In Bhaktapur

A couple of nights ago one of the residency organizers took me and another artist out to Bhaktapur. Bhakta, भक्त, is “devotee.” Pur, पुर, is “city.”

Bhaktapur is one of Nepal’s three ancient royal urban complexes, along with Kathmandu and Patan. It features traditional Newari architecture throughout the old quarter, with brick-paved streets connecting temples, monuments, and residential buildings. Bhaktapur suffered significant damage during the 2015 earthquake, and the restoration efforts have been extraordinary. The video was shot from atop a flight of stone steps of a temple decorated with enormous stone guardian figures, looking back into the courtyard. The temple entrance is an evening hangout for local teenagers. The steps were steep enough to force me to think for a moment about how I was going to get back down.

We were in Bhaktapur to dine at Tusa, which operates out of a building renovated as a UNESCO heritage project and just received a glowing write-up last month in The New York Times. Nothing makes me feel like an abject victim of contemporaneity more than photographing restaurant food for my blog, but seriously, look at this.

The chef matched the garnishes to the oils in the miso sauce surrounding this caramelized onion-stuffed potato. My mental notes about this meal are a blur of exotic Nepali ingredients. The meal opened with a ground, marinated tartare filled into a naan-like shell. The main was deboned chicken topped with a glaze reduced from the bones and served with a spinach puree that redeemed every instance of being served canned spinach at day school. One of the three desserts was a cake of stinging nettle and strawberry cream topped with rhododendron syrup and served on a short skewer. As an aficionado of American diner food, I’ve never been tempted to try molecular gastronomy, but now I’m a convert.

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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Art in America 1945-1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism by Jed Perl. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.