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.

Picture Monday: on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum

Ode to Bryant Park

Central Park is for weekend warriors, rollerbladers, ramblers. Prospect Park is where mad Olmstead's vision found it's full flourish. You are the park of the corporate citizen. The great green heart in a sharply delineated empire of shiny boxes.

Bryant Park, Friday, 1:15 PM 6/6/08

See white-shirted men flip their ties over their shoulders and squint at their Blackberries from 1:14 to 1:54. Glossy-haired women in slim, neutral colored skirts and alligator slingbacks throw their heads back and laugh. Oh, gotta go, another project to manage, pencil to push.
You are a patch of land we can stake our claim on for an hour or less. You defy the ring of skyscrapers with your flat expanse of green. Your lions guarding reams of paper valuable only to the bookish and anachronistic.


You are completely wi-fi enabled, which means that completely invisible to the naked eye, the trees and posting updates to www.bryantpark.org that say: "The lawn is closed. It is resting after a major event" and your human inhabitants are soundlessly running algorithms that will surely help them crack the quest for true love.
You are the place where, in my youthful adventurousness as a camera assisant, I floated high above the tree line on a crane. Basically, we were going to start tight on a mitten that was lying on your sidewalk. When a delicate woman’s hand entered the frame, the crane would begin its graceful arc, pulling back to follow the woman as she walked away from camera and towards the opposite side of the park. The cameraman and I, strapped to the end of the long crane arm, would then start our ascent, up to above the trees, where I was to quickly rack focus the on the glowing Chrysler Building in the distance. Today I looked up at the top of your trees and thought that they must have grown in the past few years.
Today I wandered through the flocks of watchers. Those of us who come here after work to watch movies like Hud and Superman, or during, to glaze over among the masses. To feel like our lives are intersecting, even when they aren't, and in the middle of the grid, to gaze on something alive.

The revolution will not have a Facebook page

It’s like it’s 1997 again, said one of the industry vets I was having lunch with at the IAB Social Media and User Generated Content Conference on Monday. If that’s the case, I want to know, where’s my ping-pong table? Why can’t I have a margarita machine in my office? Where is the launch party and, more importantly, my stock options?

Let’s face it, this is 2008. I’m not a millionaire on paper or anywhere else except the land called make-believe. Friendster, once the boon of noncommittal urban hipsters is now relegated to popularity only among Pilipino teenagers, and your grandmother has a Facebook page. Is social media the next big thing? In case you do not have the time or the cash to attend such an event, here is a summary of the day’s events:

Keynote: Seth Goldstein of Social Media

He talked about the social media challenge, how volume is up and effectiveness is down, but what struck me the most was how he mentioned his wife had come up with the term “social media” a couple years ago and they registered the URL. Which just goes to show you that when picking a mate, whimsical brilliance can go just as far as sheer dollars and cents in terms of net worth. Try to shack up with someone who thinks of good ideas and registers those domains, as your beloved may be in possession of the next google.com type idea!

It's All About Performance.... Isn't It?, with a bunch of people from DoubleClick BuzzLogic and AvenueA Razorfish

I love it when marketers talk about harnessing the power of the social media frontier. They are herding cats, as it were. That’s not the right expression exactly. What’s the term for taking a giant grass-roots movement and when your brand happens to come up, acting like you’ve influenced it? David-and-Goliathism? When David is the marketers and Goliath is the user base? There’s an anarchic side of me that loves this—that if you were in a pessimistic mood, you could say that marketing is in everything, or if you’re a believer in the social media space, you could say that people are taking control of brands from marketers.


Consumer Panel with Ideas to Go

Couple of things that I noticed here: focus groups are always funny. This was a group of so-called “creative consumers” who are impaneled by a group called Ideas to Go. They are like these strange animals, these people who do not work in marketing. They are seventeen year olds worth being flown out to sit on a stage in front of two hundred puzzled marketers in suits. The company had them list “social medias” that they consume. The moderator seemed like a sort of actor who rolled big, jargony words around on his tongue.

Facebook workshop

Again, I sat there wondering—are these marketers really creating phenomena on social media sites, or at they witnessing phenomena and then claiming credit? There was a dude who markets Proctor and Gamble brands like Tide with public outreach efforts like one called “Loads of Hope.” You can buy a hipsterish ironic t-shirt with a retro Tide logo and all proceeds with go to New Orleans, where presumably laundry detergent money washes away all sorrows. I was thinking there’s so little brand differentiation among detergents—they are all bright boxes with splashy comic book-like lettering—that it seems a bit of a lost cause to try and stand out. Yeah, it may be cool to wear your retro Tide shirt, but does that really make anyone think about the brand? I wasn’t sold on it.

There are days I long to escape to a land with no marketing in it. What would such a world look like? Is it a magical place in Canada that you can only reach by dogsled? And can you give me some directions?

5 Boro Bike Tour: Astoria Park

Astoria Park, originally uploaded by Brooklyn Bridge.

Picture Monday: Top Secret Attack Band in Prospect Park

IMG_0185, originally uploaded by Brooklyn Bridge.

A great day in Brooklyn

New House Passover reunion 2008

When I first arrived in New York, I sublet a room the size of a twin bed in a fifth-floor walkup tenement flat just south of Washington Square Park. I hated it, could touch both walls with my fingers at once, but like much else in my life at the time, I was too complacent to do anything about it. In my seven years living there, I grew convinced through observation that if you split MacDougal Street down the middle, there would be rings and rings of the same kind of tacky decadence going back two hundred years. When Edgar Allen Poe did his time on West 3rd St., he must have been slumming, pounding his head against his garret wall at all of the drunks and out-of-towners, clogging up the sidewalk and going: “Wither thou a good plate of spaghetti?” Dylan and the Beats were easier to picture, cheap bastards trawling MacDougal Street for a fast drunk in tack city.

Finally, I let myself be kicked out of that apartment and landed in the least likely place: a collective house in Brooklyn. A commune. And there was subsumed in the topsy-turvy feeling of sharing intimacies you would not share with a lover, four falling down floors of a crumbling brownstone, six grown-ups, one child, no locks, poor boundaries. We played this game of trying to recognize the footsteps of people coming down the stairs. I ran. They told me I always ran.

Even accepting the sacrifices that were required to live in that place, when we were forced to wear heavy coats while playing poker huddled around the kitchen table in the dead of winter, plumes of hot breath visible in the air, there was this tangible sense of something meaningful that assuaged the solitary self that I left behind me.

I remember one night early on during my stay there, Mars orbiting close, all of us clamored to the roof. Among five other bodies strewn across the expanse of black pitch and looking for the red planet, closer now than it had ever been in 60,000 years, I was floating down to earth, finally coming to rest.

I've moved on but every year go back for Passover, a messy/delicious improvised celebration with this family that I found there, these people who have become my family.

How is this house different from all other houses? I don't know how to put it into words exactly. You'd have to see it for yourself.

Highway 1: An Appreciation

A love for small-scale character-drive auterist masterpieces was not born in me at NYU film school. That happened much earlier, thanks to my late father, who introduced me to Raging Bull at age ten (whoa) and later, Clint Eastwood's directorial debut, Play Misty For Me.

Amazingly enough, American independent film wasn't born in a convenience store in New Jersey, or even in Austin, TX. No, way back in 1971, Clint and co. scrapped together the financing for this 16mm production which made incredible use of location photography in Carmel-by-the-Sea, including passages of the famous Highway 1. Still worth a spot on your Netflix queue, Play Misty for Me is a suspenseful precursor to Fatal Attraction with Clint as a late-night DJ stalked by an obsessed fan.

Things to do in Philly when you're English

My English coworker Tom asked me the other day what's so great about Philadelphia. Well, the sixth borough of New York has got a lot going for it. Throw down twenty bucks in Chinatown, and within a couple of hours, here are all the wonderful things you can experience:

1. The Philadelphia Art Museum. Yes, it's something of a rite of passage to bound up those steps, Rocky-like, and triumphantly gaze over the whole of the city of brotherly love.

2. The Mutter Museum. A total heebie-jeebie fest, this Victorian medical museum houses body parts in formaldehyde, skeletons, and other disturbing remnants of medicine before doctors, like, knew anything about disease.

3. Hoagies. Back when I was a student at Simon's Rock, there was a weekly institution at the dining hall called "Hoagie Day." The blend of cold-cuts, shredded iceberg lettuce, oil and vinegar, and fluffy bread ensured that this was my favorite day of the week. Well, every day is hoagie day in Philly. All the focus on cheesesteaks may unfairly overshadow this deserving Philly invention. The go-to spot is Sarcone's.

4. Cheesesteaks. You go to the corner where Geno's and Pat's duke it out to see the rivalry for yourself. But don't try to start an argument about which cheesesteak is best in Philly. That's like trying to prove the existence of God.

5. Reading Terminal Market. Have you noticed how many of these reasons are about food? That's because Philly has insanely concentrated areas of foodie delights, including Reading Terminal Market and the Italian Market, so if you are still hungry after all those cheesesteaks and hoagies, you can hook up with some gourmet provisions.

6. The BYOB restaurant phenomenon. I don't really understand this, but I guess Philly has worse blue laws than NYC. So you can tote your own bottle to a schmancy restaurant like Matyson. The boon of broke gourmands everywhere.

7. Cheap real estate and cheap beer. Need I say more?

I was so enchanted by Philly on my last visit that I was inspired to begin a novel about a 30ish ne'er-do-well chef named Charlie Pepper, who takes his English girlfriend to Philly over Christmas to break up with her. You can see more about my irrational love for Philadelphia by checking out that first chapter here.

For the time being, though, Philadelphians, I salute you.

Picture Monday: Sometimes, you've just got to say...

Another pic from the Flux Factory opening on Friday night, but useful in so many situations.

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.

I read the news today oh boy

When I first came to New York, more than ten years ago, it was a bad time to be a writer, an artist, any sort of creative person. A democrat was in the White House, the economy was booming, and crime hadn’t been so low since 1964. It was difficult to walk down the street without a venture capitalist hitting you with a sack of money. Recent college grads were landing jobs with fat stock options and titles like “Director of Advanced Mixology” and “Imagineer.” You could become a millionaire playing around on the internet in pajamas.

Even I couldn’t help but be touched by the boom. I sent a fake writing sample to some start-up called imaposeur.com or something, and got a call a few weeks later: how would you like 200 bucks to write a column? Sure. How would you like to write the lead feature of our launch issue? Sipping champagne on each level of the three-level launch party in a loft downtown, I was drunk on power. Those were different times. Who’d want toil for ten obscure years on some work of staggering genius when you could be an Imagineer, have your own office with a margarita machine? Why would you want to write about suffering when you could get a dollar a word for writing a feature about natural deodorant or slacks made out of organic cotton? We were all a little stunned then, what with being hit by the sacks of money and everything.

Of course, things have changed. Terrorism, blackouts, war, recession. Is it the 1970s again? Maybe. Alls I know is that every day NPR wakes me up with another scary warning about the economy falling apart, and at least I know one thing: I don’t have to worry about somebody luring me away from my dark garret with promises of untold riches and incredible stock options.

Go totally B & T

I grew up in the West, home of wide-open spaces, orange groves and concrete jungles. What enchanted me most about New York was its verticality—the way everything was stacked up, layer upon layer, the stories of a family friend who described his relatives making pasta in tiny Little Italy tenements by stretching the dough across starched white sheets. Everywhere you looked—and places where you didn’t—there was so much history.

My first few years in New York, I got to see the city as a member of various film crews, fanning out from Queens to Brighton Beach to the Village, everywhere searching for the perfect location to capture the malaise of a perpetual grad student, an inspiring sunrise, or a scary dark alley. In my mind, I could never stray from the deep canyons of lower Manhattan, where I hoofed it from river to river, hardly ever taking the subway or cab. That is, until I got a film job at the St. Augustine Church on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn.

I’d never been so enchanted before; this landmark block of leafy trees and row houses, towering spires in the distance, and the sound of the church bells filtering down. So when, two or three years, I had an opportunity to move into this totally ramshackle brownsone shared with two other women, three men and a child, just a few doors down from the magnificent St. Augustine with her beautiful spires, I took it as a sign. Except I didn’t, not exactly. For this, I would have to leave the vertical density of the city and accept a different kind of life in Brooklyn.

Certainly, if I had secret hippie proclivities, if I enjoyed strumming a guitar over vegetarian goulash, practicing free love, or not having to shave my legs, it might have come more naturally to me, this quasi-commune thing. It would be easier to explain, at least.

The church bells rang each day, the sound filtering through the house, four floors of hardwood, huge closets, sturdy banisters. Where we might intersect in the shared kitchen, impromptu dinner parties or late-night poker games where we wrapped ourselves in blankets to combat the cold. We’d play host to people passing through, musicians, radical puppeteers, organic farmers. This was a big change for me, the space, the camaraderie, the compromise. But as I adapted to life amongst so many others, I learned to make it work, coming out on the other side, a different sort of person.