March 2008 Archives

In the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii, there’s an area of convergence where clockwise currents trap flotsam from traveling elsewhere. An island of floating garbage has formed there, mostly plastic and twice the size of Texas, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s been growing, Blob-like, tenfold every decade since the 1950s. Any nation taking responsibility and cleaning it up seems about as likely as any nation phasing out the plastic grocery bag, a root of the problem. But some are giving it a try.

China, which has a long tradition of cracking down on various animate and inanimate objects, will have developed a collective, government-sanctioned frowny face toward plastic bags starting this June.

Ireland passed a 33-cent-per-plastic bag tax in 2002. “Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent,” writes Elisabeth Rosenthal in a New York Times article published in February. “Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable—on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.”

After considering a per-bag tax, everyone’s favorite city of hippies, San Francisco, is leading the states with a full ban on plastic grocery bags and demanded use of compostable counterparts.

Among retailers, Whole Foods Market will have stopped sacking its expensive groceries in plastic by the end of this month at its stores in the U.S., Canada and the UK. Ikea in the UK has stopped using single-use plastic bags, becoming the first major retailer there to do so. (In the U.S., the chain charges a nickel per disposable bag.)

I’m no big environmentalist and I’m aware the issue spans beyond the uncharted plastic-bag islands of the Pacific—What about garbage bags? Food packaging? The fact that paper bags may be worse for the environment in some ways than plastic? What about our landborne pollution problems?

But I try to do my bit and use a canvas bag now for groceries whenever I can. I see how difficult it will be to ever phase out plastic bags here: they’re a hardwire of most grocery store cashiers’ preprogrammed motions, to schlep food into a polyethylene sack. Even when I announce that I’ll be carrying home my purchases in my own bag, they often peel off a plastic bag without thinking about it.

Oh, yes, another deliciously expensive sandwich, number 63 on the list of Stuff White People Like.¹ This one from Olive’s, a tiny soup, salad and sandwich outpost located in one of my favorite shopping neighborhoods, featured roasted shiitake mushrooms, dried tomatoes, cress and herb ricotta on a crusty/chewy sourdough baguette. The key was that the mushrooms tasted to have been marinated then grilled. Another key was that I was walking around SoHo and starving and there’s always a clot of people sitting outside this place on the famous worn wooden bench, munching on expensive sandwiches. The bench was full and I was headed west, so I ate mine on the go, peeling down the butcher-paper wrapper as I went, as one would eat a banana. It lasted me until West 3rd Street and Sixth, with a detour down Minetta after it started getting messy and I wanted to avoid passers-by having to see me with bits of cheese stuck to my face.

Olive’s

• 120 Prince St.
• (212) 941-0111
• Meal 16 of 52: expensive sandwich ($8).

¹ My feelings for this website can be summed up by this Simpsons bit from the 1994 episode “Homer and Apu”:

Comedian

Yo, check this out: black guys drive a car like this. [Leans back, as though his elbow were on the windowsill.] Do, do, ch. Do-be-do, do-be-do-be-do. Yeah, but white guys, see, they drive a car like this. [Hunches forward, talks nasally.] Dee-da-dee, a-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-dee. [Audience howls with laughter.]

Homer

Ah ha ha! It’s true, it’s true! We’re so lame!

Although the guy who runs the site just nailed a book deal with Random House, so what do I know. [back]

Do you ever wish you had your own personal smoker? But maybe you don’t have the money to buy or build your own. Maybe you don’t have easy access to mesquite chips. Or maybe you don’t live in the country and have a spare shed out back in which to string up sausage links.

I’ve stumbled across a quick, low-cost option that works even for people who live in a big-city apartment. First, bake something with a high fat content—say, a meatloaf made with two pounds of ground round from the Florence Meat Market. Then neglect to consider that as the meat cooks for an hour in its sexy red Le Creuset loaf pan, it will sweat hot grease faster than John Travolta. This is key: you will want to have neglected to line the oven rack with tinfoil or to have placed the loaf pan in a shallow baking tray. Because then grease will pool on the bottom of the oven and start smoking like a tire fire. Soon, everything in a large radius will be coated with an acrid, sort-of meaty film, whether it’s ham, love seats, shirts, hair, etc. There you have it: your own walk-in smoker in a few simple steps.

Incidentally, the meatloaf turned out superbly despite a pause with 20 minutes of remaining bake-time in order for me to run out and purchase scouring pads and a cheap foil roasting pan to catch any remaining grease. I could have pressed on without these items but I was weeping uncontrollably from the billows of gray smoke and I didn’t want to set off my neighbors’ smoke alarms.

This is my Mom’s recipe, which means it’s pointless to reproduce it here in that everyone swears by his own Mom’s meatloaf recipe and every Mom’s meatloaf recipe is different. But for me it’s a delicious taste of home that I’m hoping to continue to associate with good times and not grease fires.

Bonus: Download the whole mix.

For an Upper West Side restaurant that’s fancier than a diner yet with a diner’s expansive menu, look no further than Citrus. They got sushi, Mexican, salads, pasta, burgers, you name it, all highly fancified and priced accordingly for UWS consumption. I had fajitas made with “Ancho dry-rubbed Brandt Natural Skirt Steak,” which came with peppers and Bermuda onions, steamed flour tortillas (although a wee stingy to provide only two), rice and black beans, and spicy homemade salsa.

Citrus Bar & Grill

• 320 Amsterdam Ave. (at W. 75th Street)
• (212) 595-0500
• Meal 15 of 52: fajitas ($15.95).

I introduced the mayor of Philadelphia today at a real estate conference and all I could think to ask him before he took the stage, as he stood there surrounded by an entourage of his assistant, his scheduler, three burly men of his personal security detail and a uniformed officer of the Philadelphia Police Department, was “How’s it doin’?” That’s right: not even “How’s it goin’?” Geez.

I was talking with friends recently about the genius of self-proclaimed “B movie actor” Bruce Campbell and his work in the Evil Dead trilogy, which inspired me to reread his funny and startlingly ego-and-bullshit-free autobiography from 2001, If Chins Could Kill. This time around, I noticed in the acknowledgments that Campbell reveals his inspiration to write the book was John Hodgman, who worked as a literary agent before becoming a professional comedian-raconteur-anthropomorphic PC.

Campbell writes:

A hundred years ago, a guy named John Hodgman contacted me by e-mail.

“Ever thought about writing a book?” he wrote. [. . .]

“Yeah, right,” I answered. “Another actor writes a lame-ass book. Snoresville, baby.”

John refused to back off, based on a series of rants and anecdotes I had posted on my website. He was convinced that if I could put together a “demo” book, a publisher would step up to the plate.

Campbell did just that, writing his first draft on the back of a lousy unsolicited screenplay some Dutch guy handed him at Cannes.

Hodgman confirms Campbell was his first client in an interview with Cracked.com, adding:

Like many whose lives have been touched by the genius of Campbell, my road with him began when I e-mailed him blindly, and to my astonishment, Bruce swiftly and politely wrote back. He showed an enormous amount of trust in me. I recommended I help him find a, you know, experienced agent, but for whatever reason, he let me do it.

And that’s all I have to say, really. I appreciate finding small connections like these between my favorite actors, authors, artists and musicians. Someday I’ll graph them all on a chart.

Here’s an idea that wasn’t meant to take off: an airport vendor selling nothing but magnets. This was in Terminal E at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and because the store was shuttered and apparently being overtaken by a Cowboys souvenir store, I would guess it was as useful a specialty store as The Leftorium would be in real life.

I’m on business today at the Four Seasons in Dallas and in one of the fanciest yet most unnecessary perks of staying at an upper-crust hotel, I found housekeeping had snuck into my room while I was out to pick up all the clothes I’d dropped on the floor and draped over chairs, and actually folded them neatly in piles. Like, Gap-quality folding. Good stuff and a nice touch.

For being located in an un-BBQ neighborhood (the Upper East Side) in a city frequently maligned for its BBQ (that’d be New York) while sporting a decor that conjures nothing of what I’ve been trained to believe a BBQ restaurant should look like, the BBQ itself at Smokin’ Q is pretty great. At least the pulled pork sandwich I ate there tonight was. I can’t begin to explain what mad genius it is to top sweet, saucy and smoky shredded pork with a layer of coleslaw. So tantalizing. Their mac-and-cheese is awesome, too, rich and hearty, with that slight grit real cheddar brings to the table.

The music strove to conjure fun BBQ-based times, though the speaker near my table was malfunctioning and the mix was revealed to be iPod-based when someone decided a few seconds into Dick Dale’s surf-guitar version of “Misirlou” that it wasn’t all that great and mashed the skip button.

There were only four other people in the place, probably because Easter doesn’t have all that much to do with barbecue. And although the food was fine, I just couldn’t get over that decor: reedy, woven-back chairs; lots of pastel paint on the walls; plush banquettes; a potted plant on the stairway landing; good lighting. The closest nudge to country-time was a wooden barrel plunked near the front door, on which sat takeout menus and individually wrapped toothpicks. There are at least brick walls and wooden floors, and at each table, the requisite caddy of wet-naps, extra sauce and a whole roll of paper towers in vertical wooden-dowel dispensers. But the framed B&W photos of plumes of smoke are a too arty, even if they are offset by a sad framed poster of Jim Carrey’s character from The Mask, overlaid with his catchphrase “Sssmokin’!”.

I read later, in a New York Times article from late January, that the space for Smokin’ Q was most recently a kosher Japanese steakhouse, so perhaps many of the incongruous design elements are left over from that failed venture. The space just doesn’t seem that comfortable in its new cuisine genre.

Smokin’ Q

• 206 E. 63rd St. (between Second and Third Avenues)
• (212) 355-7000
• Meal 14 of 52: pulled pork sandwich with side of mac and cheese ($10.95).

Today for Purim, I made hamentaschen. How would I grade the taste? A solid “A.” Texture? “B-.” (I could have rolled the dough thinner.) Fun making the recipe? Also an “A,” maybe an “A+” because I enjoy working with dough.

But the shape? “See me after class.”

See, they’re supposed to be tri-cornered, like the hat of Purim’s villain, Haman, but mine resemble jelly-babies snug in miniature cradle boards. And the cookies that didn’t have tightly pinched corners came undone during baking and resembled large open sores. I, of German heritage, felt I’d defiled a sacred Jewish ritual and that when I next peeked in the oven to check on the prune butter-filled variety I baked following a batch of raspberry, a bolt of pure YHWH would shoot out and punch a hole through my chest just like it did to the Nazis who opened the ark in Raiders.

I don’t know what about “form circle of dough into a triangle” I didn’t understand. This hearkens back to my challenges with spatial relations. Remember those standardized tests you’d take in grade school with a sharp #2 pencil and on the last page there was always that mind-twister with an unfolded paper dodecahedron that had different patterns on each segment and you had to imagine what it looked like assembled, rotated 120 degrees and viewed in a mirror? I was never good at that and grumbled about what use it was in real life. Well, it’s useful for hamentascnen making.

Cities are noisy. There is always noise. Traffic and airplanes and people. Horns and sirens and alarms. Dogs barking. There’s a party across the way or someone playing guitar upstairs. Even in a city’s distant reaches, in the dead of a summer night, the fans of air conditioners thrum.

Maybe the sounds of cities aren’t cacophonies but more like the familiar tumble of an orchestra tuning itself before a symphony: those trills, scales and bleats that soon shake themselves into order. The composer John Cage considered this and wrote scores for two cities, 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs for New York City in 1977 and A Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity a year later.

He plotted random points on maps then connected the dots with a straightedge and felt-tip pens. The score for Chicago looks like this:

Cage didn’t offer explicit instructions on how to realize his scores. His own interpretation was to make each point where the map-lines intersected represent a note. Then, in New York, he tape-recorded couples waltzing at each of the 147 intersections and assembled the snippets in random order for playback. In Chicago, he did much the same but let his recorder run without preplanned activity in the background, to capture raw city sound. The result would have sounded like this, neither melodious nor congruous. But as an idea, I like it.

To play the Chicago score in 1982, Cage spliced together random lengths of his city-sound audiotape and broadcast the results from 12 loudspeakers mounted on a steamboat docked at Navy Pier and trained west. What a noise that must have been. And how the city must have felt, startled by the unfamiliarity of its own voice: “Do I really sound like that?”

Andie and I had been talking vaguely about trying Spiga since it opened and seemed intent on stealing some of the thunder from Celeste, another Italian place located around the corner on Amsterdam. Then we’d usually end up just going to Celeste. I was in the neighborhood tonight, and stopped by Spiga. And it’s not bad, just a little too “new Italian.” Next time I’m in the neighborhood, I know I’ll find myself back at Celeste.

Spiga’s artichoke lasagna sounded promising and it was hearty but non-distinct with no readily identifiable flavors of cheese or spice. My salad, with fresh pears, was similarly common. The decor? Wooden, literally and figuratively. And everything’s much more pricey than Celeste. True, the tables at Spiga are more than one inch apart, but the experience was a bland one, not an exciting, bustling one involving amusing overheard conversations, as usually happens at Celeste.

Spiga

• 200 W. 84th St. (between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue)
• (212) 362-5506
• Meal 13 of 52: glass of Luna Rossa merlot ($12), arugula-pear salad ($9.95) and artichoke lasagna ($16.95).

I’m still doing that thing where the subway pulls up and it’s jam packed except for the car that stops right in front of me, as happened with an uptown 1 train at the 59th Street station tonight, and my mind says, “Whee! Nearly empty car!” when it should be screaming, “Look out!”

Because when the car door opened and the giddy group of commuters pressed forward, we realized the car was desolate because of the large yellow puddle of puke on the floor, which someone had halfheartedly attempted to cover with a few McDonald’s napkins. The napkins had no effect; the puke resembled chunky polenta and judging by the smell, contained enough gastric acid to dissolve the napkins and possibly the floor’s wax.

The person at the fore of our group, an old, fat and slow-moving lady, stood teetering in the doorway, stymied as to whether she should enter or retreat and wait for the next train. Those of us stuck behind her were all like, “C’mon lady, make up your mind,” because we were cranky and wanted to get home. That’s the test of a true New Yorker—possibly a metaphor for living here in general: Are you on the puke train or are you off?

I haven’t read any of his books, only his occasional articles, but I like Christopher Hitchens because, on one hand, he’s liberal in thought, and throws around adjectives like Promethean and Sophoclean, which sound better in his plum British accent, and he’s so intelligent that he made me feel slightly stupid by merely sharing a room with me, even though he was the one wearing bright red socks.

On the other hand, he’s conservative in thought (on record for supporting the war in Iraq, for instance) and occasionally strives to lose his female constituency. So he’s an intellectual, surpassing labels of convenience and unwilling to leave any serious thought or position unconsidered. The man loves an argument. That’s cool, but it makes for a rambling-ass lecture. I stopped by the New York Historical Society tonight to hear him talk about Thomas Paine, counselor to Jefferson and Founding Father footnote of Common Sense (which pressured and inspired the Declaration of Independence), “These are the times that try men’s souls” and little else.

Hitchens recommended additional points for Paine’s legacy. He wrote the first real secular manifestos, establishing himself as a speaker for a newly literate working class that was interested in science and technology. He was also the first person to use the word “democratic” as a compliment. He argued the American Revolution would be stronger without slavery.

Paine wasn’t a racist, opposed the death penalty, and held that “religion is a trick” and “the Bible, manmade,” even though he wasn’t an atheist, which Hitchens admitted prevented him from claiming Paine as his own. Paradoxically, Paine was also held dear by classic conservatives like Ronald Regan, who quoted the politician.

Perhaps this was because Paine was more a voice of a social force than a guy you could sew a label on; Hitchens confirmed Paine wasn’t after establishing a legacy, as were many of the Founding Fathers, merely a guy with a certain school of thought in the right place at the right time.

The Q&A session went on and on with Hitchens deeply engaged. I awaited the requisite idiot question but it took time because the average age of the audience was 50 and the average profession was “collegiate political science professor with tenure.” These guys could not ask their questions under a minute if you held a gun to their head and demanded it and Hitchens’ erudite answers, during which he would often start debating himself, were usually too complicated for me to fathom. At last, a chirpy woman mentioned that a town in New Jersey is erecting a statue to Paine (“excellent,” deadpanned Hitchens as he fiddled with his glasses) and what would Paine blog about today if he were a blogger? Hitchens waved away the question by dismissing blogs and the ’net in general as “a thief of time.”

Oh so true.

Things got exciting again when a question arose about Paine’s attitudes toward women. “He just didn’t have a light touch with the ladies at all,” said Hitchens, carefully and charitably, adding that Paine didn’t treat women seriously, like many early politicians. A couple in the audience shouted, “What about Aaron Burr?” and a bunch of people nearby were all like, “Yeah! What about Aaron Burr?” But by this point the crowd had already worn out its welcome and probably the old guy who locks up the society at night was tired because it was past his bedtime, so they wrapped it up and Hitchens attempted to continue answering questions even though the audience had been directed to applaud at him.

While enjoying several drinks in the Village last night at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame with Katie, she abruptly began motioning and whispering to me not to turn and look at the person I could then sense standing directly behind me at the sparsely populated bar. Of course, nothing made me want to turn around more just then. But I didn’t. I thought it was a bum or someone with crazy hair who wanted to know whether I’d found Jesus.

After the mystery person paid for a purchase and turned to leave, Katie gave me the O.K. to turn and check him out. It was James Gandolfini, smaller and more cherubic in person than I imagined. Before leaving, he gave a fleeting, knowing glance to everyone at the bar who was pretending not to notice him. This would be the closest I’ve knowingly been to a celebrity in New York, excluding concerts and book signings.

I’m glad the bar-crowd was of the “treat the celebrity like a regular person” mindset instead of the autograph-seeking rush-mob it could have been. I chalk it up to today being St. Patrick’s Day, for which faux Irish bars citywide attract tourists and people from New Jersey who aren’t as cool as Katie, leaving decidedly un-Irish spots like the Hall of Fame as secret neighborhood hangouts, which is sort of why we went there to begin with. Although if I’d elected to attempt small talk with James, I would have skipped the tired and obvious Sopranos chatter to mention how much I appreciated his nuanced performance as Big Dave Brewster in The Man Who Wasn’t There.

After further discussion, Katie and I decided a mistaken-identity route could have been even more fun. For example, I could have told Mr. Gandolfini that I loved his work and owned all of his albums, similar to how Katie wanted to tell Ric Ocasek, a frequent browser at her old Barnes & Noble, that her favorite vocal performance of his was “Drive”, a song actually sung by the Cars’ bassist.

I must be getting older or more mature because it used to be, when I splurged at a bar, I’d make the bartender reach a little higher for the whiskey bottle. Lately that’s been replaced with ordering expensive speakeasy-era cocktails that focus on craft.

That’s the deal at Weather Up, which opened in late February in Prospect Heights. Old-timey goodness with new-timey prices! But so refreshing. You can get an aviator for $15, the most expensive drink on the menu (most hit $11), which includes a small-print warning on the menu alluding to its mind-bending potency. I started with a Presbyterian, a refreshing rye and ginger cocktail in a skinny Collins glass that included a candied ginger garnish, a single, long cuboid ice cube and a long metal straw (with a spoon at the tip to aid stirring) that I bit before realizing its composition. If I wanted to buy it, there were unbitten models available for sale for $5, said the bartender, who apparently gets many such requests.

Depending on the drink, the ice is delivered in different forms: a popular form is hand-chiseled and I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a dandy bartender hack away at a chunk of ice with a bar-spoon as James the bartender did tonight. Some dude sitting nearby alleged he was getting hit by the chips.

Like its ilk (Pegu Club or Little Branch leap to mind), Weather Up is quiet and cozy, and but even smaller and more warm: boxed lights glow from the ceiling, and white, rectangular ceramic tiles arc from the walls across the ceiling, which reminded me not so much of New York City subway stations, but those of the Paris Metro.

Vincent called me over to his apartment this afternoon for an impromptu Wii party with Megan, Norana, Austin, Kelly, Joe, Steve and Josh. It was my first time playing this videogame system, so I relegated myself to the smaller television on which I created an avatar that resembled me and used him to play tennis, bowling and golf on Wii Sports. I enjoyed swinging around my buttersick-sized controller to represent my onscreen character’s arm—lofting it for tennis serves, arcing it for golf swings (the system even accepted my left-handedness) and penduluming it for bowling rolls. I smacked my real-world colleagues with it only twice, accidentally. Meanwhile, the alpha-nerds at the other Wii, which was hooked up to a big-screen TV the size of a sofa, embroiled themselves in the epic quad-battles of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which resembles an epileptic seizure. There was much shouting, taunting, cursing and revenge.

Later, we confirmed, as if we were conspiracy theorists analyzing the Zapruder film, that Kelly actually appears roller-skating in the background of a scene from the controversial documentary about Golden Gate Bridge suicides, The Bridge. She was even able to unearth a photo she took of herself on that same day in 2004. (FYI, in reality, Kelly has awesome hair; that’s a bike helmet she’s wearing in the photo.)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, dill is the ultimate cold-weather herb. It figured prominently into this Moosewood soup, which I’ve now made twice. The first time, I followed the recipe but found the soup frothy, possibly from over-blending, or just blending, period. This time, I added the milk to the soup after the blend cycle, plus I didn’t fully puree the vegetables, and it made for a much soupier and more pleasant consistency.

Andie left me an urgent voicemail at work early this morning, then gave me a follow-up call, to relate two distressing developments in her commute today.

First, a bum took a crap on her in-motion downtown 1 train, causing all passengers in a 15-foot radius to surge to the far end of the car and cling together like the final passengers alive aboard the Titanic.

Then, upon arriving to her gym prior to work, she came across a guy who had died while working out. Paramedics on the scene continued unsuccessfully to resuscitate him.

I believe the pooping was more traumatic because death doesn’t smell as bad, at least not initially.

One of the guys in the production department, which is so pixelated with digital technology that I don't even think it has a fax machine anymore, was getting testy. A colleague was telling him that a client needed to fax something to our office. “Tell them if they need to fax it, they can just as easily email it as a PDF,” he said. And that was that, for he had decreed a no-fax zone.

Do people still use faxes? They pop up in publishing, the print-heavy industry in which I toil, or at least at our particular company, where insertion orders and registration forms still sometimes arrive over phone lines in bursts of screeches and static. Although more often, these orders and forms are signed, scanned on a newfangled copier and arrive to our inboxes as a tidy PDF, which most recipients then print anyway. So much for “saving a tree”; we’ve died of dysentery on the Paperless Trail.

I suspect also that large corporations and governments, both lovers of the bureaucratic paper trail and useless administrative positions to file said trail, are responsible in large part for keeping the fax from devolving to cassette tape or Polaroid camera status, hoarded and supported only by aficionados, hipsters and grandparents.

I recently spoke with a rep for the newly elected mayor of Philadelphia, who’s a swell guy, and decided to welcome His Honor to keynote one of our real estate events. His scheduler insisted that we handle the invitation by fax. Requesting the mayor’s presence by speaking, as I’d just done, wouldn’t cut it. Nor would an email. I needed to wait for the scheduler to fax me a Request the Mayor’s Presence form, fill it out with a pen, then fax it back. Eventually and incongruously, a week later, someone emailed me to confirm that the mayor had agreed to speak at our event. What an archaic trail and trial.

My annoyances are petty and cliché and one of my current favorites is anonymous coworkers who siphon the office coffee so there’s a millimeter left, to avoid taking 30 seconds to brew a fresh pot. I emailed our IT Guy to check the feasibility of installing a webcam in a corner of the kitchenette to learn who was responsible for this shirking. He replied that “anything is possible with enough Ethernet cable” but admitted he’d have to check with the head boss as to my plan’s legality, so I quashed the idea.

Now I’m wondering how tough it’d be to install a circuit-contact between the bottom of the coffee pot and the coffeemaker’s burner, tied into a digital scale system on the burner, to measure the weight of the pot when it’s at rest and to blast an air horn every time it reaches a certain low weight. But then I imagine the coffee bandits would resort to topping off the pot of regular with decaf or pulling something similar to Indy’s sandbag-for-idol switch from Raiders.

This is all beside the fact that the coffee in my office tastes like burnt, wet sweatsocks. It’s the principle of the matter.

The Red Hook Park Vendors, which I’ve enjoyed before, have been granted a six-year reprieve from being overtaken by generic highest-bidder food concessionaires, reports Eater today. Hooray!

It appears there will be changes, though, as per the euphemistically worded sentence attributed to the executive director of the Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park in the press release:

We have the best intentions to create an even better food market with the assistance of New York City Parks and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

In other words, maybe we, the Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park, will no longer knead pupusa dough barehanded and serve slaw directly from open Coleman coolers. Eh, whatever. I don’t know about your body but mine is a versatile machine that can handle all manner of “improperly” prepared foods. It’s all part of the charm and can’t possibly be less healthy than the bathwater hotdogs and horsemeat kabobs you can purchase daringly from any city-sanctioned push-cart vendor here.

As I foretold, Allison staged the first installment tonight of the Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, BKLYN #1, a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme. It went down at the Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy apartment of her and her boyfriend, Jovito. I love this part: the building used to be a Tootsie Roll factory.

The dinner party included Allison and Jovito, my friend Beth and I, Allison’s friend Angela, and her sister Laura. Also present were the resident tabby, Ra, who warily shares space with the resident shelter-mutt, Manute. He’s a blend of black Lab, Great Dane and black German Shepherd named after Manute Bol because both are long-legged shot-blockers who like having their bellies scratched.

We started with three New York state sheep’s milk cheeses, Berkshire pork prosciutto and membrillo (quince paste), purple grapes and candied walnuts. For "local" drinks, we drank rye-stiffened Brooklyns throughout the evening, inspired by a recipe Allison procured in an entertaining fashion. On Tuesday, she and Jovito attended a reading featuring Brooklyn-based cocktail authority David Wondrich, whom I’ve written about before. As he signed her copy of Imbibe!, she mentioned the upcoming dinner and her consideration of serving locally invented cocktails, namely Manhattans and Jack Roses, the latter a classic New Jersey drink in honor of Jovito’s home state.

Wondrich concurred then rattled off the ingredients for a Brooklyn, a cocktail curiously absent from his book. Realizing the recipe would be a tall order to remember, he removed a piece of paper from his pocket and scribbled it down. Meanwhile, Allison told him I’d wanted to attend the reading but couldn’t, then blurted that I had a man-crush on him, so after laughing nervously, he autographed the recipe as a sort-of-wish-you-were-here keepsake.

The man-crush thing is true. What human wouldn’t lovingly admire another who can mingle alcohols to their tastiest and most potent permutations? Although I had to tell Allison that men will not often admit a man-crush to one another. Regardless, it netted me a scrap of cocktail ephemera that I’ll treasure always until I spill bitters on it. Here’s a scan of it. You’ll notice Wondrich spelled liqueur wrong, unless liquer is an archaic cocktail-maven spelling.

After the first round, shaken with ice and served in old-school coupes, Allison deviated from the handwritten version of the recipe to the one I’ve reproduced below. I must say that rye in its 100-proof form is excellent for clouding one’s mind in the best way possible.

Ah, and for the food. Beth made butternut squash soup with a plain-yogurt and cilantro topping. Laura made a shredded carrot and toasted almond salad. Angela made a Sicilian-style potato gratin with capers and Parmesan. Allison made tender, braised short ribs with chocolate and rosemary. We also had baguettes with Brooklyn-made butter. The dessert course brought out ice cream sandwiches made from oatmeal toffee-chip cookies and almond/English-toffee ice cream from the Adirondacks. I supplied my Gâteau Aux Pommes apple cake, made with apples and eggs from upstate New York. In short, great good, great drinks, great music, and great company.

Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner

• Meal 12 of 52: a heap of delicious food, home-cooked by friends.

I was all over the city today shopping and running errands. I experienced much public transportation irritation.

1 train at 191st Street. Watched six uptown trains pass, during which time not a single downtown train arrived. That's always bad news because when the train eventually shows up, it is occupied by approximately the population of Guam. As this one was.

Escalator from 59th Street station to outside Time Warner Center. Everyone on escalator, including myself, groans or curses the instant he or she is elevated to street level to see` that it’s pissing down rain. And I've forgotten my umbrella. Also, my belt, which I only realize as I try to dash between the drops and my pants start falling down.

Waiting for downtown A train at 59th Street. Jazz combo playing at one end of station, with bandleader playing saxophone. Lone, crazy saxophone guy playing at other end of station. For prewalking purposes, I was waiting directly between the competing instruments. Cacophony!

Uptown 3 train, running local, and stalled between the 59th and 50th Street stations. Stuck listening to jerk quoting to his girlfriend, at length, vaguely memorized passages from the LOLCat Bible, which he kept interjecting with, “I’m telling you, Stacey, it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read.” Then he’d quote it some more and she’d laugh weakly. Dude, you repeating it isn’t the same as me reading it. It has its moments but it’s mostly a one-joke pony, like you, Mr. Excruciating.

In 1977, during a fit of poetry, optimism and metallurgy, some nerds at NASA shot into space a phonograph made from copper, plated with gold and jacketed in an aluminum sleeve. They sent up two copies, to be precise, each affixed to the interior of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, courses set for infinity. The hope of the nerds was that eons from now, aliens might intercept the record, listen to its 27 songs representing the world’s countries and cultures, and know more about us.¹

The nerds acknowledged they were dealing with a low and particular form of audio technology, so they embossed pictographic operating instructions on the jacket. They also included a spare cartridge and needle, possibly recognizing that by the time of any interception—no earlier than 1990, when the Voyagers would pass Pluto—that even extraterrestrials would have upgraded to at least eight-track tapes.

Never mind the chance, remotely slim in the vastness of space, that any alien would find this object intact and know what to make of it. Never mind that the inhabitants of Earth, despite widely varying levels of intelligence, invariably assume that life beyond our planet will be an awful lot like us, only sporting pajamas and weirder foreheads. Never mind all that; this was a cool idea, to burn a civilization’s Greatest Hits onto a golden disc.

I’ve been skimming through the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record², reading of the wrestling over that 90-minute mix, particularly the pop songs and music from America that were debated for inclusion.

In one instance, the resident conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington called the Smithsonian’s curator of jazz at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, awakening him to ask whether the Miles Davis version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” would be appropriate to send to the stars. It was rejected. So was the whole of country music, offered as an option because the people who built the spaceships listened to it. Further bickering arose over Elvis, Jefferson Starship (who volunteered music for the record), Bob Dylan (“would the music stand if the words were incomprehensible?” asked Carl Sagan, a model of perfect diction) and the Beatles, of whom Sagan writes:

We wanted to send “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, and all four Beatles gave their approval. But the Beatles did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk.

C’mon, Carl; you should’ve sucked it up and sent it out. What did you have to lose? You’re slinging the song into a void billions and billions of miles from Apple Corps and its pugnacious lawyers.

But no contemporary pop made the cut. The four pieces of American music pressed to disc were a Navajo night chant and three songs by African American musicians: Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

Other than praising Sagan & Co. for sidestepping Armstrong’s most-popular and least-representative track, the sappy “What a Wonderful World”, I’m impressed by the selection of “Dark Was the Night.”³. It’s just Johnson and his guitar, which he played by sliding his pocketknife over the strings; his hums and moans; and his blindness and loneliness. His stepmother blinded him, throwing lye in his face when he was seven. During most of his life, he played on the streets of Texas, “collecting tips in a cup wired to his guitar neck,” writes blues historian Jas Obrecht. Ailing and rejected by the hospital, Johnson died of pneumonia, sleeping on a waterlogged bed covered with newspaper.

For all the American flags waving in slow motion on Earth and those bolted to the moon, for all the space program’s hopeful rhetoric, not as much talk covers the fact that space is big and we’re little, looking for food, water, a dry place to sleep, and company. That’s just what you get—what you feel—with Johnson and his spooky little space-song, mankind’s most appropriate mix-pick.

Bonus mp3: “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” by Blind Willie Johnson, recorded on December 3, 1927, the same version pressed to the Voyager disc.

Related: NASA’s page on the Golden Record.

¹ Also encoded in the audio spectrum of the record are 117 pictures, greetings in 54 human languages and one from the whales (remember, this was the ’70s) and 19 “sounds of Earth,” but for the purposes of this post, I’m only interested in the music. [back]

² It’s out of print. Snaps to the Strand for having a copy. [back]

³ In the middle of writing this post, the internet informed me that The West Wing incorporated this song and its involvement in the Voyager mission as a plot point. I missed that episode. But now I kind of want to see it. [back]

On the 110 between downtown Los Angeles and LAX, a car will pass at least six cell-phone towers poorly disguised as trees. At freeway speeds, they blur into the background. When I joked about them to a lifetime Southern Californian, he admitted he’d never noticed. I pointed to one and by the time he’d turned his head, we’d passed it.

Although the cell-phone towers have been decorated to resemble conifers, they’re stiffened by right angles where a real tree would branch at random. They stick out among the palm trees, which are real but in silhouette at dusk resemble giant lollipops.

Are birds fooled? Will they roost or nest in these antennae, warmed by the man-made surfaces and invisible waves? Do people living nearby consider them more acceptable eyesores than undisguised cell-phone towers or other NIMBY elements, like substations, towers and lines for electricity? I categorize them among facework, implants and fake hair, other common sights unnoticed here or accepted without comment as real.

If I had to describe Los Angeles in one word, that word would be “concrete.” It clads the earth as slabs of highway. Concrete columns, dwarfing those of the Parthenon, hoist overpasses. It’s the material of choice for wide streets, seldom used sidewalks, parking garages, swimming pools, runways and tarmac. The hotel I’m at, the Westin Bonaventure downtown, is mostly concrete, inside and out, a weathered artifact from an era when the material stood for the strength of bright, modern promise.

Related: “The New Face of Downtown Los Angeles”

Having just avoided getting smooshed by the closing elevator doors, a flustered blonde woman who resembled a shorter Cybill Shepherd told me that she was “just having one of those days.” She had a plum role in a sitcom as Cybill Shepherd’s daughter—flew out to L.A. for the audition and everything—but when Merrill Lynch pulled out as an advertiser, the network cancelled the show. “Something else will come along,” she said, exiting on the 16th floor for the audition studio. “Good luck,” I said.

Do strangers start conversations with you in elevators? They seem to seek me out.

My award for the best person to talk to on the phone goes to my 80-something-year-old grandmother. I called her on Sunday for no reason other than I rarely call or write her. I realize that keeping in touch with one’s family is important so I’ve resolved to mend my black-hearted ways. Also, a tiny part of me hopes she’ll leave me more in her will than her disgust and those living room pillows she quilted from the neckties of my deceased grandfather.

First, we established that it was I, Jason—Jason Young—her grandson—Jason—that was calling. A ploy on her part to drive home the fact I rarely call? Or hard of hearing? Grandma is crafty and I will never know.

I was walking home from the grocery store just then, bag full of red-skinned potatoes and fresh dill for soup, so I told her about that. She told me potato soup appears often on the menu at her assisted living facility. She also told me about the annual electrocardiogram she’s scheduled for. I thanked her belatedly for her Valentine’s Day card. She asked unsubtly whether I have a girlfriend. Top concerns of an elder: discussing declining personal health and working early angles to build a legacy of grandchildren.

As these topics suggest, she’s cordial in a grandmotherly way, but I’ve never spoken with her on the phone for more than seven minutes, which is why she gets my award. She reminds me of certain businesspeople I call for my job who have a mildly distracted tinge of voice indicating they can’t talk long because they’re busy or expecting/hoping for a more important call. Which is fine by me because although I talk on the phone at work for a living and I’m good at it, I don’t always like doing it. I cover the facts, maybe crack a joke and move on.

I don’t know if the brevity of Grandma’s calls with me involves her not liking to talk on the phone, too, or if she has stuff she’d rather be doing, for she is a busy and sociable old lady. But I enjoy the compactness of our conversations. I wouldn’t want them to meander with uncomfortable pauses and talk of weather.

You know what’s also contagious? Flower-shaped carbuncles. Those look painful. But she’s taking her condition in stride and probably smells nice, or nicer than staphylococcus pus.

I told myself last night that Violent Saturday would be a cracking-good film noir. I mean: Violent Saturday? (Seen on a Saturday, no less.) Doesn’t that sound noirish to you? The titles looked noirish, at least.

Relying more on the facts, I remembered that director Richard Fleischer (who at the time had just completed Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) helmed the classic noir that’s also one of my favorites, The Narrow Margin. But Violent Saturday is just a failed small-town bank-robbery scheme interwoven with interconnected bits on the lives of the people of a small town.

So much of the dialogue consists of those super-stilted ’50s/’60s line readings, which, yes, as a convention I’ve taught myself to ignore, like anyone who loves Film Forum fare has, but here it’s just really, really annoying. Lee Marvin, who plays the rumpled, nasal-inhalant addicted member of the bank-robbing trio, has a grumpy, sarcastic bite about him that elevates him above the robotic line readings, such that it’d seem he’s acting in a different era. (I also like that his character is the sort of asshole who purposely steps on the fingers of an annoying child just to get the kid out of his hair.) Meanwhile, Victor Mature, who I’ve always thought of as the love-child of Tony Curtis and Cary Grant, plays, uh, a mining engineer with a feisty, disobedient son. And, best, Ernest Borgnine plays, uh, an Amish farmer, who overcomes his Amish ways to stab Lee Marvin in the back with a pitchfork at the end of the film. All in panoramic CinemaScope and those colors of alien vibrancy that have only ever existed in photographs and film stock from the 1950s.

My friend Allison is staging a Brooklyn Sunday Night Dinner series, the first of which is a potluck with a “local/sustainable/seasonal” theme, so I figured I’d be spending time at the famous Union Square Greenmarket. But hold on: in Manhattan alone, there are 27 Greenmarkets. (Each is sanctioned by the city to promote regional agriculture and give family farmers the opportunity to sell their fruits, vegetables and other products directly to New Yorkers.) After checking a map, I discovered there’s been one in my neighborhood, on Isham Street between Seaman Avenue and Cooper Street, every Saturday year-round. I didn’t know that.

I walked up Broadway to check it out. Because of its location and the season, it’s small—much smaller than the Union Square version—taking up only one side of a block between an old brick school and Isham Park, where a flock of Canada geese scrounged for insects on a muddy baseball field. There were only seven vendors but each seemed chosen to avoid duplication, so that a creative cook could prepare a largely local meal from the Inwood Greenmarket: apples, beef, turkey, eggs, bread, pies and honey.

After several passes by the vendors, I decided I’d purchase locally farmed apples and eggs and remake that apple cake I first made for Thanksgiving. (At a glance, the recipe seems snotty and complicated but in reality it’s neither.) For the apples, I paid a few bucks for a half-dozen red-and-green skinned McIntoshes from Samascott Orchard, which has been growing them in Kindernook, New York since 1901. Different varieties brimmed in labeled wooden crates, resplendent in a natural glory without the wax, stickers, symmetry and surface perfection found in their supermarket counterparts. I enjoyed a sign on the crate of Fuji apples that blamed a particular hailstorm over the Samascott’s farm in May 2007 for the superficial scars on that variety. The apples were the size of peas at the time yet they carried the battle damage to their fully ripened size. After I had my apples weighed, I added a cup of hot cider to my order, which proved prescient, as a mini snow-squall arrived out of the literal blue shortly thereafter.

I also picked up a dozen large white eggs from Knoll Krest Farm, located in Clinton Corners, New York, where the free-roaming, cage-free hens are fed vegetarian diets free from hormones and antibiotics and whose eggs are “hand gathered.” Yee-hah.

Completing the hippie nature of my travels, I carried my groceries home in my canvas tote-bag from the Strand and instead of further depleting my iPod’s lithium-rich battery by listening to “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau, I sang it to myself a cappella.

Bonus mp3: “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau