Garth’s World

I meant to have a post listing every book I read in 2007 up by now, but I can’t find the notebook containing said list. Maybe I should have spent less time reading and more time organizing my room.

The Motto:
Be better; be happier.

The Goals:

1. Lead a less cluttered, more comfortable life.
2. Exercise and develop my intellectual, spiritual, physical and creative faculties.
3. Help make my community and my world more just, more sustainable and more beautiful.

The Objectives:

1. End the year with more money, but less stuff, than I started with.
2. Make my room and my apartment cleaner, better organized and generally more pleasant to live in.
3. Improve my knowledge of classical Hebrew language and literature.
4. Study more.
5. Exercise more.
6. Bike more.
7. Dance more.
8. Sing more.
9. Pray more.
10. Play more.
11. Continue to walk a lot.
12. Give and receive more massages.
13. Participate in theatrical and social events that enrich the lives of all involved.
14. Avoid stupid parties and bars.
15. Spend less time staring at computer screens.
16. Devote more time and money to conservation and social justice.
17. Demonstrate greater kindness towards roommates, family, friends and strangers.

I have a memory of a long-ago family dinner, when I was still a fairly young child, when someone, perhaps my grandparents or my sister, had returned to California from New York with a suitcase stocked with lox, sable and a whole whitefish from Zabar’s. Although at the time, I didn’t really like the taste of the lox (the sable was more to my liking), I was impressed by how much my family enthused over these delicacies, and I knew we were being treated to something special and important.

Now, over two decades later, I’m the one flying back and forth between California and New York on a regular basis. For the past few years, I’ve tried to make a habit of bringing my family some treats from Zabar’s when I visit.

Of course, today, Californians can pick up decent lox at a Trader Joe’s, if not their local supermarket (though nothing quite as fresh or as delectable as the lox at Zabar’s) , and my father has gotten in the habit of making his own gravlax from fresh salmon filets, but good whitefish is still hard to come by. So, the tradition carries on, and each visit, a whole dead delicious animal accompanies me all the way all the way to California, where it is disintered from my suitcase and consumed with relish. I must confess that I’m motivated as much by a nostalgia for that vague childhood memory as I am by my family’s appreciation of the treat.

This year, as I was trying to figure out whether I had time to pick up a fish after work on the eve of Thanksgiving, I felt less than enthused about facing the thronging gourmands and Upper West Side prices, which I knew I’d find at Zabar’s. Surely, I thought, there must be a quality appetizing store in Brooklyn, where the lower rents would be reflected in the price of fish. In the course of a brief web search, I found some favorable reviews of Schwartz Appetizing, located in the ultra-orthodox Jewish enclave of Boro Park.

I called up the store to find out how late they’d be open, and the man who answered, no doubt hearing my lack of a Yiddish accent, began asking questions. Where was I coming from? Did I like herring? (Schwartz specialized in herring.) How did I hear about them? He asked me to bring a printout from one of the the website’s where I’d read about them.

I’ve always liked herring a lot. We used to eat it for breakfast when I was a kid, and I still like to buy jars of it as a special treat. Last May, I bought a maatjes sandwich on the street in Amsterdam that completely rearranged my notions of how good herring could taste. The fresh fish’s melt-in-your-mouth tenderness taught me that all the herring I’d eaten and enjoyed up until then was just mediocre.

My m0uth watered at the thought that here in my own city, I might find herring approaching the quality of what I’d eaten in Holland. Nonetheless, I was not going to allow this to be a red herring for me. I confirmed over the phone that Schwartz had whitefish in stock before setting off for the store.

After a short ride on the F train, I found myself strolling along sidewalks crowded with kids on their way home from religious school, past more than a few bakeries and delis, whose wares, under other circumstances, I might have been tempted to stop and sample, but I was a man with a mission.

Schwartz Appetizing is a small store, and within moments of my arrival, one of the men behind the counter asked if I was the man who’d called from Manhattan earlier. I guess I stood out I just a little bit. After I showed him the printout of one of the pages where I’d seen favorable things written about the store, the man gave me a quick introduction to their different kinds of herring. While I was making up my mind which to buy, he asked, “do you like sweet gefilte fish?”. When my eyes lit up, he decided to make me a little sampler platter with gefilte fish, whitefish salad, tuna salad, egg salad, vegetarian chopped liver, babaganoush and eggplant salad. Everything I tasted was delicious, including the egg salad (normally one of the few dishes in the world that I dislike enough to actively avoid, but in this case actually enjoyable). The tuna salad and the vegetarian chopped liver were the best I had ever tasted (although my experience with vegetarian chopped liver is not terribly broad). Standing there in the middle of this small store without any tables, eating off of a little styrofoam plate, while all the frum customers gave me the hairy eyeball on their ways in and out, I was in heaven. I didn’t end up buying any of the salads or the gefilte fish, but I did buy five kinds of herring, which turned out to be very good in their own ways, some whitefish, lox and sable. I particularly liked the spicy schmaltz herring (very rich and tasty in spite of being made with soybean oil, and not real schmaltz) and the heimische herring. If you’re not a fan of very salty fish, the oneg-shabbos herring comes in a mustary, mayonaisy sauce that’s quite tasty. And although it didn’t quite compare to the fresh maatjes I’d eaten in Holland, the maatjes herring was very good, too.

And, in case you were wondering, the whitefish was good, too (but when is whitefish ever bad?), and cost three quarters of what it cost at Zabar’s the last time I was there.

Curious Noise Theatre presents…

HOUSE/HOME

November 29, 30 & December 1st
December 6, 7 & 8th
All performances 8:00 PM
Tix: $12
Call (646) 537-1703 for reservations and info.

Directed by Sarah Kermensky

The Lutheran Church of the Messiah
129 Russell Street (between Nassau and Driggs)
Greenpoint, Brooklyn

L train to Bedford or G train to Nassau

I just received an email from the lovely ladies of the Missoula Oblongata, announcing a one-night-only revival of The Wonders of the World: Recite at Space Space in Ridgewood on Monday, November 19th. This might be your last chance to see this delightful and poignant play for a long long time (of course, that’s what they told us a year ago, the last time they did it at Space Space). They’ve brought back the composer and musician from the original production, Leo Gebhardt (of the almost-famous early-aughts punk band, The Catheters). It only costs $5, and you can bring your own beer to drink, which is especially important, since shows at Space Space have a tendency to start late. There will be an opening act involving shadow puppets, and I’m guessing also one involving cardboard sculpture.

Go see this show!

I recommend stopping for dinner beforehand at the Tortilleria Los Hermanos on Starr Street between Wyckoff and St. Nicholas. Their food is tasty and cheap.

In summation:
Monday, November 19th, 8:30pm
Space Space
390 Seneca ave (the corner of Seneca and Stanhope)
Ridgewood, NY

Directions:
L train to Dekalb stop.
Exit at Stanhope, walk against traffic for 3 blocks.
Door is on Stanhope immediately before Seneca.
There will be a flyer on the door.

$5 suggested donation
BYOB

Saw David Neumann’s feedforward at DTW last night. When I wasn’t distracted by a subtle yet distinctly unpleasant mildewy smell, which I’m still not 100% sure wasn’t coming from me, I was able to enjoy the impressive ensemble work and laugh out loud at some of the funnier moments in this dance piece about the world of sports.

Neumann’s choreography is intelligent, and evinces the vigor and excitment of althletics. Costumes, lighting, music, text and judicious use of video also come together to create the atmosphere of an athletic competition. Even when I wasn’t actively engaged by the piece (distracted as I was by the unidentified smell and by the two women on my left who were noisily fanning their noses and who, I was convinced, blamed the smell on me, though after the show they hypothesized that the smell was coming from the stage), I was never bored or annoyed. The underlying playfulness, ubiquitous in Neumann’s choreography, serves to render even the less funny moments in the piece interesting and watchable.

The show is at DTW through Saturday November 3rd.

Rick, Greg and Matty have started probably the only blog in existence where you can find a review of an EP by folkster Joanna Newsom together with a tribute to ultimate fighting hero John Hess. It’s like Spike TV for artsy college types.

Maybe it was the fact that the trains were running slow and made me late, so that I didn’t have a chance to eat dinner before the show, and consequently the cheap ($2) beer and sake I drank during the show went straight to my head, but I went wild for Two Headed Calf’s performance of Chikamatsu’s Drums of the Waves of Horikawa last night.

Whenever I read about an artist undertaking to hybridize two apparently incompatible genres, I groan silently to myself. I mean, it seemed clever the first time, but after one has endured enough multimedia installations bringing together French New Wave Cinema and Tropicalia music, dance pieces drawing on Butoh and classical ballet traditions, arrangements of the Velvet Underground’s oeuvre for gamelan, the formula begins to seem tired.

Consequently, when I first heard about Two Headed Calf’s new production, fusing Kabuki with punk rock, I was not overwhelmed with desire to see how they might possibly make this unlikely marriage work. Are you? I didn’t think so.

So, let me tell you right now Drums of the Waves of Horikawa is a thoroughly worth-while piece of theatre. A conscientious craft clearly underlies the show’s occasionally rough-edged aesthetic, and informal tone. Director Brooke O’Harra makes no apologies for the violence and misogyny in Chikamatsu’s play, instead giving us over-the-top fanciful interpretations of the characters’ violent impulses, which induce laughter even while they disquiet. O’Harra also renders the violence more palatable by casting a woman (the crush-inducingly talented Jess Barbagallo) as the rapist/villain of the piece.

Go see this now.

It’s playing at Here through November 17th.

I’m not going to waste time composing a long post about all the reasons I liked TR Warszawa’s production of Krum by Hanoch Levin, because it’s only at BAM through tomorrow night, and I want to make sure I post this in time for someone to read it and make the decision to see the show before it closes.

Krum is sort of like Chekhov for the 21st century: a play about bunch of washed-up malcontents grappling with failure, loneliness and mortality, which somehow manages to be laugh-out-loud funny.

The production pushes both sides of this uncomfortable equation of hilarity and despair about as far as they will go, as in the scene in which a newlywed couple sit in bed together. The wife joylessly jerks the husband off, looking the other way with a grimace on her face, while he makes these pained, joyous whimpering noises. It was a bleak picture of relations between the sexes, but while my heart was sinking, the noises coming out of the man’s mouth made me snort with laughter.

So, I haven’t been posting lately, not because I haven’t had time- my day job affords me all too much free time during the day, during which I could be writing up long articles for your edification and entertainment. I just haven’t had anything interesting to write about, really. Sure, I’ve eaten at some interesting restaurants, but I’ve just didn’t feel like straining my brain for synonyms of “tasty” and “cheap”, likewise I’ve seen some good and bad theater and dance that I’d have liked to steer you towards and away from, respecitvely, but just felt too lazy to bother writing. Anyway, I’m going to give this blog thing one more shot, and if I don’t find something worth writing about, I’m gonna shut the durn thing down.

In this probationary period, I’m open to all suggestions of new formats and focuses that might make the blog more readable for you and more writeable for me. I’m toying with the idea of abandoning everything but the recommendations of things to do (eat, cook, see, hear, read, ) or avoid. If that’s your favorite part of the blog anyway, let me know, or if you think there are enough people out there telling you what to do/see/etc. already, let me know that, too.