The Reckoning

Yarrgh, it's been a month! To be fair, that month was full of ten days on the East Coast and then a week-long writing workshop hosted by this little magazine, where I wrote fiction and trebled my reading list. Which accounts for... about half the month. So I'll take a slap on the wrist for two weeks' absence. But I promise you, I've been busy.

The first thing I generally do when I get home is wrestle with my dog, and then wake up the next morning in a museum. Somewhere in there is a metro ride, but I'm generally only semi-conscious for that. I'm terrified of missing out on the Capitol's art scene. Like the jaw-dropping exhibitions I saw at the Smithsonian constellation. Art of Darkness, a collection of Yozo and Katsunori mezzotints. Revisions, the iconoclastic sprawl of Lalla Essaydi's henna. Springtime, nineteen minutes of Jeroen Eisinga being enveloped by a cape of bees. Zodiac and Fragments, two monumental Ai Weiwei sculptures. If only for aesthetic reasons, Zodiac should have its permanent home in the Hirschhorn's rotunda; it sings within that architectural chasm.

Then there were the family barbecues (grilled snapper, brined chicken, coconut lime corn, raw ribbon salads), thunderstorms, catching the last train home out of the city. Teaching my dad to make ice cream,  and running after the scrolls of my friends' unspooling life stories (law schools, art schools, laboratories, and cross-continental travel). Teaching my mother the beauty of the quick bread equation (and other kinds of ratios) through coconut banana bread. Raiding the garden to steep fluffy piles of herbs in milk for ice cream (mint with medjool dates, coconut basil, salted lemon-pepper thyme). This dog.

Mostly, I treated the entire East Coast as my personal spa, because there is no other way to endure sauna-level temperatures outdoors with a straight face. While half the state lost power to the freak storms, I bolted up to New York for air-conditioned museums. There I met one of my best friends for scads of spectacular food (hi, there, Big Apple, I see what you mean about pizza), Williamsburg nights, flea markets, and conversation. This marks my first trip to New York of legal drinking age, so we made sure to mark the occasion in a variety of watering holes.

Exhibitions seen: at the Neue Galerie, my favorite museum on this continent, a retrospective of Klimt's 150 years of being on this planet in some way or another. Also, the warm inner light emanating from Heinrich Kuehn's photography (in particular, the projections of his autochromes, some of the very first color photographs! they look like luminous watercolors). Visiting this little mansion on the edge of Central Park always makes me feel deeply, deeply nostalgic for my time in Vienna. And they even serve Kaiserschmarren. At the Met, a pyrotechnical display of Prada and Schiaparelli pieces--flashing lights, wall-size video screens, halls of mirrors, all the stops--so stunning it requires not even the slightest modicum of interest in fashion to enjoy. At the Guggenheim, Rineke Dijkstra, who I think is possibly my favorite photographer ever. I first fell in love in Switzerland, when I saw her portraits of bullfighters, photographed against a dusty wall after the fight. She specializes in studies of people in vulnerable positions--women after giving birth, Israeli soldiers after training exercises, clubbers dancing--and people over time--a little refugee in a green dress transforms into a woman with a child of her own, a fresh-faced recruit morphs into a full-fledged French soldier.

I went to an overwhelming number of restaurants. Motorino, which served up the best personal pie I think I've ever had: scorched leaves of brussel sprouts, puddles of buffalo, flecks of bacon. I got my sandwich on at 'wichcraft. Gelato at Van Leeuwen, where the indulgent barista let me sample every single flavor (all of which seemed to stem from former Dutch colonies....palm sugar and ceylon cinnamon and ginger, oh my). Zucker served up the jazziest improvement on a cinnamon roll, stuffing it instead with smears of halwa, figs, and dates. People's Pops(icles). A teaser of a bar menu at wd~50, where the long-suffering bartender answered all of my questions about the impossibly thin flatbread (stretched over the back of a cookie sheet into newspaper wisps), the phở gras (foie in everything!), the lamb sweetbreads (braised in Ethiopian berbere). Momofuku, again, but this time at Ssam Bar, where we inhaled raw mackerel and scooped up roasted duck with chive pancakes. (As a sidenote, I think I'm finally over Milk Bar. I'm glad that they've succeeded in restoring salt to its rightful place in dessert, but the crack team of children inventing Christina Tosi's desserts needs to be checked for diabetes. Putting a pound of butter into something called 'crack pie' is sure to draw attention, but the thing is sweet enough to give you a toothache and has no discernible flavor other than fat and sugar. The French already did that, and they did it better, about a dozen different ways.)

Naturally, I went to most of these places at night, so the lighting was so poor I didn't even bother trying to take a picture. So you'll just have to take my word that it was delicious.

Between eating my way through a tiny portion of the city, soaking up art, devouring every variety of iced dessert available, I wore myself pretty thin. When I finally made it back to Portland, finally settled down after the windstorm of the writing workshop, all I really wanted was soup. Which might seem wildly inappropriate, given how I just spent several hundred words complaining about the heat, but Portland turns out to be pretty cold sometimes in the middle of July. But even if it's not cold, I encourage you to give soup a chance. It's the best way to recuperate from wild adventures.