This morning, I was upset to walk past our neighborhood greasy spoon, beloved Greenwich Village institution Joe Jr.’s, and see a handwritten “LOST OUR LEASE” sign in its window, with a declaration that the place will close this Sunday, July 5. A smattering of smaller signs asks patrons to sign a petition to save the restaurant.
Look, I know that change and turnover are an inexorable part of New York City, but my sadness about Joe Jr.’s isn’t just based on sentimentality. This place serves good diner food—homemade soups, terrific omelettes with corned-beef hash, fountain lemonade, and burgers that realize beautifully that specific diner-burger idiom—AND it is thriving, not a tired old joint wanting for customers and vitality.
So I sent out an APB to bloggers I knew would care—Josh Ozersky of The Feedbag, Ed Levine of Serious Eats, and Jeremiah Moss of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York—and they all posted my sad entreaty to help save the place. (Josh mischievously identified me as “Bob Cratchit.”) Also picking up my words were Eater and New York magazine’s Grub Street blog, though the latter curiously quoted someone named “David Camp.” Thanks, blogging community! I really do appreciate it.
Alas, per further reporting from Grub Street, it looks like the place is finished. The Hondros family, which owns Joe Jr.’s, sounds resigned to their fate, and the petition movement was started by crestfallen customers, not the Hondroses. I beseech all the landlords with empty storefronts in the Village to be sympathetic, and I beseech some young would-be restaurateur to start a new institution that will serve our neighborhood as well, and as unpretentiously, as Joe Jr.’s has.*
* BONUS: Please see this touching appreciation from The Villager’s Ed Gold of Louie, né Elias Vassilakis, the beloved Joe Jr.’s counterman who died abruptly in 2004. Louie’s was the first death I had to explain to my kids in that life-lesson, death-of-Mr. Hooper-on-Sesame Street sort of way.
UPDATE: The New York Times has filed a report that carries a faint whiff of hope for a stay of execution.
July 2, 2009 
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Well, Gay Pride Week has come and gone from my neighborhood—only the municipally applied lavender stripe down lower Fifth Avenue remains—but it’s always an opportune time to enjoy Matt Lucas’s “Lesbians” song on YouTube. I first saw this—years ago, before Little Britain, before Lucas earned his crown as the funniest alopecia-afflicted writer-performer since Mike Nichols—while in London on assignment for Vanity Fair. I was nearly asleep, half-watching a show called Shooting Stars (in which Lucas played an adult-sized baby named George Dawes) when this bizarre moment shook me awake.
Evidently, Lucas is playing both Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Tim Burton’s movie of Alice in Wonderland. Not a stretch.
June 29, 2009 Link General Posts
...when I want to find out, without obfuscation or unnecessary rhetoric, what’s going on in Iran, I turn straight to the New York Times. But when I wanted to find out, without obfuscation or unnecessary rhetoric, whether or not Michael Jackson was really dead, I turned straight to the New York Post and the Daily Mail.
June 25, 2009 Link General Posts
Some talented British comics have done what amounts to a remix of all the contentious Palin-Cleese sketches: “Dead Parrot” plus “Cheese Shop” plus “Argument Clinic.” They’ve even recreated the beiges and browns of the early-’70s BBC. It’s brilliant.
June 25, 2009 Link General Posts
No doubt the skinny young moptop was trying to be friendly when, as I left the supermarket, he congratulated me for “rockin’ the reusable”—meaning my non-disposable grocery bag. He was flagging down passersby on behalf of some green group, asking them “Do you have a moment for the environment?” But I was nevertheless... rankled. At this time of year, after college has let out, this particular block near my home becomes a stalking-ground for undergraduates doing advocacy work and soliciting signatures for petitions. I find it a nettlesome business, daily dodging nice kids asking me if I have time for the environment, gay rights, affordable housing, and so on—the implication being that if I don’t stop to yak with them, I don’t have time for these issues.
Yet I feel for these callow twerps, for I was once one of them, only worse. In the summer of 1985, I worked as a canvasser for the New Jersey branch of PIRG (Public Interest Research Group), a consumer and environmental lobby founded by Ralph Nader. Not only did I actively knock on doors in the suburbs rather than just pester urban pedestrians; I asked people for money. And what’s stranger still is, a fair number of them wrote out checks to NJ-PIRG on the spot.
I still can’t believe I did this. It’s not only against my inherent nature even to leave the house (let alone appear on the doorstep of a stranger’s); I also have doubts about the very effectiveness of this sort of street-level twerp deployment, even if I believe in the causes themselves.
Yet when I look at what’s happening in Iran, where two thirds of the population is under the age of 35, I’m reminded that youthful activism can be a powerful, wondrous thing. (As opposed to, say, this.) With lives on the line and freedom at stake, young Iran has no time to indulge in twerpitude.
June 25, 2009 Link General Posts
This Friday evening, I will be among those drinking bourbon and talking out his arse at the Southern Foodways Alliance’s celebration of the favorite son of Indianola, Mississippi: Craig Claiborne (1920-2000), the great writer, reviewer, and food editor of The New York Times in the formative years of higher food consciousness. I grew up reading Claiborne and cooking from the cookbooks and columns he compiled with Pierre Franey.
This event is already sold out, so I don’t even know why I’m posting about it, except that I’m just tickled to serve on the same panel as my favorite living food person, chef/author/instructor/TV host/loverman Jacques Pépin. Me and Pépin—it’s like an air-guitar enthusiast sharing a stage with Jimi Hendrix.
June 10, 2009 Link General Posts
My old school chum Sam Hoffman has just returned with a second season of Old Jews Telling Jokes, the most briliant idea in its conceptual simplicity since the Post-It Note. Whereas Season 1 was devoted to the Old Jews of our Central New Jersey upbringing, Season 2 is dedicated to Old Jews of New York City. I attended part of the filming and was astonished to see the roster of talent that Sam had rounded up—everyone from civic leaders to sociopaths. As Kurt Loder would say, do check it out....
June 9, 2009 Link General Posts
While I understand the strategies and realities that compel The New York Times to be groovier and winkier than it once was—the flotilla of hip-hop-savvy critics it now employs, the David Pogue tech videos that are really comedy videos—I kind of miss the old days when the Times was the voice of God, and a fusty, granddad-like God at that, particularly averse to slang, nicknames, and any hint of informality.
So I was delighted to see that this week, the Times felt compelled to describe Duff McKagan, the former bassman of Guns N’ Roses and current bassist of Velvet Revolver, as “musician and songwriter Michael McKagan, known as Duff.” You seldom see the Times go to such dorky lengths anymore. Back in 1987, for example, the Times was dutiful in describing U2’s lead vocalist as “Paul Hewson, who goes by the name Bono Vox,” referring to the singer later in the same article as “Mr. Vox.” Today, Bono is a regular contributor to the Times’s Op-Ed page, under the byline... Bono.
Perhaps this week’s retro-Times nose-holding approach to McKagan’s nickname is attributable to the fact that he was the subject of an article in the Business section—namely, the weekly “Frequent Flier” column, in which regular business travelers share their tales of airport zen and woe. McKagan is a businessman of sorts, so it must be pointed out that “Duff” is just a handle, a tool of his trade.
Regardless, no one, in print or otherwise, ever refers to Duff McKagan as Michael McKagan. In over twenty years in the public eye, he has been Duff. Writing him up as Michael McKagan is tantamount to describing Jay Leno as “the comedian and television host James Douglas Muir Leno, known as Jay.” It’s absurd, and endearingly Times-ian.
June 3, 2009 Link General Posts
This little clip brought a peaceful end to a trying day. I recommend it.
May 26, 2009 Link General Posts
We all know that public appearances by writers are by and large a burden upon society; I am still traumatized, some fifteen years after the fact, by an exceedingly soporific fiction reading I attended in which the author, never once looking up from her text, numbly and mirthlessly read aloud the sentence “‘Have you seen the egret?,’ she said.” I eyed the exits for a stealthy way out; sadly, there was none.
And yet... I have some “authorly” events coming up that involve not only free wine and free food, but lively co-presenters who will engage you and keep things moving clippety-clop.
The first, on Thursday, May 21, at 7 p.m., is a talk at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arena about wine, wine fetishism, and wine snobbery, the occasion being the publication of the paperpack edition of Benjamin Wallace’s fine nonfiction oeno-caper The Billionaire’s Vinegar. The bookchatters will be Mr. Wallace, Slate’s gonzo wine columnist Mike Steinberger, my Wine Snob’s Dictionary co-author David Lynch, and me.
The second event is a real corker: On Friday, June 12, at 8 p.m., at New York City’s Astor Center, the Southern Foodways Alliance, overseen by the affable and mischievous Mississippian foodthropologist John T. Edge, will sponsor a discussion of the life and legacy of Craig Claiborne, the Mississippi-born cookbook author and former food editor of the New York Times, and, in my opinion, the most underappreciated of America’s 20th-century food figures. (He’s a major character in my book The United States of Arugula.) Pete Wells, current editor of the Times’s Dining section, will moderate, and the yammerers will be the great Jacques Pépin (who knew Claiborne well) and me. M. Pépin is a kind man, my favorite TV chef, and the possessor of the most suspiciously undiluted French accent I’ve ever heard, considering he’s lived in this country for 50 years.
John T. Edge is flying up some chefs from Mississippi to “represent” with Southern snacks at the Astor Center. This event is free but requires a reservation and will get booked up quickly. More info is here, or you can simply RSVP by June 5 to sfaevents@olemiss.edu
May 14, 2009 Link General Posts
...I have entered the brave new world of teenyposting. In two ways, no less. This past week, over at Vanity Fair, we launched a tiny feature on the Web site called Fairbook, an experiment in borscht-belt microposting, featuring rim-shot zingers from Nell Scovell (former Spy colleague, creator of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch), Tim Long (former Spy colleague, now with The Simpsons), Michael Hogan (editor of VF.com), and me.
On top of that, heaven help me, I’m now on Twitter as @MrKamp. I suspect I will be doing more of my “funny” material on Twitter, as opposed to my ponderous 7,000-word chin-strokers.
If you’ve found me via the microposts, you might like the Snob’s Dictionary books.
April 24, 2009 Link General Posts
With my friend and occasional collaborator Lawrence Levi, I have launched a new recession blog called The Breadline. Well, strike that; “recession blog” sounds unbearably grim. The idea is to provide an online space for people to tell their stories and share their gallows humor (and other survival mechanisms) as they struggle through unemployment and reduced circumstances. As I’ve told colleagues, the idea is not dissimilar to what Studs Terkel did in his book Working, had that book been called Not Working.
Anyone in America who is unemployed and inclined to share a little of his or her story is welcome to fill out our simple Breadline Questionnaire. Even in this early phase, we’ve had respondents from Hawaii, Oregon, Georgia, and Minnesota–not just from our home base in solipsistic NYC.
We also intend to put up original artwork, photography, and music that’s reflective of the times. We want the Breadline to function as a sort of online quasi-WPA project, if that ain’t putting it too cute.
April 13, 2009 Link General Posts
Tom Leonard of the U.K.’s Spectator is the latest journalist to have journeyed up to Cornish, New Hampshire, in hopes of getting that pot-o’-gold scoop: an interview with J.D. Salinger. As Leonard recounts, he had no more luck than previous doorsteppers, though he did catch a glimpse through a window of the 90-year-old author “in a blue tanktop.”
I’ll admit to being fascinated by famous recluses–most of whom, I believe, are sincere in their desire to withdraw from public life rather than pranksterishly self-conscious about cultivating a mystique. In 2002, the writer Tim Willis doorstepped Syd Barrett in Cambridge, England. He found the former Pink Floyd leader standing before him in nothing but “a small, tight pair of bright blue Y-fronts” (scant blue undergarments being, evidently, a recluse hallmark) and unwilling to talk, yet settled into a simple life of painting and gardening. It’s my suspicion that the mentally fragile Barrett wouldn’t have made it to 60 (he died three years ago) had he remained an active rock musician; reclusiveness extended his life.
Still, for all my pursuit of interviews with reclusive figures, I could never bring myself to doorstep one; it just seems too violative. (This is one of the reasons I don’t consider myself a real journalist but merely a “writer.”) The one time I’ve actually landed an interview with a serious recluse–he being Sly Stone–it took an agonizing ten-year process to get face-to-face with the man. And, it must be said, my zeal derived more from my adoration of Stone’s music than from the scoopy thrill of bagging big game. (I’ve never had any desire to interview Salinger because his work doesn’t interest me.)
Though, hey, I’ll cop to getting a kick out of the fact that this photo exists.
April 2, 2009 Link General Posts
My old Jedi master Kurt Andersen, whose assistant I was at Spy magazine, has written the cover story for this week’s Time, a thoughtful piece called “The End of Excess” that serves as a lovely complement to my Vanity Fair essay “Rethinking the American Dream.” Well, Kurt didn’t write his piece as a complement to mine but as its own entity; in fact, I’m told by a mutual friend that Kurt consciously chose not to read my essay, to tune it out, because he didn’t want it to infect his own thought processes. A good thing, too. Kurt’s essay is zippier and more forward-looking than mine–though, inevitably, since I learned so much sitting at his knee (almost literally; the original Spy offices were really small), there are some conspicuous similarities.
A reflective coda to this post: It’s funny, I grew up thinking that such institutions as Time and The New York Times were walled cities, impenetrable to suburban nowheresvillers like me. Yet now, it’s not uncommon for me to know the person behind the byline at either publication–and, in the case of the Times, to land an occasional byline there myself.
When I was a clueless neophyte of 22, I always wondered how on earth my elders in the office knew everyone: How were they all so connected?* Twenty years later, I get college kids asking me this very question. And the simple answer is: You age. As you get older, your orbit of known byline-holders naturally expands simply by virtue of your hanging around. Your original gang of callow-twerp contemporaries eventually disperses to new jobs, as do your original bosses, as do you. You keep in touch with some of these people, get to know their colleagues in their new places, and lo, before you know it, you are “of” the New York media. That’s all there is to it. There’s no secret-society induction ritual or special FastPass allotted to select East Coast Jews. (Or, if there is, I wasn’t privy to it; the Foer brothers might tell you otherwise.)
* I remember being especially awed by how all the older Spy editors referred to the esteemed journalist (and future Time editor) Richard Stengel, a person I had not yet met, as “Rick.”
March 29, 2009 Link General Posts
Since my days at Spy magazine back in the 1840s, I have known a strawberry-blond eccentric named Matt Tyrnauer. He is a dear friend and a fellow Vanity Fair writer. A few years ago, Matt decided to take the kind of bold leap to which I am congenitally averse: He wanted to expand the magazine profile he’d written about the couturier Valentino into a full-fledged documentary that he would direct himself. With cameras and everything.
Several arduous years later, Matt is on a glorious victory lap with the finished film, Valentino: The Last Emperor, which, as of this week, is the highest-grossing documentary of 2009. Even if I was not Matt’s friend, I would tell you this is a fantastic movie; you needn’t be a fashion person, a perma-tanned Italian, a woman, a pug owner, or a homosexual to fall for it. It’s just a fun, fizzy plunge into a great milieu, plus it has unforeseen heart.
Valentino: The Last Emperor is playing in limited release in a bunch of theaters nationally, with Matt himself introducing the film and taking questions in New York, Chicago, L.A., and quite possibly other cities over the next few weeks. Visit the movie’s Web site to get the details.
March 23, 2009 Link General Posts
I stepped outside my comfort zone to write this essay for the new issue of Vanity Fair. It’s what used to be called a “think piece,” but I hope you find it less ponderous and chin-stroking than that phrase suggests.
And on the lighter side, there’s always Little Graydon.
March 5, 2009 Link General Posts
I’ve noted before my fondness for good-guy rancher Bill Niman and his wife, Nicolette Hahn Niman. Now it is my duty to note that Nicolette has a new book out, the endearingly titled Righteous Porkchop. (Why couldn’t I have come up with something like that, rather than the much-maligned title The United States of Arugula?)
Nicolette’s book is that rarest of things: a readable, non-finger-wagging public-policy book. In large part, this is because she has framed the book as a memoir, recounting the road she took from single-gal East Coast environmental-advocacy lawyer and vegetarian to married California cattle rancher. (Niman Ranch’s hogs, and therefore its actual righteous porkchops, are raised elsewhere.) Along the way, we learn that Nicolette was reluctant to let herself fall for Bill Niman because he has a mustache. It must be said, though, that Bill is one of those rare contemporary men who can carry off a mustache without looking like a desk sergeant or an adult-film actor.
Anyway, if you care about where your animal protein comes from and enjoy facial-hair drama, you should pick up Nicolette’s book.
February 24, 2009 Link General Posts
This is a good week to pick up Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood, a modestly priced Penguin paperback anthology of VF’s exhaustive film reportage over the years. There are two pieces by me in it, and further articles from more credible professionals like James Wolcott and Peter Biskind. And look, Richard Schickel raved over the book in the L.A. Times!
My two articles are pieces I spent a good deal of the late 1990s reporting, one on the making of Cleopatra–still the most expensive movie ever produced, in dollars adjusted for inflation–and another on the making, and tragic unmaking, of Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons. I’m delighted that Mr. Graydon Carter chose to anthologize these two articles, because I have received lots of e-mails asking where these articles can be found, and I’ve been appallingly delinquent in archiving my own back catalogue on this Web site. The Ambersons article isn’t up, and the Cleopatra one, I’ve noticed to my consternation, is missing its ending paragraphs on this site.
So pick up Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood to get the proper reading experience. I enjoyed doing those pieces, interviewing a lot of people who have since passed on (Hume Cronyn, Carroll O’Connor, Robert Wise, to name a few) and familiarizing myself with the perilous, hairpin-turn roads of the Hollywood Hills, where midlevel midcentury film people apparently went to die.
February 19, 2009 Link General Posts
Last fall I taped an interview with Lynne Rossetto Kasper, the delightfully dulcet host of the syndicated radio program The Splendid Table, that somehow didn’t end up airing until Valentine’s Day. You can listen to a podcast of it here. (Mine is the last segment.) I was on with Lynne to promote my humor book The Wine Snob’s Dictionary, but I unwittingly provided some consumer service when she asked me about affordable wines and I sang the praises of cheap red Spanish wines from the Jumilla region. (Pronounced who-ME-ah, though some Wine Snobs actually say jew-MILL-a.) In particular, I mentioned a $12 bottle that drinks like a $40 bottle.
I’ve since gotten lots of queries on what wine in particular I was talking about, so here’s the deal. It was an Olivares 2006 Jumilla Altos De La Hoya (Olivares being the producer, Monastrell being the grape varietal). And it indeed cost $12. My local wine merchant, Rob Allen of New York Vintners, goes so far as to say it’s the best wine under $20 he has ever tasted. Rob doesn’t have the 2006 vintage in stock anymore, but he has the equally good 2007, which sells for a little more, $14 a bottle. And it’s still a bargain. Wine, in my opinion, is not one of those things you should give up in these hard times. Order a case of affordable stuff like this and give up your premium cable channels, or declare a one-month iTunes moratorium. I swear it’s a worthwhile trade-off.
February 19, 2009 Link General Posts
Read all about it here.
February 6, 2009 Link General Posts
