The hotel internet was not so much a thing when we got up on Friday morning and I spent three-quarters of the train ride home working until I could turn in my hours for the week and read Jeannette Winterson's The Daylight Gate (2012), so this is the first chance I've had at a trip report. The last time ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I went to New York City, we lived in separate apartments. We would come back from traveling and crash together—almost always at his place, being closer to public transit—but then I had to go home. Last night we just came home.
I did not read either Sean O'Brien or Jeannette Winterson until I passed out on Thursday night; I went directly to bed and then lay awake with Rob listening to the noises in the walls, which sounded like someone hammering and intermittently employing an electric drill. We called the front desk. They confirmed that no one was performing scheduled construction anywhere in the Algonquin Hotel at one-thirty in the morning. The noises persisted for some time further, then ceased. I began to doze off. The noises started again. By this time it was more like three or four in the morning and we called the front desk again. A very nice maintenance person came up, Rob opened the door to him, and blessedly the drilling noise immediately started up and he looked concerned, so we knew this was not a Gaslight scenario. He said he had a few ideas as to what it was and went off to investigate. We never saw him again, but we didn't hear the construction noises for the rest of the night, either, and finally we slept. Rob took a picture of our doorplate on our way out the next morning: it featured a photo of the resident Algonquin Cat, Matilda III, and a quotation from Dorothy Parker. I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
We saw Matilda herself as we were waiting to check out, behind a very large crowd we finally figured out was a single group rather than a badly organized line. She is a big, plumy brown-and-sandy cat with blue eyes, a cream-colored ruff, and a white milk-splash around the nose. She jumped up on the front desk and demanded homage from the bellhop. We were hoping to offer her greeting ourselves, but she vanished back into the coatroom. We will just have to return.
As I wrote to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
phi last night, the food mantra of our last two days really was NO REGRETS. For lunch on Friday, we walked up 46th Street (did I mention that Rob still has his crutches, but they took the cast off at the end of January? He has a boot now and it makes distances of more than three blocks a hell of a lot easier, i.e., possible) and cut through the Hotel Edison to eat lunch at Café Edison, Food Actually of My People. Where I completely failed to order anything like the non-vegan borscht or the whitefish or the lox platter, partly because we weren't seated by the diner counter, mostly because I saw their deli sandwiches included Reubens and I hadn't had one in months. I ordered it and some hot chocolate. The waitress brought the hot chocolate and Rob's coffee and Rob's short stack of pancakes with ham and presently returned with my sandwich. Which was two open-faced slices of caraway rye topped with A GIGANTIC PILE OF CORNED BEEF AND COLE SLAW (because I don't like sauerkraut) and CHEDDAR (I didn't ask for that substitution, but it worked fine). Like three sandwiches' worth of filling. Distributed evenly over the two slices with a third pile between them. With A PLASTIC DRINKING CUP FULL OF RUSSIAN DRESSING on the side, I don't even know, I guess just in case I decided I needed a chaser. It was a really, really good Reuben. In my delight at finding it on the menu, I had overestimated my chewing capabilities and had to leave most of the bread and, sadly, the specially-substituted cole slaw behind, but I carefully dissected out all the corned beef and I REGRET NOTHING, except maybe the fact that it threw off my schedule enough that I didn't really eat anything for the rest of the day except for some more hot chocolate and a grapefruit soda at the Museum of the City of New York. That's not much of a regret.
The Museum of the City of New York is not the same as El Museo del Barrio Nueva York, although they are no more than a block apart and technically named the same thing. We walked into the latter first, wondering if the museum was bilingual. It did not contain Norman Bel Geddes, but a lot of excellent-sounding Latino art; we made a formal decision to come back when we had more than the midafternoon to spend on Museum Mile. The English-language museum had 1939 World's Fair designs instantly visible in the gift shop window, so we knew we were in the right place. And Bel Geddes was worth the trip. I'd never before seen any of his theater designs, mostly never-realized—his Lear of cold stone masks and megaliths, his Divine Comedy which scooped a plunging pit of Hell out of the middle of the stage and unfortunately reminded both me and Rob of a toilet bowl. Staging Kurt Weill's The Eternal Road (1937) required extensive redesign of the Manhattan Opera House, just as he'd rebuilt the Century Theatre into a full Gothic cathedral for Max Reinhardt's The Miracle (1924). He worked on some films, including D.W. Griffith's The Sorrows of Satan (1926), but his contributions were re-shot when their tone did not match the rest of the movie. Also he had a tendency to go over budget and bankrupt his producers, which I can see being something of an impediment to a successful theatrical career. The visual effects when he could get the money for them were eerily striking (and his production designs sometimes even more so), highly dependent on light and color, high contrasts, multiple levels. There was a four-minute film playing of backstage footage from his 1931 Hamlet with Raymond Massey, which showed us very little of the play except its minimalist, blocky sets and some props like scepters and crosses, but by its tongue-in-cheek introductions of stage manager, lighting technician, sound engineer demonstrated just how much tech Bel Geddes built into the production. He wanted total immersion, dazzling scale. The audience should be transported. That stuck with me as much as his futurist appliances, ocean liners seamless as submarines, "roadable aircraft." I am afraid that I referred to one of his automotive designs as a fishbus. The Chrysler Airflow is still very lovely.
There was a section on Futurama, of course. It's beautiful. I think it was his one piece of theater that really came off.
And we don't live in his future, efficient as aerodynamics and fast as ambition, and there are ways in which I don't know that I'd want to, but I am so glad that these artifacts from it survive, radios of inlaid plastic and rotating restaurant blueprints to put the '64 Fair to shame, seltzer bottles finned like spacecraft and buildings a sky-filling promise of progress. It's a wonderful place to visit. I'd bring the art back with me.
And now the rest of my afternoon is about to go toward sushi candy making with my cousins, Saira, and M. The packaging is brightly colored and the instructions are partly illustrated and semi-understood by the combined Japanese-reading skills of the table. It will be glorious. And possibly even futuristic. I'm pretty sure nobody in 1937 thought that grape-flavored candy shaped like raw fish was going to be a thing.
derspatchel and I went to New York City, we lived in separate apartments. We would come back from traveling and crash together—almost always at his place, being closer to public transit—but then I had to go home. Last night we just came home.I did not read either Sean O'Brien or Jeannette Winterson until I passed out on Thursday night; I went directly to bed and then lay awake with Rob listening to the noises in the walls, which sounded like someone hammering and intermittently employing an electric drill. We called the front desk. They confirmed that no one was performing scheduled construction anywhere in the Algonquin Hotel at one-thirty in the morning. The noises persisted for some time further, then ceased. I began to doze off. The noises started again. By this time it was more like three or four in the morning and we called the front desk again. A very nice maintenance person came up, Rob opened the door to him, and blessedly the drilling noise immediately started up and he looked concerned, so we knew this was not a Gaslight scenario. He said he had a few ideas as to what it was and went off to investigate. We never saw him again, but we didn't hear the construction noises for the rest of the night, either, and finally we slept. Rob took a picture of our doorplate on our way out the next morning: it featured a photo of the resident Algonquin Cat, Matilda III, and a quotation from Dorothy Parker. I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
We saw Matilda herself as we were waiting to check out, behind a very large crowd we finally figured out was a single group rather than a badly organized line. She is a big, plumy brown-and-sandy cat with blue eyes, a cream-colored ruff, and a white milk-splash around the nose. She jumped up on the front desk and demanded homage from the bellhop. We were hoping to offer her greeting ourselves, but she vanished back into the coatroom. We will just have to return.
As I wrote to
phi last night, the food mantra of our last two days really was NO REGRETS. For lunch on Friday, we walked up 46th Street (did I mention that Rob still has his crutches, but they took the cast off at the end of January? He has a boot now and it makes distances of more than three blocks a hell of a lot easier, i.e., possible) and cut through the Hotel Edison to eat lunch at Café Edison, Food Actually of My People. Where I completely failed to order anything like the non-vegan borscht or the whitefish or the lox platter, partly because we weren't seated by the diner counter, mostly because I saw their deli sandwiches included Reubens and I hadn't had one in months. I ordered it and some hot chocolate. The waitress brought the hot chocolate and Rob's coffee and Rob's short stack of pancakes with ham and presently returned with my sandwich. Which was two open-faced slices of caraway rye topped with A GIGANTIC PILE OF CORNED BEEF AND COLE SLAW (because I don't like sauerkraut) and CHEDDAR (I didn't ask for that substitution, but it worked fine). Like three sandwiches' worth of filling. Distributed evenly over the two slices with a third pile between them. With A PLASTIC DRINKING CUP FULL OF RUSSIAN DRESSING on the side, I don't even know, I guess just in case I decided I needed a chaser. It was a really, really good Reuben. In my delight at finding it on the menu, I had overestimated my chewing capabilities and had to leave most of the bread and, sadly, the specially-substituted cole slaw behind, but I carefully dissected out all the corned beef and I REGRET NOTHING, except maybe the fact that it threw off my schedule enough that I didn't really eat anything for the rest of the day except for some more hot chocolate and a grapefruit soda at the Museum of the City of New York. That's not much of a regret.The Museum of the City of New York is not the same as El Museo del Barrio Nueva York, although they are no more than a block apart and technically named the same thing. We walked into the latter first, wondering if the museum was bilingual. It did not contain Norman Bel Geddes, but a lot of excellent-sounding Latino art; we made a formal decision to come back when we had more than the midafternoon to spend on Museum Mile. The English-language museum had 1939 World's Fair designs instantly visible in the gift shop window, so we knew we were in the right place. And Bel Geddes was worth the trip. I'd never before seen any of his theater designs, mostly never-realized—his Lear of cold stone masks and megaliths, his Divine Comedy which scooped a plunging pit of Hell out of the middle of the stage and unfortunately reminded both me and Rob of a toilet bowl. Staging Kurt Weill's The Eternal Road (1937) required extensive redesign of the Manhattan Opera House, just as he'd rebuilt the Century Theatre into a full Gothic cathedral for Max Reinhardt's The Miracle (1924). He worked on some films, including D.W. Griffith's The Sorrows of Satan (1926), but his contributions were re-shot when their tone did not match the rest of the movie. Also he had a tendency to go over budget and bankrupt his producers, which I can see being something of an impediment to a successful theatrical career. The visual effects when he could get the money for them were eerily striking (and his production designs sometimes even more so), highly dependent on light and color, high contrasts, multiple levels. There was a four-minute film playing of backstage footage from his 1931 Hamlet with Raymond Massey, which showed us very little of the play except its minimalist, blocky sets and some props like scepters and crosses, but by its tongue-in-cheek introductions of stage manager, lighting technician, sound engineer demonstrated just how much tech Bel Geddes built into the production. He wanted total immersion, dazzling scale. The audience should be transported. That stuck with me as much as his futurist appliances, ocean liners seamless as submarines, "roadable aircraft." I am afraid that I referred to one of his automotive designs as a fishbus. The Chrysler Airflow is still very lovely.
There was a section on Futurama, of course. It's beautiful. I think it was his one piece of theater that really came off.
And we don't live in his future, efficient as aerodynamics and fast as ambition, and there are ways in which I don't know that I'd want to, but I am so glad that these artifacts from it survive, radios of inlaid plastic and rotating restaurant blueprints to put the '64 Fair to shame, seltzer bottles finned like spacecraft and buildings a sky-filling promise of progress. It's a wonderful place to visit. I'd bring the art back with me.
And now the rest of my afternoon is about to go toward sushi candy making with my cousins, Saira, and M. The packaging is brightly colored and the instructions are partly illustrated and semi-understood by the combined Japanese-reading skills of the table. It will be glorious. And possibly even futuristic. I'm pretty sure nobody in 1937 thought that grape-flavored candy shaped like raw fish was going to be a thing.
