gastropoda

It’s not just because I find them absolutely revolting that I started my Wednesday railing at finding stuffed peppers on the front page of my hometown paper. Bad enough to celebrate the most disgusting creation since potted meat. But to call them out in the prime real estate? WTF? Niman parting from Ranch was news to me, but I didn’t realize that had happened until I saw a blog link later — the nut graf was in goat’s clothing, and I thought we’d been down the cabrito trail. Big type never mentioned it. Little type farther back, though, did put Joe the Plumber in the forest. WTF? Drilling for mushrooms? At least there was the great relief of real writing in the secondary review. My new secondhand sources say the ratio of editors to reporters is now three to one, which explains why so much of the front page is so turgid (too many cursors spoil the flow). And I know from double experience that many writers need that many layers of rewriting. Too bad the paper can never figure out who should be what. But of course I will never learn when to shut up. I just remembered you should never point out spinach in the teeth of anyone who can bite. Hat or not hat. In real media, failure has many mothers. . . .

I know I’ve been accused of being a little too free with the I word; I just can’t help it; I find myself fascinating. But even I was astounded at the extent of auto-fellating narcissism on display in the stunt Señor Alginates was conned into doing, clearly not realizing “straight dudes like cats” was the height of intellectual acuity on offer in Sunday Sillies. You lure arguably the most innovative chef on the planet into your crappy kitchen and it’s all about you and your relationship to your imaginary friend? No wonder the poor guy was reduced to slopping out a mishmash of so many flavors and ingredients the reader’s head spins like Linda Blair’s before hurling. At least when Mme X and I rooked Martin Parr into doing that thing he does so well, we let him shoot his best and sent a sentient being to cover him, not a self-obsessed simian who really should have passed on the assignment rather than drag down the whole newspaper in his subject’s eyes. I would endorse publicly whipping him senseless, but he already is. 

But that’s just me. 

And don’t get me started on the front-page resurrection of Panchito as political commentator. Believe me, I knew Johnny Rotten, and this lame joke is no Johnny Rotten. He could chew and think, and he left an awfully big bathtub to fill. Someone should tell the bosses some of us remember the last time America listened to the man who mistook a towel slap on the ass for qualification for the presidency. Go back to your silly paella and underwritten issues. Fool us once, won’t get fooled again. 

At a time when newspapering has become a business of whiners, though, why is our hometown burden so determined to drive readers away? I don’t want that damn Metro trudge crammed into the national and international news. I like to throw away sections I will never even glance at; I don’t want sports crammed into Bizday. But I really have to wonder whose bright idea it was to send DI/DO back to the dark ages (and not just with gender horseshit). Food photos that were bad enough in color now look as if Weegee was involved, and Bellevue, too. Is that a loaf of bread, or are you just glad to see a cow plop? Then again, maybe it’s a concerted effort to make the illos match the content: dull. That Ambien packager obviously never sleeps. 

Even that, though, was not as jaw-dropping stupid as the piece about Newman’s Own at “much-loved” Fairway, the Rollerball of food shopping. It had the feel of someone tap-dancing — clumsily — all over a fresh grave that had already been pissed on once that week. Has journalism really come to this, hanging out in the vinaigrette aisle to coax crude comments out of old ladies? Now, if someone had gotten punched with accompanying cuss words, I would have believed it. . . .

Maybe I’m losing my edge, though, because it took an astrologer friend to point out the hole big enough to drive a truck through in the elegy for a dying Jefferson Market. At a time when rent greed is running rampant, why no mention of a landlord? Do they own the space? The finger was pointed directly at the bloodsuckers in the NYPost’s piece on the end of the line for the Emerald Inn, but then that piece had a fatal flaw, too. In the mid-Eighties, I can attest, Columbus Avenue was far from “a rough stretch” of bodegas etc. It was so overrun with wannabe trendy bars and cafes and shops that it was impossible to retrieve my dry-cleaning on a Saturday; the sidewalks were mobbed. We were constantly tempted to dump buckets of water onto the sots carousing below our second-floor apartment at 72d Street. Memory is a tricky thing. But, as with Mama, you could look it up.

Long ago I decided my last meal should be in France, but I never imagined it might precede euthanasia. Or that it might flash before my eyes before my cappuccino. Could the salvation of the cuisine have been made any more soporific? A good writer meets a great topic and readers nod right off. It was still better, though, than the latest installment of Butt Boy for Eli. When the kicker turns out to be “never mind,” you wonder why the damn thing even ran, except to provide just what he intended, a promo for a store where prices are already so absurd I have often calculated it would be cheaper for shoppers to take a cab across town to the real Zabar’s. But the guy, to his credit, does pony up for an awful lot of advertising, especially starting right about now. High holy days, indeed.

And now I’m just being uncharacteristically mean, but if you go all the way back to your stamping grounds and have to call out a flack for your first corroborating quote, do you really expect readers to jump? Back to your Crisco. Johnny Rotten insists.

When I started writing for my very first newspaper, the Mingus Spirit in high school in a ghost town in Arizona, the idea of journalists ever going into the wine business would have seemed far less likely than aliens landing. And not just because wine back then meant Gallo, and Gallo was not a good name back then. So I was glad I was sitting down (at my computer) when I got the e-release on the WSJournal’s new enterprise. In some ways the Evil Ozzie has improved the paper, but this is a crossover into treacherous territory. If I had a larcenous soul, I’d be applying for a copy-editing job there, just for the inside information on the wine recommendations. Maybe it’s going to be a completely clean operation, but it’s one thing to have a lame wine column and another entirely to stock the shelves. Next, the health writers open an online drugstore.

One of the things that drove me bitter in my second gig at the Greatest Newspaper on the Planet at Least in Its Own Estimation was the frustration of, metaphorically, trying to make stellar soup out of wilted carrots. At best we could get the turkeys off the ground. It was impossible to make them fly. So I especially enjoyed a fellow refugee’s recent  instigation of a debate on which is more important: spectacular ingredients or mad-wise  kitchen skills. Obviously, you can guess my answer. Even Thomas Keller could not turn Perdue chicken into L’Ami Louis’ juicy roast. Or rancid buckwheat into shining gold leaf.

For all the WSJournal gets right these days, though, I had to wonder if it was skimping on the copy desk with ITT (the Imitation of T for Twaddle it just launched). The thing had less content than even the FT’s shameless How to Spend It, but the display type must have been gone over as carefully as teh average wingnut blog. Eric Ripert is at Le Bernadin, you see. And could a sentient human actually generate a phrase like “pique the gourmet’s palate”? Or a headline as trite as “Magic Mushrooms”? If the goal was to make lying ads like the one for a new “prewar” apartment house look sharp, though, mission accomplished.

Maybe because we are so close to voluntarily electing a doddering guy who conjures images of state funerals, I’ve started obsessing on death notices. (Actually, it’s because I like to track how long it takes the NYTimes to notice a dearly departed has merited multiple homages over many days and to run an obit.) One ad last week that gave the cause of the demise as CJD was rather chilling at a time when our trusted government by big business, for big business is prohibiting cattle producers from testing their animals for mad cow disease. Even more amazing has been the reaction to the UN official who suggested the planet could benefit from all of us forgoing meat just one meal a week. To call it a lobbyists’ shitstorm would be to underestimate the next hurricane. Never in all of history have so many people had access to so much information, and still the national motto might as well be “in cheap meat we trust.” Beef is not supposed to be as everyday as bread. So my other new obsession is Hamburger Helper. Given how prices of wheat etc. have gone crazy while beef remains  a bargain, shouldn’t someone be marketing Noodle-and-MSG Helper?

The bloviating over the shrinking of newspaper food sections reminds me of the glory days of e-rectum, when a thousand cretins who would not know a pica pole from a spatula felt qualified to weigh in on how stories came to find their way into newsprint. All due respect to the esteemed Serious Eater, but my experience has been that the food sections are not targeted first. Idiots are going through with chainsaws and leveling every expensive (read experienced, or, if you insist, older) byline in sight. (Anyone notice the San Jose Mercury News is advertising for a food writer as I type?) And while I doubt Sulzberger is quailing at the blogosphere, I am finding it has made flacks more omnipresent if not more powerful, something even I would never have predicted. The internets have given “print” incredible exposure, and not just on blogs. Mostly, though, food sections have always existed for one reason, advertising, which is why DI/DO is not being folded into the A section or Bizday; Metro and Sports are. Funny that no one is talking about the end of cookbooks in a world where countless recipes are just an Epicurious search away. Like newspapers, they will probably always be with us. Only the delivery system will change for both. Unfortunately, an iPhone makes a lousy litter box liner.

The funniest no-shit clarification I’ve seen lately was the WSJournal’s, which noted helpfully that halibut cheeks are “taken from the fish’s head.” Of course they are. The butt is what you normally eat.

I also was taken with the restaurant ad I spotted in the Village Voice: “Free soda can for every $10 spent.” Talk about nickeling and nickeling. Eat there nine more times and you’ll collect enough to get a dollar back.

Then there were the signs I spotted on 14th Street: “Real burning wood” on a new fast food joint. (No Yule log on the teevee there.) And, at the door of a bar: “Everyone here brings happiness. Some by arriving. Some by leaving.” It’s Jamaican for “don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”

I know my intolerance is showing whenever the subject of obesity comes up, but this latest wave of news reports insisting you can be fat and healthy really can’t go uncontested. If the only worry in life were heart disease, sure, the newest gainfully underwritten study would be the greatest development since the motorized scooter. But as I gimp around the city, I see untold hordes limping even worse merely because they are, in the immortal words of a letter-writer to USA Today a couple of years ago, carrying around Cadillac bodies on VW Bug frames. And every time I think about porking out, I remember the whale of a woman at PT who tried to climb onto an exercise bike and nearly pulled the thing over onto herself. The message that went out this week from even the vaunted NYTimes was very clear: Eat up. Probably no one detected the “get on the treadmill” second graf. For all the government intervention in Americans’ eating habits, it’s amazing no one has come up with the best deterrent to gluttony yet: Hang a set of crutches next to the Ben & Jerry’s case and make sure anyone who wants to buy a few pints of Chubby Hubby can first actually walk the length of the aisle on them. Now imagine trying to move fast enough to get out of the way of a speeding car (or a crazy gun guy in church) or through the door of a crashing airplane. There’s more than one way to die by fat. . . .