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?

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?

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.