I ask this leading question because, though we know the answer, we persist in champing at the usual bit. Almost no one running for office will discuss the arts or something as specific as gay rights when business and war put national, even international, livelihood at risk. Yet the health and some of the wealth of civil society depends upon the health of the arts, upon the survival of its small as well as large institutions, and upon the strength of its journalist criticism, now under mindless attack.

Our souls too depend upon the arts, but those balance sheets are harder to tally.

Just as crucial, civil rights define our "our," and they too have not been assured by any candidate. Three states, for example, are voting to forbid same-sex marriage; the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by Bill Clinton, already sends a wide, bigoted signal. Be grateful for a hospital visit, toleration, an invisible "best friend"? Not on your life.  

Some of my spleen comes directly from my memory of the young Matthew Shepard (photo above), who was murdered 10 years ago. One tonic response was The Laramie Project, a play.  

Here's mine.

*  *  *

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My wonderful neighbor Anthony, whose fisherman expertise is matched by his passionate, sensible defense of the aquatic ecosystem, came to my door at 5 p.m. carrying a paper plate. Upon it sat a beautiful spotted gray and rose fish, beheaded, slit, gutted, and garnished with large commas of roe the color of ripe pumpkin. "This was swimming a half-hour ago," he said, smiling shyly. "Are you sure?" I asked, referring to the gift, not his veracity.

 What a sweet guy.

This writer is genetically obtuse at identifying a fish by its cover -- its taste I can occasionally figure out. But when I saw this one, I knew without thinking just what it was: a trout. There are many trouts, but mine looked like a young "brookie" or Savelinus fontinalus. It could also have been a small, sea-run rainbow, Oncorhynchus mykiss (the romantic in me wants the second name to be "my kiss" and not anything scientific). I wasn't sure, having listened to more Trouts than I have eaten.

I'm a New Yorker who lives in the East Village, but the East River hasn't seen trout for eons. Disappointing artist-waterfalls, come and get 'em. But no more mile-long oyster beds, cat-size lobsters, throbbing clams. Striped bass, yes. A 40-pounder was caught in the dark urban water not so long ago.

I was weekending in Bellport, Suffolk Country, when my neighbor knocked, and he said he caught a half-dozen at nearby Connetquot River, which is a fly-fisher's dream. (Language note: The preferred trout lure is called a "woolly bugger.") I lifted the trout to my face, and there was absolutely no odor -- of decaying boots, overnight storage, glowing seepage from Long Island's Brookhaven Lab. I knew I had been given something special and took sweet butter from the fridge to prepare my meal.

Grill? Pan-fry? I couldn't remember the last time I had cooked a trout. My fish, I realized, has been absent from dinner-party tables and most restaurant menus for a while. Smoked trout, a wisp of arugula, fine. Trout almondine, truite au bleu? Get your great uncle to reminisce about wooing your great aunt at a late trout supper after the curtain went down on East Lynne, holding her soft hand under the table as the deft waiter lifts away a comb of bones. Then, trout signified not only the plaid-male outdoors but tablecloth civilization in effete French form -- along with escargot, celery remoulade, and sinful mousse au chocolat. Few foods, in fact, have been as culturally bisexual as trout. So why has it vanished from its once unimpeachable place?

What a coincidence that I had seen trout play its accustomed role just last night, in Robert Altman's 1993 Short Cuts. The satisfying film was done in the director's signature format of overlapping stories (these by Raymond Carver) with common themes -- in this case, frustrated ambition coupling with disabled affection. One segment has an unemployed L.A. husband escape his wife via a fishing trip with his buddies, but they're interrupted by the discovery of a corpse: A young woman, in bra and panties, floats in the crystalline cove.

They leave her there for days so their sport won't be ruined.

One after the other yanks up a thrashing trout (couldn't tell which kind), fish whose flesh is suffused with the water in which the neglected Ophelia decomposes. Trout fishing in Altman's America.

Trout has been farmed since the first of this nation's forebears could dig a pond. Wild trout are masculine, hatchery trout feminine in the cultural imagination. The difference in taste is similar to that between wild and farmed salmon, the latter flabby in comparison. "Trout" is a great rhymer: spout, kraut, doubt, flout. At a flea market long ago I found a black-rayon pajama top upon which fat trout in surreal color leapt from the bubbles of a fabric stream; I searched for years for the matching bottoms.

Those who routinely read about better food than they usually eat will recall M.F.K. Fisher's tale of enthrallment by the "wild-lipped" fanatical waitress at an old-mill restaurant in northern Burgundy. Fisher became seduced by a quiet, almost mad procession of irresistible food -- at the center of which was a trout, initially brought to the table swimming in a bucket. It was to be cooked au bleu, but of course, so it must be alive when it meets its fatal court bouillon. Fisher looked at the crescent in the water and asked her obsessed server if the guts are removed before or after.

"Oh, the trout!" She sounded scornful. "Any trout is glad, truly glad, to be prepared by Monsieur Paul. His little gills are pinched, with one flash of the knife he is empty, and then he curls in agony in the bouillon and all is over. And it is the curl you must judge, Madame. A false truite au bleu cannot curl."

That particular sapphired victim was immortalized first by the chef, and doubly by the author, who wrote her account in 1937. In it lies some of the answer to our question, because at the time Fisher was sampling the culinary personality of France, history was already working to make her acute traditional pleasures valedictory. War soon stripped even the flour from the bread, and later a welcome agricultural industrialization and resulting degradation began to replace a previous handful of unforgettable local joys with a supermarket of international, interchangeable ones. Media too played a part: Blackened redfish, for example, swam onto newspaper pages and tabletops far from its Louisiana home, spawned repugnant mutants, and retreated. Still, the pleasure we get in pleasure will always create unforeseen vehicles for it, old and new, written and not.

My hot trout sits on a plate, waiting.

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I'll never know why didn't he snap up the vintage photo of Public School 238's eighth-grade graduating class. He had a really good reason to do so -- but maybe an even better one to leave it be.

Who can doubt that flea markets are museums?

Yard and garage sales are those museums' feeder galleries, and all of them provide a surprise immersion into the lives that neighbors past and present have led. Those of us who are hypnotized by these object lessons in popular culture also understand that the rich discards displayed for sale have soaked up buckets of emotional juice -- some actually vibrate with survival after years of use and handling.

You may be stopped cold by one of these items, petrified by its story.

Faithful yard-salers, even the most blithe or cynical, will recognize each particular madeleine, be it the ceramic ashtray identical to the one your dead father filled or the old postcard of a pastel hotel you happened to have stayed in when, as a tan young man, you discovered the salty taste of a stranger's kiss.

I can't remember at which parking lot or upon what lawn I found the sepia graduation photo of the "Class of June 1949, P.S. 238, Brooklyn," showing rows of boys in suits and ties and coy girls in cliche-prim white blouses. I do know that I bought it because it was my very own school, the one I attended from the first to the seventh grade -- at which time we moved abruptly from the tulip-lined plots of East 8^th Street to a raw, swampy development in Howard Beach, Queens, directly under the path of flights to and from Idlewild Airport. We learned to lip-read at our new apartment, because no episode of Gunsmoke or Alfred Hitchcock Presents could be watched without the deafening interruption every few minutes from the roar of a plane. Funny how you become accustomed to regular holes in a plot and learn to fill in the blanks. I was well-prepared for postmodernism.

That photo, though of a much earlier class, still pushed me to recall the names of my teachers: third grade's plump, encouraging Mrs. Horween; the disgusting Mr. Barash, who clipped his nails at his desk and never answered questions; the wondrous Miss (Jane) Costello, whose clearheaded kindness and direct intelligence I will never forget. You probably don't care to read about how she passed around Halloween apples with hidden coins stuck in them, pennies in the large ones, nickels in the littlest, to make her modest moral point. I can still hear her calm voice, see her generous gray-blue eyes. That's my treasure, not for sale.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg went to P.S. 238, and so, I read, did artist-director Julian Schnabel. It must have been a "good" school.

A perfectly fine artist few in the U.S. have heard of named Robert Kusmirowski has a perfectly fine piece in "After Nature," the first perfectly fine group show at New York's still new New Museum. Kusmirowski, from Poland, specializes in evocative models of the past, encrusted memorial recreations, and his work in "After Nature"  -- whose modest theme embraces a world "darkened by uncertain catastrophe" -- is nothing other than a creepy redo of the primitive cabin in which Theodore Kaczynski lived, wrote, and assembled his fatal explosive packages.

The poor gallery guard standing by the cabin had to keep repeating that no, the door didn't open. (Same problem with the Bucky Fuller 1930s Dymaxion car in the lobby space at the Whitney. That guard agreed in a charming way that it would be valuable to allow us to see the quirky vehicle's rotten or gutted or absent interior, and he would do what he could.) Everyone, of course, wants to open doors.

Wouldn't you know, at least a few of the younger folks didn't know who the Unabomber was -- or is, because Kaczynski's still alive, 66, in a Colorado prison for the rest of his days. He keeps up with current events, though, which we know because a few weeks back the cyber-must Smoking Gun wrote that Ted was perturbed that the actual cabin was on view as part of an exhibit in the Newseum, the ill-named temple of journalism that opened this year in Washington, D.C.

 Unabomber cabin at the Newseum

According to Smoking Gun, the bomber saw his old residence advertised in a WashPost ad and was worried that the publicity surrounding the exhibit, as well as the shifted dwelling itself, would upset his surviving victims and the families of the three dead ones. (He also happens to be suing the government to prevent auction of his journals, letters, and ginormous manifesto manuscript.) The Newseum website invites online visitors to "Probe the Unabomber Cabin: Explore a mad hermit's life with videos and an interactive."

"An interactive." Where's the display devoted to the planet's last remaining copy editor?

Unabomber hideout, real and simulacrum. Newseum and New Museum? The parallels astound. Would the prisoner have objected more, less, or not at all if he had seen the artwork advertised instead of the real thing? And would our aestheticians (or copy editors) urge us to put quotes around real thing?

We now arrive at the place where the art critic weighs in, elaborating upon the differences between the two cabins and the way their differing viewers perceive and react to them. What if the museums swapped cabins? Next, there's the obligatory art historian (not quite a critic), grounding the problem with a discussion of mimesis and reproduction in a variety of cultures and the appeal and even magic implicit in verisimilitude and theatrical imitation.

Were I the initial critic, I'd find some way of dragging my reader into the Brooklyn Museum's tableaus of American Colonial and art deco décor, dim and romantic rooms that hypnotized baby Jeff and made him wish he could escape his mother's noise and vanish into a calm, upholstered past.

What a present-day real critic should mention, if he or she had the sense, is that in the last few years at least two other Unabomber cabins sat firmly on Manhattan art floors. Pause, by Chris Larson, was shown at Rare gallery in 2005. It had a car crashing into it -- actually a repro of The Dukes of Hazzard '69 Dodge Charger -- made of lumber, too. In 2007, Exit Art showed a more realistic version built by Seth Weiner, undamaged by any vehicle, except that when you walked in, you heard a digitally synthesized voice recite parts of "Life Without Principle" by Massachusetts cabin maven Henry David Thoreau.

Chris Larson's Pause, 2005 

Unabomber's Cabin, Montana, Seth Weiner, 2007

In a truly contemporary, interactive institution, one should be able to choose the soundtrack of one's experience. So Out There must therefore ask, what exactly would you, kind reader, wish to hear spoken from beneath the Unabomber's various floorboards?

Oat Couture

Every writer has readers who reside only in his or her brain, and right now my tenants are clamoring for an opinion about the fifth season's first episode of Project Runway. What's the cerebral word-of-mouth? They're all a bit worried. Any go-round of a formula show risks repetition, yet until last Wednesday, Runway avoided the inevitable. That time, though, the contestant virgins seemed to be familiar versions or types, and in an unnecessary obeisance to the first year's premiere, the new cast was sent again to a Manhattan supermarket (which would be a 7-Eleven anywhere else) to choose ingredients for its debut effort in oat couture.

As models marched down that well-worn, tear-stained runway, the sage judges, looking more and more like Gilbert & Sullivan supernumeraries, seemed upset that so many of the newbies purchased shower curtains instead of the obviously poetic options from the produce bins.

Vegetable Love

Let me digress. Just below is a photo that accompanied "Art: It's Food for Thought," an article by Jacqueline Combs published on Sunday, July 2, 1972 in the Daily Pilot, "Serving Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, California." Yours truly is the skinny standing figure on the right, my Prell-worthy tresses tangled in a jabot of woven scallions.

University of California, San Diego undergrad artist Robert Kushner inveigled a dozen of his exhibitionist friends to travel first to his family home in Arcadia, Calif., and create costumes by selecting samples from piles of vegetables and attaching them to crocheted (his granny taught him how) network garments. Always a culinary minimalist, I limited myself to the ivory and emerald of young onion and the garnet crenulations of stiff red cabbage.

Then we traveled to the Jack Glenn Gallery in Corona del Mar, as blue-chip a venue as Orange County could manage, and watched appropriator Kushner arrange our creations on the wall. To everyone's surprise, the stuff looked pretty good dangling from hooks: Anything you hang in a gallery becomes art, said the ever correct M. Duchamp. As the space became jammed with late-afternoon art lovers  -- you'll see why in a sec -- we waited for a signal, then shed our surfer drag, walked naked among dropped jaws to locate our particular vegetable creation, and slid it on.

Bob took the mike and narrated a fashion show in as campy a manner as the crowd would stand -- I think he ended with himself as wedding dress. But when aerosol cans of Velveeta were passed around, a surprisingly messy and salacious ruckus ensued, and the salad day was over.

So, either Project Runway leafy greens on the neck of contestant Korto's corn-yellow gown (top photo above) are mere garnish, or Kushner and I should team up for the program's next season. You may see the mature artist's persistent love for growing things realized by his lyrical 4 Seasons Seasoned (below), a 2004 mosaic mural in the 77^th Street station of the Lexington Avenue subway.

By the way, that reality show planned by Sarah Jessica Parker, the one I cited a while back that would be an art version of Project Runway, is reportedly ready to fly: American Artist has been picked up by Bravo. The question of the hour is the same as ever. Are work and achievement to be judged through creativity or commerce? I suspect that reality, televised and otherwise, has already nailed the answer.

Bash Notes

On Thursday night, July 17, last season's Runway finalist Rami Kashou was, according to every Hollywood gossip site on the Web, set upon outside a WeHo club for no apparent reason and struck in the face with either a beer bottle or martini glass. (A big difference, some would say.) He is "shaken," but happily doing OK. Comment threads have been unusually sweet and supportive, but don't for a moment imagine that at least a few tasteless Runway jokes haven't surfaced: Did the medic drape the bandages? When attacked, did Rami cry "Drape!"

Then we read that the day before (the Wednesday, coincidentally, that Project Runway began again), the boyfriend of Rami's rival and winner Christian Siriano, a Brooklynite named Brad Walsh, was gay-bashed in New York's Soho by a guy driving a truck with a Yuengling beer logo ("America's Oldest Brewery") on it. Walsh writes on his own blog that he's still hurting and trying to find the assailant (Rami's was caught). Maybe Kushner and I should rethink our video ambition.

Numbers

If Mr. Walsh had been heading for a Subway or Blimpie and not been delayed, he would have noticed that the calorie count of his $5 length of food was -- or should have been -- displayed at point of sale. Most, but not all, of Soho's eateries are immune from the new New York City law that requires chains with 15 or more national links to post the damage in a clear and prohibitive manner. This is a first, and I applaud any manifestion of what was once called "truth in menu." Now, when you sin in the Big Apple, you have another way of quantifying the evil.

I am, however, waiting for the city's chastened restaurants to come up with an effective response, perhaps a "calories-per-dollar" contest in which the highest number wins. Makes  sense, doesn't it? "Value" means getting more for your money, a truism more true now than ever and one with which no consumer -- or Project Runway producer or judge -- would dare to disagree. Make those numbers work for you, the moral of the ongoing story goes, and you'll all be winners.

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Now here's an ethical problem, one that applies to the culinary as well as the musical arts. The New York Times recently featured in its Wednesday food section a smooth, workaday article about jerk cooking in the city, along with a couple of someone-else-will-try recipes. Jerk, of course, is no longer exotic, and even if you non-Jamaicans have never eaten anything jerk, you've probably read that it's hot in a spiced-ham rather than tandoori style and, to be real, requires a particular pepper (with the delightful name "Scotch bonnet") and smoke-generating heating source.

Jerk is anywhere Jamaicans are. The wedding that ends In Her Shoes, the book (and film) by my former Philadelphia Inquirer colleague Jennifer Weiner, takes place in that town's Jamaican Jerk Hut on South Street. There, meats are cooked not in a traditional open-field smoker -- as I sampled when I visited the island in the '80s -- but over charcoal in the kitchen, rubbed and bathed first with ginger, thyme, allspice, onions and soy sauce. The Hut's a charming place, hospitable to all. Jerk, by the way, is archetypically local, receptive to personal variation, and equally successful as home cooking, restaurant fare, or ameliorated tourist treat.

But I won't, can't, eat jerk anything until things change in the recipe's island of origin, which has been called, with demonstrably good reason, the most homophobic place on Earth. Jerk simply will not go down, because Jamaica, that cruise-ship lure, that rum-steeped idyllic destination, is a fatal hell-hole for its gay and lesbian citizens -- and a dicey purgatory for queer visitors, too.

A Jamaican father recently called on a mob to lynch his gay son at school -- the mauled teen survived. Ordinary Kingston citizens chased a "batty boy" off a pier -- this one drowned. Police "egged on" a crowd as they stoned and stabbed a gay man to death -- that was in sparkling Montego Bay, seasoned travelers, "the Friendly City."

Those scenes from Jamaican life were reported in Time magazine, and similar stories have surfaced elsewhere, though rarely in mainstream U.S. coverage. Don't imagine that Jamaica's antigay stance is limited to a few benighted pockets: it's the righteous policy of church, state, and tourist board. Frommer's guide to this prime Caribbean destination provides these handy "Tips for Lesbian and Gay Travelers":

Jamaica is the most homophobic island in the Caribbean, with harsh anti-gay laws, even though there's a large local gay population. Many all-inclusive resorts maintain strict no-gay policies. ...Avoid open displays of affection -- such as handholding on the streets -- in Jamaica: You could be assaulted for trying it.

Amazingly, there's a small gay-rights group on the island called J-Flag. Note this telling statement on its Web site: "Although we provide services and network island-wide, our office is located in Kingston, Jamaica's Capital and largest city. Due to the potential for violent retribution, we cannot publish the exact location." The group's cofounder, Brian Williamson, was murdered in 2004.

So how many mob bashings equal the alluring tang of a jerk-chicken thigh or the powerful vegetal lift of a cup of hand-picked-bean Blue Mountain coffee? That's the information I need to see in a food or travel article's service box.

The humanist in me is hopeful that such mounting tales of viciousness must disgust, if not surprise, at least a few Jamaicans, on the island and off. Sadly, most of these hypothetical folks are silent, or underdog-defensive (just read any online comment-thread after the latest example of Jamaican antigay hysteria is brought to task). But that's not my point.

The whole nation of Jamaica, a proud state that freed itself of slavery and vile colonial rule, is a political and economic mess. So why should the genius of a culture -- yes, a fully developed and still transforming recipe-method such as jerk is a perfectly valid, if collective, form of genius -- have to pay for that same culture's momentary evil and madness? Do we reject sushi because of Pearl Harbor? We probably would have then, were it popular stateside (depending upon who the "we" was). I'm not certain that's the right thing to do: you may recall what happened a few years back to "French" fries in patriotic U.S. eateries when France declined to send troups to Iraq.

But gay Jamaicans too should be able to embrace their own home's cultural genius. You can't throw every baby out with the bathwater.

Murder Music

Cultural consumers have more experience with the "Leni" (Riefenstahl) problem raised by Jamaican reggae and dancehall, but still haven't found a solution that loves the art part and rejects the whole. Do we merely sift out the worst of the haters, Buju Banton, Beenie Man and their like, who wrote and sang that gay men must die ("haffi dead")? That's not good enough, because they aren't alone. And those particular exemplars of authentic musical culture are still not off the hook, no matter how many agents and labels urged them to sign the Reggae Compassionate Act, promising to abjure gay attacks, so they could perform in Europe and the U.S. without sponsors pulling out. (Reportedly, Banton signed last year and then denied that he had signed.)

There is a difference, certainly, between lyrics and lunch: A meal of jerk chicken and rice and peas never incited anyone to go out and look for a man to murder. Yet all the arts have motive power, and the strength and beauty of cooking derives partly -- maybe mostly -- from its give-and-take assertion of creativity, identity, pride. A straightforward newspaper feature about a cultural signature such as jerk leaves out a crucial ingredient if it ignores its subject's context and ultimate meaning: how it really "tastes."

Scotch bonnet peppers, among the world's most fiery, now bring two kinds of tears to my eyes. What would it take to make it just one?

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So, ladies and gents and everyone in between, why has it taken so long to have a pissy little gay wedding on network television? Yes, we're in California, not Massachusetts, so no wedding, just wedding simulacrum. Maybe, soon, they'll wake me in the nursing home: "Hey, Jeff, they're about to have a real gay wedding, and each and every parent is actually in the mosque."  No idea, but I'm relieved the justice system finally caught up with ABC-TV. I've always depended upon what William Blake once wrote: "What is now proved was once only imagin'd" -- even if imagin'd on Brothers and Sisters.

When that happens, I'll take Guess it's time to take a piece of my piece of chocolate donut out of the freezer.