Hey, I’m going to get to do something fun at the Beacon Arts members show on Saturday, November 5! I’m going to read “Parker House Loaf,” a piece about food, class, status, luxury, and art. A few of you will remember my food writing from a few years back, so here’s the place to hear some more! Along with a performance by the great Donna Mikkelsen, and of course the fabulous art of the Beacon Arts members on the walls! At KuBe Art Center, 211 Fishkill Ave. in the old high school, 4-6 PM. See you then.
This piece appeared in slightly different form in The Nation, April 18, 2018.
“Jews commit a disproportionate number of mass shootings,” Wisconsin Republican congressional candidate Paul Nehlen lied on Facebook recently. Earlier he had tweeted, “Poop, incest, and pedophilia. Why are those common themes repeated so often with Jews?” Another GOP House hopeful, Pennsylvania’s Sean Donahue, recently told me, “The United States was intended to be white. I don’t see why we had to have the Fair Housing Act.”
Welcome to Trump’s America, wherea rash of white nationalist candidates is running for office. Between nine and 17white supremacists and far-right militia leaders are currently candidates for House and Senate, governorships, and state legislatures.
Most have little chance of winning, but as with neo-Nazi Arthur Jones, who recently ran unopposed in the Republican primary for the 3rd Congressional District in the Chicago area and won 20,339 votes, their mere candidacies, along with other Republicans’ growing acceptance of them as legitimate stakeholders in the party, are dangerous. “They are by their very presence shifting the pole of what most Americans find to be acceptable political discourse,” said Erik K. Ward of the Western States Center, a progressive group in seven states where white nationalism has been active.
Heidi Beirich, intelligence project director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, pointed to an August 2017 Washington Post/ABC News poll that shows 9 percent of Americans now find it acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views. (Of strong Trump supporters, 17 percent say they accept neo-Nazi views, and 13 percent say they have no opinion one way or the other.) “This is a Trump phenomenon,” Beirich told me. “In the past, [white-power groups] saw no space for themselves in the public sphere at all. You’d see the Aryan Nations saying, ‘We never really thought politics was worth our time.'” Both Trump and a new rush of racist candidates, she said, have had the effect of “re-engaging white supremacists in the political system. Before, they were basically apolitical.”
In the new Republican universe, a flood of so-called “alt-lite” media organs and activist have become enormously influential. Sites like The Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit,Rebel Media, InfoWars, GotNews, and other “mini Breitbarts” have championed the alt-right, employed white nationalists as editors and writers, and expressed views similar to white nationalism. And through their popularity and ties to Trump staffers, they’ve been able to influence the White House and demonstrate that there is room for overtly racist policies in the US political system. President Trump has read and acted upon at least one article from Chuck Johnson’sGotNews (about a supposed leak by deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, which Politico says led to Trump firing her). Alt-lite solo media-man Mike Cernovich—who has said “diversity is code for white genocide” and “I like choking a woman until her eyes go almost lifeless”—has demonstrated access to the White House through his scoops about personnel matters and Trump’s bombing of Syria. Both Donald Trump, Jr. and Kellyanne Conway have publicly praised Cernovich, with the president’s son saying he deserves “a Pulitzer.” Cernovich said he’s considering running for Congress this year in California.
Some of these far-right media activists maintain what their own comrades call “plausible deniability” of white supremacism. In this media landscape, the effect of open white nationalists running for office is to push the limits of acceptable public racism even further. Self-declaredwhite nationalists running for office not only give cover to “merely” anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Latino, and Trumpist candidates and officials,they also can radically shift the Overton window, a term that describes the range of ideas that the mainstream media deems politically acceptable to discuss.
These new candidates “are not limited by what exists, so they can imagine genocide, they can seriously play around with deporting millions of people,” said Spencer Sunshine, a longtime writer and researcher on the far right. As such notions enter the public discussion through the far-right media, racist violence becomes more likely. Sunshine told me, “White nationalists’ milieu is super-violent, so any rise in their movement,” including mainstream publicity of their candidacies, will be “accompanied by violence.”According to a study by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, white supremacists killed 18 people in 2017, more than double the previous year; hate crimes in major cities jumped by 20% the same year, according to data compiled by the Center For The Study Of Hate And Extremism at California State University/San Bernardino. Along with Trump’s election, it is not unreasonable to attribute that to the rise in the alt-right’s popularity and its accompanying online media.
“What’s dangerous is the way Trump has helped institutionalize ethnonationalist currents in a way we haven’t seen since before the civil rights movement,” says Spencer Sunshine, an associate fellow at Political Research Associates, which monitors the far right.
The growing profile of such candidates means they sometimes have a legitimate shot at winning national office. Running for governor in Virginia last year, Prince William County Board of Supervisors chair Corey Stewart campaigned several times with Jason Kessler, the white nationalist who would soon organize the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. (Kessler has been charged in several federal lawsuits with conspiring to incite violence at the neo-Nazi rally.) Stewart came within one percentage point of winning the Republican nomination by devoting almost his entire campaign to defending Confederate monuments. That is to say, in a purple state he won 43 percent of the GOP vote clutching a huge Confederate flag and holding rallies attended mostly by white nationalists. Soon, he was using the racist, sexist white-nationalist terms “cuck” and “cuckservative,” applying them in a Reddit chat to then-Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe and to his primary opponent, Ed Gillespie. (The label comes from “cuckold porn,” where a white man—the “cuck”—watches, humiliated, as a black man has sex with the cuck’s white wife.) Stewart also palled up to Cernovich, sitting for an interview with him. The day after Charlottesville, Stewart condemned “all the weak Republicans” who “couldn’t apologize fast enough” for the violence at the rally. Continue reading “Election 2018: Off to the Racists”
Thanks to The Nation for sending me to report from Richard Spencer’s “top-secret” white supremacist conference in a freezing barn in rural Maryland. Spoiler alert: the white nationalists bashed “neoliberalism,” “capitalism,” and Jews.
I have to say, it’s hard to write about how good food tastes when Trump is compiling weekly lists of “crimes” by immigrants. I wanted to describe for you the precise degree of crispness and umami of the chicken thigh/fermented soybean/potato chip appetizer at the hot new restaurant Llama Inn, but it’s hard to stop thinking about him turning Syrian children back to die from bombing and starvation. I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out what testosterone enantato to do about this when a good idea suddenly occurred to me: it would probably be possible to roast Trump like a turkey, trussing him with a little cooking twine and rubbing him all over with European butter, salt, and pepper.
With his new, yellower hair color and more deeply-bronzed skin, he looks like a roasted turkey already, so I thought this would be a good time to try out Tom Collicchio’s Thanksgiving recipe and stuff a thick handful of Kerrygold Irish Butter between his skin and his breast meat, mixed with sage, tarragon, thyme, and rosemary to take some of his funk away. He weighs about 12 times what an average Thanksgiving turkey does, so he could provide a dinner for approximately 20 Iraqi families fleeing rape and what the UN calls “staggering violence” ultimately caused by George Bush’s war.
I have a particular idea for the stuffing. I feel more personally threatened as a Jew than I ever have in 52 years, now that we have a Nazi on the National Security Council and a White House that denies that the Holocaust had any particular impact on Jews. So I thought it would be community-building and holistic to stuff Trump up the butthole with charoset. (If you haven’t heard of it, charoset is the mix of chopped fruits, nuts, and wine Jews eat on Passover to represent the bricks and mortar we were forced to make as slaves in Egypt.) There are dozens of different versions made by Jews from different cultures, but I love my own family’s version best, diced apples and walnuts mixed with sweet, deep purple Manischewitz. There are plenty of non-Passover recipes in which charoset is used as a stuffing, including a lovely one by Martha Stewart that goes up the butt of a Cornish game hen. According to the Talmud, there are also revolutionary sexual connotations to the lush, fruity, sometimes spicy dish: the apples, dates, figs, grapes, walnuts, pomegranates, and saffron used in various versions of charoset all appear as erotic symbols in the Song of Songs, the Hebrew Bible’s ode to carnal joy. (Bananas don’t appear in the Bible, but because they’re also pretty erotic, they’re used in versions from India, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Uganda.)
And the 2nd century sage Rabbi Akiva said — I am not making this up — that charoset particularly signifies the wild frolics that ancient Jewish slaves were able to have in the apple orchards when they snuck away from their overseers to defy Pharaoh’s edict against sex. Charoset for all these reasons is understood to bring a sweetness and hope into our memories of horrible slavery and oppression, and it can bring some sweetness even into Donald’s meat.
The president is known to subsist on a diet of Big Macs, buckets of KFC, and Lay’s potato chips, so it may take some doing to rinse the flavor of salmonella and excessive salt from his flesh. I suggest using the cleansing technique developed for beef kidneys: soak him for two hours in a large Dutch oven full of water mixed with a little white vinegar or lemon juice, then rinse him out three times with fresh water and drain him in a large colander.
Once you’ve cleaned the Donald, he’s perfect for the national dish of Somalia, baasto iyo sugo hilib shildan. In the years since Italy colonized Somalia starting in the late 19th century, Somalis transformed spaghetti Bolognese, the food of their occupiers, into a spicier dish with profoundly African flavors. (Mussolini tried to boost his popularity at home by intensifying the occupation in the ’30s, but you should read up on how that ultimately turned out for him, Mr. President!) One thing to note before I give the recipe: Somali cuisine is halal. Is the First Golfer? I’m not equipped to give a religious opinion.
(With apologies to Somali cooks everywhere.) To prepare, sauté a load of onions in a large skillet. Add cumin, coriander, cayenne, cinnamon, turmeric, cloves, crushed green cardamom pods, fenugreek seeds, and fresh garlic and green pepper. Add fresh Donald, minced, till nicely browned. Add diced tomatoes and tomato paste, sauté until fully blended, about five minutes. Add a little chicken stock and some large-diced potatoes and carrots. Cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Serve over al dente pasta, topped with chopped cilantro. Eat a banana on the side. (Somalis like to have one with every entrée.)
The Somali civil war is one of the bloodiest going on right now, with the widespread kidnapping of children so they can be forced to be soldiers, and systemic sexual violence. All sides target civilians. The conflict, like most of the current wars in Africa, ultimately stems from the massive destabilization wrought by European colonization. Somali refugees could use a good meal like this: 2 million of them have been forced to flee the country, and only one hundredth of one percent of them — 299 people — were granted visas by the United States in the last fiscal year on record, 2015, according to Quartz.
A Desi chef who insisted on going nameless out of fear of being rounded up offered this recipe: “I just think that given our president’s unnatural tone and coloring, as a chef of Indian cuisine I think immediately of tandoori chicken, with that ridiculous, unnatural bright pink tone a lot of versions of it have.” (Much commercial tandoori chicken relies on food coloring,the chef notes; more holistic versions use a mixture of tomato paste and yogurt that turns the chicken reddish.) “But if you used the president, you wouldn’t even have to marinate him, he’s already that color. And given the sort of injustices he’s committing against humanity, he surely deserves” some time in “an 800° tandoori oven.”
For those of you who can’t bring themselves to bite into such meat and digest, here’s a vegetarian recipe from La Morada in the South Bronx, one of the best Mexican restaurants in the city:
La Morada’s Guacamole Recipe
1 whole avocado, hand-picked by undocumented immigrants in California
1 tablespoon of diced tomatoes cultivated by undocumented immigrants in Milwaukee, Florida
1 tablespoon of cilantro harvested by undocumented immigrants in California
1 tablespoon of onions gathered by undocumented immigrants in Washington
½ lime, hand-picked also by those whom you persecute.
1 pinch of salt.
First take the avocado and smash it with the same passion that activist smashed Richard Spencer’s face, [and activists have smashed] xenophobes, racists, homophobes, and other forms of injustice. Keep smashing the avocado until justice and equality reign. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well until it harmonizes the same way solidarity and intersectionality triumph together. Pair with your favorite Mexican food because you know America can’t survive without Mexicans. Enjoy. ”
Friends and FBI agents, this column is a satire. I don’t believe that any human being should be eaten, not even the president. I do believe his policies are immoral, and he should resign immediately in favor of Bernie Sanders, Angela Davis, or Jasilyn Charger.
Originally published in Gay City News, February 16, 2016.
Happy holidays, folks! This column is my favorite thing I worked on all year.
We cracked the lobster’s claws together, and shoved the meat in our mouths. There was drawn butter all over the table and my hands. My wife kept slipping me more fresh-killed meat. “You need to keep your strength up.”
I pulled off one of the lobster’s legs and sucked the little hole, marveling. I’d never found a Homarus americanus worth going after the minuscule meat in the legs before. This inexpensive one on Bleecker Street was worth thrusting one way, then the other, wrenching, cracking, drawing out with your teeth, and sucking. Continue reading “Sex and Fish”
This is my review of Laut, a Malaysian-Singaporean-Thai restaurant in New York’s Union Square, from Gay City News.
As it came to our table, the tiny bowl of curry dip was preceded by its smell, a mix of coconut, cinnamon, turmeric, and a small amount of chilithat literally turned my head, like a cartoon character following the aroma of pie. The curry dip accompanied our appetizer of roti canai ($7.50), a Malaysian bread that looked like a South Asian dosa but was softer and doughier. It is difficult to convey how the slightly sweet, aromatic curry sauce attracted my mouth over and over, or how fine it was to stick that bread in it. The dish was simple, delicious and enormous, a perfect appetizer for two hungry people drinking beer, and the first sign that Laut was better than it looked.
I’m dubious of restaurants that serve more than one Asian cuisine – it usually means they don’t do any of them well. But my wife and I were in Union Square after a stress-inducing visit to the accountant, and it was dinnertime. Very little food nearby was both appealing and cheap enough, or, if it was, had no relaxing seating on which to stretch our weary bones. (I’m calling you out, Num Pang Sandwich Shop and Republic – being delicious isn’t enough when people have had a hectic day!) Suddenly, there was Laut looming before us on 17th Street and Fifth Avenue, proudly announcing it served “Malaysian, Singaporean, and Thai cuisine.” It wasn’t very expensive, at least by Manhattan standards.
I was ignorant of the fact that Singaporean and Malaysian cooking are inherently very similar anyway, and that both share influences from Thai cuisine as well. More unpardonable is that I was also ignorant of these countries’ geography. Half of Malaysia sits on the same peninsula as South Thailand, and the island of Singapore immediately abuts Malaysia’s shore. The word Laut means “sea,” and Malaysia is bordered by five different seas that connect it to the rest of Southeast and South Asia. All of these countries, including Indonesia (and India, and even China if you want to go that far north on the map), share some food traditions and blend them and reformulate them. I’ve had “sambal” (a tangy chili sauce in several variations) from Sri Lanka, but here was my Laut waitress serving me an authentically Malaysian sambal with squid, my entrée ($15).
One of the Malaysian versions of sambal is made with shrimp paste crushed with chilies ( *belacan* ), and came, in this instance, with okra, string beans, bell peppers, onions, and that squid, in amazingly soft and delicate cylindrical segments. It was the nicest squid I’ve ever had in my mouth, and delicious in the very hot and slightly funky sauce.
My wife had the curry laksa with vegetables ($12). Yes, laksa, the Malay-Singaporean-Indonesian soup that snotty but occasionally adorable butch Lisa Fernandes cooked on Top Chef. (Fangirls, she has opened a food truck in the city called Sweet Chili that alternately parks in Dumbo, in the Wall Street area, and in Chelsea.) Yes, among my many weaknesses is that I can be strongly influenced by Top Chef. The reverence with which Fernandes, Anthony Bourdain and other chefs on the show had spoken of this complex, spicy soup had made me always want to have it. Laut’s version was profound and homey, its broth thick with coconut cream, lemongrass, galangal, and chili paste, and almost too spicy for me to eat. The laksa was studded with noodles, carrots, string beans, cucumber, Vietnamese mint, fish balls and fried tofu, and Karen adored it. I myself found it addictive as a leftover the next day.
Laut’s setting isn’t fancy, but there are beautiful murals on its brick walls, including an elaborate one with a squid, a bird, and a large land animal turning into flowers and other objects in the midst of a psychedelic bright blue sea. Still, the plasticated paper dinner menus are banged up and even a little funky, and the bathroom plumbing is not perfect. Service is excellent even when the place is full to the gills, as it often is for lunch and dinner. The only time I had poor service was when I came for a very late lunch and found the lone waitress too occupied with her table of dining friends to be at all attentive to me, the only other diner in the place.
But I’d rather have this food than be at a yuppie showcase. At a second meal, we had the “crispy and spicy anchovies with peanuts” and little rounds of green chile ($6), described as “must-have Malaysian style beer snacks.” Blisteringly hot, salty, and sweet from the caramelization on the peanuts, they were indeed ideal snacks with or without beer, and I’ve found myself craving them almost every day since. The translucent fried anchovies were like Lilliputian, salty noodles in the mix.
Review of Brooklyn seafood restaurant Littleneck, by me in Gay City News:
Some gay men refer to women’s bodies as “fish” or “sushi,” and as a foodie, part of me is shocked that they don’t mean it as a compliment. To me, sushi, in the form of naked, unadorned salmon, tuna or shrimp surrounding vinegared rice and a dab of wasabi, is one of the sexiest foods there is. Lobster, oysters, clams, and scallops are even sexier, with a combination of bracingness, sweetness, salt and the teeniest little bit of funk or oddity that all good sex should have.
I thought about this recently while eating the extraordinary “full belly Ipswich clam roll” at Littleneck, which tasted oceanic. I intend the word in all its meanings here: Freud used “oceanic” when he was talking about religious feeling, which he related to the newborn’s sense that there was a limitless supply of milk available for it, and that it was absolutely at one with its mother. That is how I felt eating that clam roll, one of the few fried foods I am willing to eat on a regular basis (because it’s just so damn worth it). I admit I love cheap, random clam rolls, too, but this was a costly ($17), superlative clam roll, utterly fresh, and tasting clean and frisky at once. (It comes with homemade tartar sauce and two kinds of pickles.)
Littleneck, in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is a great date restaurant, with a smart, queer-friendly staff and an attractive room full of nautical gear. There are a lot of sailors’ ropes, a beautiful, tiny mirror inserted in a porthole, a waggish lamp with Captain Ahab as its base. I usually don’t like the decorating style known as Shabby Chic (why do rich people think it’s pretty not to repaint or fix things?) but Littleneck made me reconsider this reflex. There are white-enameled metal tables that suggest the ’50s, and white, not-fully-painted wooden chairs and hutches that suggest a dilapidated beach shack somehow made elegant. Edison bulbs, a punk-rock mirror over the bar partly smeared with black paint, and flowers on every table round things out.
The casual butch style made me feel at home, but the charm of the place made evenings there magical. One night when I visited, The Clash was playing at a gentle volume; another night, it was the Rolling Stones (less wonderful to me, but it did suit the overall aesthetic). In fact, the two polite and welcoming owners, who also serve as some of the waitstaff and bartenders, are punk musicians who had never worked in the food business before. Their generally good taste in music is another swell reason to visit (at Littleneck’s tiny sister location in Greenpoint, the extraordinary country singer Buck Owens was on the sound system one lunchtime).
A smallish lobster roll ($18) had me gasping in pleasure, with the sweetest, freshest crustacean meat in recent memory. Normally I’d be annoyed by the small size, but the lobster went straight to my brain’s pleasure centers, and I couldn’t care less. A grilled romaine salad was served in one huge paleo hunk, like a Fred Flintstone-size bone made of delicious charred vegetation ($13). It came with a strongly garlic flavored dressing (I silently applauded) and substantial chunks of bacon. My partner, Karen, insisted on attacking my plate.
I don’t want to tell you about Talde being hot, or about how annoying its chef, Dale Talde, was on Top Chef. What I want to tell you is what eating at Talde was like in spite of that, or, better yet, having nothing whatever to do with that.
I went for brunch even though I had no one to go with me, because dishes like “pretzel pork chive dumplings” and “lobster buns with chile mayo” prickled the pleasure centers in my brain as soon as I heard of them, and wouldn’t stop prickling them. My wife was busy having brunch out herself with a friend, and I wanted something fancy, special, and delicious, too, to compensate for not having been invited.
I was surprised that in this case, hotness did not mean superciliousness, and I was welcomed with warmth even though I was a woman dining alone who did not want to sit at the bar. Also that Talde was so good that it made me want to communicate minutely about every aspect of the food I could, as though it were a piece of poetry or a weird white flower growing on the moon.
Talde is an Asian-American restaurant (that’s what its owners call it) in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York. I ate the bacon pad Thai, which is an oyster-and-bacon pad Thai at dinner, and was stirred to a degree that bordered on emotion by its sour, complicated, enlivening flavors. With fat chunks of bacon, it tasted of lime, of fish funk from the great sauce called nam pla, of salt, and an almost indescribable tanginess. I wanted more fat and even more of that funky fishiness – probably the addition of oysters at dinner helps it. There were some peanuts, but I wanted more, and some more minced herbs for contrast. Even so, I loved it so much that its peculiar sour mix of flavors has stayed with me a month later. I ate the entire bowl, even though it was huge and mostly noodles.
One more thing: Talde’s cappuccino. I got it because they only had Americano, cappuccino and latte, and for me cappuccino is the least offensive of the three. (I prefer coffee, and I need it at brunch.) Usually cappuccino at restaurants that do not specialize in outrageously-good coffee is terrible. This cappuccino was, strangely, the best I’ve ever had.
It was strong and buzzy enough to hold up to all that milk, it did not taste like a would-be coffee dessert or coffee for weaklings. It was bracing, yet a little fruity – coffee, with a dose of steamed milk, the way they do it in Spain.
