|
|
|
Candle 79 and Ancient Egypt
Thursday, April 12 2012
After taking the dogs for their morning walk in the forest, I returned home and went to the greenhouse, where I noticed that the most mature of my tomato plants (of which there are eleven) already has a nascent tomato on it. It's a little larger than a marble.
Gretchen has a friend who, in the vegan scene at least, is famous for her comically-irreverent cook books. For some reason Cookbook Superheroine lives in Omaha, Nebraska these days with her boyfriend John, but they'd made a trip to New York City and today we would be meeting them for dinner at Candle 79, Manhattan's fanciest vegan restaurant. Naturally, though, Gretchen had other bullet points to the PowerPoint version of today's excursion, and as soon as we got to the Upper East Side we headed to the Met (having found a miraculous open parking spot at 87th Street and 5th Avenue — sorry about the scuff on your bumper, Mr. Black Mercedes!).
Gretchen is a lot more tolerant of the slow museum walk than I am, so she asked me what I wanted to see. "Old stuff," I said. So we toured a huge exhibit of ancient Egyptian artifacts spanning more than 3000 years of its history. One is struck by how elaborate and intricate Egyptian arts and crafts were (and how well preserved some of them have been). The hieroglyphs cut into small stone objects were occasionally tiny, having been engraved with tools that must have been the size of pins. And the finish on objects could be incredibly smooth, giving stone statues the appearance of having been made out of bronze. One tends to forget that much of Egyptian history technically took place during the stone age (augmented by small amounts of copper and ornamented by gold), and the artifacts left behind reflect a mastery of stone age technology. Their tiny arrowheads looked like precisely cut (and exquisitely symmetrical) jewels. They'd also used lathe technology to hollow out stones to produce pots that looked as if they'd been thrown on a potter's wheel.
But one is also struck by the unchanging nature of Egyptian culture all the way up until Roman influences appear at around 100 BC. While their statues could be fairly naturalistic, there was almost no variance from the ritualized (and familiar) compression of human figures when represented in two dimensions in all of that time. Given how quickly styles have changed in Europe in post-Roman times, it almost makes you wonder if Ancient Egyptians were a congenitally conservative people. Perhaps when one has a life source as reliable as the Nile, there's no incentive for change.
The final phase of Ancient Egypt was the Roman phase, when the traditional cocoon-like coffins suddenly sporting garish Roman-influenced paintings at the head end. These depicted the deceased with such over-application of makeup that Gretchen dubbed one, "Tomb of the unknown ho."
I was pretty tired after our tour of Egypt, but I had enough energy for a display of Victorian electrotypes (wherein electroplating was used to manufacture perfect copies of metal objects, a form of three-dimensional copying). We also looked at some marvelous small self-portraits by Degas and Rembrandt that (for some reason) had been intermingled.
Gretchen was still suffering from a head cold but had counteracted it with pseudoephedrine[REDACTED], and she was still eager for more. So we decided to split up for a half hour or so. After getting lost back by the café (where the exit signs seem to tell lies), I eventually found my way out to Fifth Avenue, and I got a cup of bad coffee at a pretzel cart and waited for Gretchen on the steps while surfing the web on her Android.
We had about twenty minutes to kill before our restaurant reservation, so we walked a little way into Central Park, just enough to watch a few happy off-leash dogs (including a ball-chasing Whippet in a sweater).
We met our Cookbook Superheroine and her boyfriend out in front of Candle 79, a warm-hued romantic place to dine. (Somewhat ironically, the "candles" placed on everyone's table are actually flickering battery-powered LEDs.) It's always nice to go into a vegan restaurant with a vegan cookbook celebrity; things have less of a chance of sucking that way.
We all ordered fancy cocktails and discussed a wide range of things, mostly of a gossipy nature within the vegan scene.
[REDACTED]
I really enjoyed the food; my entree had been the jerk seitan, which was unusual enough that I'll probably not be seeing it at any of the other restaurants we patronize. As for Gretchen, she said she hadn't enjoyed the food as much as she'd hoped. But that could probably be blamed on both her head cold and the pseudoephedrine; the former suppresses olfaction and the latter suppresses appetite.
After dinner, we all walked to our car and we drove our friends to their apartment down 5th Avenue near 50th Street. And then we spent the next two hours driving back to Hurley.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120412 feedback
previous | next |
