Rockin’ around N.Y.C. (thanks to Marshall Crenshaw)

We are in New York for a short, post Christmas visit, and once again the great city casts its magical spells. My wife, in her typical display of brilliance, bought me a copy of E. B. White’s “Here is New York.” Now I know E.B. White mainly from studying the indispensable Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style,” a book that should still be considered required reading for all writers and speakers of our language (not that I consider myself in any way a paragon of either practice!). His “Here is New York” is a wonderful essay on the nature and character of New York City written during the sweltering summer of 1948. Whites prose is elegant and graceful and a joy to read, and while virtually none of the landmarks he discusses still exist it still felt to me like White touched the very heartbeat of America’s great city.


White writes about that great urban paradox of being alone in the crowd; “New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; better then the most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all the enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.” He also elucidates New York’s greatest gift to its admirers, the gift of possibility; “although New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness and forsakenness, it seldom seems dead or unresourceful; and you always feel that either by shifting your location 10 blocks or by reducing your fortune 5 dollars you can experience rejuvenation. Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of moral. In the country there are a few chances of sudden rejuvenation – a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless.”

White discusses the 3 types of New Yorkers, the natives, the commuters and third, the person “who was born somewhere else and came to New York in a quest for something.” He writes that it is “this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.”

Vivian Leigh said that when she got a script she looked for the key line of dialogue for her character, she felt that in a good script there would be a line that encapsulated the essence of her part, a line that best illuminated the character she was being asked to play. If New York City was a character my line will always be that great room in the Metropolitan Museum that is full of Rembrandt paintings. This large room says to me everything about NYC, if any other major museum has 2 or 3 Rembrandts, New York City is going to have a room full, wanna see Robert DeNiro do live theatre or Dustin Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman” or Kevin Spacey do Eugene O’Neill you gotta come to New York. In a way that is part of the character of New York City; bigger, better, best. When I first took my wife to New York we visited the MOMA, she was staggered to see one landmark painting after another, in room after room - art that she had seen a million times in books all in one place, that is New York City.

As we walked around New York City these few days I often thought of E.B. White’s New York; when I saw the slim young man standing in the subway engrossed in his reading of Tennessee Williams “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or when we ran into the fine actress Jennifer Carpenter (who plays Deb on the TV show “Dexter”) on a subway platform at midnight in Times Square. When I had a wonderful corned beef and pastrami sandwich at 10pm, during a blizzard at Juniors deli in Brooklyn. When we took a much needed lunch break (and escaped the insane crouds on 7th Ave.) at the elegant Warwick hotel in Manhattan. When we left the theatre (after seeing Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in the delightful musical “The Addams Family”) at around 11PM and found ourselves enveloped in the massive flow of people out and about in Times Square.

E. B. White wrote “A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, this heightening it meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life; all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt, the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residences but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushiest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the east River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing kings….”

Thank you New York, my life would be far less then it is if had not been touched by your greatness, grace and passion.

Food in Land of Plenty – a Holiday Essay on the (Un-Holy) Trinity

Being a lifelong fatso I find the subject of food is endlessly fascinating, and certainly no one can doubt that America (like me) has a somewhat warped relationship with food. Half the population is obsessed with the subject and study food labels like they were Holy Scriptures and the other half doesn’t give a shit and will eat anything put in front of them. Several weeks ago Lisa Miller wrote a fascinating piece in Newsweek examining the class divide around food called “Divided We Eat.” Ms. Miller examined 3 Brooklyn families and their approach to food and diet. One of her starting points was the fact that one of her subject families, obsessed with bestselling author Michael Pollan and his thesis regarding eating local and organic foods (the so called “locavore” movement), lived just 5 miles from families whose children went hungry. One of the more telling passages;


Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington, has spent his career showing that Americans’ food choices correlate to social class. He argues that the most nutritious diet—lots of fruits and vegetables, lean meats, fish, and grains—is beyond the reach of the poorest Americans, and it is economic elitism for nutritionists to uphold it as an ideal without broadly addressing issues of affordability. Lower-income families don’t subsist on junk food and fast food because they lack nutritional education, as some have argued. And though many poor neighborhoods are, indeed, food deserts—meaning that the people who live there don’t have access to a well-stocked supermarket—many are not. Lower-income families choose sugary, fat, and processed foods because they’re cheaper—and because they taste good. In a paper published last spring, Drewnowski showed how the prices of specific foods changed between 2004 and 2008 based on data from Seattle-area supermarkets. While food prices overall rose about 25 percent, the most nutritious foods (red peppers, raw oysters, spinach, mustard greens, romaine lettuce) rose 29 percent, while the least nutritious foods (white sugar, hard candy, jelly beans, and cola) rose just 16 percent.


This statement highlights the way cheap, unhealthy processed food has become blight on American culture, health and waistline. Another author, Dr. David Kessler has written brilliantly about the way food is carefully designed and processed in this country to make it inherently unhealthy and fattening. Kessler’s book “The End of Overeating” is a dazzling account of how the food industry carefully manufactures food that essentially promotes and exacerbates overeating. The use, by the food industry, of its unholy trinity of fat, sugar and salt has made Americans fatter by design. His interview with the creator of the Dorito is stunning. I actually went out a bought a small bag to experience the almost delicate pattern of unfolding flavors and textures and to understand how scientifically calculated they all were. While much of Dr. Kessler work centers around the fast food industry (an easy target) it is important to realize that these problems exist across the full spectrum of products found in the American grocery store.

I am certainly not trying to underplay individual responsibility in Americas obesity problem, but as anyone will tell you the abundance of cheap, fattening and unhealthy foods certainly makes healthy eating and dieting very difficult for millions of American fatsos, and the fact that the very thing that makes the quest for healthy eating so difficult is actually meticulously designed into the food we encounter every day is somewhat shocking.

Much was made of personal choices during the healthcare debate and how the American diet adds to the cost of medical care in this country, and I could not agree more, but let’s add a little corporate responsibility to that equation. Maybe as part of our healthcare system American needs to examine how food is processed, marketed and sold in this county, especially to children and the poor. This might do as much to elevate the health of our country as anything any insurance company or government agency is going to do.

Wishing you all a (reasonably) healthy holiday this year!



Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200

Once again I am reminded of the bizarro world as sketched out so brilliantly in the Seinfeld TV show, or better yet maybe it’s Wimpy from Popeye who will "gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today," either way we’re fucked!


The Republican Party, remember them - the party (largely supported by the Tea Party) who has been so strung out with deficit anxieties, fights Obama to the mat (believe me this was no heavyweight bout!) to maintain the Bush era tax cuts. The deal is that Democrats get an extension of unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut and the whole steaming pile of shit adds $900 billion directly to our deficit over the next two years.

To quote the New York Times yesterday:

The package would cost about $900 billion over the next two years, to be financed entirely by adding to the national debt, at a time when both parties are professing a desire to begin addressing long-term fiscal imbalances.

Our public debt orgy is often credited to the tendency of human nature to not address a problem until it absolutely has to, i.e. as long and the Chinese are willing to fund the orgy we will continue on, but I am not so sure it is as simple as that.

On a memorable Bill Moyers show back in 2004 Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to U.S. President Richard Nixon, argued that the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government." This unholy alliance between government and business interests (which can now count the Supreme Court in its club) must feel that when our drunken debt party ends and austerity hangover arrives they will not be touched by it. That remains to be seen, but make no mistake austerity is coming and it is going to be painful, but the plutocrats are certainly correct that austerity will be directed first and hardest on the poor and less fortunate in our society and they will be spared at least for a little while.

The phrase “no man is an island” kept coming back to me as I wrote this, the feeling that one cannot, no matter how much money and power you possess, fully or permanently insulate yourself from the pains of your fellow citizens. So I decided to find out the origin of that great aphorism, it is from John Donne (1572-1631);

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.