June 14, 2012
Bodrum, Turkey. October, 2011
Karadeniz Mısır Ekmeği, the famed cornbread from the Black Sea (Karadeniz) region. Not at all cakey like our own Southern style cornbread, mısır ekmeği is a heavy, hardly risen, somewhat challenging loaf, dense and quickly satisfying. When we ventured into a bread bakery in a far-flung Bodrum neighborhood to ask directions, I noticed a tray of this regional specialty still warm from the oven. (What was it doing here, so far from the Black Sea?) We got our directions, our bread, and a lovely conversation with the Black-Sea-native baker who wanted to know the name of this bread in English. The following morning at breakfast on board the Wind Surf, we asked our favorite attendant Ony if he could persuade someone in the kitchen to slice the round loaf for us. He did, and when he returned it, we asked him if he’d like to try a piece. He smiled shyly and confessed, “I already did.”
June 13, 2012
Noto, Sicily. May, 1988
Nick and I had been traveling throughout Italy for weeks, compiling the research that would result in his Great Italian Desserts book. We joked about our Sicilian visits to numerous pastry chefs, all of whom seemed to offer marzipan-based sweets filled with preserves made from a native citrus fruit. Whenever we told one that we’d earlier been to see so-and-so in such-and-such a town, he would invariably say, “Yes, but here in our shop we have something special.” Followed by the inevitable “pasta di mandorle con confitura di cedro.” Always. Until we met this man, Corrado Costanza. Yes, he had some of the predictable pasta di mandorle sweets (though in remarkable shapes and presentations.) But the thing I remember most is his gelato. I recall trying two flavors: rose and jasmine. Also a quince-paste dessert that made the glands in my throat quiver like a tuning fork. Such a nice man, frowning, offering his heart.
June 12, 2012
South Station, Boston. October, 2003
One of the many great gifts for me of working at the most respected name in sound was the opportunity to partner with Mike. He is the most talented and most inventive designer I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. Here we are in Boston’s South Station, inspecting the installation of dozens of huge banners we’d made to herald the arrival of the Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Canceling headphones, known only to those of us on the payroll back then as QC2s. (Our print production pal Alan accompanied us that day and took this photo.) So what if Mike never quite mastered the art of the “jumping picture.” Just being able to get the entire product name (and the word NEW, and the Bose logo, etc.) elegantly onto most of the materials we produced was a Herculean feat worth admiring.
June 11, 2012
Off Gloucester, MA. August, 2011
Jay and I live in Gloucester and love our home overlooking the harbor. Still, ever since a friend told us that we couldn’t fully appreciate the fishing town until we saw it from a boat, we’ve been jonesin’ to do just that. So when Groupon offered 50% off a harbor cruise on the schooner Thomas E. Lannon, we jumped. And we’re glad we did. Yes, it was wonderful to see the “other” perspective on our town, the side we never see from our perch above Rocky Neck and Smith’s Cove. There’s the paint factory. And the lighthouse. And, look, there’s our house up there on the cliff. The day was warm and windless, but that didn’t matter. It was nice just lolling about in the outer harbor, the sea beyond. We didn’t even mind the other passengers. Much.
June 10, 2012
Codman Farm, Lincoln, MA. August, 2011
Look at this beauty in my friend James’s garden. It reminds me of a similar cabbage, one that was the subject of the first watercolor I ever did in a class taught by Bill Stewart in Soho some 40 years ago. I took the class with my friend Mira who drove from NJ into NYC each Tuesday night to Bill’s loft on Prince Street in what was then a very dicey part of town. I felt very bohemian. (Bob Wilson, a Texan pal of Bill’s, sat in on the class from time to time and was pretty down to earth before he became famous as Robert Wilson.) I remember Bill’s encouraging me not to be too literal, to use colors more imaginatively. Consequently my talent-free painting was a wash of purples and pinks and blues, mixed in with the greens. I’m sure there was some red in there, too. Framed proudly if inexpertly, it hung in my parents’ hallway for years and may still even be there today. It wasn’t nearly as beautiful as this one, the real thing.
June 9, 2012
Christopher Street, New York City. July, 2011
Oh, my. Who would ever have thought, back in the days when Nick and I used to go there, that the fetid Stonewall Inn would ever have become historic and respectable? Years before the “Stonewall riots” during the summer of 1969, we’d timidly enter this obviously mob-run place, clearing the front-door inspection and bouncer. (There was no picture window back then.) Once inside, it was a little creepy. Tin foil covering the ceilings of the two rooms, people hanging around, music. (The Supremes were big.) Every once in awhile there would be a police raid. The overhead lights would suddenly come on. The bartenders would quickly take the cash drawers out of the registers and disappear through a back door. And the patrons would slowly leave the establishment through the front door, police cars idling outside. The few times this happened when we were there, we just walked out without any hassle. Not so in late June, 1969. And, as a result of those well-documented few days and their aftermath, things have changed mightily. So while it’s nice to see that the place is still there, I have no desire to step inside now. Seems more like a museum piece or a theme park now than an edgy bar. Happy Pride Day to all my Boston friends today.
June 8, 2012
New Orleans. March, 1991
One of the many novelties to be witnessed in this evocative city is the change of pace from one street to the next. Especially in the French Quarter. One minute you’re on Bourbon Street, passing chock-a-block honky-tonk bars with Hurricane-toting drunken tourists spilling onto the pavement. The next moment, you find yourself in front of a residence with some serene and dreamlike decorative touches. Look at this cast-iron cornstalk fence, for example, found, not so surprisingly, in front of the Cornstalk Hotel on Royal Street. Legend holds that an early owner of this early 1800s home installed the fence so that his young bride would be less homesick for the cornfields of her native Iowa. Pumpkins form the base of the fence, and there’s even a butterfly that seems to have recently alighted on the front gate. But would you expect anything less from a city whose streetcars (now buses) carry names like Desire?
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