Downtown Harvest... Downtown on Chambers street today Italian prune plums and red bell peppers were 3 pounds for a dollar from the street vendors. I couldn't resist the prune plums and red peppers so I made chutney when I got back. Three pounds of washed and pitted sliced up prune plums, two thin sliced red peppers, a medium sized diced onion, about a tablespoon of grated ginger, and three cloves of pressed garlic went into my enameled soup stock pot with a cup and a half cider vinegar and a cup and a half of sugar. I mashed these things around a little as they heated up. After things started cooking I put it on simmer and added a half teaspoon fresh black pepper, a table spoon of pickling spice and a half cup of raisins and about an eighth of a cup of honey. This mixture simmered down nicely in about a half hour, and I filled a large cleaned and boiled pickle jar with chutney for the refrigerator, and filled a two cup storage tub with the rest to freeze. There was a small amount- mostly thick liquid, on the bottom of the pot so I poured it into a jar for immediate use. Chutney on grilled chicken with curry rice and vegetables tonight during the debate! The downtown neighborhood between Chambers and Canal has some weird bargains- the aforesaid fruit vendors, (the cheapest two are near Broadway and Chambers) the Linen Depot that has huge panels of earthen color velour curtain panels out in front on the street for seven dollars, Ralph's Discount on Chambers near Church has two packages of Peak Freens for a dollar as you walk in the door, two loaves of Vermont organic assorted breads for $1.25, various spices, tuna fish and candies. Dee & Dee is good for dollar t-shirts and jerseys, and Ruby's Book Sale down Chambers near west Broadway still has a great selection of cheap maps, and back issues of popular magazines in back. Going north on Broadway from Chambers there's Anbar Shoe Sale on Reed Street just off Broadway west where anything in women's shoes is liable to show up for under $40, Italian Shoes, Swedish sandals, European Boots etc. P&S fabrics is up past Worth Street on the west side of Broadway. P&S has the best fabric and ribbon and yarn bargains at the door as you go in. This week they have unusual novelty yarns for making fringed sweaters on sale, three large hanks for ten dollars. They also have wonderful linens and silks Dupioni Silk for 5.99 a yard, ( downstairs) large pieces of African fabric for $20, dress fabrics, woolens, cottons, denims, odd buttons, patterns, decorations, ribbons, edgings, tassels and cords. Downstairs at P&S, the door is hung with weird curtain fabrics to suggest a household fabric wonderland and there remnants and bolts of upscale upholstery fabrics marked down, and a corduroy section including bolts of printed corduroy and velveteens, and a plastic section with weird plastic lace panels, plastic and oilcloth table coverings by the yard. Further up, just before Canal there is Fabric Warehouse which has leather panels for between $5 and $15 dollars. You could make yourself a leather coat for $20. Walk east on Baxter past Centre and stop at Dragonland baker for some pastries. Miniature custard pies for .80 walnut tarts, coconut cream buns, or various Chinese style buns filled with cabbage or pork with decent coffee or assorted bubble teas and drinks. Coffee and a pastry runs under two dollars. And, you get to sit at a table with a window in it, look down and see a giant live turtle inside the base of the table, sitting on a rock with some water and looking up at you. The tables are all giant "turtleariums". There is a new Dragonland bakery opening up on Worth east of Broadway, but I don't know if they are going to have the turtlearium tables.

Another Opening, another show... This summer the Children's Shakespeare festival continues with a performance by the Meri Mini Players of "Comedie of Errors" in the beautiful West Side Community Garden  floral amphitheater. The production is adapted cleverly from the original by Morna Martell who also directed it. The actors are all professional young actors. Admission is free and performances are 5 pm Sat and Sun through the second week end in August. If  outdoor theater is not your thing,  the Garden is open daily from 9 am- (or whenever I can get someone over there to open the gates) to dusk every day of the week all year long- icy conditions permitting. It is located on West 89 and 90th steets midblock between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues in Manhattan and is a more pleasant place to sit and day dream than the local Starbucks. If you feel like exercise, I need fresh blood to turn the compost. All work is done by volunteer members. Membership is $15 yearly, and if a vegetable plot is your goal, there is a two year waiting list, but caretaker plots come up pretty quickly. Check us out at westsidecommunitygarden .org.  

Food Shopping Above West 100th Street

Well I've ducked out long enough on the blog site, and will start posting again. This has been a depressing spring in the Upper West Side. The West Side Market at 110th Street closed and there is no place to shop along Broadway in the neighborhood between 100 street and 125th Street that has the variety and reasonable prices they had.. It's very sad, because the West Side Market was open 24/7 and had everything I'd ever wanted on two continents for the past 40 years. They had the special German Linseed bread and Chocolates that I used to have to search for when I lived in Heidelberg, they had a huge selection of juices, including European black currant juice, Indonesian noodles, red curry, and fish sauce, all manner of sauces, soups, and curries, health cereals, including a low glycemic cereal that I was addicted to for only 1.99 , and a vast array of produce, including bok choy, giant radishes, tropical fruits, and strawberries year round. (Strawberry Shortcake for Xmas) The Associated that took over the University market at 116th Street is as expensive as a Food Emporium, and the D'Agostino's on 110th street tries, but it is tiny and limited as to selection. The vegetables at both places are extremely pricey. The Gristedes at 107th Street closed, and is being replaced by a Garden of Eden- the most expensive food store in the City. The other day I was in the Dags at 110th buying three bagels for a dollar, and the woman in front of me spent $53 on nothing at all. A ready made salad, a vegetable brush and some sponges, some yogurt, a couple of frozen dinners, bread, juice, and cheese. She didn't seem to care, but I was mystified as to what cost so much. We've been reduced to buying vegetables near the Post Office at the Used Vegetable Market at Amsterdam and 104th Street. It's not really called that, but the produce is extremely cheap and looks like second hand produce. Some things, like the Corn, are always bad there, but the Onions, Green and Red Peppers, Lettuce and Tomatillos are usually a good deal. Of course they always have Plantains, and I've learned to plop a few slices in the pan with onions, peppers, garlic and cilantro near the end of roasting chicken or pork for a nice side dish.

Ordinary Time Out in Queens... Sunday I went out to a church in Queens to sing for a service. Being the only attorney in New York who sang at the Wagner Festspiel in Bayreuth, I sometimes get singing jobs even now. Anyway, this is a truly beautiful church painted with bright murals in a lively area filled with Italian Pastry Cafes, Polish Pork stores, Mexican Restaurants, Irish Gift Shops and cheap supermarkets. Theres even a chaotic National Wholesale Liquidators set behind a parking lot over on nearby Northern Boulevard. When we finished the service, some second sopranos invited me for coffee at one of the Italian Cafes on 30th Avenue. I got a latte and a cream filled pastry for 2.85 - both much better than Starbucks, and we sat down to discuss the Choir Scene. They are raising a volunteer choir to sing at St. Patrick's Cathedral in commemoration of Police killed in the line of duty and need strong voices, because one of their New Jersey contingents can't make it this year. I said yes, because its a good cause. We all agreed the acoustics are bad, but it's a chance to sing at St. Pats, which has its own cachet. One of the ladies at the table had a lilting Brogue, and told us about the vicissitudes of handling the family farm in Ireland. It has a thatched roof and you can' find anyone these days at a reasonable price to fix a thatched roof. After coffee, we moved out into the sunlight. We were in the wind and it was cold, but there were people sitting at the outside tables along the Avenue. Getting into my car, I drove over to Queens Boulevard to look at a construction site that is of professional interest across from the Georgia Peach Diner. Sitting in the warm car, the side of my face felt hot, as if a space heater was aimed through the open car window. I suddenly realized the heat was soming from the strong early spring sunlight flooding the inside of the car and hitting the side of my face. The thermometer at a BP station on Queens Boulevard read 25 degrees F, but spring is on the way!

GAY MARRIAGES AND AWOL ...I don't want this election to be about Gay marriages and Bush's going AWOL for several months in 1972. It looks like the right thinkers are going to pump this gay marriage business into another knee jerk issue like abortion. Instead of being happy that people are getting married and committing themselves to a lifetime relationship, they act like its some kind of a slippery slope- if they let the gays get married, then all of a sudden masses of straight people will turn gay. Your mother will suddenly want to abandon your father and go off with her best friend from high school. Your boyfriend will see married gay guys and suddenly change his sexual orientation and start picking up men. This whole idea is moronic. All the gay people I know knew they were gay since the age of 12 if not earlier. Why would we deprive someone of the benefits and recognition of marriagebecause of an accident of birth or early childhood conditioning? Everyone in our society deserves the same honor of full rights and responsibility that come from being a member of society. Speaking of responsibility, why are the lefties so interested in Bush skipping out of the Guard to work on a political campaign in Alabama? Vietnam was an unpopular terrible war, and many people, especially the more left leaning socially responsible types, did what they could to stay out of it. But with all this recent history to chew over, why bother with something that's tired meat? How about the environment, the loss of jobs, the failure to secure our container ports, the war in Iraq, the mess that followed, and our country's unpopularity in the rest of the world. I was in Europe when Bush turned his back on the Kyoto Accord, and his unpopularity overseas shot up right then. Every time they showed him on the TV my landlady would start into a tirade about "my president." Europeans softened up after 9/11, but we totally blew it in the windup to the war in Iraq and its aftermath. The war is widely perceived in Europe as stupid and blatant imperialism. The problem is that we are all responsible for what our country does, not just the few in Washington. Go overseas. When people perceive you as an American, they want to talk about your country's foreign policy, like you personally just thought it up. No I don't want this election fought over gay marriages and Bush's attendance record in the Air National Guard thirty years ago. There are real issues here that need to be addressed.

Screed against Bush....And the guys around him. So, last week Bremer gets in front of the camera at a Senate hearing and they are asking him how come some of this money the Bushites want can't come from the sale of Iraq's oil. Well, Bremer starts shifting around in his seat and looking uncomfortable, saying how like all the Iraqi's oil field equipment is old, and the pipelines need refurbishing and all, but the Senators keep pushing, and he finally blurts out that Iraq will need all its money to pay back the 200 billion that they owe. What! Can't we just excuse that debt? Wasn't incurred by that bad guy Saddam? Why do they have to pay his debts??? Well, Bremer says like we're trying to excuse it, or a least some of it, but it turns out that we'll,... uh they'll... just have to pay it. Cause after all it was real money lent to Iraq by real banks that real people put their money into in places like France and Russia and Japan. And the people of Iraq will have to use some of that oil revenue, actually almost all of it, to pay off those debts. Now, remember last February when they were all gearing up to war, they said if there was damage or we incurred expenses, the Iraq oil revenue would be able to pay us for our trouble? Well. I worked in an investment bank on a research project once upon a time (before the internet) and I remember that all the debts owned by various countries were well known and published, and banks bought and sold them as debentures. So, these guys must have known about Iraq's debt before the war, and knew it when they were saying how Iraqi oil would pay the extraordinary costs. So, not only did they lie about the WMD, they also lied about how much all this would cost, and how it would be paid for. Now we are stuck. We can't really expect to go into a country and remove its government and take over without taking responsibility for building things back up again, can we? I hope all those people that voted for Nader, thinking that it didn't matter if they took votes away from Gore because there really wasn't much difference between Gore and Bush are paying attention. I cannot believe this country has gotten into such a fix in three short years. Yes, things would have bad because of the recession and 9/11 but there seems to be an almost willful desire in this administration to make things just as bad as they could possibly be, just so long as the upper upper class is reaping big profits.

Rebuild the Towers ... Although the twin towers were really pretty ugly, except at sunset or in the mist, I personally think they should just rebuild the towers exactly the way they were, right way, except maybe correcting some of the burn flaws and aesthetic errors. That would make a better statement to the world than all this crapping around about the footprint, the bathtub, the towers of light, the memorial, the loved ones, the brave firemen, the cops, the grief struck iron mongers cutting the tangled girders on the building they spent 10 years putting up, the brave window washers that died doing their job, and all that etc. People think hat no one would want to work in replacement towers cause they are a 3x target, but I bet people would rent the space right away, I know I would. The more I hear about it, the more convinced i am they should just get on with it and rebuild them pretty much the way they were as fast as possible. That would be the best statement to the world, the terrorists, and the people that think we needed to be taught a lesson. Last month I took my bike downtown and was riding around in the park around the SI Ferry when i came upon this crushed up golden globe like statue thing. I stood there looking at this strange crumbled art wondering why does this thing look so familiar? It was never here in the Battery before... when I realized it was the arrogent gold globe sculpture that used to sit in the middle of the WTC plaza that got crushed when the towers fell. They have set it up in Battery Park with an eternal flame and a little plaque. I immediatly burst into tears. As far as I'm concerned that is enough memorial for me.
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