In Which Our Hero's Faith Continues, Some Tasty Victuals are Recollected and Still More Tasty Victuals are Collected For Future Ingestion

It has been a little over a week since I recounted my alimentary epiphany, and I am pleased to report that its mandate to eat healthier and more healthfully grown foods has not subsequently weakened. This week the missus and I ate not just healthily but also quite well: grilled lamb andouille sausage with sautéed chard and a basmati rice pilaf; grilled pork chops with pan-roasted potatoes, steamed asparagus, and a delicious salad; coq au vin and spaghetti dressed with sautéed chard, olives, garlic, and plenty of my favorite olive oil; a Trader Joe's frozen pizza (mundane, sure, but quite tasty, truth be told); and plenty of leftovers. Much of what I prepared (including all the meat) was locally and sustainably raised, and much of the rest was organically grown. It was a good week in the kitchen.

I was all set to return to the Carrboro Farmer's Market yesterday to lay in another week's worth of meat products plus whatever produce and cheeses looked good, but alas fate had other plans for me. On Friday night the world-famous juggling troupe The Flying Karamazov Brothers performed in Garner, NC, a good--no, check that, lousy--hour's drive from my home. My college buddy and longtime bandmate Mark is an FKB, so of course the missus and I went to see the show and to hang out with Mark until all hours of the night. The farmer's market closes at 12 and is picked clean well before that hour, so I opted for sleep and allowed that window of opportunity slam shut. Although it made me feel bad to neglect a resolution so recently made, getting up at 9 would have made me feel much, much worse.

Fortunately there was another option: Carrboro's Weaver Street Market Cooperative, which carries a fine assortment of locally and sustainably grown produce and meats. I've been vaguely aware of this store for many years but have rarely set foot in it, as I've always found it a bit off-putting. The clientele mostly look like the sort of people you see at a Sufjan Stevens show: wispy folk with serpentine postures and facial expressions that seem to say "Where did I leave that hackysack?" Despite being surrounded by so much healthy food, they do not look at all healthy. Peppered among the young ectomorphs are equally ectomoprhic academic types, pony-tailed and batiked and more stern than dreamy in demeanor. Perhaps this is what will happen to the Sufjan fans when they grow up.

Customer base aside, Weaver Street is a paradise for folks seeking a healthier diet. The produce is much more robust than it is at the similarly positioned Whole Foods Market up the way in Chapel Hill, and my first impression is that it's much more reasonably priced. Plus, it's pretty much all organic; no having to choose between organic and agrindustrial here. Here's what I scored:

1 beautiful fennel bulb, $2.29 (Whole Foods fennel tends to be pretty sickly and dessicated)
3 portabella caps, $3.71
I large and lovely bunch of red chard, $2.79
2/3 pound green beans, $1.32
2.25 pounds red potatoes, $3.12
1.5 pounds yellow onion, $1.45
1 pound bag of Bhutanese red rice $3.79 (exotic and ostensibly pricey, but I'll get 6 to 10 servings from it so it's really not that bad)
1/2 gallon locally produced low-fat milk $2.89 (plus a hefty $1.20 deposit on the bottle)
1 French bread, baked on premises $2.00
1 ciabatta to eat on the way home $0.75
two substantial locally raised smoked pork chops, $7.20
1 whole locally raised chicken, $6.88

I figure I've got 3 or 4 dinners for two there with some leftovers to boot, all for a little over $40.00. Yeah, the conventional grocery store is cheaper, but not so terribly much so. And for now at least, the way I'm shopping really has me looking forward to another good week in the kitchen. I'll keep you posted.

In Which Our Hero Gets Religion, and an Apology is Proffered

A while back--two weeks ago, to be exact--I was the sort to scoff at the notion of organic farming, sustainable farming, humane farming, and a whole bunch of other good things that I thought of collectively as "hippie sh!t." I would look at the organic carrots at the Whole Foods, which often cost twice what conventional carrots cost, and laugh that I'd buy the inorganic carrots--you know, the ones made of petrochemicals, I joked--instead. Hahaha. It's funny because it's true. Except it's not funny, and I didn't know how true it was when I was making the joke.

That all changed last week, when I finally read The Ominvore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan (I'd bought it over a year ago but managed to dodge it until now), an engrossing book about food production in the United States. Pollan has a gift for taking complex subjects--agribusiness and monocultural growing, large-scale organic farming and smaller-scale sustainable farming, how economics and not nutrition drives food production policy, etc. etc.--and making them both understandable and extremely compelling. Sometimes I forget how a book can change your life. This book reminded me.

It's impossible to summarize this book in such a short space, but the crux of Pollan's argument is this: the way we produce food in this country is unnatural and unhealthy. Instead of rotating crops and promoting diversity to keep farmland healthy, we grow the same crops on the same ground over and over again, depleting the soil so that we must 'replenish' it with artificial fertilizers (these fertilizers are petrochemical-intensive--hence, carrots made of petrochemicals). We subject our food animals to unimaginable cruelty that in turn makes them susceptible to all sorts of horrible diseases in order to produce cheap meat of dubious quality. The processes required for such large-scale crop and animal harvesting are tremendously damaging to the environment. Occasionally they are tremendously damaging to us as well (e.g. mad cow disease), not even taking into account the effects of living in an increasingly toxic environment.

Pollan spends a good deal of time on the subject of food animals and the ways they are treated by various types of producers. He is a devoted carnivore, as am I, and his experiences with our nation's Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) do not cure him of that. They do, however, cure him of the desire to eat CAFO-produced meat ever again, an effect his book probably has on most readers, myself included. I won't disgust you with the details, but I will warn you that after you read this book you will likely always feel a little queasy whenever you look at a Tyson chicken or a large-scale produced pork loin. Man has been eating animals for millennia, and I still don't see anything wrong with that. We only started torturing them in the last century, though, and that's wrong. And we do it just to save a dollar or two on the pound.

Admittedly, that sounds like a substantial savings, but Pollan argues convincingly that these savings are illusory. Hidden in the low prices are the tax breaks to large producers that we pay for, the price subsidies we pay for, the cleanup of the singular forms of pollution that industrial farming produces that we pay for, etc. Calculate the true cost of that pound of chicken into its retail price and suddenly it's not the bargain it appears to be.

Pollan contrasts the agribusiness model with both the large-scale organic industry (better but hardly perfect) and smaller local sustainable growth producers. 'Sustainable growth' means doing all the things farmers have done throughout the millennia before agribusiness: rotating crops to maintain fertility, managing pastures, grazing feed animals… basically, creating and managing a complete ecosystem that, because of its thoroughness, doesn't require the annual purchase of seed, insecticides, chemical fertilizers, etc. etc. It's not easy work but the sustainable farmers Pollan profiles are committed to the principle of sustainability, and they sound pretty darn fulfilled in their work.

But is their food any good? This morning I decided to put my money where my head has been. I visited the Carrborro Farmers' Market--an emporium of organic and sustainably produced local food--to see what I could scrounge up for tonight's dinner. January in North Carolina means slim pickings for produce but I did manage to find a lovely bunch of red chard ($2.50) and a beautiful head of purple cauliflower (just under $2). Meat selections were much more plentiful. For tonight's dinner, I bought a fresh ham steak (when it comes to ham, the term 'fresh' designates uncured and unsmoked) about an inch thick (1.5 pounds, $10). At $15, my haul seemed a little pricey for a home-cooked meal for two, but I decided to put that thought on hold until after the meal was done.

I prepared the food pretty simply. The ham steak was frozen, so I had to defrost it. I then brined it for a few hours in a saline solution spiked with some peppercorns and a splash of fruit juice (peach nectar, to be precise) to add a touch of sweetness. When it came time to cook, I rinsed the steak, seasoned it lightly, and threw it on a hot grill. About 4 minutes per side did the trick; it was crispy and singed on the edges, cooked firm through but not overdone.

I diced some onion and smashed a garlic clove and sautéed it all in olive oil, then added the washed and chopped chard and a pinch of salt, covered it, and let it cook down (5-6 minutes). I cut the purple cauliflower into florets, tossed them with a little salt and olive oil, and roasted them in a 460-degree oven for 15 minutes. And that was it, a simple but conceptually appetizing dinner.

And good news--it tasted as good as it had in my mind's mouth. I won't even pretend I can distinguish between the actual taste of the food and the way that my preconceptions of how much 'better' this food was than agribusiness food colored my judgment. For whatever reason, the ham steak was the tastiest piece of pork I've had in a long, long time, and the vegetables seemed to have a more intense and enjoyable flavor than I've come to expect from a serving of veggies. It was all very good. We even had leftovers, meaning that $15 price tag isn't so terribly high after all.

OK, I'm sold. Good thing, too--I've got some lamb andouille sausage and some beautiful pork chops I bought today to cook later this week. I'm all out of farmer's market produce but I can get some of the organic stuff at the local Trader Joe's or Whole Foods. I'll be sure to take my NPR tote bag with me so that I don't have to waste any plastic bags. Dear God, is there a pair of Birkenstocks with my name on them out there somewhere? Peace, man.

PS That apology mentioned in the subject heading belongs to my sister, who has been preaching the virtues of organic and sustainable farming to me for a long, long time. In response, I have joked, scoffed, and parried, but I haven't until now given the subject serious thought. Sis, you were right and I was wrong. I'll even be joining a CSA this year, as you have suggested I do for so many years now. I apologize.

Now let us never speak of this again. :-)

Cheese is Crizal™ Mighty!!!

I have traditionally been a frugal consumer of eyewear. Since college I've favored those little round wire frames that some refer to as 'granny glasses' but which I've always thought of as 'John Lennon glasses.' They're cheap, they're practical, and they look good to me. The worst you can say about them is that they are inconspicuous, which is hardly a demerit in the eyewear universe. Grandpa glasses, on the other hand--those giant plastic frames that somehow make all old men look like cartoon turtles--are another story entirely.

My wife thinks I can do better, and has reminded me of this point often enough that, last time around, I decided to relent and buy something 'fashionable,' even though doing so would surely double the cost of a product I hardly ever even see. She reminded me that she has to look at me and my glasses all the time, for which there was unfortunately no reasonable rejoinder. And so 'fashionable' glasses for me it would be.

Thus the missus and I went foraging for spectacles the last time we were in New York City. Our wanderings naturally led us to SoHo, for that is where one is most likely to find the most expensive eyeglass frames in this or any neighboring solar system. It took a while to find a pair I liked. The first pairs I tried on were at a distinct disadvantage: I would find out what they cost and then put them on, only to discover that my reaction to the price had turned my skin a shade of green that did not at all complement the color of the frame. Eventually, though, I grew accustomed to Soho prices, to the point where I could laughingly scoff, "What? These cost only $700? I'll take six pair!!!!" Finally I found a pair I liked and they weren't even that terribly expensive. And, truth be told, they looked pretty darn good on me.

I figured it made most sense to have the lenses installed back in my hometown of Durham, NC, just in case there were any problems that required repair or replacement. Having been broken of my eyeglass frugality, I was now intent on spending 'good money' to finish the job. I identified a tony eyewear boutique and headed off to discharge my business. I already had a prescription, so all that was left to do was to deliver the frames, make a deposit, and await the results of this shoppe's anticipated fine work.

Unfortunately, it wasn't quite so simple. The woman working in the shoppe would not allow me to leave until I'd made a seemingly endless series of choices about my lenses. Did I want the lenses tapered on the sides so that I would not look like I was in need of special education? Yes. Did I want lenses that turned dark in the sunlight, clear in the dark, and rose-colored when I was feeling a little gloomy? No. Did I want scratchproof coating? No, I like my glasses really scratched up. That's a joke! Yes, please, scratchproof coating. How about Crizal™ anti-glare coating? Feeling extravagant, I assented.

At this point, I detected just the slightest look of concern on the woman's face. I now speculate that she must have been new to her job and had not yet learned never to cue a customer who has made a terrible, terrible mistake. Alas, her error did not register profoundly enough with me, and soon the inquiry continued. I left her with a ridiculous amount of money as a deposit that, sad to say, covered only half the cost of the lenses, and went on my way.

But I was pretty darn pleased with the glasses when they were ready just a few days later, and after trying them on I was quite happy to bail them out, even though it meant a diet of rice and beans for the rest of the month. I enjoyed them all that first day. Right up to the point, that is, that it came time to clean them. The optometrist had supplied me with a special Crizal™ cloth specifically designed for cleaning Crizal™-coated lenses, which made me feel very special indeed. Out came the special cloth. Rub, rub, rub. Hmm. Jeez, these lenses are still pretty dirty. Rub, rub, rub. No, still not quite clean. Rub, rub, rub. Rub, rub, rub, rub. Rubrubrubrub. Rubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrubrub!!!!!! Sigh.

OK, so here's the thing. The special Crizal™ cloth actually does a pretty good job of removing dirt and dust. What it isn't so good at is removing grease, such as might spatter on your glasses, say, when you sauté something, as I am wont to do. Or, if you are human, such as you might excrete as one of the regular biological processes that keep you alive. The cloth does an excellent job of moving that grease around, sometimes relocating it in more or less the same shape elsewhere on the lens, other times smearing it in a delicate veneer across the entire lens, but always, always, always leaving it on the lens.

Thanks to Crizal™, I do not see glare. I do, however, constantly see rainbows. Also, there are times when the world through my glasses looks like a goddamn Monet; a pleasingly glare-free Monet, to be sure, but a Monet nonetheless. I can only imagine that no one at the Crizal™ company has ever been forced to wear Crizal™-coated lenses, because the evil required to knowingly market so profoundly defective a product is too terrible to contemplate. Next thing you'll tell me is that there are folks out there who would start a war based on false pretenses.

I'd like to say I've learned a valuable lesson from this experience, but the lessons here are either too specific ("Don't by Crizal™-coated lenses!") or too trite and obvious ("Let the buyer beware!"). I have learned exactly nothing other than the fact that when you have made a costly mistake, you no longer have enough money left to undo that mistake. I suppose I could have taken the lenses back and demanded satisfaction, but I am unfortunately a little slow witted, and it took quite a while before I was certain of the cause of my consternation. I figured somehow--mysteriously, inexplicably--that my inability to clean my glasses was somehow my fault. That sounds dumb, you say? Are you surprised? I'M THE IDIOT WHO BOUGHT CRIZAL™-COATED LENSES!!!!!

PS As requested by Dave P, a photo of myself in the lovely but smeary glasses. Note my slightly confused look, the result of not being able to see so terribly well.

Thought For The Day

Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead.
Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow.
Do not walk behind me for a while, then walk ahead of me, then go wandering off in every which direction, for I may get confused.
Just walk along beside me, so I can punch you in the arm if I have to.

Only 14 minutes, 57 seconds remaining...

If you watched The Daily Show last night, you saw Demetri Martin do a bit on the SATs. If you were watching carefully, you saw the home page for Princeton Review podcasts flash on screen for a full three seconds! During which time, if you were really paying attention, you would have seen the title of the podcast I create for the Princeton Review right up there on national television!

Don't believe me? Hit The Daily Show link above and scroll down through the videos until you find the title Martin-The SAT. Click it and let the video stream begin! My moment of fame arrives at 1:08 and lasts clear through 1:10.

I have dropped Mr. Martin the appropriate thank you note via his my space page. I promised him I would mention him next time I'm on television, which seems only fair.

Is this the beginning of a Vocab Minute media blitz? My Warholian clock is ticking.

The Thalia and Popeye

One of the great blessings of attending college in New York City was, well, being a college student in New York City. College can be overwhelming and college students are not especially well equipped with perspective, so it's nice to be somewhere that encourages you to see your problems in their proper scale. Living in a city of 8 million gets the job done (especially when so many of those 8 million clearly have problems bigger than a late term paper).

New York in the early 1980s offered innumerable escapes from the college grind. My favorite was a dumpy movie theater called The Thalia, located on 95th Street just west of Broadway. The Thalia was a repertory revival house, meaning that it showed a different double feature of old movies almost every night of the week (occasionally a popular feature would run for two days). It was an extraordinarily poorly constructed space. The front half of the auditorium sloped away from the screen, meaning that someone sitting in this section had to be significantly taller than the person in front of him to have an unobstructed view. The seating sloped along a more conventional trajectory in the back half of the auditorium, which was also the smoking section. This is where I always sat. The whole place couldn't have seated more than 150. Ancient, decrepit, wired at the turn of the century, and with only one narrow exit, it was the sort of place you'd see illustrated in the dictionary next to the word 'firetrap.'

The Thalia is where I received my extracurricular education. I became something of a movie nut (I probably would have called myself a cinefile then, between puffs off a clove cigarette—ugh!), with a special affinity for pretentious foreign films, American film noir, silent comedies, and cartoons. In this last category I was especially lucky, as The Thalia regularly ran three-hour cartoon programs, all programmed by Greg Ford, a film historian who obviously knew his stuff. Programs were organized by main character, film studio, or theme (e.g. "Cartoonal Knowledge" for racy cartoons; there were also nights of appallingly racist cartoons, e.g. "Inky and the Mynah Bird"). A copy of Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic provided all the historical background necessary to achieve total cartoon geekdom.

It was during one of Ford's programs that I first realized the genius of Popeye. Like most folks my age, I'd grown up watching Popeye cartoons on television, but what I'd seen was a hodgepodge of 70 years of Popeye, most of them bland, unimaginative made-for-television cartoons. Ford showed only the cartoons created by the Fleischer Brothers Studio, the ones that begin with the title credits shown between slamming doors on a ship's deck. They are some of the best cartoons ever made, crammed to bursting with surreal gags, mumbled profanities, and a truly wonderful cast of lowlife characters: a one-eyed sailor, his weird beanpole girlfriend whom everyone inexplicably finds attractive, a big fat sociopath whom the beanpole inexplicably finds attractive, a hamburger-devouring mooch… it's a truly dysfunctional society, but one that makes complete sense, and is completely engaging, when taken on its own terms.

These cartoons made such an impression on me that, a decade after last seeing them regularly at The Thalia, I wrote a song about them:

If my life was a cartoon
I'd want to be Popeye the Sailor
I'd have a damsel in distress
And I would never fail her

I'd mutter something clever
Then I'd knock Bluto cold
I'd be a one-eyed mumbling crazy thug
With a heart of gold

And all my problems would be solved
Because I eat my greens
My life it would be measured out
In well-constructed scenes

I'd have drama without tragedy
Anger without pain
Love without loneliness
Hey, I would not complain

But I am what I am
And that's all I am
That's all I can stand
'Cause I can't stand no more

As a result of a rights dispute between various owners of different Popeye licenses, these cartoons existed in copyright limbo, with only a few that had crept into the public domain receiving DVD releases. The warring parties finally settled their differences last year, and today their truce bore its first fruit:Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938, vol. 1, a four-disc collection of the first 60 Fleischer Brothers Popeye cartoons, in chronological order. It's a beautiful set with lots of great extras (lots of documentaries, a good sampling of Fleischer Brothers silents, including a few of their wonderful "Out of the Inkwell" cartoons); the folks at Warner Brothers should look at this set and hang their heads in shame, as it is everything their animation collections should be but aren't. I spent a good part of today reacquainting myself with these cartoons and I'm very pleased to report that they are at least as good as I remember. Go get it, you won't be sorry. You might want to prescreen it for your kids, though, as they are incredibly violent and not infrequently racist. But hey, we saw them when we were kids and they probably didn't do us much harm.

Right?

Score One For Corporate America

I recently did something incredibly stupid, as detailed in the letter below. The letter is pretty self-explanatory; all you need to know in addition is that the CD box set in question has those annoying built-in CD holders that cannot be separated from the box set and which are invariably made of a very hard plastic that breaks too easily.

To: Dr.Rhino@rhino.com
Subject: Help Me, I Am an Idiot
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 2:38 PM

Dear Dr. Rhino:

I am writing to seek your help, because I am an idiot.

I recently--as in yesterday --received as a gift Rhino's "Have A Nice Decade" box set. Like all your products, it is great and I love it.

Unfortunately, because I am an idiot, I have done something incredibly idiotic. One of the teeth of one of the CD holders in the box set was damaged, and as a result one of the discs kept falling out. I attempted to repair the wobbly tooth with Krazy Glue. This was idiotic move number 1, and of course It did not work. Idiotic move number 2 was failing to move the discs far, far away from the area to which I was attempting this repair. This is how I got Krazy Glue on the playing surfaces of discs 1 and 2, and this is why they no longer play.

I understand that you are under no obligation whatsoever to replace these discs. However, I am a loyal Rhino customer and a full-fledged idiot, so I figured I would write you to beg mercy. Is there any way I can replace these two discs without having to purchase the complete box set again? If you could help me with this I would be forever in your debt and would promise to do my best to avoid future Rhino-impacting acts of idiocy on my part.

Sincerely,

Tom Meltzer, idiot

The response was three weeks in coming but was, ultimately, edifying:

Dear Tom,

Please send your damaged discs to:

Rhino Customer Service
Attn. Mac Dunlop
3400 West Olive Ave. 5th Floor
Burbank, CA 91505

We'll send you replacements. Please include your mailing address and a copy of your email (or a note detailing your request). Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery.

Dr. Rhino

Kudos to Rhino Records. Extra credit for resisting the temptation to address me as "Tom Meltzer, idiot."

A Little Knowledge...

I was never any good at science in school. I took the bare minimum number of classes required to graduate high school, then did the same in college. And, I did my best to retain none of what little I was supposed to learn.

Recently this has begun to feel like a shortcoming, which is why I decided to read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, a book written for science morons such as myself. I haven't learned much from it, but what I have learned has me wishing I hadn't. In fact, it has me huddled in a fetal position in the corner of my office.

Here's what I've learned: Our solar system consists of one star, along with an ever-changing number of planets, some moons, and a whole bunch of space detritus. It is part of a galaxy called the Milky Way, which consists of somewhere between 200 and 400 billion stars. Billion. That is not a typo. Billion. See? Not a typo.

The Milky Way is one of approximately 140 billion galaxies which, I assume, are more or less the same size as the Milky Way, give or take a few hundred thousand light years. Once again, billion. 140 billion, by the way, is the number of frozen peas it would take to fill Carnegie Hall from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Just in case you were wondering about that.

What this means is not only are we entirely insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things, but also that our feeble minds are completely incapable of truly comprehending just how insignificant we are.

I'm going to put the book down now and go watch some Spongebob Squarepants.

The Four Stages of a Man

Beatles music is the first music I remember hearing. Meet the Beatles, Something New, and Hard Day's Night all got heavy play in our house when I was just a toddler; it was my musical mother's milk. I remember singing "I Don't Want to Spoil The Party" to myself as I walked to elementary school, entirely oblivious to the song's emotive meaning but deeply in love with the melody, the harmonies, and the guitars. Over the years, Beatle music has remained a constant in my life. Other music climbs up and down the mental hit parade, but there's always a Beatles song running through my head at some time during the day.

When I was a little kid, Ringo--loveable, cute, devil-may-care Ringo--was my favorite. He was always happy, never took things too seriously, just glad to be part of the gang.

Adolescence was all about John, angry and angsty, irreverent and sarcastic, taking the world so damn seriously. There was a time in my life when Plastic Ono Band seemed the pinnacle achievement of Western art. I was a little depressed at the time.

Adulthood is for Paul. Paul is a genius, pure and simple. Even his crap floors me, because it reveals an understanding of music so far beyond anything I could ever hope for for myself. Fabulous singer, brilliant bassist, stellar guitarist (that's him playing the frantic solo on "Taxman"), and seemingly a nice fellow to boot. Someone to admire, and to aspire to.

Dotage will be devoted to George. Quiet, underappreciated, a tad petulant but ultimately at peace with the world--what better way to prepare for checking out? As George reminded us in his masterwork, all things must pass.

As La Rosita Goes, So Goes Morningside Heights

I arrived on Manhattan's Morningside Heights 27 years ago, a Baltimore suburbanite with little experience of urban living. I immediately fell in love with the place, embracing its grunginess with much enthusiasm. And it was grungy. My apartment on 109th and Amsterdam got hot water maybe 2 hours a day; sometimes there was no running water at all. I was mugged three times in my first five years in the city. A drug deal on the corner a few yards from my front door culminated in one fellow shooting another in the face. Reports that yet another landlord had torched a building in order to rid himself of pesky rent-control tenants and rebuild as a condo were met with a shrug more appropriate to a 'dog bites man' news story. I have several friends who lost their apartments in just that way, in fact.

27 years later, the grunge is gone. There are now two Starbucks between 110th and 116th Street on Broadway. Fancy grocery stores and drug emporiums are ubiquitous, as are surprisingly upscale restaurants. Gone is the Mill Luncheonette, where Rene served up breakfast 24/7 and threatened to charge you extra for 'crunchy eggs' if you complained about the bits of shell in your food; Ta-Kome, home of the soggiest hero in creation and sole vendors of Canadian Ace, a beer that came in a gallon jug, cost under $1, and gave you a headache the minute you opened the bottle; the Marlin Bar, where a local alcoholic cleared bottles from tables for an occasional drink and where I first heard the immortal dictum "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here"; Ben and Ralph's Tobacco and Newsstand, domain of two of the grumpiest old farts who ever lived and the place where I first heard the immortal dictum "Hey! This ain't a library! Buy it or get out!!!"; and the Blue Rose, a firetrap at which my band played every other Thursday (after it closed, we discovered that the entire bar was running off a single extension cord that ran out the back window, up the airshaft, and into the owner's apartment).

So it seemed fitting that my favorite Morningside Heights restaurant shut down during the week I was visiting New York. La Rosita was a Cuban restaurant that started as a hole in the wall, two parallel counters with barely enough space between to wedge yourself into your seat; it later moved a block south and expanded to include tables. It was here I first discovered the delights of café con leche, chicharrones de pollo (bits of chicken deep fried, then rolled in garlic), yellow rice and black beans, sweet plantains, Cubano sandwiches, and salads that consisted of nothing more than shredded lettuce, a slice of tomato, and a wedge of lemon. It was cheap, it was filling, it was damn good, and it was nothing like anything I'd ever eaten growing up in Pikesville, MD.

La Rosita's lease came up at the end of 2006 and the building owner told them the new rent would be $18,000 per month. You have to sell a lot of rice and beans to pay a bill like that. And so La Rosita is no more. La Rosita closed with a series of parties featuring live music; my good buddy Mark Ettinger, his daughter Kate, and I performed a set on the restaurant's penultimate night, several hours after I enjoyed my last La Rosita Cubano Especial with fried plantains and a mango batido. I composed a song especially for the show:

The La Rosita Song

Perdon, senor, no hablo Espanol
Pero quiero una plata de frijol-es
Y arroz amarillo y tostones
Y pollo frito; si, los chicharrones!

Par tres chuletas cantare el heptacordo
Now you know why my friends call me Gordo
And also why they call my wife Gordita
Because we take our meals at La Rosita!

The missus and I finished the night at Le Monde, a spiffy and lovely French restaurant on Broadway and 112th Street. We split a bottle of wine and had some late-night snacks and reminisced about what we miss about NYC, and what we don't, and I looked out the window and tried to remember what Morningside Heights looked like when I was a college kid. I couldn't remember what the Le Monde space used to be--a laundromat? a hardware store?--but it sure didn't look like this place, with its gorgeous wood columns and restored hammered tin ceiling and ultra-thin waiters and waitresses. I felt vaguely uneasy without knowing exactly why. This Morningside Heights certainly fits my current lifestyle better than the one on which I first arrived. I should welcome these changes, right?

When I got back home to Durham, NC, a new issue of the New Yorker was waiting for me. The first Talk of the Town piece nicely articulated the uneasiness I was feeling:

[There's a growing sense that] the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

Another soulful NYC venue has done bit the dust. RIP La Rosita. You guys decide to relocate, we sure could use you here in Durham.
photo shamelessly borrowed from Hugh Siegel

Somewhat remarkable moments (part 1 of a series)

I used to post this blog at myspace.com. I generally travel light, but I've decided to bring a few of the best posts of the last nine months along with me. Over the next week or so I'll be posting selections from The Best of Man of Constant Leisure.

Not long after we arrived in Durham, NC, the local free alternative weekly ran a contest that asked readers to write haikus expressing their desire to sumo wrestle. The prize awarded the two best submissions: the privilege of sumo wrestling between the 6th and 7th innings of an upcoming Durham Bulls game. Those unfamiliar with the game of baseball may not know that sumo wrestling is integral to the pagentry of the contest, as too are Ants in the Pants/Termites in the Trousers, Baby Buggy Derby and Wool E. Bull Fires T-Shirts Out of a Giant Hot Dog and into the Stands. At least they are in Durham, NC.

I enjoy a good haiku as much as the next fellow, so I immediately set pencil to paper and composed the following:

My bland, pudgy frame
Shrouds a feral endomorph
Aching to sumo

This was deemed one of the two best haikus submitted, and so it was that I suited up and tangled with another bespectacled, underexercised, typical-reader-of-free-weekly-alternative-newspapers-and-occasional-haiku-writer guy like myself, whom I dispatched two falls to one. The best part of the event was when the on-field announcer read the two winning haikus over the PA. You could actually hear the sound of 5,000 people scratching their heads simultaneously when he read my entry. None of us, myself included, was entirely sure how to pronounce feral.

Here I am on that night of glory. This photo was taken before the bout, hence the intimidating grimace.


photo by the missus

9/11

I lived in New York City for 20 years. When I lived there, I had this recurring nightmare. It started with the air growing electric and people starting to panic. Then I would turn to look at a clock that was running quickly backwards to midnight. I would usually wake up in a sweat just before the clock struck 12, which I somehow knew meant that a nuke was about to be dropped in midtown. Occasionally the dream would last long enough for me to see the mushroom cloud.

I suspect most New Yorkers have some version of this dream. They know that their hometown has a big bull's eye on it, and they've known it since long before 9/11. It's part of daily life there, part of what makes the place insane and wonderful. There's something empowering in knowing that you live in a place so important that it--along with Washington DC--is the place our enemies would like to hit most. There's also something ridiculously stressful about it.

That stressfulness is part of what compelled me and Lisa to leave New York in 1999. We were ready to live in a place that was simply a great place to live; we didn't have to be at the center of the cultural universe any more, so it was time for us to cede our spot to someone hungrier for all that the city has to offer. We left a lot of good friends behind, and that was probably the hardest part of leaving.

One of those friends--Lisa's closest--was visiting us in North Carolina on September 11, 2001. That day was a blur, a combination of short spurts of frenzied activity (trying to reach friends and family in the city, rebooking Lisa's friend's trip back to NYC--I even got a call in to work that morning and had an editor describe the scene from her Varrick Street office window in the West Village) with long, dumbfounded stretches in front of the television, watching the crash and the collapses replayed over and over.

By late afternoon we'd made all the calls that were going to get through (not many) and watched as much news as we could stand, so we headed over to our favorite barbecue place for a meal and a break. It was a strange experience. The restaurant was just going about its business as usual: the radio was playing music in the background, folks were eating and laughing… it could have been any day of the year. Americans have made a big show of rallying behind New York and declaring their solidarity with the city since that day, but on 9/11 I got a real sense of how most of the rest of the country views New York City. To them it's practically a foreign location, a city whose allure is incomprehensible and whose misfortunes are remote from their daily lives. Carolinians were concerned and compassionate on 9/11--one of my neighbors, bless her, brought by some homemade muffins to console us on what she knew was an especially trying day--but there was also a general attitude of “That's the sort of thing that could never happen here, and that's why I'm glad I live here and why I'd never live there!”

I realized that day that there's a part of me that thinks exactly like a Carolinian, that you'd have to be nuts to want to live in a place like that. New York City is ridiculously expensive and it smells like baked piss in the summer and in the winter the wind cuts right through you and the people are not exactly what you'd call friendly and you take your life in your hands whenever you cross a street or drive a car or entrust your safety to a taxicab driver…. and on top of all that, some very bad people would like to blow it to smithereens. And still, Lisa and I miss New York a lot. We miss our friends and the long walks through Manhattan and the incredible restaurants and shops and the museums and the parks and the awesome energy of the place and the people who overfill it. There'll always be a part of me that considers New York City home; I lived there too long and have too many close friends there for that to ever change. If we each made six figures, maybe we'd think about moving back.

Then again, I haven't had that nightmare since we left. So maybe not.