gastropoda

Whatever you do, do not click on any link breathlessly “reporting” on anything related to the Julia mashup being filmed by someone who really should feel bad about her dreck. You’re guaranteed to feel like a contestant on that new “Hurl” reality show. This gives new meaning to the term circle-jerk. Or the Barney theme song for old people. What most amazes me is that when I worked at the Paper of Highest Integrity, reporters were not even allowed to slap political bumper stickers on their cars for fear of being perceived as biased. Yet culture critics can just take roles — however ridiculous or small — in movies that will be covered in their sections. Breathlessly, I might add. And if you want to start taking bets on the suckability quotient of this project, just consider this: When in the history of tortillas has anyone gone shopping for salsa at the temple of elitism? You know all those earthquakes shaking Reno? It’s a 6-foot-tall icon thrashing in her grave.

Metro must be already outsourcing its reporting to Bangalore, judging by the story on the shutdown of construction on the restaurant pavilion in Union Square. Could an actual New Yorker (reporter or editor, even one from Montclair) have let into print the understatement “where a popular greenmarket has been situated for several years”? Forget the fact that the G word should be capitalized, and overlook the peculiar need to explain the obvious. But since when does 32 years qualify as “several”? Kumar, get me rewrite.

One of my sources says fixes are being downsized as part of the purge at the Taj Sulzberger, which may explain why half the stories I slog through have at least one glitch (more and more on the front page). First I read about the “complementary” treats for dogs at a cafe in the park, then there was an op-ed reference to the “complementary” potato chips HIllary served supporters. Eons ago I remember filing a freelance story in which I mentioned complimentary appetizers at a restaurant in Virginia. I opened my paper to find it changed to complementary and complained to Big Al. Who wrote back to say the best solution was to use the shorter, less pretentious word: free. He’s gone, everyone’s taking buyouts or being purged and the lesson was clearly never learned. Last copy editor out, please turn on the Spell Check.

(And you would think, with the country overrun with Mexicans no border can keep out, high-paid reporters could learn a little bit about the food. In a piece on calorie counts at Chipotle, a diner is described as “dipping his nacho into his burrito.” Would that be a tortilla chip, by chance?)

I should have the tautest jaw in town for all the dropping it does. I just read an interview with a very charming celebrity who was asked if she was “suffering from writer’s block”  because she has not had a cookbook out in a while. This is a person who I doubt has ever written more than her name on the back of a check, but she swears she’s “working on one right now.” Yeah, she and seven hired pens. Then again, my cynicism barometer might need recharging, because it took a far out-of-towner to get me wondering what the hell is really up with that My Little Pony enterprise. Richard Thompson wrote a great song asking the crucial question, with the operative verbs starting with the letters J or P. There must be a segueway in there somewhere. . . .

I’ll leave it to the heavyweights to decide whether a chef has to be Italian to cook Italian in Italy (we already know the answer in America: Molto No). The bigger question in that thin-as-blogging-kills story is whether Parma is, even arguably, the best food city in Italy. I have never heard that, even in two eating expeditions to the very town, and would lay my own euros on Torino, which, as a friend always says, makes the Tuscans look like peasants. But then the annoyances just keep coming in the big birdcage liner in town. Was that a food story or a yogurt advertorial? And when you run a piece on the travails of fast food pizza chains, you might want to illustrate it with something out of Domino’s rather than with a shot of glorious pizzas at an independent joint in Chicago. It’s as bad as a photo of people in shorts under a “December sales are down at Coach” headline. Nickel stock might be good for the bottom line. For credibility, not so much.

This is like kicking a lame ho, but the Human Scratch N Match is really giving bimbos a bad name. I would almost love to be a roach on the wall when the slot decides which copy editor is going to have to descend into the pool of verbal muck to format that crapola and give it a hed. Clearly, no one even attempts to edit it into a publishable state. With Merkato 55, she had me at “the menu is colored.” But the stupid just kept coming. Until I realized that is the whole point. Unlike every earnest reviewer who has ever tried to contort into that impossible position, she has people talking. We study the brain wreck to see if there are indeed limits to cretinism. For the paper, though, it’s a deal with the devil. Let your copy editors amplify delicious nuances long enough and they will soon be letting “seemless bras” into print. And speaking of which, throw one onto the table, please. The promo ads could be for Spitzer services.

Higher up the print chain, all you need to know about why we have a good ol’ fuckup in the White House was on full display in an NYT blog post by a “reporter” on the trail with the Big O in Pennsylvania who was shocked, shocked to encounter that local oddity cheese fries — something sold less than a block from his workplace the last time I worked there, at the Nathan’s straight out of Coney Island. Candidates are expected to be totally in touch with every level of this very complex society. “Journalists” with six-figure incomes, 401Ks and stock plans can afford to be appalled by what the other nine-tenths eat. No wonder the Budweiser heir-by-marriage fed them Costco barbecue — he knew they would roll over and wet themselves.

What should be scaring the Barneys pants off print journasaurs is this: In the time it took me to gimp the mile and a half home from the press lunch at Cafe Boulud, someone got a blog post up. I was reading about what I had eaten before I had even begun to digest it. Which makes me worry for onebonyass.com — my consort had the same “Shades o’ Molly/How do you make a million in cyberspace? Start with three million” reaction I did. Free is an unbeatable price on the series of tubes.

In a similar vein, the contrast on the same day between noble and crude reactions to what really is shaping up as a depression was pretty fascinating in DI/DO and the WSJ. The former was cheering rising prices that might make Americans realize crap is not unleaded when it comes to human fuel; the latter was cheering the awful truth that people who might be priced out of Applebee’s etc. would never be able to pass up dollar meals (even the sorry exploited souls grinding that scary meat). I would have lost the morning in total despair if not for reactions from either coast to the source of the main reading matter. One described it as “forgettable as a PIN,” the other as warranting attention “coming close to the length of an average dump.” Which I suspect is longer than it takes to cook something instantly steamable in a microwave.

Then again, any editor passing through there hits the same wall. No good ideas go unrepeated. I was reminded of that adage “there are no new stories, only new reporters” when the NYP dredged up not one but two blockbusters that were actually novel during my indentured servitude: chefs surveil you while you eat, and people — get ready! — steal shit from restaurants. Next we’ll be reading about scary stairs. . . .

I tuned it out, but a friend had an interesting reaction to Panchito’s pathetically dribbled top 10. She saw “Vantage Point,” the film about an assassination attempt viewed through many characters’ perspective, and said by the fourth re-enactment people in the theater were yelling, “Not again!” Johnny Rotten must be spinning in his bath at never having realized high-amortization stories could be milked until they curdled.

Interesting gossip from a source out in Eden on the Willamette. A certain publication that has always presented itself as the highest bastion of ethics while studiously looking the other way with certain contract writers has apparently now decided freebies aren’t so bad after all. Not with the stock price in the crapper and buyouts all around. Freelancers allegedly can hop on the junket train as long as they don’t let the gravy touch the biscuits right away. As some of us who pay our own way always knew: Hos rule. Gold-plated bidets all around!

Here’s a new psychological syndrome: Attention Whore Disorder. I was amazed that bloggers would be bummed not to be swept into the Phat Phuck corral. They not only admitted it, they posted at length. As I said before, 8 is the new 12. Now I want to add: Obese food writers are so last century. The one time I went to the Pillsbury Bake-Off, in Miami sometime in the Eighties, I was horrified at the herd of lumbering food editors engaging in gavage at the breakfast buffet in our hotel. All of them were women. Today they would be aberrations. Which is just one objection to that silliness in search of a nut graf. It should have been headlined Boys Don’t Scarf and Barf. Only one woman was quoted, and she happens to be one renowned for wrestling with the object of her profession. (I was happy to see the only other one mentioned, and photographed, was not allowed to sell herself as a role Moss, not with a full Olsen left to drop.) The one story no one could ever do would cover the extent of eating disorders among people who eat for a living; I can’t remember how many press events I’ve been to where women (and one particular guy) disappeared into the bathroom after inhaling everything in reach (one was renowned for an accessory worn to cover the external damage she was doing to herself). So I thought this piece was all about piggishness, then I opened my magazine to see the lithe spirit had not moved the Omnivore to reconsider his intake — he was writing for the shape issue. Don’t read it if you don’t want to think about him in “the teensiest bathing suit,” though. I had to go back and brave the photo of the creature from the gluttonous lagoon to flush that image out of my cranial sieve. And that made me wonder: Forget a gut you would have to lift to be able to pee. Wouldn’t skin the color of a Silkie chicken be a sign that all was not well in Whaleville?

Get ready for more instances of restaurant critics apparently eating a single snail, or for more subject-verb disputes like “component . . . matter.” Word is that one of the few Gray Ghosts I both liked and respected is sacrificing his smarts and his institutional memory early for the sake of the bottom line. You gotta wonder about an industry that adopts essentially a first-hired, first-fired policy and wonders why business is hurtin’. The best pate is never made by the newest garde manger.

A far more educated writer than I has already spotlighted the bleeding-heart embarrassment on the slaughterhouse whose owner finally admitted Downers “R” Us (can you hear him now, Joe Nocera?) While he thoughtfully spun Upton in the grave, I limited my WTF to a river of drivel on pasties by someone who had apparently never had to survive on them for a week and a half in Cornwall because her consort had to shoot sunset every night when in June that happened to coincide with last call in the pubs. You live in New York City. Speak empanada, damn it.

And while I admit to being mystified by the American fascination with horror films at a time when we are supposedly going to be killed in our beds by felafel-eating terrorists any night, can someone still please explain to me how a movie poster wound up illustrating a food story? The readout from “Your Waiter Tonight” should have been “Is Extremely Tired and Very Angry — All Cookin’ and No Bourdainin’ Makes Mike a Very Dull Boy.”

It figures that I let our WSJ subscription lapse for one week and missed an apparently good story on how chefs are economizing as the economy goes to hell but re-upped in time to read a piece that had me asking that eternal “what happy hour were the editors patronizing” question. I could see covering a woman chef at the South Pole. Letting said chef write it herself tilts the axis toward promotional, but factoring in the fact that she was touting a cookbook for which she tested the recipes spins the whole thing off toward the galaxy unethical (the Murky Way). And let’s not even get into the reality that many of the recipes in that book do not work. I got no problem with “citizen journalism.” But at a time when even the pros are ready to throw standards overboard, someone really needs to draw a bottom line against penguin shit.