Frolic: jazz, books, food

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

27 November 2003

My boss shut down the office early Wednesday, so I started my journey out of Washington a few hours before the after work rush. I picked up a rental car at National Airport and joined the crawl of traffic moving west on I-66. After an hour of driving through the ever-expanding suburbs of D.C., I exited on to Rt. 29 and the speed of traffic increased. Around that point, I began picking up fewer radio stations concerned with the congressional budget and more programs occupied with the imminent end of the world. From what I heard, we’ve got about 20 or 30 years left.

In the middle of my journey, I stopped at Pete’s Park-n-Eat for an Italian sub and a chocolate milkshake. The uninformed masses eat their roadside snacks at McDonald’s across the street, but people in the know stop at Pete’s. While waiting for dinner, Chris called from Aspen to wish me a happy Thanksgiving. He said it was already snowing in Colorado.

Thanksgiving morning, while Andrea studied for finals, I cooked a few pies. Ricardo and Zoe had invited us to their house for Thanksgiving, which is a good place to go since they think about food as much as we do. Normally, I don’t care much for turkey, but they brined it following Alton Brown’s recipe and it was one of the best birds I’ve ever eaten. After a second of helping of sides and three slices of pie, all I’ve been able to do all night is sit on the couch and sip water.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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25 November 2003

At the lower end of Adams Morgan, L’Enfant Café serves humble French food, one of the rarest cuisines in American. In this country, we recognize that some occasions warrant multiple courses and heavy sauces, but we have a harder time understanding the need for a well made salad or a crêpe of gruyère on an ordinary evening. Andrea and I ate at L’Enfant Café Monday night, and the simple food and the almost French atmosphere was the ideal antidote to the rainy evening. Now that the weather has turned cold, I might go back for the boeuf bourguignon. If only this neighborhood restaurant were located in my neighborhood.

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23 November 2003

After work last Thursday I was too tired to buy groceries and cook, so I decided to go to Matchbox in Chinatown and order a plate of mini-burgers on brioche buns. I’m terrible about easedropping, so I couldn’t help but notice that the other patrons in Matchbox were talking about the last time they saw Bon Jovi or how high they got in the bathroom of a Rush concert. Aerosmith and KISS, I discovered, were playing later that night at the MCI Center around corner.

The personality of Chinatown changes nightly depending on what event is attracting which particular population from the suburbs to the MCI Center. That night, there were more denim jackets than normal and more kids stumbling drunk through the aisles of CVS. There was also a good showing of pudgy office workers ready to rock out.

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To do list:

Schedule an appointment at the Federal Reserve Board Gallery to see Complexity.

Catch jazz great Maynard Ferguson at Blues Alley.

Hear Paul Krugman read from The Great Unraveling Friday at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and become even more depressed about the state of the nation.

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21 November 2003

Other people’s prose:

The students are trying to go on strike over some educational reforms, but most seem apathetic about the whole thing. A couple of the strikers knocked on my door while I was trying my best to dispell stereotypes about Texas and announced that they were going to give a speech to the class about “the capitalist pillage of the planet.” “Allez-y,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, I regretted the whole thing. No respect, I thought. These young French wippersnappers have no respect for their professors. They tell me to me face, “this isn’t interesting. We want to play games.” Wow.

Russ Cobb writing about teaching in Paris on his blog This Paris Review.

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20 November 2003

Terry Teachout judged the non-fiction entries for the National Book Award this year and wisely voted to award the prize to a professor of Early Modern Spanish history. On his blog, About Last Night, he offers a glimpse of the awards ceremony for those who couldn’t afford the $1,000 a plate dinner.

It sounded like quite an elegant affair, which makes it hard for me to believe that it took place at the Marriott Marquis. For me, the Marquis will forever be associated with the MLA job interviews I suffered through in several of its rooms.

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Tina Brown, in her weekly Washington Post column, voices her concern about the plight of the modern-day mogul. The CEO, once a giant among men, is now just a fat guy in a suit bewildered by this newfangled digital age. For Brown, no simile is too stretched, no hyperbole too large to describe the fate of her regular dinner guests. The overpaid executives live in a “Fog of War” like “dinosaurs after the asteroid impact” and must “swim in a rancid scum of aired feeling.”

Pondering the tragic fate of the corporate leader, Brown naturally draws a parallel to the citizens of the Congo living through the chaos of a civil war and US soldiers in Iraq killed by shadowy assailants. As Brown says, reporting on a Manhattan conference of media executives hosted by an investment banking boutique, “It’s not just in Iraq that we don’t know who the enemy is.”

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19 November 2003

Never stay in an $80 a night hotel room in New York City. Even if it’s located on the Upper West Side. Even if it was recommend by Expedia. Last weekend, the four members of the Telluride Association investment management committee who lacked friends in the city with extra space in their apartments checked into the Hotel Riverside Studios on 72nd St. The lobby, looking like an IKEA showroom that had seen better days, was fine. When the desk clerk locked the lobby and led us down a narrow hallway and through eight doors to the elevators, things took a turn for the worse. Up on the sixth floor, we found grim hallways with braids of phone cables running along the ceiling instead of crown moldings. A half dozen rooms shared two bath rooms and two showers, and the toilet paper was provided in each guest’s room to prevent theft. The rooms were clean, at least, but the curtains were falling off the windows.

The next day, we had considerably betters digs when we took over the Burden Room in Columbia’s Low Library. With its wood paneling and stuffy portraits of early century industrialists and their wives, it was the perfect setting to decide how to spend several million dollars. As it usually does, the committee’s meeting lasted all day and into the night. Around noon, a conference of French MBAs assembled in the main room of Low Library. By the time we left many hours latter, they were drinking wine and dancing poorly.

For dinner, we ate high brow Mexican food at Rocking Horse in Chelsea. If you go, be sure to try in the Shrimp in Papaya Sauce and slurp down several bowls of the salsa.

Photo Bonus: All this week, Frolic Photo will feature photos from the Hotel Riverside Studios.

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18 November 2003

If a politician hands a Washingtonian a pamphlet, you can bet it will be scrutinized closely. Tuesday morning, Kwame Brown, who is challenging Harold Brazil for an at-large seat on the D.C. Council, was distributing fliers outside the Cleveland Park metro. Down in the station, half the people waiting for the train were reading what Mr. Brown had to say.

Then again, if you hand a Washingtonian a copy of the Express, a daily give-away that reprints brief AP wire stories and makes USA Today look profound, it will also be read carefully. The Washington commuter may just be extremely bored.

Posted by Todd at 10:19 pm | No Comments

17 November 2003

Be careful when you make a deal with the devil to sell a gallon of pickles for $2.97. Vlasic learned the hard way that selling 240,000 gallons of underpriced pickles at Wal-Mart can cost you millions of dollars, undermine sales of your higher priced products, and empty entire fields of cucumbers that eventually rot in people’s refrigerators before they can be eaten. Don’t ask for relief and a slightly higher price, though, or you might find all your products pushed off the shelves a company that earns 7.5 cents of every dollar an American spends at a store.

Wal-Mart, of course, is not the devil, but a tough company with an almost crusading zeal to sell things cheap. It’s hard to blame the company when Americans want nothing more than a bargain. Fast Company reveals, however, the consequences of an economy dominated by Wal-Mart.

It’s not just that 10% of all imports from China end up on the shelves of Wal-Mart, it’s that Wal-Mart removes the barriers that foreign companies used to face when trying to enter the American market. With a single sale to Wal-Mart, a foreign company can blanket the entire U.S. As Paul Krugman says, “Wal-Mart is so big and so centralized that it can all at once hook Chinese and other suppliers into its digital system.” In the end, sending manufacturing overseas will erode the quality of jobs held by Wal-Mart shoppers. It also sends a signal about the American consumer’s concern with the rest of the world. Says Steve Dobbins, whose textile company has felt the full force of Wal-Mart’s need to sell the cheapest product no matter the costs, “We want clear air, clean water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world–yet we are not willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions.” [via Locus Solus]

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Other people’s prose:

Though learning to write takes time and a great deal of practice, writing up to the world’s ordinary standards is fairly easy. As a matter of fact, most of the books one finds in drugstores, supermarkets, and even small-town libraries are not well written at all; a smart chimp with a good creative-writing teacher and a real love of sitting around banging a typewriter could have written books vastly more interesting and elegant. Most gown-up behavior, when you come right down to it, is decidedly second-class. People don’t drive their cars as well, or wash their ears as well, or eat as well, or even play the harmonica as well as they would if they had sense. This is not to say people are terrible and should be replaced by machines; people are excellent and admirable creatures; efficiency isn’t everything. But for the serious young writer who wants to get published, it is encouraging to know that most of the professional writers out there are push-overs.

John Gardner in The Art of Fiction.

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13 November 2003

Tomorrow I’m off to New York for the quarterly meeting of the endowment I help manage. Through a connection at Columbia, we found meeting space in Low Library, one of those grand university libraries that now houses the offices of top administrators. There is no telling if I’ll find an internet connection, so you may not hear from me again until Monday.

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The winds picked up this evening and created a constant howling noise in the halls of my apartment building.

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12 November 2003

The window of the Red Box vending machine in Adams Morgan was shrouded with a tarp when I drove past it Saturday. A sign thanked customers for their patronage over the last year, as if the Red Box was a family owned store and not a giant machine installed by the McDonald’s corporation. The Washington Post confirmed today that all four Red Boxes in the metro area have been closed. A McDonald’s spokesperson said, “We are focused on bringing more customers to our 30,000 restaurants around the world.” Perhaps if the Red Box had sold alcohol like the vending machines in Japan it would have survived. Selling booze might also be a strategy for attracting more people to McDonald’s restaurants.