General Posts Archives

...and this is an all-too-realistic depiction of what a meeting with him is like.

July 3, 2008  Link  General Posts

You know we’ve reached some kind of tipping point with regard to both eco-awareness and high grocery prices when even a historically inept gardener like me starts growing his own food. Behold, above, a typical daily haul from my modest little trellis-ful of snap-pea plants. I grew them, from seeds (purchased here), on the tiny terrace that abuts my office in New York City. Within minutes of picking, the peas were flash-blanched Thomas Keller-style and served in a mint butter made with spearmint leaves (also grown on the terrace) and Ronnybrook butter purchased at the nearby farmer’s market.

A cheap, local, delicious, minimially footprintish component of our early-summer dinners. I’m not only inordinately proud of this modest achievement; I’m smug about it. Isn’t it time you became a Smugavore?

July 2, 2008  Link  General Posts

The success of WALL•E, with its Hello, Dolly! leitmotif, has given my Spy and Vanity Fair colleague Nell Scovell a pretext to tell a real Hollywood Babylon-type story she recently heard about one of the forgotten stars of that blowsy 1969 movie musical. Read Nell’s tale from the gutter here.

July 1, 2008  Link  General Posts

Look high, look low, look anywhere on the Web where user commenting is enabled, and you’ll find vitriol, hate speech, and an appalling ignorance of the difference between “Your” and “You’re.” The “empowering” of reg’lar folk with the ability to comment on Web sites has generally led to a lot of unpleasantness and just a thimble-ful of thoughtful discourse.

I recently read a fine summary of the case against comments on the blog Luminous, written by a Web developer named Michael Barrish. Barrish says:

I stopped reading blog comments long ago, recognizing, in confirmation of Sturgeon’s Law, that 90% of all comments are crap. There are many varieties of crap—off-topic, self-serving, ass-kissing, uninformed, superficial, showboating, belligerent, and of course, just plain dull—but the result is the same. Of course, 90% is not 100%, which is say that some comments are not crap at all, and that some—one percent?—are truly thought-provoking. Unfortunately the better comments don’t come with little flags indicating their higher quality, so the entire endeavor remains too much of a crap shoot (pun intended) to tempt me.

Yet there are certain sites where the comments are actually worth reading, and where the commenters themselves have formed a happy, civil community. On Serious Eats, the food site run by Ed Levine, the tenor of the comments is jolly and small-townish, with none of the nihilism, know-it-all one-upmanship, or loony vein-bulging you get on sites like Eater and Chowhound. See this old post by Ed about doughnuts, for example, in which Ed laments the state of the doughnut trade in New York, and take note of how the commenters chime in with their own thoughts and suggestions; Serious Eats is the most uncynical, undepressing food site out there.

Part of this is to do with Ed himself. The shop proprietor is a sunny, middle-aged enthusiast, the antithesis of the callow, attention-mad Webutante hater. Furthermore, as Ed has explained to me, Serious Eats commenters must register with the site to comment. Required registration doesn’t always weed out the cranks, but it does act as a deterrent to anonymous drive-by hate-comments of the “F U faggit” and “Your so retarded” variety. Plus, it fosters a sense of community and cooperation.

Another site with comments worth reading is Scott Schuman’s wonderful three-year-old blog The Sartorialist, which basically adapted Bill Cunningham’s shot-on-the-street fashion photography to the Web age. Anonymous commenting is allowed on The Sartorialist, but it’s seldom cruel or bitchy–which, on a fashion site, is really saying something. Again, this is a case where the proprietor’s enthusiasm is infectious. The commenters, whether chiming in on a man’s ensemble or a woman’s, come out in large numbers and offer a very readable mix of gush, constructive criticism, and fill-in-the-gaps ID’ing of specifc elements and accessories. They are indispensable to the reading experience of this particular blog, and that’s as great a scenario for user comments as one could hope for.

P.S. The eccentrically dressed young woman whose Sartorialist photo I link to above is my college-age cousin Fay! I was utterly astonished to find her included among Schuman’s roster of hardcore fashionistas in Milan, Paris, and London. She’s from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, for gosh’s sake.

June 25, 2008  Link  General Posts

A young fogey named Jeremiah Moss writes an interesting blog that I’ve visited from time to time called Vanishing New York. Its subtitle–“A Book of Lamentations: A Bitterly Nostalgic Look at a City in the Process of Going Extinct”–gives you a good idea of its tenor. Moss is at once an eloquent appreciator of NYC’s vestigial middle- and working-class haunts and an authentically bitter crank. I bet he’s as upset as I am that Tony Scott is remaking The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, a scuzz-perfect evocation of early-1970s New York that no one has any business remaking.

Anyway, I must have been behind in my blog-reading, for it’s taken me until now to discover Moss’s March post on a word I coined in 2005 and promptly forgot about, “Vongerichtified.” I used the word to describe what was happening to the West Village in a New York Times piece about the closing of my favorite neighborhood Italian restaurant, the Beatrice Inn: “In a neighborhood that grows ever more fabulous, expensive and Vongerichtified,” I wrote, “the Beatrice is one of the last vestiges of the nudgy, agitational, oppositional Village of yore.”

Moss, unfamiliar with Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the chef whose design-forward restaurants often represent the tipping point in a neighborhood’s stampede towards hypergentrification (e.g. Spice Market in the Meatpacking District, 66 in Tribeca [now shuttered], and Perry St in the Far West Village), consulted with a Hunter College professor of philosophy (!) named Frank Kirkland on what my word meant. Kirkland, after consulting with his colleagues, came up with this marvelous mini-treatise:

“A neighborhood that is ‘Vongerichtified’ would be one whose restaurants have shifted their cuisine, their ambience, and their prices in [a] high-end direction. Sociologically this is quite interesting, characterizing a neighborhood in terms of its restaurants. Usually, a neighborhood restaurant carries a kind of ‘gemeinschaftlich’ (communal) sense. A restaurant in a ‘Vongerichtified’ neighborhood does not appear to carry such a sense.”

Amen to that, professor! With the exception of his very first New York restaurant, JoJo, none of Vongerichten’s restaurants have successfully integrated themselves into the fabric of a neighborhood. A Vongerichten restaurant is like a plasma TV that’s been wired into the wall of a Victorian townhouse: a flashy add-on that’s cool in its way but messes with the overall vibe. And is obsolete within five years.

Still, I’m more accepting than Moss of the city’s perpetual state of upheaval–yesterday’s workingman’s club is today’s baby-tee boutique is tomorrow’s haute fro-yo outlet. So it goes. Losing the old Beatrice Inn, though: That, I admit, was a body blow. I continue to feel a visceral yearning for the subterranean red-sauce joint on a weekly basis, nearly three years after the fact–a circumstance not abetted by the fact that the space, its name and facade unchanged, now houses a club where Lindsay Lohan, assorted Ronsons, and both Olsens congregate, and where bouncers enforce a door policy. Truth be told, there was no villainy in the switchover from the old Beatrice Inn to the new: the old place’s owner-proprietors, siblings Vivian Cardia and Aldo Cardia Jr., simply wanted to sell out and relax after their mother died. (I’ve since come across Aldo bicycling in the neighborhood, his waiter’s starched whites and bowtie replaced by a polo shirt; he looks ten years younger than he used to, with probably the first tan of his life.)

But my wife and I had planned on growing old at the Beatrice Inn. In the Times article on the old place, I wrote that it attracted “an older crowd, a lot of gray heads, uncertain gaits and the occasional customer who comes in accessorized with an oxygen tank.” (Actually, I wrote “...with an oxygen tank and a nasal cannula,” but the Times editors deemed the mention of the breathing tube too grisly.)

Uncertain of gait Lindsay Lohan may very well be, but does she have any sense of the gemeinschaftlich?

June 17, 2008  Link  General Posts

Last August, I wrote a post entitled “Barack’s Little Arugula Problem” in which I forecast that “Arugula will be for Obama what the Swift Boat Vets were for Kerry.” Thing is, I was just goofing around and didn’t think that Obama’s summertime “gaffe” (he mentioned arugula and Whole Foods in front of some unwealthy Iowan farmers!) would matter once the actual primaries started and people would presumably care about, you know, important issues.

But lo, here were are in the first week of May, and this was Newsweek’s cover last week...

 

....and, as Ben Kaplan notes in Toronto’s National Post, the arugula issue won’t die.

And we’re now in this dumb predicament, yet again, of choosing a president based on who we’d most like to have a beer with. (As opposed to sharing an arugula salad with, which is Mark Penn-Karl Rove code for committing sodomy.) It brings me down, down, down to watch our presidential candidates play-acting at being extras in John Cougar’s “Hurts So Good” video, trying to prove their white, denimy, working-class, tavern-dwelling bona fides and arguing over who was less privileged growing up. I’m including Obama, too, who’s been baited into going on a de facto national pub crawl just because Hillary Clinton has somehow convinced a bunch of voters that she’s more a brewski-chugging Scrantonian than what she really is, an abstemious Washingtonian. (I know whereof I speak; I married into a family of brewski-chugging Scrantonians.)

This riles me on two counts. First, why has it become political doctrine that a candidate must prove that he or she is just like the voter? I keep waiting for a candidate to have the guts to say, “Look, I’m not just like you. I won’t pretend that I share your drinking habits, your economic situation, your ethnic background, or your salad-green preferences, if any. But you can be damned sure that I have your best interests at heart, and that I am here to listen to you and represent you. If I were not sincere in this, I wouldn’t be here today asking for your vote.” I think that voters would appreciate this sort of actual straight talk more than the usual, patently phony “common touch” claims of NASCAR fandom and pork-rind addiction.

The second thing that troubles me is that a candidate can so easily be put on the defensive for coming off as “elitist” and therefore “out of touch.” Let’s not delude ourselves: All three candidates–Obama, Clinton, and John McCain–are, by definition, elitists. They are members of one of the most elite institutions on the planet, the United States Senate, and they have adjudged themselves smarter and more qualified than other Americans to lead the country. And that’s fine. I have my issues with each of them and my preference for one over the other two, but I’d rather our pool of candidates come from an experienced, motivated political elite than from an open casting call for a plainspoken “everyman” unsullied by any connection to politics. (Those dream scenarios always turn out badly, anyway; think of Ross Perot, or Homer’s campaign in 2004.)

“Elitist” and “out of touch” don’t necessarily go together. They can–as when Barbara Bush alleged in 2005 that living in a temporary encampment in the Astrodome was “working very well” for Katrina refugees, most of whom “were underprivileged, anyway.”

But I don’t believe that any of the three elitists currently running for president are fundamentally “out of touch” with the American people, as each accuses the other two of being. They’re all wealthy, but none of them exude the who-gives-a-damn Marie Antoinette twittishness of Barbara Bush, or the “So?” insouciance and arrogance of Dick Cheney.

Finally, as much as I think Obama has nothing to apologize for, having willed himself through sheer smarts and drive to overcome his messed-up itinerant upbringing by an unendingly questing single mom–if he wants to live the yuppie dream, let him!–I would like to offer him what I think is a masterful bit of pandering strategy. In the tradition of Grace Bedell, the little girl who encouraged Abe Lincoln to grow his beard, I am encouraging Barack Obama to grow a mustache.

The mustache, though associated in earlier times with urbanity and/or refinement (think William Powell or Clark Gable) has in recent decades come to be an identifier of the disenfranchised white, working-class voter that our current candidates so covet. You ever notice that whenever a newspaper or TV show checks in with “blue-collar voters” at a bar during an election season, they always focus their cameras on a guy like the dude below at the right?

Yet no presidential candidate dares to throw his lot in with the common man by growing some lip fur; we haven’t had a mustachioed president since William Howard Taft left office in 1913. So I urge Obama to be bold, be American, and be a mustache man. It’s one area where Hillary can’t outdo you.

May 6, 2008  Link  General Posts

This week in New York City, the Mitzvah Tanks are out in full force. They’re RVs tricked out by the Chabad-Lubabitch Hasidim to function as mobile synagogues and places where lapsed Jewish-Americans can reconnect with traditional, felt-hatted Judaism. As a child, I remember being traumatized when, walking down the main street of my small town in New Jersey, I was ambushed by two Hasids in the full regalia, who said “Hey! Hey! Sonny! Does your mother kindle the Sabbath lights on Friday nights?” It sounded like a lewd come-on.

But now, I have to say I appreciate the comedy of the Mitzvah Tank hustle. Yesterday I was walking past a convoy of Tanks parked along 42nd Steet, wearing the most English thing I own–a pinstriped suit made by Anderson & Sheppard of Savile Row–when a Hasid started walking in lockstep with me, saying “’Scuse me? ’Scuse me? You Jewish? You gotta be Jewish! You look too Jewish!”

April 17, 2008  Link  General Posts

Writer and acclaimed food-person Michael Ruhlman has for the last five months featured an elegantly composed homepage photo on his Web site that hits many of the marks of Food Snobbery as portrayed in the humor book I wrote with Marion Rosenfeld, The Food Snob’s Dictionary. We have definitions in the book for some of the things pictured–the chinois strainer, the Le Creuset pot, the All-Clad pot–and we only wish that the copper pots in Ruhlman’s kitchen had been picked up by him during a trip to E. Dehillerin, the renowned Paris kitchenware shop, because we have a definition for that, too. (The copper pots, alas, came from someone’s house in Florida.)

Anyway, for New York magazine’s Grub Street blog, I thought it would be fun to do an annotated version of Ruhlman’s kitchen (and hair-care secrets) that readers could scroll over for his comments. Michael, a genial fellow, was happy to oblige.

I only wish that some of his blog’s fervent commenters, unfamiliar with the Snob’s Dictionary series of books (and, evidently, with humor itself), were as easygoing and chill as Michael. They’ve taken offense at the term “Food Snob,” as if some sort of grave accusation were being leveled, and assured Ruhlman that, really, he is not a snob. (One reader even reassures Michael, earnestly, that he is “a man of the people.”)

Michael, I’m sorry that our bit of fun turned into a serious referendum on your snobbiness-versus-populism. You snob.

April 10, 2008  Link  General Posts

Huzzahs to the New York Times–an American institution I adore despite the widespread Murdochian bloodlust for its demise–for breaking, first, the news of Eliot Spitzer’s link to the Emperor’s Club, and, second, the identity of “Kristen.” BUT: Was it really necessary to denigrate young Ashley Youmans’s sample song on her MySpace page as “an amateurish, hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune” that uses “dated slang, calling someone her ‘boo’”? Such unwarranted Rock Snobbery! This is a news story, not an arts-section critique! (Evidently, someone at the Times must feel similarly: the latest version of the Ashley story has had the word “amateurish” excised from it.)

First, a word in defense of “dated slang”: It can be an effective lyrical tool, both evocative and funny. Witness Bruce Johnston’s use of the phrase “She’s really swell” in the sublime 1971 Beach Boys song “Disney Girls (1957),” or Beck’s couplet “Word up to the man thing/ She’s always cold-lamping” in the song “Mixed Bizness,” which came out in 1999–a solid decade after the phrases “Word up” and “cold-lamping” were in vogue.

Second, given the Times’s rough treatment of young Ashley, I couldn’t help but think of the scene in the Farrelly Brothers’s Me, Myself & Irene in which Jim Carrey’s character, in full schizo mode, unleashes a cruel monologue of what he presumes to be the Renee Zellweger character’s life arc: “Let me guess: Everybody in town told you you were easy on the eyes, so you decided to become a supermodel. When you got to the Big Apple, they treated you like the worm. So you packed on a few pounds and started calling yourself an actress... Unfortunately, you can’t get far without talent, and after a while the only bright lights you saw were the ones that hit you in the face when you opened the fridge. That’s when you got a boob job, started hanging around on the Upper East Side, looking for a rich old man with a bum ticker... and waved a white flag in the face of your own self-loathing.”

Godspeed, young Ashley: You’re only 22, and dated slang is not such a bad thing.

March 13, 2008  Link  General Posts

Sometimes the YouTube time-machine experience disappoints; the retrieved televisual artifact of one’s childhood isn’t as pleasing or outré as memory promised. But in the case of the infamous New York Rangers “Ooh, la la, Sasson” commercial of 1979 (featuring Phil Esposito, left, and the fabulous Ron Duguay), the experience is even better than what memory promised.

The YouTuber comments that appear below the video are the usual homophobic, subliterate vitriol, but I can only applaud Messrs. Esposito, Duguay, Hedberg, and Maloney for being so brazenly “up” for a swish, Fosse-on-ice number that finds them singing and jazz-handing in designer jeans. That’s precisely what was charming about New York City in the late ’70s, and about the late ’70s in general: that worlds collided under the disco ball, that cultural life wasn’t stifled by the imperatives of corporate caution, that brilliant mistakes like this one could be made.

So here’s to you, Phil Esposito, whose 1972 memoir, Hockey Is My Life, I read in the fourth grade. (Its scandalous [to me then] opening sentence: “I’m a high school drop-out.”) You were even braver off the ice, sir, than on.

March 8, 2008  Link  General Posts

This past football season was the first in which my father, hobbled by rheumatoid arthritis and assorted other ailments, did not feel up to accompanying me to Giants Stadium to watch our team. I’d long been reluctant to bring my son, now eight years old, to Giants games, worrying that he was too young to endure the five-hours-plus ritual (counting the commute) and the sight of middle-aged men screaming themselves raw, which I myself had found terrifying at age ten, sitting by my dad’s side at the stadium in 1976, the year it opened. (It didn’t help that the Giants went 3-11 that year.)

But I had the tickets, and so, it was decided that Father and Son Mark II would try out a 2007 home game: the October 21 matchup with the San Francisco 49ers. In anticipation, I went to a sporting-goods store to pick out a size-small Giants jersey for my boy. In the racks, it looked like this: SHOCKEY, SHOCKEY, MANNING, SHOCKEY, STRAHAN, TOOMER, SHOCKEY, BURRESS, MANNING, UMENYIORA, SHOCKEY, SHOCKEY, SHOCKEY.

I chose the lone BURRESS jersey. Part of the reason was that Plaxico Burress, the team’s big-threat wide receiver, is my favorite Giant to watch when he’s on the field and healthy: those long, spidery limbs, those suction-cup grabs he makes, his ferocious downfield blocking, the fearless stiff-arms he delivers when running after the catch.

I also find endearing what lots of other people have cited as evidence of Burress’s (now fading) reputation as a head case: his refusal to participate in May minicamps if they overlap with Mother’s Day. Burress lost his mother, Vicki, a diabetic, in 2002, when she was only 49 years old. His May no-shows aren’t a con; they’re an unabashed display of tenderness that you don’t see every day in the NFL.

But the other reason I chose Plax’s jersey is because it has long nagged at me that the jersey most commonly worn by fans at Giants games is tight end Jeremy Shockey’s. This isn’t a knock on Shockey, who’s also lots of fun to watch when he’s healthy. What bugs me is that Shockey’s name is disproportionately represented on the backs of Giants fans because he’s… white. Let’s face it, the majority of the fans in the stadium are white, and they more readily identify with the volatile, charismatic white guy with the American flag and bald eagle tattooed on his bicep.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Before Shockey, in the late 1990s, it was Jason Sehorn, the Giants’ model-handsome white cornerback, who most captured the fancy of in-stadium jersey-wearers; this, with defensive end Michael Strahan and linebacker Jessie Armstead in their primes. But why can’t a white kid identify with, or at least proudly wear the number of, a black player?

You can call me out as politically correct for getting my son the BURRESS jersey. But I see it more as socially corrective. My dad, a gregarious car salesman born in 1930, the son of an immigrant from a shtetl, had friends and devoted customers of all races. He wasn’t remotely a hippie-ish dude or a committed social activist, but he instilled in me the idea that you respect everyone equally—and, wherever possible, you schmooze your fellow man until you find common ground with him.

The Giants beat the 49ers in a walkover in that game last October, winning 33-15. It was at that point that the pathology that has afflicted my family for three generations—Giants fandom—infected a fourth generation, and that my son became as obsessed as my father, brother, and me.

My dad died on Saturday evening. My son cried from the very soles of his feet when he heard the news—as had I, along with my mother, sister, and brother, as we’d surrounded my father as he breathed his last.

Sunday night, with the funeral pending the following morning, I simply wasn’t in a football mood. But, needing something to distract us, my son and I turned on the game. When Burress, of all people, caught the winning touchdown pass with 35 seconds remaining, my son let out an exultant scream that was as unfilteredly emotional as the despairing sobs I’d heard from him almost exactly 24 hours earlier. It was by no means curative, but hey–it helped.

Five days earlier, my father, ever the comforter, must have sensed how stricken I was when I walked into his hospital room and saw how bad he looked, how labored his breathing was. Right away, he pulled off his oxygen mask and, in a voice hoarsened by the pneumonia that would kill him, said “The Giants are gonna win!”

Now, personally, I think it’s wrong, bordering on sacrilegious, to think that God has any bearing on the outcome of football games. But I was nevertheless amused and gratified to receive an e-mail from a friend late Sunday night that read, “Your dad must have some incredible pull.”

NOTE: Since some people have asked... donations in memory of my father, the great Seymour Kamp, may be made to the Poile Zedek Cemetery Restoration Fund; the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Foundation; and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey.

February 5, 2008  Link  General Posts

It’s always about them, even when it’s putatively about “helping others”:

“It was just so touching when this woman said, ‘Well, what about you?’ I just don’t think about that, I think about what I can do for other people. I have spent a lifetime trying to help others; I’m very other-directed. That’s maybe why people don’t get me in the political world.”

January 8, 2008  Link  General Posts

I recently attended a pre-Christmas choral concert in which some of the poetry of Robert Southwell, a sixteenth-century Jesuit priest, was set to music. I’d never before heard of Southwell, but I couldn’t help but be fascinated–well, amused, too–by the bizarre conceit of the verses in question. They all posited the infant Christ as a Satan-trouncing little Rambo. To quote from just part of one poem, “New Heaven, New War”:

This little Babe so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak, unarmed wise,
The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field,
His naked breast stands for a shield...

Southwell goes on and on in this fashion, in this poem (The crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes/ Of shepherds he his muster makes...) and in others. I couldn’t get these odd verses out of my head, so I looked up Southwell on Wikipedia and learned why his devotional poetry was so ferocious: He defied Queen Elizabeth I’s ban on Roman Catholic priests, administered the rites of his church to English Catholics, was tortured and imprisoned in the Tower of London for doing so, and was ultimately hung, drawn, and quartered.

Not a funny fate at all. But Southwell’s poetry still sounds like it could have been written by Michael Palin circa Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

December 21, 2007  Link  General Posts

We young fogies of Kurt Cobain vintage–that’s the former “Generation X” to you, pal–are quite possibly the least titillating, least Caligulan people in American history. Which has its positive and negative ramifications. Or so I argue in the new issue of Marie-Claire.

December 7, 2007  Link  General Posts

When Sly Stone played his first “official” show in ages at the Flamingo in Las Vegas on March 31, there was a warm, familial air to the affair. He was accompanied by the touring band of his sister, Vet, and his daughters, Phunn and Novena, joined him onstage. Tentative at first, Sly grew increasingly comfortable, and delivered moving versions of “Stand,” “Family Affair,” and “If You Want Me to Stay.”

Tuesday night’s early show at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill had a rougher feel to it. Gone was Vet and her amiable co-vocalist Skyler Jett. Gone were Sly’s daughters. And the promised quasi-Family Stone reunion featuring Sly’s guitarist brother Freddie and his vocalist sister Rose didn’t pan out. This show’s band was a ragtag assemblage of original Family Stone members (horn section Jerry Martini and Cynthia Robinson), members of Vet’s band, sundry supplementary musicians from who knows where, and some skinny toastmaster/sycophant dude (“Does everybody here think that Sly Stone is ownin’ it?!”) who looked like Chris Rock with Ice-T’s hair.

The show started off promisingly: Rather than tease the audience by not showing up until his band had already performed half their set, Sly bounded onto the small stage all by himself, a jovial figure in ersatz Flavor Flav gear and a pasted-on black Mohawk. “You know all those times peope said I was late?” he asked. “I was busy!” He continued onward with his slightly naughty banter, clearly reacclimated to public performance, if not disciplined music-making. It took forever for him to summon the band in full–there was an especially curious interlude in which he ordered a roadie to “interview,” him, quizzing him about past arrests–and by the time the band was actually onstage playing an actual song, “Dance to the Music,” Sly had wandered back off the stage, crouching in the wings just beyond where Martini stood.

Sly returned, though, and he and the band sounded good on “If You Want Me to Stay,” “Family Affair,” and “Sing a Simple Song.” He dispelled any notions that he’s too frail or withdrawn to perform by bopping around with abandon and tossing his shades into the audience, actually letting a large group of people see his eyes. Still, it was a shambolic show, and not the big step forward from Vegas that I’d hoped for.

And yet I hear that the second show of the night, at 10:30 p.m., was fantastic. He was joined this time by Paul Shaffer of Letterman fame, which evidently brought out the best in him. Perhaps, in time–maybe even on December 7–we’ll be able to tell Sly that he is indeed ownin’ it.

November 21, 2007  Link  General Posts

In case you missed it, I reviewed Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen in the November 18 edition of the New York Times Book Review, as well as two collections of Woody’s prose. The Book Review also Q&A’d me for its Up Front section, and included a curious caricature of me in which I look 55 and have acquired Hanna-Barbera-style facial stubble.

There’s a young(-ish) comic writer, performer, and director I like who sometimes draws comparisons to Woody. His name is David Wain, and comedy cultists know him from his stints in the troupes The State and Stella. (He also directed the movie Wet Hot American Summer, a sendup of Meatballs-style teen-hormone comedies, and has another feature coming up, Little Big Men.) But he’s truly found his metier with the Webisode format, having launched a delightful running series of five-minute episodes this fall called Wainy Days. I can see why people detect some Woody influence in Wain–he’s Jewish, wears glasses, likes to portray himself as romantically hapless, and offers up an explicit Hannah and Her Sisters homage in Episode 10 of Wainy Days–but Wain is ultimately more surrealist and outre than Allen, more Monty Python-ish. Since his days with The State, Wain has combined a sweet upper-middle-class amiability with a depraved-sicko fearlessness that often entails multiple self-humiliations and, er, rubber phalluses. All of these elements are on wondrous display in Wainy Days.

November 20, 2007  Link  General Posts

Those upcoming engagements at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill grow ever more intriguing for Sly and the Family Stone fans. For starters, the shows in question, at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. on December 7, sold out within a couple of hours, so two new shows have been added, on November 20.

Then there’s the matter of band personnel. When Sly Stone returned to performing this year, as chronicled in my story in the August issue of Vanity Fair, he did so with a band organized by his youngest sister, Vet Stone, with only one original member of the Family Stone, trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, behind him. This time, original members Freddie Stone (guitar), Rose Stone (vocals and keyboards), and Jerry Martini (saxophone) are also on board, and it’s entirely possible that original drummer Greg Errico will also join in. (I contacted Errico about this, and he said nothing’s been arranged at this point, but “I really would like to get out and do some playing!”)

That leaves only original bassist Larry Graham out of the picture. (Yes, this all sounds obsessive, but I like to think of this as an example of benign Rock Snobbery.) Graham, of all the original members, had the most fraught relationship with Sly, and also the most success on his own, as the frontman of the delightfully named funk band Graham Central Station. Graham is now a devout, cheerful Jehovah’s Witness who lives on Prince’s Paisley Park compound in Minnesota, and when I spoke to him earlier this year, he went out of his way to speak magnanimously of Sly and argue that tales of their enmity were overblown. That said, when I brought up the idea of his returning to the Family Stone fold, Graham seemed unenthusiastic, telling me, “I’ve been leading my own band for 35 years now, and it might be hard to enter a situation where someone else is the leader.”

Still, it’s shocking enough that Sly has emerged from seclusion, survived a difficult European summer tour, and scheduled two rounds of dates in New York, so anything’s possible...

November 7, 2007  Link  General Posts

The re-entry of my old motorcycling pal Sly Stone into public life continues. Over the summer, he played some festivals in Europe. Now, he’s booked his first New York City dates since the 1970s, two shows (at 8 and 10:30 p.m.) on December 7 at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill.

As uneven as his European shows were said to be (most of them at outdoor, multiple-act festivals), I have a good feeling about the engagements at B.B. King’s. It’s a smallish indoor venue, and when I saw Sly play at the similarly cozy theater at the Flamingo in Las Vegas last spring, he seemed to be in his element, in good voice and in good form. The “revue” format will continue, with Sly appearing for just part of the Family Stone’s show. But the promise is that he’ll put in 30 minutes per set, and the hope is that he’ll get comfortable enough onstage to stick around for longer.

It bothers me that a lot of people are rooting for him to be a train wreck, to live up to his infamy as one of music’s most erratic figures. This is a guy who, for whatever reasons, has decided to give it a go again when most people expected that the next time they’d be reading about him was in his obituary. He’s certainly not blameless for making a mess of his life over the last 30-odd years, but his return–like Brian Wilson’s, Roky Erickson’s or any other drug-addicted or mentally tormented musician’s–was bound to be a bumpy road. I sincerely hope things start to smooth out for Sly.

October 26, 2007  Link  General Posts

You might have seen obituaries for Peg Bracken, author of The I Hate to Cook Book. Peg would have made a good blogger: She was contrary and dyspeptic before it was widely fashionable, and there are passages in the aforementioned book that sound more like Gawker than 1960. Chapter 9 is entitled “Desserts, or People Are Too Fat Anyway,” while a passage about children’s birthday parties advises, “You are giving this party for the children, not for their mamas. That’s why you needn’t clean the house before they come, merely afterward. It also means you mustn’t let a mother in when she brings her little charge up to the door.”

Astonishingly, Birds Eye frozen foods took up Bracken as an official spokescrank. My vintage copy of The I Hate to Cook Book actually has the Birds Eye logo on it and this quote from Bracken on the back flap: “I may hate to cook, but thank goodness, Birds Eye likes to.” Would any food company today embrace a cookbook with the word “hate” in its title?

The I Hate to Cook Book succeeded ultimately as a well-timed stunt, a novelty book in the vein of Lisa Birnbach’s Official Preppy Handbook or Bruce Feirstein’s Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, and it deserves to be appreciated as such. But hey, Margalit Fox of The New York Times, what’s with that subtle dig at the end of your Bracken obit?

October 23, 2007  Link  General Posts

Somewhat by mistake, I’ve ended up launching two food-related paperbacks in the space of four months. The paperback version of The United States of Arugula came out in July. Now comes the release of the latest in my Snob series of humor books, The Food Snob’s Dictionary. It will be in stores as of October 9. Here are some upcoming events related to this wretched circumstance:

October 10, New York Public Library, NYC, 7 p.m.
I will be on a panel called “Julia Child in America” with three smart, articulate people: Child biographer Laura Shapiro, longtime New York Times foodperson Molly O’Neill, and Blue Hill chef-activist Dan Barber.

October 13, Strand Bookstore, NYC, 3-4 p.m.
I am signing copies of The United States of Arugula as part of the Strand Literary & Arts Festival, which marks the ornery 12th Street bookseller’s 80th birthday. It’s an all-day event featuring lots of authors. This is just my one-hour slot. I’ll be sharing my signing table with Gina DePalma, the fearsomely gifted pastry chef at Babbo, whose cookbook Dolce Italiano is just out. By the way, be careful when Googling Gina–there is also, it turns out, an adult-entertainment star by the same name.

October 18, Gourmet Garage, NYC, 6-8 p.m.
My co-author Marion Rosenfeld and I will sign copies of The Food Snob’s Dictionary at the Greenwich Village location (117 Seventh Avenue South) of this lovely mini-chain of comestible emporiums. Andy Arons, Gourmet Garage’s owner, is a kind man and has cornered the market on food-humor parties–his last one at this location was for Amy Sedaris’s I Like You.

November 10, Miami Book Fair International, Miami, FL, 1:30 pm.
At this mega-bookchat event, I will be on yet another food-talk panel with Laura Shapiro and Molly O’Neill–my apologies to these two ladies–but this time the panel will be moderated by Marcel Escoffier, the actual great-grand-nephew of Auguste Escoffier (click on link and scroll down).

October 5, 2007  Link  General Posts

From 1992 to 1995 I worked as an editor at GQ magazine. Public perception to the contrary, most of the people on GQ’s editorial staff are not professional fashion people and have little if anything to do with the magazine’s fashion coverage. (That’s mostly handled by fashion director Jim Moore and his staff. Before Jim, the job belonged to Nonnie Moore [no relation], a delightful woman who once complimented me on a striped-tie and checked-shirt combo by saying approvingly, “You don’t want to be too matchie-matchie.”)

I was one of GQ’s non-fashion people–an articles editor, essentially–but I created a humorous little monthly feature called “GQ Regrets” in which I selected and wrote up some of the magazine’s “occasional lapses in judgment,” fashion-wise: the trends that dated poorly, the ill-considered photo shoots, the truly absurd garments that never stood a chance of catching on (like the “Jumpajama” pajama-jumpsuit hybrid promoted in a 1958 issue). The feature continued onward well after I left, and GQ, as part of its 50th Anniversary festivities, has posted an online slideshow of its “Regrets,” which you can access here.

But as easy as it was to make fun of stuff in old GQ’s, especially the issues from the anything-goes 1970s, I couldn’t help but admire some of the more progressive fashion photography from the latter half of that decade: stuff that jumped out for its clarity, sharpness, and forwardness. I soon realized that I was admiring the early work of Bruce Weber. And as I studied the masthead from those early-Weber years, to see who he was working with then, I realized that I’d never heard of most of these guys; they weren’t in the magazine game anymore. I soon found out why: These guys, the ones at the top of GQ’s late-’70s masthead, were early casualties of AIDS.

For October’s gala 50th Anniversary issue of GQ, I’ve written an article (not available online) that tells the story of these GQ-ers who are no longer around to speak for themselves. Bruce Weber was generous with his reminiscences, as were the surviving members of that staff, including Jim Moore, who was but a young intern when he started out there in 1980. The article, “It All Started Here,” is kind of the flip side of “GQ Regrets”–a belated recognition that the ’70s had much greatness to offer, and didn’t always warrant the snotty, facile treatment I gave them in my younger years.

October 3, 2007  Link  General Posts

Who says we don’t offer service journalism over at Vanity Fair?

October 1, 2007  Link  General Posts

I am privileged to know very slightly a tall gentleman from Liverpool named Peter Serafinowicz. (His last name rhymes with terrapin-o-wich, which was a popular snack in the time of Edith Wharton.) Peter is a fantastically talented comic writer and actor who, while well known in Britain, is at this point only a cult figure in America. You might know him from his viral video in which he played all the Beatles save George whilst proving conclusively that John Lennon invented the iPod. He was also the star and prime architect of Look Around You, a BBC2 comedy program whose narrowly defined concept–it was a sendup of science-oriented educational television circa 1981–didn’t prevent it from being one of the most brilliantly written, conceived, and performed pieces of sketch-style television since the heydays of Monty Python and SCTV. (I am still convulsed by a sketch from the show’s 2005 season, the “Music 2000” competition, in which three finalists performed their renditions of what they thought pop music would sound like in the year 2000. Finalist “Tony Rudd” is my favorite.)

Anyway, Peter has a new show premiering this week in the U.K. called, rather succinctly, The Peter Serafinowicz Show. Based on this trailer, it looks like he’s thrown his all into it. He’s hoping to get America interested in the show, and, frankly, so am I. At the very least, he deserves Little Britain-style exposure on BBC America, or the Flight of the Conchords treatment on HBO. Start pestering your local executive-vice-president-in-charge-of-entertainment-programming now.

September 29, 2007  Link  General Posts

Glenn O’Brien has for several years been GQ magazine’s resident Style Guy. He’s also a fascinating human specimen: a former Warhol acolyte, a trenchant wit, a dad, and one of the only straight men I know who wears foundation and eyeliner. I barely know him, but I worked with Glenn a little in my GQ days, and we put together a few features in which I’d have the photo researchers assemble pictures of a group of men–political candidates in one instance, NFL coaches in another–and Glenn would offer fashion analysis that doubled as incisive and funny social analysis.

Glenn’s still at it on his GQ blog, evaluating the slate of GOP candidates. And, as ever, he manages to be more astute, even while writing on putatively superficial matters, than a thousand David Broders. Here he is on Rudy Giuliani’s hair: “I miss the comb-over, which seemed to so neatly symbolize his biography (his illusory heroism during the attack on America having combed over a history of blundering management in service to special interests).”

September 14, 2007  Link  General Posts

Some years ago, I discovered that there was a New York-based landscape architect with the same name as me: David Kamp-with-a-K. It was an accidental discovery; I kept getting phone calls intended for him. But, my curiosity piqued, I decided to find out more about this other David Kamp. He turns out not to be just any landscape architect, but a highly regarded and forward-thinking one. His company, Dirtworks, PC, specializes in creating therapeutic environments for places like hospitals, senior homes, and autism centers–using groves, arbors, hedgerows, and the like to foster mental and physical well-being.

I’ve never met the other David Kamp, but I’ve been thinking of him this week because of his involvement in the Living Memorials Project, an old-school Rooseveltian public program, sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service, to create permanent green spaces devoted to the memory of those who died on 9/11. (Above is a detail from Dirtworks’s plan for the Flight 93 commemorative site in western Pennsylvania.) Dirtworks is in the process of creating a September 11 Memorial Grove along the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.

It’s a lovely, bracing idea, the “living memorial.” Having spent my childhood D.C. trips shuttling from classical edifice to classical edifice, I never would have thought that a memorial could be constructed from living things. I guess that’s what you need other David Kamps for.

September 11, 2007  Link  General Posts

One of my stock lines in describing The United States of Arugula is that it’s the story of “how we went from Velveeta and Wonder Bread to chevre and artisanal loaves.”

You wouldn’t be wrong to detect an inherent anti-Wonder Bread stance in this statement; I’ve always found the stuff pretty nasty. But now I’ve discovered that Wonder Bread serves a noble purpose that would delight even the most processed-food-abhorring aesthete: It helps preserve great artworks.

Recently, I became acquainted with a director at one of the major art auction houses in New York, and she let me in on a trade secret: Wonder Bread is often used in the art world to clean oil paintings. You wad up a slice into a ball, she says, and you remove the grime and grit from the painting with a blotting, rather than wiping, motion. Repeat over the canvas with several slices of bread, section by section. And just like that, your dusky Mark Rothko will blaze and glimmer anew. Makes the bread taste great, too!

September 5, 2007  Link  General Posts

You know that we’re already deep into election season when a candidate gets smeared for being conversant in an allegedly highfalutin foodstuff. Last autumn, on the eve of the midterm elections, I did an audio essay for NPR’s All Things Considered about the tired trope that right-wing operatives trot out about “latte-sipping, sushi-eating” liberals–as if having cultivated food and beverage preferences is an egregious act of sedition, or an exclusively left-wing trait.

Now, the scorched-earth Clinton campaign is taking it to Barack Obama for making a tin-eared reference to arugula before an audience of Iowa farmers. Newsweek reports that Hillary’s war room seized upon the opportunity to demonstrate that she is the candidate of the working man, while Obama, presumably, is the candidate of deviant mixed-greens fetishists who will rend the very fabric of America. My favorite sentence in the article is, “In a 10-minute interview with Newsweek, Clinton strategist Mark Penn mentioned arugula three times.”

It’s all over now; Hillary’s won. Arugula will be for Obama what the Swift Boat Vets were for Kerry. I guess you’d have to be an outright pinko to name your book The United States of Arugula.

For what it’s worth, the powerful Iowa Beef Industry Council lists a recipe for “Beef, Arugula and Spinach Lasagna” among the manifold uses of honest, home-grown Iowa beef.

August 20, 2007  Link  General Posts

A list inspired by the recent passings of Merv, Mrs. Astor, and the Scooter, none of whom I had the pleasure of meeting. Most of these figures were at the peak of their cultural relevance in the mid-20th century. The further we get away from that time, the more remarkable I find it that I ever got to talk to them.

Steve Allen
Red Buttons
Graham Chapman
Hume Cronyn
Buddy Ebsen
Arthur Lee
John Phillips
Richard Pryor
Artie Shaw
Bobby Short

August 14, 2007  Link  General Posts

If you’ve tried of late to get in touch with me via the david at davidkamp dot com address, your mail has bounced back to you with some rude, automatically generated message. I have fixed this problem and apologize. I do try to answer every query that comes my way via this site, except for the ones from that curious man who goes on about something called Cialis.

July 22, 2007  Link  General Posts

For those of you in need of a beach read, look no further than the paperback edition of The United States of Arugula, which has just been published with a new cover and better subtitle. Summer is when I most enjoy a good food-related read, and, if you haven’t picked up my book, I swear, it’s the “fun” kind of food book, not the kind that leaves you thinking about tainted spinach and doomed fat children.

I get this question a lot: “Did anyone turn you down for an interview?” Generally, the leading figures in the food world are wonderfully accessible, much more so than their analogs in business, sports, or Hollywood. What’s more, most of these folks were downright thrilled to participate in the book, to get into what makes them tick, to dig a bit deeper than newspaper and magazine food journalism allows.

But there was one, and only one, food person who turned me down for an interview: John Mackey of Whole Foods. I guess he was too busy complimenting his own haircut to participate.

July 16, 2007  Link  General Posts

Because I have to start using this site as a promotional platform for the pending publication of the paperback edition of The United States of Arugula, I am offloading the fun tidbits related to my Vanity Fair profile of Sly Stone to my other site, Snobsite. And I’ve just posted something especially fun there: the fax (or, rather, phax) that I received from Sly shortly before the article’s publication.

In other Sly news, on July 10, I appeared on John Schaefer’s WNYC radio program Soundcheck to talk about the VF article. You can listen to our chat here.

July 12, 2007  Link  General Posts

...in the new, August issue of Vanity Fair, or, if your eyes can stand reading a long article on a screen, here.

There’s also a nifty slide show of Sly through the years. A lot of people have already asked me, based on the new Mark Seliger portrait of Sly, if he’s put on some weight. The answer: not really. He’s still slim, but when he’s not performing, he favors baggy, Straight Outta Compton-style G-wear; he seems to have fallen in love with Eazy-E’s wardrobe.

On the day Mark was taking pictures of Sly at his compound in Napa Valley, we waited expectantly for Sly to emerge from the house, and he did in the most wonderful way: whizzing out of the garage on a tiny motor scooter with a huge grin on his face, like Groucho Marx as Rufus T. Firefly in Duck Soup.

July 3, 2007  Link  General Posts

ON MR. KAMP: overcoat by Prada; jeans by Levi Strauss; shoes by Ralph Lauren. ON MR. STONE: cap by San Francisco Giants; plush worksuit and tricolor-trim sneakers, model’s own.

Some people are born funky, while others are simply fortunate to pose on a chopper motorcycle with the funky. I had ardently pursued an interview with Sly Stone, one of my favorite musicians, for years. But Sly remained elusive and reclusive–until this spring, when he decided to make a return to public life that is still in its fragile beginning stages. My story on Sly appears in the August issue of Vanity Fair, which will be out on July 3 in New York and Los Angeles, and a week later in the rest of the U.S.A. Even though the VF story is a lengthy feature, there’s much more to tell about Sly’s return and my own experiences with him, so I’ll fill you in with more info and anecdotage in future posts, once the article’s out. And by the way, the chopper above is not Sly’s chopper, which is a much more flamboyant contraption. You’ll see the SlyMobile in all its three-wheeled glory in the magazine, in a brilliant photograph taken by Mark Seliger.

July 1, 2007  Link  General Posts

You might have noticed that the book-cover image on the upper right has been changed to reflect the new paperback edition of The United States of Arugula. The paperback comes out on July 17–a smaller, cheaper, more portable version that makes an ideal beach read, mountaineering companion, hostess gift, airplane time-passer, or languorous cocktail-hour page-turner. (In no way am I trying to drum up sales or anything.)

You’ll also notice that my publisher smartly appropriated the excellent artwork by Ed Lam that ran with A.O. Scott’s review of the book in the New York Times Book Review, and that the book has a new subtitle: “The Sun-Dried, Cold-Pressed, Dark-Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution.” This subtitle is more in keeping with the one I originally had in mind for the book, because it conveys the sense of fun and discovery in the story I’m trying to relate, and positions the book as what I always wanted it to be, first and foremost: an entertainment, not a “food issues” tract. The hardcover carried the subtitle “How We Became a Gourmet Nation,” and while I understand my publisher’s need for a catchy, concise, explanatory tag, I never really make the argument in the book that we have become, all of us in these United States, a gourmet nation. (What’s more, the old subtitle opened me up to critiques from officious wankers who wanted to whinge about obesity and impugn the character of Vanity Fair, for which I do most of my magazine work.)

There will be events and readings related to the paperback launch that I’ll mention in future posts.

June 27, 2007  Link  General Posts

I have a brother named Ted who works in TV production out in L.A. but leads a Walter Mitty-ish fantasy life as a singing, nay, rocking, architecture critic. One day, thanks to such Apple programs as GarageBand and iMovie, he realized that this peculiar avocation didn’t have to be mere fantasy, and he made a brilliant rock video about the life and work of Mies Van Der Rohe that has become a minor viral phenomenon. (A still of which sits above this text.) Even better, the video led to his being interviewed by Lee Bey, one of the foremost architecture critics in this country’s greatest city for architecture, Chicago. Bey has an impressive CV–though not trained in architecture, he was for years the architecture critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, and, after that, he was the deputy chief of staff for planning and design for Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, and, after that, he worked as a media-affairs guy for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He now has a blog that’s among the better and more accessible ones devoted to architecture.

Ted is preparing another architect song-video, but he won’t tell me which architect is his next subject. I suggested Walter Gropius, but what rhymes with that?

June 25, 2007  Link  General Posts

The Shake Shack, Danny Meyer’s haute fast food joint in Madison Square Park, has already evolved into a New York institution. Studio 54 never saw such long lines; but then, Halston and Andy Warhol never stopped by the Shake Shack with Liza and Bianca. Anyway, on Thursday night, June 21, at 6:30 p.m., there will be still more incentive to brave the queues*: Danny and I will keep you busy with readings from our respective food-related books, Setting the Table (his), and The United States of Arugula (mine). This is part of a new series called Mad Sq Reads, and it takes place right in the middle of the park, at the foot of the Farragut Monument. There will also be books for sale, and Danny and I will be signing them, even if you stain them with Shack Burgers and caramel shakes.

* Egad, it turns out the Shake Shack will be closed for a private function on Thursday eve. So Danny and I will have to hold our own as an attraction. There will be snacks, though.

June 13, 2007  Link  General Posts

My dilettantish excursion into the fretful-parent genre has generated more response than anything I’ve ever written. It was the New York Times’s most e-mailed story for May 30 and much of May 31, and it elicited 300-something comments on the paper’s site. The article also inspired a segment on NBC’s Today that featured my homegirl Marion Nestle, whose What to Eat is just out in paperback, and whose own Web site/blog has just launched. To Food Snobs, the idea of a Nestle blog is the most exciting development since the advent of Harold McGee’s blog.

Of all the blog hoo-hah over my chicken-fingers article, my favorite lines came from Ed Levine, who boasted of his own son’s wide-ranging tastes but added that the boy “wasn’t one of those weird, obnoxious foodie ‘trophy’ kids who ordered sardines, anchovies, and foie gras with impunity,” and from the Gurgling Cod, who wrote of modern kids’ menus, “This is the road that leads to a species that slurps Soylent Green out of bendy straws running between cupholder and orifice.”

May 31, 2007  Link  General Posts

But despite my adamant insistences to this effect, I’ve had two food-related articles published in The New York Times this week. Last Sunday, I reviewed The Devil in the Kitchen, the memoir of Marco Pierre White, the histrionic but talented London chef, for the paper’s Book Review. The British press hated White’s book*, but I attribute this to their inability to judge it on its own merits; White is a celebrity there, and a polarizing one at that, so the Brit food writers, already known for their stunt vitriol, were ready to tee off on Marco’s shaggy head. Me, I thought the book was pretty good.

In the Times’s Dining In/Dining Out section, I have an article borne of my frustration with, er, chicken fingers. It’s better explained here.

* Since I originally posted this entry, Mr. James Steen, who was White’s co-writer on The Devil in the Kitchen, has written to me to note that there were some British reviewers and arbiters who liked the book. “Before publication,” Steen says, “there was a bidding war for serialisation rights and all the big players-the Telegraph, the Mail, the Sunday Times-were keen to snap it up, which suggests that they liked it. In the end, it was serialised by the Telegraph. There were some lovely reviews. And yes, there were a couple of bad reviews. Actually, bad is an understatement. They were vicious beyond belief.”

May 30, 2007  Link  General Posts

The very first person I interviewed for The United States of Arugula was Giorgio DeLuca, the more florid and Italian half of the Dean & DeLuca founding duo. (Which was really more of a trio, given the role that Joel Dean’s partner, Jack Ceglic, played in the store’s conception and look.) One reason Giorgio was my first interview was that he’s local: I can walk to his penthouse apartment from my non-penthouse apartment. But the other reason was that he loomed large in my culinary awakening. Visiting the original Dean & DeLuca on Prince Street in 1977, its first year, when I was eleven years old, was an epiphanic moment for me. The array of stinky cheeses and olive oils and whole-bean coffees and (then-novel) prepared foods made me realize that there was a lot more out there to eat than what my supermarket in central New Jersey offered. Alas, I was not one of the customers that Giorgio belligerently and profanely sales-pitched into trying fresh chèvre back then. (See page 202 of the book for specifics on this.)

I’m pleased to say that, at Giorgio’s request, I’ll be the guest speaker/reader at a dinner he’s giving at his restaurant Giorgione on Saturday, May 19, in conjunction with the New York Toasts Italy festival being put on that weekend by Bene, an elegant American magazine devoted to all things Italian. There will be other events featuring other fine people at other fine restaurants–Mario Batali’s hosting a dinner at Otto, his pizza place; Cesare Casella and Bill Buford are doing their Brokeback Toscana Style routine at Maremma; and Silvano Marchetto and his wife, Cancer Vixen author Marisa Acocella Marchetto, are pairing up for a presentation at Da Silvano. But your entertainment dollar will go furthest at Giorgione. For one thing, Mr. DeLuca is an adorable, charismatic old-school New York neurotic. Then there’s the fact that I actually “do” a Giorgio voice when I read his quotes from my book, and it comes out disconcertingly like a bad Christopher Walken imitation. (Both men grew up in Queens, so it’s not totally off-base.) Order tickets today by calling Mary Beth Hubbard at 212-717-6380, ext 117, or by visiting Bene’s site.

May 1, 2007  Link  General Posts

I’ve not generally been a fan of the ombudsman/public editor phenomenon that took hold in the wake of the Jayson Blair controversy of 2003. Though its ostensible purpose is to hold media organizations accountable for their mistakes and missteps, the effect is more one of dorky killjoyism–some gray-haired eminence of mild temperament is brought aboard to uphold Eisenhower-era standards of rectitude and emit the occasional harrumph.

But I have to admit that I loved the April 12 post by ESPN’s new ombudswoman, Le Anne Schreiber. On paper, she seems like yet another of the species, almost an ombuds-caricature: 61 years old, formerly employed as an editor at The New York Times and its Book Review, sensibly coiffed and wardrobed, self-described in her introductory post as someone who has “a reputation among friends as a fair-minded person of sound judgment. For that reason, I am often asked to weigh in on their decisions about everything from choice of mate to choice of career, coast or coffee maker.”

Yet Schreiber goes about her ombuds-business with a welcome drollery, not hiding how enervated she is by all the fratboy shouting that goes on during SportsCenter and the network’s various sports-yak shows: “The yelling, especially during rapid-fire basketball highlights, felt like the aural equivalent of a tall guy jumping up out of his seat and blocking my view of the action at a crucial moment,” she recalls of her inaugural ESPN-watching binge in January. Of the network’s pregame analysis on NFL Sundays, she writes, “[I] remembered a favorite saying of the day that had once been posted on the farm stand where I buy tomatoes: ‘Certainty is the place you stop when you are tired of thinking.’”

I doubt that Hootie, the Blowfish, or any of the brothers at Kappa Sig will ever read Schreiber’s column–or will ever read, period–but for those of us who love sports but dislike being shouted at, Le Anne’s worth checking in on.

April 17, 2007  Link  General Posts

“The strange thing about the comics page, given its youth-associatedness, is that it has long been anchored by men of the World War II generation,” I wrote in the April 2000 issue of GQ, shortly after Charles Schulz died. “The Family Circus’s Bil Keane is 77, the same age Schulz was at his death; Mort Walker, of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois fame, is 75; Dennis the Menace’s Hank Ketcham is 80; Tiger’s Bud Blake is 82; and B.C.’s Johnny Hart is 69. These old-timers have displayed a remarkable stick-to-itiveness over the years—no wussy Garry Trudeau sabbaticals for them!—but frankly, they don’t have that many working years left.”

Thus began the cranky-old-man phase of my writing career, in which, at the age of 33, I found myself writing almost exclusively in lament form, relishing the past and forlornly shaking my head at latter-day cultural developments. In light of Johnny Hart’s recent passing, I’ve posted that old GQ column. Since it was written, Blake and Ketcham, too, have gone to that Great Cartoonist’s Syndicate in the sky.

But lo, the ovoid-headed Family Circus gang continues to hang on, as does its creator, Bil Keane, who will turn 85 this year. A confession: I used to find The Family Circus unbearably corny, and took pleasure in ridiculing it. (As did Chris Elliott, who, on David Letterman’s old NBC show, did deadpan segments in which he paged through albums of his “favorite” Bil Keane cartoons.) But all that changed in 1992, when, as a young editor at GQ, I got the idea to do a Family Circus parody in our election-themed issue. On Sundays, when The Family Circus is in color, Keane often does large, single-panel strips depicting young Billy’s meandering path (over a fence, across a puddle, aboard a found tricycle, through a hollowed-out log, etc.) from school to home.

I thought it would be funny, in light of all the tribulations that Bill Clinton had faced en route to the Democratic nomination, to do a Family Circus-style cartoon that traced “Little Billy Clinton’s” winding path to the top of the Dem ticket. Unfortunately, the legal people quashed the idea of hiring an illustrator to do a Keane parody, on the grounds that Keane could sue. But Robert Priest, then GQ’s art director, said, “Well, why don’t we just ask Bil Keane if he’ll do it himself?”

To our surprise, Keane was thrilled to do it, and promptly delivered a wonderful two-page cartoon based on my script. (I’d show it here, but Keane owns the rights.) Little Billy Clinton looked just like any other ovoid-headed Circus-er, except he wore a blazer and had a head of bushy, graying hair. I consider it one of my greatest accomplishments that I got Bil Keane to draw Sister Souljah, the militant rapper-activist who achieved a measure of minor ’92 fame when Clinton repudiated her inflammatory racial remarks. (Souljah actually looked kind of adorable with an ovoid Keane head.) Keane also drew a nude Gennifer Flowers making goo-goo eyes at Billy from behind a bush, and Arsenio Hall applauding Billy as he played sax. I never knew Keane had this side to him, and I also gained a new appreciation of his clean, uncluttered draftsmanship, which rivals Charles Schulz’s. From then on, I’ve been a fan.

And when I wrote the column to which I’ve linked above, Keane did the illustration: The Family Circus’s Billy opening up the April 2000 issue of GQ and exclaiming to his sister, “Look, Dolly! There’s somethin’ about us in here!”

April 12, 2007  Link  General Posts

It’s not coming out ’til October, but The Food Snob’s Dictionary is already splashed out across Broadway Books’s fall catalog with a brief Snob Aptitude quiz. Because you are not, in all likelihood, a bookseller who gets catalogs from publishers, I thought I’d share the quiz with you–and test your Food Snob knowledge.

Read the rest of this post on Snobsite.com...

April 11, 2007  Link  General Posts

I love bad taste and transgressive humor as much as anyone, whether it’s a crucified Eric Idle singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian or the Acceptable TV gang on VH1 parodying reality-TV shamelessness with the willfully excruciating “My Black Friend.”

But I’ve always winced at anyone who bills himself (or has his representatives bill him) as an “equal-opportunity offender”–which is the tack that the defenders of Don Imus have taken. Any true aficionado of comedy and comedians knows that “equal-opportunity offender” is apologist code for “hack entertainer trading in dated ethnographic material.” Jackie Mason comes to mind (he actually has a DVD out called Equal Opportunity Offender), as does Carlos Mencia. A corollary to this, which I learned from my old Spy boss Kurt Andersen, is that anyone who uses a construction along the lines of “I treat people all the same; I don’t care if they’re black, white, purple, or green”–who uses colors that no human being can actually be–is inherently a racist bastard.*

Growing up in the orbit of the New York metro radio stations, I was subjected to Imus-mania from about the late ’70s onward, and I must say, I never found him funny; even 25 years ago, his shtick was tired and bigoted, and leaned heavily on fish-in-a-barrel targets. His most famous running character–oh, the originality!–was a vain, buffoonish, corrupt evangelist named Billy Sol Hargis. (In retrospect, I realize that Hargis was basically Imus’s unfiltered id.) I tuned Imus out in my teens, and was shocked to learn, in the early 1990s, that his show had become a popular stop for senators and prominent mediafolk. Evidently, going mano-a-mano with the Ime-ster was an aging Boomer’s idea of being frisky, a rite of midlife crisis.

I’m glad, in a sense, that Imus has now screwed up so badly that he can’t “equal-opportunity” himself out of this one. Unlike Michael Richards, who shocked himself with the ugly thoughts he had roiling inside him, and who was aptly described by Malcolm Gladwell as “the prototypical Hollywood liberal... clearly devastated by the notion that he might be considered a racist,” Imus has a long, unambiguous history of being a flagrant hater. His comeuppance is overdue.

What I’m not glad about is that this is now what the 2006-’07 Rutgers women’s basketball team will be forever remembered for. Up until a few days ago, the Rutgers team was one of this year’s great sports stories, a team supposedly in a rebuilding year, heavy on freshmen, that jelled into a late-season powerhouse that almost gave coach C. Vivian Stringer her first NCAA championship. As a child I lived within bicycling distance of the Rutgers Athletic Center and frequently attended Rutgers games, men’s and women’s. (My dad sold cars to Stringer’s immediate predecessor, Theresa Grentz.) So I was especially happy for the Lady Knights and took a keen interest in their tournament run. I appreciate that fellow Imus-slur survivor Gwen Ifill has nobly sought to put the spotlight back on the team’s accomplishments in her New York Times Op-Ed piece. But it’s still maddening that Imus will remain the bigger story.

* Well, I guess every rule has its exception. In her first press conference since Imus made his remarks, Stringer, the Rutgers coach, used the “black, white, purple, or green” construction, with the adjectives in that order.

April 9, 2007  Link  General Posts

Last week I attended a dinner hosted by Steven Rinella, the most unpretentious man ever to have written a food book. Steve and I met last autumn when he was promoting said food book, A Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, at the Texas Book Festival, and he and I were on a panel with Jay McInerney, whose collection of wine writings, A Hedonist in the Cellar, had just come out. The three of us somehow coalesced into a breezy vaudeville team that made the gathered audience laugh rather than just sit there catatonically, as bookchat usually warrants.

So we vowed to reconnect in New York, and finally did last Thursday. Steve hunted, caught, and trapped most of the ingredients for a multicourse game feast, including Brooklyn squirrels* and sparrows. Jay brought wine. I did nothing. And the New York Times’s Chip McGrath was on hand to write about the meal. You can read his report here.

* Further pursuant to the subject of eating squirrels, you must check out this semi-famous YouTube clip about “squirrel melts” if you haven’t already.

April 4, 2007  Link  General Posts

My friends and I often wonder why Christopher Guest hasn’t sicced his brilliant ensemble of comic actors on the food world, the way he has on the similarly eccentric milieus of dog shows, folk festivals, and community theater. (Can’t you just see Catherine O’Hara as a Ruth Reichl type, affecting a new daffy persona with every wig she tries on?) Maybe it’s because the food world is preemptively amusing, offering such wonderful verité tidbits as Serious Eats’s mini-miniseries on Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten (pictured above). In the first set of episodes, Steingarten hires the wunderkind English chef Paul Liebrandt to be his personal cook for two weeks. Steingarten, known to the wider masses as an Iron Chef judge, is a natural on camera, roosting imperially in his apartment (which looks disconcertingly like Fred Sanford’s house) while Liebrandt sweats it out with grace. Sorry, ladies, Jeffrey’s robe never falls open.

March 29, 2007  Link  General Posts

Wolfgang Puck’s recent announcement that he will, from here on out, source all his meat, seafood, and dairy products from organic or “natural” suppliers who practice humane animal husbandry has been greeted with praise in some quarters and with skepticism in others. On Michael “Forcemeat” Ruhlman’s site, a guest blogger, a chef named Bob del Grosso, suspects that this is primarily a PR ploy on Puck’s part, and is also annoyed that Puck, like Charlie Trotter, is renouncing the use of foie gras. (An acutely unthreatening white man, Forcemeat seems to be getting a vicarious thrill these days from periodically turning over his blog to short-fused tough guys.)

Now, I’m not thrilled about yet another chef’s turning his back on foie gras, especially in this climate where some local legislatures are trying to pass laws against its manufacture, sale, and consumption. I don’t like the government legislating what chefs can and cannot use in their kitchens, and on these grounds I oppose even the trans-fat bans that are catching on around the country. My position, as I stated in my Beard House chat, is that, apart from human flesh and endangered species, nothing should be off-limits to a chef.

But I think all the doubters should lay off Puck vis-à-vis his embrace of natural and humanely raised meat and dairy products. Here’s an industry leader trying to do the right thing, and people are taking shots at him for it. I must confess that, prior to interviewing Puck for The United States of Arugula, I, too, was inclined to write him off as a cold, calculating publicity hound of dubious fashion sense. To my surprise and delight, I found him to be a thoughtful, gracious man who spoke with disarming candor and wasn’t hesitant to critique himself and his far-flung enterprises. (When we last spoke, two years ago, he was particularly agitated over the quality of the frozen pizzas sold under his name by ConAgra, the food-processing giant. “They fucked it up, so we have to start all over again,” he said.)

Meanwhile, as Puck gets raked over the coals for actually taking a stand, few in the food world have bothered to critique, or even pay attention to, the ridiculous proclamations of Irene Rosenfeld, the newish CEO of Kraft. It’s an index of how much consumer tastes have changed that Kraft, dark empire of processed cheeses and scary lunchmeats, has been struggling of late, its profit margin nipped into by smaller companies offering products more recognizable as food.

Yet Rosenfeld, in a February interview with the Wall Street Journal (I’d link to it, but it’s subscription-only), seemed to give little thought to fixing the company’s problems by offering healthier and better foods. Instead, she remarked that today’s consumers “think about assembly as opposed to necessarily cooking.” She was excited about “this new product we just launched in January called Deli Creations. These are hot sandwiches that are made with our high-quality ingredients like Oscar Mayer meats, Kraft cheese and A1 and Grey Poupon sauces. But what’s so cool about them is, you stick them in the microwave, it takes 60 seconds, and it tastes freshly baked.” No comment necessary.

She also described what she perceived as the inefficiency of supermarket layouts: “Today, if you want to make a salad, you have to go to the produce to get your lettuce, you have to go to the meat and cheese sections–which are in two different places–to get your meat and cheese, and then you have to go to a third section to get your salad dressing.” Leaving aside the fact that many people derive pleasure from the act of walking section to section–it’s the closest approximation many Americans have of the old, small-town rite of “going marketing,” as James Beard put it–how lazy and lard-arsed do you have to be to complain of visiting four different sections of a store with a pushcart in front of you?

Rosenfeld oversees an operation far larger than Puck’s, yet few in the food world are giving her any stick for her barmy pronouncements and tin-eared business strategy. I’m not opposed to Kraft itself–a proper Philly cheesesteak demands Cheez Whiz, after all–but it’s the mega-companies, more than anyone else, who have to start getting with the times (as Burger King suddenly seems to recognize) and changing the way they go about their business. Wolf, I’m with you–and it looks like I’ve just given you more publicity.

March 28, 2007  Link  General Posts

In The Rock Snob*s Dictionary, Steven Daly and I included a definition of the sulky genre known as emo, noting that, “given the hypersensitivity of the genre’s practitioners, most emo artists recoil at being called ‘emo,’ claim their music is unique and uncategorizable, and insist that you don’t even know what the term means anyway.” Now, the foremost practitioners of molecular gastronomy are taking a similar position. In a recent blog post, Michael “Forcemeat” Ruhlman* recounted how, in an onstage conversation he had with Alinea chef Grant Achatz at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, Achatz, whose name is synonymous with molecular gastronomy in America, argued that the term doesn’t apply to him. Forcemeat further cites a “Statement on the ‘new cookery’,” originally printed in the U.K.’s Guardian, in which molecular-gastronomy gods Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal, along with Thomas Keller and Harold McGee, protest that “the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ does not describe our cooking, or indeed any style of cooking,” on the grounds that the phrase was coined in 1992 “to name a particular academic workshop for scientists and chefs on the basic food chemistry of traditional dishes. That workshop did not influence our approach.”

Adrià, Blumenthal et al. undoubtedly mean what they say, but at this point, they’re being pedantic. Language gets bent and morphed by popular usage, and the term “molecular gastronomy” is a good example. Whatever its obscure origins, the term has been repurposed to denote the kind of audacious, wildly inventive, rigorously lab-tested, visually striking cuisine that Adria and Achatz, especially, practice. “Molecular gastronomy” is, simply, a useful term to describe what they do. And complaining about labels is so emo!

* So nicknamed because of his borderline obsessive use of the word in his book The Soul of a Chef. Sure, it’s a legitimate culinary term, but Ruhlman just loves to type it: F-O-R-C-E-M-E-A-T. There are probably Freudian implications to this.

March 13, 2007  Link  General Posts

...a preview entry from The Food Snob’s Dictionary, to be published this fall by Broadway Books.

Newtown Pippin. Homely, tart, green-skinned HEIRLOOM apple variety native to the Long Island section of New York State. An ideal apple for baking and cider-making, the Newtown Pippin is also upheld by righteous SLOW FOOD people as one of the historical gems that was nearly rendered extinct by the evil, Frankenfruit-favoring hybridizers of agribusiness. If you care about good fruit–if you’re a feeling, compassionate human being–you’ll join us in our efforts to help reestablish the Newtown Pippin.

(The CAPPED words indicate a cross reference to another term in the dictionary. More such preview entries to come.)

February 26, 2007  Link  General Posts

The Chinese New Year’s Menu at Chinatown Brasserie, the non-Chinese-owned restaurant that nevertheless has the best dim sum in Manhattan, offers a dish called Prosperity Branzino. Isn’t that the name of that ingenue Jersey girl on American Idol?

February 25, 2007  Link  General Posts

In today’s (2/21/07) New York Times are two compellingly disparate uses of that expensive, attention-grabbing PR stratagem: the epistolary full-page ad in a national newspaper. In the “A” section, JetBlue CEO David Neeleman flagellates himself for the air carrier’s operational meltdown and grovels for forgiveness; in the Dining section, a restaurateur named Jeffrey Chodorow all but asks for the firing of the paper’s restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, on the grounds that A) Bruni gave Chodorow’s latest venture, Kobe Club, a bad review; and B) Bruni is “not really [a] food critic,” given that he previously worked as a political reporter and has no culinary background.

In the annals of full-page epistolary Times ads–I’m a collector–Chodorow’s is not as spectacularly ill-considered as the one that Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford took out in 1994 to affirm their heterosexuality. Nor is it as cluttered with nutjob typography (like a Dr. Bronner’s Soap label) as this guy’s, or as the ones that Steve Allen took out in the 1990s to lament the hell-in-a-handbasket trajectory of American pop culture. But Chodorow’s ad still has the effect of engendering precisely the opposite response that its writer/purchaser desires. Rather than making me feel for the guy (whose restaurants I’ve never visited, so I have no opinion of them), the ad makes me want to stay far, far away from Kobe Club and all other points in the Chodorow empire; its author comes off as a bitter, vengeful megalomaniac. Which, call me crazy, isn’t the best personality profile for someone in the hospitality business.

Neeleman’s letter-ad (a version of which appears here) is something else altogether, an extraordinary document. We’ve all seen corporate apologia after a product recall or an E. coli scare, but I can’t remember another instance of a CEO being so authentically wracked with remorse. The despairing tropes pile up, one after another: “We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all, we are deeply sorry... Words cannot express how truly sorry we are... We know we failed to deliver... You deserved better–a lot better–from us last week and we let you down.” No misguided upbeat chirp-speak, no legalese qualifiers, no buck-passing to underlings. Neeleman is the anti-Cheney.

So I accept his apology. Yes, readers, I am a survivor of last week’s JetBlue Terminal Six Apocalypse. I shall take Neeleman at his word and fly JetBlue again. But not with any takeout from Kobe Club.

February 21, 2007  Link  General Posts

The image above comes from the video for the song “Kingdom of Doom,” off The Good, the Bad and the Queen, the lovely collaboration between Damon Albarn of Blur, and, among others, Paul Simonon, the former bassist of the Clash. I’ve long held Simonon in high esteem as a musician, a painter, and one of the most stylish men on the planet. Now, thanks to this video, in which the band prepares a typical English fry-up, I know he has solid knife technique as well.

February 14, 2007  Link  General Posts

New York magazine’s newish but already very accomplished food blog, Grub Street, invited me to contribute a list of five great reads about food and dining in New York City. I obliged them, and in so doing continued what the young people would call the “viral campaign” for my book.

February 10, 2007  Link  General Posts

You might have heard about John Amaechi, the former NBA center who just became the first pro basketball player, active or retired, to identify himself as gay. The situation is very evocative–alas–of Dave Kopay’s. Kopay was the first pro football player to come out, way back in 1975. I profiled him for GQ in 1998. Like Amaechi, he was a journeyman, not a star, and his career was already over when he disclosed his sexuality. Even so, it was a big deal for Kopay to come out, a much bigger moment than any he’d ever experienced in his playing days.

I admire Amaechi and Kopay for their steel spines and fortitude, but it’s troubling that even in our putatively more gay-friendly era, Amaechi is still eliciting the kinds of responses from his former league-mates that Kopay got in the mid-’70s. LeBron James’s comments are especially disappointing. I’m inclined to like James, whose precocity, grown-up appearance, and game belie his 22 years. But in this instance, he sounds more like a callow, unenlightened high-school jock. Reacting to the news that Amaechi spent his career in the closet, James said, “With teammates you have to be trustworthy, and if you’re gay and you’re not admitting that you are, then you are not trustworthy... It’s a trust factor, honestly. A big trust factor.”

Were LeBron to read about what Dave Kopay went through (I’ve just posted the article), he’d see that a gay athlete has many reasons to fear that he can’t trust his teammates.

February 8, 2007  Link  General Posts

...it’s probably because there have been some technical problems with this site over the last couple of weeks. Pretty much anything sent to me at the david (at) davidkamp dot com address since mid-January was obliterated and not seen by me. So, my apologies, and if you’re one of those former Chez Panisse employees from the ’70s writing to tell me that, man, my book didn’t get the half of it (I get, like, two of those a week), the system is up and running again. Feel free to re-send.

February 8, 2007  Link  General Posts

For those of you in the New York area who have an hour to spare at midday on Wednesday, February 7, I’m di