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Posts from the ‘Page & Screen’ Category

Feb 2

Sound Off

BlogfoxI thought podcasts and user generated content were all the rage (and stating that only reinforces how behind the web 2.0 revolution I am) but Fox 5 just discovered blogs this month. Except that they don’t quite seem to know what blogs are exactly. Perpetually brain damaged Rosanna Scotto (which reminds me—how old is Toni Senecal? Her face looks abnormally smooth and taut, while her neck is two shades darker and heading into wizened turkey territory. Sometimes when the light hits her at a certain angle she resembles Michael Jackson. Her age is suspiciously absent from her New York Times wedding announcement, too. And her currently being pregnant means zilch since the elderly are getting knocked up in 2007.) makes me violent every time she says, “send your blogs” during their Sound Off segment, which recently has covered very important topics like the sexy Harry Potter pics and whether The N Word should be banned (how it's possible to ban a word is beyond me). Two weeks ago sending viewer feedback via an email address was called, um, emailing. Last night I noticed they’d even designed a new graphic to reinforce this misguided concept. I work for Newscorp and I’m a researcher, perhaps I should get to the bottom of who decided that hitting send in Hotmail constitutes blogging.

On to print media. I’ve never understood why when you subscribe to a new magazine they invariably send you an old issue as your first. It’s now February so I don’t find it terribly useful to read about Christmas gifts, cute as they may be, in my recently received ReadyMade. I suspect this is an American bungling because I got my first copy of Olive, February issue, all the way from England in early January. Then again, I’m lucky if 60% of my subscriptions even make it into my hands. Sometimes I forget that Time Out New York isn’t bimonthly because I don’t think I’ve ever received four in a month.

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Jan 18

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With a (back)Side of Bacon, Please

Porchetta_thongI was captivated by the photo used to illustrate today’s New York Times review of Porchetta. (I have no idea why I knew from a glance that the guy in the center is a writer/blog fixture because I don’t enjoy that sort of information. That’s what NYC will do to you.) What I was really trying to understand why they chose to use a picture featuring a girl with pants off her ass and an exposed thong. This restaurant is just a short walk from my apartment and has been on my mental to-try list for a few months, but now I’ve completely re-thought the whole thing. If I wanted copious amounts of human flesh with my meal, I’d go to recently opened Hawaiian Tropic Zone.

Backfat's nothing. It's the backside I'm concerned about.

Also, the irritatingly erudite (no, I didn’t have to look that one up) Times once again caught me with a vocab stumper: chilblains. What the hell? And the writer who used it was once my boss for like five months. Clearly, I learned nothing from that stint.

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Jan 10

Civic Lesson

Football I swear I don’t love beating dead horses (even though I’m mildly equine averse) but just a few minutes ago I heard Go! Team blaring from the living room TV while in my bedroom. Lordy, what could they possibly be selling? I guessed car, it’s often autos. It was Honda Civic. Frankly, I’m surprised their bouncy, upbeat sound hadn’t been used in a commercial yet (ah…apparently, Nike and McDonald’s attempted it). I’m totally beyond the whole indie sellout label. Who cares as long as curtails ‘80s worship.

I expect that sort of thing from a car ad, but sports elude me. Sunday afternoon I was trying to tune out some NFL pre-game show but I couldn’t ignore the background music during a montage. You know how you know a song but out of context you don’t always identify it immediately. They were using Voxtrot’s “Missing Pieces.” Yeah, I guess they’re popular. I can’t gauge what’s mainstream anymore, though from flipping through radio stations in the car I can definitely say Voxtrot is not playing in NYC. I hate to admit that even the National Football League knows better than to blast Nu Shooz.

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Nov 16

$38.10 Worth of Thanks

Being the last Wednesday before Thanksgiving where you can do actually something about what you’re being told by food sections, it’s been a turkey barrage. I’m not turkey crazy in the least but I’m starting to feel the bland, meaty tug, especially since last year I went out for dinner and ended up missing picking at leftovers over the three-day weekend.

Turkey1At work we were trying to find historic turkey prices and I was moderately surprised by the statistics coming from the American Farm Bureau. They’ve pegged the cost of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner for ten at $38.10. That is totally doable if you have simple tastes but otherwise it’s kind of a sad meal. They’ve broken it down by individual items so you can see how they’ve arrived at the figure. I’m thrifty as hell and yes, New Yorkers tend to be out of touch spending-wise (I don’t need to re-remind you about New York magazine’s cheap $500 holiday party for eight do I? Ok, I do.) but come on, a 59-cent relish tray of carrots and celery?  That’s dietetic and depressing.

$1.86 for a 30-oz. pumpkin pie mix and $1.89 for two pie shells…eh. While there’s no way in hell I’m coughing up $28, you can still make a quality dessert from scratch for under $5, ten dollars if you live it up. And no, most people including myself, don’t use fresh pumpkins for pies but a home made crust likely uses ingredients already in your house: flour, eggs, shortening, butter, salt, sugar, water or some variation of these. Extras like nuts or whipped cream add to the price, but only marginally. Even if you’re tempted to buy a ReadyCrust (I used to totally covet the chocolate crusts in the store when I was a kid. I could so imagine a green misty grasshopper pie in the preformed shell) read what the New York Times has to say about crust perfection.

So this year I plan on cooking some basics but probably not until Saturday and likely only for myself (Thanksgiving proper I’ll be working so no prep time and that evening I’ll have a few holiday orphans over for a turkey-free slumber party). I envision a small poultry item, stuffing of some sort, a green vegetable and possibly a potato-based dish and that’s it. I might even forgo dessert because there’s already enough sugariness in the house. But I suspect I’ll still overspend the $38.10 average.

I was just looking at heritage turkeys you can order through Fairway and even a small one, at $5.99/lb is around $70. People have been heritage gaga for the past few years. I’d like to give in to history and wild birds but this isn’t the year for financial risk. Maybe I’ll get my taste of Bourbon Red or Standard Bronze in 2007. It’ll be an antibiotic-free free-range vegetarian fed turkey for around $25 and I’m guessing I can put the whole meal together for less than the price of one heritage turkey, tasty as it may be. I’ll add it up next week and see.

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Nov 10

Home Turf

Community20involvement20logoFile this under Who the Hell Cares or Just Plain Petty, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m not community minded, particularly when it comes to cyberspace. Lord knows what most bloggers do in their real lives because I’m not friends with (m)any. And it's probably for the best that I remain in the dark because often the more I know, the less I like. Sometimes I do wonder with food blogs when the authors consistently visit high-end restaurants. I assume they’re either in the industry, well connected or just plain wealthy. Of course, for every L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon and Gordon Ramsey at The London (Ok, I’ve seen very little on that, give it a few weeks) chronicle there are countless praises for pizza and hot dogs.

Some would say that’s what makes this city great, something for everyone. Uh, the wonderful (financial) diversity. Fine. Maybe my taste is plebian and irrational but I don’t relish reading the food musings of someone who owns property worth $37.5 million. I’m not saying that multi-million-dollar homeowners are hideous folks whose opinions don’t matter, I would just prefer to read other things instead. It’s not envy; it’s nothing in common. Like is drawn to like. It’s not exactly a secret that Manhattan is filled with people who do quite well for themselves but I’m more drawn to people who struggle to pay triple digit rent. Ok, I’ll broaden my horizons because those paying $999 and under anywhere in the city are few and far between.

As a cranky aside, is $500 for an eight-person holiday party really cheap?

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Nov 5

Johnny-Come-Latelys

The food blogs never stop coming. Even though I’m working my way through recent American food history (I’m up to California cuisine and budding stardom of Wolfgang Puck) with the thoroughly engaging The United States of Arugula, it’s still baffling to me that 2006 has become the year of the “professional” food blog. Rather than exciting, I find it exhausting. Sure, it’s fun to poke around all of mainstream latecomers for different perspectives but there are only so many hours in my already oversaturated day. Plenty tends to make me tired rather than invigorated (though yesterday I was incredibly irritated by Jose Cuervo gold being the only tequila choice at the liquor store next to Costco. 1,000 mezcals would’ve been overwhelming but one is ridiculous. Costco was also out of frozen scallops and chicken wings. I was cruelly reminded why we food shop in NJ despite the outrageous $9 Verrazano Bridge toll).

The new entrants are:
Village Voice’s Eat for Victory
Gourmet’s  Choptalk (epi-log is not new)
Yahoo Food (more portal than blog)

New York, The New York Times and Chow hit already. Time Out NY is behind but they’ve been focusing their energy on TV and radio programs (oh, I guess they have a CMJ blog). The NYC dailies? They might stay resolutely old school. I didn’t even know that the New York Post had blogs until the other day (they appear to be limited to sports and travel) and I work at the damn paper. Half the employees there have trouble handling email (seriously, having to print out articles for anyone under 70 is beyond lame and makes me genuinely angry) of basic internet search engines so my faith is not with newspapers.

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Jul 10

Precociousness in the City: Part 2

I was waiting for those panini boys to show up in the New York Times and now I can finally rest easy. And what a whopper of a title: La Dolce Vita, Never a Hard Sell.

I've always assumed that the paper is filled with so many of these isn't-that-curious slices of life stories is because a good number of their writers (freelance and staff) live in Park Slope/Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill (I have one in my building). To be fair, this was in The City section, which is precisely intended for such nichey articles, as it's only included in the NYC-area print version.

From what I've heard, the editors do look favorably on missives from lesser known neighborhoods since they're harder to come by (I used to occasionally rack my brain for good Sunset Park scoops, but I don't have a newsy bone in my body. I find those kinds of articles hard to come up with, which is why I have a day job). I guess a glut of Times caliber scribes just don't live in or have awareness of Canarsie or Corona, though this week they did have tales from outposts like Soundview (Bronx) and West Brighton (Staten Island).

As an aside, read my take on the White House Sub Shop, which serves the anti-panini.

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Jun 14

Early Bird Special

Oh my goodness, my early to bed, early to rise and then exercise plan is not having the intended effects at all. I had visions of rising an hour earlier and after 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer and a shower (I'm a night bather) I would be amazingly energized and refreshed. Instead, I woke up with that tired gritty eye feeling and it never dissipated all day. I've had bloodshot eyes and have been groggy since 6:30am and it's now 8:10pm.  So, not revitalized. I had even poorer concentration skills at work, was hungrier and sweat even more than normal on my way to work. I'm going to keep at it for the rest of the week in hopes that my body will acclimate, but I see sleeping in till the last possible moment, working out a few nights a week and going to bed with wet hair in my future.

In fact, I'm so exhausted that it's all I can do to type the following link about the Cheesecake Factory from this week's Time. If I went to Yale and knew how to write journalistically and published in mainstream newsweekly magazines, I would totally want to write about Cheesecake Factory (though, apparently, one needs an unusual name for this gig. Oh, and to live in Park Slope. I was curious about a name like  Jyoti Thottham, so I looked it up. If you ever see a one-line writer's bio that claims the author lives in Brooklyn, you're guaranteed it's Park Slope. Jyoti lives right near those Grand Army Plaza arches at the top of Prospect Park.). No commentary from me, this quote sums it up, "With its kitchen-sink menu and gargantuan portions, the Cheesecake Factory is big-tent cuisine at its most expansive. It is a restaurant where everything is included but nothing is authentic." In other words, no mint in the summer rolls or anchovies in the puttanesca, but you'll get large servings of said blandness. I actually plan on a C.F. excursion Saturday while at the Menlo Park Mall in Edison, NJ on a suit-seeking mission. It's not every day you get to eat fried macaroni and cheese on top of marinara.

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Feb 11

Haute Shit

StptuxYou’d think that I understood PR, especially since I’m now apparently working in the industry (corporate clients, not fun stuff), but I don’t, except to say that someone must be putting in extra hours for Vosges Chocolates. It’s not like they’re new (I did buy a friend a box for her birthday a few years ago), yet every Valentine’s candy related article I’ve read (ok, it’s not like there are hundreds of them) in the past few days has mentioned the company famous for using ingredients like wasabi and naming a collection after million dollar sperm donor Vincent Gallo.

Of course, now I can’t recall any of these mentions except from Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchen, Gothamist and yesterday’s Critical Shopper column written by that scary gazillionaire who lightheartedly wrote, “Until December I had not really eaten chocolate for about 10 years. A gift of chocolate was, I believed, a veiled and hostile gesture to make me fat.”

It’s inane omissions like that, that forces me to read the New York Post. Post columnists wouldn’t write about denying themselves chocolate for a decade. Food phobias like that drive me batty, I just can’t hear or abide that kind of nonsense. The kind of person (woman) who thinks that presents of chocolate are hostile is beastly. It shows the inner workings of their fat and sugar-deprived minds because a run of the mill individual would likely be happy with chocolate unless they were diabetic or allergic. That someone would even conceive of candy as mean spirited implies that’s the sort of passive-aggressive way they’d act out. Like not-so-innocently giving someone a dress a size too small, “oh, I didn’t realize you were a six.” Ew, because a six would be really huge and disgusting to someone who hadn’t eaten chocolate since Rent debuted on Broadway (and thinks Alphabet City–or for that matter, uses the phrase Alphabet City–is actually filled with kooky singing and dancing squatters).

Ok, I wasn’t intending to go to town on Mrs. Kuczynski. My original dilemma concerned Vosges founder Katrina Markoff. I’ve been having all these issues lately because I just can’t seem to settle on anything career-wise. No matter what I do, I end up loathing it. So I ask myself like a What Color is my Parachute retard: what would I like to do? Not work in an office, for starters. I’d like to have a product I could sell, but I’m not sure what said product would be. Unfortunately, I’m the opposite of entrepreneurial, have zero business savvy and an empty bank account. So, I’m always awed/annoyed by people who have successful food ventures, and look for the back story.

Like, obviously you couldn’t open a giant flashy candy store inside one of NYC’s most famous department stores if your father wasn’t a wealthy well-known fashion designer. I don’t know the Vosges woman’s background, but when I read things about people my age (usually younger, though, which is even more distressing) who go to France and study at Cordon Bleu, apprentice with renowned Spanish avant-garde chefs and travel around the world for months on end just trying new flavors, I can only assume that they don’t work for a living.

Where others see a fun, fascinating multi-faceted person, I see an irritant. I’m sure Katrina Markoff is a perfectly nice human being, I haven’t seen anything unpleasant written about her (in fact, this piece about Vincent Gallo being mean to her makes me like her more). I’m the one with the problem. I’m just miffed because I’m tormented 9-6 daily while others flit around the globe and make candy.

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