On the morning of our fifth day, we enjoyed some fantastic brunch at a little place called Estela, located on Mulberry St. and Houston (back in the part of town where the numbered grid ceases, Mulberry and Houston roughly equating to 4th Avenue and, er, Zero-ith Street). I can’t remember how we stumbled upon this place or why we decided to dine here, but it was a delight nonetheless. The place is one of those so-called “New American” restaurants, and it’s difficult not to compare it to nouvelle cuisine except with proper portion sizes: essentially, Estela mixes things up in new ways but without all those ridiculous bits of dribbled sauces surrounding three walnut sized chunks of some kind of edible matter shaped into flat cylinders, all on a giant white plate big enough to hold a turkey.
I enjoyed a dish of endive with walnuts, anchovy, and ubriaco rosso (that’s fancy talk for some lettuce with nuts, fish, and cheese), and it was simplistically delightful. I believe I also enjoyed a drink call the Big Soft Punch: Bourbon, rye, Cynar, and genever (I’ve started to develop a taste for rye, which is surprising me), and we closed brunch with some desserts that are now escaping me, but I seem to remember enjoying them immensely.
Following this, we did some snooping a block south of Estela, venturing along a cute little street market on Prince where artists were selling photographs and jewelry among other things, then continued east on Prince to stop by Little Cupcake Bakeshop on Mott and Prince (it was fun but nothing to, er, write a blog about), walked farther south on Mott to admire Chinatown with all their street vendors selling fish (the crabs were still moving a bit as they sat there, mainly dead, on ice) and vegetables (where I got to try lychee for the first time, a curious fruit with a kind of porcupine exterior that splits in half as if someone designed it to [but that would be, obviously, ridiculous], and within is a creamy white fruit that tastes understatedly sweet), until we made our way to a wonderful little museum called Mmuseumm, directed by Alex Kalman.
We haven’t done many museums thus far on our adventures (indeed, Mmuseumm will be only one museum of two we actually enter during our 6-1/2 days here), but this little museum is definitely worth going to over any of those other museums in town.
Mmuseumm is located at 4 Cortlandt Alley, and the permanent collection resides in the space no larger than an elevator, about 10 feet deep, 6 feet wide, and 7 feet tall, a tiny alcove within a building. Among its collection are a series of God Made books for children, as in God Made the World (he didn’t), God Made Me (she didn’t either), and God Made Weather (they also didn’t). There was a also a series of fishing lures and various hooks that had at one point been surgically removed from human bodies, a series of promotional items for various drugs like an Adderall soap dispenser shaped like a brain, and a series of homemade gas masks made out of plastic bottles and pop cans. One particularly delightful series, however, was a “Cornflake Index”: a collection of variously sized and shaped cornflakes, some long and thin, others small and broken, and more still just awkwardly shaped.
All of Mmuseumm’s permanent collection, if it isn’t obvious to you by now, is a collection of modern day artifacts, “and the artifacts of today’s world, found in between the cracks of our communities, are the physical embodiment of contemporary humanity – intimate illustrations, honest proof,” as the guidebook said.
The museum’s current feature exhibition, located just ten steps away from the permanent collection, housed in a similarly small alcove inset into the building and sectioned off by glass, is Sara Berman’s Closet in collaboration with artist Maira Kalman (the museum director’s sister), and the exhibition was (as the name suggest) a re-creation of the artist’s mother’s closet, and she was a mother who wore all white in shades of eggshell, cream, and parchment, and who always carefully organized her closet with every shoe, every dress, every blouse placed with purpose and intent in a way that suggested an eye for detail of the most minutest kind.
We were apparently at the Berman exhibition on its last day, but their website currently indicates that it’s been held over. So, if you have a chance, do make sure you make it to Mmuseumm and the current exhibition. It’s fantastic and worth going out of the way for!
We made our way back to the walkup via a Chinese market where I bought some oolong tea (It’s so, so good! I’m enjoying some right now!), walked by Roosevelt Park (that’s Sara Delano Roosevelt, the mother of who you were probably thinking of when I mentioned Roosevelt [FDR if you weren’t thinking of him {Franklin Delano Roosevelt, if I must spell it out <he was president during the Great Depression and WWII, if you didn’t know, but you really should, and if you didn’t, then I don’t want to talk to you>}]), and after enjoying some oolong tea at the walkup, we made our way to the Daryl Roth Theatre to enjoy Fuerza Bruta, a kind of acrobatic dance show created by Diqui James and Gaby Kerpel.
And the show was, well, fine, I guess. Not really my cup of tea, as they say, but a marvelous spectacle, nonetheless. That said, of the six shows we saw while in NYC, I would place this fifth (but the distance between Fuerza Bruta’s fifth place and Sleep No More’s sixth place is immense–more on that when I write about Day 6).
Before the show started, we’re forced to listen to some awful music. (I Shazam’ed it while I was there, and one number that happened to play was this repetitive monstrosity by someone called Joey Daniel and Rub A Dub.) This music sadly was an omen of the music to come, a kind of acoustic version of horrible club music where all you hear is a loud beat with some semblance of a two-note melody with a one-chord harmony. (Not that there’s anything wrong with two-note melodies and one-chord harmonies, but it takes delicate care and careful thought to pull it off successfully.)
The choreography, however, was impressively glorious, and the skill of the dancers was sublimely divine. The lighting, too, was a delicate mix of impatient strobes counterpointed by carefully blending colors, shifting at just the right moment and at the right tempo to keep you interested in everything that happens around you.
All of Fuerza Bruta takes place in a black box affair, maybe 50 feet on each side (but I’m a terrible judge of distances like that), and you remain standing throughout the whole show (I think about 8o minutes or so in length), as at points throughout you need to shift your position with the crowd a bit to accommodate space for the dancers and other apparatuses that enter into the area.
One such apparatus was a conveyor belt raised about 6 feet off the ground and about 10 feet in length. With booming music playing, a single man walked on this conveyor belt as other members of the troupe placed chairs and tables on the belt, simulating someone walking through a busy sidewalk, perhaps, past restaurants with street seating. The tables and chairs would be caught by others on the other end of the conveyor belt, then brought forward to the front, and then placed on the conveyor belt again.
The tables and chairs were then replaced by walls of stacked cardboard boxes that the man would crash through, the conveyor belt speeding up, the man running as fast as he could until a loud crack simulating a gun shot struck him in the chest, but he tried to continue on, running, as best he could despite being wounded.
The man was black, incidentally, and this moment no doubt was a clear representation of goings-on amongst us that the terribly important Black Lives Matter movement is working so hard to remind us all.
The athleticism of this man was so impressive, and it was an athleticism that every other dancer shared, and the choreography saved no expense to showcase the skill of these dancers, and there were many examples. At one point in the show, the entire audience became surrounded in a shimmering tarp that stretched all around us and all the way to the ceiling. Two dancers were suspended from the ceiling with a cable on a circular track, and the two women simulated running along this tarp, bodies perpendicular to the floor. At another point, another similarly shimmering tarp was gently draped over our heads, and then the tarp was inflated Metrodome-style with loud and powerful fans. Up top were three person-sized holes that the dancers would emerge from, suspended by cables, performing various twists and turns in the air as they descended to the audience. The part that everyone probably talks about, however, is when a transparent ceiling appears above us, it filled with water, and four dancers slipped and slid across the surface.
And this was all very well and impressive, but I couldn’t help but think that this was all just spectacle for spectacle’s sake. “Look what we can do!” they might exclaim, and I might respond, “Sure, this is all very cool, but it’s kinda weird that you made a powerful statement about Black Lives Matter early on in the show, but then everything after that just forgets that moment, and I’m left wondering what the whole show’s raison d’etre is. And the music is too loud and boring.”
So, that’s that. If you like spectacular shows that lack any depth beneath the surface layer, and you want to just go to a show where you don’t have to think too much, then you’ll probably like Fuerza Bruta. I’m glad I went, of course, because, as I said, the athleticism of these dancers was quite a sight to behold, but I was left feeling that the show didn’t really have a clear purpose to bind it together. Maybe I’m fixating on the moment that we witnessed a black man being shot, and that moment seemed to have no effect on events to follow, but it just seemed a bit crass to include something like that in a show that was really only spectacular because it was spectacular.
Following this, we made our way to an Italian restaurant called Via della pace (you really can’t get Italian food quite like this in Minneapolis) to hold ourselves over until we had a simply divine dinner at The Eddy, located right next to our walkup in the Village. This was Amy’s birthday dinner, and we enjoyed their fantastically wonderful 5-course tasting menu. I think the tasting menu has since changed, as some of the items on the menu aren’t jogging my memory. In a couple words, though, it was a decadently sublime evening of fine food and drink, and I wish I could remember it better to entice you with all the details. The Eddy is one of those fancy-ish places where you don’t have to wear a jacket and tie, but you should at least make some sort of effort to look nice, and everything is priced generally very reasonably for the quality you receive.
(Incidentally, there was a couple sitting next to us the were on a horrible first date that made us chuckle and feel bad for them.)
Our evening ended with some more drinks at a little place called Amor y amargo followed by more drinks at Dead and Company. Needless to say, we rather stumbled home, but nevertheless made it home safely.
Stray Observations (a la AVClub):
- In Minneapolis, three cocktails probably means $30. In NYC, two cocktails means $30.
- Where are the cats? We were always on the lookout to find cats sunbathing in windows, but never saw a single one!
- And we also never saw a single cockroach.