Holiday Travel

I really detest those who can sleep whilst traveling, those whose
metabolisms crawl so leisurely that they can sleep upright, against a train handrest, on the shifty head supports of commuter buses.

I hate those who sleep through turbulence the most.

Part of the uniquely terrifying circumstance of plane turbulence is
observing the terror with a slice of humanity, one looks around and
shares a moment with fellow humans for, potentially, the last time. This might be the last time I see elasticated pants, Christmas sweaters that resemble cotton igloos, the last time I witness the hideous, Chicago-particular pairing of high-heeled boots, pricey denim with the contours of leggings, and floppy north face jacket. The last Asian! The last football enthusiast! The last In the last moments of our waking life. . .

EVERYONE should be awake for it.

How dare they miss out on the collective fear! This is betrayal of the highest order! On my last two flights to Chicago I've sat next to two separate families all of whom slept through prayer-inducing turbulence, the kind that makes you eat spinach for lunch for a week and call your parents so frequently they get suspicious.


This is not about suffering together, maybe a little bit about suffering together, but more about how fiercely I oppose a populus whose internal systems are so lazy that they can CEASE ACTIVITY 30,000 feet in loose air!

In reaction to the above statements, you may be saying to yourself
"that's so mean." People who use this phrase tend to be from New
England, and I like this about New England, I like its straightforwardness about how mean it is. I find this to be one of its few redeeming qualities.

Chicago Pizza and its accompanying Pride

Second City Comedy Theater. Third Coast International Audio Festival. Even in its own naming conventions, Chicago appropriates and recoins its second-class status in pop culture and the American zeitgeist. I write today in praise of my home, Chicago (more accurately, Chicagoland) and its native cuisine, the deep dish pizza.

Snobbish East-coast foodies malign it, Grinnell-alum and New York Eater Ed Levine disparages it as merely a “casserole” and apart from the garish “Pizzaria Uno” on Sixth Avenue, pizza with substance, pizza that puts up a fight, is conspicuously absent from such a haughtily self-described “diverse” food scene. Indeed, the cornmeal-bottomed wet cracker New York passes off as pizza can make one desperate: searching for a proper substitute in a time of need, I was once swindled by La Villa Pizzaria in Park Slope, which peddles a dry calzone in a pan for thirty-five dollars.

What is a native Chicagoan to do for pizza in prissy NYC? I went back home this past weekend to first, consume the savory ambrosia in a pan, and second, to unlock its secrets so that I might expose native New Yorkers to true deepdish nirvana, therefore elevating its public profile.

Like asking New Englanders what makes a “good” lobster roll, posing the question “Who makes the best deep dish” to a native Chicago crew is certain conversation TNT. I will always be partial to Ferentino’s, where I waitressed as a teenager, and of course, “stuffed” advocates will champion Giordano’s as the pizza of record. However, city-wide, many if not most will cite Lou Malnati’s as the commonly-agreed upon favorite. I have ordered it from afar and had it delivered packed in dry ice, I have sent doubters there who came back converted. It is my favorite, the taste I pine for when I am homesick, and where I headed to find out what makes it so gosh darn addictive.

Malnati’s is a family venture, handed down through members since it was first created in 1943. When I spoke to local manager Shaun, he relayed that to this day, Malnati family members are involved in all aspects of the business, from the marketing materials inside the store to (and this is from the web site) meeting with the tomato farmers in California each year.

Shaun was kind enough to let me watch the pizza assembly process in the remarkably squeaky-clean kitchen. First the dough, which rises and gathers flavor for 24 hours, is patted out into the deepdish pan:


Second comes the toppings, and of course that means cheese and Italian sausage. It helps foreigners to think of deepdish assembly like a layer cake or a parfait: at the base level is mozzarella (Lou’s) or provolone (Ferentino’s). Then toppings cover the cheese level—here sausage is applied to the pan with surgical precision: little military formations of meat surround and then invade the center:




Spun around slowly, the edges of the crust are pulled up towards the top of the pan three times. Then the delicious plum tomato sauce floods the top, and a dusting of parmesan cheese completes the prep process.







The result: an extremely excited Mozzadrella, poised to stuff her face with the final product.



I returned home, determined to replicate the delicious buttery crust in my galley kitchen in Brooklyn. After some detective work on food blogs, I found a recipe supposedly divulged by a Malnati member on the Food Network years ago:

16 ounces water
1/8-ounce yeast
1/2-ounce salt
2 pounds bread flour
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup cornmeal

I tried it, and the attempt got me 80% there—the crust is flaky, the sauce close to form. However, I do recommend a touch more butter, both to line the pan and to coat the crust before sauce and topping application. Also, the crust thinning process requires some elbow grease—it should be thinner than 1/2 and inch in pan before it goes into the oven.

Mozzadrella ventures homeward!

Cheese is still cheese is still cheese.



Any way you slice it. Above: state spirit! Below: Cheese in the shape of Wisconsin.



And for local color:

More Italian Food You've Never Heard Of

Italian pastries get no love in the US—our palate caters more to the nauseatingly sweet (cupcakes, doughnuts, butter cookies, etc.) than the subtle. Dessert is a fix, not a conversation. And while France garners all the haute pastry prestige, Italy has its own robust baking culture. Unlike its cream and custard counterparts, Italian pastries are more likely to include cheese fats (mascarpone, ricotta) and are often infused with anise or almond flavors.

My grandmother usually served pizzelles that she made herself, which look roughly like a dough doily and had a licoricey undercurrent. Amaretti, or stone-like amaretto macaroons, were usually present in their distinctive red tin. When the holidays rolled around, we would usually have a panettone, which resembles a bundt cake and tastes like wonderbread with raisins. My father is quite partial to sfogliatelle, which is sort of like a mille feuille with an orange-ricotta filling. Mostly unavailable in the states until recently, sfogliatelle once gave him food poisoning when he packed it in his suitcase in Florence, and ate it when he returned to the states.

Those are the more common desserts, but today we will look at more distinctive incarnations of Italian sweets, and a couple Italian-American bastardizations as well. A couple of bake shops in my neighborhood have freaks in their windows. It’s ‘bout time I found out the constitution of these vaguely modernist items.

Our first, Ossa dei Morti, the “Bones of the Dead” cookie.

Made with sugar and water in celebration of All Soul’s Day, this Venetian cookie smells faintly of anise and is chalky to the touch. Imagine stale corn flakes compressed into a brick. These are perilous pucks; my jaw hates me. The cookie’s chemistry reveals itself when dipped in coffee—it self-destructs.

The second is pretty unimaginative: the “S-shaped cookie.”

It’s indigenous to Brooklyn but inspired by Italian pastry treatment—the almond paste is very present. Still a little hard for me, even after the coffee immersion.

The third and last pastry is perplexingly named a “St. Martin’s Biscuit.” (If my memory serves me, St. Martin was militaristic Hungarian.)

A little like biscotti in texture, I appreciated the whole anise seeds in the batter. ‘Twas rather difficult to bite, though, since it has a concrete texture and a larger round shape. I can’t seem to locate provenance, so perhaps it was a house special.

Other Italian Specialty Sweets:
Rainbow Cookies
Torta Caprese
Pignoli

Fresh Mozz w/ Cheese

Years ago in college, due to trickery and nefarious tactics, I was backed in to doing a radio show on my college campus. Rachel and I decided to have a "how-to" program, where we would showcase one talent or area of knowledge each week.

Rachel knows how to do a lot of things, including percussing and dressing a crustacean. Comparatively, my abilities appeared paltry, but I drew from my background in cosmetics (rally!), and brought the ingredients to make oatmeal facial masks to the studio.

Did chunks slip off our cheeks as we were at the switchboard? Yes. Did it encrust to our faces like orange pulp? Absolutely. Stalking her flickr account this morning, I came across this photo:



I think I also forced Rachel to play a roleplaying game on the air--I believe I made her make up stories about a goth family on the spot.

Divine retribution for her deceit!

The Mystery of Stanley S. Lamm--Solved!

Weeks ago, this building caught my eye, and I sought and enlisted the help of the Brooklyn Historical Society to find out about the Dudley Memorial building at 110 Amity, and it’s namesake, Stanley S. Lamm. I was hoping to uncover that Lamm was the Blackwater of pediatric psychiatry, that the empty building was creepy for a reason other than the real estate vultures circling above.

The building’s provenance is a yawn: ‘twas built 1903 by Henry W. Maxwell, a member of the Long Island College’s Board of Regents, as a memorial to Dr. William H. Dudley. Dudley had organized the German Central Dispensary, which soon became the Long Island College Hospital. All four floors of the Dudley Memorial originally housed nurses.

When did the building morph into the Stanley S. Lamm Center? Answer: 1951, when Stanley S. Lamm established it in his name. The Center for Developmental Disabilities, which now resides in Long Island College Hospital proper, has been rechristened the “Institute for Child Neurology and Development Medicine”—perhaps in light of the etymological bitch-slap that is “the opposite of to make fit.”

Here is where it gets interesting: Lamm also served as the medical director for classes for neurologically impaired youth in Brooklyn. Through the Center, he also ran a school for students with disabilities. The guiding torch of Lamm’s theory? Pediatric medicine must detect and treat pediatric neuroses, since they “account for more than half of the chronic illnesses in childhood” and can be identified and read early in childhood behavior.

Lamm favored examining and teaching students on an individual basis: “A major problem, according to Dr. Lamm, is that children with minimal brain dysfunction are generally grouped together, even though ways of teaching them have to be vastly different” (New York Times, Jul 20, 1970).

While I am not in favor of exclusionary classroom methods, (i.e. “special ed”) Dr. Lamm surely noticed a phenomenon only articulated in the mid-to-late 60s, as Congress initially discussed the “Children with Learning Disabilities Act” of 1969: suburbanites embraced special ed in droves, its existence absolved parents of responsibility and shame. Urban communities, in contrast, couldn’t squeeze out the tax dollars to support the programs--educators at New York Teachers College discovered that students diagnosed with learning disabilities came from predominantly middle- and upper-middle class backgrounds. Once Congress recognized learning disabilities as legit and eligible for federal funds, urban communities could better support developmental programs.

Though I can’t find any evidence that Lamm testified, lobbied or submitted reports to the Congressional Sub-Committee on Education, I’d like to think that the individual evaluation he supported in Brooklyn helped secure funding for our area.

cold blooded murder of the english tongue.

grapple. n. grape flavor infused fuji apple.


grapple. n. mechinzed "hand" used as a logging tool.

Campari Party, General Disappointment

Having honed my taste for Campari in preparation for an event this evening, my research swelled my expectations out of proportion. Campari's recent saucy marketing campaign led me to believe that certain items would be present.

BAMBOOZLED: There were no Italian flygirls in red body paint.

HOODWINKED: I couldn't find any representatives to speak with me about the apertif's place in American culture, only waitresses in bad 40s-era replica hats passing out gift boxes. They weren't a far cry from mechanized mannequins: useless for information.

SURPRISED: A burlesque dancer, wearing only what I believed to be a fishing net, carried a massive translucent beachball into the crowd. She referred to herself as the "Female Atlas."

I did sample a host of Campari's permutations, and isolated bitterness as the variable that elicits the most dismay from my tastebuds. With fresh orange juice, it no longer tastes like decomposing swamp puss. I highly recommend this incarnation for anyone who finds themselves in in the face of a poorly-stocked liquor cabinet.

Wes Anderson's God Complex

la donna e mobile: campari

I’ve always felt taunted and challenged by “acquired tastes”— the level of maturity required to appreciate the item, the implied elitism of the expression—I would learn to love artichokes, fish sauce and Catherine MacKinnon, just for spite. Campari remains a target to overcome. My aversion to Campari is a point of cultural shame, particularly in light of my enthusiasm for appertivo, or happy hour. I resolved: in October, as I approach 25th birthday, I would make a concerted effort to appreciate the liquor, and then bask in my enlightened standing.

It’s bitter, barky flavor has put my off for years, but I keep coming back for the alluring, vibrant red. Campari’s signature flame, I am told, comes from the natural pigment carmines, which are the dried remains of the cactus-dwelling insect, cochineals. The recipe for Campari is CocaCola-level secret (only one man in at Campari’s factory in Novi Ligure knows the details), but officials do confirm that wormwood and 59 other aromatics and herbs comprise the aperitif.

Campari is almost a fable, a continental version of Camelot—culturally it symbolizes the achievement of success, of a self-made man, but also tradition, of easing into mealtime after the workday. Gaspare Campari was born in Castelnuovo, Italy in 1828, and became “apprentice maitre licoriste” (barman extraordinaire) in Turin at the green age of 14. After futzing with the recipe for his bitter concoction over 20-some years, he officially founded the Gruppo Campari in Milan in 1860. Campari would only sell his product to outlets that displayed “Campari Bitters” posters, quickly establishing a brand identity outside Milan. The business plan was both sturdy and stellar: today, Campari grosses 33 million bottles in annual sales, about the same world-wide as Jack Daniels.

The iconography of Campari is as unique and recognizable as its color. Davide Campari, Gaspare’s son, commissioned ideas for the Campari posters from European artists with the following instructions: “Artists must clearly display the brand name; use uncomplicated color; and the brand should be incorporated naturally in the picture.” French poster art luminary Leonetto Cappiello responded with one of the most noteworthy works of the period: a clown dancing in an orange peel holding a bottle of Campari. Also patrons of progressive design, the Camparis contacted Futurist art superhero Fortunato Depero to create the bottle for CampariSoda, the premixed cocktail. The beaker-like final product combines forceful and urbane features, and appears just as modern as when Campari released it in 1932.



As glamorous and distinctive as its image came to be, the house of Campari contracted trenchfoot in the culture wars of the 1980s. In 1983, the Reverend Jerry Falwell brought a case against Hustler magazine for producing an ad which featured Falwell and his mother in a “drunken incestuous encounter in an outhouse.” The ad parodied a contemporary Campari advertising campaign in which celebrities described “their first time” drinking Campari, with obvious sexual innuendo. The Court ruled 8-0 in favor of Hustler, finding that public figures “must tolerate occasional false statements, lest there be an intolerable chilling effect on speech that does have constitutional value.”

Over the next week, I will sample Campari in various incarnations, I will sweet-talk and swindle my taste buds into submission, I will take down this feeble-minded aversion of mine!

I shall try each of the following drinks, report back on their flavors and my level of satisfaction with the cocktail, hopefully garnering some level of affection for the drink as the week goes on:

• Campari neat
• Campari and soda
• Negronis
• Campari and orange juice
• Americano

Mozzadrella on Mozzarella

My grandparents regularly outfoxed the U.S.D.A. when re-entering the States: they smuggled their native cheese from Umbrian mountain country. Upon arrival, they would move the precious cheese, with its fetid bouquet, to their cool basement for ripening. To get Christmas lights or more Sprite, I would descend into the cheese crypt, the rinds hanging like fragrant contortionists.

My appreciation for cheese, then, is spurred by a sense of adventure and informed by the death drive. Today an ode to the cheese I love, and my namesake: mozzarella.

Mozzarella is the diminutive form of “mozza” or the general term for “cheese,” but it derives from the verb “mozzare” which loosely translates to “to cut off” or “to dock.” In Italy mozzarella is made only from buffalo milk—if made from cow’s milk the cheese is “fior di latte” or “flower of the milk.” While it is often found as a large lump floating in salt water, one can also purchase bocconcini (small mouthfuls) or ciliegini (little cherries).

A short historical sketch: while some attribute the provenance of water buffaloes in Italy to the Visigoths, others believe Marc Anthony brought the animal from Egypt and sent it, with a recipe for bufala mozzarella, to Caesar as a gift. Much much later, when Hitler’s armies retreated, they destroyed Italy’s entire water buffalo population. Italy was forced to grovel and order more from India.

To see first hand how the cheese is made, I consulted the Italian specialty store Pasdeli, which agreed to let me join the mozzarella creation ritual. On the weekends, John, the owner, makes 5lbs of fresh mozzarella a day. He starts with bricks of whole cow’s milk curd, a large silver bowl, two colanders, and a custom-design water heating system.

When I come in, he has already begun the “pasta filata” process: the bricks are soaking in a large silver bowl. The initial bath of warm, unsalted water breaks up the logs of curd and loosens the milk proteins. With a custom-designed water heating system, he rinses the bricks in warm, then hot water over a colander, returning the cracked curd bits to the larger bowl.


After heating it twice, John’s hands begin to mold the curd into something more solid and smooth, ironing out the curd’s pocketed surface. He then begins to twist the cheese, bringing air into it, and breaking chunks from the mothership that remains in the bowl. With the portion he broke off, he tucks the chunk into a sphere, or “makes a face” with it, and dips it back into the water to smooth it and form a skin on the surface.



The newly-formed globes rest in cold water to stop the cooking process, then soak in salt water for flavor—salt is added last and not first because it renders the curd too sticky to work with. After their salt bath, John wraps the balls in plastic, and seals snuggly to get the air out. Air will make fresh mozzarella turn slightly yellow, says John, and it looks better when it’s wrapped in plastic. If you buy mozzarella that is a little yellowed at the edges, it may mean that it’s made fresh, not necessarily that it’s past its prime.

He is right that mozzarella is attractive—the final result is a tray of glossy, malleable pearls.



As satisfying as it is, however, cow’s milk mozzarella does not feature the soft, spongy, rustic disposition of the water buffalo. The next objective: how to procure the best bufala “mozzarel” in New York.

The WOP's Guide to Kosher

“I have a friend who is half Italian, half Jewish. When he can’t get something wholesale, he steals it.” -clerk, Kosher liquor store, Borough Park

What is “Kosher,” and how can the average Dago be sensitive to the needs of our Semitic friends? Most people know about the restrictions of milk/meat and shellfish, but why do Orthodox observers keep turning down my dinner invitations? I went to Borough Park, Brooklyn to find out about Kosher and Italian cuisine’s place in it.

First off, Kosher (or Kashrut) food requirements derive for the stringent and severe book of Leviticus, and apply to almost all foods, both the by-product and the process of making it. The regulations—there are too many to name here—are upheld by certification, or by routine rabbinical inspection by a local Rabbi:


It’s immediately apparent that Italian food is popular in Borough Park—Amnon’s Kosher Pizza is bumping with modestly dressed women pushing strollers and visibly warm young men with peyos. I spoke to a couple of people behind the counter, and gathered the following about Italian cuisine through the lens of Kosher:
• Cheese: they use Haolam cheese, and it comes from sheep and cows only. I followed up, and the cheese also has to be made with rennet from a Kosherly-slaughtered cow, or grown bacterially (without coming into contact with animal).
• Vegetables: these are routinely inspected by a Rabbi. Why? Because vegetables may contain insects. Insects are not (not not not) Kosher.
• Bread: when it’s time for unleavened bread (i.e. Passover) the Italian restaurants have come up with a solution—no yeast whole wheat pizza and calzones! They look as if they have passed through the tunnels of the human system already, but I was assured that they are quite popular year-round.

I went into a Kosher liquor store on 13th Avenue, and talked to the clerk about Kosher wine. If invited to a Kosher household, what should I look for on a wine bottle or know about the wine before purchase?
• Certification: this is paramount in all Kosher foods, especially for those who observe Kosher and are eating outside the home. The most familiar and popular is OU, or Orthodox Union Kosher, which has 600 rabbinic field representatives world wide, and its “New York headquarters staff consists of over 50 Rabbinic Coordinators who serve as account executives for OU certified companies, supplemented by a roster of ingredient specialists, flavor analysts and other support staff.” OU is symbolized by the following sign:


• Process: I was told it had to be pasteurized, or “cooked” so to speak, but Baron Herzog wines indicate that wine only needs to be handled by Kosher methods, and use yeasts that are also Kosher.

Fellow goyim might wonder: what’s the deal with Kosher salt? In addition to being Kosher itself, Kosher salt is used in the process of Koshering meat (ritual slaughter and preparation). Since Torah dictates that one cannot consume blood, the large crystals cure and remove the residual blood within the meat.

All of you Catholic eye-talians out there, don’t try to Kosher at home! In addition to individual items and processes, Kosher also refers to a system: kitchens that have separate milk and meat plates and silverware, dishwashers, and even stoves. This is often the reason why Orthodox or Conservative Jews may decline invitations at your home, or as I heard it, will not “eat by you.” Do not be insulted my brethren—Kosher Pizzerias make the only passable Chicago-style pizza in New York!

Mystery! The Phantom Clothes Leaver.

On a very busy street in Brooklyn, adjacent to a Catholic church and a purveyor of fish, I began to find discrete items of women’s luxury clothing abandoned, left to the elements of urine and brine.

Sometimes in piles atop garbage bins, sometimes strung up on the fence that surrounds the church, at times cast atop fire hydrants—the trail felt maniacally deliberate or slapdash. As a hand-to-mouth youngin’ starting out in New York, the discards would taunt me with their extravagance, and I would pass by their display two or three times before finally discouraging myself from taking it.

After six or eight instances of finding this quality apparel, I began to keep track of the articles: 3/14/2007, a translucent Louis Vuitton knapsack. 5/2/2007, solidly-made Merino wool trousers. 7/26/2007, oversized cowl-neck sweater. 8/16/2007, jersey skirt, sparkly purple top, constructed white button-down.

The bizarre behavior of the Phantom Clothes Leaver. What causes someone to violently pluck items from their closet? It’s so much easier to leave them there, unworn! I’d like to think it’s a motive more sinister than “donation,” so I began to cobble together ideas for who this person might be.

1.) Fashionista with the attention span of a subway turnstile. A cross between Anna Wintour and a werewolf. Bad or outdated clothing is a virus on her closet that drives her mad.
2.) Female superhero who must strip down to her skivvies before fighting realtor’s fees.
3.) Predatory assailant who is indiscriminant about what they will steal from victims, but becomes more discerning on the way to the train.
4.) Fervent bulimic who hates the label “Size M” on her clothes, so she purges them like microwave tacos and instant brownies.

Pictures of the remnants to come.

It's Quite Pedestrian--On the LAMM

There’s an abandoned building at Henry and Amity that I feel consistently drawn to—it’s a rather large brick semi-institutional building with bars on the windows, filmy glass, and the strangest items inside: signs that still say “Please present your insurance card at the window,” bulletin boards covered with tinsel wishing no one a Happy Holiday, sinks torn from the walls in placed in the middle of the room. It’s obvious the building has gone unused for years.





The fact that it’s the former home of a child neurology clinic--The Stanley S. Lamm Institute for Developmental Disabilities—makes the items inside even creepier. According to the Long Island College Hospital website:

“The Stanley S. Lamm Institute, a part of Long Island College Hospital, treats cerebral palsy and Cooley's anemia patients. The Lamm Institute was established in the 1950's by Dr. Stanley S. Lamm for the comprehensive care of the developmentally disabled.”

I was very curious about this person, especially since everyone knows the 1950’s were flush with experimental methods for treating disabilities: Ice-pick lobotomies just began to decline in the early 50’s (who can forget Rosemary Kennedy’s sexual disqualification in 1941?), and involuntary electroconvulsive therapy continued until the Surgeon General regulated its administration in 1999.

Research on Lamm’s background and methods is scant. A visit to the Brooklyn’s Historical Society uncovered little background on the building--it was built in 1903 as a nurses’ facility.

However, I did find that the LAMM method of robbing a bank means taking a military approach: acquiring blueprints to the building, assigning a role to each associate of your gang, and doing “drills” of each possible outcome.

The Gray Hair Diaries

I’ve always known that it was might fate—I would go gray young. Growing up, no one ever officially came down with the sentence, I gathered the evidence from my mother’s coloring rituals: a robe spattered with ammonium drips, the brown paste at her crown as she defrosted dinner, the basement bathroom dedicated to the activity.

My future in black in white. It came across as a decree, rather than an option, in the furtive way female family members would admit it, away from their husbands: “Once you start, you can’t go back” “I prefer to call it ‘frosting’, makes me feel like a cake!” These asides, cagey, coy, or earnest, bespeak some communal knowledge: 1.) many women do color their hair—“color” not “dye” because no one wants to be “dead,” and 2.) the trompe l’oeil is permanent. Fudging your age with color means you are “of a certain age” and you can’t go back.

But does gray mean you are “of a certain age’? Since we do not collectively gray, at say, 35, gray does not communicate that we have moved past a fixed age: gray does not betray a number. Rather, it does convey that one has started the process of aging earlier: you are the bruised peach in the bunch, you have passed ripe, you’ve begun to sour sooner.

As forecasted, the fog rolled in around my sixteenth birthday. Further defined and fuller in volume since then, others began to notice the streak around 23. I know how many of them there are (21 last count), I know how to style my hair to hide them (or did until recently). I can project when the contrast level will shift from gray to white (32).

Going gray early forces you to address aging, and then the cultural forces at work in making you feel older, far sooner than actual middle-age. As the sage (and obviously, gray) Sontag noticed, aging is “mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a pathology” in Western society, especially for women. Case in point: Gabrielle Union’s recent commercial trying to sell my demographic wrinkle cream. In a show of hands, most of my female friends already use some sort of anti-aging product.

Apart from the biological wear-and-tear we will all address, melanin’s cruel abandonment of hair follicles pushes you into a maelstrom of tensions: Will I be a crusader by not coloring my hair? Could I justify coloring it until others around me begin to gray? Is the anxiety from aging itself, or the unmerited quality of the graying—I am only 24. If I do color my hair, at what point would I begin?

Folks, it’s not just a sensitive subject because of the anxieties gray will signify, namely age, but also the gray-ee may not have resolved how they want to express the gray—as pride, as denial, as fashion, or as I have plainly tried to play it, as Sontag devotee-ism.

For your convenience: The Double-Standard of Aging.

That is a nasty aftertaste

I know I've been mentioning this, but the event left a mark on my spotless brooklyphile record:

Apart from my new perverse relationship with the Food Network--folding cake batter, oh my, Nigella!--Sunday's real estate section in the New York Times is the basest consumption I do. I love its voyeurism, the way you suspend your own poverty and dismiss the shabby 2.2 mil brownstone on Baltic in favor of the 2.5 on the corner 8th and Union. I blame this snooty-licious behavior on my mother, a realtor to the stars for 30-odd years.

Sunday's times featured a profile of the most indulgent, revolting, arrogant display of excess income i have ever seen. A couple is building a behemoth for the luxe lifers on west 15th street. They paid 1 million dollars to buy out the former tenants alone. Please, for a moment, indulge the description of the couple's current home:

"Long before they began the current project, the couple spent five years creating the apartment next door — a place like no other in the city. It contains a two-story-high waterfall that flows into an 18-inch-deep river set into the living room floor.

The river, which is home to 10 large koi, follows the outline of the Yangtze, a feat the Raths accomplished by building a Styrofoam model (following a National Geographic map that they enlarged), setting the model onto the building’s foundation, and then pouring the concrete floor around the model. (The final step was using gasoline to dissolve the Styrofoam, Mr. Rath said.)"

This made me so sick that I wanted to turn Giada off, and may have dulled my invasively-dirty passion for real estate in New York, and at large, forever. I find it tasteless in the most gauche and frivolous way, and I am fast becoming bitter about a paper and a city that would elevate this couple as a symbol of who it is or who it wants to be.

book store, i want to like you.

But probably I never will.

I like that it's there, on my street, small and haughty. I like its collaged and unorganized window displays. I like how, by the simple miracle of walking by it, I feel as if I am supporting something independent and community-sustained. I live in a neighborhood that still has an independent bookstore, after all.

I just hate everything in it.

I resent how it invites me to just "drop on in" all nonchalant and casual, but never stocks anything I want to read. This is a tease and it puts me in a bad mood.

Their history section perpetuates the myth that history is about war. This brute oversight I might allow if the bookstore featured a cultural studies section, a sociology section, an ethnic studies section, and/or current affairs section.

But it doesnt. Apparently, to this day, men and their wars made all of history.

The philosophy, oh, I should say 'philosophy/religion' area leaves me underserved--a scant volume of Foucault, a book that teaches me how to read tea leaves in my urine. Also in this section: "My Inner Goddess and Her Love for Chocolate Cake."

The very inaccurately genre'd "essays" area is half full with fiction anthologies. The poetry section is comprised of Shakespeare sonnets and the odd Ogden Nash.

I often attempt to support Bookcourt, only to storm off to the Barnes and Noble two blocks away. it has occured to me to speak to their manager--please stop buying books that suck--because i want it to pull through so badly. My inner goddess is keeping me in check for now.