, in Manhattan, apparently “family” is synonymous with “trendy” and “lots of money”. I guess I should have clicked when we were sent off from the hotel with a gold-embossed reservation card issued to us by Lindsay that she told us to be sure to present to the maitre d’ when we arrived.


Despite having left towers of snow a mere 90 minutes' flying away, we found Manhattan bathed in Spring, much to the delight of this sleepy behemoth, a resident of the Central Park Zoo. (And for the record, we were indeed this close. But I've carefully angled the camera to miss any reflections off the strong-as-steel window separating us from him.)

(The foregoing casual dress description applies to me and offspring. Leslie had been to New York before and had pre-determined that restaurant minimal-dressiness wear was to be tilted no closer to casual than a pair of black pants. Offspring, on the other hand, was festooned in a Charlottetown “Cows” t-shirt over which she decided to retain her windbreaker throughout the entire meal. As for me, I wore jeans and a black sweater that, shortly after we arrived, I decided was going to say, “I’m rich enough to be able to afford to look ‘cheap’.” Take that, Big Apple!)

But it turned out that our little-black-cocktail-dress-clad maitresse-d’ notwithstanding, a great many other patrons were indeed quite casually dressed – at least to the point of being tieless – and eventually we even spotted someone else in a t-shirt.

But “Mexican” in New York – or at least Manhattan – sure ain’t limited to tacos, enchiladas, burritos and quesadillas. Our waiter, Eli, was quick to recommend the reason most people came to Dos Caminos – their guacamole. Now I’m not a big fan of avocados or this particular product of that fruit, but when in Rome, etc, etc. So we ordered it.

To make a long story short, I’m still not necessarily a fan of avocados, but what they do to them in Dos Caminos to produce what they call guacamole is the sort of thing that makes you wonder just why in heck you’ve been settling for anything less somewhere else. It arrived in a huge stone bowl that weighed about three pounds if it weighed an ounce, and was of the type you normally associate with the bowl half of the “mortar and pestle” team. It was a good thing Eli planted it table centre, within equal distance of all three of us, because once it was set in place, it was not going anywhere.

After one taste, I could happily have sat there all night long with a couple more bowls of their guacamole and something with which to scoop it.

Oh… and here’s why:

Dos Caminos Guacamole
(Chef Scott Linquist, Dos Caminos) -- Makes 4 servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro leaves
2 teaspoons finely chopped white onion
2 teaspoons minced jalapeño or Serrano chilies, seeds and membranes removed, if desired
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt
2 large ripe Hass avocados from Mexico, peeled and seeded
2 tablespoons cored, seeded, and finely chopped plum tomatoes (1 small tomato)
2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lime juice
Instructions
In a medium size bowl, use the back of a spoon to mash 1 tablespoon of the cilantro, 1 teaspoon onion, 1 teaspoon of minced chile, and 1/2 teaspoon salt together against the bottom of the bowl.

Add the avocados and gently mash them with a fork until chunky-smooth. Fold the remaining cilantro, onion, and chile into the mixture. Stir in tomatoes and lime juice, taste to adjust the seasonings, and serve with a basket of warm corn tortilla chips.

Here are some add-ons to dress up your guacamole:

Lobster Guacamole
1 lb whole lobster or 4 oz lobster meat
(steam, cool and pick meat from lobster and rough chop)
Japanese pickled ginger works well for a garnish.

Chipotle-goat cheese guacamole
4 ounces crumbled goat cheese
2 tablespoons chopped canned chipotle chilies

Mango Guacamole
1 large ripe mango peeled seeded and diced
(any fruit will work, fresh berries, seedless grapes, papaya for example)

Artichoke guacamole with toasted pinenuts
1 cup marinated artichoke hearts chopped
1/4 cup toasted pine nuts

(Must be the “Hass” avocado that makes the difference.)

One of the most magnificent building lobbies on earth: the Empire State's georgeous temple to the god of Art Deco

While in la Grande Pomme we saw two Broadway shows, both of them musicals. And both of them just flat out outstanding entertainment.

“Wicked” takes its name from the book of the same name by Gregory Maguire, a man who has recently made a literary career out of recasting fairy tales and kids’ stories into completely different, much more adult context.


In the case of “Wicked”, the Maguire story is a biography of The Wicked Witch of the West, the green-skinned villainess from L Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz” stories. (photo: www.jiggerbug.com) In “Wicked”, she is christened Elphaba (Catch that connection? L Frank Baum / El-pha-ba) and made an infinitely more sympathetic character who has to struggle all her life to overcome the curse of having been born with green skin. Then one day this damned kid from Kansas turns up and steals her sister’s red shoes after flattening her with a house…

In the literary “Wicked”, Maguire creates a whole new mythology that proved to be so popular it required a sequel, “Son of a Witch”. Now incarnated as a hugely successful Broadway musical, “Wicked” – I won’t be surprised to hear one day soon – is almost certainly due for a full-blown big-budget movie treatment as well some day. Both offspring and I came away with “Wicked” t-shirts, festooned with winged monkeys. And all of us came away with some thoroughly happy memories of a great evening’s entertainment.

And the second show? Well, here’s a hint. From the gift shop of the second show we went to, offspring brought home a bag containing two half coconut shells and an instruction sheet for banging them together. And I came away with a special custom-labelled can of SPAM.

“SPAM-a-lot” is officially a Broadway musical. Unofficially, it’s pretty much a combination of “Monty Python and Holy Grail” revisited with music, and a concept best rendered as No Joke Too Low. For fans of the former, all the best bits are there: the taunting French castle guards (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberry!”); The Knights Who Say “Ni”; “Watery tarts freely distributing swords is no basis for a system of government”; “Bring out your dead”; The Killer Rabbit; the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch; et al, et al…
And there are a few other ”greatest hits” from other places in the Python oeuvre added to the mix, such as “Always look at the bright side of life” that was a high spot in “The Life of Brian”. (Heaven help me if you’re not a Python fan as you read through this paragraph… I can hear it: “What the hell are you talking about?”) (photo: www.fresnobeehive.com)


To a baby boomer, this is a must-stop in NYC -- Strawberry Fields, a small patch of Central Park purchased by Yoko Ono. Surrounded by souvenir vendors, the site is directly across the street from the Dakota, the residence where John Lennon was shot and killed in December, 1980. Strawberry Fields' perimeter is festooned with signs asking you to be quiet and contemplate. As Leslie noted in a separate family album of photos, one can only wonder what John Lennon would have made of that.

= = =

OK CBC… so let’s look at just where my sympathy vanished.

Canada’s national consumer of many tax dollars – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – recently announced that it was shutting down what is the last surviving radio network in-house classical orchestra in North America. The morning after the announcement, CBC radio ran several interviews with some of the affected musicians. And it was quite poignant to hear some of them. One – former violinist Nancy DiNova, who has both a son and husband playing in the orchestra now – was audibly upset and in her brief comment, she ran her emotions from sorrow to anger. Unfortunately, she lost me at anger, because any sympathy I might have been mustering vanished when she whined into the microphone, “The CBC is now going to spend more money on banjo players.”

Pardon?

My suspicion is that Nancy might soon regret her heat-of-the-moment comment and find herself the butt of a backlash from musicians and fans who, like me, have long ago found many, many musical junctions where “quality” and “banjo playing” intersect, often in wonderful ways.

As just one such example (and with apologies to those BDers who don’t have a video play capability on your computers), I offer these three minutes and 54 seconds.

Oh… and one more note to Ms DiNova. A maker of violins resident here in Ottawa once explained to me that the name of the instrument is simply a function of its playing environment. In a classical orchestra or chamber music string ensemble, it’s a violin. In a Celtic kitchen or on a Cajun porch, it’s a fiddle and it sounds damned great in the company of a banjo!

= = =

If anyone’s keeping track – because I know in the past I’ve had both good and bad things to say about the video-by-mail service, Zip.ca – my mood of the moment is to hell with them.

We’ve been searching around for what seems a reasonable quest – a service for movies at home, when we want them. We had been renting from Blockbuster – which is not a bad service if your priority is to be able to select one of 400 copies of a movie that was in the theatres the previous week. But once your search becomes more than a few months old, finding any title is a crap shoot at best. So we tried – for several months – Zip.ca. And what Zip has that is head and shoulders above Blockbuster is selection. They have pretty much any title you can think of, including a vast library of award-winning foreign and film-festival presentations that are frequently what we seek.

What they also have – and what drove us away – is a not-insignificant monthly subscription fee structure that makes you a “member”. And after several months, we decided we just weren’t using the service to the extent required to justify paying the subscription.

The other thing about their service we found aggravating is the disconnect between what they appear to promise – and what they actually deliver. Zip has a ranking hierarchy that lets you list as many movies as you want to see, and to rank them in numerical priority. But what we found is that it’s a priority they seem to ignore completely when it comes to determining what movie they’re going to send you next. For example, we had a movie sitting in our #1 position for many weeks, but we often received selections we had placed at number 10, 15 or even farther along our priority line. The only way to be sure of getting a particular film was to pay a usurious special fee to guarantee delivery immediately. Which to my mind flies in the face of what their damned membership fee is supposed to mean!

Next stop was Rogers-on-Demand, a service option that comes with the cable service we use. But in very short order we discovered that RoD suffers from a truly awful selection. Very few foreign films; very few “classics”; and, like Blockbuster, possessed of a heavy emphasis on recent box office.

So back we went to Zip.ca. And in the few short months we had been away, we found that they had augmented their total ignoring of their own priority system by sending out completely unplayable versions of the disks they did send. In our most recent month (the one that resulted in our coming to “To hell with you”), of the first four movies we got, two disks were cracked through from centre hole to outer rim, and the third simply stopped working at the halfway point of the movie. (In the latter case, we did try moving the disk to a second player in the house but it also ran into the e-breakdown at the same place.)

Hence, to hell with Zip. And I have nothing to say to recommend them this time. Maybe I’ll take a look at NetFlix next. Or maybe not.

= =

And while I’m in a discommending mood, recently I started to read what seemed a most hopeful and interesting book – “Bitter Chocolate” by Canadian journalist Carol Off. As its title might suggest, it’s a look at the history and grossly exploitive present-day harvesting processes that take the hugely popular confection from its beginnings as a pod-enshrouded cacao bean through the manufacturing and marketing process to a frequently overpriced decadent nibble.

The book sustains one's interest when it builds its compelling and depressing description of the often horrific conditions under which the beans are grown and harvested. It in fact is no exaggeration to label a good many of its field workers slaves. Often children from hopelessly destitute third world families, they are sold to farmers by human traffickers who recall the worst of Simon Legree and his kind. The farmer then informs the kids that they will start to receive pay when he recovers what he paid for them – a break point that, of course, never comes.

And no one escapes Ms Off’s arrows – from the giant Hershey’s, Cadbury’s and Mars confectioners to the powerful legislators from US states where those companies maintain factories and provide jobs.

Unfortunately, for some reason, about two-thirds of the way through, she decides to take on in relentless detail what is little more than a trip down Nancy Drew lane as she sets out to try to discover – over many dozens of pages – what happened to a crusading journalist in the cacao bean exporting nation of Cote d’Ivoire, a man who made a career out of exposing corrupt government actions in that country.

(Well let’s see. You have a country where corruption is rife and practised in very large measure by just about everyone in the nation with a uniform and gun. And along comes a passionate rights advocate whose widely published articles begin to threaten a lot of those cash pipelines. Add in vast tracts of jungle and rainforest geography that probably haven’t seen a human footprint in centuries and, even though no one will ever find a trace of what happened, one is left with no doubt at all that it happened, "it" clearly being an execution and disposal of the body.)

I don’t mean to detract from the essential goodness of the crusading journalist and the worth of his cause; nor to soften the cruelty, corruptability and essential evil of the Ivoirian authorities in question, but this sidebar story, coming where it does in an otherwise fascinating book, really pulls the work off its rails. Points for tenacity, Ms Off, but big deductions from me for losing sight of your bigger-picture main purpose here.

Next time – more New York; more whining. It’s what I do.

Until la prochaine.