Adventures with Eustace: This Week's New Yorker

David Pasternack: "The other quintessential Long Island fish"

2005-09-02T17:31:00.000-04:00

This is, as far as I can recall, only the second or third New Yorker food issue (culinary idolatry being a nascent addition to American faith / fetish), but it’s definitely my favorite so far. I have to know this is true when one of my least favorite NYer contributors (trailing really only Katha Pollit) writes an absolutely sterling profile of David Pasternack, of Esca.

I’ve eaten at Esca only twice, but both times with spectacular results, and the bar is by far the best place for an icy martini in about a 6 or 7 block radius. I don’t have the means to become a regular there, but I wish there were a few dozen more restaurants like it in Manhattan. Beyond being full of generally well put-together people who know how to act in public, it’s not a 'scene' restaurant in the least. The formidable wine program (200 selections or so) combines ambition (and often outright obscurity) with expert wine service. And though it’s part of a general trend towards eating raw fish, it was also the innovator, one of the first non-Japanese restaurants to include naked fish flesh on its menu. I’ve had the crudo platter that Singer describes, and at least a few years ago, before it garnered so many imitators, it was revelatory. The pink snapper with black lava salt was like a salty confection, a briny balancing act that you'd eat every day if you could afford it.

As I said, Marc Singer’s byline doesn’t typically fill my heart with anticipation, as I normally find his writerly persona rather spineless (evidenced here in his “Citing my journalistic priorities, I managed to steer clear of the heavy lifting” copout), but I enjoyed the swift pacing in which he demonstrated the dual importance of Pasternack the chef and Pasternack the fisherman; without making a big fuss about it, he illustrates that Pasternack is more rooted in his local environment (dare I say terroir?) and the origins of his raw materials than most chefs of his near-celebrity stature. That goes a long way towards explaining why each time I’ve visited, Esca always seems comfortably full.

Jack Handey should be Secretary of Ha-Ha

2005-08-07T14:45:00.000-04:00

But you already knew that.

You say we are violent and barbaric, but has any one of you come up to my cage and extended his hand? Because, if he did, I would jerk it off and eat it right in front of him. “Mmm, that’s good Martian,” I would say.

Grumpy Old Men

2005-08-07T14:33:00.000-04:00

If I ever say this, or something like it, just smother me with a pillow. Seriously.

“I don’t go to concerts much,” he said. “I’ve heard everything. When I do go to movies, I walk out half the time. As for literature, I’ve read everything .. There’s nothing I look forward to,” Rorem said. “I’ve seen everything. It sounds blasé, but it’s true.”

Anthony Lane auditions for Andy Rooney's job

2005-08-07T14:24:00.000-04:00

"Through a storm of bobbing heads, we watch Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Franz Ferdinan, and others--the cream of current bands, supposedly, although the uninitiated may wonder why most of the cream sounds like a cow giving birth in a wind tunnel."

Alternate title: Anthony Lane is the new W. for 10,000 hipsters.

Community Communications

2005-08-07T14:08:00.000-04:00

Let me start by saying that George Saunders is a genius, a national treasure, a visionary, and my daddy. He's written some of the most beautiful, incandescent fiction I've read in the past few years, especially from 'Civil War Land in Bad Decline', the concluding story of which should be in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction 2083 Edition. So I've had spectacularly high hopes for his two stories in the NYer this year, but neither of them has really connected with me.

'CommComm' is pure Saunders, to be sure; we're in a dysotopian, lightly-alternate universe where characters speak an odd jargon and refer to incidents like "The Night of the Latvians". Uncertainty and general not-knowing abound. It's a tricky thing to pull off, teasing the reader like this and refusing to disclose the full context, a trick for which Ishiguro and Murikami seem to have a special knack.

I need to read this story again, but the first time through, it struck me as a little disconnected, a little haphazard. But there's also a luminous closing passage, a feather-light limning of death which would make just about anything worth reading to get to this end.

"That is why I came back. I was wrong in life, limited, shrank everything down to my size, and yet, in the end, there was something light-craving within me, which sent me back, and saved me."

And one again I understand why George Saunders is the new icon, the new Raymond Carver, for scruffy young writers.

Rove: The Musical!

2005-08-07T13:50:00.000-04:00

Hertzburg gets himself good and lathered up in the August 1st Comment, 'Roe vs. Rove'.

"As of last Monday, when Time and Newsweek hit the stands with Karl Rove on their covers, the elements were in place for a good old-fashioned seond-term White House scandal wallow."

Can't you just hear the joy, the blood-lust in his voice? Picture Abe Simpson appealing to his fellow parishoners "Sacrifice him to our God!!!"

"The story had a villain, who, like all the best villains, came equipped with vassals acclaiming him a here. It had a silent, remorseless lawman in Patrick Fitzgerald...it had a colorful supporting cast, including the spy herself ... her husband ... and a Times reporter jailed for her refusal to talk."

Coming this fall to theaters near you: "Rove: The Musical", directed by Michael Bay and starring
Billy Bob Thorton as Karl Rove, Sigourney Weaver as Judith Miller, and Robert Redford as Hendrik Hertzburg.

Sadly for Hertzburg, forces him to actually write about John G. Roberts, Jr.

At a time when the left is all too apt to play the innefectual part of the whiney little brother, I'm actually pleased to see that Roberts is, given the context, a reasonable candidate (the man has done pro-bono work for gay rights, or as Hertzburg so lamely states it "He is not, it appears, a hater"), that the core of the Democratic Party has recognized this (even Ted Kennedy paused between Gin Fizzes to give a hesitant thumbs-up), and that we don't appear to be headed for a sequel to "Bork: The Culture Wars".

But mainly, Hertzburg is just sad that the heat was briefly removed from 'The Turd Blossom', and consoles himself with some warmed-over wishfullness:

"Bush's popularity is at a low ebb; his plan to privatize Social Secrutity is failing; his war and his budget are in chaos. And by Friday the troubles of Karl Rove were back on the front page."

YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP! YAP!

2005-07-05T23:23:00.000-04:00

For a time I thought I was Adam Gopnik's biggest fan. Then a former boss of mine told me that her boyfriend not only had all his first editions, but had them autographed. (Not that he has many first editions, but still...). In this same enterprise, another writer was perhaps Gopnik's biggest detractor, casting suspicion on every word he wrote, especially those attributed to his precocious children and their whimsical imaginary friends (i.e. Charlie Ravioli). Which brings us to 'Death of a Fish', Gopnik's meditation on the death of a betta fish which belongs to his daughter.

Even for me, this essay is stretching it. Gopnik (admirably) loves his daughter, but is profligate in assigning this love. Hence, his daughter's mess of fish and gills and oxygen and (finally) death becomes, in turn: Kim Novak, Frank Stallone, Grace Kelly, and Tippie Hedren. Poor fish. He only forgot how to breathe.

But the more that I ponder it, Gopnik's fault isn't an essay that swings and missses at too many meaningful metaphors, it's his own shitty fathering. By failing to pull the damn fish out of the plastic castle window, he condmned it to death. Why? Because he was worried that giving the fish a hearty yank would pull its fins out.

Imagine yourself a simple, 200-cell brain fish. You live in the home of a writer with a weakness for sweeping metaphor. Through a series of misjudgements, you find yourself very much lodged in the window of a plastic castle. Gopnik won't pull you out, and suddenly, in your microscropic fish brain you wish that George Will or William Buckley Jr. were there to save you. They'll either try their best or leave you to die a quick death. Not like Gopnik, the hoser. He'd rather have you suffer quietly than bother his wife with the grisly details.

How Judaism turned into Jail Time

2005-07-05T22:54:00.000-04:00

Jeffery Goldberg's 'Letter from Washington' is a fascinating excursion into the interplay of partisan politics and oddly-funded lobbyists. Personally, I encountered a huge disconnect between Lawrence Franklin's soft abuse of pro-Israeli information pipelines and the hard fact of "six to eight years". From what I read in The Daily News, you can shoot a guy in broad daylight, and as long as you didn't plan for it ahead of time, you're also due for "six to eight years."

But without engaging the difficult knife-edge of dual-loyalty.......actually, screw that. Let's knee dual-loyalty in the groin and call it what it is: Dual at best.

I have in mind a new lobbying organization,

Organization for Rewarding Gaullists Advancing Socialist Morals.

I already hold the keys to a cold-water walk-up on K street. And from this domaine, I plan on advancing the cause of the French way of life. If the Israelis believe that setting up camp on desolate beaches is the way to please G-D, I will milk goats for chevre in Hoboken. If the Israelites hold true that wearing fuzzy hats and preposterous outfits in the dead of summer somehow has a benevolent effect on their Almighty, I will wear sailor shirts and black felt berets until Labor Day. And anytime France's right to import unpasteurized cheese or wine is threatened, I will raise the spectre of Normandy and D-Day, do my best to shame public politicians, and compare proposed bans on foie gras to the Holocaust. As a public lobbyist, can I do any less? Mais Non!

Hertzberg Cashes the Bowl

2005-06-23T12:56:00.000-04:00

Has Hendrik Hertzberg been spending too much time with Anthony Lane? Because that’s the impression I get from Hertzberg’s barely coherent ‘Comment’ on the Supreme Court's ruling on ‘Gonzales v. Raich’ (otherwise known as “that pot case”). With Lane’s movie reviews, there’s an implicit understanding that the review will be as much about Lane’s rapier wit as it is about the quality of the film in question. And as it relates to ‘Star Wars III’, that’s a tradeoff I’m happy to accept. But Supreme Court decisions, they’re, well, important and stuff. So cutesiness like this:

“To make sense of Gonzales v. Raich, a Supreme Court Decoder Ring, available with three box tops from Original Intent Cereal, would be a valuable accessory.”

And this

“Justice Thomas’ separate dissent … could have been written by Justice Cheech or Justice Chong”

sounds more like material for a Capital Steps audition than actual journalism.

What’s missing from Hertzberg’s typically self-congratulatory op-ed is recognition of the sagacity of Justice Stevens’ majority opinion. While ruling according to what he sees as the determining law, Stevens simultaneously recognizes that this law (persecution of patients who use or cultivate marijuana) is frivolous at best, and cruel at worst. To rule according to a law while at the same time critiquing it is a difficult action, and one worth admiring. Even more meritorious is Stevens’ closing movement, in which he opines that “More important than these legal avenues is the democratic process, in which the voices of voters allied with these respondents may some day be heard in the halls of Congress.” Nice to see a high government official sublimating his power to that of the democracy with a straight face. “Judicial activism” can be a frightening specter from either side of the bench, and this sort of reasoned, moderate stance is perhaps the antidote.

Hertzburg could recognize this, or he could engage more deeply how unusual a split this decision created in terms of the usual Court factions. (How often does Thomas vote counter to Scalia, after all?) He could even interpret this ruling as the first step towards a more sensible relationship between federal prosecutorial zeal and the various natures of drug use. But no, he’d rather just take his cheap shots, as below:

“Scalia’s concurring opinion … was devoted largely to explaining why his concurrence should not be taken to suggest that he likes big gummint.”

Hendrik Hertzburg: Class. Always class.

Little Mac's Revenge

2005-06-23T00:17:00.000-04:00

Not much to add to Remnick’s dispatch on the passion of Iron Mike, other than that this sentence "For one erotic marathon, a satrap lined up twenty-four women for the night" sent me scurrying to a dictionary. (Question: What is a satrap and where do I get one? Answer: "1. A governor of a province in ancient Persia. 2. A ruler. 3. A subordinate bureaucrat or official.")

What’s interesting in the juxtaposition of Hertzberg and Remnick’s pieces is that Remnick has managed to make a marginal heavyweight boxing match sound more “important” than a Supreme Court Decision. Whether that’s to Remnik’s credit or Hertzberg’s discredit is up to debate.

Giving Anna Benson a run for her money...

2005-06-06T14:16:00.000-04:00

...as the most loathsome individual to populate this week's issue is Stephanie Klotz, one of the petulant would-be valedictorians who wouldn't recognize class if it was embossed in thirty-point type on their precious high-school transcript.

I'm not convinced these litigious goodie-two shoes are worth the space Margaret Talbot devotes to them, but at least we get a savory bite of unintentional schadenfreude in the process:

Klotz remembers being given "so many academic awards and plaques, it was ridiculous. Every time I sat down, I had to get up again to get an award. I had so many plaques I literally couldn’t carry them off the stage, and I'm, like, 'Oh, yeah, right, I'm not valedictorian?'"

Klotz graduated magna cum laude from the University of Dayton in May, and will start medical school at the University of Cincinnati in August. At college, Klotz realized that she was "a little fish in a big sea with a lot of valedictorians." But she's glad that she sued: she learned that she could be a fighter when she needed to be, and she showed Germantown that she couldn’t be "walked all over." Klotz, who is engaged to be married to a social worker, is working as a waitress until school starts.

Take that, Germantown!

Magnet Tape Killed the Gramophone Star

2005-06-04T00:40:00.000-04:00

I’ve admired Alex Ross ever since a pair of his pieces three or four years ago. One was a frank and honest account of the experience of the classical music novice. Who among us hasn’t sat in the audience of a classical performance and felt a little underwhelmed, a little longing for the bombast and comfortable theatrics of popular music, a little drowsy despite the luxury price surrendered for the tickets? Ross managed both to acknowledge this impulse and to celebrate the classical performance and the growing appreciation for nuance that comes with repeated visits and more careful aural attention.

The other winning piece was an appreciation of Radiohead. Ross’ arena is classical music, but he found much to admire in the reigning lords of thoughtful arena music. Half profile and half music theory essay, the article was a satisfying hybrid of Rolling Stone and Gramophone. I relished this article all the more because Ross had such a keener perspective than The New Yorker’s then-pop critic Nick Hornby, that pasty nostalgia artist who parlayed a string of mediocre novels into a cottage industry of shallow, fabricated wistfulness. (His self-glorifying review of the Lukabop Shuggie Otis reissue was the last straw for me.) Hornby’s review of Kid A was narcissistic hokum which betrayed the essentially conservative, even reactionary, bent of his music sensibilities. In any case, Alex Ross was the antidote. (Where Sasha Frere-Jones fits into this scheme I’m not sure anyone knows just yet.)

So I’m pleased to see Mr. Ross given free reign in this week’s ‘Critic at Large’, in which he surveys a recent set of books devoted to the interplay of recorded music and live performance. There’s not much I can add to his well-constructed, unobtrusively written essay, but I’d like to touch on two particular points.

The first is Ross’ elegant summation that “The machine is a mirror of our needs and fears.” He’s speaking specifically about the phonograph, the CD player, and their ilk, but this is a useful truism to keep in mind when considering all manner of gadgets and gizmos. I’m especially intrigued by the “fear” side of that equation. Most entertainment technology plays to our fear of being bored, or worse yet, lonely. First the Walkman and now the Ipod act as insulating tools protecting us from our fear of being actively involved with our surroundings. (Remember The Onion headline announcing the Walkman’s arrival with the headline “Millions of Americans Fitted with Audio Pacifiers”?) And of course, the cell phone (my own private windmill) protects its user from the fear of being disconnected, the panic of being out of reach, the anxiety of having nothing but the solitude of your own thoughts to buttress you.

More germane to the thrust of Ross’ essay is his depiction of classical music performance in America as a precise but soulless reproduction of the European tradition, “an immaculate copy”.

‘Most modern performance tends to erase all evidence of the work that goes into playing: virtuosity is defined as effortlessness. One often-quoted ideal is to ‘disappear behind the music’. But when precision is divorced from emotion it can become anti-musical, inhuman, repulsive.’

In reading this rather harsh indictment, I called to mind the three or four New York Philharmonic performances I’ve been lucky enough to attend this year. Every time, my enjoyment of the program had far more to do with the work performed than the performance itself. This may sound rudimentary, but it also hints at something limiting, something constricting in contemporary classical music performance. When you settle into your seat at Avery Fisher, you rest assured that you’re about to witness a world-class, flawless or nearly-so performance. And it’s worth asking, does that take some of the thrill out of it? Returning to the crux of Ross’ essay: without the risk, without the hint of musical danger, how exactly is the live performance preferable to the recorded artifact? At the end of the performance, it’s not enough to only be immaculate.

On the perils of wedding a stripper

2005-06-03T11:29:00.000-04:00

Am I going to have to rethink Lillian Ross? I've always considered her society profile pieces to be akin to "Entertainment Tonight" for the moneyed set. Everything trite and tiresome in these cumulus-level puff pieces can be found in this recent yawner. As Buford Sharkley from Baseball Primer once commented, her pieces would be hilarious if they weren't entirely devoid of irony.

But this week's Anna Benson profile calls into question just how in on the joke Ms. Ross may be. In its depiction of Anna Benson as the last person you would want sitting next to you on a lengthy flight, it's a character assassination piece. But the genius is that Ross just sits idly by and lets Anna set herself on fire. Some gems:

"I have to come up with stupid humor to be understood by these idiots who take everything so literally."

"Kris doesn’t want me to have plastic surgery on my face. He says, ‘Don’t let them do any of that crap to you; you’re too pretty.’ Kris has the eye of an eagle."

"Before we were with the Mets, when players tried to boss me around I told them, ‘You’re not my daddy!’ I don’t give a shit. I don’t care that much about baseball. I want to do many other things. I’m a humanitarian and a philanthropist."

Behold! The beauty of the self-administered hatchet job.

"You will find true love on Flag Day"

2005-06-02T11:27:00.000-04:00

Jeremy Olshan writes the nearly-inevitable quirk piece on the New York fortune cookie factory whose back-of-the-fortune lottery prediction enriched a hundred and ten people to the tune of $100,000 or so.

Apparently writing such gems as "Behind every good man is another good man" is taxing work, and Donald Lau, the Columbia-eductaed proprietor of Wonton Food, is ready to hang it up. (Right now I'm wondering if he's the genius behind my all-time favorite fortune, which I've encountered a remarkable three times: Constant grinding will turn even an iron rod into a fine needle.)

So Lau has decided to bring in new blood. The company will soon advertise for a new fortune writer, and Lau will make the transition to editor. "Maybe when I retire I’ll write again—perhaps a book about writing fortunes," he said. Returning to form, he summarized the thrust of the book with two simple axioms. "Don’t have too complicated a mind," he said. "Think in ten-word sentences."

If Lau can hold out until January 20th, 2009, I think I know just the man for the job.

Chandler meets Chekhov

2005-05-27T10:11:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I enjoyed a NYer story as much as David Bevmozgis' 'The Russian Riveria'.

This story is like a clinic on taut, muscular fiction with solid emotional footing. As Thom Jones has illustrated time and time again, something about boxing resonates with literary fiction.

The man had measured the length of their arms; checked with calipers the thickness of the skin below their eyebrows; had them execute the standing broad jump and a complex version of hopscotch. Then, to eliminate criers and bleeders, he had punched each boy in the nose. From a class of twenty boys, he had selected three.

I'm planning on stopping by the bookstore soon to pick up his collection of short stories, which will be the first time a NYer story has inspired me to do that since George Saunders' dystopian boarding school tale.

We are Devo

2005-05-24T19:51:00.000-04:00

Has H. Allen Orr contributed to the magazine before? I’m curious, because his tone is rather out of place. Not that I didn’t enjoy or find edifying his crowbar-to-the-knee assault on “Intelligent Design”. It’s just that when he whips out lines like “Despite all the attention, Dembski’s mathematical claims about design and Darwin are almost entirely beside the point”, I halfway anticipate a laugh-tracked “ooooooohhh”. The article (whose title ‘Devolution: Why Intelligent Design Isn’t’ hardly hides the agenda) is a purposeful, well-aimed missive, but could well have been subtitled ‘When Academicians Attack!’

What I find interesting is the assumption, which neither Orr nor his targets address, that evolution has resulted in something approaching an ideal state of biology. I’d be first in line for the open auditions of “Human Consciousness, the Musical”, but as humans, we’re not without our flaws. Have you watched a loved one die a needlessly painful death? Have you grappled over your own petty addictions? Have you recovered slowly from a broken bone? Have you watched FOX lately?

The narcissistic core belief of the I.D. partisans seems to be “My God, we’re good looking. And charming to boot!” Which inevitably leads to the question “Who do we thank?” Hence, God.

Yes, we humans turned out pretty nicely, but we’re hardly the Bentleys of evolutionary biology. When standard-issue human beings come equipped with a 200 IQ, lungs for both air and water, jaguar dexterity, cheetah speed, and feline good looks, then maybe we can begin to discuss a higher power. Till then, I’ll be grateful for my opposable thumbs and worship at the secular temple of statistical luck.

The other fallacy that strikes me is a very human inability to appreciate the awesome span of time. We think in seconds. We suffocate at the idea of spending 20 minutes in line. We’re ready to burn things down if we have to wait an hour. Yet the story of the earth, of our planet, is one of millenniums. If, as the Young Earthers argue, an absolute vacuum turned into the 21st century in 10,000 years, a “higher intelligence” would be essential and perhaps unarguable.

But one must give more credit to the sheer patience of evolutionary biology. If anything, we should be grateful not to Jesus but to the single cells which mucked around for eons before hitting three lemons in a row and deciding a two-cell organism wasn’t such a bad idea. Feel free to pray to your vengeful, didactic, blood-hungry God. I’ll be off in the side pasture, giving thanks to the forgiving, nurturing balm of endless time.

Amen infinitum.

I hope I die before I get old

2005-05-24T11:30:00.000-04:00

My girlfriend and I spent Sunday afternoon visiting her elderly relatives (two great-aunts and one great-uncle) in Jackson Heights. These visits are nearly always of a tragicomic nature, but this week the tragic beat the comic into silent submission. Her great-uncle is in poor health, the type of poor health wherein there's no getting better, only not getting worse. But rather than accept this harsh fact he's chosen to, in his words, "start a war" against his doctors, whom he holds in bitter contempt as a bunch of lying, self-serving bullshit artists. (His words.)

He's a stubborn man, so our suggestion that he seek out new doctors hardly registered. Which brings us to Surowiecki's column, in which he posits that when it comes to health care, "geography is still destiny". It's a startling assertion, yet hard to argue against. I chose an eye doctor based on the fact that their office is three blocks north of mine. My general practitioner? A five minute subway ride away. Locality is all.

Surowiecki: Where you live has a profound effect on how much attention your doctor gives you, how many days you spend in the hospital, and what drugs you are (or are not) prescribed. For all the talk about the death of distance and the homogenization of the American landscape, when it comes to health care geography is still destiny.

Being a healthy person with a lingering immortality hangover from the teenage years, I spend little time or thought on doctors, medicine, and sickness. But it's striking how much easier it is to get opinions on where to eat in Manhattan, or what book to buy on Amazon, than it is to research the individual in whose hands you place your physical well-being.

This week's Hendrik Hyperbole

2005-05-24T02:06:00.000-04:00

I'm not shy about the fact that Hendrik Hertzburg rankles me, sticks in my craw, gets my goat, and so on, and so forth. Even when I agree with him ideologically, which is more often than not, I feel a little catch in the back of my throat, a little shudder at the idea of his physical voice (which I imagine as shrill and nasal in the extreme). I find myself reading his columns with an imaginary scorecard, marking an 'x' each time he's intellectually sloppy, each time he turns demagogue, each time he assumes the reader shares his precise political beliefs and passes wry attitude for tricky facts. Whiny, strident, condescending, he’s got it all. Without putting too fine a point on it, he's an emblem my disgust with the American Left since last November. (This coming from a Kerry voter who was rambunctiously disconsolate for days after the first Tuesday in November.)

That said, his ‘Comment’ this week, while formulaic and rhetorically over-heated, hit its target. This is due in large part to his citation of the Times piece of a week or two ago which detailed the use of torture in Afghanistan. He quotes from the story directly, and it makes your blood run Arctic cold. After reading these details, one cannot refute or decry, one is just simply shocked.

I personally feel guilty for not having read the Times article, hid as it was behind the unremarkable headline about two detainees who were mistreated. Let’s be frank – in a media universe where 30 people a day meet violent ends in Iraq, two ‘foreign combatants’ who met less than ideal ends doesn’t seem much worth clicking on. And then you read what Hertzburg cites

“The death by torture of a slight, shy, illiterate young Afghan villager who was shackled by the wrists to the wire ceiling of his cell for days, struck more than a hundred times in one day…and beaten on the legs until the tissue, in a coroner’s words, ‘had basically been pulpified.’ "

and you want to hit the reset button for the media, for your sensibilities, and for the world at large. Hertzburg, predictably, blames it on the Bush White House, but there’s more than enough blame to go around.

Tables for Two

2005-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

Why oh why does our magazine persist in half-hearted, amateur-level restaurant reviews? At this point, they might as well send me out to do dance critiques. Potential excerpt: "Only one dancer fell down, and my seat was not uncomfortable. Partial thumbs up."

This week we have Leo Carey (?) reviewing Cru. Presented with a wine list which rivals Veritas' as the city's best (and believe me, I've drooled over the pdfs of both documents online), Leo has about as much insight as a freshly arrived tourist from Pittsburgh who is surprised at how tall the Eiffel tower really is. He mentions two vanity wines (the ancient 1899 Lafite and overhyped 1970 Petrus), notes thier stratospheric prices, and moves on.

In other words, He Misses. The Point. Entirely.

He does not realize that of the 8,000 or so parties who will eat at Cru during the year, perhaps .5 percent will order bottles in excess of $1,000. Yet these are the only two bottles he mentions. It's madness, really. When I was writing reviews for similar (if not quite as exalted) restaurants, I'd focus on the wines you'd actually want to drink, the wines you could pay for without Jewish / Catholic / Human guilt kicking you in the palate. But not Leo, he's all about the bling.

Adding insipid to injury, Leo laments that only two of the main courses "can really hold their own against the gigantic reds". From this we can assume one of two things.

1. Conde Naste is printing their own money, and Leo really did have a difficult time pairing the unctuous Merlot of the 1970 Petrus against his main course.

2. Leo somehow overlooked the dozen upon dozens of Rieslings, Gewurzs, Viogniers, and other lively whites which would pair with crudo like silk sheets to smooth, shapely legs.

In his summation, Leo characterizes the Cru's wine list as "unmatchable". Memo to Leo: there's 3,500 selections there. Unless the restaurant is serving hobo entrails in a petrol reduction as the lone entree, there's a wine that's going to match whatever food the kitchen puts out. Back to the drawing board for you, sir.

And so we begin, with May 23, 2005

2005-05-18T22:22:00.000-04:00

I may as well commence this blog with an admission. I have a big schoolboy crush on Nancy Franklin.

In much the same manner that I pine for MFK Fisher and Roz Chast, there's something about Nancy's work that makes me want to buy her a drink at some posh-but-not-obvious place like the Mark hotel. But much as I wish the subway smelled like honeysuckle and I could take naps at the office after lunch, I wish Nancy wrote about something over than television. Because I don't much like television. I don't have cable, and my rabbit ears pick up only about 2.5 networks. But I read her columns and critiques anyway, as she dissolves and dissects shows I'll never watch, just to see when her prose winks at me just short of lasciviously. That wink in this week's column came when Nancy imagined the summer break for the characters of 'Lost' -- "Perhaps these characters will explain what they've been doing while off-camera all season long -- playing beach volleyball."

With that out of the way, we can address the 'big news' in this week's issue, which is new fiction by Jonathan Franzen. Odd as it is, I actually feel a little bit sorry for Mr. F. Despite more popular and critical success than a literary writer can reasonably hope for, Franzen seems to have defined himself as someone who's permanently misunderstood. (Witness his 10-page meditation on the Peanuts comic strip from several months back.) Also, he's not part of a movement. He's the right age but wrong temperament to be lumped in with the McSweeney's boy geniuses like Eggers and Foster Wallace, and he's slightly too senior to be rubbing metaphorical shoulders with that three-named author with the expensive townhouse in Park Slope. That said, his name still has some gravity, and I was hopeful that his story this week would be a reminder of the not-so-recent past in which The New Yorker's fiction was measurably important, and not just dutifully diverse.

Sadly, while Franzen's 'Two's Company' is well-written, it has all the emotional resonance of late Woody Allen movies. There are some nice turns of phrases and a few interesting abstractions, but it boils down to a fatal flaw: People Simply Do Not Act This Way. It's all too pat, too clinical, and to top it off, the characters speak in parenthesis. Our protagonist: "It's just, why does Kimbo (unfunny name by the way) have to be cartoonish."

The unintended irony of this piece is that it seems a sort of attack on emotional immaturity (hence the protagonist's reversion to an all-black wardrobe and pat bitterness) from an author who himself seems fossilized in a sort of forced alienation redolent of sophomore year angst.

On to happier territories: Ben McGrath. Jesus but this kid can write. His Talk of the Town column on the writers' constructed habitats was wry and knowing without being cutesy, a tough trick to pull off. And the piece on Freddy Adu exhibits once again that McGrath is the heir to Roger Angell in top-shelf literary sports writing. His pacing, his feel for the texture of sport, and his ability to balance between the on-field competition and off-field context are all remarkable. McGrath is writing outside of his expertise here and writing a somewhat anti-climactic story, but it's still a wonderfully focused, well-told tale. Perhaps what I like best about McGrath's writing is how un-self-conscious it is. Like the better athletes he describes, his best work does not seem to be a labor, but a natural occurrence.

In San Francisco, from "Eighteenth and Castro streets, perhaps the gayest address in the world" (you can be sure 8th avenue and 17th is just fuming), Michael Specter makes it painfully clear that even if we're terribly drunk and feeling footlose, Crystal Meth is a bad idea, regardless of sexual inclination. He makes the all-night hyper drug orgies sound rather appealing, until you hit this "let's sober up and brush our teeth with vigor" sentence: "The chemicals used to make the drug are so toxic that for those who smoke it there is the danger that their teeth can crumble and fall out." His intelligent but slightly timid article also features what must be the first time this sentence has appeared in national weekly print: "A few weeks ago, I spent an evening stuffing condoms and lubricant pouches into packets."

Let's close this week with someone who has a fair bit less understanding of what it means to be gay -- Robert Goulet (profiled by Adam Green in a Talk of the Town which may or may not result in a lawsuit). "Is that what you call it when you've got two gays together, the alpha male? Anyway, the one that doesn't wear a dress." Goulet, in discussing broads he wanted to bed ("She reminded me of a dancer in our show, who I was trying to bang. I really wanted to jump her bones.") and the shortcoming of the Chinese language ("Goulet scrunched up his eyes and spoke rapid gibberish"), comes across as an utter, unrepentent jackass, and yet, someone with whom it would be a hoot to play a game of pool or share a stiff, unforgiving cocktail. As long as Nancy Franklin's not there.