You’re never alone

The hot chocolate comes in a generic white bowl. It is sweet and thick and comforting. It doesn’t give you a rush, quite the opposite. The hasty gourmand is likely to suffer a nauseating choc shock. No, this hot chocolate wants to be enjoyed in small sips—slowly, just as slowly as it reaches perfection, simmering in small cauldrons, almost turning into fudge at its edges. With its mildly frothy texture and its subtle nuances of flavor, this hot chocolate is like a warm hug.

The rest of City Bakery, of course, is a genuine New York experience: busy, with long waiting lines and deafening levels of noise. The lofty space offers 120 seats—long banquette benches in beige and olive, bar stools with heavy iron legs or steel tubing, and Mid-century modern fiberglass chairs in turquoise. Most of those seats are hotly contested for most of the day. Expect a motley jumble of Prada bags, Bugaboo strollers, Mac notebooks, and the latest suggestion of the New York Times book review.

Woanders is auch Scheiße

I found this postcard—an ad for a German publishing house—last summer and wanted to post it months ago. Back home for christmas, I found it again, so here it is. “Woanders is auch Scheiße” is hard to translate, I don’t know if I’ll get the tone right. It means something like “no matter what, it’s gonna be shitty anywhere else, too”. Wanderlust or homesickness, it’s just in your head. Is it?

Alone with People, on the Lower East Side

Alone with People, on the Lower East Side.

Love this post from the New York Portraits photo blog. Here’s what Kitty, the author, has to say:

It’s a common paradox of life in the city – you can be up against people all day long but still wind up feeling very much alone.

So true. So sad. 2 points off.

Enlightening

It’s hard to believe that you don’t see shades but actual bulbs going on and off, when looking at Jim Campbell’s Scattered Light installation in Madison Square Park. Utterly beautiful. Even more so after or before a burger at Shake Shack. Life can be good. 7 points.

Brooklyn rulez

Paris vs New York

Just found this. No actually, my wonderful friend Avinash found it for me. Love it, love it, love it. 3 points for New York and, if I could, another 3 for Paris.

The fear of being uncool

“For every person who visits a private house, there may be 10,000 who only view it as a picture”, Dustin Hoffman’s voice-over says in a movie about photographer Julius Shulman. Add another 2800 since October 14, when the red carpet rolled out for the first-ever Architecture & Design Film Festival at New York’s Tribeca Cinemas. That’s not many in a city of eight millions, but it’s a start—especially since the program was not designed for entertainment. Anyone expecting a dazzling sequence of motion pictures starring grand architecture or grim urban canyons as in Blade Runner, Metropolis and Brazil, was quickly disabused. Instead, the four-day event screened more than 40 documentaries, mostly on architecture, some on graphic and a few on furniture design; some just a few minutes long, others full-length feature films.