Pete Is Bought Pancakes, and Other Sunday Astoriana
Pete writes to me "Thanks for buying me pancakes!" I appreciate the sentiment: anytime! However, the phrasing is a bit cold, suggestive of a businesslike pancake transaction. So here's some extra context, for the sake of camaraderie or local color. Also I should get around to my new year's resolution of actually writing about things that happen.
I was in NYC over the weekend while Pete was coming through, and that worked out well. He had this poetry festival thing on Saturday (and then he had jet lag) but we met up Sunday. Actually, he was staying with a friend literally a street away from Maddie's apartment in Astoria. That made things pretty easy.
He came over around 10 AM for coffee and mimosas. That's when I found out that he quit drinking while in Berlin. So we chatted, and Maddie and I each had a mimosa and a half, since she'd already made three of them. How the hell she used the entire bottle of champagne in making them I still don't know, but anyway, that's how I drank half a bottle of champagne before breakfast. Hey, it's noon somewhere.
Pancake breakfast was in a high-quality neighborhood diner somewhat misleadingly named "Lite Bites." We all got pancakes, which like much on their menu are not particularly lite, but food is tasty and the waitstaff are friendly there. We got all caught up.
In the early afternoon we wandered down Broadway (Astoria Broadway, of course) to the Isamu Noguchi Museum, down by the river. Noguchi (d. 1988) had a studio space across the street from there, so the place has a nice authenticity to it. Noguchi's sculptures are largely stone, often vertical (I guess you'd say) or monument-like, and expressive of clean abstract forms and variety in surface texture. The Museum is partly postindustrial showroom, partly outdoor rock garden of sorts. I've always liked it there. On the same block is the Socrates Sculpture Park, which is artistically a bit modest but affords a pleasant enough river view along with some fenced-off Mark DiSuvero pieces-in-progress. In conversation, Pete says it "SOH-crates," phonetically, like in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Weather was chilly and clear, good for neighborhood walking. Broadway was full of daytime trick-or-treaters in store-bought costumes and plastic pumpkin tubs of candy. Outer borough living can be good living.
I was in NYC over the weekend while Pete was coming through, and that worked out well. He had this poetry festival thing on Saturday (and then he had jet lag) but we met up Sunday. Actually, he was staying with a friend literally a street away from Maddie's apartment in Astoria. That made things pretty easy.
He came over around 10 AM for coffee and mimosas. That's when I found out that he quit drinking while in Berlin. So we chatted, and Maddie and I each had a mimosa and a half, since she'd already made three of them. How the hell she used the entire bottle of champagne in making them I still don't know, but anyway, that's how I drank half a bottle of champagne before breakfast. Hey, it's noon somewhere.
Pancake breakfast was in a high-quality neighborhood diner somewhat misleadingly named "Lite Bites." We all got pancakes, which like much on their menu are not particularly lite, but food is tasty and the waitstaff are friendly there. We got all caught up.
In the early afternoon we wandered down Broadway (Astoria Broadway, of course) to the Isamu Noguchi Museum, down by the river. Noguchi (d. 1988) had a studio space across the street from there, so the place has a nice authenticity to it. Noguchi's sculptures are largely stone, often vertical (I guess you'd say) or monument-like, and expressive of clean abstract forms and variety in surface texture. The Museum is partly postindustrial showroom, partly outdoor rock garden of sorts. I've always liked it there. On the same block is the Socrates Sculpture Park, which is artistically a bit modest but affords a pleasant enough river view along with some fenced-off Mark DiSuvero pieces-in-progress. In conversation, Pete says it "SOH-crates," phonetically, like in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Weather was chilly and clear, good for neighborhood walking. Broadway was full of daytime trick-or-treaters in store-bought costumes and plastic pumpkin tubs of candy. Outer borough living can be good living.
1 Comments:
Nice. Yeah, writing about things. I like pancakes. Also the Noguchi Museum; it's a good space.
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