Yesterday was diet-break day ("Breakdiet"?), and I did it in style.
Big discovery. Tamales Lupita is a little side-street joint at 154 E 112th St hailing from Guerrero, a rare Mexican state for immigrants hereabouts. I had my first-ever goat tamales (they're on the left; pork on the right):
Very nice server told me they make a rare sour soup, purely vegetarian, on "Wednesdays or Thursdays", usually by 5pm. He himself didn't know the name in Spanish. I have no idea (I'm more of a Mexico City/Juarez/Puebla/Veracruz/Oaxaca guy; Guerrero is like Mars to me).
Then on to PQR, the new Roman pizza place on the Upper East Side which I'd heard great things about. I got a portobello slice. Beautiful work, unlike anything else local (fwiw I did recently try an interesting, under-radar, good-not-great Neapolitan pizza place in Franklin Square, Long Island).
Problem: the pizza is copiously dosed with olive oil, and properly so, but when they reheat the slice, it cooks the oil into the bread, creating an unpleasant twice-fried effect. Even so, still very good. And while everyone complains about slices costing circa $7, I was served two for the price. Not sure if that was a special treat or normal procedure.
Then a reference-quality slice of coconut custard pie from Petee’s Pie Company on Delancey, which I hadn't previously noticed. It's better if you click to expand (kindly note the striation).
I followed with one beer each at Top Hops and One Mile House Bar. I took an interesting photo at the latter - a normally impossible angle made workable by shooting through the connecting passage between their double-sided bars:
This hardly constituted a full-out bender, but I think I scored well in quality/diversity with a few far-flung bites.
In their conscious thought streams, people are as unique as snowflakes.
Beneath that, in their subconscious, they're are like peas in a pod; some notes a bit louder or softer, but always the same song (ala Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, et al.).
Beneath even that, at the ground zero where pure attention chooses perceptual framings - before getting lost in identification with a particular framing - there's only one awareness, neither colored nor individualized.
The most disturbing pattern I see in the Trump era is anti-Trumpers recognizing a dire need for Trump's circle to at least try to moderate and restrain him....while demanding that everyone in his midst bitterly renounce him and walk away. The contradiction hits me like a migraine.
I suppose their rationality recognizes the need to take every possible step to avert apocalypse, while their emotionality thirsts to see him provoked, trolled, and isolated to the brink of apocalypse. Hatred, as usual, trumps rationality.
This is the lesson for future historians. This is the only truly surprising element.
Normally I make an effort to empathize with irrationality. But I can't excuse the application of indulgent emotionality in such dangerous circumstances. I suppose the Taoists were right; extreme begets extreme (or, as I keep repeating, "Will we human beings ever learn to react to extremism with enlightened moderation rather than with reciprocal extremism?"). Put a demented toddler in charge, and opposition will inevitably take on the characteristics of demented toddlers.
By this point, nearly every variety of suboptimal human behavior has been categorized as a syndrome, with big pharma, naturally, gunning for cures. Poor dresser? No sense of rhythm? Undertipper? Blame my genes!
It's true and it's not true. Genes may indeed be to blame, but they can be transcended. I've got a complete set of narcissism genes, but have spent so many years methodically sticking hot needles in those impulses and willfully pivoting from that frozen perspective that I've likely overshot, and tend to ignore my own interests (the whiff of sanctimony in that statement struck me like a stream of battery acid to my eye. Seriously, I'm a victim of Clockwork Orange-ish Beethoven aversion therapy, only I've done it to myself).
I do understand that some problems can't be overcome by force of will. A schizophrenic cannot train himself to ignore hallucinations (the film "A Beautiful Mind" did a terrible disservice), and a depressive can't simply "cheer up". I do believe there's often a trail out via introspection, but when your introspector itself is impossibly skewed, it's like a house of mirrors. Some - not all - people really can blame their genes for their behavior. But that's a tough call to make.
In my 55 years I've noticed two things I'm certain about: first, everyone's nuts (just some people hide it better). And, second, some people wield their neurosis like a cudgel, while others make an effort to shield those around them. As with nearly all other minor societal atrocities, it stems from a willful lack of situational awareness. As I once wrote:
I am, it appears, the only remaining human being with situational awareness. But the crux of the problem is not that others lack it. To accommodate other people, you first need to register their existence. Once you recognize that there are other human beings - and if that fact holds any interest for you - you may then, and only then, proceed down the path of developing situational awareness. You must 1. know, then 2. care, then 3. learn, then 4. apply. The problem lies at step one, not step four, for our sour-pussed, self-involved population of oblivious rich-world narcissists.
Yep, I just got back from Trader Joe's.
I have a friend who's a control freak. All the way - it's not just that he's "bossy". If you're going to meet him for dinner, it will be grievously hard for him to accept a time or place you set, even if they suit his preferences. It's literally painful for him to be in a situation where he doesn't call every single shot. While I can't get inside his mind, I imagine the sensation is like holding a conversation while workers hoist a piano directly over your head with a frayed rope. You may try to maintain decorum, but first comes the sweat, then comes the panic, then comes the freak out.
Thing is, he hates all this. He's a nice guy. He understands that nobody wants or deserves to constantly submit to someone's will. He firmly disapproves of the social politics of it. So he tries to hide it, to channel it, to soften it. He works very hard. He has a great big bag of tricks and workarounds to help prevent those around him from feeling pushed around. It doesn't always work, but he does all he can.
How many control freaks give a damn? Most pursue their programming, period. If it feels right to seize control, it must be right. They essentially behave like hamsters or ants; via rote instinct, without an iota of self-examination or empathetic consideration.
If you deal with neurotic people (and you do; once again, everyone's nuts) and you find yourself trying to navigate the tricky question of what to overlook and what to forgive - what's indulgent volition and what's intractable - just watch for situational awareness. Is the person trying, however feebly, to shield the effects? If so, is it just about passing for normal, or is there real empathy for those around them?
If there's consideration for others and an effort (however flimsy) to shield, the person has character. Forgive their impulses! If not, the person's an asshole in addition to whatever else is going on with them. Any allowances you make for them will be processed narcissistically; looped back into their unbridled impulses, often to your detriment.
"I never took a dime, or a morsel of free food, from any restaurateur...except Kenny."
I did accept one other freebie. There was a bbq place in Jamaica, Queens. It was literally a shack in a vacant lot, and it was insanely great; better than places down south. I raved over it in NY Press, and literally every other critic soon piled on, turning it into a SENSATION. Lines were crazy-long, and you'd spot food luminaries eagerly queuing in this ghetto nabe.
The owner, who knew me as a regular, managed to figure out that I’d made this happen. I waited in line there for an hour once, and as I entered the shack, and no one was watching, he came around from his station behind the building, touched my shoulder, and quietly handed me a single rib wrapped in paper towel. It was literally the best rib; I'll never have better till the day I die. He walked off wordlessly.
He didn’t offer to let me shortcut the line. He didn’t grovel or profusely thank me. He'd taken care to consider and measure his gesture; to make it pure.
I definitely ate that rib (and then paid full price for dinner).
So much was always made over what a character Kenny was. That aspect never phased me. I'm old enough to remember when NYC was full of characters. Shoot, I'm a character, myself. And to be perfectly honest - what the hell, it's not like he ever held back! - I thought Kenny had crossed over into the realm of shtick, locked into playing this Kenny Shopsin character. Pandering to feather-ruffling expectations rather than genuinely ruffling feathers. He was hardly the first fuck-you iconoclast to wind up a treasured cultural landmark (slip a quarter in the slot to receive your "fuck you"!). The eccentricity racket can be an awfully sticky wicket.
I was much more interested in the deliciousness of his cooking. We musicians had found him early. It was pianist Uri Caine who first tipped me to Shopsin's, describing it as "this great soup place". Uri offered no titillated stories about the eccentricity, because, compared to us and our friends, Kenny was downright straight-ahead. Musicians had him on our radar purely for his food - both its deliciousness and its singular creativity. Who else had invented so many genuinely successful dishes? We considered him an artist, period. Same with the Soup Man, for that matter, despite Seinfeld's disrespect.
I never spoke directly to Kenny, though I made infrequent visits to both his restaurants over the years. For a peripatetic chowhound, always questing for new greatness just over the horizon, it was hard to find patience to work methodically through Kenny's twenty zillion offerings. I did really like everything I tried, however. I was an early adopter of mac-and-cheese pancakes.
But I do have a story to tell you about Kenny. It's a secret. As I once explained, I've always taken ethics very seriously. There were only two instances where I intentionally relaxed my self-imposed rules. I ate anonymously everywhere (to the best of my ability) except at Astoria's Kabab Cafe, where I was friends with owner Ali. And I never took a dime, or a morsel of free food, from any restaurateur...except Kenny. When Chowhound had scaled from a fun hobby to a time/money sucking nightmare, and I'd exhausted my own meager savings to keep the damned thing open as a public service, and had to ask for support from users, Kenny sent a couple of checks. Big checks. With no notes attached, no self-identification, nothing. Just mutely generic checks in plain white envelopes, signed by one Kenneth Shopsin.
To this day, I'm not sure why I accepted. It wasn't greed; it's not like I was tempted or anything like that. I just felt a deep certainty that it was the thing to do. The quietness of how he'd gone about it spoke volumes. I understood no strings were attached; that it would never bring me grief. In fact, we moderated discussion of his restaurant extra vigilantly from then on, to be sure we weren't playing favorites. Kenny wrote in a couple times over the years to politely (believe it or not) complain about the moderation. Our staff politely explained the specific issues, and he amiably accepted those explanations. That's it.
To his great credit, Kenny never once mentioned his support when he wrote in. Or at any other time. Class guy. I know terms like "quietness", "class", "amiable", and "polite" were not his brand, so I've waited until today to tar him with this slander. But I felt him.
I was championing quality; trying to awaken consumers and coax them into more thoughtful choices, to help support the good guys. He understood I was chopping a decade out of my life to work an essential angle no one had previously thought to work. While other restaurateurs tested Chowhound's defenses, scheming to pollute and dilute the resource with fake raves, or sent us furious objections for allowing people to post negative opinions (if I had a dime for every threatened defamation lawsuit...), Kenny, and seemingly Kenny alone, understood that it was all a big fat wet kiss on the lips for dedicated, talented people like him. Don't ask me how I knew this, but I did, from the silence of his gesture. So we cashed the checks.
Mr. Asshole turned out to be a white knight.
His cookbook, "Eat Me", is wonderful, by the way. Very underrated. It's currently out of stock, but I'd imagine they'll reprint if there were demand. Order at Amazon to help make that happen. If you enjoyed Chowhound, this would help return the favor.
Yesterday, Brazil's national museum burned to the ground, taking with it millions of artifacts and artworks, including the skeleton of the oldest hominid found in the Americas. All their formative national documents, everything, completely gone, reduced to ash.
Let me tell you about a trip I once took to Brazil. My Brazilian girlfriend was headed home for a few weeks, so I grabbed my trombone and a bathing suit and joined her for a couple weeks of fun in Rio-by-the-sea-o. Here are some snapshots from the visit.
The first curiosity is that in Rio, everyone’s famous. Over and over, I'd pass seemingly regular-looking people and be told that they were elevated and...fabulous. One lady was known far and wide for her bumbum (the local term for butt), which struck me as good-not-great; another for being the mistress of a billionaire; and a slew of people were simply famous for being famous. They weren't canny stokers of their personal brands, ala Hilton or Kardashian. That requires skill and effort. These folks were simply anointed, period.
I spent an afternoon drinking shots of cachaça with this guy, "Tim", no last name, just Tim. He was an American who'd insinuated himself within some TV star’s entourage, and had become famous for the connection. He was so impossibly Kato Kaelinesque (this was a few months before the OJ trial) that he actually lived in a guesthouse by the pool. He was perfectly down to earth with me, but whenever a Brazilian came within range, he'd change all his mannerisms along with his language, becoming the haughtiest and most affectedly languid straight dude you've ever met. He was rocking it old school...ala 15th century. I hadn't realized anyone could still do "princely". I suppose my own caché increased from having hung out with him, not that I'd have even noticed. I imagined locals pointing at me and whispering "he drank cachaça with Tim!"
Most nights, when she wasn't out on the town preening in her tight black dress amid the hoi polloi and the faux-famous-polloi, my girlfriend would get quietly drunk in front of the TV, puke, and fell into bed. We hadn't done much of anything during the day either, as a crippling dull lethargy gripped her, her family, their apartment building, the neighborhood, the city, and the country. But one morning she rallied and told me she'd bring me to a jungle paradise, full of waterfalls, a few hours out of town, and she'd decided - over my strenuous objections - that we'd hitchhike there. The first car that picked us up was driven by a creepy drunk who we forced to drop us off a few miles later. We walked back to the apartment. Drink, puke, sleep.
Music-wise, I expected a vibrant scene, with streets full of samba and clubs full of bossa nova. What I found was the shiny music of everywhere-but-Brazil. You know how when you hand a kid an open microphone he'll do his version of the most obnoxious and affected sports announcer? All I heard was the most exaggeratedly vapid American-style pop, hip hop, and fusion jazz, and equally vapid Caribbean Latino pop, performed, always, with blindingly white teeth. Flashy trashy bullshit.
We went to a concert by renowned singer/composer Chico Buarque (billionaire mistress chick - who weighed like 17 pounds and survived on mints and cigarettes - had scored primo tickets from her "boyfriend"). Like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, Buarque had done some good early work, though a bit pop-ish, but all three were now caught in the same shiny tractor beam as everyone else, producing lame bloodless affected pap. The entire nation seemed a couple pints low on plasma.
It made no sense. This was a great and beautiful country, with a cultural heritage of pure poetry. But, unable to live up to that heritage, it had been captivated by empty, shallow flash, which felt more current and fabulous than their own stuff, which felt local, dowdy, and unfabulous. Above all, one felt a thick restlessness. Something similar is subtly experienced in other has-been countries like England or Spain, but here it was full-blast. Brazilians have a love/hate relationship with Brazil, and they choose 180° wrong, loving the hateable and hating the loveable.
Finally, I hit the streets, searching for a vestige of the real Brazilian spirit to rescue my trip. On a mountain in the outskirts of Rio, in a very dangerous neighborhood very late at night, I heard, to my shock, live real Brazilian music. I entered the restaurant, where they were playing chorinho, the style which had preceded samba and bossa nova, sort of analogous to our ragtime. It's great. Get a sense of it here:
There was joy. There was bloodedness. I whipped out my trombone and played all night. And returned the next.
The players sat informally around a table in the restaurant strumming myriad guitars and shaking percussion and stacking their shot glasses. They were alcoholic vagabonds who did little else but sleep all day and drink and play all night, and only a few dozen people knew about them. There was a fuzzy dream quality to the whole scene; no one ever talked to me or asked my name. There was no time for it; I never once saw them take a break. And the entire room - musicians, audience, and servers - perennially hovered near the point of alcohol poisoning. Booze was their Popeye spinach.
I hear they're still there, still doing it, decades later. In my mind, I view it through the wrong end of the telescope as a tiny, distant, sharply focused gem, the final glowing ember of the national culture and soul.
I've written about how depression is caused by a frozen perspective. Brazil - a place where even the recent past seems faded and crusted - is an entire society cursed with frozen perspective. Nothing really works, and no one really cares.
As a disconsolate Brazilian raged on Twitter this morning (read her short thread, please):
If you are not Brazilian, it may be difficult for you to fathom the fact that the museum had absolutely no mechanisms that could possibly help extinguish the fire.
Not even the hydrants were working properly when the fire brigade arrived.
To her, and to me, this wasn't so much a tragedy as the culmination of a tragedy. García Márquez would have rejected this development for being overly heavy-handed. Too damned on-the-nose.
I've been wondering lately what to expect from the ongoing decline of the American empire. While I've never felt particularly jazzed to be part of the Number One Country, and would be perfectly happy with #20 or #30, I worry we'll congeal into a hellscape of ennui, corruption, soullessness and incompetence. That we'll foresake indie rock and blues and jazz in favor of shitty English language versions of the latest Chinese pop. That we'll wind up lost, restless, and too distracted by our own self-loathing to prevent it all from burning down.
"I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious — by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but solitary communion with the “mountains & the woods”—the “altars” of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures." - Edgar Allan Poe
Creativity requires space. You don't tighten your belt to foster your best creativity, you loosen it. You don't bear down, you dilate.
If you were to observe me, you'd think I was the biggest slacker in the world. When not in mid-project (actually executing the things I've dreamed up), I spend an awful lot of time sitting around, watching TV, ruminating, hanging out, not doing anything productive. This used to mortify me. I figured I was lazy, shiftless, and broken. I've constantly worried about wasting my life. It's been a huge source of shame since early childhood. But at a certain point I turned around, looked back, and noticed, to my surprise, that I'd actually accomplished stuff, and developed a range of skills, even in my seeming sloth. Magically, stuff got done!
I know now that it's easily explained: creativity is fostered by loosening the belt, by making space for epiphanies. An awful lot can get done via relentless hard work (and I eventually learned how to knuckle down into that in order to execute my ideas), but creativity is a different animal, and it looks lazy.
I thought Mickey Rooney's Potato Fantasy restaurant was a real thing until Barry Strugatz sussed out the hoax's originator, Chris Shapan, who does a miraculous job of spoofing old-style print media. Don't miss his FB page (expect to fall down a very deep hole).
If, like me, you're too moderate to entirely spurn the memory of John McCain for the real harm he did to the nation by bringing us the loathsome Sarah Palin, setter of our current stage; too measured to dismiss him outright for his frightful hawkishness; too forgiving to damn him for abandoning principle to pander and tap dance through his final race for the presidency; and you choose a more nuanced view, recognizing that just because John McCain, the man, was a very different entity from his own legend doesn't mean he didn't damn well earn that legend the hard way...then I would suggest that you:
2. share my fervent hope that McCain, in death, will fully transmogrify into the John McCain we all wanted, and provide timely inspiration to the Trump property junior managers of the US Congress to summon some courage and character, or, at least to keep alive some of their fading rational ambivalence.
