Category Archives: information

Come, support these artists during Women’s History Month

In honor of Women’s History Month in March, it is fitting we visit this exhitit at the El Barrio Artspece PS 109.

The 1st floor gallery space gets a lot of use for exhibits through out the year, for a Gala once a year, for meet & greets. There is a sweet black box theatre in this space.

For this curated group show, Lamar Rogers and Rolinda Ramos chose the best of the best. In fact I am delighted that my friend LisaMaria Maya has been chosen to participate this year.

This hidden-in-plain-site (sic) gem of a community space, PS109 ArtSpace El Barrio, is located at 215 E 99th Street.

Come check it out, and support the show and the artists!

The joy of gratitude

The other side of this fortune promised that I would get more cookies with the next Chinese meal.

It has been my experience that  gratitude can be liberating.

A friend recommended I try the practice, and her advice was echoed on a few occasions.

Eventually, I indulged in some form of gratefulness.

Gratitude is an attitude of mind and a turn of the will. It really is a practice, as my friend told me.

Wire structures

I am so taken with the exhibit of  Ruth Asawa at MoMA that I hardly can speak of anything else.

Her work is engrossing and she was so prolific that I can be excused for my single minded focus.

There’s some Picasso. A bit of VanGogh, whose popularity put us several rows back of his masterpieces. Matisse. Monet.

All those surrealists, including some female masters I had not encountered before.

Oh, and do stop for lunch! Café on 2 and 6.

Mixing it up

The New York Irish Center kicks off its popular “Crossroads Concerts,” for 2026 this month.

We enjoyed one of these cross cultural musical dialogs last May. Can’t wait for this year’s concerts. It’s a wild concept. And it works!

Colin Harte, ethnomusicologist and educator  curated the 6-concert series which will start on Thursday January 29 at 7pm and run through June. 

The featured fusions are:

  • Irish- Southern Italian-Sicilian (Jan 29)
  • Irish-Turkish (Feb 26)
  • Irish Sene-Gambian (Mar 26)
  • Irish-Moroccan Gnawa (Apr 16)
  • a special encore of Irish and Puerto Rican Bomba (May 28)
  • Irish-Albanian (Jun 11).

All shows fall on Thursdays, and are at 7pm.  Tickets, which are $25, are now on sale at www.newyorkirishcenter.org

Odds and Ends

It’s almost for sure, for certain, that there’s an ad I heard on Spotify in which [I think] a live woman pretends she’s AI.

The commercial is a dialog in which a woman [actual] is so pleased with what the AI offers that she says Now, that’s music to my ears. Fake [I think] AI says “I can only talk.”

What we find funny can often be odd.

For my part, I was amused by the synecdoche that Madeleines represent for Proust.

For Proust the Madeleines were what triggered his memory.

Burt, whose memory had been stolen by his dementia, loved these cookies. It tickled me every morning when I ordered a half dozen to go with his latte.

Replica

Podcasts are good company.

Many of my favorite listens can be alarming [political or just informational]. Due to the algorithm, you know who you are, but for my readers, let me recognize these faves: the Bulwark family of newsletters, especially JVL’s good luck America takes and Sam Stein’s quirky analyses, Sarah on the illegal, and Tim’s interviews. Even better, Tim and Bill Kristol, or JVL/Tim/Sarah.

Robert Reich [with Heather Lofthouse] attempts to soothe, but – let’s face it- these are dire times. Kimmel and Colbert, the crew from The Daily [and The Weekly] Show, Trevor Noah, Josh Johnson bring humor with the bile.

There are inspirational interviews like the one Julia Louis Dreyfus has at Wiser Than Me, and the fun at Amy Poehler’s Good Hang.

Amy Poehler’s set for her chats is intriguing, and the reason for this dissertation. Fake food, replicas of sandwiches and ice cream cones, is on shelves. It’s neatly stacked and referenced during the pod. 

Today, in the New Yorker, I was apprised of fake food as art. At least in Japan. So, this bit of serendipity brought me to this bit of exposition.

At God’s Love

My friends and I were given a tour of the impressive operation at God’s Love We Deliver.

The facilities are in SoHo, near VanDam, although this spring their new distribution center opens in Brooklyn.

I had never seen an industrial kitchen before. Our guide, Nigel Finley, told us it was the largest such in our city.

We saw staff and volunteers at work in the kitchen and bakery.

God’s Love We Deliver provides medically tailored meals to ill and home-bound New Yorkers. They cater specifically to clients’ needs; for instance, low salt for those with high blood pressure, or pureed food for anyone with swallowing issues.

Founded in the midst of the AIDS crisis, GLWD has delivered food since 1985.

This is the 40th anniversary of this excellent service. See how you can participate.

West 44th

Enjoying a late lunch with my friend T. is a long conversation, catching up. 

Miss Nellie’s lost us to India / Times Square where the menu is long and on a screen. By long, I mean extensive and, let’s face it,  enticing. Miss Nellie’s is catty corner from India etc.

It’s menu is predictably smash burger and salads.

It is truly serviceable but not exotic, and we preferred the wilder choice.

We each chose an item from the vegetarian selections.