Last week I picked up a used copy of Leo Rosten's People I Have Loved, Known or Admired from the one dollar racks in front of the Strand. Yippee, I thought. I had liked The Joys of Yiddish when I found it in my grandparent's basement in Kokomo, IN. So clever, so vibrant, so Jewy. But as I started reading Rosten's book, I realized this guy is truly terrible. All the corny jokes, the volubility, the wisecracking that is lovable when my grandfather does not age well. Read years later, it comes across as bad, undisciplined, try-y writing. One opening paragraph in particular is intolerable.
I've known Wilbur since he was knee high to a romalea microptera--and the fact that I write "Romalea microptera" instead of grasshopper shows you the peculiar influence he (Wilbur, not the grasshopper) has had on my life.
Though I'm not one to read too much into happenstance omens, oh man, I passed this on Broadway the other day. A puddle of wet magazines discarded among the autumn leaves and dog shit. The crow flies! We're all doomed! What does this inauspicious muddle of magazines tell us? Who is the first to go? Well, judging from this pile, W Magazine is on the way out. Ditto GOOD although we all knew that. And, of course, PRINT is a goner. Deadsville.
This is evidently some of the things the public would like to see pictures of. A collection of captions from Wenn, a photowire service used by newspapers and magazines.
The crowd that filtered in to the Times Center which, Lord Almighty is like some sort of spacious temple, was giddy with anticipation to see Ferran Adria, chef of El Bulli, TV personality and chef Anthony Bourdain and interlocutor Eric Asimov. They queued for an hour or more. One woman did the entire Saturday crossword puzzle, in pen, in an hour.
Once inside the auditorium, four chairs sat on the stage. "Oh my god," said the woman next to me, "who is the fourth chair for?" Red Red Wine played over the speaker. "Oh my god," said the woman next to me, "this is my ring tone." She was here to see Eric Asimov, the wine guy from the Times. "I hear he is the grandson of Isaac Asimov. Someone who knew him personally told me." He's not. He's his nephew. Drew Neirporent sat in the second row. Behind me some cute asian girl kept on looking at me like she thought I had dirty hair, which is accurate.
Soon enough Mr. Asimov sauntered on stage with a strange and compelling strut. He was followed by a very tall Bourdain and a very bull-like Adria. The fourth chair was for the translator, a very very cute Spaniard. Though Adria speaks English, he prefers Spanish. Vale! Adria was clearly the star. Bourdain was his back up. Eric Asimov said a total of about three things, none of them relevant and all of them ignored. He would ask a question and even before it was translated to Adria, the chef would be answering. His reply rarely had anything to do with Asimov's query but were consistently enlightening. He was simply reading his manifesto, interrupted occasionally by a question and pausing momentarily to allow Bouraain to interject. What really stuck with me is Ferria's insistence that he was creating a new language, a language spoken by avant garde cuisiniers around the world. With this new language he was engaging his diners in conversation. "Cuisine is a dialogue" he said on numerous occasions.
Bourdain manned up to approaching El Bulli with a hostile attitude. But after he ate there---he was the first person to actually eat with Adria---he said. it was like "Eric Clapton seeing Jimi Hendrix play." That makes Bourdain Clapton to Adria's Hendrix which is, well, a tad overly self-regarding but he said it with a smile. He then called his meal, "the most important meal on the planet." Asimov did ask one good question for which Adria's non-answer is germane. "There's not going to be an El Bulli in Las Vegas?" he asked. Adria replied, "El Bulli has become a monster. It's impossible to tame." Which is, what, a yes or just another moment of disregard?
Other tidbits: The are 70 people who work at El Bulli for 50 diners. Adria supervises their staff meal every day. The meal he's most excited for in New York? Katz's Delicatessen.
For lunch yesterday I found myself in the culinary chamberpot of Midtown Manhattan. Thankfully Zach Brooks at Midtown Lunch offers a handy map of carts/delis worth their salt. Instead of getting an overpriced wilted salad from Digby's, I gamboled over to Hallo Berlin!, a German soul food cart on 54th and 5th Avenue.
Now I'm not one for ironic Stalin nostalgia (especially after reading the Gulag Archipelago...ok, ok, I'm only on Volume One which is DEPRESSING) but how could you say nyet to a special called the "Joseph Stalin Dictator Special No Choice" when it contains one Berliner Knockfrank, one Bratwurst, topped with German fries, Red & White cabbage, satueed Onion and Small Soup all for $8.00? Quite simply, you can't. Next to that the Angela Merkel Democracy Special, which comes with free choice of any two wurst and a bonus Bavarian Meatball, pales in comparison. No soup! Cabage? No good.
From Gay Talese's 1961 book New york: A Serendipiter's Journey: At 7 a.m. a floridly robust little man, looking very Parisien in a blue beret and turtle-necked sweater, moves in a hurried step along Park Avenue visiting his wealthy lady friends--making certain that each is given a brisk, before-brekfast rubdown. The uniformed doormen greet him warmly and call him either "Biz" or "Mac"
because he is Biz Mackey, a ladies' masseur extraordinaire.
Mr. Mackey is spry and straight-spined, and always carries a black leather grip containing liniments, creams and the towels of his trade. Up the elevator he goes; then, half an hour later, he is down again, and off to another lady--an opera singer, a movie actress, a lady police lieutenant.
Biz Mackey, a former featherweight prizefighter, started rubbing women the right way in Paris, in the twenties. He lost a fight during a European tour and decided he'd had enough. A friend suggested he go to school for masseurs and six months later he had his first customer--Claire Luce, the actress then starring in the Folies-Bergere.
Dear Friends,
I'm getting married. That's me in the World War I Italian Infantry uniform, holding a rose. The woman behind me in traditional housewife garb is my fiancée. Her name is Ana Mascarenhas Heeren. I met her the first day I ever came to New York back in 1999. That's long enough to know she is brilliant, beautiful and Brazilian. Also that I love her and will forever. Nuptials are set soon (August 29) at City Hall for families. At some point after that, we'll have a much larger raucous celebration.
JDS
Clay Davis is alive and well and living as a ballsy Mexican lady who isn't afraid of lions. [NYT]
Once again in a failed attempt at satire, the staff at the New Yorker has managed to publish an incendiary cartoon cover. It seems like last week's Obama kerfluffle didn't teach them anything. This week's cover depicts a bunch of affluent whites carousing while their crustacean dinner escapes through the kitchen window with the aid of a red-and-white tablecloth. Clearly this is a veiled attack against the Jews. In this case, the humanoid character with the Semitic nose (on the right) is shown drinking some sort of red wine. Not only are lobsters a food no self-respecting Jew would eat (shellfish aren't kosher) but this diner is shown with a glass of red wine in front of him. Red wine does not go with lobster. Karen MacNeil, chair of the professional wine studies program at The Culinary Institute of America recommends an Albariño from Galicia or a Oregon Pinot Gris. At any rate such an insulting depiction of American Jewry should not go unmentioned.
Then there is the issue of the lobsters, a noble and brave species, who have in the past, faced their fate with the sealy Stoic resolve of a true warrior. Like good Soviet soldiers, they would never retreat. Better to die nobly than live as a coward. This cover, in which the lobsters prefer ignoble escape, is an insult to homards worldwide.
How did John Paczkowsk, the senior editor at the website All Things Digital and a graduate of Brown University somehow rise to the primo spot in Google Image Search for "John," one of the most common male names? How did Josh Trentine, the CEO of Overload Personal Training, become the prince of all Josh's on Moderate Safe Search All Images? And Peter! Professor Peter Guttorp, a Swedish Professor of Statistics. These men have no right to crow from atop their perches. Especially John. Peter, I'm completely happy with. "He received a B.S. in mathematics, mathematical statistics, and musicology from the University of Lund, Sweden, in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley, in 1980. He joined the University of Washington faculty in September 1980." That's great. Also, the top three Peters all have full beards.
As for Josh, though I'm not entirely happy with an orange bodybuilder representing visually my namesake, it's slightly better than 2nd place:
