New York reaches out for help

I saw this when I was being driven around the other night ... I wonder if it helped?

I saw Gypsy with Patti Lupone on Friday

I really loved it more than I thought I would. I have always loved that musical, but this production and cast were wonderful. I was never a huge Patti Lupone fan, but after seeing her in Sweeney Todd I became a convert, and this sealed the deal. She was born for this role.

I know that I live here, and can wander down to 44th street any time I want, but I forget sometimes that getting there is sometimes at least half the fun.

There is also always this:

Walking down the street on the way to the theatre, I can't imagine that this feeling of WOW is to be had anywhere else in the world...

Broadway show posters are always changing,

I love New York. I thought about moving away at one point and realized that there was no place I could be happier. This is part of why.

Oh, we also ate at Molyvos, and had the incredible Grilled Baby Octopus. Go. It is worth the trip just for that. However, when you go to the website, leave them a note telling them to ditch the muzak.

Since I am trapped by the weather...

Take a look at the new header Photo. If you read using Bloglines or Google Reader or whatever, you need to actually go to the blog to see it, but it is worth the trip, I think. I put a new - different - header on Above the GWB - Photo also. New season, new header photos all around.

Thursday weather

First it looked like this.. actually, it looked like this early in the morning. Then it RAINED bullets.














Then it looked like this for about 20 minutes.















Now there are these lovely leaves in the sun and this HUGE black cloud behind them and it is all going dark. I know there are tornadoes in Colorado, and I am glad I am not there, but it is raining again now, and in half an hour I'll bet it looks sunny. WEIRD weather. This year so far has been spectacularly odd in the weather department up here on the river.

Been there, seen the beginning

I went to the Brooklyn side of the Bridge on Tuesday to the Fulton Ferry Landing and ..... the Telectroscope is emerging.
Rainy Day on the waterside, not too many people there but some interesting convergences.. also an article in the NY Times today. The upside-down drill bit .. it is coming up from the tunnel .. is slowly rotating, and just sort of working its way up out of the ground, though it made no progress while I was watching.

It was raining all day and part of what makes New York the best place in the world to live is that serendipity flourishes here. Catch the wedding couple having their pictures taken under a red umbrella behind it. I tried to get them in as much as possible.

I have had several people email me with comments similar to the ones that the Yarn Harlot reports. People tell her that she could buy socks for $1 at K-Mart instead of knitting them - as if she could possibly not know that. People ask me when they read my previous post "You don't really BELIEVE this !(insert worried brow wrinkles) Do you?" or they say "You know this isn't REAL, right?"

Well, it is REAL. The drill bit is REAL and it is REALLY turning. What is the wonder for me, and why I am so interested in this is that seeing it, whatever it turns out to look/work like, is that it requires what I call "a willing suspension of disbelief." I might have read that phrase somewhere, and if you know where, please let me know. The point is that like The Angel Project, which was here several years ago and is a fundamental piece of my art-brain, and like a lot of the work of Ann Hamilton, this creates a space into which you and your imagination can enter and wander about. The fact that Artichoke is involved and how much I loved the Sultan's Elephant is icing on the cake. (By the way, that links to a different video than the one of the Giantess that is here. Suspend disbelief for a little while.

I went to Brooklyn today

I went to see the Telectroscope, and I will post about that later, but I also wanted to comment on some of the other things I saw during my walk in the rain.

The Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory.. oh my .. I was in heaven. Rain on the roof and really good ice cream in my mouth. How else should you spend a rainy day, especially when you don't have an umbrella.

more telectroscope... for the disbelievers among us

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article3845892.ece

Hmmmm....

added later.. Operator error. At the risk of being annoying I am going to load the pictures again, so those of you reading me on google reader or bloglines may see me more than once.. if so... suck it up, stuff happens and the pics re a lot nicer when they embiggen.

Those pictures are not getting bigger when I click on them. Has Blogger down something that I have missed? They are done the same as the previous million pictures, I think...

As a test, a gratuitous picture shot a while ago to see if it enbiggers when you click on it. If not, complain to blogger, you can be sure I will..

This is the current state of the socks from hell.. or one of them. The other is done.

socks again

Facing miles and miles of garter stitch, I find myself contemplating why I am a sock knitter. Or IF I am a sock knitter. I guess the pictures speak for themselves, so here are some of the pictures.

These were probably the first pairs I ever made. 2 skeins of yarn, 3 pairs of socks. I learned about how top down socks can be too tight to put on. If you notice the thin line of another color of yarn at the top of one of the red pairs, I cut the tops off and added a sewn bind off to replace the original tops.

On this pair I learned toe up and I also found eye of partridge toes and heels, halfway through, the right one has them, the left one only has heels.

These were toe up from a pattern that was top down. By this point I think I was really a sock knitter, not just playing with it.

Monkeys ... need I say more?

Fair isle knitting of my own creation. The left ones are merino, the right ones are cotton. I am not a knitter for cotton, though in the mass picture over on my picture blog you can see one more pair.. I am wearing them... that are cotton fair isle that I do love dearly.

In addition to these, I have also finished 3 pairs each, or maybe 4 each, for Bob and Fred, where I have spent Christmas many years, a pair for Travis and a pair for Jenni, and a pair for Josephine, all blogless for a variety of reasons.

I've also done 2 sweaters since knitting came back to me a few years ago and a variety of small things, but it seems that once I figured out socks I always have a pair going somewhere, even including the Jacobean socks from hell.

They have been torn back 4 separate times. It is a pattern that does not lend itself to A train work, and when it does get knitted it seems to be particularly prone to holes, thin spots and general insanity. But one is done so they WILL get finished.

Because I know some of you care not one fig for knitting, I will only say one other thing... toe up, 2 circular needles, one sock at a time. If you know what I mean, you're a sock knitter ... and I am now, despite the Jacobean diversion, facing miles and miles of garter stitch.

miles of garter stitch to go before I sleep

It looks more purple here than I think it is overall, but it is NOT really charcoal, though that is what they called it. I love the color, and I hope Sarah will.

I figure she is much too busy getting ready to get married to be reading my blog, so I would guess I am safe, and if her family looks.... Keep your traps shut til I get it done and send it to her.

This is from Elizabeth Zimmerman's Opinionated Knitter with modifications by Meg Swenson. It is miles and miles of garter stitch, and although this Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Chunky says chunky it is not quite chunky enough for me to get gauge and a fabric that I like, so I added 6 stitches and therefore 6 X 16 = 96 rows...oh well. I hope I have enough yarn. I love the fabric I am getting and it won't be way heavy. One of 2 smaller pieces done, and one more small and two looonnngg to go.

This may become a cliffhanger in terms of yarn, but when I finish one part A and one part B if I use more than half the yarn I am going to get a different color for the other two pieces. Stay tuned.

.

The Telectroscope is coming NEXT WEEK!!!

http://blog.telectroscope.org/
It is part of the 125th birthday party for the Brooklyn Bridge and it will allow people in New York to wave at people in the UK.. .... realtime. In London it is on the Thames near Tower Bridge.

Now I know I have reader(s) in the UK.. Does somebody want to try to set up a time and see if it works??? There is a way to email Telectroscope and schedule a time so that you can actually wave at people whom you either know or might recognize on the other end of "the device, which purports to connect New Yorkers with Londoners using giant parabolic mirrors installed in a forgotten Trans-Atlantic tunnel." These are the same people who did the Sultan's elephant
http://abovethegwb.blogspot.com/2008/02/artichoke-is-maybe-coming-to-new-york.html
that I was/am so enamoured of and wish I had seen.

There is a video on that link if you want to see what I am going on about. I am hoping I can go down on Tuesday when "a gargantuan drill will rise up half-way from the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge. Another drill will rise in the Thames near the Tower Bridge." That should let me scope this whole thing out. Pictures then, if I can get close enough.

It runs from May 22nd to June 15th.. Any takers?

The next BIG project...

Last night I was dipping into and out of the Elizabeth Zimmerman catalog of knitting books. I was looking for a good restrained afghan pattern for a bride-to-be with elegant taste. Saw it on Brooklyn Tweed and went digging about for it in the Opinionated Knitter. Exactly what I wanted. Great changes via texture, warm, not too heavy. I have already ordered the yarn from Webs in a lovely, I hope, granite grey blue.

Well, while I was mucking about in the Opinionated Knitter, I realized that it was time for another innoculation of EZ and her amazing viewpoint on knitting. I bought Knitting Without Tears back in 1971 when it first came out. I am not even sure I knew who EZ was at that time, but it made sense to me and made me a better knitter, for sure. I had forgotten how pithy and funny she was as a writer and how she made you see what she wanted you to with just some sketchy drawings and words.

In any case... once the yarn arrives and I figure out the guage I am going to post regular updates because this has to be finished SOON! I have procrastinated long enough.

My Coop gave me a present

though I am sure they did not intend for it to be one. They installed a camera that broadcasts live pictures of the lobby on channel 999. (Turn that upside down for all you devil worriers out there). Of course the first thing I did was to record Sienna's and my going out

and our coming in...
Now how cute is THAT!! I think it is for security purposes, though when you think about it,

• there is the buzzer



• if TV not on, run to turn it on



• wait for warmup



• change to channel



• try to prevent deafness while buzzer rings again and again



• or



• person goes away.



• if you can catch a fleeting glimpse as they go you can get dressed and run them down on the street if you hurry.

I am not sure this will enhance security. HOWEVER. Since I am such a sad person, I listen to music a lot instead of watching the daytime soaps, so I now just let the TV play channel 999 while the music is on and when I waft through the living room...(a fantasy for another time)... I glance at the TV and see, generally, this:

The other thing is that I wish we had this in the other building I lived in, down in Chelsea before I came up here. Now THAT would have been a lobby worth watching. The mind boggles at what might have been seen there....sigh.

More apartment interiors

Several years ago.. maybe longer than I want to admit, I decided that I needed more storage space in my old apartment and I moved my bed up into the air. Not really FAR up, about 4.5 feet. Under the raised bed I was able to store not 1 but 2!! flat file cabinets. 10 drawers of big flat storage for paper and completed art works. I loved it. When I moved, the movers took the bed apart and re-assembled it in the new apartment. It is a little more "flexible" than it used to be, it sometimes sways a little if I roll around at night, but on the whole it is still storing both 10 drawers of flat paper AND my extensive stash of knitting yarn.....or at least most of it...AND my button and bakelite bits stash.

Attractive, however, it was not. You will also notice that I never got a real ladder, instead using some little library stairs and a stool painted to match nothing else in the room to get into bed at night.

Sienna and Clem were happy with it all though. Last week I got another surge of energy and decided the time had come to do something about that mess in the bedroom. 8 yards of fabric, a sewn hem, a staple gun and a lot of sweat later .... TA DAAAA!
I even found a fabric that matched the bottom of the stool and portions of the Chinese rug. NOW... all that is left is to dig some finished artwork out of the flat files and hang it on the walls. Almost 8 months after moving in, I am closing in on sort of finished.

I never am finished, that is not my style, but I am at least not wincing when people see the bedroom. You will notice, however, that I am still not making the bed. Hey! It is MY bed and it is hard to make. So I don't. Eventually I will figure out that part of civilization. For now...

Happy Mother's Day to me.

Travis and I are in sync, he called and offered to buy me the fabric to do this right after I finished it. How nice it is to have a child across the country who still somehow knows what will make his mother smile..

Bambi Sighting in my Hummus

Every year or so, it seems, there is a sighting of the Virgin Mary.. on tv screens, in hospitals, under an underpass on the freeway...

Then there are the vegetables and chips that resemble the famous -- or portions of the famous -- or things in the 'real' world.

Yesterday, I had what I think was the first sighting of Bambi in Hummus. I was just nibbling away last night when I noticed something in the top center of my container of hummus.

The discerning among you will no doubt notice that I did not decant my hummus but rather was eating it straight out of the container. Sigh. It TASTES better that way and there is only ME eating this so it is not as derelictus in majorum as it may appear.







Notice the top center item.






A closeup of Bambi, as he appeared to me in my hummus.


Now, the exact significance of this sighting is not clear to me at the present, however the truth in this will come out in the fullness of time. I will accept with gratitude any speculation from those of you who may be more enlightened in the area of apparitions in food than I am.

Is Bambi trying to send me a message? He appears to be leaping over something.. clouds perhaps? Urging me to take on new challenges? Or he could be just lying down in a nice hummus meadow, encouraging me to take it easy...

Feel free to speculate, meanwhile, dear reader, after I photographed him.... I ate him.

Sunday printing

I started out from 181st street, and took the #)$(# shuttle bus to get to 168th street, where, in their infinite repair work, the MTA was starting the A train. Of course, they were pretending on the signs that it was the A (an express train) but in reality it was running like a C train.. (The local). So we all settled in for a long winter's nap. After MANY stops we got to Jay Street in Brooklyn.

Off I got, onto a bus to the Navy Yard... only to find that the traffic was stopped just across the street.

You can see the Navy Yard from where I was standing, but in between me and the entrance was the ENTIRE 5 Borough Bike Ride. Not a race, just a ride, but they weren't stopping. Adults, kids, unicycles.. all between me and my access to a printing press.


So, I did what any red-blooded New Yorker would do. I ignored the cop, waited for a bit of a break and dived accross. No screeches, no crashes, I made it !






and this was what I did once I got there.











This one especially made me happy.

Going Down

I talk a lot about living on a hill. Well, the subway is built under that hill, and when the down escalator at 181st street isn't working, this is what you face.

Don't get me wrong.. as long as the UP escalator is still working I am not complaining. When I first moved here there was a day when the up escalators, there are 2, were not working and I nearly panted myself to death coming up these stairs.

There is, however, a "Customer Assistance Intercom". See the red sign? See how close it is to the TOP of the stairs? Well, by the time you have managed there from the bottom, you can crawl the rest of the way. I figure that if you push the button a voice comes on and says "You made it this far, you can make it the rest of the way.. Just put one foot in front of the other and plod along you wimp."

I was new to the neighborhood then. Now I know there is an elevator at the other end, but it lets you out at 184th Street, so there is some walking included but it is downhill from there to 181.

Living in New York is NOT for sissies.