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At this unsure moment, sex doesn't seem to be on everyone's lips. A decade ago, the bodies politic were forever getting it on, at least in the then-pulsating media and groovy groves of academe.

But now the topic has cooled to family-room temperature. Of course, I'm not sure about actual coital statistics -- so this could be a New York Times trend story. It's like when, as a graduate student, I read that hetero anal sex was unusually popular in Europe during the reign of Napoleon. 

So were Empire silhouettes. Any statistical correlation?

Please, historians, where's the ... data?

The wonderful thing about erotic reality is that it rears its ruddy head wherever and whenever it has the chance. So I should have anticipated my initial shock and subsequent delight when, on a random Netflix billet-doux, I saw cinematic drool and lust run rampant in a 1934 pre-Code Paramount feature called Search for Beauty.

That's a nice title, no? It stars Buster Crabbe, well-known even now as a firm aquatic Tarzan, and an unrecognizably blonde Ida Lupino. The movie proposed a contest to choose the most athletic specimens from gymnastic Anglo places such as Scotland and South Africa, and it was in fact a "real" contest -- in which 19-year-old Ann Sheridan won a part, a contract, a life.

Here's the deal. The movie has a scene in which hunky guys show their bare butts. What?!? The gluteal exposure adds nothing to character or plot development, and neither George Cukor nor Mitchell Leisen directed. Towels snap; flesh quivers; it all takes eight or nine seconds. At the time, anyone with a quarter could buy a ticket.

 

There's another scene in which the sad drunken actress Gertrude Michael ogles Crabbe's swimsuit bulges through binoculars. (She has a line like: "Oh, Momma, that's for me," but I didn't write it down, I was too surprised.) But the next photo is better than pert dialogue:

 

The actors above, if alive, must now be in their nineties. Film, of course, simulaneously denies and nails mortality. But how can anyone reject the sweet vitality pictured here, all subject to official and personal erasure?

Let's see if our century's video capabilities have any impact on cross-generational joy:

 

A while back, when it was "leaked" that the 600th issue of Archie comics would be a wedding announcement, I myself made a modest proposal. Today, the New York Times published an Archie follow that pulls my facetious wishful thinking into the real -- albeit comic -- world. Sometimes, buried sentences such as these just cry out for attention:

"The polls that I've seen ran about 80/20, Betty over Veronica, with Jughead continually coming in a strong third," said Mr. [Michael E.] Uslan, a comic-book historian, a longtime "Archie" fan and a producer of the big-screen "Batman" films.

 

A strong third! Right after Veronica! My felt-capped head is reeling. Did other poll choices include Veronica's tycoon father, Mr. Lodge? (I always thought he was really Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.) Mr. Lodge seems quite svelte, and rich: a catch.

"What is now proved was once only imagined." Yes, William Blake is almost always right.

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A Modest Lesson in Journalistic Advice

It may be odd for a former restaurant critic to claim that he always thought anyone could cook anything well, but it's true. Cooking in a restaurant shouldn't be rocket science, yet it certainly isn't easy. Silly Hell's Kitchen and TV shows like it are staged exaggerations, but their working assumptions -- of instinct, teamwork, communication -- are all honest kitchen keywords.

This is my preamble to what could seem like a brag, but it just so happened that tonight I made for myself what could be the best pesto on pasta I have ever eaten. It wasn't difficult, not at all. My supper also led me to remember my other "best" pastas, and I will quickly recount them, so you understand that I understand the subjectivity of "best." Critics in all fields worth their salt think about this sort of stuff all the time.

Two pastas in my life have stood out, and both were eaten in Italy in 1984. The one that continues to demand its primacy was served when my guy and I were guests of artist Sol LeWitt at a town luncheon at a castle in Spoleto. Cloudlike pork-filled ravioli were spooned lukewarm to dozens and dozens of guests seated at long wooden tables. The pasta was burnished by a primitive sauce of meat drippings blushed with warm, ripe tomato.

This is when I understood that the word inevitable could be applied to food. I sampled two, then three portions, and would have eaten more, until a persistent photographer pulled me to follow him among the dirty marble columns of our public estate so he could shoot my red-stained shirt and American-hippie hair.

That momentary, almost medieval savor stayed with me for days. The memory of that memory refuses to go.

The other was a dish of golden silken ribbons, which I rolled out thin on a 300-year-old gray-marble table. Artist Betty Woodman cut and boiled this wheaten tissue, then sauced it with local yellow pepper and oil, a salted rabbit alongside. In this Tuscan kitchen, it wasn't the eating as much as the making; everything save the wheat came from within sight -- that view being a Leonardo given, a Renaissance scrim.

Tonight I am in New York's Long Island, facing a vase filled yesterday with two kinds of basil. You touch plants like these and they flood the air with September smell.

So here's what I did. Epicurious.com gave me a recipe that included three basils and parsley, but it didn't seem quite right. Then without thought I opened the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, recipes from the San Francisco restaurant by the underpraised Judy Rodgers, and there I found a sage pesto in which chopped velvety leaves are heated in scant olive oil and macerated with garlic and salt in a mortar.

So I tried the same with my basil, but right away realized that cooking in oil would sink its flagrant flavor, so I added raw leaves to the mix until I felt confident. Then came a toss of raw pignoli, grated Romano, coarse salt, black pepper. Grind, grind, grind into a paste -- I told myself that it's just this sort of labor that results in pleasure.

I boiled Delverde tagliatelle for seven minutes, took a third-cup of the pasta water and threw it in a preheated bowl, then spooned in my pesto. Too much water! So I poured some out, added all the pesto, then the drained pasta and more cheese.

No occasion attached itself to my solitary supper, but as I lifted each forkful, I was drawn into a world of unprecedented superlatives. Each swallow confirmed, then surpassed, the one before. 

I am an average cook, getting better. But my intimacy with flavor has been flourishing since I was a little boy and is now, I am surprised to say, mature and decisive. The critic in me desires so very much that my peak pesto experience could be recounted, repeated, and available to anyone, but the devil behind my ear knows better. It's a victory, that one whispers, to recall your private evening at all. 

Write it down, the critic insists. Pay no attention to him. Write it down.

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Who Would Expect a Video Artist To Be a Hero?

 

Every week's cultural and political news is actually a puzzle to be solved, a jigsaw set with antagonistic pieces. Here's one part of the puzzle that I find heartening, though others may not.

Artnet.com is an auction and art-market site that also has a kind of magazine attached, Late last week the mag lifted part of a story almost verbatim from Catholic New Service. I myself will borrow the beginning of the original:

Pope Benedict XVI has invited hundreds of artists to meet with him in the Vatican in an attempt to rekindle the special historical relationship between faith and art.

More than 500 personalities from the worlds of art, theater, literature and music have been asked to gather with the pope under the legendary Michelangelo frescoes in the Sistine Chapel Nov. 21.

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the meeting was to be the first of many initiatives aimed at bridging the gap that has developed between spirituality and artistic expression over the last century or so.

Though the list of invitees hasn't been released, the story says, the following were named: "Italian film score composer Ennio Morricone, avant-garde theater director Bob Wilson, architect Daniel Libeskind, and Bono, the lead singer of the group U2. American video artist Bill Viola was asked but has already said he won't be able to attend."

So Ennio, Dan, and "Bob" could be ready for Rome, but Bill? Artnet, to its immense internet credit, didn't let that sleeping dog lie. Here's its contribution:

According to a source at James Cohan Gallery, which represents the artist, more than just a scheduling conflict is involved. "Bill Viola doesn't agree with many of the policies put forth by the Vatican and the Catholic Church and this is his reason for declining to participate."

I wish the source had been named, but here's the question: Can the art ever trump the context? Years ago, an extremely talented artist I know -- and an exceedingly fine person -- told me that she made something expressly for the Nixon White House. It was work that actually could be used by the president (I won't say more) and probably was.

Do I still like my friend? Yes, of course. I must have asked why she had agreed to add her beauty to the home of a war-mongering crook, but I can't recall. The look on her face, which I do remember, told me she was confident that her pristine work would remain inviolate. After all, Michelangelo too pleased murderers and thieves.

So come November, Ennio, Dan, "Bob," and so many unnamed others may meet Il Papa right under that heavenly ceiling, painted by a man who loved men.

Wonder if they will. 

 

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And Other Crucial Parts of the Culture Puzzle

I've never been a fan of purely reactive writing. Most of it banishes those errant ideas and images that have no obvious connection to the fake trend or genuine outrage of the moment, but are nonetheless a writer's best reason to write.

It's a puzzle, then, to find novel ways to react "new" to the daily cultural-political flood. Maybe the task can be accomplished in pieces.

Jigsaw Part 1: Bloodsuckers

I'm afraid that our favorite TV "crossover" shows are withering. You know, crossovers, the programs that appeal to all shapes and sizes, the ones that full professors pretend to feel guilty about watching. Every season has 'em, but in television as in life, nothing good remains firm. Everything droops.

There's not even a Dorian Gray attic to imagine on the inevitably jowly Desperate Housewives premiere. Ellen on Idol? So You Still Think You Can Dance? As one of my outraged Facebook friends said when I moaned about the early dismissal of Project Runway's two most creative contestants, "Please, they're being asked to choose from Macy's Wall of Accessories."

So what's wrong with Macy's? My late mother sold makeup in the Herald Square store, once to Joan Crawford -- shades of The Women.

It's a plug. The whole show has been a multipronged plug, but now that all the compensatory elements of surprise and conflict and joy of looking have evaporated, there's no hiding it. Didn't someone know that you can't move a sewing circus out of New York, New York and expect it to retain even faux credibility? Plus, that pathetic model "competition" appended to the main hour is like throwing a sweater set onto the runway after the wedding-dress finale. So I have moved to that favorite-show middle ground where I won't lose sleep if I miss an episode -- which every studio knows is the beginning of the end.

Yes, Project Runway has jumped the sharkskin.

Faithful readers may be able to guess which crossover shows I look forward to on Sunday nights. Yes, they're both about bloodsuckers. True Blood is first-class progressive trash, and you needn't even remember its axiomatic trope that Fangs = Fags to find the bloody soap simultaneously comforting and refreshing. I'm about to grill a New York steak, bleu, to prepare for the season finale. Maybe I'll shed a red tear afterward.

To introduce Mad Men's third season, the promotion machinery fastened on its period wall-ovens and stovetops, ignoring utterly the show's -- paradoxically faulty -- critique of advertising's hold on culture. Why faulty? The luscious vintage sets and outfits ignite the very hunger for product that the storylines half-heartedly propose is merely a symptom of mass manipulation.

How else would I have noticed that the white Eva Zeisel dinnerware used in some Midcentury Manse looked not like the designer's vintage Tomorrow's Classic (genuine article below), but instead were newly bought examples of the smart hybrid sold by Crate & Barrel?

I ate that steak, by the way, on sleek plates designed in the early '50s by Glidden Parker. The same dishes were used by Lucy and Rickey during their first year as America's escape valve -- probably not my own particular plates, but you never can really know where aged objects have been.

Next Piece of the Puzzle: Why Bill Viola Is Mah Hero

 

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The evidence is overwhelming that someone has gathered up the world's editors and placed them on a ship to sail around the globe, over and over, all by themselves, never to dock again.

How would you like to be author of that boat's daily newsletter, or its menus? ("No, I beg to differ, our style requires two Ls in "fillet"!)

Just as bad editing drains the life from a living thing as does as any fanged character on Alan Ball's True Blood, good editing does the opposite. Sometimes that means as little as a kind word to a nervous scribe, or a swashbuckling challenge, or a left-field query, surely between equals.

One editor, of course, is always enough.

Readers may recognize the Man Ray photo above of Margaret Anderson, not the character played by Jane Wyatt on TV's Father Knows Best, but the founder and editor of The Little Review, who with lover and coeditor Jane Heap first published, in serial form, James Joyce's Ulysses. I think it my duty as a typical example of that hybrid monster of journalism, editor-writer, to quote from My Thirty Years' War, Anderson's memoir of time spent with the likes of Stein, Hemingway, H.D., and D.H. Lawrence under lapis lazuli modernist skies. 

Does this editor protest too much, or not enough?

I was having a marveolus time being an editor. I was born to be an editor. I always edit everything. I edit my room at least once a week. Hotels are made for me. I can change a hotel room so thoroughly that even its proprietor doesn't recognize it. I select or reject every house seen from train windows and install myself in all the chosen ones, changing their defects, of course. Life becomes confusing. ... Where haven't I lived?

I edit people's clothes, dressing them infallibly in the right lines. I am capable of becoming so obsessed by the lines of a well-cut coat that its owner thinks I am flirting with him before I've realized he is in the coat. I change everyone's coiffure -- except those that please me -- and these I gaze at with such satisfaction that I become suspect. I edit people's tones of voice, their laughter, their words, I change their gestures, their photographs. I change the books I read, the music I hear. In a passing glance I know a man's sartorial perfections or crimes -- collar, cravat, handkerchief, socks, cut of shoulders, lapels, trousers, placement of waistline, buttons, pockets, quality of material, shoes, walk, manner of carrying stick, angle of hat, contour of hair. It is this incessant, unavoidable observation, this need to distinguish and impose, that has made me an editor. I can't make things. I can only revise what has been made. And it is this eternal revising that has given me my nervous face.

Me, I would delete that last sentence at least, maybe the last three.

(At right, "The Little Review" coeditor Jane Heap. Cut of shoulders seems fine.)

Most everyone old enough to know who Irving Berlin is knows that "Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning" was written in 1917 at Camp Upton in Yaphank, Long Island when the composer was called "Sarge." It became part of a musical revue called Yip! Yip! Yaphank! I know it's not Yip, Yip, Yaphank or Yip, Yap Yaphank, both common mistakes, because the New York Times review of its 1918 run at Manhattan's Century Theatre (on the Upper West Side!) spells it with the three exclamations -- way before the decimation of all our copy desks, so it must be right.

Oh, wait. The songsheet above has it otherwise."We can't run the piece until we're sure of the spelling," the ever-vigilant copy desk says.

By the way, google-eyed (small G) Eddie Cantor put the number over.

Yaphank, a long-settled town of sprawling charm, is the site this weekend (July 10-12) of a hybrid event by my warm, inventive friend Tricia Foley, author of the just-out At Home With Wedgwood: The Art of the Table. She wanted to gather friends, neighbors, and random visitors to her 1820 home and its various satellite sheds on Lily Lake. She also wanted to collect and display dishes, linens, plants, and produce that "objectify" and condense the sort of savvy, local idealism that was once called American utopian, and sell them. She wanted a general store; she wanted a popup store. She hoped that style and fellowship could spend an afternoon together.  

So Trish put together what she calls the New General Store that I would call popup utopia.   

Chef Roy Hardin makes a fine locavore pizza, too.

 

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Lettuce Soup. For vegephiles. To my friends Meredith, Sasha, and Daphne.

If you can score a real head with dirt still on it, or harvest your own -- I know, lets out most of my faithful correspondents -- or just pretend with what's left in the fridge, this recipe will make your lettuce almost sumptuous. And, unless you're an Asian cook, chances are this will the first time you've put heat to this particular leaf.

Ingredients: that lettuce, and it can be a few days gone, because it will still throw its faded lettuceness into the broth; garlic scapes or garlic; any hard grating cheese, Pecorino is fine; pine nuts or leftover almonds from your weekend party; olive oil, the Greeker and stronger the better; vegetable or chicken broth, boxed organic or that high-rent frozen kind, or make your own. Or canned. Or just use water. Cheap is a plus.

Basically, you're wilting the lettuce in a dead-simple broth whose flavor has been "bloomed" by a few spoons of basilless pesto. (Basil trumps lettuce.) You can make the pseudopesto in advance; the oil will leach flavor from the scapes and share itself with the nuts.

Get out your processor, blender, mortar and pestle (yes, I know), or knife, and make a pounded, chopped mash of the nuts, cheese, and scapes or garlic. Whip in the oil. Ingredient ratios can vary, but mix it up so the result is one color, maybe two, not three or four. Taste. If you use scapes and almonds as opposed to garlic and pignoli, the texture may be sandy, but don't fret. Maybe add some salt if the cheese doesn't do that trick already.

Heat a cup of broth per person.

By the way, this is an ideal solipsistic solo lunch. The food will provide the company you need.

Add one tablespoon per person of that partial pesto to the broth, or even a bit more, and watch the oil float out of it like a ghost and the tiny particles of flavoring disseminate. What a pleasing aroma, the magazine would say.

Rip or cut the lettuce into wide strips or pieces at least half the size of the leaf. When the broth is steaming, throw it all in, stir for a minute or two at most, pour into your flattest, widest brimmed bowl, plucking out the just-collapsed greens that remain in the pot, wipe edge (please, neatness counts), and serve immediately with hard-crust bread or at least toast.

Elizabeth David, an English food historian of convincing chic and poet whose poems were recipes, first alerted me to lettuce soup in her earthy and elegant 1960 correction to English food, French Provincial Cooking. She assumed that her readers also read French, which is odd, but she was concerned that her research be understood in an authentic mode. The lettuce recipe, then, was named "Potage du Père Tranquille," after some obscure Capuchin monk who was particularly susceptible to the well-known quieting effects of lettuce. She recommends the dish as "useful for those who have more lettuces in their gardens than they can eat as salads."

That's the advice I remembered. What a curious thing to say, I had thought when I first read it so many years back. Imagine, kitchen gardens in sooty London, Manhattan. And "lettuces," a plural form that meant I would never feel comfortable at the author's table. Her iceberg, I had joked, could only be the one that sank the Titanic.

Yet as I turned through her fruity-voiced, pleasure-filled instructions and learned the many ways to cook an egg and how to discern exactly when the optimal point was reached for a baked yolk or fillet of this or that, I fell in love. Or maybe I should say that in some small but permanent manner, I was overtaken by the writer's senses.

Do you lose your sense, your sense of yourself, when someone's sensibility inhabits your own? No, not at all. Instead, that gentle transfer is the way cooking breeds a certain human sympathy, a "sense" of being at least two people at once.

Elizabeth David's Potage du Père Tranquille, or Lettuce Soup

Two large whole lettuces, or the outside leaves of 3, about 1 pint of mild chicken or veal broth and 1 pint of milk, seasonings, a little butter or cream.

Cut the carefully washed lettuce leaves into fine ribbons; put them in a saucepan with just enough broth to cover them. Let them simmer gently, adding a little more liquid, until they are quite soft. Sieve them, or puree then in the electric blender. Return the purée to the pan, gradually add the rest of the broth and enough milk to make a thin cream. Season with salt if necessary, a lump or two of sugar, and a scrap of nutmeg. Before serving stir in a small lump of butter or a little thick fresh cream. Makes five or six helpings.

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One of the reasons I became what people call a "food writer" was my clam-broth baptism in the behemoth, much-mourned Brooklyn restaurant called Lundy's. That fish palace on Sheepshead Bay coalesced a constellation of 20th-century American values: collective melting-pot festivity (it seated more than 3000), the promise of local unpolluted cornucopia (littlenecks and fluke from right outside, sort of), institutionalized racism (underpaid all-black staff), and working-class strife (a bloody strike).

My personal attachment, however, was identical to that of many Brooklyn-Jewish contemporaries: beaten biscuits hot enough to melt the icy butter-pat, sandy clams, salty bisque -- and a first view of fat, glistening lobster and its pillowy reward inside.

My father, who beamed to see his two boys join him in the pleasures of the table, had one signature selfishness (that I knew of, anyway): Lundy's lobster was his, only his. Mom didn't really enjoy it the way he did, and it was out of bounds -- as was most everything a la carte -- for Leslie and me.

Yes, Leslie. He hated his name, always said that I was the one who should have been Leslie. Sweet.

  We lived in a postwar apartment on Ocean Avenue, close enough to walk as a family on weekends to an early Lundy's meal. When we were led through the cavernous dining rooms, the immense din, the metallic kitchen clatter, the aural and visual evidence of irrevocable mass pleasure made me as happy as I think I have ever been.

Still, for me, growing up meant ordering anything I wanted -- and paying for it myself. Of course, I never did the latter when I was a restaurant critic. 

Anyway, once we brought Grandma. Mary Weinstein -- Mary? Is that a Jewish name? -- kept a kosher home, but my father, the black-sheep favorite of seven, had a trick. He began months before telling her that there was a special Weinstein dietary "dispensation" for lobster. He worked it, and worked it. Just for Weinsteins, he said, grinning his used-car salesman grin. Just for us.

"Here, Mom," and he lifted a chunk of his trayfe fra diavolo on his fork to her mouth. 

Can you imagine the expression of warring impulses on her face? I watched my white-haired grandma sink in luxurious defeat. Her darling Hashel could do that every time.

If they had had websites named "Renegade Kosher" then, "Weinstein" would have been a constant keyword.

So what drew out this piece of delicate nostalgia? I was recently asked to eat and rate the kosher offerings at the insultingly expensive Citi Field and Yankee Stadium by the folks at the Forward. Results? I hope you're a Mets fan, or at least can pretend for just those few hours that I'm your dad and allow yourself an online, adoptive, baseball-park "Weinstein dispensation."

Happy 4th of July,  

 

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June 22 is the 40th anniversary of Judy's death -- like Marilyn's, the result of an overdose that whether accidental or intentional will never be clear. Some think that Garland's gargantuan two-day funeral -- 20,000 fans and friends attended -- was the last straw for the harassed and brutalized drag queens, faggots, dykes and proto-twinks who were pushed, hit, arrested and shoved into a big wagon early the next morning by the cops who raided the Stonewall Inn. What was happening on Christopher Street?

That sinkless, mob-owned, wretched bar was is where our Greenwich Village forebears could meet, flirt, and actually dance. New York police, many on the take, had the upper hand.  

Yes, dear readers, the boys and girls exploded that night and a number of nights after. Part of their neighborhood, and part of a whole city, joined them. Soon, a Gay Liberation Front formed, tired of the brave but docile and mostly ineffective efforts that preceded it.

Was Judy's death the straw that broke this miserable camel's back?

Some say yes, some no. Writer, critic and gay maven David Ehrenstein emailed me to say that "Judy's passing was 'in the air,' " and one of the "Stonewall kids" named Tommy who was there confirmed that to him. Others, noted in my piece for Obit Magazine out today, completely disagree.

As you can read in my salute to Judy and Stonewall, I think the truth, by its very nature fugitive, is somewhere in between. Both riveting spirits reward another look.

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