El Toro Blanco

The rough plan for the day is this:

--Get up, get out of bed. Drag a comb across my head.
--Read the Times/drink coffee/engage in correspondence/blah, blah, blah til @11
--Don bicycling togs and meet Chuck at the 15th St. entrance to Prospect Park by noon.
--Half way around the park, veer off into the streets of Prospect Park South and Ditmas Park, making a beeline for Difaro's Pizza.
--Order a square with sauted broccoli rabe and black olives.
--Eat pizza.
--Return to park. Continue around for a loop or two, then ride bike straight to studio.
--Confront and engage El Toro Blanco--in this case my pencil sketch of Ben Bernanke.

Quick aside: This is Hemingway engaged in his version of painting Ben Bernanke. A simple man at a simple table performing a simple task. One word follows another. One sentence yields two. Drip drip drip.

Aren't we all, really, Hemingway? Leastways without that whole shotgun in the mouth business?

--Ride home, take a shower. Possibly a nap.
--Meet Bobby the Gravedigger at the Peter McManus Cafe--the thinking being that he and I will later be scooped up by his wife and taken to Blue Smoke, the upscale Danny Meyer BBQ restaurant.

Quick aside: Although I am totally complicit in the decision to go to Blue Smoke, I find the very notion of an upscale BBQ restaurant to be absurd. Bar-be-que is essentially a minor regional cuisine and to listen to people rhapsodize about it as if it were the stuff coming out of the kitchen at Per Se makes me want to vomit. More crap has been written about the relative merits of bar-be-que than society as we know it can possibly withstand. No wonder the traditional print media is in a shambles.

--Repair home. Watch Mets play Sox. God help me in advance on this one.
--Go to bed.

Final note: Hemingway looks a lot like Matisse, doesn't he.