what about the plastic animals?

Our Beloved Mayor

Bloomberg is a Dictator
Vote Him Out
Bloom-Out

It's almost election day!  People are getting tired of Mike Bloomberg but he'll probably win anyway.

Maya Lin's "2 x 4 Landscape"

This afternoon I went to see Maya Lin's "Three Ways of Looking at the Earth" installation at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery.  The attention-getter is the huge "2 x4 Landscape" piece, which is made up of over fifty-thousand 2 x 4 pieces. 

Jesus, H&H, Christ

Three storefronts in Manhattan.

Lyndell's Bakery Half-Moon

New York City is known for its black-and-white cookies.  It is a mystery why as the cookies are almost uniformly mediocre.  The NYC black-and-white is based on a dough that is somewhere between a cake and a cookie.  The black and white icing is hard.

Venture to upstate New York or New England and you'll find the morphologically similar, yet gastronomically different, half-moon cookie.  The half-moon is actually a small cake with buttercream frosting on top.  Half-moons are classically made with cocoa in the batter, though the cocoa-less form seems to be more popular nowadays.  Upstaters take a lot of pride in knowing that half-moons are better than black-and-whites.

The whole upstate vs. downstate argument is pretty boring so let's skip to Somerville, Massachusetts.  Lyndell's Bakery has been in Somerville since 1887.  I went there a couple of weeks ago on National Doughnut Day, after first having a doughnut at the Gail Ann Coffee Shop in Arlington with my sister.  The powered sugar doughnuts at both places were great - light and not at all greasy.  (Why does anyone ever by the crappy greaseballs from Dunkin' Donuts?)  The half-moon cookie was for later in the day.  It tasted even better than it looks.

Armory Window

Stained glass window in the Veterans Room at the Park Avenue Armory.  The Veterans Room and the Library next to it are the "only fully extant interiors by Louis C. Tiffany, Associated Artists in the world".  Associated Artists was a cooperative firm of artists led by Tiffany and Candace Wheeler.  Here's a narrated slide show of the room.

Ernesto Neto's anthropodino

On Sunday, the last day of the installation, I finally went to see Ernesto Neto's antropodino at the Park Avenue Armory.  I wish I had gone sooner as it was pretty wonderful and smelled great!  The blobs hanging from the ceiling are filled with spices.  Those are ground cloves in the second photo and turmeric in the third.

The armory itself only recently opened as an art space.  It was completed in 1881 and includes room interiors by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White and the Herter Brothers.  I need to return as the rooms are dimly lit and my pictures of them only dimly in focus.

Five Spiced Pork Belly

Saturday was unexpectedly dry so I opted to have lunch in Union Square.  This is the very delicious five spiced pork belly sandwich from Num Pang, the new Cambodian sandwich shop on 12th Street.

A Broader View

The morning I left for Las Vegas I went out and bought a wide angle lens for my camera.  It was expensive but I figured the lens would be good for the open skies of the southwest.  It is also good for catching buildings like the fake Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas and the Siegel-Cooper Dry Goods building on 6th Avenue.  I was pretty pleased that I could finally get a photo of the latter.

Springtime Saturday in Central Park

The Pool

Blue Flowers

Bamboo

Pretentious Affectation

It was the warmest day of the year so far (79 degrees!).  I spent several hours in Central Park doing not much of anything.  I don't know why there is one clump of bamboo growing along the Loch.

The Dave Clark 5 in Harlem

The renovations to the building where the tire shop used to be at 117th and Frederick Douglass Blvd. have uncovered fragments of three old posters.  The yellow poster on the left is for a supreme court judge election in Manhattan and the Bronx.  There's not enough remaining of the blue poster to tell what it is about.

The Paramount Theatre, in the truly fabulous Art Deco Paramount Building, closed on August 4th, 1964.  Murray the K was on WINS-AM (now the all-news 1010 WINS), from 1958 until December 1964.  I couldn't find concert dates for the Dave Clark 5.  However, I found that they played the Ed Sullivan show three times in 1964 before the Paramount closed:  March 8th, March 15th and May 31st.  That would make these posters almost exactly 45 years old.  Check 'em out before they disappear for good.

Update:  A commenter on the Gothamist posting knew that the blue poster was a Johnson, Humphrey, Kennedy (Robert), campaign poster like this button.