From Streetcars To Spaceships

The real New York, in one tidy package.

So, I'm in the middle of using up yet another day of my life formatting the newest edition of the Native's Guide to New York. This is just rebreaking lines for the copies to send out to book stores, which means that I'll be doing this all over again in a few weeks one last time before slapping on an ISBN and finally bringing the "serious" editions to press. That having been said, I cannot begin to say how sick I am of those little pages of text. Once you've read and revised anything this many times, it's like tearing out your own fingernails to work on the damn thing.

But it does remind me of something that I'm going to write up for the next serious revision. If you're ever going to be in New York for a day with a couple of friends and want a real cross section of authentic New York food, forget every place you've ever heard of and get on the 1 train. Take it to 231st and get off. Right under the tracks is a classic New York diner, though these days they sell Mexican, too. A block over to the west is a huge Italian deli that can give you all you need in the way of pizza, heros, and the like. (And they sell a full selection of Manhattan Special. WIN!) Along that strip and on Broadway in the few blocks north you can get Dominican, New York Chinese, and pretty much the whole set. You want to hit a greasy, dark, Irish neighborhood bar? You're good. You want to shop for African crafts? No sweat. You want some gorgeous 1800's churches? Easy peasy. You've even got Riverdale from Archie Comics starting about five blocks away. Feel free to take the Number 10 bus north past the highway stretch and you'll get all the kosher pizza and real New York deli you can handle.

If you want to see places you've heard of and that they talk about on the television shows, then fine, go to Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty and the frackin' World Trade Center site.

But especially if you've got enough folks with you to be able to hit a dozen places in one shot and buy food in all of them, especially if you've only got one day, if you want to see the real New York as New Yorkers live it, screw Manhattan, get up to the Bronx, walk around one little area you've never heard of, and you've all that you need.

You're welcome.

-Rustin

The correct way to eat cabbage.

I just LOVE sauerkraut. But afaic, to be appreciated properly, it must be taken to Version 2.

Slice yellow onions thin and brown over low heat, ideally in butter, generously adding caraway seeds as you go.

Take conventional sauerkraut and add to onions.

Add large dollops of Kosciusko mustard (there is no substitute) and a sweet white wine.

Cook over low heat, keeping liquid down. If necessary, reduce the liquid in a separate saucepan.

If desired (and it should always be desired) brown small randomly cut chunks of a sharp sausage over medium heat with more caraway seeds. Add this sausage to the rest of the transcendent mixture.

Serve over egg noodles that have been generously garnished with chopped parsley. If desired, cook the noodles with a small amount of fresh-ground black pepper added to the water. Butter can also be added to the noodles before they are served.

Eat with gusto.

And with more sausage.

Repeat.

Stride purposely in cold, windy weather for miles under a heavy load so as to burn off meal and be ready to do it again as soon as possible.

Repeat.

 

About all those "Portland" lifestyle trends…

So I see that yet another group of "New Yorkers" is getting snotty about these "new" more sane and sustainable ways of living by calling them just "college life in the pacific northwest".

Pissants.

Here's where the stupid has now gathered.

Normally this is a wonderful web site. But on this one the idjits have risen to storm levels and well overflowed the levees of reasoned analysis. These people are so deep into the depths of the Sea of Moron that they are citing Portlandia as a way to figure out life in Portland. Television, kids. Fiction. Really.

So I wrote a simple little response. Note please that being a REAL native New Yorker, raised by real New Yorkers, I had the discipline to take out all the curse words that I kept wanting to include. I would like to think that the ghost of my cigar-smoking, fiercely political and analytical grandfather (yes, he really did typically say "toity-toid and toid") would have thought all the same monosyllabic additions and been enough of a German intellectual to take them right back out again.

My post:

Speaking as a one-time fourth generation Manhattanite (over 35 years in NYC) who now lives in Portland, folks, some of us were backing NON-gentrification forms of this right in New York's poorer neighborhoods back in the freaking SEVENTIES. So would you please stop, catch your breath, and accept that urbanism, density, and "edge" are in no way contrary to "green" ideas, sustainability, or inexpensive craft/DIY business.

The Gaia Institute was doing rooftop plantings in Morningside Heights in the 80's. A few blocks from the pioneer greenmarket on Amsterdam and 103rd. Which wasn't too far from the "rooftop beekeeper" whose honey was being sold locally well before any such ventures got going on the left coast. Local chickens from known sources? We always had those. Local eggs, too. My mother always bought both at a place in Harlem. Though she had them kill and butcher the bird, unlike many of the other customers, who having grown up in places like Jamaica and Puerto Rico, wouldn't even consider buying a dead bird, let alone one chopped up and wrapped in plastic.

All, mind you, surrounded by community gardens, locally run, low cost theater and micropublishing, and "world fusion" cuisine. I could find all of this near my apartment at 97th and Amsterdam while Carter was president so, if anything, I was sad to see it fade away. And moved west mostly to be part of the next round.

I still miss the smell and vibration of the printing plants of the west 20's and east 50's where I used to work and where many New Yorkers had their short-run printing done cheap and fast. And the "artisan" midtown leather shops like the one my uncle Abe worked in. And the "scratchbuilders" I used to hang out with at Polk's on 31st. And later at the machine shops and supply shops on Lafayette and Fulton and Canal who were always so helpful to us young, self-taught prototypers and craftspeople.

If denigrating these trends by calling them "too Portland" gives y'all such joy then, hey, have a day. I'm sitting here in a $500 a month, 800 square foot, 12' ceiling loft space and somehow enduring the pain of all this "Portlandness" even if I do have to tolerate "nice" people, clean sidewalks, and visible sky. And I can see how that offends you. But I'll keep thinking of these trends as things I first saw and became part of on the 70's Upper West Side and wonder just when you out-of-towners evidently new to the city will buy yourselves some clue.

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So that's it. That's what I wrote. What I didn't say (much) was how predictably this kind of chowderheaded trash is typical of ignorant dingbats, fresh from some expensive liberal arts college somewhere in Ohio or wherever and eager to show how now that they've been in "the city" for a few months they are real New Yorkers and have that appropriately "real" new York contempt for things like civility, plants, a visible sky, or anything else that wouldn't get ample screen time in the cop shows and gang life fantasies that they eagerly and religiously studied for years to "learn all about" NEW. YORK. CITY.

Well, let me tell you clueless little dipshits how it is. New York is harsh and expensive and difficult. And oh, by the way, teaches those of us smart enough and strong enough to be able to handle it a very sophisticated sense of esthetics and appropriate behavior. And those of us who are really good at it find ways to live such lives without vast salaries or slavish adherence to whatever trash the fashion magazines are trying to sell this hour.

It's a shame that you're not up to the job yet of seeing how things like rooftop gardens are actually very New York and always have been. Most of you are probably too microbrained to ever figure this out. But I look forward to the day that some of you grow up (five or six years in New York should be a good start) and I enjoy the knowledge that you will then look back, remember the childish contempt you had for these things before, and be ashamed.

Punks. 

Bob's Red Mill leads the way again.

In 1970 mechancial engineer Robert Moore and his wife moved to Milwaukie, Oregon with the intent of retiring, studying the bible, and living a more spiritual life. Like many other people at the time, they explored healthier foods and Bob got interested in stone-ground grains. Interested enough that he set up his own little mill. You know, just as a hobby.

Thirty years later Bob's Red Mill is a leader in stone ground flours, cereals, and, overall, over 400 hundred products. All created and sold by a little over 200 employees and still, despite considerable setbacks, in MIlwaukie, Oregon. Estimates suggest that his little post-retirement project may now be worth something like fifty million dollars.

Well, yesterday was Bob's birthday and he made an amazing announcement. He's giving the company to his employees. He's setting up an employee stock ownership plan and everybody who has been there three years or more is fully vested as of today.

It would appear that it's not just at software companies that a normal, hardworking person can take and hold a normal, everyday job and wake up one day with stock worth more than their house.

Milwaukie City Councillor Susan Stone said, "What a wonderful 81st birthday present from Bob to his loyal employees! Bob is one of the good guys! I think it's a smashing idea!"

I couldn't agree more.

Like fellow Milwaukie company, Dark Horse Comics, Bob's Red Mill has made honest products they can be proud of, stuck to their plan, and never tried to get by with copying what the megacorps told us was what we wanted, and as a result have persisted, thrived, and made a better world for all of us.

Here's to Bob. Here's to his employees. And here's to Milwaukie, Oregon for fostering yet again a company that we can all be proud of.

Some things are so huge that words really don't encompass them.

I'm having a lot of trouble these days trying to encompass a profoundly important trend within a repeatable phrase. Or even just a few pages of approachable text. Not doing so well, I've got to tell you.

Something vast is happening right now. After several hundred years of design engineering built around adding function through ever increasing complexity some of us are moving to a subtler, wiser paradigm of functionality brought closer to some functional ideal through things like further optimization of proportion, materials choice and simplification.

Our computers and cars show where we have been. Each year there are more parts per car, more lines of code per application, more expensive and scarce materials to increase speed, decrease fuel usage.

A Flip video camera gives us a taste of new ways of doing things, providing a better user experience at much lower cost through unrelenting simplification, fewer parts, fewer functions, and simple, transparent design.

Are we perhaps, as a civilization, finally ready go grow past our nouveau riche adolescence into a way of living characterized by doing fewer things well rather than ever more things more flamboyantly?

For a hundred years we have told and read stories of elder races who live lives of beauty with minimal but flawlessly designed possessions, of disciplined grace, in close relations with the living beings surrounding them. Lives that accept a certain degree of vulnerability that comes from that connectedness but also achieve a degree of awakeness and capability from that same interrelated way of being.

Maybe, after this past hundred years or so, we're finally ready to explore what it will take to head towards that way of living rather than just conceding the high ground to fictional elves and fairies and dome-headed space aliens.

I really do hope so.

So I see that Whole Foods is even more distasteful than I had thought.

The CEO has again been spewing his pseudo-libertarian trash again. This time in opposition to the Obama health plan. Guy's awfully full of opinions. Shame that his judgment matters. Seems to me that it's up to us to minimize the power of that judgment.

I have found Whole Foods viscerally distasteful from the first time I set foot in one. Even aside from their "recent" move to stock more junk food, they were always heavy on melamine fixtures when they could have used wood or otherwise hired local craftspeople, they have always have a broader selection of disposable plates and otherwise consumption society oriented self-indulgences than even stores like Food Emporium that made no such claims to social responsibility, and, as we all know, they always had a vibe of supreme entitled contempt for the barriers that their prices create. While others moved to light pipes and skylights and explored LED fixtures, they "championed" compact fluorescent, both as used in their stores and for sale, that they of all people had the resources to understand were an ecological and social disaster waiting to happen. This doesn't even begin to get into local issues like their predatory approach to our regional Pacific Northwest markets. Like Walmart and Exxon and Microsoft, they "justify" their attacks as "only fair" and "just business". Well, to hell with them.

As far as I'm concerned they've never been any more than a yuppie palace for the entitled to do no better than protect themselves from perceived risks to their personal health while turning their backs on the great majority of the population who they were quite pleased to see kept on the other side of those gleaming doors.

I'm not going to rant against Whole Foods at great length. Plenty of others have. I have avoided them this whole time and have made no secret of it. And, no doubt, at some point I will choose by circumstance to buy something there due to time pressures or avoiding arguments with others.

Or maybe not. I've never yet bought so much as a pair of socks at Walmart. I have endured considerable discomfort and cost to avoid other chains.

So yeah, in theory, the day may come that I set foot on one of their plastic simulations of a responsible store again. But not willingly.

I call anathema on them. I wish upon them bankruptcy and dissolution and humiliation.

And first, and foremost, the latest action by their senior decision maker reminds me once again that we must remember to stick to the simple things we speak of. Grow food yourself. Help others to do the same. Buy unprepared foods and prepare them yourself; then share that food with friends. Buy local. Cut your consumption. Barter. Take seriously the task of structuring your life to become one in which the temptation to do business with these creatures is minimal.

Get an energy-efficient standing freezer if you have the room and buy fresh-frozen local foods in bulk. Instead of buying prepared foods from the big chains get things like locally made prepared foods. Personally, I've had a rough few weeks and it would have been a lot harder without things like locally made frozen steam buns, pelmeni, and so on. My steamer and I are great friends. And my wallet appreciates the relationship.

Do not waste your energies in open conflict with these creatures if you can possibly avoid it. Just withdraw and help us build healthy lives in which they have no part.

In. Which. They. Have. No. Part.

Don't buy from them, recommend them, or, if you possibly can, work for them. Don't "compromise".

Just walk away.

-Rustin

Shame about all those highway deaths.

Funny, we've got all these studies about our dangerous roads, especially crowded highways, because of texting, alcohol and drugs, fatigue, and so on. I read the articles and they suggest remedies. More laws. More cops. More signage. More checkpoints. Wider highways. Cutting down all the trees to clear the sightlines. Driver training. Sorry, but I look at those and think "what the hell are they doing in cars in the first place?" Mass transit addresses all of these, ya know.

I've taken plenty of forms of mass transit so f*cked up that I could barely see. Tired, drunk, distracted. Never seen any of that affect the safety of the vehicle yet.

All of this, I might add, applies just fine to cabs and jitneys. How many cabs could we subsidize to what degree to keep drunk drivers off the roads and have it cut net costs for a given city?

Do I sound snotty? Yeah, I guess that I do. But as far as I can see, this is yet another case of "normal" Americans who live in a way that results in vast processions of deaths, cripplings, torturous pain, and billions upon billions of dollars of costs but even when confronted with all of this they can talk about it for years and shake their heads disapprovingly and suggest yet more spending and never once even consider that maybe instead of more subsidies and more police state tactics, maybe the rational answer is TO STOP DOING THIS THING THAT KEEPS KILLING PEOPLE.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Old 1920's shorts used to treat it as a given that the drunk guy in the Betty Boop or Keystone Kops or whatever film would then shamble off and get on a trolley. A simple, safe (compared to cars) trolley that would then deliver said drunk person to a location a few blocks from their door. This was just obvious common sense with technology we had by 1915. If you think that we can't cost-effectively do it now well, I don't even know what to say.

Oh, right. Yes, I do.

Go play in traffic.

-Rustin

Daily life, daily joys.

I just got back upstairs from one of my periodic post-midnight walks around the East Village. My body stays on west coast time so I do plenty of drifting about in the early hours whenever I’m back in New York.

After an hour or so of meandering, some time sitting on the Cooper Union steps, and a bit of a walk I drifted back to my friend’s place. Before heading up I stopped at the deli around the corner and picked up some toilet paper, a roll of paper towels, a Manhattan Special, and four jars of Kosciusko (to ship west, natch). I get to the counter and chat with the guy there and as he’s getting ready to ring me up he asks, “so, you need a sandwich?” With, I might add, a friendly, helpful little smile. And I realize that he recognizes me. Because when I go by there I almost always get a sandwich (or three). But keep in mind, I only go there about fifteen times a year. This is the first time I’ve set foot there in at least four months. But he recognizes me and I recognize him.

And ya know what? I really treasure these things. It means a lot to me that the deli guy knows what I tend to get. That he pauses to chat, puts aside what he’s doing to discuss the day and what he thinks of the crowds and if anybody is likely to start a fight out front tonight. In some ways, no matter how many cities I live in, I am still very much a New Yorker and I guard my right to pass through my day in complete anonymity with implacable conviction. But the very idea of a life stripped of those little relationships, the meeting of eyes, the exchange of opinions and maybe even a small favor or two, seems to me to be arid and dead beyond all reason.

I truly believe that I live a life more suffused with beauty and peppered with shared moments of alliance and friendship than most people in America. And I am very well aware that this is largely because of the choices that I’ve made and continue to make every day. Every time a moment like this touches me, I’m reminded why all of our work to support community farms and small businesses and locally run schools is so very, very crucial. It may well be that nothing in our lives we do so helps us fight the Walmarts and Halliburtons of the world as much as the occasional thirty seconds we spend now and again holding the door for a guy delivering vegetables or watching the door for a few minutes in a thrift shop so the counterperson can use the bathroom in less of a rush.

And, at the end of the day, that makes us all feel better.

It was a good potluck BBQ at Watershed.

Sometimes it's enough just to see that we really are living years ahead of the yobs out there. Excellent cheap food and an ever-changing variety of tasty booze don't hurt either.

Is there still a Williamsburg?

Back when the G.I.s of World War II were still drifting back into civilian life in the late forties a bunch of smart fuckups, like a Columbia University football player named Kerouac, started hanging out in New York City. Going to jazz clubs, writing awkward but ambitious scraps of poetry. Drinking a hell of a lot and hanging out with young theater types like my mother. These men were the Beats. They created great work in amidst their drinking and screwing and thieving and lying. And little by little their wanderings got broader and their fame started to oppress them and, usually, their work got worse. Most of them died young of stupid destructive things like alcoholism and freezing on the train tracks, strung out on drugs. The kind of deaths that only seem romantic to those of you who have never had to share your home with a heroin addict and check your pants pockets each morning to make sure that nothing has been stolen.

But by the early fifties the Beats had inspired a hell of a lot of men and women from places like, say, St Joseph, Missouri. Men like my father who had maybe done a hitch or two in the army, hadn't grown up anywhere cool or hip, had stayed in school and gotten their degrees and were holding solid, respectable jobs. They started wearing lots of dark clothing, letting their hair get longer than was considered respectable, and went to poetry readings in dark basements in questionable neighborhoods. They dressed and talked and read the same things they believed the Beats did. These people came to be known as Beatniks and were thought of, with a certain validity, as latecomers to the party, people without the fierce creativity or commitment to living outside the system of the Beats but wanting that anti-establishment cool to rub off on them as they wore their black turtlenecks and snapped their fingers in approval - far too hip to do anything as crass as applauding. But only until midnight or so when they went home to be in bed early enough to be up at 8:00 and at work by 9:00.

Well, I can tell you that my mother, who was studying dance and listening to jazz by 1946, was, by 1985, about as esthetically leading edge as a Coke commercial while my father, the onetime gawky kid from Poverty Knob who was still wearing polyester plaid shirts from Montgomery Ward, was in Sri Lanka arguing about academic culture and sending me cards with a return address poste restante from wherever he next expected to able to pick up mail. Maybe.

Sometimes the kids from nowhere we dismiss as posers turn out to be the edgiest ones of all. Even the most inspiring.

I first started spending time in Williamsburg round about 1989 when I would drop by the loft a girl I knew shared in a barely habitable loft building. I still remember the cracked skylights, the paint-spattered splintery floors and nominal heat, and how absolutely abandoned the streets around there seemed. And while it took me quite a few years to get comfortable there, like the Lower East Side, eventually it came to be more of a home to me than the places I picked up my mail and paid rent ever could be.

But that Williamsburg is gone. Utterly. None of us will ever again be offered a cup of tea on a cold day by Amanda at Clovis Books. The crowd of clubgoers ordering burritos at one in the morning in the Mexican grocery a block from the L train is a thing of the past. Walking on a summer evening and discovering some temporary three thousand foot art space from the sound reaching the street just doesn't happen anymore. I miss those things and a hundred others. Almost as much as I miss the simple sensation of walking around on those nights juiced up just by the awareness that all of that was going on and there to be taken advantage of.

But maybe the posers and solid corporate citizens who have overrun what used to be our world aren't entirely useless. I haven't seen a good painting there in years but some of the industrial and graphic design out there is still damn good. Lucky Cat may not be what it was but when I grabbed a beer there a few months ago it still looked like a good place to spend a Saturday night and you can still head a few blocks down Grand and get late night Japanese food right off Bedford. JUNK has raised their prices enough to not be such a casual yes anymore but their selection is still massive and their dozens of semi-anarchic shadowy corners still conceal many a treasure.

What I'm trying to say is that while the vibrant, demanding, creatively fecund neighborhood that so many of us loved has undoubtedly been murdered by high real estate prices, Guilianiism, and the relentless blanding that media attention always creates, let's not be too quick to dismiss what is still there as a complete loss. If somebody who has never been to New York before says that they want to go off and see Williamsburg with the inevitably annoying glee of the newcomer, reign in your reflexive cool derision, explain Beacon's Closet, tell them to try the falafel near the subway entrance, and admit to yourself and them that there actually is still a good time to be had a stop or two past First Avenue.