Maybe the new JGold Wannabe shoulda packed up his silver and china, though. Reaction to the “let ’em demand cake” by the food coven’s nastiest bit was fast and furious. I would have been oblivious to it if not for a FB posting by an unmet friend I take for a sweetheart, so I didn’t post over there what I alluded to on the Twitter: Who in holy hell would listen to etiquette advice from someone who puts the C(word) in coven?
I can’t keep up with all the old-media hypocrisy these days, but the trashing of bloggers for taking freebies really makes me snort. The best development in so-called journalism has been the disclosure requirement for online reporters. It’s very liberating to admit you are writing about a friend — in the food coven’s heyday either editors were lied to or everyone danced around the truth. Today, to quote the sheep farmer’s wife we met in North Wales who was responding to Chernobyl denial: “They think we’re stupid.” A few weeks ago I passed a new salon between the C train and the Union Square Greenmarket and saw a sign outside saying something along the lines of “we may look open, but we’re doing an editors’ preview.” Sure as shit, a few days later first the hometown paper had a report on the place. And then the print Faux did as well. And I’m sure magazines will be hair-flogging away soon enough. We all know how the sausage is made. Why not dispense with the opaque casing?
Now back to the home of the food coven: Why, when you report a chef is leaving, would you not also reveal where he’s heading? Is the gold plating for the bidet thicker from the spurned party? And no wonder the Egopedist has been MIA from print and his name was conspicuously absent from the flier that came with the hometown paper boasting of the big changes coming to the Richless section. If you want “Tomatoland,” why not read it in the original English?
Also got a good laugh on seeing the “family retainer” crediting Crain’s for reporting Alto had auctioned off its stuff — when her own outlet had run an ad in its pages only the day before, disclosing exactly that. Can’t blame Craigslist this time.
Now for a bigger question: Was the cat away for the Thanksgiving Eve edition of the section formerly known as DI/DO? The lede story was was so tedious I couldn’t even read it to count errors (although I did detect a punctuation glitch in the caption). The off-lede was so painfully overwritten I wanted to scald my own eyes. And the hoariest cliché ever was actually pressed into crude service for the hed on the review. Or should I call it the turd that finally plunked into the punch bowl? What other restaurant has had so long to get its act together before the starry hammer dropped? From there it was on to the outsized narcissism of a restaurant critic ordaining himself the expert on home cooking, and then the clunky verbiage on alleged restaurant openings. How absurd is “ingredient-driven food” when your lede story is on . . . beyond-esoteric ingredients? And WTFF does “pushes the sports bar envelope” mean? Pigs in a jockstrap blanket?
Maybe I’m cynical, but the passengers stranded on the cruise ship seemed to get more coverage than the cholera victims in Haiti — poor things had no cold beer or “champagne.” Certainly they got more food, even if it was crap like Spam. What was weirdest was how the media spun it as the wealthy on a luxury cruise, when anyone paying attention knows the 1 percent with the real bucks in this country would not be caught dead on a floating project with the middle and lower classes. They have their own yachts. In assorted ports. All I want to know is if the capitalist cruise line that called in the socialist Navy and Coast Guard for help has taxpayers covering the cost of the lobster substitutes, too. If so, let ’em eat Pop-Tarts.
A friend emailed to chuckle at the Rudest Woman in Food writing her own etiquette questions (because who would actually ask such silliness?) But I just skimmed her and thought of that all-purpose caption for the New Yorker’s cartoon contest: “Who is that fucking asshole?” And thought of it rewritten as one-answer-fits-all, essentially what I heard yelled into the phone for 46 months: “Eat shit and die.” Really, would Miss Manners ever boast about scamming her own husband?
Finally, I guess I have to dive into Forgione v. Fool. Where in the name of Madoff was this money expert when looters were pillaging Wall Street? If there was ever a time to cross journalistic boundaries, was it not when his very own stock was tanking? Mostly it’s funny how I never saw that Timesman on his white horse galloping across the Style newsroom to throttle the rudest voice in food as she was berating some sorry soul tasked with merely trying to get her to bestow unicorn dust on some new product/restaurant/event. Rather than blogging his silliness himself, he should have done the proper thing. And consulted Eat Shit & Die herself.
Apparently it wasn’t just me laughing at the notion of the rudest name in food getting an etiquette gig. Someone else who smelled the sulfur emailed: That’s like Pol Pot lecturing on good management practices. . .