at the sign of The Pink Pig

Casellula: Or the Brief Career of Cheese in New York Restaurants

[Pigging by Wilfrid: May 25, 2007]

The only problem I had with this week-old westside wine-and-cheesery was the name, which I kept reproducing as some irrelevant version of casuela.  Apparently not, and I am sure there's a good reason for it.  (Case means cheese...and...?).

(Casellula by night)

But ten years ago, who'd have thought a neat little boite in the far Fifties - or anywhere, really - serving pretty much nothing but cheese.

The Bar at The Modern: Was Frank Bruni Right?

[Pigging by Wilfrid: May 25, 2007]

Well, that's a question which pretty much answers itself.  No, of course he's not actually right.  But I can see what he means, at least.  Cheers, sir.

A Pig in the Rain: the Last of the Ninth Avenue Food Festival

[Pigging by Wilfrid: May 25, 2007]

The last as far as I am concerned, anyway.  An event which has outlasted itself, and should switch off the light and go home.  I agree, the rain didn't help, but if not for the rain I'd have stuck with my original plan and gone somewhere more interesting.

Earth, Salt and Old Books: the Last Crumbs of Spring

[New York Peasant: by Wilfrid, May 25, 2007]

A bitty sort of week.  To a large, and largely deserted, screening room in the bowels of MOMA for a showing of Dovzhenko's great silent classic Earth.  A contemporary of Eisenstein, with an altogether more sedate approach to montage, Dovzhenko composes lush, stately portraits of wheat fields caressed by the wind, fallen fruit beaded with rain, and stoic Ukrainians bearded with beards.  Great visual beauty, somewhat oddly interrupted by controversial scenes of peasants peeing on a tractor and a plump nude bewailing the death of her lover.  Atmospherically, the movie was accompanied by a live pianist; and less atmospherically, by the rhythmic snores of an audience member.

Much weirder, though, was the Midnight Cowboy party scene at a Tribeca loft where the Chista Gallery was celebrating "Roots: Old Work, New Pieces" by Alon Lagotsky.  Young people, odd clothes.  The show was a strange mix of Tapies and American Craftsman: wall-pieces textured with salt (rather than the Tapies standbys of sand and gravel); and furniture (of speculative functional value) apparently made of highly treated bits of trees - roots I suppose.  The setting, and the precious crowd, squeezed the naturalism out of the show.  Also, an open bar is nice, but there shouldn't be a line that long.  And the pizza tasted of licorice.  Fennel, I presume.  Anyway, all delightfully odd.  I am sure they do it more justice at their own site.

Finally, and glumly, I note today that the other shoe dropped at Gotham Bookmart.  Closed since before the holiday season, it auctioned off its stock yesterday.  Not much of an auction as, according to the Post an attorney working for the landlord picked it all up as a job lot.  Wise men will need to fish elsewhere.  This store was nearly ninety years old, and deserves a story to itself. 

Enough: the mercury is rising and there is grit in my eye, and I am due to explain the philosophy of the odious Ludwig Klages to a small and doubtless disinterested group before I even see a cocktail this evening.   I'll be on the other coast by the time you read this, dear reader, dear reader.

Thought Bubbles...

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: May 25, 2007]

Reality TV and Dead French Thinkers

Strangers have often come up to me in the street, since the recent death of French critical theorist Jean Baudrillard, and invited me to nutshell his contribution to our modern intellectual endeavor.  I always refer them to the example of so-called "reality TV".  "Reality TV," I say, taking on a studious air, "broadcasts the results of placing people in the most artificial, contrived and implausible situations imaginable - what once might have been called 'unreal' situations.  Baudrillard would have taken this as diagnostic of what reality, or 'the real', now signifies."  If pressed further, I remind them that Baudrillard's contemporary, the similarly deceased Guy Debord, would have argued conversely that this is diagnostic of the fact that we have now forgotten what reality, or 'the real', signifies...

Politics and religion a click away...

What Wylie Did Next: WD-50

[Pigging by Wilfrid: May 18, 2007]

It's what he gets up to with the foie.

(Foie Gras in the Round at WD-50)

He's been at it since the day they opened, too...

The Royale, et alia: or Second Burger to the Right and Straight on Till Morning

Take my hand for another trip to the Never Never Land of the perfect burger.  Where hefty patties are broiled to perfection every time, juices soak into the toothsome bun, and fries are crisp and golden.  In other words, where food is served which pretty much anyone can make at home with a decent pan and a tolerant smoke detector. 

Item: the Royale with cheese, as heralded last fall by Peter Meehan (for it is he) of the New York Times.  With little pointy pink thing.

Soft Sunlight Came Through the Cracks: the Chicago Art of Sherwood Anderson and Tony Fitzpatrick

[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: May 18, 2007]

So why Sherwood Anderson, and why now?  I had thought of him as a nineteenth century author - in fact he was twenty six at the century's turn - a writer stuck somewhere on the twilit road stretching from Mark Twain to the creation of modern American literature in the 1920s.  Stupidly and inexplicably, I even conflated him with Ambrose Bierce, another reputable, ever-in-print, rarely read writer of prose.  Winesberg, Ohio.  Something like that.

(Public domain photograph of Anderson by Carl Van Vechten)

But I suspect I am not alone in being ignorant of Sherwood Anderson the modernist poet, now represented in a selection edited by Stuart Downs and published by the Kent State University Press: American Spring Song.  (Don't worry, we get to visit some bars and grills further down...)

Country Wines for Summer: Under $20

[Pigging by Wilfrid, May 18, 2007]

Kind of a coincidence that the four wines I wanted to mention are all imported by Neal Rosenthal (web-site)...but then, not really.  It started late last Saturday afternoon with a brief visit to one of the most pleasant - shady, cool - tasting rooms I know, downstairs at Rosenthal's East 84th Street premises. 

How to Eat South American: Tierras Colombianas

[Pigging by Wilfrid: May 11, 2007]

(My tongue)

This advice might well be given in memoriam the indomitable and much-missed internet food writer Tony ("Tuckerman") Finch who passed away suddenly and sadly earlier this year.  Of South American food, Tony would insist that it was carbs, carbs, and (okay, except the grilled meat) nothing but cards.  This overlooked, of course, the whole Nuevo Latino movement, but as far as neighborhood South American restaurants go he had (although I'd never admit it) a point.

Follow your stomach to the Colombian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian diners of Queens, and you will find your entree accompanied by some generous combination of rice, beans, potatoes, yucca, starchy posole, bread or flatbread,  and platanos boiled or fried.  This is gut-stretching stuff.  But do not panic: know how to order your entree.