Wunderkammer

Today was one of those days so fantastic it leaves you breathless and reeling.

We woke up and I ran four miles through Prospect Park with Sharon and Jon in the early morning. Before we biked home we bought fresh baguettes of bread, concord grapes, apples, and pears at a farmers market in the park for a picnic later in the day. Our plan is to meet our friend Serena and catch the lines North through Manhattan to the edge of the Bronx for a picnic at a secret place called the cloisters. It is not really a secret, but considering what is housed there few people make the journey up. The cloisters is an extension of the New York MET. Housed here within a complete medieval monks cloister brought across the seas from Europe is a treasure trove of ancient medieval art spanning the Dark Ages to the Renaissance. Perched in the park overlooking the forested shores of the Hudson River with a medieval castle at your back New York City feels a world away.

Sharon and I have a special interest in being here as our film ideas center heavily around the nebulous world of science and myth. During the middle ages in Europe there was little to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and hearsay. As such, innumerable legends popped up to explain the wide world, in ways we would today explain in other ways, such as evolution, geology, medicine, and astrology.

During the Middle Ages what we know of as "science" hadn't yet overshadowed the world of myth to help explain so many curiosities. From this sprang wunderkammer, in German this means "wonder cabinet". During the middle ages people began collecting fantastical objects, objects whose categorized boundaries were yet to be defined. These curiosity cabinets were in many ways the precursors to the first museums. Museums though without a theme or structure to guide them other than pure curiosity. Works of art, antiquities and relics, strange rocks, and many odd natural history specimens comprised the first wunderkammer.

Here in the cloisters we gazed on many objects like this from the ancient world: ancient tapestries and frescoes, stained church glass, chalices, sculptures, paintings, and entire rooms from ancient monasteries brought over the sea stone by stone. It is a window into another time and world unto itself. Amongst many of the artifacts were some vestiges that we have been seeking, for instance this dragon fresco from 13th century Germany. Why dragons, where did this mythology come from? Tapestries of a unicorn hunt, strange paintings of mythical creatures, and innumerable relics and murky religious artifacts. A medieval cabinet of curiosities...

It was fun and gave us some serious food for thought and when we headed back to Brooklyn we encountered some curious food. This curiosity though, was a member of the mysterious fungi clan. You see, I found a giant chicken-of-the-woods, Laetiporus sulphureus wandering in Prospect Park the other day! Chicken of the woods are a wild mushroom delicacy. Of course, many wild mushrooms are also poisonous, so with Sharon and Jon's help we narrowed it down beyond a doubt and then went back and harvest over 6 lbs (!)

Not a bad find for my first week in the city. It seems you can take me out of the woods, but you can't take the woods out of me. I'm still attracted to green wild places, where I always find my muse. And in case you were wondering, they call it chicken of the woods because it literally tasted just like chicken. So far we've had chicken of the woods pasta alfredo, pizzas, fajitas, and yes, chicken (of the woods) nuggets :)

~Bon appetite!