Though Dad had a point, he also had eighteen denim shirts and zero friends. Restaurants are a fact of life, and there's no way to avoid them. For years I managed to justify the rather exorbitant expense: I didn't have to wash dishes. I didn't have to grocery shop. It was almost worth it if the chef put in a lot of work.
And then came the latest food movement: quality ingredients, simply prepared. That's the motto of every restaurant in New York these days. And that's where I draw the line.
You know that story about how you kill a lobster? Put it in cold water, and slowly bring it to a boil. The temperature rises so slowly it doesn't realize it's in trouble until it's already dead. That's what the restaurant scene is like. First they charge you $50 for dinner, and then they try to get out of cooking it. It's like asking the lobster to crank up that burner himself.
See, the last thing I want is my food "simply prepared." I want the chef to show me what I'm paying for. I want the end result of dozens of cooking processes. I want my steak deep-fried and french-dipped and fricasseed. I want my fish seriously fucked with. Before my chicken hits my plate, I want that dead flesh to sit up and say, "Okay, okay -- enough al-fuckin'-ready!" I want the chef to drive my chicken to Rockefeller Center to meet Bernadette Peters before he plops it on my plate.
Needless to say, I heard Dad's voice in my head while reading Pete Wells' review of Hearth in the New York Times.
[W]hen I think of Hearth, ... I also picture the platters for two. The spatchcocked chicken with flavor in every scrap of its flesh and golden skin, the whole roasted fish stuffed with lemon and rosemary, and the côte de boeuf are all treated like the classics they are. Unlike other restaurants, where trendy platters for two are an old-fashioned opportunity for price gouging, Hearth sells the chicken and fish for about as much as two regular main courses.
"Spatchcocked"? Isn't it slightly pretentious to have an entrée that sounds like the landlord in a Dickens novel? "Chicken with flavor in every scrap"? I don't know about you, but I'd be a bit more surprised if the breast was meaty and toothsome but the wing tasted like soggy tofu. Heading to Hearth's online menu makes Dad drop his soldering iron:
Can't. Give. In. Must. Fight. Back. Pete Wells is right! If stealing a glove compartment is a misdemeanor and stealing a tire is a misdemeanor, stealing a Mercedes should be a misdemeanor too. The meatballs are $29. The pasta is $30. So $62 for a chicken isn't crazy at all! Seasoned and stuck in an oven. Served with two cents worth of lettuce and three cents of corn. Not price-gouging! Frantically searching for justification I find Hearth's philosophy.
It doesn't help. They find inspiration "in the strangest places"? Are they trying to say their beer comes from Belgium, or they bought their champagne at the Dollar Store? Dad would head back to the garage to grind the lens of his telescope, but I don't have to be stuck in a long-dead past. I'll stay and compromise. In the future, my food is also going to be "rooted in the modern traditions of the American kitchen."
I'm going to buy an $8,000 stove and then live on take-out.
While the store sells licensed merchandise like wands, books and sweater vests for those who want to re-create the boy wizard's look, much of its stock is unofficial and merely reminiscent of objects from the wizard's universe.
Customer Caity Knox, 27, said it would be a shame if the legal dispute forced the store to close, because she prefers the store's unlicensed merchandise to the real thing. "If I am going to dress up as Harry Potter, I am not going to buy something that has a logo on it," she noted. "I want to buy something that an actual wizard would have."
Tom of Finland's woodcut of the sinking of the Titanic falls masterfully into the latter category. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this adage is never truer than when one is talking about a sailor's ass. Like Manet's Olympia, the central figure's body language shocks us with its crudity. Is this poor lad fevered and thinking that rather than clutching an oil drum he's humping his girlfriend Stella? Or did the sinking leave a void that he finds manifested in his ample buttcheeks?
Mr. Finland displays his mastery of allegory by omitting all the flotsam and jetsam of a typical maritime disaster to cause the reader's eyes to focus on the sailor's dookie maker. Where are the lifeboats? Where is the iceberg? Mr. Finland seems to be saying that all the gory details of the modern world don't amount to a hill of beans when one has a booty that could crack Brazil nuts.
Like all great artists, Mr. Finland takes us into a world we've never entered before, and the wealth of detail he includes is astonishing. The ship hasn't even finished sinking, yet the sailor is far from it, with no other passengers in sight. We're drawn deeper into his world of secrets as we wonder: Is he a fast paddler? Or did he leap off the deck before the ship sank because he saw an island and had a yearning for coconut?
Though he's floating aimlessly, the sailor isn't wet. Though ship disasters can be messy affairs, he isn't dirty. In fact, he hasn't even lost his hat. Gradually we begin to wonder: is this sailor, in fact, a victim to the ship disaster, or was he just floating by doing the Sump-Pump Shuffle when the tragedy occurred? Judging from the expression on his face, he looks like he's next in line for Go Ahead And Chute Me! at the Dorney Water Park. Is shock the reason his face struggles to convey something more than, "Man, I could sure use a Pepsi Light"?
To the artist's credit, the work still serves as an educational instrument, because without it we wouldn't have known that the Titanic sank exactly on the horizon, and that, judging by the steam pouring from the smokestack, the engines were still going full-speed ahead even though the prow was pointed down.
It's a pop-up avant-garde queer space, which means no cupcakes.
MAXXI, the provocative modern art museum? Good luck finding it. The controversial Renzo Piano towers? It's like they didn't exist. EUR, the suburb infamous for its colossal fascist architecture? From the total absence of information it could have been in Africa for all I knew.
I took the subway to the EUR stop anyway, with my fingers crossed. Instead I found nothing. Vast, wide open horizons with no clue where to find the interesting stuff. Where was the "square Colosseum" Mussolini built? Where was the culture museum, a ridiculously overblown piece of propaganda the fascists hadn't had time to finish? Where was the stadium encircled by marble statues of half-naked Aryan muscleman? I zigzagged for a mile or two but didn't run into anything. Finally, exhausted and mad, I hopped the subway back.
I tried to keep my spirits up. Rome still had a lot of attractions. Giorgio Armani, Salvatore Ferragamo, Donatella Versace: the place definitely had the market cornered in one department. Unfortunately arm hair doesn't have the cultural cachet that it used to.
Men in Italy are very stylish. Some have sport coats that very nearly match their pants, and a few go quite well with their tennis shoes. They wear mesh t-shirts that look like fishing nets strung between their shoulders. Sometimes if you get close you can smell the mackerel. It's easy to remember that Italy gave birth to drama when a somebody casually takes off their shirt and all of a sudden you're in "Streetcar Named Desire."
Italian women also have their own special style. This year it's bare shoulders. They're sexy, they're sassy, and they're the only body part that can't get fat.
Both sexes chain-smoke. It's part of their allure. It's illegal to smoke indoors, so now in the middle of the day Roman streets look like the moors in Wuthering Heights. Imagine the synergy when two grand Italian passions, smoking and style, collide:
As a whole, Italians are a very expressive people. Just look at the faces you see on the subway. Love, rage, frustration, peace. And that's just the folks who are picking their zits. They're also refreshingly unpretentious: In America the only place you'd find this model is on GetThatAwayFromMe.com.
Still, I was a bit startled by the sexism. Men still harangued attractive women with leers, whistles and catcalls. Even the advertisements clearly delineated the gender roles.
"Like women, catching men," the billboard says. The good news is, with all the cigarettes and jewelry, the women can't get up to six miles per hour in a week and a half.
The streets were full of American tourists clutching maps and grimacing, seemingly close to their limits frustration-wise. You don't want to get within fifty feet of them, because they're dying to share their stories. They can't wait to tell somebody about their lunch, their hotel, their flight here. After days of talking to Italians, they yearn to once again speak English without having to yell.
Mere seconds after taking a seat at Ivo, a sidewalk cafe in Trastevere, an American couple started nattering away at me. I ate my pizza and drank my wine and eventually the woman stumbled upon an intelligent thought. "I was touring the Sistine Chapel with my parish priest and he told me how the Vatican works. Any time there's evidence of something embarrassing -- a sculpture of a saint who's been discredited, a painting of a pope with eighteen mistresses -- it's hidden in a corner of some hard-to-find room and all the lightbulbs around it just happen to burn out."
That explained everything, I thought. I paid my bill and hit the road. All in all I liked Rome: the food was great, the streets were alive, and there were still some cool people around. So what if they wanted to control what people saw or didn't see? What was wrong with that? I followed the road to the top of the hill and snapped one last photo just in case I forgot.
My cousin giggled. "It's so you don't hit your head and hurt yourself," she said. "I want to make sure you see them."
I smiled. She clearly thought it was sweet, but I wasn't so sure. The more I thought about these idiot stickers the more insulted I felt. Did she think I was clueless? That my eyes didn't work? That I was too stupid to see these giant dark wood things stretching the length of the room, or that I was too dumb to duck?
We chatted for a while over tea and scones, and at nightfall she drove me back to the station. I told her I'd take care of her if she ever got to New York. Pick her up at the station, give her a snack, tie a towel around her neck in case she drools. "Isn't that thoughtful?" I'll giggle. "I mean, I'm sure you'll be absolutely fine but we don't want to get the carpet wet."
