Out There

George Lang Had an Answer

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:55:30 -0500

An extremely pleasant and perfectly bright acquaintance surprised me by stating with his usual attractive confidence that food is a frivolity and cooking not part of our cultural life. His spouse, whose every meal gives the lie to such silliness, just smiled.

So I asked them if they knew that George Lang, best known as reinventor of New York's Café des Artistes, had just died. His life, I said with my own brand of confidence, may be worth a look, because he personified and made public the need to feed as well as be fed. How can hospitality not be inherent to the world's manifold cultures, a mythic boon everywhere?

Lang's 1998 autobiography, slightly puffy and larded with "stars," does have a frivolous title: Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen.Yet it tells a brave and even beautiful story of how a soul came into its own.

Here's my Philadelphia Inquirer column about the book and Lang's life.

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I Never Cooked for My Father

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:24:04 -0500

"I learned about cooking and flavor as a child."

Maybe I'm worried that it's too easy, or dislike the part of me that's a permanent boy, but I've become increasingly shy of drawing from the same family well to recount my early fascination with food. Recently, though, I came upon a recipe for creamed scallions by the late chef Edna Lewis (here's my 2006 Philadelphia Inquirer appreciation) taken from her kindly and expert "memory" cookbook, In Pursuit of Flavor. The line at the top of this post is that book's opener, and this is how she introduces the onion dish:

Growing up, we would sow onion seed in the garden and then thin a lot of them out before their bulbs got too big. We chopped them up, sautéed them in bacon fat, poured in heavy cream, and ate them for breakfast. This recipe is not quite as rich as that, but uses scallions in a way that tastes just delicious. In my opinion, they are an underused vegetable and taste almost as good today as they did years ago.

Breakfast. Scallions, bacon grease and cream for breakfast. Even though her Freetown, Virginia family, settled there by her slave grandparents, was a larger collection of relatives than my nuclear Brooklyn four, what the hell. If Miss Lewis could look back without reservation, so may I.

Many of her recipes run from-the-dirt ingredients through butter-and-cream initiations, claiming their own particular France. There's a wonderful one for "long-cooked green beans" in which the chef politely dismisses "undercooked" vegetables and instructs us to find thick-skinned Kentucky Wonders to simmer (with pork) for more than an hour. So here's her scallions, an easy lesson in how to find luxury in basics.

Heavy cream gains the antique ivory you see by reducing and morphing into sauce. (Whisk carefully till the very end.) Taste? In the movie Heat, actress Pat Ast refers to pimpled hunk Joe Dallesandro as "a little piece of semiheaven."

Wonder why I made that connection....

Forbidden Lundy's

No, I won't drag yet another Lundy's story out of my Mouseketeer cap, the one with the ears that my California toymaker-uncle Irving who lived in Sherman Oaks next door to Liberace sent to me -- and one to brother Leslie -- with our names sewn in pink script so we could be the first on our block to wear them to school, the same school that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Julian Schnabel went to, a few blocks from where Arthur Miller brought bride-to-be Marilyn to meet the parents. No, I promise I won't talk about the fine, floury steam of napkin-wrapped beaten biscuits, the army of black waiters, the way Dad convinced his observant mom that when it came to lobster, God made a kosher exception for the Weinsteins, and the oh so sad attempt late in the Lundy's game to revive the clam bar by calling it the Teresa Brewer Room, the same place where I first saw my father, Harry, eat steamers.

I actually have few ordinary memories of my dad. He was a car dealer and closet bookie who felt it necessary to be away a lot. Yet special things stand out, as in all family memories: how proud he was that he could take his many brothers and sisters for wet jaunts on his shiny Chris-Craft, which he docked in Sheepshead Bay, right near Lundy's. (Suddenly it was gone.) How good he was at making messy tuna salads and at grilling steaks, and how very much this short, redheaded, sun-freckled man enjoyed his food.

I've written before that eating out was our special connection, but I see something now that's new. When I think of him 50, 55 years ago at F.W.I.L. Lundy Bros.on Emmons Avenue, plucking and sucking his clams and piling up the shells in a keen, mechanical manner, not sighing over how good they are or pausing to say so, then sipping the still-warm broth, intent on its finality, I realize that in this and this alone we have become the same person.

An uncomplicated dish of littlenecks and pasta led me to this realization, a recipe fashioned by the genius turned generic Emeril Lagasse, whom I once met (anonymously) as, flush-faced, he swept through his just opened New Orleans cri de coeur, Emeril's. What a changed man, as are we all.

Local Long Island littlenecks are 50 for $17, and for some reason -- in spite of its reputation to the contrary, food does not automatically make one self-aware -- I had stayed away from buying and cooking them. Yes, I know they pop open on a grill, spilling their insides as you try to gather them up. So I Googled and found something so basic from Emeril's Food Network show (a network that would never take off, I had written long ago) that I wasn't afraid to try.

Scrubbed them and soaked 'em in salted water with cornstarch, which is thought to "bleach" the meat as well as purge the poor things of waste and sand. Then all you do is cook some pasta and in another big pot cook some garlic and pepper flakes in olive oil, add white wine and the clams, cover, shake, and wait till they open. Add pasta, parsley, stir, serve.

I used the chef's proportions, except added more clams, and ate with a gusto and delight that comes too rarely. I am a little older than my father was when he died. No matter. He would have loved these clams, the first dish I have ever cooked that is just for him, and for his son.

X X X X X X X X X

Do you have a recipe that you'd like to cook, or like to have cooked, for your mom or dad? If so, share it in the comments section, and I'll post them here and on Facebook so we can compare.

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Newspaper Fate

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:56:28 -0500

Do you want to pay for your news with dead trees or the predation of oil? In this case, the form of payment itself makes news.

The news corpus above is part of a new artwork by Gustav Metzger shown in a small basement space in New York's Lower East Side. E-flux, at 41 Essex St., is right near not one but two Orthodox Jewish ephemera shops and the Pickle Guys, where school kids line up for half-sours among barrels of brined turnips and pineapple chunks.

At e-flux, "the viewer is invited to cut out articles related to the topics 'credit crunch,' 'extinction,' and 'the way we live now' " and put them up on the wall. The piece is called Mass Media: Today and Yesterday.

How many words is a picture of a thousand newspapers worth?

We're in a pickle, aren't we.

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Applause! Applause?

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 01:08:11 -0500

Normally, my single question to you at the end of this post would be posed via Twitter or Facebook. But so many smart classical-music mavens are my Artsjournal neighbors that I thought I might borrow some of your tidewrack readers for just one time.

Recently I saw and heard the Met's production of Richard Strauss's Capriccio, starring Renée Fleming, at a fairly comfortable, stadium-seating multiplex cinema in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York.

The theater was almost full -- and I may have been the youngest customer. I was truly happy that so many of my Long Island neighbors would attend the showing of a somewhat undervalued, orphaned work, thought to be talky and, except for the last "moonlight" solo, not sensational diva material.

I loved every thrilling moment. How beautifully conducted, directed, sung! The witty, valedictory plot illuminates the classic battle of "words or music," and although Fleming unfortunately channeled coy Ginger Rogers in Tom, Dick and Harry (filmed in 1941, only a year before the birth of Capriccio), the whole experience was almost faultless. Who cared if, supine on a sofa, the star made ridiculous love to a rose?

Yet, good readers, here's my question. I have no trouble understanding the differences between live and HD-projected opera. Complain about vulgar closeups all you want. Sure, real voice is like real mayonnaise compared to Hellman's in a jar. I know that, and you know that, but when I'm hungry for it, I'll have my mayo any way I can. Both kinds of performance are salted with the same tears.

Here's the thing. I attended this opera movie with a lovely friend, a composer and performer who will travel for hours to hear live anything. You couldn't find better concert company.

When the last note of Strauss was sung, and the strings and horns faded into nothing, she hooted and clapped her enormous approval.

"Brava! Bravo!" as the cast grinned and bowed on the screen. "Bravo! Brava!" The sound of one fan clapping.

No humans were on that stage ledge; the Metropolitan Opera cast was many miles away. No other audience members, save myself, added to my dear friend's highly audible delight. All our dour companions in art stood and filed out, silent.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

So, is applause for those onstage, for those in the audience around you who may have shared your pleasure, or for yourself?

I will collect and post your responses.

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Getting Pickled: My Brine Cocktail Comeuppance

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 12:47:45 -0500

I was taken aback by my failure to find a worthy pickle cocktail.

I love pickles to an extent that should embarrass me. I could eat pickles every day of my life -- especially classic kosher half-sours. I can't explain that, in a Freudian or even middlebrow New Yorker way; it's just a kitchen fact, and I have no expectation that constant or even random readers would share my pickle jones. Perhaps it's genetic, like green hair or being gay.

But how could you not crave tumid, crunchy, garlicky off-green pickles? Cut them up into dainty pieces if they're too drippy and phallic for polite you. And there's no need for worn-out nickel-a-shtickel sentiment. In my private kingdom, Pickle is All.

Apparent Change of Subject

National census reports are still coming in, and if you want to see blindness in action, watch the way that certain acquaintances of yours and mine will not admit to themselves or anyone that they're now part of a numerical minority. Fellow caucs, I won't say any more.

My solution? Brine. From now on, we should limit ourselves to a pickle census. Pickles can divide us, of course: Ask '50s Brooklyn "kids" what they think about gherkins or frilly bread-and-butters and watch those faces crinkle. Yet cucumbers in any brine are still just a sliver of pickle possibility. Widen your vegetable eyes and you'll see that pickles of all persuasions -- Indian, Korean, Mexican, plus our own farmstand jewels -- may knit the world's antagonistic parts into one harmonious pickleverse. There's something irresistible about a pickle.

To toast that Disney concept, I tried to reproduce or even create, with brine or bits of the thing itself, widely appealing "picktails." I attempted this not just to provide recipes that would set party-tongues wagging, but to offer "if I can, you can" examples.

Trouble is, my picktails tanked. Not completely, of course, but any drink you don't want every time you want a drink is a no-go, a one-nighter at best. Still, read on. There's an "almost" you may enjoy.

The Sin of Vodka

The main reason my picktails failed is personaI. I am anti-vodka. A straight shot or iced, fine, but it's not a full-deck player in a cocktail, just an alcoholic solvent. An honest bartender will divulge that he or she can mix any kind of brine -- half-sour, caper berry, high-rent Brooklyn anythings (there are two links here) -- with Smirnoff or Grey Goose or Black Swan and get a salable "dirty" drink. Waiter, could I see the brine list?

But what you taste at first is merely spirit-diluted pickle juice, a mildly spiced embalming fluid, which, after a few gulps, results in a salty hiccup, the drink and the snack muddled in one pricey dose.

I will not discuss picklebacks. Google them. Then, unless you are an NYU undergrad looking for some Park Slope action, avoid them.

The "Almost"

Brine does work wonders in a Bloody Mary -- if Mary's made with gin. Cowards call that version a Bloody Margaret or a Ruddy Mary, but it's my standard. I'm sure you have your own Mary formula, but here's how I do it with brine:

No Worcestershire; no extra salt, and be careful with the amount of your choice of pepper till you taste at the end; lime and lemon juice, or lime only. Two jiggers of gin, a half jigger of brine. During summer, use diced fresh tomatoes, skin and all, mash together, then ice and stir. The rest of the time, use the usual juice.

Yes, I'm in my Elizabeth David "some of this some of that" mode.

The Briny Mary is delicious, but a failure as a drink because it doubles too easily as a first course -- its own accompaniment. It's a salad in drink drag. In my mental bar, a cocktail should never be "delicious."

So I tried substituting brines for vermouth in brinetinis. Do dry sherries sub for vermouth? Yes, they're starchy but elegant. Sakes? Girly, yet intriguing. Brines? Sour and alarming, unless you go eyedropper dry. And that result is still not a new-cocktail handshake, friendly if challenging, a relationship possibility. Particles of brine smudge actually laughed at me through the glass.

Then, with the pickleback in mind, I went the way of the Manhattan. Rye, bourbon, or Irish; brine; bitters: the Lower Manhattan. I was hopeful, because the wrong section of my brain, not the instinctive palate-part, was working.

That's all I shall say about that.

A long-loved culinary fantasy proposes that really good recipes combine ingredients so that their individual flavors and qualities disappear into a big, fat something else. I treasure that concept, especially when applied to elemental categories such as cocktails. But even the French, who tried to get others to believe that they and no one else could perform this magic, know that recipes are more complicated.

No matter what you force a single ingredient to live with or how you convince it to change its shape, it will always find a way to hold on to its origin -- even in the form of flavor ghosts. In fact, we seek good ingredients because they never entirely give up their ghosts. So your poor, put-upon palate, faced with a haunted mansion of competing spirits, does its best to be welcoming to a madhouse.

What a din! "I'm new, I'm the diva."

"No you're not, you're just the three of us he put together, six of us, 10 of us, in chorus."

The argument between the newbie dish and its ingredient ghosts goes back and forth, and that ongoing confusion is what we taste.

But not in a brine cocktail. There, the pickle dictator has his way.

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Oh, You Can't Scare Me ...

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:20:35 -0500

Photo courtesy of New York University's Grey Gallery

Would it shock you to read that "only" 146 people died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire? It's not a lot, really, but poets and peasants long ago figured out that death can't be measured by numbers.

"A thousand" tsunami-drowned bodies wash up on Japan's shore. "Hundreds of thousands" died in

Haiti

's quake; global disease and starvation kill cool, statistical "millions." Yet every mourner knows that one loss close to home can mean everything. In the math of death, all totals equal zero.

The impact of the fire had to do with why the girls, women and men died. Every single death was preventable. Greed and a corresponding lack of humanity were responsible. The two men who owned the fatal factory got off because one lawyer confidently defended a world of corruption.

By the way, do you know what shirtwaists are? They're turn-of-the-century blouses that had modernity written all over them, the free woman's uniform -- even if she couldn't vote. Think of them as cotton Nikes. In both cases it's been convenient to forget who makes them.

For readers who disdain labor unions -- and there are good reasons to be cautious or critical -- I'd like to offer two reasonably short links. The first is an opinion piece in the New York Times written from the point of view of a Wisconsin idealist, a calm voice who taps from his state's agrarian utopian past. You recall that Wisconsin presently has a governor who is doing the bidding of smarter, wealthier, men than he by trying to crush public workers. If history's measure were moral and not chronological, Gov. Scott Walker would have to account for 146 deaths.

The second is my own piece, one among many recountings and memorials, about the Triangle fire. Do look at the photos in the slideshow, which, however riveting in themselves, should churn your guts and fasten your resolve.

The centenary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Titanic of this nation's movement for labor rights, is Friday, March 25.

Now, it's time to sing the rest of my headline...

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Condiment Time-Travel

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 09:35:57 -0500

Who Invented Crab Louis?

It's almost pink, not a pretty-in-pink pink but a sickly, Pepto pink. Neither liquid nor solid, it crawls from server to plate like lava, lava with chunks.

I know what those chunks are, because I chopped and diced green pepper, green onion, and green olive to create them.

Sure, I licked that spoon. But in the time it took for my palate to awaken, before I could compute the flavor and register my pleasure and approval -- the taste was right, in the certain way that a blend of wrong things can be right -- I found myself not in my own kitchen but at a small, naperied table, dwarfed by an enormous room with tall columns and large electric globes.

Sunlight tries to force its way through tea-colored curtains. (They look emerald in the illustration, but postcards of the time were colored fancifully.) Smoke drifts from the glossy bar, and polite clinking can be heard from similar tables around me, with muffled clatter somewhere in back.

A high, hard collar digs into my jaw. These sleeves are the roughest wool I'd ever felt, my pants the same. I touch my hair: grease. Everything is off, unreal, yet the crab salad in front of me looks like a friend because it wears the same thick, pink coat. I find myself tearing a soft roll and swiping things off my plate. Nothing ever tasted so good, nothing.

I am in San Francisco, you see, some years after the earthquake, but before we enter the Great War, finishing my Crab Louis.

Have you ever eaten or assembled a true Crab Louis, which most everyone spells and pronounces "Louie"? It's an early-modern offering whose merit and value come from the happy collusion of two centuries and two places: staid old France and nervy America. To be sure, we of the 21st century are genuinely surprised that ancient citizens ate salads. On National Public Radio we now learn that even the fecund dungeness crab, Louis's raison d'être, is finally threatened. Of course, West Coast trawlers at last century's turn returned to port with nets full of dripping pincers, so why not expect them forever?

Opportunity grew everywhere; was kitchen genius wanting? Haute cuisine chefs of yore bragged in print about using chic canned corn and bottled sauce. So which of them invented this assortment of lettuce, hard-cooked egg, and same-day crab meat with a ketchupy remoulade or what we'd now call a quirky version of Russian or Thousand Island dressing?

It may sound odd, but new recipes aren't unique, like paintings. Instead, local ingredients and culinary fashions result in almost identical dishes that pop up in clusters, simultaneously, like novel mushrooms in welcoming soil.

So it is with Crab Louis, for I am sitting in one of at least three West Coast dining rooms that may have served it first. You can't see me in the neutron-bomb card above, but that's where I find myself, in the cafe of San Francisco's Hotel St. Francis. Fame-queen chef Victor Hirtzler runs the kitchen, and will for quite some time.

Major digression: Some claim that Hirtzler was responsible for Woodrow Wilson's razor-thin second presidential victory in 1916. The story goes that the credible Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, was to be hosted by the hotel's owners at a pre-election banquet. But right before the meal, waiters went on strike. Because the kingly cook told his guests not to worry and himself served the food, the union leafleted the city, attacking Hughes as anti-labor -- which, as a firm Republican, he most certainly was. Hughes lost California by 3673 votes, and therefore the White House.

Our megalomaniac chef with the pointy beard probably assumed that his dinner was more than adequate compensation.

Here's the Hirtzler Crab Louis recipe, from the May 7 menu in The Hotel St. Francis Cook Book, published in 1910:

Gendarme potatoes? Glad the chef's not serving that reindeer leg on December 25, with or without the jus. You may read -- and cook, if you have cinematic ambitions -- the whole fat-laden tome page by page via an extraordinary online culinary resource called Feeding America, which archives dozens of influential U.S. cookbooks from the late 18th- to early 20th centuries.

Two More

Postcards of Solari's Restaurant, at 354 Geary Street, show that it was lit by pseudo-primitive Mission chandeliers that would now bring a pretty penny. In 1914, Clarence E. Edwords wrote the peripatetic and thoroughly charming Bohemian San Francisco: Its Restaurants and Their Most Famous Recipes, in which he includes Solari's own Crab Louis -- not in the body but in the afterthought index:

Take meat of crab in large pieces and dress with the following: One-third mayonnaise, two-thirds chili sauce, small quantity chopped English chow-chow, a little Worcestershire sauce and minced tarragon, shallots and sweet parsley. Season with salt and pepper and keep on ice.

The distinguished city of San Francisco cites that egg-absent, lettuce-free example as the world's first.

But chili sauce? Which chili sauce? Now that I think of it, chef Victor used an unnamed chili sauce, too.

We must leave the creative Bay Area and head north, because Davenport's, another prime Louis location, is the great hotel and restaurant of Spokane. Look at this place!

Phony columns, wooden chairs, just like every other restaurant. My collar is killing me.

Davenport's still exists, though it looks nothing like the faux-español one in 1906:

Publicity continues to claim that hotel founder "Crab" Louis Davenport invented the dish, using Seattle crustacea. (Did he invent the sofa as well?) His initial recipe hasn't surfaced, but here's what's on the menu now, $20 at lunch, $22 for dinner:

Created by Louis Davenport himself, our signature salad is made with crisp butter lettuce topped with fresh crab, hard boiled eggs, tomatoes & pickled white asparagus dressed with a rich Louis dressing.

Ah, dressed with a dressing. Waiter!

Chili Sauce

No mention of chili sauce, and that is where we must take our attention, for there is a hoary chili sauce still to be found in markets. How had it escaped me?

Heinz makes it. I bought it. It sits on the shelf in its faceted glass bottle, sticking out its geriatric tongue. I emailed and phoned the Pittsburgh-based company to get information on the product's history, but after numerous backs and forths, no one seemed to know. I tasted no chile pepper, and none is listed in the ingredients: tomato puree, water, distilled white vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, salt, corn syrup, dehydrated onions, spice, garlic powder, natural flavoring. You know the drill: HFCS can't be historical; "spice" and "natural flavoring" are Nixonese mysteries.

Yet ... when I twisted the white metal cap and tasted the red stuff with a very narrow spoon directly from the jar, I was jarred back, far back, into another eating place: Coney Island sweet, holding-hands warm, a hint of India with no risk, no tusk, no harm.

Yes, I am transported.

So I constructed my own original Crab Louis, balancing Heinz's time-travel elixir with simple mayonnaise, Worcestershire, and salty chopped additions, staying far away from puerile avocado and tomato. The crab is the thing, and my East Coast mongers could never provide the sugary, throbbing Pacific flesh a real Louis requires.

So I do my best with what I have and pull myself to the present. Eating may take us back, all romantics know, but as food and everything else tells us, the past is never what it promised.

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Milton Rogovin: 'The Rich Have Their Own Photographers'

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:01:17 -0500

rOGOVIN communist

POLITICS buffalo

DOCUmentary art

PHOTOGRAPHy

Milton Rogovin: Joseph Kemp, Hanna Furnace, Buffalo N.Y., 1978

All art is political, dripping with implicit or aggressive assumptions about what is right or wrong with the world. The very notion that someone would make something without obvious practical use is itself as political as an upraised fist.

Yet contemporary art that expresses an explicit political point of view is not thought by most art lovers to be top Christie's material. There are well-known exceptions, to be sure; is it odd that women come more easily to mind? Martha Rosler, Kara Walker, Barbara Kruger ... the list is not long, and the danger that fame defangs and coopts is ever-present.

Politics also consists of surprise in context. An otherwise ordinary photo of two men or two women kissing wouldn't raise an eyebrow in a family album such as my husband's and mine, but could raise the roof in certain countries -- even parts of our own. We know too, from the recent, sad Smithsonian Frolics, that art can be used in political ways that the artist may never have intended.

Optometrist-turned-photographer Milton Rogovin died last month at the age of 101. He was a social activist, a Communist, "Top Red in Buffalo" according to the papers. His best photos, especially those in the 1962 series "Store Front Churches," are as beautiful as any I can think of. Political. Beautiful.

You may read -- or listen -- to my appreciation of his life's work in Obit Magazine. More photos and videos of the artist are on his elaborate family website.

Daylight magazine put together this slideshow with that same Obit voiceover (added 2/18).

Also, the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography has just now posted hundreds of Rogovin shots on its cumbersome but valuable site. You'll have to register first in order to view them, but it's certainly worth the trouble.

Milton Rogovin, 1960

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Susannah York, 'Tom Jones,' JFK, 'Killing of Sister George'

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:32:46 -0500

I'm back in the writing saddle after quite some time, and it took unexpected memories of an underknown movie star to do it. The helicopter-shot hunting sequence in Tony Richardson's 1963 Tom Jones brought that equestrian cliche to mind, because in it a saddled Sophie Western is plucked off her runaway steed by a steed of another kind, the ready, randy Mr. Jones.

Yes, Susannah York died recently. She had ensorcelled my adolescent eyes not once but twice, the second time as creepy Childie in 1968's The Killing of Sister George. We should know by now that public figures can inhabit one's imagination for quite private reasons, reasons I try to discover in an essay published today in the online Obit Magazine.

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Hats Off to the Ghosts of Us

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 10:02:05 -0500

Digital inebriates, slow down for just a moment. Anyone invested in media currency and the gives and takes of reputation is entitled to a rest, and an antidote. I'd like to offer a holiday reminder that the value of our gawking intercessions may be weighted and elucidated by a smart salute to the past. (And to a young James H. White, who produced the film above.)

Historians know I'm right, for their present, crossing the street, always looks both ways. Also, because I recently visited the original Disneyland in Anaheim, I was driven back to my own teacup history. You will not be burdened with wide-eyed tales of my Uncle Irving's gift of early Mouseketeer ears, or my later boyfriend's dirty-feet-overhead apotheosis at "Pirates of the Caribbean" -- yo ho, long-gone Michael.

Hats

Like John F. Kennedy, I could never wear a hat. Any hat turned me "into an organ-grinder monkey," someone who may have actually seen such a curiosity on a New York avenue told little me a long time ago. But hats were once the crowning definition of polite citizen. And they were canvases for artists of the silhouette.

The topic is now the predictable melancholy of the past. Most of us have no real, tangible sense that real people lived more than a few decades before we did, which is why photos and films of ordinary folks a century ago make some of us profoundly upset. A written record of this or that significant figure is never the same as a moving image of some plain Jane in cumbersome frock musing and smirking at an unknown man with a camera. She laughs without sound at your grave thoughts, a scythe in her gloved hands.

Paris. Here's Paris. 1900 Paris.

Here's the same view, from the Trocadero, but wait! Who is the man in the hat?

And then, at the very left, the angular woman in her hat. Any relation?

She's walking in front of the camera, ruining the view, the modern cameraman says.

They are spirits, of course, ghosts of the 20th century. I suggest we greet them, wherever they may have wound up: as early trench fodder, grizzled Vichy cowards, MGM extras, loving gay spouses. Their hats, at least, provide an entree to the future and an invitation to all of us to write.

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Gay Performance, or Why the Director of the National Portrait Gallery Should Resign

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:20:06 -0500

This is a short post about long-held beliefs.

If you know the abbreviated world of performance art or the run-on-sentence world of gay activism, you've heard of Tim Miller. Thirty years ago, the nervy tyke co-founded PS 122 on First Avenue and Ninth Street in Manhattan's East Village. His lightning struck twice in Santa Monica, when he co-founded the performance space Highways more than 20 years ago. Tim is also known nationally as one of the NEA Four.

Although I've seen Tim perform throughout his career and urge you to attend his latest, Lay of the Land, at the almost refurbished PS 122 this week and next, I am not offering a full review. Miller onstage is like no one I know, charming, grating and riveting at once. His passionate queer-rights work is central, unavoidable, to any history of people-centered theater. Just go, to understand why the core metaphor of the piece is "homophobic gristle" that must be urged out of the choking gay boy's throat by his father, holding a knife. But don't imagine grim. Champagne poodle hair appears, and Tim believes that prying open certain giant closets will solve global warming.

But here's the happenstance reason we New Yawkers must attend. There's a gay art show at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in gay marriage-positive DC. The Smith -- a national institution with some quite dirty underwear, by the way -- doesn't call the exhibition "gay," exactly, but it's relatively brave. Yet the old-fashioned, right-wing Catholic and Republican haters did a Piss Christ on a short David Wojnarowicz video tribute to his AIDS-deceased lover Peter Hujar, and, in response, the director of the gallery, Martin E. Sullivan, removed the work just the other day. Here's Sullivan's explanation in the New York Times:

It's really a very tough call to make. Obviously the Portrait Gallery is a part of the Smithsonian. It's just one of many, many players in this new discussion or debate that's going on in Congress about federal spending, the proper federal role in culture and the arts and so forth. We don't think it's in the interest, not only of the Smithsonian but of other federally supported cultural organizations, to pick fights.

Sound familiar? Oldsters may also recall a certain Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition that DC's Corcoran refused to show (you can Google this), while other, better spaces did.

I actually know a few museum directors and understand that their problems and positions aren't easy: who pays for wine at openings, how can we keep the board happy, etc. These are often bureaucratic, Kafkaesque jobs that deaden ambition, no matter what the elevated salary. Yet once in a while, a mild-mannered museum director is given a chance to leap into history.

He or she may decide to stand up to bigotry and stupidity, declaring that the art they love, the art they are hired to love, is worth defending.

Such chosen directors usually have only one chance in a lifetime to show their stuff. But sometimes they fail that chance, either in court -- I think of the small-minded cowardice when the Mapplethorpe show's Philadelphia originator was challenged at its 1990 obscenity trial in Cincinnati -- or just behind their desks. In this instance, Mr. Sullivan has failed to put up a fight at the very start.

Dead gay artist mourns his dead lover. Dismissed. Anger vies with pity in this particular museum case.

I've written obituaries, and although all obit writers try to emphasize the positive, semi-prominent folks such as museum directors are usually remembered publicly for just one thing.

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PS: Tim Miller's work has long been word-centered, and that's not in any way a bad thing. His handsome, animated face virtually sprays language at you. Still, my earliest memory of Tim on this stage is one in which his young body moved smartly, silently, with his long-gone partner John Bernd. Their twin forms spoke volumes.

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Why Donuts Are Like Sex, Plus a Letter From Jackie Robinson

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:55:52 -0500

Chock Full o' Something

Yes, we can be nostalgic, really nostalgic, for something we never knew.

Of course, we've understood for eons that nostalgia -- a warm haze of sentimental regret for a more beneficent past -- needn't have anything to do with what we actually did or saw. My own nostalgias usually hang on something edible: a stuffed artichoke, a cold piece of buttered toast, a dripping pickle. Each of these personal -- Brooklyn -- icons kicks off an emotion-larded story, a tale whose verifiable details left the premises long ago, but whose meaning gains traction with every recounting.

So, I must report that I am swamped with nostalgia for a Chock full o' Nuts donut, the kind that sprays clouds of talcum sugar onto your chest and lap.

Never had one of those powder bombs gone off in my mouth before last week.

I needn't retail the donuts of my life, the fresh and the boxed, the sport and the routine. Still, somewhere along the donut line, a chocolate-covered heavy bullied its way into my grade-school psyche. I've spent thousands of calories trying to madeleine that moment, looking for the same audible crack into the hard, dark skin, the feminine chew through vanilla-scented cake, the choking bulk sluiced by gulps of milk.

The only thing I learned is that all Entenmann's labels should read "You can't go home again." (For those of you in some other place, Entenmann's is a giant Long Island, New York baking company that wears a local, homemade costume -- until you read the chemistry-set ingredients. Squads of its glossy chocolate donuts await purchase on every corner. Its pound cake alone remains ... almost pure.)

Nutted Cream

I live with someone who says he ate every day at a Chock full o' Nuts near the bookstore in which he worked while struggling to survive in New York as an artist and poet. The "Chock" brand first sat atop shelled-nut stores and then lunch counters. The stand-alone coffee and jingle came later:

Chock full o' Nuts is that hea-venly coffee,
Hea-venly coffee,
Hea-venly coffee,
Chock full o' Nuts is that hea-venly coffee,
Better coffee...

Well, first it was "Rockefeller's money can't buy," but Gov. Nelson sued, so it became "a millionaire's," then, as inflation set in, "a billionaire's." So the New York name of popular, counter-only eateries became attached nationally to a brand of workaday supermarket coffee, the antithesis of its future nemesis, burnt, pseudo-Euro Starbucks. But these Depression shops thrived at least into the '60s, serving secretary sandwiches and donuts with the joe.

Well-trained uniformed servers, many of them black, wore "untouched by human hands" gloves. Doily-strewn Schrafft's was a ladies-who-lunch extravagance, while Chock full was the nickel version, with dainty, satisfying sandwiches too: especially the nutted cheese (Neufchatel and walnuts on whole-wheat raisin) and what most people remember, the date-nut and cream cheese. Yes, there was ham and cheese, lobster salad (25 cents in the late '50s!) and the like for the clerical working class, but some things stick -- to the roof of your mouth.

One of the joys of writing for readers and not editors is that you can bury your lede in the same way a raisin is buried in a loaf: "Not long ago, a Chock full o' Nuts with vintage items on the menu opened at 25 W. 23rd St., right next door to the new, jammed Italian-food mall with the annoying name Eataly." London-based friend Daniel Young nailed that urban-tourist shopping experience on his blog -- you may recognize the white-haired guy grabbing pasta. Too bad Dan didn't follow that up, as I did, with Chock nutted cheese, date-nut cream cheese, and donuts. But that serious young man who in fact became an artist and poet did come with me so we could test our various nostalgias side-by-side.

We sat at a table; with tables, it's almost restaurant. Servers were friendly as could be -- but no gloves. Nutted-cheese and homemade date-nut bread with whipped cream-cheese sandwiches were $5.95 and $4.95 respectively, which in 1960 dollars would be 83 and 69 cents. The ingredients felt properly "old." You know I mean "old" as in "old-fashioned," not moldy or stale.

Yet the sandwiches themselves, like the date-nut at left, looked dropsical, swollen, with thicker bread and too much filling. The tearoom scale that once made them almost elegant, even on chunky restaurant plates, was gone. Technically, the original proportion of bread to filling worked, but the small size made the sandwiches taste special in another way: they became treats as well as sustenance. And they were sustenance. People with limited funds were hungry then as now.

But look at these babies (at right).

Hot from the back, then dipped in powdered sugar. Two for $.99.

I know I must have asked my mom if you could get TB from breathing in that powder. (But did I ever eat one?) They crunch, from the frying. The sugar melts in saliva and immediately joins the crust and the dark, chewy crumb to knit them together. I tested this by eating one unsugared and found that there's no better way to illustrate that the whole is greater than its parts than by using these two donuts.

Have I ever had a better donut? Not now I haven't. Generically, it kicks the wimpy Krispy Kreme back into the Southern sand. I'll be checking Bob's Coffee & Doughnuts at the Farmers Market on 3rd and Fairfax in L.A. quite soon, those plain ones also sparkling from the fryer.

Why do we like donuts? They symbolize the regularity of pleasure in our lives, and by doing so fasten us lightly to our past.

More Than a Millionaire's Money Couldn't Buy

Photo credit: Chock full o' Nuts

From 1957 to '64, former Brooklyn Dodger and first black major leaguer Jackie Robinson was vice president for personnel at Chock full o' Nuts. On May 13, 1958, he wrote a letter to Dwight D. Eisenhower after the President addressed a meeting of "Negro Leaders" that Robinson had attended.

Here's the letter (reproduced in the new Other People's Rejection Letters by Bill Shapiro, Clarkson Potter):

The letter concludes:

...in dealing with Governor Faubus if it became necessary, would let it be known that America is determined to provide -- in the near future -- for Negroes -- the freedoms we are entitled to under the constitution.

Respectfully yours,
Jackie Robinson

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Why I'll Never Again Read the Washington Post

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:49:22 -0500

Speech after long silence; it is right,

Ever take a really deadly poetry class, the kind where only the strongest or strangest works survive? The line above always pops up unscathed, even after Prof. X throttled, stabbed, garroted and buried it. "The word speech stands for love," he said, shooing away all other options. "What does that make silence?"

Devoutly to be wished. I had never seen a poem with a semicolon. Yeats. Nice.

Out There regulars know that I've been silent for a while, and it took vileness and death, the silence of suicide, to get me back to the keyboard.

Have you been reading about the "rash" of gay teen suicides? It's nothing new; gay, lesbian, transgender youngsters have been killing themselves for decades and decades. And not just from isolated bullying.

Every day I can find another reason to feel attacked. The Washington Post, for example, thinks it's somehow acceptable to publish -- on National Coming Out Day, no less -- an elaborate opinion piece by a vicious gay-hater (filled with errors, too), as if my right to exist were debatable. Remember when not so long ago, the BBC proposed an online back-and-forth about whether it was right for the Uganda government to jail and kill "homosexuals"?

I am not including a link to the Post because that is the last time I will ever link directly to it, for any reason. (Sorry, Anne! I'll read whatever you write at Artsjournal or anywhere else.) But here's a long and furious response you may want to see.

So, instead of swallowing my fury, I just filed a short piece for Obit Mag about an inventive response to gay suicides started by columnist and editor Dan Savage: a YouTube channel called "It Gets Better." If you click on the brief, heartfelt videos made by gay folks who survived to happy adulthood, you may be moved to speech after your long silence, too.

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French Dip, or Roast Beef Regret

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:31:00 -0500

Recently I took a short break from intense and gratifying work with 25 theater and arts critics in Los Angeles, at the NEA Institute in Theater and Musical Theater, and avoided lunching yet again at the gastronomically hypnotic Lazy Ox Canteen. Instead, I strolled on a gorgeous bright day from our Little Tokyo hotel past Olvera Street, bathed in hubbub and jacaranda light, to Philippe the Original, the not-original, post-WWII site of one of the oldest restaurants in Los Angeles. I had mentioned Philippe -- everyone calls it Philippe's -- to my hungry colleagues on an earlier tour through nearby Union Station, but we hadn't the time for a visit. My goal now is to add roast beef regret to an illuminating afternoon.

There's no easy or original explanation for my dogged fascination with food eaten in the past. For years I have collected defunct menus, and each of them, especially the most modest, conjures an actual lunch or dinner for me, right there on the table, served with a Kodak smile. Of course, that smile is a long-dead thing, and the piping hot meatloaf or buttery sole almondine or juicy fried chicken with beaten biscuits set with such ease before us have long ago found their various ways to oblivion.

Yet we are hungry every day, and food is always new. So here there they are again as always, my grease-hot, half-dollar treats, pre-Hiroshima sustenance, tasting of Hollywood's bottle-blond innocence and unworried by the chemical, political cynicism that properly clouds every thoughtful 21st-century meal.

How perverse can it be to love the past, when love of any kind is so dear, so hard to come by? Perhaps I would have hated being stuck in the 1920s or '30s, always wishing for some freedom that the spaceship future would bring. But even the future of the past seems to glow, compared to the future of now.

So I cross the dangerous street and walk into Philippe's, all by myself. Being alone is an advantage in a lot of eating situations, especially when you wish to be a kind of spy, stationed in a foreign place.

Harsh sun outside, no hint of that within. Stools under long, high, worn wooden tables made for communal eating fill the main room, lined perpendicular to the counter at which you stand on one of a half-dozen lines to order your food. Walk among the diners and through the threshold up to that counter, and turn the clock back 50, 60 years.

Who are the folks here with me? A donut-box assortment of language, color, age, dressed in such a noncommittal fashion that you can't really tell time or place. Money simply does not define this ordinary, murmuring clientele. Is that sawdust on the floor? (Who nearby still cuts wood?). No one comes here to spend. Everyone is here to eat.

Not long ago, a close friend dismissed as tasteless and worthless the "overdone" sliced beef that makes a Philippe's French Dipped sandwich. Well, she's wrong, completely and utterly. It's not underdone or overdone. It's exactly in the middle, unconcerned.

"Hi. I'd like a beef dip."

"Single or double?"

Double means more dip -- in a light and natural pan-juice. They dip in advance and don't provide a monkey dish filled with salty brown broth for you to play with, as some other L.A. French Dip places -- uh, Cole's -- do. Phillippe claims to have invented this fetching wetting technique in 1918, but Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet, in its original downtown site, also fights for that distinction. You can read about their old, mild rivalry here. No contest in the result.

The white-haired lady serving me indicates by magic mental waves that only fools get double beef juice. When you order, you say "beef" because there's also pork, ham, lamb and turkey to be had. I guess they're good, but who would want lamb or turkey juice dampening that nice roll? She has gloves on, and stands in charge of a metal tray of just-sliced meat-portions from the back. She dips each piece of bread herself.

It's not soggy. Double is soggy.

Because the beet juice-pickled eggs in giant glass jars sing their ruby song, I ask for one, and also get a cole slaw side. The touted mustard at the table (in squeeze-bottles, no more glass pots) is almost too hot and dominating, so I merely test it to be sure it's the same.

What kind of lunch is this? That's not a simple question. First, no matter where the beef is from, it's real cooking, the result of a series of specific marketing and kitchen decisions made over time, not a preprocessed idea turned to profit. You could make it anywhere, I suppose, but the beef sandwich is dipped in this very location on North Alameda as much as it's dipped in the jus. The meal's affordable -- beef is $5.75 -- but not so cheap as to lose its value, its identity.

Because of the food's "realness," it knits together the many customers with a sort of edible honesty. There's a shared, civic sense that this restaurant and its food should be here, and surprisingly little nostalgia for old times or mourning that this may be the last of its kind.

I am biting into warm, moist beef on a roll.

I am so peaceful, so pleased, so removed from my age, that I can still taste it.

Michael Jackson -- There, I Said It

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:30:13 -0500

Never in a thousand million years would I ever have expected to write anything about him. Music was always for the others to write. Maybe I could tiptoe toward cabaret, but that's because Bobby and Blossom warbled words I had already memorized as script for my own performing life -- singing lustfully, wrenchingly, privately. You see, I have no voice, but the person looking back at me in the mirror will make you weep with his.

Yet I was asked, and being just a guy who can't say no, I complied. Jackson's been dead a year. I like "death bump" better than "death bounce" because there's some danger implied.

Here's my Jackson piece today in Obit Mag.

And when I say now that I was the first on my block to watch MTV, believe me. Anyone, voice or not, can watch anything. That's culture.

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