THE ANNUAL NEW YORK CHRISTMAS TOUR, 2013

ABOARD THE CHRISTMAS TRAIN DOWN FIFTH AVENUE

Top ten movie: Miracle on 34th Street. Biggest ambition at the age of seven: ride the escalator at Macy's along with Natalie Wood. Biggest thrill in my forties: taking Emmy as a toddler up 5th Avenue to see the windows at Saks, Bendels, and Lord & Taylor. I'm not sure what Emmy thought. It was cold. She was constrained to her stroller. I'd taken her at night because I thought the magic of the window was enhanced by a night's twilight but it meant she was tired. I wanted her to look forward to it as much as I did. Now she's grown and in school in Wisconsin tethered to the Midwest, preventing her from jumping on my imaginary sleigh to be pushed down 5th Avenue from department store to department store window. I still walk the streets and avenues with a delightful regression to my childhood wonder at the beauty of Christmas in New York. I circle through the red and white striped aisles of the outdoor Christmas markets watching all the fathers with young children in tow. The cold of New York is no match for the biting sting of a Midwest December freeze. A winter scarf and a pair of lined gloves is enough to fight off the chill. If the cold starts to tickle my fingertips and toes making them itch as the temperature drops below freezing I step inside one of the department stores where snow-clad branches twinkle with millions of sparkling lights taking the chill away.
Since I can no longer find the time to write out cards let alone finding everyone's home address my Christmas gift is this folio of pictures without editorial or comment for those who couldn't make the trip ot the city of lights and magic. Let the child or parent in you take a journey on my Polar Express.

Columbus Circle,
The Time Warner Building
Bloomingdales

The Peninsula

Henri Bendel

Grand Central Station

ABC Home, Broadway & 19th Street

Lord & Taylor

Bryant Park

Saks Fifth Avenue

Rockefeller Center

Bergdorfs

Tiffany

Macy's

THE GALLERY

New York City, 1939
Photographer, Unknown

THANKSGIVING 2013

THE TRADITION

It all started in the late 80s. Johannah was a producer, Susan an art department manager, Jim was a photographer, Rick a job manager and I was a designer in an industry that required twenty-four hour attention managed by a healthy dose of various stimuli. We worked together, frequently vacationed together and always spent the Thanksgiving holiday together. As the eighties slide into the nineties Johannah and Susan added husbands and soon after sons, Roby and Andrew. We added a home in the Catskills where every fourth Thursday in November we'd gather for a long holiday weekend of food, wine, sledding down the mountain out back and huddling around a blazing fire in the snug.
The kids have grown. Johannah and her family have moved to San Francisco, Susan and her brood now live in Atlanta, and we now have a home in Madison, Wisconsin. But our friendship hasn't changed nor skipped a beat and neither has our Thanksgiving.
Johannah, Adam and Roby were the first to arrive, the Tuesday evening before Turkey Thursday. Jim came the next morning after flying in from New York and Susan, Randy and Andrew drove in from Atlanta that evening. Cooking began immediately and never stopped.

Tradition is a glazed ham Wednesday evening with cheddar and sage biscuits. Rick always makes the glaze out of apple cider, brown sugar, and mustard and then studs the ham skin with cloves. For me, this is the food I most look forward to savoring.

William Sonoma now has a red velvet Bundt cake mix and Rick added that to the Wednesday menu as a special treat for me. He knows how much in love I am with red velvet.

The real cooking starts early Thursday morning with the preparation of the stuffing. It starts with sautéing onions and celery in a ton of butter and then browning Italian sausages from our local Italian purveyor. This gets mixed with a bunch of rubbed sage and fennel seeds. Loaves of Italian bread had been purchased days before. On Wednesday night the girls ripped the loaves into bite size pieces and left them out by the fire to dry. In the morning all of this is rolled together with a container of chicken stock and a half dozen eggs and thrown in the oven for about 45 minutes. When the turkey is finally cooked the drippings are made into a creamy gravy and then used to smother the dressing.

The wines come out pretty early along with sparkling cider for some of us teetotalers. The selections aren't overly pretentious: a Chardonnay white and a Malbec red.

The turkey is the next item on the preparation list. The turkey is first rubbed with butter and stuffed with lemon, sage stalks, onions, carrots, celery and salt and pepper, then the secret magical cloak is prepared. It's the ingenious invention of our mentor and phantom sous chef, Martha Stewart. She calls it Turkey 101 where you soak cheesecloth in a mixture of melted butter and white wine then wrap the fat laden cloth around the turkey to bake like George Hamilton on a beach on the French Riviera. You put the turkey in the oven feet first at 450 degrees for thirty minutes. Then you turn the oven down to 350 and let the carcass cook for another two and a half hours, basting every twenty minutes with the remaining butter and wine. There is nothing better than a drunken turkey resulting in a perfect golden bird with seasoned, succulent meat.

After that everyone has their specialty to prepare. Mine is clean-up.

Johannah makes her Southern pecan pie.

Adam does his English apple pie with huge chunks of firm apple.

Susan does a medley of roasted root vegetables

and Jim makes potatoes Anna, always done in a seasoned skillet with layers of russet potatoes sandwiched with pounds of butter and salt and pepper. The key is in the constant application of pressure forming a dense juicy pancake with a crispy outer shell.

Johannah and Susan run the preparations like captains on a ship making sure we end up with dinner arriving promptly at six.

The young adults set the table with a combination of vintage tabletop and silver from our collection that now lines the walls of our garage.

None of us worry about Black Friday. The weekend is about food and friendship, making sure the fireplace is always blazing and giving thanks for a lifetime of memories.
















THE GALLERY

Rome, Italy, 1959
Henri Cariter-Bresson, photographer
Represented by Magnum Photos

TRAGEDY STRIKES MY BLOG

TRAGEDY IN THREES

I am hoping fate has its eye on me and with three loses within a 24-hour period I've hit my quota of bad luck for the remainder of the month if not for the year. This past week it was my turn to fly out to New York for client meetings and making sure all our projects were on track. My family may have thought it was a perverse form of escapism, baling out from the chaos and turmoil we are currently living through with our renovation project. I have to admit the pace of New York was serene in comparison to the Madison madness and that is a real turnabout. It was that madness that made me dash out of the house, totally ill prepared, at five in the morning to get to my 8:15am flight out of Milwaukee without doing my mental checklist of all the essentials. I was never a boy scout and therefore I never really learned how to do that "be prepared" thing. It was an uneventful flight and on this rare occasion I actually slept for the entire flight. I woke up just as we began descending in to La Guardia, my bag was the first one out of the carousel, it was a balmy 60 degrees in November and there was no line for a cab. Seemed like a good start. We rolled over the Tri-boro, down the East Side Highway and across the park to the apartment. I always keep my travel keys in my dopkit. That way I don't have to think about them. As I got out of the cab and pulled my bag up to the front steps a little dose of panic seized my frazzled mind. A memory flash of me cleaning out my bag popped above my head like a cartoon bubble. I saw myself dropping my keys into another leather pouch. I had always kept that pouch in my satchel but in a fit of cleanliness precipitated by the disarray of my Madison life I decided it was too big to carry with me everywhere. I flipped my four-wheeler, extra-large, easy carry black bag on its side, wrenched the bag's zipper around its racetrack course, and dove into my dopkit. No keys. I rifled through my satchel. No leather pouch. Out came the cellphone and the panic calls to our rental agent, the building super, the management agent and Rick. The first thing I found out was my keys were back in Madison, the second thing was the super didn't have a pass key to our apartment, and finally the management had an extra front door key and a key to the apartment below me but not to my apartment. The agent said he'd see what he could do. Ten minutes later my cellphone rang. It was a, "what did we do before cellphones" moment. The agent had found their construction crew. They had a key to my apartment and they were right around the corner. In ten minutes we met at the ACE Hardware store and I had a set of keys and a pass on having to sleep on the streets card.
It wasn't until late in the afternoon when I was getting on the subway to go back to the apartment that I reached my hand into the right-hand side pocket of my pants.. I'm a creature of habit and the right side is where I always keep my house keys. Change and lip balm go into the left and the wallet goes into the back. My newly pressed keys were not in the right-hand pocket. I checked the left just in case I had a lapse in continuity. No keys. It was cool enough for jacket. I checked all its pockets. Like Joan Rivers' sex life it came up empty. One last stab into the right pocket and that's when I discovered the hole in the side of the pocket, the escape route of my new set of keys. You never get cell service in the subway. It was 4:30, the very end of quitting time for any construction crew in New York. I dialed Yaokim in one futile attempt to totally embarrass myself with my stupidity. No answer. I left an S.O.S. from my sinking ship.  Desperation makes me do strange things. As I got off the subway my cellphone rang. Yaokim had twenty minutes before he had to get back to New Jersey. He'd meet me at the ACE in fifteen. Old age was no deterrent to my dash to the corner of West 90th and Columbus. Embarrassment aside, I now had another set of keys and I had avoided a night of relying on the kindness of strangers for a place to hang my hat that night.
The next morning, still less than twenty-four hours since I arrived back in New York, I had rented a car, gone out to do a site survey in New Jersey, returned to Manhattan and picked up a lamp on the upper Eastside that we needed repaired. When I arrived a detective was at the counter asking to see their video surveillance footage one more time. I had no idea of what she was looking for but it delayed my getting anyone to help retrieve my lamp so I could get out of there. It was as I was returning the lamp to our apartment that I realized I couldn't find my cellphone. I did find my keys were safely in my right pants pocket this time. When I got up to the apartment I called the lamp store on our landline but I knew the results. The owner who had been working with the detective said he'd look at the videotape but no one had turned in my phone in. I called my cellphone but no one answered not even my own voice telling me to leave a message.
They say bad things happen in threes. I'm hoping this was the last of my bad luck. It was depressing enough to make doing last week's posting the first missed week in my blogging history. Please forgive me, and to add to the embarrassment I discovered today that my apartment keys were attached to my car keychain all the time safely stored in a plastic bag at the bottom of the fabric sack inside inside my satchel.
A belated Happy Thanksgiving.

THE GALLERY

Homeless, Ca 1950
Weegee, photographer

MY APOLOGIES

THE MIA CULPA

This is the latest I've ever been in getting out my weekly post.  We've been buried in getting our home ready for the holidays. For most that would mean putting together a grocery list and perhaps doing a deep cleaning.

For us it means new hardwood floors throughout the main floor, new tile in the entry and for the fireplace surround, all new windows, exterior soffits and gutter guards, and while we were at it all new baseboards and interior doors, a new ceiling in the living room (all already posted this one), painting almost every wall in the house, new window treatments and general all around decorating. The cleaning people don't show up until Friday.

Since my mind is filled with the mathematical calculations necessary for hanging a wall of pictures, my fingers are covered in 50 shades of gray paint and my body is stooped more than usual from loading everything I'll never see again but couldn't afford to give away into the crawl space below the kitchen. I going to ask for a pass for this week.

As we empty out the Pods and ll I'm capable of is a little tease of what I hope will be a series of peeks into the new Shaver/Melahn residence, a cottage in suburbia.
















THE GALLERY

Palace Theater, Gary, Indiana, 2008
Andrew Moore, photographer
Represented by Yancey Richardso

INVESTING IN ART

WHY ART MAKES A DIFFERENCE

I always thought everyone had art. It didn't matter how rich you were or how sophisticated your eye it was unimaginable to me that people could live without art. I'm finding out that my assumption isn't completely true and I'm stunned.

Even the earliest cave dwellers decorated their walls with art. Civilizations throughout history have made art an important part of their visual history, a way to document their lives, a means of bringing comfort and joy to their surroundings and a way of confronting issues and provoking imagination.

I'm no art historian and documenting ordinary households in early history isn't an easy task to research but my assumption is no matter how many rungs down the financial ladder you are standing on at any point in history art will have somehow found its way onto your walls.
Even during the depression of the 1930's people made due with what they could find and decorated their walls with scraps of wallpaper and discarded advertising signs.

Sooo, I'm stumped with a client who has no art and no apparent need to acquire any. My client is a financial whiz kid. He knows numbers and money and investments. It made me do a little more research to see what the experts had to say about art. What I found out didn't make me happy. The money analysts said art is rarely a strong financial investment. Art is fickle, like in fashion one day your in and the next day your out.

At first I tried to argue the investment option on the argument of financial return but it was a losing battle with someone who knows how to count beans. He countered with art isn't liquid.  It needs time, the right auction or gallery with a hungry client to show a profit and it can't be sold off in pieces like stocks and shares. The big sales and profits you see at auction houses isn't for the faint of heart and doesn't revolve around mid-level artists.  If you happen to have a Van Gogh in your closet or a Picasso in your attic you're in good shape. All this information made me extremely depressed about my own meager collection until I remembered why I collected the art we have.

Try to imagine any of these rooms without their art.

We're furniture designers, as well as interior designers and I can't imagine a space with our furniture that wouldn't be enhanced by the addition of art.

Walls need art. That's why I still see art as an investment. It's an investment in your soul. It's beauty. It's provocative and at the least it makes your walls look better.















THE GALLERY

Sidelong glance, 1948
Robert Doisneau, photographer

THE NEW YORK PACKERS

A FOOTBALL FETISH

I guess there are fans that are in it for the blood, although I think most bloodsuckers are into the sports where death is a constant thrill and the infliction of pain is the main attraction. I never understood NASCAR or events in the boxing ring. I love football, but its brutal aspect is not its enticing feature at least not for me. I'm in it for the competition. I love to root for my team as if it's an extension of myself and my very being is affected by the outcome of the game. Win and I'm ecstatic, lose and I can't sleep. I understand how fans can literally die from heart failure while watching their team, the anxiety level so high and the results so precious. We all want to be winners and supporting a team that has a winning record by some extraordinary feat of transference gives us that winning glow and sense of being a part of something great. There is so much superstition connected with being a sports fan that grants us the permission to take some credit for a win because we wore our socks inside out, or drank precisely 13.6 ounces of beer at 6:13pm the day before the big game and it was due to that that our team won. The reverse is also in the mix when our team loses. We chose the wrong socks to turn inside out or we accidently spilled point two ounces of beer laughing at a rerun of Will & Grace tainting our karma and destroying our luck.

This was the enthusiasm I took to the Kettle of Fish, a New York bar that embraces Packerdom for every game the Packers play. I had read about the bar when surfing the web for the Packer-Vikings starting time for last Sunday's game. We had recently decided to bite the bullet and rent an apartment in New York. October was our first month in the apartment and true to New York living the cable was first late on delivery and then installed incorrectly with a cable box that didn't work. I had no TV of my own and there was no way I was going to miss the game, even in New York.
The Kettle of Fish is located on Christopher Street right next doot to the Stonewall, site of the initial gay uprising. What one has to do with the other I'm not quit sure but the lady at the door to the Kettle I'm sure could have broken my arm in several places if she really wanted to.

There's a twelve-dollar cover to get in the door. For your twelve dollars you get two tickets worth two drinks and a seat or standing space near one of the many TV's showing the game. Unlike other sports bars there is only one game on all the monitors and it's the Packers. The added bonus is they pump the volume up so you actually get to hear the commentary as well as see the action. There isn't one person in that bar during game time that isn't completely focused on the game.
You'd think most establishments catering to a crowd ready to spend on food and booze would be prepared to do whatever it could to make those patrons drop as much coin as they could squeeze out of them. Unlike those other bars the Kettle only serves brats on game day but lets you order in from any other restaurant or pizzeria willing to brave a rowdy crowd. Some fans had been stacking out their viewing tables hours before kick-off. That meant there was a steady stream of delivery boys running through the front door carrying hot boxes of pizzas and paper bags full of ribs.

The bar is divided into two rooms: one with the bar, bathrooms and counters and the other with a scattering of tables. The tables are filled well before game time by regulars all dressed in their appropriate green and gold. Your status is measured by which table you are allowed to sit at. These tables are reserved well in advance and the Kettle has a punch card system that gets you entry into the bar for play-offs if you have enough holes punched in your card. Prior to game time pitchers of Wisconsin beer splash and swill as their liquid gold makes its sloppy journey from the pitcher's mouth to the pilsner glasses bubbling and frothy with foam.

Just before game time and over Jon Gruden's pre-game jocularity the room breaks out into the Packer song. As a new initiate I didn't know the words but by the end of the game I think I had most of the verses down. This was quickly followed by a very loud rendition of, "The Bears Suck". You definitely don't want to show up here in any combination of blue and orange or wearing a Jay Cutler jersey.

The Kettle is owned and run by Patrick Daley, a man with more energy and Packer pride than any one person should have. When he's not hoisting trays of clean glasses back to the bar and dirty ones back into the kitchen he's circulating from table to table high-fiving the crowd over a Jordy Nelson catch or an Aaron Rodgers touchdown. I don't think there was a patron at the bar whose hand he didn't shake or shoulder he didn't squeeze and there was a big crowd.

Now the hoot of the evening for me was just before game time, Madison's local CBS affiliate news team waltzed into the bar with a film crew in tow.  Apparently Susan Siman and Mark Koehn had been beating the streets of New York looking for stories connecting Wisconsin with the Big Apple. What better way than with a beer and brat and crowd of Packer Backers screaming for the home team in a home far from home.  Too bad they didn't call us for a look at a couple of Mid-Costals commuting weekly from our comfortable Madison home to our New York energy intensive lifestyle and the design connection between the two. Come on Sue, you missed the boat there.

THE GALLERY

1897 Harvard Football Team
Pach Brothers, photographers
Vintage print