California eats: Father's Office

The word on the streets of LA was that Father's Office was the greatest burger phenomenon since Micky D's first opened their doors. With the burger craze in NYC in full swing, I was anxious to try it. Cue the requisite hipsters and remember you're not at Fette Sau:

This is apparently the second version of Father's Office. This one is down the street from my sister's place in the charmingly revamped Helm's Bakery. The restaurant has a host of weird rules that New Yorkers would love: no vodka, no ketchup, no diet soda, etc., etc. Also, it's swank but totally open seating. You order at the bar and then some dude delivers it to your table. When I heard this I started to panic, but apparently ordering at the bar at a mega popular spot isn't as horrible as it is in Gotham.
More about the bar...they've got a million obscure beers on tap, blah, blah, blah, you've been to Spuyten Divul, you've heard it all before. They're really locovore, with a host of brews from microbreweries up and down the coast. Bit of a shame not to have their east coast brethren up there, though--Six Point and Dogfish Head to name but a few.

I might point out they are selectively locovore--one of the specials was a soft-shell crab dish.

I of course ordered the burger, plus a beet salad and a famous appetizer composed of smoked eel, a poached egg, dill and some other stuff.
I'm a bit hazy on the burger. You're not allowed to change it's composition. I believe it actually has two kinds of cheeses--blue and Gruyere--plus an onion compote that reminded me of brisket in texture.
LA Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold compares FO to New York's the Spotted Pig, and I could see where he gets that. The thing is, if you can squeeze into Spotted Pig, the burger there is really amazing. This one, I don't know...I feel like I'm being finicky lately, but it struck me as a bit cloying. The food hit a lot of rich/sweet notes, so maybe that's why I wasn't so jazzed about it. The ever divisive shoestring fries seemed to get better with time.

So, Father's Office...fun place to go after a long day slinging screenplays at the Sony lot, if you're a New Yorker, maybe not so much. Perhaps if you're able to get over your East Coast microbrew enthusiams and expand your horizons, and maybe aren't too picky about the food.

Review Thursday: Oceans

In a freak coincidence, the past week has seen me floating on my back, toes pointed toward the sky, in *two* count 'em two oceans.

First: the Atlantic. Covering approximately 22% of Earth's surface, the Atlantic Ocean is second only to the Pacific Ocean in size.

Cultural significance: Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Hart Crane, The Pearl, The Old Man and the Sea, Jaws

Pro: always freezing cold, which is nice on the hottest, muggiest days of August.

Cons: Scary. When we went swimming on Fire Island, the swells were four feet and breaking close to the short. Strong cross-current = large chance of panic and drowning.

Second: the Pacific. Above, me at Santa Monica beach.

Cultural significance: Baywatch, Hawaii 5-O, Gauguin, Life of Pi.

Pros: bathwater warm, easy, rolling waves, lack of sharks (at least in L.A.)

Cons: too many people, slimy seaweed.

An East Coast sunset

The winner was easy--I had so much fun in the Pacific. Realizing you're not to old to body surf? Priceless.

No cliches were harmed in the making of this video

Let's not lie...air travel is the place where it's totally cool to watch eight hours of Kathy Griffin. On my first Virgin American flight, I got drunk on chardonnay and played video DJ and watched the following. Not having had MTV for quite a while, I was unsure about what the kids were into these days. Herewith, a sampling of my amateur observations.



Lupe Fiasco "Superstar"--In spite of myself I love this song, right down to the "Chris Martin called, he wants his act back" stylings of whoever it is does the chorus. Matthew Santos? Yeah, time for a new shtick, your whispery falsetto warbling isn't fooling anyone.

When I heard this song, judging from the verse where Lupe raps:

"So just take me home where the mood is mellow
And the roses are grown
M&M's are yellow
And the light bulbs around my mirror don't flicker
Everybody gets a nice autograph picture
One for you and one for your sister
Who had to work tonight but is an avid listener
Every song's a favorite song
And mics don't feed back
All the reviewers say you need to go and see that."

I pictured him as a chilled out, self-deprecating dude. And when you've written a song about wish fulfillment, you've got to cut against expectations. You have to, right?

I can't imagine was fool they hired to conceptualize this video. It bummed me out because I bet there was a million cool ways to do it. It could have been the hip-hop Hard Day's Night. You could have cast it with playacting kids like Bugsy Malone.

Instead, you get a dry ice filled cheesefest. Pyrotechnics spark out from his fingertips. Hoochie mamas coming out of the limos. Flashbulbs pop along the red carpet. What cliches did they not employ in the making of this video?

My grade: F



Yael Naim, "New Soul"--Okay, so Apple made you famous with your cute little ditty. To start, this video seems promising, with Yael moving into an apartment, no lip synching. But then she puts up some woodsy wallpaper, and then Yael is tickling the ivories, she's singing now, and the video inexplicably cuts to some dude in a field with a horn. She puts up pictures of all of her bandmates and then does crude drawings over all of them. Suddenly, there's a porthole in her apartment, she knocks down the walls and she's on some kind of hippie barge. The bandmates, on handpainted inner tube, will be right there. She dumps the goldfish in the river. Hey, that goldfish will never survive...but it doesn't matter, the hippies are dancing. You don't have to pay rent when you live on a barge. Score!

My grade: C-, sorry, cutie.

Fiest, "I Feel It All" (Embedding is disabled, but you can see it here.)

Fiest, I love Fiest. Sure, she's a chart-topping pop chanteuse, but she's not exactly a young thang, she's striking without being perfect looking (she wears a pair of jeans and an old striped sweater in the video). She has Peaches and Canadian music scene bona fides. She makes great videos that don't seem to have been dreamed up in an ad agency.

All the creative choices are kind of weird and non-commercial. I mean, are those red isotoner gloves meant to pick up the lipstick red of the oil drums? It may have been the Chardonnay talking, but I was just sitting back and thinking, this is the first time I've really felt something while working my way the queue.

I've got to hand it to Fiest. You get the sense that despite how annoyingly catchy her songs are, there's still something original about her, that she's really doing something that she cares about and that comes out in everything she does.

Love the crazy exuberant dancing, the sheer romanticism. I'll be the one to break my heart, indeed.

Grade: A+

Review Thursday: It pains me to say it, but...

It's unfortunate when you are the second book to write about layoffs and office life in the first-person plural. Man, would that suck, but such is the zeitgeist. I'm trying to write about fictionalized office life, so I'm interested in books that do it well. Because working is boring, writing about work is boring. When a writer captures the mundane and stifling in a fresh, even inspiring way, it's a truly remarkable accomplishment. When books about work take off, I think it's through capturing some kind of idiosyncratic singularity (like Ferris's book or the underrated Big If by Marc Costello) or the workplaces is a kind of accessory to the an overall commentary they are making to American culture (Palladio).

Another book I'm looking forward to reading is Among Other Things I've Taken Up Smoking, if for no other reason as it has an amazing title. Also, More Than It Hurts You, by a former teacher, Darin Strauss. It's gotten great notices, and I like the is-it-or-isn't-it premise about Munhausen by Proxy, and the attendant satirical tone.

Review Thursday: Taco Time

Taco Porn., originally uploaded by Kevin Church.

I have mixed feelings about this new taco-reviewing blog, Lost Taco. The writing and visuals are very good, but as a native Southern California who moved to New York quite a while ago, I'm kind of over this whole "why can't I find a decent taco in the city"? The pejorative perspective people have of the Mexican food situation in NYC is a holdover from the time, a decade or so ago, when we had very few bona-fide Mexicans living and cooking here, and most of your tacos would be slung by someone from China. It's true that East Coast natives have grown accustomed to inferior, Benny's Burrito-type concoctions. But immigration patterns have changed, and there are thriving Mexican scenes in Sunset Park and Jackson Heights that are emblematic of the way Mexicans are weaving into the culinary fabric of city life. Transplants who whine about the lack of good Mexican food haven't gotten out enough.

The second thing I've come to understand (despite being a reformed sanctimonious taco snob from the Left Coast) is that taste in tacos is really very subjective. Lost Taco gives the thumbs up to Pinche Tacqueria, a Nolita sliver which I think epitomizes flavorless, gringofied hoity-toity Mexican. Thought she does rightly single out Zaragoza in the East Village. One adjustment Californians must inevitably adjust to is eating real Mexican-from-Mexico food, and not Cal-Mex food. That means tacos (just meat, sprinkling of cilantro, onions and cheese, no guacamole, no kiwi fruit), and not burritos, which are Cal-Mex.

I have to admit that my favorite taco place on the planet (please, 8 readers of the blog, keep this to yourself), is located in New York City. It's called Tehuitzingo, and it's a little bodega on 10 ave between 47th and 48th St. It's run by a couple from Puebla, MX. Squeeze past the gregarious man in the front and find two Spanish-speaking ladies in the bag slinging the most sublime tacos enchiladas (spicy carnitas) you've ever had in your life. They are two dollars a piece, and you can grab a beer from the convenient refrigerator case nearby to ease the heat. I returned from a foodie crawl in San Francisco's Mission District craving these delectable specimens, with the realization an incredible taco place can be found in the most unlikely places. And when you've found your bliss, you'll keep coming back again and again.

Review Thursday: My new favorite show

I remember seeing the warnings posted around "campus" when I was a student at NYU. Beware a well-dressed woman who claims she's found a wallet right near you. Beware when she asks you to hold onto the money until they can find the owner of the wallet. Be especially on guard when some other stranger become involved in the debate. These notices appeared frequently one year. They told a little story about gullibity, street theater and greed, for they outlined the specifics of a con called the "pigeon drop" which has been around since the Depression.

I found the notices as compelling as a soap opera in miniature. I follow them avidly, and began to do my own research on this kind of American folk hero, the con man. I read books like the Big Con and watched movies like The Sting and David Mamet's wonderful House of Games. In short, I was totally obsessed with con artistry.

And you could chalk my ardor for the FX series the Riches to that initial obsession, but in fact I think there is much more to it than that. It's a show about the American version of the gypsies, the Traveller clan, and concerns a family of grifters headed by Eddie Izzard as Wayne Molloy. Overall, the show's definitely got a little FX low-budge clunkiness in terms of the writing and production value. But Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard are both sensational in completely unique ways, and together they are a force to be reckoned with. Who knew that two Brits would play a couple of white trash Southern thieves so soulfully and convincingly?

The Riches starts out with Driver's character Dahlia getting out of prison after two years. Driver as Dahlia actually looks like someone coming out of prison, not a dressed-down movie star, and her performance in the series is continually rich and surprising. She bears both the wounds of being let down by Wayne, and also the drug habit she picked up in prison, and often the pain she's able to express in the role in wrenching.

That's not to say the show is depressing; to the contrary it's often hilarious. Part of it is the fish out of water premise--through a twist of fate, the Molloy family assumes the identity of a pair of wealthy suburbanites, the Riches of the title. Part of the humor comes through Izzard's hilarious, charismatic performance. He discovers the man he's playing is a securities lawyer, and goes so far as to con his way into a job. One further surprise about the show is that Wayne Molloy et al are not the best con artists. Much of the fun is watching them fail and weasel their way out of another mess. It's cheesy, but I guess that's what makes them so "relatable" and appealing.

Even when the script falters, Driver and Izzard pull it up through their talent and chemistry. And I think that a lot like another one of my favorite shows, Weeds, the casting here is really superb, from Margo Martindale as a pill-popping neighbor married to a gay man to Hartley Underwood as the high-strung, one armed neighborhood bitch. I've been watching the first season on DVDs-through-the-mail, and I highly recommend it for anyone who likes a good dark comedy with indelible characters.

Review Thursday: Dissolute Cities

“Nothing in this book can be considered reliable or accurate,” reads the jackassy disclaimer of James Frey’s third foray into fiction, Bright Shiny Morning. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment on whether or not the writer who’s making self-aggrandizement cool again has mastered a sense of originality, I only remember being in the minority of people who thought A Million Little Pieces was corny and overblown. At the time I received of the phony memoir, I was reviewing books for the Quality Paperback Book Club, and I couldn’t fathom all buzz the book was getting. It’s main claim to fame seemed to be using Capitalization and punctuation incorrectly to Make. A. Point. Man. Also the bloody, no painkillers airplane scene. That was Intense. But it never seemed particularly Real. So Oprah revealed him as a Big Fake. Big Whoop.

This time around, people seem to be responding to Frey’s portrait of LA, or at least Janet Maslin is, pulling a Michiko Kakutani and writing the review of his book in his style. I just want to know why are people so impressed with writing like this, when there are so many similar, better books? It’s the same thing I thought when I picked up Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children. I had read it talked up in Elle (don’t mock me, they actually devote an admirable amount of ink to books), and so reserved a copy at the library. From all the advance notice, the book promised to be a riveting portrait of sketchy types in Las Vegas—you know, criminals! Broken dreams! Strippers! The porn industry! I like my salacious literary reads as much as the next girl, and I was all primed for a seedy vision of Las Vegas to wash over me.

Man, was I let down by this book. It felt as though the writer tried really hard but a book that should have been populated by the richness of intersecting lives had tumbleweeds rolling through it.

More than that, both books seem a pale shadow of an overlooked favorite of mine, a novel that takes a panoramic view of Los Angeles and delivers something funny, powerful, emotional, authentic and edgy. Not just James Frey posturing “edgy,” either. Really edgy. That book is I’m Losing You by Bruce Wagner.
In an overflowing plot too complex to explain, Wagner gets up close to the lives of everyone from a heartbroken studio exec to a crazy masseuse who believe she can steal people’s energy. What continually impresses me about his writing is how well he modulates tone—one minute biting and satiric, the next, emotional and lyrical. I’ve always thought that his deserving novels are not given the praise and attention they deserve because they are about Hollywood, and regular people, for some reason, don’t read Hollywood novels. But in I’m Losing You and the later Still Holding (and you have to get past the groaning phone lingo inspired titles) he draws a bead on the human experience in extremity and comes up with something as invigorating as it is wrenchingly emotional. Wagner’s books always make me want to write, and for a populated panorama of a dissolute city, these more recent contenders just can’t hold a candle.

Review Thursday: On the ampersand

via Conor and David

In movie credits, the ampersand is a code. It means: John Doe & Jane Smith duked it out in a room over this script, one choking the other with second-hand smoke and the other spitting in the other's coffee. The dreaded "and" means different writers were employed at different times: John & Jane got sacked and Quentin Tarantino was called up for a punch up job. As a device to help me remember the difference, I think: tied together, the ampersand means the writers were tied together.

With it's curving sweep, the ampersand is a saucy shorthand for "and," which is why it surprises me that it's so common in the British writing I see at work.

Wikipedia notes the growing use of the ampersand due to text messaging.

And if you enjoy this seductive bit of punctuation as much as I do, you may want to check out the Ampersand blog, a treatise on all things, and only things, ampersand-related.

Review Thursday: Into the Wild, book and film

You're either the type of person who comes alive in the presence of others, or else you need to get away from people in order really feel yourself. I mention this because I think your identification with one role or the other will probably determine much of they way you feel about Into the Wild, either the Jon Krakauer book or the Sean Penn film.

Watching the DVD the other day reminded me how engrossing I found this story when I first read the book. The hero of the nonfiction story, Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, really calls into question the prevailing attitude that solitude inevitably means loneliness. Conjuring an archetype honed by everyone from Henry David Thoreau to cranky naturalist and Desert Solitaire author Edward Abbey, the Krakauer book grapples deeply with a forbidding yet fascinating topic: being alone.

What would it feel like to just check out of society? Burn all your money? Spend day upon day by yourself, out in the wild? I don’t know many people who could embrace such deep solitude, so, by virtue of that accomplishment alone, I’m fascinated by McCandless.

At the same time, I know that the book and movie are both guilty of romanticizing this character. They want him to be one-of-a-kind, when certainly there are things about McCandless that are of a kind: there’s something about the guy that suggests the sort of self-righteous, fanatical hippie that probably everyone knew in college (exhibit A: when he gives himself the dopey moniker Alexander Supertramp). The hubris of a young twentysomething man--also, of a kind. The Penn film, particularly, lets McCandless of the hook for not having developed the skills to survive in the Alaskan wilderness.

Still, I was surprised how much the film was able to evoke fundamentally internal states. In both the book and the film, there is something really haunting about McCandless’s demise, when it’s certain that McCandless wasn’t feeling the life-affirming joy of self-reliance, but instead desolation…and loneliness.

How easy it is to slip between solitude and loneliness is certainly a worthy subject, and one that the book is able to cover much better than the film. But both portray a fascinating story that I think is worthy of consideration.

Review Thursday: Lush Life by Richard Price

I confess: I’m a huge Richard Price fan from way back in the Clockers and Freedomland days. I stuck with him through the slim and somewhat unsatisfying Samaritan, and it was with excitement and trepidation that I discovered that he’d tackled a scene much more familiar to me than the Jersey projects that form the environment of most of his novels: the gentrifying Lower East Side.

“In New York, 30 is the new 50,” I heard Price say in a radio interview, and his novel piles the humiliation onto one of its key protagonists, Eric, who works at a sort of Schiller’s doppelganger in the Lower East Side. Eric has glimmers of talent, but in his mid-thirties is confronting the fact that he may not have enough to make it in the big city. When he’s on hand for the shooting of a fellow employee, his life is turned upside down when the cops suspect him of the crime, which readers know early on was the work of a couple of nervous projects kids.

Pick up Clockers and Freedomland, and you’ll basically find yourself clearing your schedule in order to finish the doorstoppers. Written in highly literate and yet suspenseful prose, the dramatic setup in both books are humdingers: Freedomland goes inside an explosive Susan Smith-like child murder and Clockers takes you inside a crack dealing subculture through a gripping Cain and Abel story that contains an electrifying twist.

Lush Life, on the other hand, has no such fundamentally gripping archetypical struggle at its core. The murder is kind of, for lack of a better word, underwhelming, and what’s more, you know who did it early on. From the point of view of Matty, the lead detective on the case, “Most murderers, when he finally caught up to them, pretty much never met his expectations. For the most part, they were a stupid and fantastically self-centered lot…Survivors, on the other hand…always appeared to him as larger than life.” The passage struck me as odd, because for much of the book, Price seems to sympathize more with the murderers than the defeated Eric.

I admired Price’s quest to depict colliding worlds on the Lower East Side: the worlds of the projects, the hipsters, the cops, and the Chinese, but I thought the panorama was more compelling than the meat of the story. Without a strong story hook, everything’s world got kind of equalized, and in that case, it’s easier to see the hipster interlopers with a kind of contempt. What’s happening with Eric, the survivor, and the victim’s family don’t seems as compelling when there’s no larger dramatic question to solve.

Lush Life has Price’s usual crackling prose, his top-notch dialogue, but in the second half, the book really feels inert. I finished it and enjoyed many parts of it, but can only recommend it with reservations.

A journey to the intersection of art and life to say farewell to the Flux

This is the story of one Englishman, one Argentinean, and one Californian’s adventure into the fringes of the Queens art scene. It all started when my coworker Tom was invited to an opening at a show called “Everything Must Go” last night at the Flux Factory.

In case you’ve never heard of this teeming experimental laboratory, Flux Factory is a live/work commune for artists in Long Island City that’s about to be demolished. At one time, I wanted to create a photo book about collective living spaces, and Flux Factory was one of the places I researched by stopping by occasionally, once for a class on bookmaking, and also for an installation piece where they had novelists living in pods in the main loft space churning out a complete manuscript in a month.



Every time I’ve been to Flux, I’ve felt like I was intruding on the living room of people far cooler and artsier than I. This visit was no exception—after we’d woven our way past car dealerships and Taiwanese megachurches to arrive at the space right on time, Tom and I found ourselves the first non-residents present. Everyone else seemed to be artists engaged in final tweaks of their installations.







The charms of the show were slow to reveal themselves—I think in part because we were initially timid to begin exploring a space where there was little delineation between public and private space. Everything Must Go is definitely one place where art is everywhere from the giant soup pot of jellybeans on the kitchen table to a loft-bed laden with homemade pies, but more on that later.



But once people started to arrive, including Tom's Argentinean friend Manolo, and the booze started to flow, Flux Factory revealed delightful secrets in hidden corners and some truly innovative uses of space.


Above is a picture of Tom adding to the wall of art. His contribution? A Fish n' Chips sign, of course!

One of my favorite installations is pictured at left. The giant cut-out figures conjured childhood and were a little bit scary at the same time. The best part was the sound, though. A sound artist had rigged up a xylophone and some other percussive instruments to play weird, whimsical music.




“This is the best experience of New York I’ve had since I got here,” Tom raved. A native of the UK, Tom has been living and working in Stockholm for the past five years before joining the British Tourist Board New York office on a temporary assignment. He’s grown very fond of the relaxed, laid-back atmosphere of the Swedish capital. “So it’s the like the Brooklyn of Europe?” I asked him. “No, more like the Berlin of Sweden,” he replied. On the other hand, Manolo insists that Buenos Aires is filled with examples of Flux Factory-like places.

Several of our favorite experience not represented here:

• The pie and milkshake installation: one of the artists had transformed her living space into a salon of delectable desserts. For a nickel, she would make you a custom milkshake, but even better, you could climb up to her loft bed and enjoy a slice of pie! Not something you see in New York everyday, kids! Tom’s inner Homer Simpson gave this installation a blue ribbon.
• The slide. Remember to sign the release!
• The rooftop shack built by Tom’s friend Michaela
• The strange percussive rattling of Manolo’s truck on our way back to the city over the Queensboro Bridge.

You can experience the swan song of the Flux Factory’s current incarnation in Long Island City during the month of April. There will be a closing party that will probably surpass this opening on Saturday, April 26. Check their website for more details.

Go for the pies, stay for the intersection of art and life.

Review Thursday: Another Dull and Lurid Year

The other day I was in Posman Books at Grand Central Station, where they always have a really great browsable table of fiction. I started talking to this woman who was holding a copy of Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End. She was shopping for her husband’s fiftieth birthday or something. I was psyched that someone was actually that jazzed about fiction. So from so many great choices, I hand-sold her my two favorite books from the last year and a half or so: the Josh Ferris and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children.

On Amazon, Emperor’s Children has a couple hundred reviews, and opinion is totally split. I have to say at first it sounded like some kind of hoity-toity bourgeois-fest, a novel of manners, apparently, revolving around a rootless trio of privileged 30something Manhattanites. I had seen Messud speak once at Columbia and it seemed like she wrote super thinky artsy little novels. I was swayed, however, but one of those excellent Slate Audio Book Clubs about it. They called Messud a kind of modern-day Edith Wharton (who happens to be another writer that I feel is severely underrated because she’s female and writes about the subtly of human interaction). Once I got into it, I found Emperor’s Children completely engrossing, a “literary page turner” as some critic said. It was smart and you wanted to keep reading it. That’s not to say that the characters always felt true or that Messud really has an authentic grasp of the environment she’s writing about (I've read a lot of people pointing out how she puts her own British/Canadianism into the mouths of bona fide American characters). But the book did have a lot of power and imagination behind it—and what’s more, it’s one of those books that made me want to write more.

Ferris’s book is so buzz-worthy that you kind of want to hate it—it’s the literary version of “The Office,” it’s written in the third-person plural, it uses the ad world to sort of reflexively comment on Our Times. But once I got past the gimmicks and the jokiness, I found myself thinking about how one of my teachers at Columbia, Richard Locke, spoke about Nabokov. I would always ask Professor Locke how is that Nabokov is so £*$&!*&$ amazing. His answer was that Nabokov was a master of combining pity and delight. And so in the best, most incredible moments of ATWCTTE, you’re totally buzzed on the language, the humor, the inventiveness—delight—and then Ferris will hit you with the revelation of some profound frailty in one of his characters. Those juxtapositions produce a lot of wow moments in the book. I totally agree with a lot of people that this book could have been trimmed like 100 pages, but read it, it’s worth it.

I’m one of the world’s laziest readers, I’m always starting books and then not finishing them, so a book has to do a lot for me to stick with it. These were my wow moments in reading for the last year, but I’m always open to suggestions.

And for all the DeLillo nerds out there (I can’t be the only one), Ferris’s title is the very first sentence of DeLillo’s debut novel, Americana. Neat homage!