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Austrian Wine Dinner
I celebrated my first day in Manhattan after Sandy by signing up last minute for the Austrian Wine Dinner at Corkbuzz on Monday night. There were just four of us, due to hurricane related cancellations, which meant we got plenty of one-on-one attention. The wine was all served cool or on ice, which was counter-intuitively…
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Astoria Tango Club
On my first visit to Buenos Aires, an expatriate American that I became acquainted with said to me that the city had a “theme”, which he smartly suggested to me was “nostalgia”. He pointed to the Kennedy-era cars on every block, the coffeehouses with their bow-tied waiters, the grand Parisian architecture, and, although he scarcely…
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The Loneliest Planet
Among the new releases I have seen and liked so far this year, there is not a one that I admired as much as I did this one. THE LONELIEST PLANET is fresh and new, and at the same time solid and assured. It is a marriage of cinematic technique and psychological narrative so balanced…
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Nobody Walks
The vice and the virtue of NOBODY WALKS is its simplicity. A pretty young artist from New York has arranged for a Los Angeles sound editor to help her complete a gallery film project. His wife is the friend of a friend. The artist arrives on a jet plane and is immediately taken by the…
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Smashed
When I saw the trailer to SMASHED, something in Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s eyes told me I had to see it. I should normally have shied away from a film that appeared to be about alcoholism and its destructive effects, fearing the oversimplification and moralism with which our culture tends to address the issue, or a…
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Como el musguito…
I think that there is no other person who has been mentioned so often as muse and inspiration by the dance and theater people I know as the late Pina Bausch. That she was one of the signal theatrical artists of our time is beyond dispute, and so is the fact that it took me…
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Truffle Dinner
Halfway through this week’s Truffle Dinner at Corkbuzz, the sommelier’s table was a chaotic jumble of half consumed bottles of Nebbiolo, along with a few extras, but still awaiting the Pedro Ximenez that would top off the experience. As usual, both the food and the wine were superb, and went well together, with little flecks…
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Elsewhere
My first foray at BAM’s new Fishman Space was ELSEWHERE. Described as an opera for cello, it was the sort of living artwork that washes over you, its individual elements inseparable from general sensation, even with one of them, the cello, plainly at the core. The cellist Maya Beiser cut an imposing figure vocally and…
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Wake in Fright
In his great essay On Racine, the French theorist Roland Barthes observed that the most ancient of tragedies arose in the arid and sundrenched landscapes of the Mediterranean, under merciless skies and aside great oceans. It would have been no accident that a sense of cosmic isolation and the exigencies of survival posed a dramatic…
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Spanish Wine Dinner
At the Spanish Wine Dinner at Corkbuzz on Tuesday night, the labels alone were pretty intriguing, including one printed in Braille from a winery that uses blind persons, with their heightened taste buds and olfactory abilities, to test the wines. An interesting slide show accompanied the meal, narrated by Kerin Auth, who owns the excellent…