In Praise of Restaurants

At the bottom of the hill I live on, there's this restaurant/bar called The Falls. I love the place, even though it's still imperfect. It's the place I most often go when I want to drink coffee or beer 'out'.

The hill is really one side of the valley that opens onto Baltimore city and eventually onto the Harbor of Baltimore. From the continental perspective, it's the spent end of the vast, rolling coastal plain that you descend onto when you climb down out of the Blue Ridge heading east. The Falls is where you end up, by one route or another, if you are immigrating from Appalachia, looking for factory work, fleeing the shift and final collapse of the economy that supported household farming through 20,000 years of settlement culture. You sell the dirt and head up the Blue Ridge, across the swaying backbone of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and the Virginias, you cross the rivers and horse pastures of Western Maryland, noting how curiously well the grass still thrives over Antietam, Harper's Ferry, Gettysburg. You pick your way along country highways, the meanderings of which seem to have forgotten whatever historical logic first trod them into being, until with Baltimore in the distance you travel the last sleeping suburban Main Streets and the growing disorienting swarms of wallboard mansions. Finally you come to modest old neighborhoods inhabited by the hand-to-mouth middle class, teetering above the collapsed industrial dead zones of Baltimore City. Welcome.

Finally, you peer down Sulgrave Avenue, over the last several million years of eroded time, and there at the bottom is Jones Falls. Falls is a regional word for 'river', and Jones Falls is the river that Baltimore used to power its mills, choked into a coma, and then built a highway over so as not to have to think about it. And curiously, most of the beautiful buildings along Jones Falls, under the roar of Jones Falls Expressway, are old stone and brick mill buildings that are a hundred times better able to shelter actual human warmth than the mansions you've climbed down past to stand here, at the bottom of Sulgrave, in the neighborhood of Mount Washington, in front of The Falls restaurant.

The Falls is not housed in one of these beautiful old mill buildings, but it squats near the warmth of the last one, near the expressway, the lightrail tracks and Jones Falls. God, I really hate the racket from the expressway, but there is some deep principle of gravity that draws us all to this intersection--me and the river, the highway, the edge of the neighborhood. I'll happily sit out in the heat and roar on a summer morning and scribble just for the pleasure of being near this sense of gravity. Even though it feels poisoned in some ways.

The Falls opened about two years ago in a storefront that for years had a Korean grocery with nearly nothing on the shelves. There was then a struggling and failed deli. The corned beef was awesome; the lighting was death. The place was just too big, inorganic somehow, yucky. You ate the too-expensive corned beef and fled, wishing them well but unable to stay. When the place closed it was depressing because, while there are several other restaurants in the same little part of Mount Washington Village, there was no place for people from the neighborhood, really. We have expensive taste but no money. Mount Washington Tavern is an expensive sports bar with bad beer that attracts aggressive young professionals on the prowl. Ethel & Ramone's does often-good Cajun fusion but it's expensive and dark. I don't really know why I don't like it there. Their gumbo is excellent and I've had a couple great evenings eating late on their front sidewalk on warm summer nights. The crepe place next door to E&R can be a great place to take one of the girls to talk and eat snails but I don't like the fussy little tables. Everything is like doll furniture that got sent through a bigulator, including the food, sort of.

The Falls always has nine beers on tap, often really interesting and beautiful, often local. Always an IPA, and always a stout or porter. The the food is only adequate but they make a good burger and there's also more interesting stuff if you want to try, and there's always veggie stuff if you're with a veggie, which I really appreciate. But what makes it part of the landscape to me is the restlessness of the owners, the way they've gradually made a restaurant that fits the weird L-shaped space, found lighting that drew the room towards its centers, filled in corners with bottles of whiskey and tequila, glasses of various shapes, drawn the eyes up with clay busts, with paintings and photos, books. And the wait staff and bartenders are smart and polite in a very human way. None of the particular decisions is all that important in itself, although the beer is crucial and the lighting was deathly and bad bread is really sort of literally depressing. What makes the place work is something else.

Luca Turin has called perfume "the most portable form of intelligence," which reframed some of my thinking about art. That is, art--for me, anyway--is defined in part by intelligence. All kinds, obviously. If something is artful or elegant it is in some way just right, fitting. And when something is fitting in an unexpected way, there is the delightful pop of discovery, that clicking in the brain when a new synaptic pathway switches on. And something that continues to grow with those sorts of clicks and shifts is alive and enlivening. To know a restaurant as a form of intelligence, to be around for some of the attempts to make it fit the place: these are, in the modest scale of an ordinary life, great pleasures.

The Falls is slowly becoming a place where they know the food and drink that they serve. They have chosen it mindfully and they eat and drink it themselves with real pleasure. They stand around and taste and speculate over the relative quality of the new charcuterie platter. They understand the pleasure of drinking good beer, and there I don't have to feel self-conscious about noticing and sometimes talking about the layers of sensation and flavor. It is becoming a place where a person who wishes to locate himself or herself in the senses can attempt to do so with some of the resources and types of thinking required to do that. No small thing.

The continent is behind you. The Falls is just down there, at the bottom of Sulgrave Avenue.

Call and Response - the Folkways of the Urban Bicycle Commuter

Before a man is going to push his boulder up the hill there are a few questions he must answer. So too did I have to answer some questions before I got going: first, "Am I strong enough?"; second, "Can I keep the bicycle in good working condition?"; third, "Can I be safe, pushing this boulder?"

I take this third more seriously now than I did when I was a bicycle messenger in D.C. one summer in college. I shudder to think of the things I did then: riding one way the wrong way down one-way streets in rush hour. Being willing to do almost anything to avoid stepping down of the bike - cutting across busy intersections at crazy angles, veering up onto the sidewalk heedless of (even rejoicing in) the stricken looks on the pedestrian faces.

I am a materially different person these days. Old and fat. A father. Winner of bread. It would not do to die or be maimed or suffer the dependent and deranged state of the traumatically brain injured. That of course could still happen, but meanwhile I will try to do my bit not to raise the odds. One of my goals, after all, is to get healthier.

That was not the only kind of safety to consider. The neighborhoods through which I would ride are the stuff of white-flight nightmares: abandoned row-houses, arrests on the street, poverty, suspicion, and violence. Or so I imagined. The fact is that the intra-urban interstate I commuted along in my car conveniently circumvented most of these neighborhoods, and I know of them mostly by rumor. So, to "do this safely" is coded language. Coded for me and for others who ask about my riding in the City: first they clearly think of how narrow and congested many of the City's street's are, and then they almost inevitably ask, "Wait, how do you ride home? What route do you take? What neighborhoods do you ride through?" So, I thought about that, too.

What I mostly thought was that this plan would not work if I were to ride, guarded and paranoid, can of mace or other milky defense mechanism clutched in one hand, down the hill and up. I did not want to spend an hour and a half a day afraid. So I took the opposite tack. I decided to say hello to folks as I went along: embrace the whole thing. The advantage of a bicycle is that you are going slowly enough (especially at first, and especially uphill on the way home) that you can call out and there is enough time for a response.

So that's what I did; what I do. On days when the weather is not too heinous (storming so I can't see, or blowing a tornado watch's worth of headwinds my way), I try to say hello to most folks I see. I try not to be obnoxious about it - if someone's not making eye contact, is on the phone or whatever, I leave them alone, but otherwise I throw a "Mornin", "Evenin", or "How you doin?" their way. Almost all of the people I interact with to and from work are African American. Probably two-thirds of them respond to the call, but here's the thing: not one of them has been rude or hostile or paranoid. Everyone who responds has been nice, and I get all kinds of responses back: "Hey", "Why hello, how are you?", "'Sup?", "Be safe", "What's goin on, big man?", "Mornin", "Evenin", "Hey, Brother", endless variations in the various accents telling of lifelong city residency, immigration from the Carolinas or other points south, or New York or Philly. I had a conversation with one guy in a car at the end of the summer about the importance of hydration - he had just come from working out and I was nodding my head to the music coming through his open windows. He told me to make sure I got enough water because it was hot and it was important for my health.

Occasionally the call comes from the pedestrians, and not from me - one young man was waiting for a bus, listing to headphones and nodding his head in time to the music. I was going slowly up the hill, not pushing too hard, so I also started nodding, which brought his exuberant call of "My nigga wid a bike!", to which I could only smile and keep pedaling. I had never been anyone's nigga wid a bike before. Pretty great, really. Another man called out "Hey I keep seeing you!" - pleased - and I gave my response.

Occasionally - usually at night - I might get a long stare, and once, from a kid who looked like he was about ten, a real eyefuck and chinthrust, and a call, "You police?" I just laughed. He asked once again on another night but I just shook my head and kept riding. His assumption has left me pondering, but I'll write about that later. Once a young man in a car waited till I was abreast of him and blew his horn - I jumped, and all the guys in his car laughed, but it was not malicious and I was willing to be the object of fun. Another guy rode his scooter by me going my way, honking tonically, laughing like a madman, but again he didn't bother me (and the sudden honk from the loud car horn is much more effective than the long blare of a slowly approaching scooter anyway).

Overall these interactions with the people along my route have been the most gratifying, most unlooked-for and wonderful part of my experience. That there is such a pleasant interaction between strangers of different backgrounds in this City just feels very good to me, better than the weight loss and sticking it to Big Oil. I do not fool myself that there is more to these interactions than there are. After all, folks are mostly just being polite. But the fact is that I don't think the white folks would be as polite to unknown black folks coming through their neighborhoods. If I ride through a white neighborhood and say "Hey" I often do not get any response. And so I am grateful for the people who are polite and warm to me, because it makes my life easier in a small but very important way.

My favorite call and response? I was leaving work, exhausted one evening and frazzled from the day. If I leave too late, the ride home is a little jangly and there is no flow, no rhythm to the ride. This was the worst so far - my rear view mirror that clips onto my glasses had worked itself loose a few blocks from where I work. I reached up with one hand to adjust it, but then I saw a car coming around the corner in front of me: no big deal but without thinking I grabbed the front brake, lost control of the bike and went down, landing painfully on my left thigh. I pulled my bike to the far side of the street to check out my pager, on which I had landed and my bike, and to finally get the mirror situated. Across the street and behind me there had been a group of kids - five or six of them, about eight or nine years old on average, probably. These kids live right there, in the projects, in lives that that tend to be steeped in drugs and violence. (These lives I know a little more about because of the toll of this kind of life on the mental health of the residents in the community. One young man told my colleague, who kept telling him to take his meds at dinnertime every day, "You keep telling me to take my meds at dinnertime, but I live in the ghetto, and I don't know what this 'dinnertime' is, we don't have dinner....") So, right after I went down, one girl started cackling at the top of her lungs: "He fell! Oh, my God, he fell! HAHAHAHAAHA, did you see that, heeee fffffeeeeeeelllllllll". I flushed with quick anger and humiliation, but the obvious glee that she was taking in my downfall was infectious, and after about a second and a half I found myself smiling ruefully. It was dusk so it was a little hard to see, and I wasn't interested in facing my mocker, so I just kept checking the bike. Then, the call came, from one of the older boys in the group: "Hey, are you OK?" And my response: "Yeah, thanks, I'm just embarrassed." And I got on my bike and rode off. That the boy would reach across the gulf and ask me, an old white guy from the suburbs, if I was OK, when he had nothing to gain but just because it was a common, decent thing to do, has been by far my favorite moment, born of my clumsiness and his willingness to ignore the class and race differences dividing us.

I have a couple of friends who have been punched while riding their bikes or scooters. I don't know whether that will happen to me, and if it does how my answer to the question of whether I can do this safely will change. For now the answer to the third question I asked myself before setting out to become a bicycle commuter - the question of safety - has been answered, at least for the moment, but in a way that is more nuanced than was the original question. How safe is it to depend on foreign oil? To get fat? To ignore the struggles of poor neighborhoods and remain fundamentally ignorant of the lives of those who surround us? I feel less afraid, less isolated, less weak than I did when I started, and I am grateful. For now that is more than enough.

This Roma Girl

What was it like? When you're a filmmaker you're always late for someplace else when the real shot shows up. There's never enough money or time. It's cold or it's hot; I'm late; no one will hold still or they won't keep doing what they were just doing that was actually interesting, and then something shows up in shit light or smiles at me, right there, and I don't see it because the film is already about something else.

The girl was about 12. Or maybe older and just small. There was food there and everything but all the people were small and hard, and looked older than they were, although I had no way of knowing how old they were. But even the children looked old. Not old with time but stamped with age to which time only needed to be added. The Roma aren't like the Czechs who age into good-humored cynics, or the Americans who age into surprised children. There always seems to be some chance that an American might escape mortality. On film they mostly look busy or surprised.

The gypsy camp was an ugly maze and I was late and lost. Men kept hitting on me, asking if I would take them home to America. I live in London, I said. Take me to London they said. And then this one little girl. She had very dark eyes, and it struck me enough to check what I was seeing without the camera. Although when it's bright like that the world disappears for a moment anyway when your eye leaves the camera. But it was impossible to see anything but shy darkness in her eyes. I mean their invisibility was palpable. And I couldn't look away. You can see how the shot wobbles. There.

And then I realized that we had surprised each other--my rush and her tears--she was weeping. They were all dusty, and the tears left channels of girlish skin down one cheek that spread to one side of her Roman nose as she wiped her face with her knuckles. We were hurrying away from each other the whole time but we did this dance, which I mostly got on film. She was hurrying back to conceal her tears, and I was hurrying to be wrong about what my film was about.

'Are you crying? Why are you crying?'
She looked away and looked back which was a kind of answer. I think she meant that I wouldn't understand, or that's what I imagined. On the film, she looks away and when she looks back she has decided that her eyes will be less opaque. She looks into the lens and the autofocus flickers and then she is gone again.
'Why are you crying?' I ask, and she shrugs. And then, "What is your name?"
'What is your name?" she says, and her voice is small, only the voice of girl, although very husky.
'Pavla.' And then, 'What is your name.' Now coaxing, which she likes, and smiles.
'Pavla?'
'What's wrong?' again. And she looked at me blackly and answered in some language I assume was Roma. I couldn't understand, of course. I speak English and Czech and some Russian but no Roma, of course, if that's what it was.
She said whatever it was again, looking at me as though it were impossible to say it in any other language.
She shrugged and--although it doesn't seem to show up on the screen--through the lens her face was a child's face and her eyes were green.

Romans in Sturdy Denim

Marketing is mostly bunkum. Politics is mostly marketing, at least during an election season. And if you are interested in the invisible substrate of our collective assumptions--many of which we individually doubt--then nearly everything is political. So how is it that even if we don't see the world the way that we are told Joe the Plumber sees it, we still feel limited in some way by what Joe will supposedly swallow? Fictitious weathervanes of public opinion. Was it ever thus? At any rate, advertising, mythologizing, self-narration, romancing, bullying, pep-talking, vogueing, bunkum--these are sister muses. Especially in an age as persuaded by the rhetoric of images as our own.

V recently commented on my feeling located vis a vis all this American stuff. And the troof of course is that I'm no more located than him. We have equal rights to America, and similar scruples about the ethics of authenticy, about the misappropriation of images by marketers. And maybe a similar body memory of the sting when we're reminded that we might be wearing plaid or whatever, we might be out in the same heat working for the same shit wage, but we're still college boys. I spent a summer in California heat moving scrap metal and used car batteries that had accumulated for years in the inferno of the narrow alley between two corrogated metal warehouses. Coming in overheated and with my clothes coming to pieces from the battery acid, and the old guys who worked there year around just laughed at me, never allowed me the honor of being one of them, even insofar as I was doing a job even they weren't willing to do because I had to have the money. And I suppose even so I wasn't one of them. But why, exactly?

Their suspicion is not without cause, of course. Think of the "Tea Party" "movement" with its familiar Reagan era rhetoric of an evangelical Christian national founding and a monolithic set of "American values". This is a fantasy of the American past. Americans have always been deeply divided; the Union was always tenuous; our present sea to shining sea thing would have been unthinkable to anyone at the Constitutional Convention. If you don't believe me, o Koch brothers, read the handsome two volume Library of America record of the proceedings. Interesting and scary stuff.

And the Tea Partiers are not alone in their more or less deliberate revisions of the past. Both sides do it. We all do it. "Revisionism", though,--and the quotation marks are buzzing like flies, here, as they always do around this fecund poop--is just one way of slinging it. How about "reinvention"? How about "self-interested reinvention"? How about "interested but historically responsible reinvention as one important mode of problem solving"? How about that?

Levi's and L.L. Bean have both recently taken an interest in their own past. And in the case of Levi's in particular, their past has real significance as an image of what is worth repeating in the American past. This despite a history of exploiting other peoples' ideas and labor and distorting their own history in various ways. Levi's hired an in-house historian, Lynn Downey, in 1989, and the brand has wheeled out variations on old designs, some of them very good, and made their archives available to the public. The fact remains that you can buy two pairs of sturdy denim jeans, which Levi's actually does make, and they will, with reasonable care, get you through several years of multi-purpose use. The popularity of such practical clothing, and the fact that in the West at any rate, you can wear them most places without being discourteous to your hosts, says something good--to my mind, anyway--about one aspect of our national values. It's a strange brand of populism that is so fearful about manipulations of the market by "socialism" but shows no interest in manipulations of the market by corporations. It is also perhaps a strange brand of populism that characterizes the poor as subject to a kind of hereditary illness, and seems--in its public rhetoric, anyway-- to have a hard time imagining that the poor could share the pleasures of work. Work clothes made of sturdy denim that show the line of the body, allow free movement and are reinforced at stress points with steel rivets? That's not a bad start for a populist platform.

Of course it's marketing for Levi's, and they have no particular scruples about where populism ends and bullshit begins. Their ads are beautiful lifestyle marketing, like so much marketing. But look at this recent ad--short film, really--and this one which uses what is probably a wax cylinder recording of Whitman deliberately reciting four lines of 'America', his voice holding you so close to the four-beat rhythms of the lines that you feel his hairy chest, the cross-tie scratchings of the cylinder clipping through camera frames like a train.

I hate business writing, so bold-face-emphatic and easy-to-summarize, but I recently heard this thing that might actually be true: "A leaders hire A people; B leaders hire C people." So who are you willing to invite into your self-interested reinventions with you? How much of their voice and vision will you let in? Do they get to speak, or will you merely take a couple names in vain? Is this Levis' ad marketing--speech--that dares to enter the room with something truly anarchic and physical? Something like American Eros? To me it is.

IKNOWYOUHATEMEBABYBUTDON'TBREAKTHENEEDLE

When George W. Bush posited that "thee hater freedoms, thee hater wayalife," my greatest fear was that a bunch of American religious radicals would combine with religious radicals in other parts of the world and that they would collectively take aim at the mid-tempo alt-country rocker, which is the freak flag of guys like me, and is the only vessel fit to enskull the mythy conscience of my race, narrowly defined in the 19th C sense which guys like me know what that means.

The idea as I understand it is this: if a given song could not be discussed in a conference session entitled The Dust Bowl and the Radicalization of the American Folk Ballad: From Dust to Grit or Is the Answer Still "Blowin' in the Wind"?, then the songwriter must keep revising. And if, in mid-discussion no one raises an index finger, pad up, to the dropped conference room ceiling and mentions Springsteen in half-ironic reverence or reverential irony, then keep revising--(note bene: prolly needs cars). And these conferences really are worth something, a lot maybe. When Pete Seeger, who really was pretty fucking courageous, sits all knees and elbows and chin and bangoneck across from Hugh Hefner and has a televised conversation about the history and implications of playing an African instrument at a groovy televised sexual liberation party with bunny ears and cotton tails and Hef is really listening and asking groovy perceptive questions, then something good is happening. This really happened and I suspect it could not, now.

And I like all this stuff, truly, but it smacks of tourism.

(Why is it that we need to keep coming back to poverty in order to say anything smart about democracy. I think we do.)

But so. A couplethree weeks ago I went on a whim to see a local(-based) band called J. Roddy Walston and the Business. I'd heard a couple songs on the radio and I liked. Reminded me of a sort of cross between early Cheap Trick and Dr. Professor Longhair. Boogie-woogie piano and mic-assaulting caterwauling a la Aerosmith or James Brown or Bon Scott. And I'd been listening to and writing (Gawd hep me), yes, mid-tempo alt-country rockers for so long. In fact I graduated to them from G-major artmurmur poetgurgles that I wroted in the dry well of my soul. I do my best, really I do. But I'm really not sure that the message of rock and roll is :be here now", John Lennon having made the ultimate sacrifice notwithstanding.

This is a little bit interesting: the opening act was this guy who looked really good in blue jeans and wrote mid-tempo alt-country rockers and who it was real easy to tell rode his wallet in his front pocket and made a big point of being intimate good friends with the next opener, Shooter Jennings. Now Shooter Jennings is the more photocerebral--and somewhat shrunk as if abandoned in the parking lot of a Sunglass Hut in a steady drizzle--son of Waylon Jennings. And he wroted an album demanding that the O be returned to "country" and has pursued this whole plan of wearing country duds but more beat up (cf. 'poverty, fake') and being photographed in psychedelic colored lighting from arty angles. But his latest plan involves a concept album co-written and dramatically narrated by Bangor, Maine's own Stephen King about the last era-closing broadcast of an independent rock and roll radio station before the Total Take-Over of a Rock and Roll Hating (because duh) Totalitarian Regime that curiously resembles Abercrombie & Fitch except without those louver blinds. So Shooter strapped on one of them Madonna mics (even less plausible in a tiny club in Baltimore) and straddled a little crotch-level keyboard with also a guitar dangling from him and counseled us rockingly to abjure our conformist ways. He had one of those guitar players with girl-long hair who can't be fucking serious but who maybe is. And the thing is, Shooter just screamed and kept screaming, hitting some serious notes with complete and desperate conviction. And the guitar player just shredded scales and doubled big notes with power chords until I sort of stopped smiling and began to think, fuck, these boys mean it. They're goofy but that's not the issue.

And this has gotten so long because I don't even know what to say about J Roddy Walston and the Business. It was they who were the second opener. But what they really opened. Was my heart. (I mean it.) J Roddy swung his dirtyblonde ringlets at his (actual upright) piano and pounded and pounded and screamed out the sum total of all Anglo-African horror and longing, and spattered us with the cumulative effluvia and sifted gold of all patient river deltas. It was just blues and only rock and roll but Professor Longhair was there with magnolia breath, and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis with his half-kidnapped brides, Blind Willie Johnson testifying in oil-skid feathers like a pigeon, Dylan or maybe Jehovah in a prayer shawl of lightbulbs and hubcaps. And when I walked out ears ringing as if the room still hung ringing around me, there were thunderheads blowing in, and the storm smelled like rust and like honeysuckle and like the sea, and it descended in black tatters over the harbor and Fort McHenry until the last of summer broke in sheets of rain.

Io Sono L'Amore Orange Preoccupation Pumpkin Pie

Zest of one orange in the crust
2 cups squashed up roasted pumpkin
1 1/2 cups of half & half
4 oblong chicken eggs
1/8 t each of allspice, nutmeg, clove & cayenne
(Nota bene: as you add the cayenne, briefly imagine one daughter saying that she just likes pumpkin pie regular, and another daughter asking why do things have to get different, and then put in)
1 t of ground ginger.
Then in the whipped cream: ground fresh ginger, crystalized ginger cut up real small, the zest of another orange, powdered shug, and a passing afterthought of vanilla. (Things are getting less precise by this point.)

Serve with Belgian ale or a squinch of whiskey or do what you think best.

Enemies and Friends, Updates

Enemies

Deer

The Internet

God

Former Enemies Now Listed as Friends

Tobacco

Romance Novels

My Penis