The prevailing mainstream-media widsom is that this decade we’re winding down just might be the worst ever—or at least the worst in recent memory.
I’m not ready to offer such a sweeping assessment myself, but, back at the decade’s midpoint, in late 2005, I stopped to contemplate the half-decade that had just passed and thought: This has been an ugly stretch. So ugly, in fact, that there was no way that VH1 and its stable of “fundits” could pull off one of those “I Love the Eighties”-type shows where they could rat-a-tat glib quips about all the horror that had unfolded.
Or could they?
(Courtesy of the archive of my semi-defunct site Snobsite.)
December 22, 2009 
Link General Posts
Hey: If you have one of those e-readers made by Amazon, or the corresponding iPhone app, you can now wirelessly download my seriocomic survey of American foodism, The United States of Arugula, and make it part of your portable library.
I was initially wary of the Kindle, because I like real books and independent bookstores. But now that I have one, I find it complements rather than replaces my actual-book-reading. The Kindle is great for loading up on ripping yarns in the crime and thriller genres, which are a godsend during flight delays and long waits at the DMV. Actual books are great for the visual and tactile stuff that the Kindle can’t deliver on. I think Arugula makes for a good Kindle read—it’s not a visual book, and it fits the bill for anyone who needs a fun, absorbing read to get lost in during winter vacation (hint, hint). Besides, I’m eager to reach a new audience of readers in a new way. And the telepathy thing wasn’t working.
December 21, 2009 Link General Posts
My pals at Greenwich Letterpress have just relaunched their Web site, making it easier than ever to order the Food Snob place cards they devised with me. Sisters Beth and Amy Salvini are third-generation printers, and we are working on further Snob products that will adhere to our high standards of heavy paper stock and graphic drollery.
Beth and Amy were recently featured on LXTV 1st Look NY, which supplies content for those little TVs in New York taxicabs. In case you haven’t been cabbing, here’s the clip:
December 17, 2009 Link General Posts
The official dinner menu for November 24’s White House state dinner for the prime minister of India includes a salad made with “White House arugula.” Take that, A.O. “Tony” Scott!
November 24, 2009 Link General Posts
Some months back, I was goaded into experimenting with a microposting utility you might have heard of called Twitter. I’ve since lost interest in Twitter, but, given the hotness of vampire stories and the imminent release of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, I thought I’d reissue, in its entirety, a 24-tweet “teen novelette” that I composed one spring day. It is called “Bruce Weber and the Photogenic Vampires of the Adirondacks,” or BWATPVOTA for short. (I have never read a Twilight book, but I have interviewed Weber and know from experience that this is pretty much exactly how things go ’round his place.)
I now hereby present “Bruce Weber and the Photogenic Vampires of the Adirondacks, A Young-Adult Novel in 24 Tweets”:
BWATPVOTA, Pt 1: Kendra was discovered while rowing at the Schuylkill Navy Regatta. Her ponytail was like a sheaf of golden Champlain wheat.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 2: Porter was discovered while splitting rails on his grandpa’s ranch in Moab, UT. He had cheekbones you could gut trout with.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 3: Kendra and Porter met on a shoot at Splintery Posts, an old camp Bruce Weber owned in the Adirondacks.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 4: Fourteen youths had been booked for the shoot, all with abdomens as tight as drumheads. Only two, however, were vampires.
BWATPVOTA, Pt. 5: Porter first spotted Kendra draped across an old Packard coupe that had been converted into a planter. Weber snapped away.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 6: She wore a madras bandeau and a sarong made from the flag of Burma. Porter caught her eye—the most cerulean eye ever.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 7: The pheromones sizzled off their skin like summer raindrops on an overheated vintage Buick.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 8: They knew then that they desired one another. They did not yet know that they shared a desire to eat the photographer.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 9: The models’ hospitality tent was loaded with carnage: blood-rare steaks, huge haunches of lamb, joints of local elk.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 10: Weber was vividly aware that the teen metabolism knew no limits.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 11: Yet Porter ignored the buffet; he “dined” only when night fell. “Dude,” said a towhead named Andy, “aren’t you hungry?”
BWATPVOTA, Pt 12: “Andy, it’s just that I’m a v—” Porter caught himself. “...a, er, VEGAN.” Kendra had overheard it all. And now she KNEW.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 13: Weber was not ignorant of the fact that the young and beautiful were often shape-shifting beasts.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 14: Two of his favorite subjects from the early 1980s, Darren and Michael, had been werewolf lovers. They’d been all over GQ.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 15: Weber approached Kendra and Porter as they nuzzled. “This afternoon,” he said, “it’s just you two for me.”
BWATPVOTA, Pt 16: “We shall hike up to Crystalline Pond,” Weber said. “The light there is especially gorgeous... at dusk.”
BWATPVOTA, Pt 17: Dusk fell at the pond. Weber arranged things just so. Porter wore nothing but an ounce of Lycra. Kendra, only a canoe.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 18: A rivulet of sweat trickled down Porter’s sternum. Kendra moved quickly to swab it with a finger. “Wonderful!” Weber said.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 19: But as it got darker, they grew hungrier. A little past six, Porter really did gut a trout with his cheekbones.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 20: Porter used the slurry of fish blood and innards to write on Kendra’s thigh, BATS 4 U. Weber got it all on film.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 21: The light grew ever fainter, the areolae more puckered, but Weber loved the strange energy his subjects were giving him.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 22: It was when Weber turned his back to reload his Pentax that the sun disappeared, and Kendra shot Porter a knowing look.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 23: The following morning, the police dogs finally picked up Weber’s scent at the mouth of a cave near Crystalline Pond.
BWATPVOTA, Pt 24: But all the police ever found was a do-rag, a Pentax 67, and the most softly worn chambray shirt that had ever existed.
November 12, 2009 Link General Posts
In an audaciously small-time attempt at brand extension, I have collaborated with the talented young artisans at New York City’s Greenwich Letterpress on a series of place cards based on The Food Snob’s Dictionary. I must say that they turned out fantastically, and that they are, at $14 a packet, a perfect hostess gift (or hostile gesture) for the upcoming holidays. The cards come eight to a packet (two samples are shown above) and are printed on heavy stock. You may purchase them at Greenwich Letterpress’s lovely, endlessly browsable shop at 39 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, NYC, or order them online here.
November 8, 2009 Link General Posts
I judged a Piglet.
I wrote about Dad Lit.
I learned that Rockwell actually rocked well.
I delighted in discovering that my lighter work is ideal for convalescents.
November 3, 2009 Link General Posts
Because they’ve given him the voice of a lightly buzzed yuppie having a heart-to-heart with his “bro” shortly before leaving the bar and committing vehicular manslaughter.
October 30, 2009 Link General Posts
Having attended more Yankee games this season than in any year past, I’ve become fascinated by the now de rigeur “entrance music” that each batter chooses to be played as he steps up to the plate. Mark Teixeira uses “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister; Derek Jeter uses 50 Cent’s “Get Up”; Nick Swisher uses “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” by the hat act Big & Rich. Fun stuff, and telling in its way, but pretty much what you’d expect from a bunch of jocks.
But late in the regular season, after the Yankees had clinched the division, I attended a game where they were starting a bunch of backups (who still demolished the hapless Kansas City Royals), among them the 30-year-old Shelley Duncan, whose impressive slugging in Triple A never quite seems to translate to the big leagues. But what an entrance-music choice! He strode to the plate to the White Stripes’s “Icky Thump.” Heavens, could there be a bona fide Rock Snob in the Yankees organization?
This naturally got me thinking what song I would choose if I were a Yankee position player. My first impulse was to make a joke of it and choose the gayest, most antithetical-to-jockdom song I could think of, something like Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out” or Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy.” (I am, after all, from a small town.) But I soon realized that nothing could top the cognitive dissonance of the Yankee Stadium grounds crew’s ritual fifth-inning pantomiming of “YMCA,” a song conceived by Village People svengali Jacques Morali as an homage to cruising.
I then thought that something vaguely alt-rocky and Shelley Duncan-ish would be good, but what? Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” is one of the best pop singles ever recorded, and it has the right energy for a stadium, but the title phrase has become too cliché, not to mention redolent of steroid abuse. Big Audio Dynamite’s “C’mon Every Beatbox” is inspiring and dynamic but too English for the Bronx. The Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot” has sports-appropriate lyrics and the right geographical pedigree, but it could almost qualify as jock rock.
So for the moment I’ve settled upon Lou Reed’s “Vicious,” because A) Reed is so New York; B) it’s a good, rollicking song to step up to the plate to; and C) there’s something subversive and enigmatic, especially in a baseball stadium, about the lyric “I hit you with a flower.”
October 27, 2009 Link General Posts
About a year ago I was a part of a group of authors that participated in a charity fundraiser in Sacramento, California. The star attraction was John Grogan, the guy who wrote Marley & Me. Grogan turned out to be a personable, unpretentious man, easy to talk to, and I ruefully confessed to him that, while I have a dog, I hadn’t worked out an angle for lucratively exploiting my dog’s inherently endearing dogginess.
But now, the drumbeat begins. My dog, a shiba inu named Trixie, has made two recent appearances in “the media”: first, as part of my photo portfolio in Time Out New York...
...and now, as the faithful companion animal and seeming collaborator in Ross MacDonald’s new contributor’s illustration of me in Vanity Fair:
The occasion for this new round of Trix-sploitation is my article about Norman Rockwell in the November issue of Vanity Fair. Rockwell was keen on including dogs in his portraits of work and family life, so having Trixie pose with me seemed apposite. (Though it borders on heresy to have a purebred in the picture; Rockwell’s dogs were invariably mutts.)
If you’re looking for a more immediate experience than my longish article on Rockwell, Ross and I did a slide show with audio voice-over for Vanity Fair’s Web site.
My dog, incidentally, is repped by Suzanne Gluck and Jennifer Walsh at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.
October 8, 2009 Link General Posts
No sooner had I finished Nick Hornby’s highly entertaining new novel, Juliet, Naked, did I learn that its narrative was inspired, believe it or not, by my 2007 Vanity Fair piece on Sly Stone. Hornby says so in an interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross that you can read excerpts of and/or listen to here.
Let the record show that Hornby’s protagonist is a loser male Rock Snob obsessed with a reclusive musician named Tucker Crowe. But the person who actually gets to meet Crowe in Juliet, Naked—the way I actually got to meet Sly Stone—is the male loser’s pretty and more sensible girlfriend. Can we say that I fall somewhere in between the two characters?
October 6, 2009 Link General Posts
Like a lot of people, I was whomped by this year’s succession of big-name summertime deaths: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Walter Cronkite, John Hughes, Ellie Greenwich, Teddy Kennedy, etc.
So I set out to explain—first to myself and then to Vanity Fair readers—why this particular round of deaths seemed to hit us with more force than others have. The result is an essay you can read on V.F.’s Web site called “Twentieth-Century Nostalgia, or the ‘Summer of Death’ Explained.”
October 4, 2009 Link General Posts
My post on the unsung but appealingly named NFL defensive tackle Leger Douzable prompted an e-mail from, of all people, Douzable’s mother, Felichia Henry of Tampa, Florida. Ms. Henry writes, “Thought you’d want to know that he was activated today to the Rams roster. Hopefully he has found a home for a very long time.”
Though Leger is no longer a Giant, I wish him well with the Rams, and we in the Leger Douzable Fan Club share his mom’s hope that he indeed enjoys longevity and prosperity in the NFL.
Now I have to get serious about those fan-club t-shirts...
October 3, 2009 Link General Posts
This week I grew a beard out of necessity; I cut my chin and cannot shave until the skin there heals. I’ve never been a beardy person, but it so happens that beards are very “now” in the five boroughs. Since acquiring the beard, this is what’s happened:
I don’t feel like a “David,” more like a “Ben” or a “Sam.”
I am overtaken by an urge to festoon my home with taxidermy.
I’ve been lost in reveries of reclaimed wood from old maritime chantries in rough parishes.
I’m keen to relocate to Sullivan County.
Lots of drainpipe trousers all of a sudden.
Lots of waistcoats, too. In tattersall and plaid.
No more Tanqueray or Maker’s Mark; now my cocktails are concocted with things like sloe gin and jenever.
I am compelled to make my own artisanal chocolate.
September 26, 2009 Link General Posts
With the NFL season kicking off this weekend, I hereby announce the founding of the Leger Douzable Fan Club. You are all invited to join me; I’m hoping to print up membership cards and t-shirts.
Douzable is an unsung, fringe-prospect, modestly compensated defensive lineman on a team stacked with famous, talented, and highly paid defensive linemen—my team, the New York Giants. I met him in August, when he was the longest of long shots to make the team, an undrafted 23-year-old free agent who’d already been released by another team, the Minnesota Vikings. He was, for all intents and purposes, just another body to have in camp, a big guy to throw out there on the field for practices and drills. He did have one feather in his cap, though—on the final play of the Giants’ first preseason game, he forced a fumble by the Carolina Panthers’ quarterback, and this fumble was picked up by another long-shot D-lineman, Tommie Hill, and returned for the winning touchdown.
On August 19, a couple of days after that game, I attended the Giants’ training camp on the SUNY-Albany campus with my 10-year-old son and my writer pal Peter Richmond. After watching a morning practice, we stationed ourselves in a spot where my son could request autographs from the players. The veterans were friendly enough, but it was Douzable (pictured above, with child’s face awkwardly cropped out) who charmed us, and who seemed as appreciative to have inquisitive fans as we were to talk to a (for the moment) professional football player.
First of all, that name: it is pronounced, he told us, Le-ZHERE DOOZ-able, and is easily one of the best Giant football names since Ali Haji-Sheikh, who was a placekicker for the team in the ’80s. Freshly showered, Douzable emerged from the practice facility wearing a t-shirt bearing the words BE THE CHANGE—the slogan, he explained, of the African-American Student Union at the University of Central Florida. (A Tampa native, he graduated from UCF last year and was an officer in the student union.) He sweetly accepted our congratulations on the forced fumble, kindly cradled my son for a photo-op, and, in a manner we deemed wildly optimistic bordering on delusional, talked hopefully about his chances of making the team.
Peter Richmond was so taken with our new pal Leger that he wrote a rhapsodic audio essay about him for an upstate-Connecticut radio station, WHDD, which you can listen to here or read the text of here.
But even after this whole Douzable love fest, we were resigned to the fact that our Leger would soon be cut, perhaps never again to be picked up by an NFL team. Which is why it was such a delight to learn, last week, that, against all odds, Douzable had made the final 53-man roster; not the eight-man practice squad where teams stash their raw prospects and emergency fill-ins, but the actual roster.
There’s still every chance that Douzable might get released in the course of the season—even as soon as next week, when the suspended linebacker Michael Boley is elgible for reinstatement.* But we in the Leger Douzable Fan Club look forward to seeing our guy trundle onto the field to spell the big-name defensive tackles Fred Robbins, Barry Cofield, Chris Canty, and Rocky Bernard. And we hope that, when he records his first sack or stuffs his first run, the scoreboard operators at Giants Stadium take us up on our suggestion to put up the words, WUZN’T THAT A DOUZ-Y!!!
* UPDATE: Sadly, on Tuesday, September 15, this exact scenario played out—our buddy Leger was waived to make room for the returning Boley and a new running back, Gartrell Johnson, who was signed to fill in for the injured Danny Ware. Still, the Leger Douzable Fan Club will remain active, and we will track his movements and career wherever it takes him.**
** UPDATE OF UPDATE: Leger was quickly picked up by the St. Louis Rams, whose new coach, Steve Spagnuolo, is the Giants’ former defensive coordinator. The saga of Douzy continues...
September 10, 2009 Link General Posts
I was one of 83 New Yorkers tapped to participate in Time Out New York’s “NYC in Pictures” issue. The way it works is, each participant was sent a 27-exposure disposable camera (actually, they are now euphemistically called “single-use cameras” to obfuscate their un-greenness), and we were told to mail in our used-up cameras by a certain date in August.
Compared to the outré, willfully provocative pix by some of the other New Yorkers selected, my little portfolio is rather mundane. But it’s fairly true to life, in that it features Jerry Orbach, my dad’s old Dunelt bicycle, the dog, the smugavore tomatoes, Jack’s Stir-Brew Coffee, and lovable neighborhood crank Ted Heller.
September 5, 2009 Link General Posts
I am trying to coin a new word for the type of person whose food is so locally and immaculately sourced that he is beyond proud or virtuous; he is smug. He is a smugavore.
Last year, I tried to popularize this word in honor of the sugar snap peas that I’d grown on the little terrace off of my NYC office, which is roughly the size of a lounge chair. But this attempt failed. This year, in honor of my terrace-grown organic, pesticide-free heirloom tomatoes and fresh basil (pictured, smugly, below), I’m having another go. Sample usage: David Kamp is so self-righteous about the teeny carbon footprint of his tomato-basil salad that he’s turned into a tiresome smugavore.
August 7, 2009 Link General Posts
I wrote up this little appreciation of John Hughes for Vanity Fair’s Web site.
Keep a wide berth from me; I am a death hex. I was preparing to write a piece about Hughes when he died. In 2002, while researching my VF piece on the British Invasion, I spent many hours in the delightful company of Gordon Waller, of the Invasion duo Peter & Gordon, who passed away on July 17. Back in 1999, I spent a bit of time with sax-man Sam Butera for my VF story on Butera’s boss, Louis Prima. Butera died on June 3. And in the 1990s, I spent many hours in the company of the great screenwriter Budd Schulberg, whose memoir of the making of On the Waterfront I was editing for GQ. He died on August 5. (He was 95, though.) The funny thing about editing Schulberg is that I went to his house in Westhampton Beach, New York, and we worked on the story outside—sitting, literally, on the waterfront.
August 7, 2009 Link General Posts
Love this.
July 30, 2009 Link General Posts
This morning, I was upset to walk past our neighborhood greasy spoon, beloved Greenwich Village institution Joe Jr.’s, and see a handwritten “LOST OUR LEASE” sign in its window, with a declaration that the place will close this Sunday, July 5. A smattering of smaller signs asks patrons to sign a petition to save the restaurant.
Look, I know that change and turnover are an inexorable part of New York City, but my sadness about Joe Jr.’s isn’t just based on sentimentality. This place serves good diner food—homemade soups, terrific omelettes with corned-beef hash, fountain lemonade, and burgers that realize beautifully that specific diner-burger idiom—AND it is thriving, not a tired old joint wanting for customers and vitality.
So I sent out an APB to bloggers I knew would care—Josh Ozersky of The Feedbag, Ed Levine of Serious Eats, and Jeremiah Moss of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York—and they all posted my sad entreaty to help save the place. (Josh mischievously identified me as “Bob Cratchit.”) Also picking up my words were Eater and New York magazine’s Grub Street blog, though the latter curiously quoted someone named “David Camp.” Thanks, blogging community! I really do appreciate it.
Alas, per further reporting from Grub Street, it looks like the place is finished. The Hondros family, which owns Joe Jr.’s, sounds resigned to their fate, and the petition movement was started by crestfallen customers, not the Hondroses. I beseech all the landlords with empty storefronts in the Village to be sympathetic, and I beseech some young would-be restaurateur to start a new institution that will serve our neighborhood as well, and as unpretentiously, as Joe Jr.’s has.*
* BONUS: Please see this touching appreciation from The Villager’s Ed Gold of Louie, né Elias Vassilakis, the beloved Joe Jr.’s counterman who died abruptly in 2004. Louie’s was the first death I had to explain to my kids in that life-lesson, death-of-Mr. Hooper-on-Sesame Street sort of way.
UPDATE: The New York Times has filed a report that carries a faint whiff of hope for a stay of execution.
UPDATE OF UPDATE: Alas, an eleventh-hour save was not to happen. Joe Jr.’s is no more.
July 2, 2009 Link General Posts
