It’s tennis & diving season again. Diving class consists of 4 young skinny asian girls, a tall latin american boy, me, and Yasuo, the prestigious fine art framer.  Yasuo doesn’t commune with the beginners, preferring to do his own thing on another board.  I bide my time waiting patiently for my turn amongst the newbies. Our instructor, C, is good with details.  He was impressed with my retention of diving prowess.  Besides Yasuo, who is a great diver, I am the only one who can perform a dive.  But C gives plenty of constructive criticism, often mimicking the ridiculous gesticulations of the divers with good humor.

Tennis is a different story.  A, the buxom young instructor, doesn’t mess around.  The 7 women and I run drills, returning balls, rallying with each other, and practicing volleys.  The two oldest women – a fiery 60-somethinger and a middle aged latina – joked about having to compete for me as a hitting partner.  An oversized and middle-aged administrator at the university stated matter-of-factly that I would hit with her since the two best hitters had already had me.  Later, the administrator questioned the integrity of my racquet, based on the sound made when hitting.  Towards the end, we practiced serves, with little guidance.

Five Guys is easily the best of the bad hamburgers.  The bun is the kind of bun you find in the supermarket.  The beef tastes like the beef you buy at the supermarket.  The mustard tubs are of the cheap yellow kind.  All burgers are well done with a bit of crispiness to the beef.  The servers seem like they were lured away from the employment pool of the Alfred Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.  But they look like they know how to barbecue.  This is how a fast food burger chain should be: unexceptional and cheap.  It’s your hamburger.

A theme restaurant gone awry

Just a regular hamburger

As if an explanation is necessary

Good riddance to Burritoville

I am preparing to go jogging with Chris.  We are in Canada.  We are getting geared up out of my car, which is a Saab hatchback, the old kind.

We start running, and I realize that we haven’t made any plan about what to do with thte car.  Chris carries on running, and I pull the car along to the curb, trying to find a place to leave it.

There is a short section of the curb that seems like a good place to leave the car, but a sign says something  about narrow cars only being allowed there.  It seems to me that my car is not the sort that is allowed to be left there, so I pull it back towards a parking lot (from which we came?).  People at the parking lot tell me that we are not likely to get a ticket before we get back to the car – this is Canada.

New scene: I am listening to a girl talk with two other guys about how she built her website:  She says she used flourless (i.e. codeless)  design with cake (i.e. CakePHP?), whch she found did the job very well.  I see the words flourless and cake as if they are links on a web page.  The guys are asking detailed questions…

…and that’s when the squirrel scratching outside my window woke me up.

While Obama is cracking jokes about how his detractors are missing the point, I am deeply involved with my new client down on Hudson Street near the Passport Office.

Very little natural light makes it in from the two walls of windows.  The cubicles irregularly shaped and arranged in an ad-hoc abandoned honeycomb pattern.  I sit at one of several steel tables half a foot too high.  My neighbor, who’s name I immediately forgot, is a freelance front-end coder.  He is young and seems far too happy to be an HTML programmer.  Sometimes he can’t contain his excitement at how “neat” his own code is.  Planning his own obsolescence…  But he, being relatively neat, tall, good looking, personable, and clean, is not what I would usually imagine a programmer to be.  Based on this and my last office experience a few weeks ago, I am starting to detect that the breed of geek who works at these ad or interactive agencies is not at all the same as the antisocial, dirty, drug-obsessed geeks I am used to.

Behind me, in the dark cavernous space, full-time employees in the production division exchange the latest technology gossip.  They swear a good amount and talk in authoritative voices a few steps too deep for their natural range.  Today, my third (and second-to-last) day, I made my second presentation, this time to the accounts department.  The head account woman picked cucumbers out of her gourmet deli salad and alternated between twiddling her Blackberry and iPhone, interjecting occasionally with justifications for why the high-profile system I am designing should not do anything different from what has been done previously.  I agree entirely, but unfortunately, I must keep myself entertained.

Nestled at the long-neglected corner of Manhattan Avenue and Bedford Avenue, the Brooklyn meeting point of the two formerly distinct but now inseperable worlds of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, lies Five Leaves, a diner with the carefully and successfully constructed ambiance of an imaginary simpler American rustic past.

On to the hamburger:

Five Leaves Burger

The beef is grass-fed, which calmed my own stomach considering my very recent screening of Food, Inc., in which an industrial cow researcher sticks his hand elbow-deep through a port drilled into the side of a fully-conscious cow, giving him access to the contents of one of its stomachs, where he mashes around and shows off the rotting corn (i.e. not grass) inside.

But for full disclosure, I am working on the assumption that, as I believe is necessary for gastronomical honesty and integrity, judgment lies mostly in the hamburger, not in the contents of the cow’s stomach (which is nowhere to be found at Five Leaves) at the moment of its murder.  And in this department, the Five Leaves Burger is a great mashup, regardless of whether the long dead, extruded and now medium-rare cooked cow of questionable upbringing had arugula or rubber tire as its last supper.

The bun at Five Leaves was very well educated, and had a crispiness to the outermost layer of refined white flour that did not seem to be the result of any significant toasting.  The innards of the top bun were doused in mayo mixed with red pepper powder.  Then came the perfectly cooked sunny-side up egg with no evidence of any frying visible on either top or bottom.  Beneath the egg was a solitary slice of beet, lying astride the meat patty itself.

The first bite released the unfertilized juices pregnant within the egg, which flowed through the home-made prophylactic of mixed salad I surreptitiously inserted directly beneath, and were eventually lapped up greedily by the soft absorptive inner lining nascent in the bottom bun, spilling out the overflow mixture of blood and amniotic fluid onto the fresh green side of salad.  The meat patty was crispily overcooked on a few rough outer edges, but soft and tender medium rare on the inside, exactly as requested.

Conclusion:  delicious burger, but the meat was oversalted such that I would be remiss in not mentioning it in this otherwise perfectly good review.

Everyone says you have to see the Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim, so I took a peek yesterday, not realizing it was the final day.  I agree with everyone not because his art is so interesting, but because by following the reverse chronology of Kandinsky’s work while spiraling down the Guggenheim turret’s ramp, you see firsthand the deconstruction of his late complex abstractions as you descend towards his earlier, easier digested works.

One thing which seems clear is that Kandinsky, like many people in postmodern culture, was focused on symbols and their meaning in shifting contexts.  Certain motifs consistently repeat themselves from his earliest works up until his final paintings, despite the drastic changes in style.  Certain hatch marks, marine forms, and what appear to be feet and toes appear again and again in the most unexpected places.  And it is this which gives the retrospective meaning.  Repetition turns “Kandinsky” into an emergent body of work amenable to discussion and analysis.  If every work was unique, how would you address it as a whole?

A late work

On of his works, unusual in its style even for such a varied artist, seems to serve as a legend to the symbols prevalent in all others:

Thirty (Trente), 1937. Oil on canvas

A "typical" Kandinsky composition

An early work

Last nights’ Gastronauts expedition was the largest ever – 80 or so people descended upon  Engeline’s in Woodside, Queens for a night of Filipino fare.  Ben and Curtiss had pre-ordered a series of delicacies off the menu, and we took over the restaurant.

Bitter melon is indeed very bitter and swims in a sort of egg-drop soup goo – will take some more acclimatization.  The “ruffle fat” pig skin was a bit cardboard in texture, slightly bitter, and not as tasty as memories of my momma’s fried chicken skin – I think they need to be eaten straight out of the frier in order to truly appreciate their natural texture.  String beans are always delicious, and the Adobong Sitaw were a fine variety in a pleasant sauce.  The pig heart and intestines were very good, almost a staple, and I found myself returning to them between other dishes.  But it was the the Dinuguan, stewed pork in a pork blood gravy, that made the night.  This was nothing like Chinese pork blood jello, which I’m not crazy about, although it did share that metallic iron flavor which is inevitable when manging healthy animal blood.  In this case the sauce was thick and viscous, but perfectly complemented the tenderness of the cubes of pork.  The two whole suckling pig lechóns were impressive in presentation, and perfectly crispy skinned, buttery meated, and tasty, yet somehow unspectacular.   Engeline’s chefs have managed to cook them in an oven mimicking the result of an open fire spit, but the unevenness of a fire-roasted animal was missing.

A true spit-fired suckling pig at a Marlyand wedding

It was a little disappointing not to have a chance to retry balut, which was the first thing I ate with the Gastronauts group upon joining at Krystal’s Cafe on 2nd Ave.  At that time, years ago now, I had shown my mettle to the small group by being the first to crack open the egg and drink its amniotic fluid before crunching the bones of the innocent fetus inside with relish, picking soft feathers from between my teeth.  Courtney, one of the co-founders, ran out of the restaurant and threw up on the sidewalk.  Then we sang karaoke in Tagalog.

Gastronauts has changed a bit.