May 23, 2006
Seven downtown artists performing outside of the grand opening opening of 7 World Trade Center featured rocker Lou Reed highlighting the show. He held fort for nearly ten minutes at lunchtime today in probably one of the oddest venues he's ever performed at. Despite the thin crowd, the audience was pumped when Lou Reed broke into an inspired extended version of "Sweet Jane" that featured rants about the frightful prices of downtown real estate (and by extension the sponsor of today's event, Larry Silverstein) as well as John McCain's performance at the New School University a few days ago. Reed could barely contain himself as the crowd egged him on for more, declaring that New Yorkers weren't stupid enough to fall for exactly the same drab speech given at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University some days prior. Despite ambient noise from the subway roaring underneath, it was a moving musical tribute just to the north of the massive hole in the ground that was formerly the World Trade Center.
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Posted on 5/23/2006
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May 23, 2006
The gaggle of press at high noon today outside 7 World Trade Center made it clear that Larry Silverstein hasn't got many friends in this world—at least not right now. With enormous colorful banners announcing 7 WTC is open, the festivities kicked off in lower Manhattan with the seven @ 7 festival featuring Suzanne Vega, Lou Reed and five other acts. Silverstein, never one to shy away from publicizing himself, had huge banners "Presented by Silverstein properties" festooned over the stage. Make no mistake: with so few tenants signed up and the nebulous news just a few days ago that perhaps (cough) the insurers might not pay up the $4 billion, Silverstein finds himself in deep, hot water these days.
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Posted on 5/23/2006
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May 05, 2006
Apparently tired of being pushed expensive bottles of water that inflate the tab (and offset the high cost of food, it might be noted), Frank Bruni writes in his Diner's Journal that the bottled-water scheme is becoming less odious. In other words, some wait staff are now asking Sparkling, flat, or tap? implying that perhaps New York water is both fit and possible to drink in their esteemed restaurant.
But seriously, folks: Do you really get that annoyed when a waiter aggressively pushes the bottled water? Sometimes it raises my otherwise-low blood pressure a tad, but mostly I just pipe in that I'll have the "New York water" or the "Hudson River special". Apparently it's not amusing to say that you'll "just have the Bloomberg water" (previously known as the "Giuliani water"). One comment on Bruni's blog declares:
everything has been said about this
but as waiters,
we dont want to hear “the bloomberg water”
before that it was “the guliani water”
its not funny.
stop.
And another:
Do some restaurants ever charge you an “irritation fee”? Because if I had to wait on some of you, I would.
(Which recalls an Upstate delicatessen that had fine print at the bottom of the menu: Extra charge for wear and tear on waitress: $5.00)
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Posted on 5/5/2006
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May 03, 2006
What exactly is cruel? Tearing off the beaks of chickens and packing them lifelong in dark, cramped and filthy industrial-sized coops? Keeping hogs in pens so filthy they require constant antibiotics to prevent disease? Or force-feeding a goose? It is astouding that both Chicago and California have decided to ban the sale of foie gras, because the Pandora's Box of unenforceable and hypocritical legislation has now been opened. Lawsuits will be the inevitable result, and some apparently are already in progress.
As a twelve-year-old, I read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and was suitably outraged by the excesses and dangers of turn-of-the-last-century meatpacking houses and stockyards in Chicago. Yet as I grew older, I began to realize more and more that we Americans are almost utterly divorced from traditional animal husbandry. Children today think meat grows on a piece of styrofoam, hygenically packed in plastic wrap. In contrast, it was on a trip to the Himalayas, where I saw goats slaughtered in the market and their blood running into the dirt that it became clear people in most other countries have a less dissociated relationship with meats.
So we come to the great foie gras debate. How do you measure cruelty, and gradations thereof? Because the supersize industrial factory fams—call them what you will—that produce beef, chicken and pork are vastly more cruel than the production of foie gras. On sheer scale alone, they are vastly more cruel. Ban foie gras, and you would be negligent for not banning all but free-range or organic chicken, or so this line of logic goes. And where does all this banning end? High fructose corn syrup? (We have way too many diabetics and soda addicts in this country.) Or with GMO corn and soybeans? (Save the rainforest—soybeans are the culprit.) Well, the agribusiness lobbies would never tolerate that, so it won't happen. But the foie gras lobby is almost non-existent, although our local D'Artagnan and Hudson Valley Foie Gras have banded together with other producers to form a modest lobby. Fortunately legislation in Albany to ban foie gras—where there is never a shortage of absurd or meaningless legislation—has been withdrawn.
Where do I stand? As someone who recently contracted giardia from eating a raw papaya salad prepared by someone with obviously dubious hygenic credentials, I'll keep eating the occasional foie gras and meanwhile make the papaya salad at home. If you're going to eat meat of any sort, do opt for organic or free range whenever possible, and do attempt to understand the politics of hypocrisy.
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Posted on 5/3/2006
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May 02, 2006
Over at The Company Bitch it seems the dear lady has been banned from Whole Foods for theft of one-half meatball. Here's the premise: Today I grabbed a meatball (made with soy protein) and ate it out of a take-out box as I tried to decide what I wanted to buy for lunch. After a few minutes, I knew the answer was sushi. I threw out the box with my half-eaten meatball, got in line and paid for my food.
Now this a particularly New York story worthy of much attention. Because it crystallizes a number of life-giving forces which we all have strong opinions about.
In the first place, New Yorkers seem to expect they can sample anything at any time, whether or not it is in a sealed package or made a bit more accessible, for example on a salad bar or prominently displayed at a Greenmarket. You really don't encounter this sense of entitlement in many other places in the United States, not at the Greenmarkets in Los Angeles, not in Miami, and not in Seattle.
In the second place, our intrepid Company Bitch followed the other carnal rule of food desire: where a sign is posted telling you not to do something (in this case: NO NIBBLING), you really want to do it. I knew someone in college who would put on an orange vest, take large pieces of cardboard, a toolchest, and a stepladder, and head down into the subway and unscrew signs and bring them back to the dormitory. Why? Because he could. Because it was thrilling. It was theft, albeit more complex, than the theft of a soy meatball.
In the third place, the story about being banned from Whole Foods (along with signing an agreement not to enter the store ever again as well as being photographed for a Rogue's Gallery of food thieves) awakens the amateur lawyer in all of us. How dare she! How dare they! Take her picture? Sign an agreement? Is any of this legal? Is it all illegal? And so on...the story and the consequences fascinate endlessly.
In the fourth place, the story pleases those of us who actually do pay for all of the food we select in the market, rather than feeling entitled to graze for free. Yesterday after the protesting campesinos (I did not say illegal) began streaming away from lower Broadway, I saw a bunch of kids entitling themselves to a fruitseller's grapes. Hey, when you're a kid it's one thing. When you are poor and broke, it's another. But when you have an office job, stealing is a different story, right? Here is the comment from one devoted Whole Foods employee: I have to say, I cannot imagine that you are not completely APALLED by your own behaviour. I work at a Whole Foods, and all day long the store has to spoil out food that people have opened, eaten, and then decided not to pay for. It is theft, and you deserve to be banned. Another friendly comment: I'm glad you got busted. Whether through omission or commission - grazing daft animals or starved homeless and cheap rich people - nibbling hurts everyone.
In the fifth place, we are all amazed that the store has got video cameras trained on the salad bar. It's obvious a lot of you out there (you know who you are!) are foraging for greens the way our counterparts in the forest, in the taiga and in the deserts would. Now if only they would install a camera by the bakery items, so all of you who graze on the croissants and muffins and toss the bags before you get to the cash registers would get caught as well....
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Posted on 5/2/2006
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