Robert Zurer’s Blog

Flowers Telegraphed

July 5, 2009 at 12:43 pm · Filed under photography

Flowers Telegraphed
The little fake world is a blue egg nestled in an infinite loop. There are meteor chips which must have flown into the brick at one time. And the thin black telegraph wire which runs from the roof down and left must be what carries the flowers, petals as dots, stems as dashes, to all parts of the real big world.

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Cool Tea W/Milk And Tentacles at the Deluxe Food Market

June 23, 2009 at 7:45 am · Filed under the arts, food, philology, nyc, found, photography

In Chinatown there is this wonderful supermarket/restaurant called the Deluxe Food Market. You can enter on Mott Street and exit on Elizabeth Street, which, in itself is cool, sort of like how you could enter Bloomingdales directly from the subway station. But I digress.

Anyway, they have fresh alligator feet and many other delicacies. We had some chicken wings that had a beautiful scarlet tinge to them and some cold sesame noodles. We went up to the counter and ordered some ice coffee with cream and no sugar to share. It was delicious coffee and was consumed in no time. But when we happened to look at our cup …

Cup Label

Oops!

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Lost Souls Found Embedded In Allentown Concrete

March 8, 2009 at 8:31 am · Filed under Uncategorized, the arts, found

Yesterday we took a trip to Allentown and Bethlehem, PA. In Allentown, while walking across the 8th street bridge, we encountered two lost souls stuck inside a concrete light pillar. Luckily I was quick enough to get pictures of them.

The first must have been a soul who was never able to communicate with either higher or lower forms of life.

Concrete and Steel

The second just stared at me through two sets of very lonely eyes.

Concrete Lost Soul

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Tucker Place Afternoon

January 4, 2009 at 9:26 am · Filed under food, philology, nyc

Yesterday, in our eternal desperate quest for food, we made our way to Liman Restaurant in Sheepshead Bay.

Liman

The grilled fish more than lived up to it’s reputation — but I digress.

Sheepshead Bay has special meaning to me as my father lived there for some time when he was growing up. When I was a child we used to go there to visit his sister Vera and her family. I always thought it was Sheep Said Bay. (This actually makes perfect sense as sheep do say baa, or bay or whatever).

Years later, on a cold and rainy day, we scattered Vera’s ashes from the little pedestrian bridge which connects Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach.

It turns out that there was a politician in the area who pushed hard to get this very bridge built. His name was J. Driscoll Tucker. Two doors down from the restaurant is Tucker Place, a tiny sitting area named for him and run by the Parks Department. What I like about it is that it is very small and sort of tucked away behind the wall of the Stella Maris Bait Shop which has been there unchanged since 1947. You can see it on the right of the picture.
Stella Maris Tucker Place

There is also a mural on this wall painted in the 1970’s

Before lunch, we saw only one or two people sitting on the benches at Tucker Place, seriously bundled up looking out across the bay. After lunch it was deserted. The afternoon sun was intense and made a brilliant yellow streak across the bay that was hard to look at. On the pavement, near the railing, someone had written “Evan Stay Famous” in blue crayon.

My daughter called while we we there. When I told her where I was, she asked if I was going to blog about it. I said that I would blog about her asking me whether I was going to blog about it. Being the sensible woman that she is, she quickly found a way out of the recursion and rang off, as they say.

The wind was in our faces and blowing the seagulls all around. There were also ducks, swans and pigeons. They swam over and asked for a crust of bread and such. A ‘Bagel’ was soon procured from Dunkin’ Donuts (to the left of Liman in the photo). The swan really didn’t stand a chance against the ducks and the ducks really didn’t stand a chance against the dive-bombing seagulls and the pigeons didn’t try.

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Why are Moleskine notebooks so cool?

January 3, 2009 at 2:02 pm · Filed under the arts, philology, writing

Well for one, Moleskine I like to say the name. I pronounce it mole-ess-keen-uh. I don’t really know if that is right, but I don’t care. It sounds good. It sort of sounds like a waterproof coat or oilskin mackinaw. Oilskin things are retro. Paper is retro. Bound books beat the hell out of spiral notebooks. I like that they are small and very well made. They have stitching. Stitching is retro. Retro is not retro though. Here is a nice new crisp one.
Moleskine

You can’t tear stuff out of one unless you want to spoil it. Like a diary. Even if it is just a shopping list it inherits importance by being an unerasable record of your everyday life. The mundane mixed with the maybe not so mundane. Like Twitter. I love the details. Like when you travel by bus through a neighborhood that you can’t get to except by bus. Of course you could walk. You would get even more details, if you have the patience.

It makes a precious record. You have to use a pencil, maybe from behind your ear, maybe a little stub with an eraser that doesn’t erase but just smears the page, also very retro. A Moleskine is no good for long opuses. A writer, writing feverishly in the cafe, couldn’t use one — a minimum of 8-1/2″ X 11″ for them I think. But for glimpses… yes, definitely the perfect size size for glimpses.

Glimpse is another word that is really fun to say. It feels like a short upward curve. Like skipping a flat stone. The GL part goes a little under the water( glug, glug, glug), the IMP fights it’s way back up and the SE flies away and is gone before you know it. That’s why it’s a glimpse. But the irony is that glimpses commonly leave you with much more information than longer experiences. I think that is because they catch you unawares, take you by surprise. Artists try hard to be landing pads for these glimpses. They say, “Hey, come on, anytime you want, I won’t swat you”.

So the days go by, and you remember to carry your Moleskine and a stub of a pencil, (or maybe a rapid-o-graph, if you are that type), and you collect them one by one and store them right next to your to-do lists and shopping lists and phone numbers and what not. And then you let them sit for a while, not too long a while, but not too short a while. (There don’t seem to be any directions included in a blank one). Now they are ready to be part of a painting or a song or a poem or a piece of code or a choreography or some such.

The other very wonderful thing is the little bookmark string that they come with. More inherited seriousness. Bibles sometimes have one and the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns has two. So there you go, a good thing to give and get in the new year

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Happy New Year

January 3, 2009 at 12:24 pm · Filed under music, the arts, food, nyc, Film

Happy 2009 to my many thousands of faithful readers.

New years eve was somewhat blah. We went to The Bell House where the Pontani Sisters were performing.
Wester

After freezing on a long line to get in we got carded at the door. Amazingly, we got in without having to have our driver’s licenses scanned.

One of the draws about this event was that there was a DJ playing 60’s soul and Motown. What was cool was that he played only 45’s. What wasn’t cool was that aside from one or two, the tracks were all so obscurely hip that I just couldn’t attach to the music. The sound was, perhaps purposely, muffled and distorted. There was one really good cut by Little Willie John though.

People were all trying a little too hard to have a good time. A woman I didn’t know, one of the other six people in the room of 400 over 40, grabbed my hand and started dancing a kind of Lindy Hop with me. She didn’t meet my eyes once and then just as perfunctorily, dismissed me. Not so fun. We left at about 1:30. Maybe it got better later.

By far the best part of the evening though, was waiting with my sweetie, a little drunk, for the B37 on the ridiculously freezing and ridiculously windy and wonderfully desolate corner of Third Avenue & Sixth St. The bus finally lumbered along and almost passed us even though we waved at it. It came to a short stop. It was almost empty. The bus driver complained that we should not hail her as she thought we wanted a cab. She warmed up later and said that she liked Obama but was sure someone would, “put a bullet in his head” within a month. She also volunteered that she didn’t like his wife, that she was “common”.

Waking up late a little hung over we went to our favorite Congee Village for lunch. We went to the one on the Bowery this time. There was a lot of vomit on the sidewalks outside of the neighborhood clubs. We had “Hot Sizzling w/ Chinese Broccoli”. What it was that was sizzling turned out to be no more mysterious than pork and baby shrimp so no problem. We also revisited our new favorite, Pan Fried Bean Curd with Soy Sauce.

Pan Fried Bean Curd with Soy Sauce

From there we went around the corner and froze on another long line to see “The Wrestler” at the Sunshine. While we waited we watched people interacting in various ways with the Yonah Schimmel’s knishes next door. We wound up sitting in the first row with our necks hanging backwards over the seats, but it was worth it.

I loved the actors but most of all I loved the way the lonely marginal characters matched the lonely marginal look and feel of the South Jersey landscapes matched the chilly gray sky matched the lonely marginal Bruce Springsteen song that closed the film.

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Things I saw yestereday in New Jersey

November 2, 2008 at 7:10 pm · Filed under the arts, found

Oh Boy It's Good

Platterworld

PlatterworldOutside

MarcheseOil

Soaps
Drinks

Drinks1

Gelatin

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The Narrowest House In New York

October 4, 2007 at 9:41 pm · Filed under the arts

The narrowest house in the city is at 75 1/2 Bedford Street. It is only 9 1/2 ft. wide on the outside.

Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there from 1923-1925.

She was one of many that come to this city not to satisfy their hunger, but to experience it more intensely.

Here, in this narrowest of houses she wrote

I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
So wonderful as thirst.

I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.

Feed the grape and bean
To the vintner and monger:
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and my hunger

(Feast, The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, 1923)

Her most famous poem was written a the year before

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light!

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Robert Zurer’s Blog

Flowers Telegraphed

Cool Tea W/Milk And Tentacles at the Deluxe Food Market

Lost Souls Found Embedded In Allentown Concrete

Tucker Place Afternoon

Why are Moleskine notebooks so cool?

Happy New Year

Things I saw yestereday in New Jersey

The Narrowest House In New York

My Dog, My God

The Family That Moved Away

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