It dawns on me that the photos that I’ve been thinking about taking this week were inspired by a funny cartoon in last week’s New Yorker. It’s by William Haefeli. A man stands by an apartment door, dressed to go out, and says to his partner (in a Haefeli drawing, you cannot infer marriage), “I’m ready to go whenever you’re through fussing with tablescapes.” It’s pretty clear that “fussing with tablescapes” is meant to be a kind of self-absorbed navel-gazing; certainly it’s not something that you ought to do when someone else is waiting to go for a walk. In fact, you had probably best be alone.

I don’t fuss with tablescapes nearly as much as you might think. During the weekly dusting, I clear the table and wipe it clean, and I take a damp cloth to whatever isn’t paper. Then I put everything back where it was. Once a year, at the most, there might be a rethink. Some things never change: the Royal Doulton statuette of a lady in riding costume (one of my mother’s treasures) has been standing in front of that Mottahedeh plate, accompanied by the two whelk shells, for twenty years at least.

What a ghastly word, tablescapes. Has “still life” come to mean only the painting of a still life?    

***

How curious it was, just now, to go to Fairway right on top of reading about it in The New Yorker — the current issue, this time. Patricia Marx has a piece about the better-known specialty food outlets in the Metropolitan Area (that’s to say that she includes Stew Leonard’s, an operation that in ten years of Connecticut weekending I never patronized once), and she manages to exclude the Balducci’s, who run, on the Upper East Side alone, Grace’s Marketplace and Agata & Valentina, the latter an indispensable resource for me, even with the new Fairway across the street. “You wouldn’t walk seven blocks to go to the Food Emporium,” she has Fairway CEO Howie Glickberg saying. “But you’d walk seven blocks to come to Fairway.” I’m very glad that I don’t have to walk seven blocks to go to Fairway; as for the Food Emporium, which is on the ground floor of my building, I have not set foot in it since the day Fairway opened, back in July.

The other day, I overheard a man in the elevator say to another man. “It’s two levels; you can’t find anything.” I could not help noting his heavy outerborough accent, which suggested that this was a guy who wasn’t going to look for anything that wasn’t where he expected it to be. But even for New York, where grocery stores are often laid out eccentrically (it goes with the real estate), Fairway presents a steep learning curve. Why is the bakery downstairs, beneath the deli, rather than the other way round? Would it kill them to carry a few dairy items on the street-level floor? Surely something a little less staple might have been shelved opposite the stockroom doors, across an already rather narrow aisle? And that downstairs organic area: in less than six months, it set up its own funky vibe, a marketplace for those who put soma ahead of savor. But, hey, I’m not complaining.

I read the Marx piece over a quiet lunch at Café d’Alsace, which I’ve rather neglected lately (and not so lately). I did not, for once, have a croque monsieur; I was afraid that it might seem too rich. I had an omelette instead, with the most delicious caramelized onions. Tempted to linger over a third glass of wine, I wisely drew the line at two, collected my things, and went to the post office, which was, as I’d hoped, deserted. I still had a few cards and calendars to mail, including two to be sent abroad; business was so slow that the clerk offered to fill out the customs forms. When I got home, I wrote down some advice for next year, which I printed out and tucked into a Mary Engelbreit Christmas book that Kathleen unearthed. This book will not be stored away. It will stay in the writing table drawer. I finally realized that, although you can and indeed must store Christmas paraphernalia in a place apart, it’s a good idea to keep the instruction manual handy.

The one piece of advice that I’d like to give, but don’t know how, would be a good tip for avoiding colds and flu at holiday time. I hope that we never go through that again!

***

I’m listening to a strange playlist, clearly more the skeleton of one than anything actually thought out. It alternates Schubert’s piano sonatas, Mozart’s wind concerti, and all of Ravel’s music for orchestra other than the two operas, with a garnish of Strauss waltzes and polkas. Strange to say, it works. I don’t think that Schubert and Ravel are alike in any musical way, but both were drawn to the unusual, and Schubert is as colorful in his way as Ravel. The interesting thing is that neither sounds odd when juxtaposed to the other; perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the obsessive sonatas and the vivid dances don’t flatten each other. Even the Strauss seems fresh and even a bit cheeky.

I’m also reading a biography of Ravel (1875-1937), by Roger Nichols. I’m not sure that I’m having any fun. I’ve got to about 1903, and Ravel has written a handful of important pieces, namely the string quartet and Jeux d’eau. He has lost two attempts at the Prix de Rome, and, really, there doesn’t seem to be anything veyr remarkable about him, except for his short, trim figure. It turns out that he was a “mediocre” pianist — how extraordinary, considering the virtuosity required to play what he wrote. The text is full of forgotten names, and there is a lot of close musical analysis that demands more than I’m willing to give at the moment. But I shall carry on, closing my eyes and thinking of Paris whenever the going gets rough. I just hope that the book doesn’t make me like Ravel less. The music, I mean. I like liking Ravel.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 at 11:00 am.