Old School

 1. I was more than a little sad to learn that Zelda Kaplan died.  What a wonderful, vibrant woman.  They say it’s not the years in your life but the life in your years, but she had plenty of both!

2. Speaking of glamorous nonagenarians, was reading this great article about Francoise Gilot – she looks amazing for 90, not as flamboyant as sweet Zelda though.  Amazing amazing – a Parisian and a New Yorker, celebrated painter, educated at the Sorbonne and Cambridge, partner of both Picasso and Jonas Salk…love it. Although she met Picasso when she was 21 and he was 61 – can’t imagine that myself but I guess nothing’s more mysterious than the interworkings of other people’s relationships.

3. Had an appointment on one of the top floors of the Chrysler Building last week, very cool art deco inside and amazing views from all the (oddly shaped silver rimmed) windows.  Between that and finally visiting the Empire State Building a few weeks ago, this has been a good month for visiting iconic NYC landmarks.  This was the view from the waiting area, even on my blackberry camera you can see all the way to the Verrazano!

4. Took my mom to dinner in honor of her cooking show fave Lidia Bastianich‘s cookbook, Lidia’s Italy in America:

  

I wanted her to go because Lidia wasn’t at her restaurant when we went the last time, and my mom is a big fan.  I thought it was kind of odd but apparently Lidia has groupies, several of which were seated with us at dinner, which was very interesting.  Food was okay, not really my sort of thing, but lots of it, and lots of wine.  Here is the menu, for anyone who is interested.

It was a ridiculous amount of food so we walked down to Grand Central, I dropped my mom off there, and took the train back.  S had to work late that night anyway so we got back around the same time.

5. I don’t think we did anything Thursday, Friday was a long day at work and I barely got out in time to make my fotofacial and laser hair removal appointment.  After getting creamed and zapped, I had to go home and do some work before heading out to our friend’s birthday party.  We made an appearance and had a few drinks but I don’t think either of us was very into it.  I was zonked and stressed from work and S fell asleep while I was doing work so we made it a pretty early night.

6. Saturday was good, S made me oatmeal with strawberries and we went to class.  There is a bodega across from our school that has the best french chocolate almond flavored coffee – I look forward to it every Saturday.  After class I had an appointment for a blowout because we had tickets for Mike Doughty at City Winery but I started to feel hit with either bad allergies or a cold or something so we didn’t end up going.  I was pissed to waste the money and stay home but I really didn’t feel well.  Sunday we skipped the 5k we were supposed to do too, and S made pancakes with the rest of the strawberries but I was still feeling like crap so only had one.  Weirdly drinking some coffee and most of the Croton Reservoir did make me feel a bit better.  

7. Monday I still felt pretty crappy so I worked from home.  Yesterday I felt a bit better so I went into the office and then met S at this art opening to kick off the Armory Art Fair week.  It was totally bizarro, in an old schoolhouse with each room/floor area given to a different artist who did random things with it.  Grabbed some wine and perrier and mini-cupcakes, the ground floor was pretty cool with all these groupings of old objects, like a jai alai scoop, taxidermy, garden tools in groups, locks, stuff like that.  Random but interesting.  

Then we went upstairs and there was just garbage, pizza boxes, crumpled paper, strewn all over the floor.  There was a weird guy in the midst of it all who looked crazy and homeless, but he was sketching, so am guessing he was the "artist."  Honestly, it reminded me of a few years ago we went to this party in a building on Houston Street that was about to be demolished – we got there too late and all the vodka was gone and all that was left was a few cans of redbull and a homeless guy sleeping in the stairway.

Yeah.  Other installations included:
– A room with fake hair and wigs strewn on the floor and a video of a guy freaking out and screaming
– You know those big round inflatable santas and other creatures that people (insane people) put on their lawns at the holidays?  There were some of those deconstructed and sewn back together in weird ways.  S really liked this, I don’t know that I was totally a fan but appreciated the effort.  
– A room with instructions on how to build a silver protective suit to shield against radio waves and possibly zombies
– A video of a woman’s face airbrushed onto a red velvet cake.  Faceless hands then stuck their fingers into the woman’s cake eyes and cake mouth before totally tearing the cake apart.
– Huge inflatable black Easter Island type heads – my dream was that people would get into the heads and have a sumo wrestling match.
– Outside in the "school yard" there were two segways circling around an obstacle course.  Drivers would take a passenger each on the segway, and give them headphones to put on.  What was then played on the headphones, I have no idea.  I was curious, but did not want to get close enough to share a segway with a stranger.
– My favorite was in the same room as the roll-y poly creatures, it was these large hyper-realistic portraits of totaled sports cars.  Random subject matter but really nice style, kind of a Hockney landscape with car wrecks in place of a swimming pools.
– Huge video of hipster couple kissing and then smacking each other’s faces.  Could have been cool I guess but wimpiest kisses/slaps, ever
– Blown up pencil drawings of gmail browsers of teenagers composing emails to their friends

Random random random. We went through once, and that was enough, so we headed out.  By the time we left, there was a line around the block.  Why, I am not quite sure.  We stopped in at my old favorite Rice.  We had more wine and veggie meatballs and brown rice (me) and beef satay with sticky rice (him.)  It was delicious.  We walked home and I proceeded to stay up way too late drinking copious amounts of water and watching some random thing in netflix streaming.