Jun 28
My friend and I were noticing how Citibike stations are becoming informal gathering places, functioning somewhere between generic cialis price compare a park bench and a stoop.
Or in this case, temporary pet storage.
If you aren’t going to make it to the Venice Biennale this year (I knew I should have reserved that hotel room 18 months ago), on June 15 you can see a piece of it on Staten Island at Lumen, one of New York City’s most anticipated art events of the summer.
Among the fifty artists exhibiting video and performance art projected in and around Lyons Pool is Jose Carlos Casado, whose Off was shown in May for the opening of the Biennale. Also of note at Lumen this year, Scott Van Campen’s Cicada Machine, work by Margaret Cogswell, , Yorgo Alexopoulos, the amazing Jonathan Ehrenberg, DD’s re-animation of It Came From Beneath the Sea.
Curated this year by David C. Terry and Esther Neff, Lumen is a chance to see an eclectic collection of video and performance art from around the world in the magical atmosphere that is Staten Island By Night.
Any excuse to take the Staten Island Ferry is fine with me valium abuse, whose battered steel and pale-blue fiberglass interiors affords the opportunity to revisit childhood memories of amorous mosquitoes and burnt hot-dogs and marshmallows, not to mention a quick spin on one of the swivel chairs in the mirrored foyer of the women’s bathroom. And for what glamour of a Broadway first night or cinq à sept are we preparing ourselves for in the middle of New York Bay?
Staten Island is home to not only Lumen, but some of the city’s most intriguing museums, such as the Alice Austen House and the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art. The first is a house that is a museum, the second is a museum in a house designed to resemble a Tibetan monastery.
Enter at the lower level of the Staten Island Ferry if you are coming by bike. Bike valet parking is available at Lumen. For directions, and an overview of some of the other cultural destinations on Staten Island, click on the map below to download the printable pdf.
Animals roller skating or dressed as airline pilots make me sad, and human beings walking on a wire at great heights or diving into tiny buckets of water fill me with terror, but no delight. A circus-themed childhood nightmare involving frothing alligators, sequined ladies, a sinister jar of pickles, and…well, the mere thought of it even today makes my heart freeze.
No circuses for me, therefore, most definitely not.
How to explain, then, my passion for circus art? For what Einstein was to physics, so is circus art to the art of the poster.
The announcement in the New York Times of an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center The Circus and the City had me on the phone in an instant to the painter Frédéric Lère.
Apart from supreme distinction of having three accents in his name, Frédéric has quite a pronounced circus theme in his work, not to mention a French trapeze artist grandfather. A few days later we were standing together at the entrance of 18 W 86th street.
Well, not exactly together. We waited for each other for 20 minutes at a distance of about six feet, one so absorbed in the catalogue (me) and the, other unable to resist taking a peek into the first room and then transfixed as if before the Oracle at Delphi (Frédéric), that neither of us were able to perceive the presence of the other, even as we both wondered whether we hadn’t gotten the time or the day wrong. The spell was broken only when we, almost simultaneously, pulled out our cell phones, and looking up as we waited for the first ring, found ourselves gazing into each other’s eyes.
Frédéric lives in a fantastic world of esoteric and astonishing facts peopled with extraordinary personalities whose lives defy not only social convention but occasionally the space-time continuum. A stroll through a sequence of rooms whose walls are covered with images of regally bearded ladies and 3-ton golden carriages rolling through Union Square finds him in his element. He is also a rare craftsman with a deep knowledge and keen appreciation of the technical mastery required to produce an article such as The Grand Procession of the Steam Calliope Drawn by a Team of Six Elephants in the City of New York, the details of which he is delightfully willing to share.
A lengthy discussion of registration, wood blocks versus metal plates, paper shrinkage and conservation, the fading properties of ink, or not…time stopped as a magic spell wrapped me up in a moment I would have liked to go on forever.
Then we stopped in front of this, which reminded Frédéric of something. It reminded me of something, too. “Maybe it wasn’t just a dream…” I thought, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up in a braid.
Fortunately, Frédéric was talking, and I tore my thoughts from the abyss reeling before my mind’s eye to give him my full attention. When with Frédéric, this is best. He speaks quietly and quickly, and if you let your mind wander for even an instant, when you come back you will find you have completely lost the thread.
“A while back, when I was going to Moscow a lot for work, I met a girl who ended up marrying the pal I worked with. They eventually moved here. Little by little, she brought her whole family over.
“Her sister married a guy who had an alligator farm, and they went to live in Florida. She started doing a show in which she fought with an alligator. ”
At this point he had to stop to laugh at the mental image of the sister of the pal’s girlfriend in a bikini combatting an alligator, a laugh made of equal parts delight, astonishment, and maybe a little sadness.
“It’s incredible, these people who come here wanting nothing more than a normal life. All she wanted was to escape the Hell that was life in Russia for a quiet, ordinary existence, and she ends up in Florida fighting alligators…
“She was a very unassuming kind of person…in a room full of people, you wouldn’t notice her. She had a couple of kids… Over the years I’ve sort of lost touch with them. I think we’re Facebook friends.”
And he laughed again, shaking his head.
Frédéric Lère
A few weeks later, I met Frederic at his studio, where he was in the middle of creating an enormous wall mural for La Bergamote’s new shop in Midtown. He was on a terrifically tight deadline, so I brought lunch.
“French Dip. That’s a first.” he said, taking a bite.
“Do you know why it’s called that?” I asked. “There’s nothing like it in France, as far as I know.”
“Nothing,” he agreed. “Maybe it’s the baguette?”
He picked up a small paper bag lying on the table where we had spread out the sandwiches.
“The people downstairs make extraordinary chocolate, he said, picking up the remains of a bar. “This is chocolate à la bergamote. I’ve managed to hold on to this, three squares, for two days–we’ll have it for dessert.
“It’s an old story, the story of bergamot, it’s very bizarre. Attempts to export these bergamot candies were never successful. They’re a specialty of Nancy. The Duke of Lorraine, Stanislaus, was the King of Sicily as well–or the Duke, or something like that– he introduced the bergamot fruit into Nancy. So the pastry chefs of Nancy developed a recipe for bergamot candies. But the problem is, they never exported it; even in France it’s not well known outside the region where Nancy is, the Lorraine.
“Anyway, these two French guys came here, and opened a pastry shop. They named it La Bergamote thinking everyone would be very impressed, but it was a bit of a flop at first.”
“Where do you come from in France?” I asked.
“Tours.”
“And how was that?”
“Profoundly boring. I detested it. When I lived there I had only one goal: leave Tours.
“When I was in art school, I lived with a group of friends in a kind of collective in the center of town, in a building that was slated for demolition.
“In this building there was a doctor’s office–everyone else had been put out–and the owner was trying to get the doctor to leave. There was a lease, and the doctor didn’t want to go.
“So the owner posted a classified ad at the art school ‘Free apartment for rent.’ Wow! When I saw that, I went to valium check it out immediately! And it really was a free apartment. We paid only the electricity, heat, things like that.
“The owner thought that we, being artists, would make a lot of noise and be generally obnoxious, and drive the doctor out. We, on the other hand, realized right away that if we made the doctor leave, we’d have to leave too, so we mustn’t make noise or be a nuisance. We became great friends with the doctor, and we had parties only on Saturday and Sunday, or late at night when he wasn’t there.
“It was a magnificent apartment.”
Frédéric Lère
“My grandfather was born in Paris, he started in the circus very young–he must have been around sixteen– in 1914. Apparently this circus was a hit, and the whole troupe was hired to tour the United States. They came over on a boat, and since this was 1914, during the crossing war was declared. When the ship arrived in New York all the French passengers were told to remain on board, they weren’t allowed to disembark; they had to return to France with the ship because everyone was being called up, it was the mobilisation générale. My grandfather watched his colleagues jump overboard and swim to shore because they didn’t want to go back to fight. But he didn’t jump, thinking that since he was so young he wouldn’t be called up right away, and the war would be over before he was drafted.
“So he returned to France without ever setting foot in the United States.
“But he was called up, and he was in a battalion called the Bataillon de Joinville, which was just for athletes. They didn’t go on combat missions, they just did sports–competitions and demonstrations, things like that–until the Battle of Verdun when they said, the time for fun and games is over! Now we need everyone. He was wounded, he took a bullet in the head. He had a scar, a kind of indentation, on his forehead. And after that the trapeze, it was finished for him.
“After the war, since he was from the Auvergne, which meant the whole family was in show business, he opened a boîte, a place like a cabaret or a nightclub. He performed there, and of course he had all his connections with circus people. Then, during WWII, when everyone fled Paris, he went to Tours. After the war he stayed on, and set up again there.
“When I was growing up, we all lived together, on a farm. My grandparents lived in a big house behind ours. It was wonderful. I didn’t get on with my parents very well, so I was always going to stay with my grandparents in their big old house behind our house.
“One day my grandfather bought a gymnastic apparatus with a trapeze, knotted cords, rings, smooth cords–everything for practicing circus numbers. It was an enormous thing. He said, ‘Now I’m going to show you all what I know how to do.’
“He got all dressed up in his trapeze costume and climbed on the apparatus where he struck a few poses, he did a few pirouettes–and then he fell.
“No one ever used that apparatus after that–we were all afraid of it.
“Because of that experience, I had a rather ambivalent perception of the circus. My grandfather talked about it as something absolutely fantastic, with all his stories of voyages and things he’d seen, but in fact, all I ever saw of it myself was the dangerous side.
“The first circus in my own work came about when I was doing frescoes. I found the process of fresco painting so dangerous, I said to myself I must paint something really dangerous to express the danger of the fresco itself, so I painted circus performers, always in poses of delicate equilibrium.
“In fresco painting, you have up to five hours to paint, and after that it’s over, finished! You can’t correct or add anything. The fresco is done. Everything that is wrong, well, it’s there–all the flaws are there, right along with whatever came out well. It’s a real balancing act. You start at one end of the cord, and you walk on a wire across the whole distance of the circus. And if you fall, well then, you fall.
“For La Bergamote, I made a wall mural for their first shop in Chelsea. I liked what they did, but I felt the decor was a bit… cheesy. I felt they needed something a little more French, more traditional –because it’s really traditional and authentic, what they do.
“The most important thing, when you go into a place you like, is that if you can contribute to making it nicer, that in itself is the best reward.
“Then they opened a second boutique on 52nd Street and they decorated it in the same non-descript style as the first one. After only two years the decor was falling apart, so they had to completely redo the place and they asked me to make a new mural.
Frédéric Lère
“Here you have chariot crossing the Place Stanislaus in Nancy, making the first delivery of the bergamot from Calabria.*
“Remember this image of the horse and carriage in the exhibition? I thought it was such a gas, I absolutely had to take that for the point of departure of my mural.
“Instead of the orchestra, here I have the pastry chefs who toss bergamot candies from the chariot into the crowd. And the two people driving the chariot, are, of course, Romain and Stephane, the owners of La Bergamote.
“When I paint, what I want to achieve is not, ‘Look at me, I’m so gorgeous,’ but to express an action.
Frédéric Lère
The arrival of the bergamot in Nancy is on permanent view at La Bergamot , 515 West 52nd Street. The FREEvolous King Lère Show is a public art installation which has been traveling around the world and on the web since December 2012, when it launched at Cup Cake Café. Since then, Frederic has given several small free-standing reliefs of circus scenes to friends who take them around the world.
The tiger act was last seen at the Bouglione Circus in Paris.
To see more of Frédéric’s work, visit his site, or La Bergamote.
On June 18, he will be painting the Empire State Building from the terrace of the Spring Hill Suites in Midtown at 25 W 37th St. from 4 to 7 pm.
Monica Hunken moved to NYC two days before September 11 bringing with her a family background that included a failed whistle-blower lawsuit and an intrepid immigrant grandfather. These turned out to be fertile soil for the agit-prop street theatre, political action and bike culture that flourished in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks, the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and the 2004 RNC protests.
In 2010, inspired by Follow the Women, group ride for human rights that takes place in the Middle East annually, and enabled by a serendipitous catering gig in Qatar that provided the starting point, she embarked on a 6-week solo bicycle trip across Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
A brief description of this gay outing to a longtime peace activist friend elicited “That must have been quite a shock for the locals.” Truer words were never spoken. But it’s amazing what a six-foot tall blonde American can get valium for felines away with in a region whose inhabitants are bound, on the one hand, by the laws of hospitality, and, on the other, intimate knowledge and fear of the weight and caprice of American state power.
Bringing a “disconcerting American optimism” as she set off just a few weeks before the debut of the Arab Spring, Blondie of Arabia pedaled right into the very heart of the cultural-social maelstrom that is the Middle East, blueballing a series of gallant gentlemen along the way and blithely delivering a terrific whack to any number of gender clichés and hetero-normative sexual political assumptions nestling in a bouquet of Orientalist geo-political post-colonial paradigms and islamo-phobias, as only a woman riding a bicycle alone through Aqaba can.
Safely back on Bleecker Street three years later, she plays it all for laughs for a brisk and thought-provoking hour at Culture Project, nightly through May 11.
My friend Luc told me that biking is the perfect meditation. I sighed and said in my pious enlightened voice “So true.” My imaginary skeptical voice scoffed and said “Oh God here we go again.” He was referring to my history with meditation; I am a dilettante of spiritual traditions.
NYC is Candy Land for spiritual seekers like me. I’ve taken all the yogas: hot, naked, Kundalini, and laughing. An acupuncturist using electrified needles has worked me over more than once. The herbal oil enemas were transcendent, but wrecked my furniture. I took the 12 steps and turned my life over to the care of a doorknob.
It was expensive, but I loved all of it and regret nothing. One of the smartest purchases I made was the $250 I spent on the secret mantra. I have been meditating with it sporadically for 16 years, so I feel well qualified to judge whether or not biking is the perfect meditation.
Let’s compare the two.
| Meditation | Biking |
| Gently close your eyes | DO NOT CLOSE YOUR EYES |
| Sit in a comfortable, upright seated position | Wedge a piece of plastic mounted on a clattering aluminum frame between your ass cheeks |
| Slow your breathing | Gasp for breath |
| Bring your focus to a single point | Only Chinese delivery guys are qualified to do this |
| Play gentle, calming music | Sift crucial sounds from 85dB of city noise |
| Activate your calming prefrontal cortex | Fire up the amygdala. It’s fight or flight time, baby. |
On paper, biking is about as meditative as a Rammstein concert.
But is it?
After crashing into a limo on 6th Avenue and being doored in Chinatown in the first week of my bike commuting experiment, I realized that spacing off while hurtling through a gauntlet of cars is deadly. There are hundreds of harmless things on the streets that can turn perilous in an instant. All my senses must be focused on everything at once and my reactions must be agile enough to evade danger. When my mind is occupied in this way, the chatter nearly stops. I’m forced to be in the moment.
While in this state, the ride is sensuous and I feel everything intensely. Rhythms emerge from the din. I float across dunes of asphalt formed by pounding tires. Sound is hushed when I turn off a busy thoroughfare onto a side street and the kaleidoscopic city turns into a quiet little town. I fly down the avenues with pigeons on a magic carpet. It’s exhilarating. And then the ride ends.
Luc was right. Biking in NYC is the perfect meditation.
Weather. Where would we be without it? That’s what I say when people complain. Think about it: no weather at all. We’d be on the moon.
Weather that makes noise, or piles up, rain, hail, snow, sleet, fog, mist, any and all of these in any combination are my passion. When a friend of mine who lives in another part of the country heard there was a snowstorm in New York that included thunder and lightning she left a voicemail, “You must be in seventh heaven.” And she was right.
Apart from being out in it, my favorite place to find out about the weather is Intellicast, which has interactive maps which to the weather fanatic is like a shot of whiskey to an alcoholic: one is too many and a hundred are not enough. I’m not exactly sure what “interactive” means in this case because you can’t actually do anything on the site to modify the weather. But you can get very detailed information about it, where it’s coming from, how quickly it’s coming, and what kind it is.
Today’s forecast from Intellicast
NASA satellite image of nemo
Nor’easters are among winter’s most ferocious storms. These strong areas of low pressure often form either in the Gulf of Mexico or off the East Coast in the Atlantic Ocean….
In places like New York City and Boston, for instance, if the wintertime low tracks up to the west of these cities, wintry precipitation will often change to rain.
However, if the low moves slightly off the coast to the east of these cities, assuming there is enough moisture and cold air accompanying the storm, Boston and New York will typically get snow or a mixture of precipitation types.
A nor’easter gets its name from its continuously strong northeasterly winds blowing in from the ocean ahead of the storm and over the coastal areas.
The forecast said snow today, and a few tiny flakes were already swirling past the window as I ate my breakfast. When I got on my bike I was wearing my Snow Outfit: a shearling coat over a merino wool sweater, a wool watch cap and two scarves, a silk one beneath a woolen muffler, and of course, The Gloves. By the time I got to the Manhattan side of the bridge I was sweating like a pig.
Straight ahead of me riding up the Bowery was a man dressed for the weather much more appropriately than I in a dapper lightweight gray herringbone tweed jacket. He was riding a bike with upright handlebars and super-skinny tires. At the next light I found myself stopped beside him, well positioned to get a glimpse of the front view, which, just as dapper as the rear, revealed a pleasant, lightly bearded face and stylish rectangular eyeglasses.
“Doesn’t it seem like it might snow later,” I asked.
“It’s supposed to,” he agreed amiably.
“Is that very attractive jacket going to be warm enough?” I asked.
“I have another coat,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“Right here,” he said, patting a knapsack in the basket over his front wheel.
“How about those skinny tires in the snow? What’s that like?”
“I have another bike,” he said, smiling, “that has little metal spikes in the tires.”
“Aha.” I was very impressed by this information. Spiked tires! That’s preparedness for you. “Where is that?”
“In Brooklyn,” he said.
By this time the light had changed, and we were riding down Third Avenue side by side.
Hoping to convey warm interest that would encourage him to say more I said, “Aha.”
We pedaled along for a few minutes in silence as I tried to think what good this bicycle in Brooklyn could possibly do him in the present situation, but I couldn’t figure it out.
“That might not be so convenient later today,” I ventured.
He laughed, and agreed.
” Do you ever take the subway with your bike?” I asked, still trying to figure out what the plan might be. Surely the exceptional foresight that accounts for two bicycles–one with spiked tires no less–would also factor in a plan?
“Yes, but only in extreme emergencies.” His eyebrows come down toward his glasses making his pleasant face look, if not exactly annoyed, very serious. This does its handsome pleasantness no harm whatsoever.
“It’s such a hassle. By the time you lug your bike down into the station and wait for the train, you’d be halfway home already.”
He laughed lightly, as if to say such a problem could not possibly ever concern him, personally. I wonder what he would consider an ‘extreme emergency.’ But we’d approached the corner where I turn off Third Avenue and the light was green, so there was no time to ask.
I laughed, too, hoping to convey sympathetic agreement, and I said, “I turn here. Nice talking to you.”
“Nice talking to you, as well,” he replied, and we glided off in our separate directions.
I wondered what he was going to do if it did snow more later, with those spiky tires on his other bike at home in Brooklyn. I wondered if that could that be considered an extreme emergency.
As the day went on the wind shifted and the temperature fell. The wet snow of the morning froze beneath the new snow which the wheels of quiet slow cars pushed up into creamy ridges made all the more beautiful by the knowledge that their existence would be so fleeting, ending in a long, slow decline of gurgling black slush.
By the time night fell the snow was howling frantically past my window like big gusts of confetti and the only cyclists still out there were delivery guys on mountain bikes grinding through the drifts with bags of Chinese takeout hanging from their handlebars.
A Band on Wheels
Mr F.W.Painter, the well-known cycling instructor and
bandmaster of the Christchurch Professional Band, intends shortly to
introduce to the public a novelty in the form of a bicycle band.
Several members of the Professional Band have been practising,
assiduously for some time past, and cialis at a rehearsal this morning they
showed considerable proficiency in playing their instruments while
cycling. On a more suitable ground than that at the drillshed they are
able to perform several manoeuvres on their wheels.
The Star (New Zealand), 13 April 1898, Page 3
I stop in to say hello to Mike at the Bicycle Station around six.
“So you’re riding in the cold weather! How are you holding up?”
Fine, I say, only my hands are cold; I need to get better gloves. I show him my arrangement: a pair of glove liners stuffed inside leather gloves. Riding that morning, it had taken only 15 minutes for my fingers to go from numb to smarting, the second stage of frostbite.
“Wait a second,” Mike disappears into the back of the shop and comes back a minute later pulling the tags off a pair of gloves that would not look out of place in a jousting match between Martians. “Take these, they’re too small for me.”
The next morning my phone says it’s 23 degrees Fahrenheit when I leave the house, but the wind has died down so it doesn’t feel as cold as it had the day before. I pull on Mike’s gloves and start off. When I stop for the light six blocks later, my hands hurt just as much as they had with my previous four-glove arrangement. Waiting for the light to change I pass the time pounding my hands together to stimulate the circulation. I’m thinking that the new gloves, for all their appearance of high-tech invulnerability, provide a mostly cosmetic improvement
But as I turn onto Flushing Avenue my fingers start to warm up inside the gloves. By the time I turn on to the Manhattan Bridge I’m wondering what similar arrangements there might be for my feet…
That night, on my way home, I stop in to thank Mike for the gloves, and I tell him about the strange getting cold and warming up again experience. He grins and says, “You have to make sure you stay warm, if you’re going to ride in winter. You don’t want to get frostbite. Racers use BenGay on their hands, on their legs, on their feet, to warm up their muscles.”
” That last snowstorm, I rode in it. I had hybrid 700×38 tires which still gives you some stability, but even so I was concentrating on main streets that were plowed. When you hear of icy conditions, you shouldn’t ride. You could break your body up pretty badly. They make studded tires for mountain bikes, but even so.
“I’ve been to Bear Mountain on the 1st of January several times. The Century Club used to have an annual ride. “It went from a ride to a race!”
“We started at Central Park, 25 of us. By the time we got to the George Washington Bridge, only seven of us decided to continue. We were dehydrated because the water bottles froze within 15 minutes. We spent like two hours in a diner, we were so frostbitten.”
I was curious about the way my hands had warmed up in Mike’s gloves, so I went to REI in Soho to ask them about it. A guy in the bicycle department, he sent me to the glove department. There I met Jay and Hotek, standing in the midst of more gloves I had ever imagined could exist, hanging on hooks on one wall from floor to ceiling and both sides of two aisles of chest-high racks.
What is the warmest glove?
Jay said, “People will argue this a lot. You need something with wind protection, and insulation. Lots of companies say their gloves are windproof, but they’re not.
She turns to the rack, scanning the gloves for a good example cialis with atenolol.
“Which part of your hand gets hit by the wind first, knuckles or fingers? A lot depends on how you ride. If your handlebars are drop-down or t-shaped, your hands are facing the wind in different positions.”
She takes a pair of gloves from the wall.
“See? Mittens like these are really insulated at the tips, but on the knuckles they’re pretty thin. So you have to think about that.
“Then, mittens or gloves? There’s a lot of discussion about which is better. People tend to prefer one or the other. Scientifically, it seems like it makes more sense that mittens would keep your hands warmer.”
She returns the gloves to the rack and takes down a pair of fleece mittens.
“One pouch to hold the combined heat of your fingers–and your whole hand– rather than isolated fingers trying to keep warm separately.
“Then, there are three kinds of insulation: Triplex, Primaloft and Comfortmax. Primaloft is considered the best because it has a higher warmth to weight ratio than down. ”
Hotek, who has been talking to another customer, comes over just in time to hear this.
“Well, that depends on what kind of down you’re talking about,” he says.
A rapid-fire. discussion ensues about fill power vs. quality of down, and whether “fill power” and “quality” mean the same thing.
A disagreement about feather weight turns into an argument about how fill power is determined and Hotek starts explaining something having to do with filling a tube with feathers and ratios of feathers to air in the tube.
Trying to drag the conversation back to the difference between fill power and down quality Jay says, “Some down is just chopped up feathers.”
Hotek shoots back “That would just be false advertising which is a separate problem.
“Now if you want to talk about what kind type of birds it comes from, that’s another question.”
I discreetly collect my lower jaw from the floor to say, Can we get back to mittens vs gloves?
A nearby customer overhears this and says, “You can’t wear mittens when you’re riding a bike; you need your fingers to be able to switch gears.”
Jay looks at Hotek. He shrugs as if to say, that’s a good point. “A lobster claw would be probably be good.”
I show them the gloves Mike gave me.
“Oh, Thinsulate,” Hotek says. “Thinsulate was the first microfibre, built in 1979 by 3M. It has good things and bad things about it. ”
“The good thing,” says Jay, “is it’s incredibly warm. I have a Thinsulate hat that belonged to my grandmother. It’s so old, and it’s my warmest hat.”
“The problem with Thinsulate, ” Hotek goes on, “is it doesn’t breathe very well.”
“Then you get into sweat and wicking,” agrees Jay.
“The premier synthetic is Primaloft.”
So what’s the warmest glove?
“That would be these Black Diamond gloves over here,” says Hotek walking over to a pair of green nylon gloves with leather palms hanging in the center aisle.
I try them on; they seem very warm, but they’re so thick I can hardly close my hand.
You could never a bike with these, I say.
He nods. “They’re made for skiing.”
“Wait a second.” He squints, looking at the ceiling. “There was a guy in here a while ago…” he walks around to the other side of the rack, “looking for warm biking gloves, and we gave him a Manzella windproof liner underneath a Pearl Izumi lobster for insulation.
“That’s got to be the warmest, most windproof glove.”
Fall doesn’t really begin for me until Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair at PS 1. I go every year, and every year it seems like it’s better than the year before.
Something about literacy seems to encourage a particular kind of hob-nobbing, cheerful flamboyance. This year the ambience of fearless bonhomie is perhaps due at least in part to M. Wells , currently in between locations, serving up excellent snacks in the PS1 café.
The first time I went I seem to recall being able to get through the entire thing opening night, despite spending quite some time with a publisher from Pennsylvania who had brought a small collection of large, smooth rocks to keep him company during the fair. It was the extremely pleasant discussion of the life story and occupations of these rocks that made me linger at his table far longer than could be considered efficient. But even without such unhoped for, impossible to imagine opportunity for uplift, in recent years, between the sheer quantity of wonderful things to look at, not to mention interesting people to talk to, it takes me several hours just to get through the zines, requiring more than one visit. Worse things can happen.
While I use a bike to get to the fair, I don’t usually expect to Levitra find anything like Jenny Lin’s Skinny Leg, a hair-raising, and page-raising, pop-up book and zine that tells the story of her bicycle accident and how she lived to ride again. Her pop-up engineering is great and full of imaginatioon, so not surprisingly, we found out we are both fans of Sam Ita. She has one of his books, and I have all of them.
Jenny’s book is published by the excellent B&D Press back at the fair with a new Judith Butler zine in their series “The Life and Times of Butch Dykes a “series of fanzines about the lives and times of amazing women”
It would take all day to mention everything noteworthy, thrilling and delightful, such as Louis M. Schmidt , Cinders Gallery , Fantasy Camp, just to mention a few–but I’d rather get back to the fair for an egg sandwich and a closer look at what’s new from Picturebox.
Bike parking would be nice at some point. Meanwhile, I’m making a note to myself to remember, on a day when our species has got me down: there are way, way more book lovers than there are parking meters and bus stop signs in Queens.
In the New York Times Magazine of September 15:
The author of “War and Peace” took his first bicycling lesson at age 67, only a month after the death of his 7-year-old son, Vanichka. He was still grieving, and the Moscow Society of Velocipede-Lovers provided him a free bike and instruction along the garden paths on his estate. He became a devotee, taking rides after his morning chores. “Count Leo Tolstoy . . . now rides the wheel,” declared Scientific American in 1896, “much to the astonishment of the peasants on his estate.” A close friend noted: “Tolstoy has learned to ride a bicycle. Is this not inconsistent with Christian ideals?”
Below, a sampling of Tolstoy’s chores from his diaries of the period 1895 – 1899.
March 31 — I awoke at 6, and aroused everyone else, but, not rising, through indolence, went to sleep again till 9. Drank tea, and read for a while. Alexeyev called, and, until luncheon time, hindered me from working. Yet he was so civil that I was afraid to offend him, by refraining from going to his place for luncheon. Before the meal, roamed about a little. Am growing faint-hearted… must force myself to do bold things.
April 1st. — Again awoke after 7, but went to sleep, and slept till 10. Read the Sovremennik. Every item in it is poor. How strange to think that bad books should demonstrate to me my faults better than good! Good books cause me to lose hope. Wrote a chapter on prayer. It progressed but indifferently. Vanyushka is a bad, lazy copyist. Nevertheless I have not lost all hope of accustoming him to it. Was foolish enough to go out to dinner, which wearied me unbearably…
April 2nd. — Rose at 9, and both read and wrote. Only B. disturbed me, and that not much. Went out to luncheon. After luncheon, read; then set Vanyushka to work, while promising him to settle his mother in Grummont. That much, at least, is his due. Went out shoot- ing, but saw nothing except a good-looking Cossack woman. Had supper. After supper wrote until the present moment, which is a quarter past one. The second day is very bad, I must work at it again.
April 3rd. — Rose at 12, and had only just time to drink some tea before I was summoned to luncheon. In the absence of A. things are not at all dull. Also, to-day I have been in good spirits. After luncheon Nikolinka arrived, and I proposed to read to him the 6th chapter, but he offended me with a cold response. Wrote a little…
April — Rose at 10, read till luncheon time, wrote a little, and went out shooting… Read; then went to supper. Alexeyev was so stupid that never again will I stir a foot to visit him. It is wearisome constantly to have to . Every item in it is poor. How strange to think that bad books should demonstrate to me my faults better than good! Good books cause me to lose hope. Wrote a chapter on prayer. It progressed but indifferently. Vanyushka is a bad, lazy copyist. Nevertheless I have not lost all hope of accustoming him to it. Was foolish enough to go out to dinner, which wearied me unbearably…
April 2nd. — Rose at 9, and both read and wrote. Only B. disturbed me, and that not much. Went out to luncheon. After luncheon, read; then set Vanyushka to work, while promising him to settle his mother in Grummont. That much, at least, is his due. Went out shoot- ing, but saw nothing except a good-looking Cossack woman. Had supper. After supper wrote until the present moment, which is a quarter past one. The second day is very bad, I must work at it again.
April 3rd. — Rose at 12, and had only just time to drink some tea before I was summoned to luncheon. In the absence of A. things are not at all dull. Also, to-day I have been in good spirits. After luncheon Nikolinka arrived, and I proposed to read to him the 6th chapter, but he offended me with a cold response. Wrote a little…
April — Rose at 10, read till luncheon time, wrote a little, and went out shooting… Read; then went to supper. Alexeyev was so stupid that never again will I stir a foot to visit him. It is wearisome constantly to have to remettre propecia him a sa place. One can do nothing with such a fool. Better have no dealings with him save those of service.
April 6th. — Rose at 6, and am much pleased at the fact. Wrote until luncheon time, then lunched at home, and wrote again, though with little attention, owing to sleepiness. At 5 went for a ride to rouse myself, and returned after 6, to finish writing out the first day — though without sufficient care. The style would appear good, and the additions are not altogether bad. Yapishka is in the room with me. Shall listen to him awhile, then have supper, then go to bed. Am satisfied with the day. The hour is 10.55.
April 22nd, Port Shandrakovsky — Rose very early, and, though I caught nothing, enjoyed a splendid morning. My dogs either run or they do not. Hence it is difficult to come to a decision about them. At Bolshaya Oreshevka had a talk with a peasant of intelligence. Hereabouts the peasantry are satisfied with their life conditions, but not with the Armenian Government. Had dinner and a rest ; then went shooting, as well as meditated on slavery. At my leisure I shall consider whether my thoughts on the subject could fill a pamphlet. The moment that I arrived at Shandrakovo I went, though darkness had fallen, to the seashore, where I mistook a swamp for the sea, and, with the help of my imagination, formed of the black swamp a most formidable and magnificent picture.
May 14th. — Rose early, and have been feeling well. The tarantas broke down at Mozdok, and again I lost my temper. Went into the town, and gorged myself on raisins (a stupid proceeding!). Had a fairly interesting chat with B. One sensible thought occurred to me and I have since forgotten it. Am retiring at 10.15.
May 26th, — Rose after 3, having awakened myself. Felt splendid. The same routine as usual. Wrote little, for the reason that I spent a long time in considering a mystical phrase of small significance which I wished to render eloquently. Wasted the whole morning thus, and am displeased. Paid P. a visit. Why do not only people whom I dislike and cannot respect, people of a different bent from my own, but also all people without exception, feel perceptibly embarrassed in my presence? I must be a very difficult, unbearable person. Retiring to bed at 11.30. To-morrow letters to Pelageya Ilyinishna and Nikolenka.
May 28th. — Rose after 4, and pursued the usual routine. Could do nothing all day. Bulka (his hunting dog) has been nearly killed, and the incident has so affected my nerves that I have been bleeding from the nose, though otherwise I am well. Am sitting down to supper…
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