blackout

this past Friday was not only significant because it was day number 13 of the calendar month. no, no, no, mon frere. just about thirty years, two days and three minutes ago (July 13, 1977 if you're counting at home; but it was a Wednesday back then), my adopted city of New York experienced the most significant power outage in its history (my personal in-the-dark NYC experience is limited to the more recent grid failure, the one where we tried to "Blame Canada").
Son of Sam was still on the loose and Spider-Man was nowhere to be found. the Yankees were on their way to a world championship (four games to two over the Dodgers) while the Mets would finish dead last in the NL East, 37 games behind the Phillies (not-so-Smokin' Joe Frazier started the year as manager while Joe Torre was at the helm for the unexciting conclusion).

my spouse and I marked the occasion by venturing to the Rubin Museum of Art (very friendly and accomodating staff, by the way), a rather interesting establishment on West 17th Street specializing in the art of the Himalayas. Friday marked the beginning of their summer concert series, "Naked Soul," and featured Michelle Shocked performing not only acoustically, but unamplified as well.
I took pics from the (nearly) soundproof tech booth above (a little taste above; others, more finely rendered, will be posted at last concert I ever saw soon enough) while my spouse ventured to the extremely intimate (listed capacity is 137) auditorium below, meaning she could fill me in on at least some of the large amount of audio I missed.
on my own I was able to make out that Ms. Shocked's fiance, David Willardson, was supposed to paint her portrait during her set but, alas, his paints failed to arrive (my spouse told me later that UPS was the designated culprit).

Saturday we headed to Central Park, Summerstage where I (and about 150 other photographers) fought the photo pit crowd for shots of Cafe Tacuba (some of which will appear tomorrow morning within the Village Voice's Sound of the City blog). and later we hit the Burger Joint inside Le Parker Meridien (earlier note and picture found here, but you've got to scroll for it) and even managed a run by Whole Foods.

today was more sedate. the N and W trains continued to run in the wrong direction (for the second day in a row), and no return trip would be complete without the inevitable delay to let another train pass around 36th Avenue. yet we were still able to arrive in time for our regularly scheduled Sunday morning project before making a run to Union Square where I finally located a copy of Wall of Voodoo's Call of the West (hopefully more on that later) at the Virgin Megastore and a copy of A History of Hungary (which I didn't even realize I was looking for), published in 1990 (God, I hope nothing's happened since then) by Indiana University Press, at the Strand.
cutting the day's festivities short allowed us to not only do laundry, but to catch up on some more not very good movies on our recently available HBO. the recent list includes Monster-in-Law (so very, very trite), The Devil Wears Prada (at least Stanley Tucci was good), The Break-Up (not really, no) and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (at least it was ambitious). which soon enough should damn well teach us that just because a movie's free doesn't mean it's worth watching.