cocktails out of ice and water

I remember seeing this poem one time on the Tube in London, and really liking it at the time, then rediscovering it some time later. Enjoy.

Animals

by Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then

when we were still first rate

and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time

but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves

and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal

we didn't need speedometers

we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster

or greener than now if you were with me O you

were the best of all my days

This weekend, thanks to having out of town guests and thus without good excuses to be a bum, I did a bit of walking through some less-traveled (to me) parts of the city. With my friend Katie, visiting from Mass., I walked from my apartment in Long Island City over the Pulaski bridge into Brooklyn, through Greenpoint and down to Williamsburg, where we then got on the L and crossed into Manhattan. As we progressed through three boroughs, the farmer's markets got increasingly better, from the pretty sparse one in LIC, to the more vibrant one in Williamsburg's McCarren Park, to Manhattan's more well-known and well-represented market in Union Square. The jeans got skinnier, the Ray-Bans more abundant, and the language more colorful, shifting from English to Polish and back again. Points for artwork on the Pulaski bridge (below), and more points to Georgia V., whose gorgeous jewelry we snapped up at Artists and Fleas (N 6th between Bedford and Berry). We also discovered that she'll be opening her own store, Tria, in October (at Grand between Bedford and Berry) with a reception at the store on the 10th of the month. We didn't even make it much further into the market for the sake of our thinning wallets, but it's definitely worth a look.


Saturday evening we put on our Ohio State party pants and whooped it up with the best of Cleveland at Bar Coastal- thankfully, we also had Jess's birthday to celebrate, as well as hot lashings of beer and wings to ease the pain, as our dear Buckeyes left us with little to cheer for. Even a football illiterate like me knows a good ass-kicking when I see one. Celebrations continued at a karaoke bar, and finally ended with a post-party viewing of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler as dead-on Sarah Palin and Hil Clinton.

Sunday saw culinary and cultural treats, as we went out for a delicious brunch at Balthazar, where we rubbed shoulders with the celebs (well...were at least in the same room as at least one celeb, Mr. Gordon Ramsay) and downed bloody marys with the Van Wagenens. After a lazy day of browsing street vendors and relaxing, I had a dinner date with my friend Elise, visiting from DC, at Dovetail on the Upper West Side. We enjoyed their "Sunday Suppa" menu, a very reasonable 3-course prix fixe. Elise and I had, respectively, cauliflower soup and crab ravioli to start, followed by lamb meatloaf and braised striped bass, then topped off with a selection of ice creams and a warm coffee cake. Treats!

"What was a party is now a wake"

David Foster Wallace died this weekend of an apparent suicide, at the age of 46. Though I've never read any of his books or essays, Infinite Jest has long been on my list. Call it sick and twisted, but his death somehow makes me even more intrigued to check out his work (and I bet I'm not the only one).

Meanwhile, according to Business Standard, a hacker apparently splashed DFW's wikipedia entry with the n-word today: http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?autono=334498. If that's not sick and twisted, I don't know what is.