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 1, 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
So, instead, they do roundup posts like this one.
I really enjoyed reading this critique of the U.S. mint’s “state quarters” series.
Two Clemson professors think that my Snob books represent a new form of satire, or something. Whatever, I’ll take it.
I never knew there was a video for Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice” until now. I always liked this song, the last thing John Lennon ever worked on in the studio. It was skeletal, icy, post-punky, and dancey, the antithesis of the blissed-out mellowness of the Double Fantasy album. And Lennon plays a metallic, Adrian Belew-like guitar part that sounds like no other guitar part he ever played. I wish that some of this weirdness had crept onto Double Fantasy.
November 14, 2007 Link
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
