Not All Black and White

Monday, December 17, 2018

Judy Chicago, an artist who focuses on feminist themes, has been living in Belen, New Mexico, a town of 7,000 people, for over 25 years.  Some prominent citizens have suggested a museum devoted to her works, looking to emulate the success of the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe.  Other folks, noting the aggressive feminism of Chicago's work, including the representation of "nasty bits", are in opposition.  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/us/judy-chicago-belen-new-mexico-museum.html

One person said, "As Christians, we are for order, justice, security and protection."  He is not a theologian, so I won't extrapolate his comment too far.  However, I have to note the isolation of justice, absent love or truth.  He might as well be hiring a group of mall cops. 

. . .

To my mind, ramen is to the kitchen as a bookcase made of bricks and boards is to the living room, the most modest attempt at self-sufficiency.  Nevertheless, I entered Momosan Ramen & Sake, 342 Lexington Avenue, with only minor hesitation.  It's an attractive space, white-painted brick covering most of the interior.  A bar on the left is backed by a mirror, roughly 4' x 8', reflecting dozens of colorful sake bottles. 

There are 16 stools at the bar, 6 booths, 2 high communal tables with 12 stools each and a counter in the front window with 6 more stools.  Almost every seat was occupied at lunchtime by no one more than half my age, which probably explains why the loud music was much more foreground than background.  Note also that manual dexterity is required, because the only utensils provided are chopsticks and that cute little Asian spoon.  

I ordered the "new tokyo chicken/zuke lunch set" for $17, capital letters apparently extra.  It consisted of a bowl of  chicken broth with soy marinated chicken, menma (lactate-fermented bamboo shoots), kikurage (edible jelly fungus), aji (pepper sauce), ramen and half a medium-boiled egg (all together quite delicious) and zuke don, marinated tuna (nori) over rice, very good as well.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

"Geographic mobility hit a historical low in 2017, when only 11 percent of Americans picked up shop and moved -- half the rate of 1951."  Many others sat around waiting for Appalachian coal mines to reopen and automobile plants to return to the Midwest, as promised by Tangerine Man, even while 96% of New York City taxicab drivers are foreign born, over 60,000 Filipinos are nurses and healthcare practitioners locally, the waiter in the Italian restaurant is Albanian, the cleaning woman is Polish and the nanny is Haitian.  Don't give me that Hillbilly Elegy stuff when I'm hearing an Ode to Inertia.   

. . .

Speaking of mobility, my grandnephews Tomas and Benjamin, who grew up in Buenos Aires, now both attend the University of California, Santa Cruz.  They are sojourning in the Holy Land during their holiday break and, as part of their pilgrimage, they went to Madison Square Garden tonight for services conducted by the New York Rangers on ice, accompanied by their grandfather. 

I caught up with them before the game at Ben's Kosher Delicatessen Restaurant, 209 West 38th Street.  I was delighted to have this time with them.  I had lunch with Tomas in California a couple of years ago, but last saw Benjamin 9 years ago.  I've asked them to set aside time for Chinatown with me later in the week to continue their religious studies.   

Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Open Table is the leading restaurant reservations web site in the United States and it uses its transaction data to periodically publish restaurant rankings.  Now, it offers the 100 "best" restaurants in the USA.  "The list of honorees is based on an analysis of 12,000,000+ reviews of more than 28,000 restaurants across the country."    
https://www.opentable.com/lists/best-restaurants-in-america-for-2018?ref=9472&cmpid=em_Email2018

Given the volume of data, I accept the results, even if they are not in harmony with my own preferences.  The list may be addressed geographically, but not by cuisine or price range, a limitation in the denser urban areas.  I must also note that, of the 22 restaurants cited on Manhattan Island, none are in Chinatown.  
. . .

Arthur Dobrin, longtime friend and fellow Stuyvesant High School graduate, sends along "The Case Against Peter Stuyvesant".  https://newyorkhistoryblog.org/2018/12/the-case-against-peter-stuyvesant/ 

While there is a lot of agitation about Stuyvesant's elitist admissions policy, some folks are bothered by the name on the door.  Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, was a good bigot -- good in the sense of the comprehensive scope of his bigotry.  His record has been evident for hundreds of years; I think that most of us Jewish kids were well aware that he was an anti-Semite and took a perverse pleasure in going to "his" school.  We don't know what Stuyvesant thought about Asians, currently the school's dominant ethnic group, but we can guess at his displeasure.  While there shouldn't be a statute of limitations on cleansing our history, let's leave old Pete alone in his ironic position. 

Thursday, December 20, 2018
An interesting controversy has arisen in the area of race-blind theatrical casting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/theater/all-my-sons-director-quits.html

 

Arthur Miller's daughter has refused permission to cast a black couple in a revival of "All My Sons," her father's play set in Ohio in 1947.  They would have played against a white couple and Ms. Miller believes that benign inter-racialism was highly unusual for the time and place.  Last year, the estate of Edward Albee rejected a contemplated production of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" that would have had a black man as one of the two husbands, as two couples spend an evening insulting each other and exposing their secrets.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/theater/a-black-actor-in-virginia-woolf-not-happening-albee-estate-says.html?module=inline

 

A representative of Albee's estate said "that a mixed-race marriage between a Caucasian and an African-American would not have gone unacknowledged in conversations in that time and place and under the circumstances in which the play is expressly set by textual references in the 1960s.”  The article notes a few instances where white actors are excluded from "black" roles.  

Color-blind casting is becoming more common, but not common enough that a Broadway stage looks like the contents of a New York City subway car.  While "Hamilton" effectively turns history on its head and Pearl Bailey succeeded with an all-black "Hello Dolly," it's not easy to leave conventions and experience behind.  Can we have an interracial couple at the center of "Fences" or as the Roosevelts in "Sunrise at Campobello"?  

I admit that some casting decisions have made me squirm in my seat (for a whole variety of reasons including race), but remember that I'm the guy who confronted Arthur Miller backstage in 1992, at a revival of "The Price," because the NYPD officer on stage was wearing the wrong color shirt.  Can I limit myself to OCD and get rid of the racism?

Friday, December 21, 2018

I tried to make our time together interesting and enjoyable when Tomas and Benjamin met me this afternoon in spite of the rain.  We started in front of 13 Essex Street, where Mother Ruth Gotthelf, their great-grandmother, was born in 1909, right there, not at some hospital or clinic.  I gave them a copy of the ship's manifest showing that her mother Esther Malka arrived in the United States on February 24, 1909, reuniting with her husband, 9 months and 2 days before Baby Ruth (!) was born.  

We went around the corner to 121 Henry Street, where Esther Malka opened a grocery store to make sure that her growing family (eventually six children) was fed one way or another.  I showed them various examples of the vital Jewish community once centered around East Broadway, including The Forward building and the Garden Cafeteria, now almost entirely replaced by Fujianese Chinese.  

 

Since worship was an essential part of their visit to the Holy Land, we wound up at the High Temple, Wo Hop, 17 Mott Street.  We shared beef chow fun, shrimps in lobster sauce over shrimp fried rice and sweet and pungent boneless duck.  If they needed to be converted, this sealed the deal.