|
|
 Dangerous New York Cooks The tell-all Kitchen Confidential published in 2000 propelled Anthony Bourdain from the sweaty bowels of New York restaurants to the height of foodie fame.
I spent more than a couple years slinging hash myself so I identify with Bourdain’s portrayal of restaurant life and it’s lineup of characters. His war stories unearthed near-forgotten memories. I closed the book a couple times just to return to 1980s Giovanni’s, the Milwaukee restaurant where I did my time.
Giovanni’s, a bustling Italian restaurant, was home to a lot of back-of-the-house screaming, a lot of bonding and most of all, a lot of post-shift fun. Thanks to Tony Bourdain, forgotten incidents zoom back to my mind in real-time detail.
Bourdain describes the fervor of working behind the line with uncanny accuracy. However, he pounds a heavy skillet over your head to describe the same gritty scene in different restaurants or the same scene on a different day several times over.
At points, I marveled at the level of badness that I assume describes the entire New York restaurant scene rather than just the joints that Bourdain journeyed through. I’m probably lucky I slung my hash in Milwaukee.
Bourdain’s passion for food inevitably triumphs and he describes his introduction to new flavors vividly. Remembering his first oyster, he says, “Now this was a truly significant event. I remember it like I remember losing my virginity—and in many ways, more fondly.” He goes on to say, “with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater . . . of brine and flesh . . . and somehow . . . of the future.”
His passion sometimes crosses into gross-out territory. In Tokyo, a land of gastronomic awakening for him, he and his companion “dug out the orbs, slurped down the gelatinous matter behind it, deep in the socket, we gnawed the eyeball down to a hard white core.”
Despite all the slurping and gelatinity (two words that gross me out), I am hankering to indulge in some adventurous dining after finishing Kitchen Confidential.
I also have an urge to eat at Les Halles (411 Park Avenue South) again and despite Bourdain’s advice, I want to order mussels. But I must wait til Tuesday since, according to Bourdain, Tuesday is the only night to go out to eat if you want to be assured of a fresh meal.
 Book Cover Every once in a while, I feel I must read some classic book I missed in high school and college just to expand my limited horizons.
Sometimes reading from that backlog pays off. I plucked Of Human Bondage from Modern Library’s 100 best books of the 20th century (at number 66) and couldn’t put the book down.
I read a couple of Maugham’s short stories before and I heard of this book before. But not everyone has—not the girl making chit-chat in the lunchroom asking me what I was reading.
I hesitate—it’s a world of The Secret readers. But I answer, “Of Human Bondage” and look for the reaction.
I am surprised at the shock on her face. Or is it horror? Oh my god, she thinks I am reading a bondage book. In the lunchroom.
Of Human Bondage was made into a movie three times. The latest version (1964) starring Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak is pure garbage and the 1934 version with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis is even more unwatchable. Nothing left to do but read the book folks.
Our hero, Philip Carey starts life with a few strikes against him, no parents, a club foot and a burgeoning attitude. But he wants what many of us want—freedom, adventure, glory and the woman can’t have. But his dreams get beaten down time and again.
[People] must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself.
Yes, it is an engrossing little spirit crusher. Enjoy.
 The Harvard Psychedelic Club Timothy Leary took his first psychedelic trip the day I was born: August 9, 1960. With that first magic mushroom, the Sixties counterculture was born.
The Harvard Psychedelic Club journeys through the psychedelic explorations of four key players in the birth of the counterculture: Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil. Yes, that Andrew Weil. The initial experimentation was part of the Harvard Psylocibin Project.
Trickster, Teacher, Seeker and Healer. Author Don Lattin labels each man and thereby turns each into a symbol that represents the four paths they took. But Lattin does more than profile the key players; he digs up dirt.
The dirt is mostly on Andy Weil who dug up the dirt on Leary and Richard Albert (Ram Dass) that got them booted from Harvard. Weil also wrote an article about the scandal in the November 5, 1963 issue of Look magazine. Weil acted out of jealousy and spitefulness rather than a belief that Leary and Alpert’s experiments were immoral.
I have always respected smiley bearded Dr. Weil and his stance on health and nutrition. But The Harvard Psychedelic Club tainted my image of him, not because he indulged in consciousness-raising chemicals, but because he comes off as a vengeful nerd.
Post Harvard Lives
Readers don’t spend a lot of time at Harvard, but then again, neither did Leary and Alpert. Latinn takes us through the rest of their lives: Leary’s flight from the law, Alpert’s transformation into Ram Dass and Weil’s journey from drug taker to mainstream healer and marketer.
Huston Smith, a expert on the world’s religions, was a member of the Harvard project though he taught at MIT. His inclusion as a member of the club makes some sense, but I came away feeling like he was part of the periphery. Smith rejected Leary’s project pretty quickly.
Ralph Metzner, a graduate student, seems like a more integral member of the club. Metzner too went on to a lifetime of spiritual search, but perhaps Lattin did not perceive his story to be as compelling as Smith’s.
All four members of the Harvard Psychedelic Club dedicated their lives to the study of the human consciousness, including chemically induced altered states of consciousness. What separates Huston and Ram Dass is their understand that the real test of a person spirit is the way they live their lives. It’s what happens after the ecstasy. –Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club
The book contains a few annoying tics, but let’s get real. If I ran into a hippie time-machined to the present, I would all find the hippie-speak annoying pretty fast. Latinn’s point of view seems contradictory in places. Pick one and stick with it, please. Or, tell your reader you are describing a character’s point of view. The writing feels choppy but we are recounting the Psychelic Sixties after all.
One final suggestion: don’t use song lyrics as part of your prose.
 Super Sad? True Love? But What a Story. Who isn’t scared about America’s future? Reading Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story will crank that fear up a notch. Unlike other dystopian novels, Shteyngart’s future is so close, so touchable, I want to run into the streets and make it stop.
Super Sad never gives the year, but the hero Lenny’s past has surely overlapped our present. Everyone wears an electronic device, called an äppärät that constantly streams data about others in the vicinity. The äppärät ranks and broadcasts your “fuckability” against everyone else in the room.
Lenny is so afraid of death, his every move is driven by that fear. He works at the Post Human Services division of a Halliburton-like company that is devoted to bestowing eternal life on worthy individuals, though they haven’t quite cracked the code. Lenny’s boss, his mentor, his God, Joshie looks younger and younger but the cracks in the façade just reveal his own fear.
In this future, books are media artifacts that smell bad. In 2010, books almost are media artifacts—the smell is a matter of opinion. In this future, sexuality is flaunted in ways that are surprising only for a minute. Girls wear Onionskin jeans and Total Surrender panties.
The political world is just about as subtle. The remaining political party is the Bipartisans, a word rendered meaningless like many other overused words in our vocabulary. The American Restoration Authority who request you deny their existence and by reading the posted sign you imply your consent, keep tight rein on the population. Deny and imply, deny and imply at every turn.
The dollar is pegged to—what else?—the Chinese yuan. That isn’t so far-fetched. The Wall Street Journal wrote last week about the markets trading in yuan for the first time and the speed at which the trading has taken off.
Like the real world, when the LNWI (low net-worth individuals) are so removed from the HNWI (high net-worth individuals) that they have no hope, society can rupture at the seams.
But amongst all this, there is a love story and it is super sad, but not sad in the way most love stories are sad. Is Shteyngart talking about true love or a true story? I’m afraid his tale might turn into a true story.
 Dick Cheney and his cronies fulfilling the desire of the American people by torturing prisoners, Christopher Hitchens said at a Slate party Saturday night. If the Obama administration tries to prosecute them, these mitigating circumstances must be considered. In the nymag.com account of the incident, the public wanted torture. What?!
After 9/11, Americans wanted “a ruthless government,” Hitchens said. After 9/11, Americans were angry, but no rational person (in the general public) suggested throwing out the Geneva Convention.
Chris may have had a few drinks before he mouthed off but he is heading down a dangerous path.
Hitchens does have the credentials to speak about torture. He voluntarily underwent waterboarding, as research for a Vanity Fair article. He lasted about ten seconds and called the experience horrendous.
People have tried to protect the Bush administration’s actions by claiming the acts weren’t torture, but this is a man who accepts that they tortured, but wants to blame the American people.
When has the government ever heeded what the common people wanted and when was that an excuse? If the government listened to the people, the Vietnam war would have been over in 1967. Our soldiers would be home from Iraq.
|
