Awake

so... much... snow...

Yes, New York is in the middle of a feisty blizzard, right when I have plans to board a flight to Spain tomorrow evening.  I'm still hoping that somehow everything will work out, and that on Wednesday morning I'll arrive in Madrid after all, to 50 degree Spanish weather and all sorts of new sights and sounds (and smells and tastes).  I'll be visiting Madrid and Barcelona (for the first time!!), returning on 1/5/11 (2011?!!!), but I am keeping my fingers crossed I'll be able to at least post a few photos before then. (!!!!) (Just adding parenthetical explanation points for the sake of consistency)

I went out today, just to look things over, and after forty minutes in Central Park I ended up with neon pink cheeks and a face wet with snow.  But I had good black coffee and rum cake at Cafe Fledermaus at the Neue Galerie at some point between outside and home, so I can't complain.

Wishing everyone a happy New Year - and that you are all warm and dry... peace!  love!  joy!  (Maybe that's the rum cake talking...)

That time of year...

It's all of a sudden that time of year - two days before Christmas, streets packed with shoppers, subways filled with people carrying cumbersome packages, Christmas tree vendors making brisk last-minute sales... my favorite fashion blogs not updated nearly as frequently... and so I thought I'd write a quick "hello."

 

Lunar Eclipse, NYC

With the number of moon pictures I've been posting lately, you might think I'm trying to compete with the farmer's almanac.  Really, I'm not, yet I couldn't resist waiting up for the lunar eclipse tonight.  Full moon + solstice + eclipse = very exciting!  I also discovered that manual camera settings + tripod (!!) = more successful pictures.  Now I'll have a better record to share with my wiccan sisters, my werewolf brothers and other full-moon-loving friends.

fashion/fiction

Just recently, I mentioned that I was fretting over the question of why women's magazines used to include fiction, but don't any more.  Imagine my excitement, then, when I found this book, 100 Years of the American Female from Harper's Bazaar, in Archivia Books on Lexington Avenue - a store that's so full of thrills I'm almost afraid to enter it sometimes; it's like a candy store for art and design books.  This is an out-of-print book published in 1967 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Harper's Bazaar.  Not only does it present a selection of fantastic photographs and articles about fashion (e.g. an article about Coco Chanel by Jean Cocteau) reprinted from the first editions of the magazine onwards, but it also includes some of the fiction that was printed in Bazaar for the first time, including short stories by Eudora Welty, Colette, Flannery O'Connor, and Isak Dinesen, to name a few.  Amazing!

just over half...

This is by Saint Vartan's Armenian Church near the Queens mid-town tunnel on Second Avenue, just before five o' clock.  The moon is all the way to the East, when less than a week ago at the same time it had just begun to hide behind buildings to the West - how quickly it moves!

Goodbye, Piggie Bank

Over the past several years, I've been in the habit of hoarding my coins in mason jars.  I think of it as embezzling money from myself - it gives me a chance to skim a bit of cash of the top of my budget, and then every so often I take the hoard to the bank and have the great delight of suddenly having an extra forty or fifty dollars to get myself an unexpected present.

More from my neighborhood...

It has been a while since I wrote about another longstanding business (and/or landmark!) in my neighborhood, and I’ve been meaning to write about this one for a while: Lascoff and Sons Pharmacy, which has been in business since 1899 and located in its current little castle on the corner of 82^nd and Lexington since 1931.  The building used to be an ordinary brownstone, but when Lascoff remodeled it to house his expanding business he was inspired by sixteenth and seventeenth century apothecary shops.  Hence, gothic windows and turreted doorway!  The windows now display not only Italian soaps and sunhats, but also school-project-style poster boards that provide history and trivia about the store: for instance, they sold leeches to Salvador Dali for him to use as models for his paintings!

 

crescent

 

... above the armory near Hunter College, around 5:00 PM yesterday.  

It's suddenly so cold!  And the past few nights I've been suffering from what I used to call "reverse insomnia," meaning that I wake up very early and can't fall asleep again.  Around five o' clock this morning, not only was I somehow able to remember almost all the words to a song I wrote when I was 16 (I wrote the lyrics, my musical friend wrote the tune, it was very avant garde and the world is none the worse without it) but I also pondered:

- why is it that magazines like Mademoiselle (now defunct) and Harper's Bazaar used to publish poems and short stories - by very well-known writers, no less, both men and women - and they don't any more? (I think that Seventeen was also sort of a junior league for aspiring writers.)  Did readers lose their appetite for having some fiction alongside their beauty tips?  Did the magazines just grow more desperate to dedicate a lot of page space to advertisers?  I'm sure with a bit of research I can dredge up the answer, but it seems a shame.  When I grow up I will start a new women's magazine, that not only has fashion content but also fiction once again!

- how strange it is that many women used to only wash their faces with cold cream.  No water- they'd grease up their faces in the evenings, and then wipe it off with a tissue and that was that.  Now that habit sounds terrible, but ... I wonder if we really look so much better for more frequent scrubbing?  Then there's the hair-washing thing - I was looking on-line at a copy of Every Woman's Encylopaedia from 1910-1912 (don't ask what inspired me to do this) and they recommend washing hair once a month ... in the oral history of New York by Jeff Kisslehoff I referenced once before, a woman who grew up on the Upper East Side recounts that someone came to their house to wash all the women in the family's hair once a week.  When did the expectation become washing hair daily?  And have we really discovered superior methods of taking care of ourselves, or are the companies that make soap and shampoo really brilliant at getting us to use more of their stuff, or something in between?

With worries like these, no wonder I can't sleep!

winter morning

This is the first morning that it's really felt like winter to me - though I suppose technically speaking it will be autumn for a few more weeks yet.  Still, according to WQXR's 8 o' clock weather forecast it was just 31 degrees when I stepped out of my apartment this morning, I wore my long down coat for the first time this year, and I found white-gray skies and flurries.  

Normally I approach winter with some dread - the short days are wearying, and I'm sensitive to cold - my fingers manage to freeze unless I'm wearing the thickest, most ungainly sort of mittens.  But this year I have a very different sensation.  As I struggled to wake up in partial darkness this morning, I was overcome by the feeling that the day was like an eye that has been slowly closing, gradually shutting out the light as the weeks progress.  But in only a few weeks that eye will just as slowly start to open again, and will see the world with new light, and maybe so will I.  The city I live in will be stripped and frozen and hidden under dirty snow, to clear the path for new growth - in other words, if there were no winter, we wouldn't have spring, and the annual thrill that comes with seeing signs of life again.  I suppose that while we all know this, for some reason today was the first time that I profoundly felt it to be so.

When I took the picture above it wasn't nearly so dark: I was playing with my manual settings again, trying to show how the sun whitened the clouds in front of it as the flurries fell.  Now I'm waiting for my laundry to make its way through the dryer cycle - more renewal!

1,000 cups of tea

… this is what it seems to take to get me going these days, as I slog through a never-ending project that sometimes I seem to be making such slow progress on, I wonder if I’m moving backwards.

So I get up, make a large pot of strong black tea that I share with my husband, walk him to the subway to get moving, and then when I get home either make myself a pot of Earl Grey, or make myself a cup of black coffee and THEN make myself a pot of Earl Grey.  Later in the afternoon, when it's time for my gingerbread cookie (I've become addicted to "Contessa" cookies by Bahlsen, the illustrious maker of Choco-Leibnitz cookies, which are like a better version of the LU Little Schoolboys), I make ANOTHER pot of tea, though sometimes decaffeinated English Breakfast.  Yes, I drink a lot of tea these days - A LOT of tea.  In fact, when I walk past cafes, and feel like having a nice cup of something and then tell myself I shouldn't spend $4.00 on a beverage because I am an economical girl, I think, "I know, I'll just go home and make tea!" and then I drink some more.