Monday, November 17, 2008

Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan went straight home from our meeting and wrote an article about negotiating with the leaders of the Taliban. Hmm.

• Posted at 8:25 PM · LINK

Food, Glorious Food

I often cruise restaurant review boards, not so much for the food info as the sheer drama of the arguments. It's fun to see people debate something as inconsequential as where to get the best veal marsala...and it can give you insight into the illogical ways in which some people bicker. You can observe the same silly tricks of evasion and myopia that they then apply on other forums to mud-wrestle over important stuff like abortion, guns, Iraq or Best Episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

People really like to argue food. Someone once told me, and I think it's true, that the best way to get information on a restaurant chat board is not to ask a question but to start a brawl. Let us say you'll be travelling to Jerkwater, Alabama and you want to know where to get great ribs. You will learn little if you just post a query that says, "Hey, could someone suggest some good places to get ribs in Jerkwater?" Instead, you should do the following. Google "Jerkwater AND ribs" and get the name of any rib joint in the area. Let's say it's Murray's BBQ. Then under some anonymous handle, you post, "Had dinner the other night at Murray's. Boy, that's the best 'Q within a hundred miles of Jerkwater and anyone who'd eat ribs anywhere else is an idiot with no taste."

That will get you plenty of insults but it'll also get you plenty of recommendations.

Another thing that amuses me is that there is little recognition that restaurants can vary from day to day, meal to meal, even hamburger to hamburger. If you write from the heart, "Rosie's Cafe is great. I had the best hamburger of my life there," someone will feel the need to debate this. It will be like, "That's ridiculous. I had a hot turkey sandwich three years ago at Rosie's that was terrible." People like to believe that their favorites are consistently good and that once a restaurant has done wrong, it cannot possibly do right.

A subset of that is something I call The Latka Rule. It flows from the widespread belief among us Jews that the way your mother made potato pancakes is the only correct way to make potato pancakes, and that all future potato pancakes you encounter are to be judged not on their own merits but as to how much or how little they deviate from The Way Mom Made Them. In truth, you can apply this to any kind of food, even when your mother was a lousy cook. But her goal was always correct...so if she put American Cheese atop your tuna noodle casserole, then a tuna noodle casserole with, say, Cheddar is just wrong.

Lastly, one thing that has always fascinated me about restaurant discussions is that while people can debate anything edible, there are seven categories that seem to draw blood. Those seven are...

1. Hamburgers
2. Pizza
3. Chinese Food
4. Barbecue (ribs, especially)
5. Philly Steak Sandwiches
6. Hot Dogs
7. Clam Chowder

People do quarrel over where to get the best Prime Rib or Tostadas but they do so in a civil and calm manner. These seven seem to bring out the shrill and vituperative disagreements.

Sometimes, pronouncements are geographic — the only decent pizza is in New York, you can't get a good hot dog outside Chicago, etc. Debates about Philly Steak Sandwiches usually start with the understanding that the best are in Philadelphia and then they diverge into sub-topics (Where in Philly? Anywhere outside of Philly worth a mention? And what about Cheez Whiz?) Just outside Los Angeles, there's a community called Monterey Park that is famous for a cluster of superior and authentic Chinese Restaurants. There are Angelenos who will karate-chop you if you suggest that any Chinese Food from anywhere but Monterey Park is fit for human consumption.

The Great Clam Chowder Controversy is probably the most interesting one. I have seen death threats hurled over the question of white versus red, let alone where one might procure the finest of either. Years after we finally bury the issue of race in this country, foodies will still be wrestling with that color question.

I was going to end this by posting my list of places I like in L.A. for the above seven but I got enough hate mail during the recent election. So let us all live in peace. Let us link hands, respect our divergences of opinion and recognize that just as people are different, tastes are different and there is no right or wrong answer to any of this. And then let's go beat the crap out of anyone who thinks Vito's on La Cienega doesn't make the best pizza in Los Angeles. Thank you.

• Posted at 8:13 PM · LINK

Fits, Fights, Feuds and Egos

Revivals of Gypsy are like cab drivers who don't speak English: You can almost always find one coming or going in Times Square. The latest, starring Patti LuPone as the maniacal Mama Rose, will close soon but Carolyn and I got to see it Saturday night and had a very good time, indeed. It really is an expertly crafted work with many a show-stopping tune and an overall unity of purpose that tells a strong, emotion-laden tale. This version reportedly recreates most of the original Jerome Robbins staging as well as the original orchestrations (which, I somehow only recently learned, were done in part by John Kander). The cast is generally solid so it pretty much comes down to a matter of Mama. A production of Gypsy is only as good as its Rose.

So how's Patti? Pretty wonderful, I'd say but with one quibble. Her Mama Rose is ruthless, unsentimental and all too human in an inhuman way. I saw a semi-professional production once in which the actress playing Rose — the woman who practically tortures her daughters in becoming stars so she can live vicariously through them — wanted us to love her. She kept winking (not literally) at the audience, as if to say, "You know I'm only doing this for their own good" and softening every rotten thing she could soften about Mama. To her credit, Patti LuPone does none of that. I am not discounting the possibility that the play's author, Arthur Laurents, who staged this production is largely reponsible...but the point is that Mama Rose, as played by LuPone, is every bit the monster her makers intended her to be. Which is the only way the story really works.

She also succeeds in something that I always thought was the Catch-22 of Mama Rose: The role calls for a big, huge musical comedy star who can come out and belt out the best Broadway tunes and send shivers up our spines...but still convince us that she's a woman who could never have been a star herself. I never saw Ethel Merman play the role but she always seemed to me like perfect casting. Merman was a big, huge Broadway star who looked nothing like a big, huge Broadway star. One of several reasons the movie version never worked for me is that you look at Rosalind Russell and you see this tall, glamorous woman of accomplishment and breeding, and it's like Warren Beatty trying to play a guy who can't get laid. Ms. Russell just can't convince me she's an uneducated broad who's fighting her way out of poverty and failure, desperate for her first taste of success.

Patti LuPone obviously is a star with all the equipment to be a star...but she pulls off that sleight-of-hand. For 2 hours and 45 minutes of misdirection, she fulfills the demands of a star while making you believe she herself could never be one. Amazing.

So what's my quibble? You may think this is silly but even though we had great seats (fifth row, center aisle), I couldn't understand an awful lot of what she said.

Impressionists do Patti LuPone mumbling her way through numbers, slurring dialogue and being generally unintelligible. It's not true all the time but if I didn't know this show fairly well, I wouldn't have been able to make out about a fourth of what came out of her mouth. That's not fatal because not only do I know it, but I think most of the audience could recite much of the dialogue and all of the lyrics by heart...and I guess if you didn't know the material, there's still more than enough there to savor. But you'd also be frustrated because what you could comprehend seemed so perfect and you'd wonder what you were missing. It's a shame they can't have the whole stage closed-captioned or something.

As I said, that's a quibble. If you're thinking of going before it closes, don't let that stop you, even if you don't have the play memorized. And if you do miss it, don't worry. Another revival of Gypsy will be along before you know it. I'm guessing either Rosie O'Donnell, Liza Minnelli or everyone's favorite...Harvey Fierstein in drag. Hey, ya gotta get a gimmick.

• Posted at 12:06 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Direct from the convention I attended over the weekend, here's historian (and writer and videographer) Mike Catron exploring the uncanny breach of comic books and politics with Marvel legends John Romita and Roy Thomas...

• Posted at 12:04 AM · LINK