Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel

   For a New Yorker, few things could be cooler than living in the Chelsea Hotel, residence of great artists, writers, and underground filmmakers. The place is adorned with great artwork, and the owner, a sentimentalist despite himself, used to let eccentric people live there without paying the rent. It was the home of Andy Warhol’s superstars, and residents included (at different times) Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendricks, Dylan Thomas, and Dee Dee Ramone. From the get go, Nicolaia Rips makes her status clear; she grew up in the Chelsea Hotel, but she wasn’t invited to any cool parties or treated like royalty. If you think this is about a kid who grows up in the Warhol crowd, think again, because she’s too late. Warhol was long dead by the time she was born, and the Chelsea residents she writes about are all old. She’s the daughter of eccentric weirdos and the kids at her school all have rich celebrity parents. She’s a free-range kid who doesn’t fit in with the socially precocious and over-sophisticated children of the elite. She’s born into an artsy crowd that’s dying off.

    While this may sound harsh, keep in mind that she was born around 1998, so by that time there weren’t a lot of less-affluent educated families in the area anymore. She makes a horrible impression on her first day of kindergarten because (a) she doesn’t know how to read yet, and (b) her parents haven’t hired a million tutors to teach her Chinese, opera singing, and how to play the harp. She’s basically a kid, that’s it, but her classmates have been taught to be little grownups with fancy manners. When she causes a disaster at a rich upstate pool party, I wanted to cheer.

    Rips exposes the city elite’s self-delusion of talent. She has a dance teacher who’s obsessed with the avante-garde, and on the first day of class the child is ridiculed for wearing a tutu. The dance program is all “modern” dancing, while the teacher despises kids who want to learn ballet or tap. When I read this chapter, the first thing that entered my mind was Holden Caulfield. The teacher has the same mindset, ranting about “phonies” and overcome with grandiose views of herself, even though she’s only a dance teacher for six-year-olds. Holden would’ve thought she was a genius for turning up her nose at conventional arts, but his sister Pheobe would probably have seen right through her. As for her classmates, the parents are like something out of The Nanny Diaries, pushing their kids to do activities that aren’t age-appropriate.

    A lot of the blame goes to the author’s own nutty parents. They don’t get her to school on time, and she nearly gets held back, though her father has plenty of time to play pranks on the local dry cleaners. She gets into LaGuardia High School, that is good, but she still doesn’t fit in. Most of the white kids in the city by 2012 came from rich families. There aren’t a lot of kids in the city who come from families that are educated by not wealthy. It seems as though her parents were steering her towards kids who came from rich families, rather than the ones that have decent social skills. Not all city kids are rich or sophisticated; as a private tutor I saw every kind of city kid, and not all of them push their children to excel.

   Trying to Float is a great memoir, a cross between the manic Eloise and the cynical Holden Caulfield. Unlike most memoirs about crazy childhoods, it’s written by an 18 year old, so everything that happens here is still fresh in her mind. There were other children who lived in the Chelsea, like actress Gabby Hoffman, but she left around 1990. I was there twice in my life, once for a friend’s party in one of the rooms, and once while my apartment was being fumigated. Based on what I remember, I would like to have read a better description of the building, the famous art collection, the other things about the neighborhood. The problem is that when you’re a kid you don’t observe things the way an adult would, so it’s difficult to understand the mood.

    Kids who grow up in Manhattan are often classed as spoiled and socially precocious, though the author doesn’t fit the stereotype. When compared to other similar writers, she could be part of what I call the “why is that kid here” school of memoir writing. Dalton Conley, author of Honky, was the only white kid in a Lower East Side housing project (obviously not sophisticated) and his memoir is all about social class structure. Then there’s The Basketball Diaries, where the working-class Jim Carrol attends Trinity School, plays basketball, and does heroin. As for MacCaulay Culkin, he hasn’t written a memoir, but his childhood on the Upper East Side involved dysfunctional parents and squalor. Let’s face it, growing up in Manhattan is great or horrible. Trying to Float pulls no punches and gives us both.

    My research into the author tells me that her book began with complaints. Someone advised her to write them all down, and the long collection of gripes became her memoir. Currently she and her family live on the Upper East Side while the Chelsea Hotel is being renovated, and according to her, the neighborhood has nothing to do. I didn’t like it much myself when I lived there 17 years ago, and I don’t like it much now.

   I wonder if people like her parents would’ve been better off in the Westbeth building, where most of the artists lived. There would’ve been a lot more kids there, and she wouldn’t have been such a misfit. Something tells me Rips will publish another memoir later on. I look forward to it.

Digestate: A Food Anthology

In this anthology from Birdcage Bottom Book, 40 artists draw tales of food and eating. A babysitter, aggressive in her vegan philosophy, tells her poor little charge the real story of the three little pigs. Yes, it’s scary, and yes, he gets nightmares. Ben Snakepit’s story about punk rock vegans is simple and funny, while his drawings are minimal but focused, like Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi. Hazel Newlevant’s story Soul Food is all about food laws in different societies, with a solid story and good artwork, it could be the start of a full-length book. Newlevant’s style is similar to Lucy Knisley’s French Milk, but without all the narcissism and self-indulgence. Best of all, it makes me hungry!

   Marek Bennett goes international for his story. He travels to see his hillbilly cousins, in Slovakia, and sees how they’re eating habits are somewhat Spartan, right down to the way they butcher a bull. A local farm, restricted by lack of funds, is considered “organic” by European Union standards and makes a fortune selling meat to Italy. Unfortunately the meat is too pricey for any of the locals, as Slovakia has few jobs and everyone’s leaving. The story is great, but I’m not sure about portraying the people as rabbits. It may have worked in Maus, but here there’s no reason for it.

    Alex Robinson, of Box Office Poison and Too Kool 2 Be Forgotten, draws a comic about picky eating. I was glad to see something by Alex Robinson, I’ve always been a big fan of his. 

Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century

 Every city has its own unique public housing and problems that go with it. New York City has huge high-rises in bad areas, where land is nonetheless at a premium. Chicago had the Robert Taylor high-rises far from the city center, on a strip of land that nobody wanted. New Orleans had the Iberville Houses, only four stories high, and possible the very first of its kind in the USA. Boston had Old Colony, London had Broadwater Farm, and Paris has its “banlieues.” Wherever you go, public housing usually stinks. The questions of this book are as follows; why do they stink, and were there any that worked?

    Nicholas Bloom begins with the Depression in the USA, a time when everyone in the USA was broke and desperate for work. In NYC, the crumbling fire-trap tenements needed to be torn down, and with Hoovervilles springing up in Central Park, there was also a need for cheap apartments. Under Mayor LaGuardia there was a lengthily study of this problem, and it led to the founding of NYCHA. The New York City Housing Authority would start with just a few buildings, and for the most part it went well. But as the years went by, NYCHA would build many more buildings and become less adept at managing them.

    Bloom defines NYCHA as having higher standards than other cities, but staying cheap without going shoddy. New York City’s public housing does have a higher standard than Chicago, as with the poorly-built projects like James Honer, Robert Taylor, Ida Wells, and Cabrini-Green. Soviet visitors to Chicago once remarked on the poor quality of the Honer buildings, and how such terrible construction would cost a Soviet architect his job (and possible his life too) if he were to skimp on quality. Under Federal laws, the buildings couldn’t be far-off from the main parts of the city, or in an area badly-served by transit. This meant that to cram more people in, NYCHA had to use the high-rise approach, which didn’t foster a sense of neighborhood.

    Robert Moses also comes into play here. He didn’t want the public housing in the outer-reaches of the city; that would necessitate bringing public transport all the way to the suburbs. He also designed the Patterson Houses to be occupied by two-parent families, no single moms, prospective tenants had to show their marriage certificate to get in. The wicked Robert Moses thought such a rule would keep unruly tenants out, and for a while, he was right. But here’s where the problem started, one which nobody anticipated. Once the small 1950’s houses came within their means, the regular working people left the projects, replaced by Black and Puerto Rican families. The next wave of tenants didn’t meet the “21 traits” of Robert Moses, and there weren’t enough gainfully-employed two-parent families to fill the buildings. Single mothers on welfare with unruly kids moved in.

    Compared to Chicago’s housing and the Pruitt-Igoe houses in St. Louis, NYCHA buildings worked. But just because they’re still standing doesn’t mean they’re any good. They still look horrible, and they still diminish the sense of neighborhood. But unlike the extensive South Side of Chicago, NYC land is limited and costly. That’s the only reason the tenants in the worst buildings don’t move out. Did NYC public housing really work? Maybe, at first, it did.

Latino Politics in America

   John Garcia begins with a 2006 protest against an anti-immigrant Bill (not designed to be anti-immigrant, but the de-facto outcome would be) that would set harsh penalties for entering the country illegally. Since the biggest source of immigration to the USA is Latin America, such a Bill would have a tremendous bearing, and not a good one, on the Latino demographic. The author defines Latinos as a people that share language, cultures, habits, values, and while subgroups exist, he focuses on the ties that bind.

    Garcia uses two maps of Latino population in the USA to illustrate the shift. In one map, the majority is in Florida, Texas, the Southwest, and New York. But in the map that shows population growth, the concentration in the Southeastern states. In the chapter on Culture & Demographics, he shows how Argentines and Continental Spanish are the wealthiest, while Latinos from Honduras and Guatemala are on the bottom. This isn’t surprising to me, because Argentina has a notoriously well-educated population and most Argentines are of German or Italian origin.

    As far as political organization goes, Garcia doesn’t find much of it until late. In the Rust Belt, Latino workers would simply have joined whatever labor unions represented their industry. There were some earlier groups, like the LULAC in Texas in the 1920’s, and the Little Schools program of the 1950’s, which worked to improve the English skills of preschool-age kids. Most of these groups were benevolent societies, rather than political ones on par with the NAACP. When the mass deportations occurred in the Great Depression, there was little support for Latinos in the media, no Mexican-American version of the NAACP or CORE to speak out on their behalf. In Florida there have been many Cuban-American lobbyist groups, but their interest is strictly for the benefit of Cuban refugees.

    Garcia makes good use of charts in this book, because a lot of the issues discussed here are regional. The biggest concentration of Latino immigrants is obviously in the areas closest to Mexico, and these states will be effected the most through immigration reform. Though not mentioned in this book, there was an earlier one called Lone Star State which delved into the subject of Latino politics. According to that book, Texas is no longer the right-wing Republican state it had been when George W. Bush was governor. With an increase in Latino legislators, there has been greater advocacy for peoples’ rights in education, health, social services, and criminal justice reform.

Robert Frank: In America

Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, always a keen observer of the mundane, spent 1956-1957 documenting the USA. His photos from this journey became a book called The Americans, though others from the project were not published for another 20 years. This current book, In America, includes his earlier photos from 1949-1956, taken across the USA, that didn’t make it into his first.

    The first two photos in this book are of old men in California, and they have the quality of snapshots, with no attention to framing. However, what they lack in composition, they more than make up for by capturing the mood. In the photo, titled Main Street California 1956, a hunched old man in an ill-fitting suit shuffles across the street, looking like a hobo. He’s the only guy in the photo, alone in a vast expanse of auto dealerships and drug stores, oblivious to his surroundings. His hand in his pocket makes him the air of a country bumpkin, and you can see the chain of a pocket watch hanging from his belt. Maybe he really was a country bumpkin? Maybe he came to California during the Great Depression and never lost his country habits? Maybe he even arrived as a hobo? He’s a sharp contrast to the man in the second photo, wearing a tailored white suit and hat and riding a bike, his chin up in the air. Yet even that photo is funny, because few men commuted by bike in the 1950’s.

    Differences abound; the people of New York, Chicago, and Miami are well dressed, compared to the slovenly unwashed people of North Carolina. The Detroit auto workers wear short-sleeve open-collar shirts, baseball caps, and have an “I don’t give a damn” attitude. The city people in Frank’s pictures obviously pay more attention to their hair, clothing, and grooming habits, a trait that I still see today. During a visit to Wilmington, Delaware, I saw how the locals dress like construction workers, in baggy jeans and chunky shoes, even on weekends, while New Yorkers wear tight-fitting clothes and high heels (even the men). From these photos, you can tell the difference in the habits of the city and country people, along with the way their careers effect their manner, which has not changed in the years since. However, one difference I see between the 50’s and today is how the people age. There’s a photo of a man in a gray suit and hat, in the club car of a train, and he looks to be at least 60. But was he? Could he have been younger? Nowadays, men who grew up in the 1970’s don’t look old, at least not the way their ancestors did. Furthermore, I have to wonder whether the wealthier classes were truly happy. Is the gray-suited man in the train satisfied with his life? Those of you who read the novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit ill know how dissatisfying life was for the white-collar man. Were the slovenly Detroit auto worker in a better mood? They would have made just as much money as the gray-suited salaryman, and if not, Detroit’s auto workers could still buy houses on their salaries. As for the social class differences, the wealthy-looking ones don’t all look happy.

    Some photos in the book are risqué, like the one of the Puerto Rican transvestites in New York. Others capture the racial attitudes of the south, like the one of the Black woman holding a White baby. Frank said he was shocked at the racism of the south; White women wouldn’t think twice about trusting a Black woman with their kids, but they wouldn’t let her sit on the same park bench. I’m sure there was class conflict in Frank’s native Switzerland, but the skin color issue would’ve made American racism more evident. Then again, if Frank had visited London at the time, would he have commented on the racial segregation there? Or the segregation in Paris? Racial segregation is not restricted to the USA.

    I first saw Robert Frank’s work at the Whitney Museum in 1996, in an exhibit titled Robert Frank: Moving Out. The exhibit was placed simultaneously as another one, about Beat culture in the 1950’s. Perhaps Robert Frank’s photos captured both mainstream and fringe in American society? Was it because he wasn’t American? In a trend started by Alexis De Tocqueville 120 years earlier, he joins the ranks of Europeans who document American life, with the awe and disgust of an impartial outsider. Frank’s photos capture the peoples’ way of life, and leaves the viewer to draw conclusions.is hotos from

   

  

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Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers

Today’s cities don’t have skyscrapers to save space, at least not the way they do in New York and Hong Kong. Today’s megatowers are symbols of prosperity, like the ridiculous Burj Khalifa in Dubai, or the huge fountain in that city, ironic since there are now lakes or rivers anywhere in Arabia. Each city comes with her own unique challenges, like sanitation, sewage, policing, and transport. According to author Stephen Graham, they also bring about the development of new technologies.

     Helicopters are increasingly used to police major cities. While rarely used in Britain or Israel (despite their problems with terrorism) it was common for the police in Los Angeles to use them as far back as the 1980’s. Today, heat racking systems come in handy, as in the case of the Boston Marathon Bomber, caught hiding in a disused boat. While a helicopter with a heat detector may have helped scope out a hidden fugitive, it has also become a symbol of military-style policing in poor areas. Los Angeles was notorious for this in the 1980’s (see Blue: The LAPD and the Struggle to Redeem American Policing) during the War on Drugs. While the LAPD has made curbs to the use of SWAT, it has always been commonplace in Brazil, Jamaica, and South Africa.

    The Favelas of Latin America are used in this book as an example of an urban policy that is both a success and a failure at the same time. The city of Medellin, Colombia, has a typical urban center at the bottom of a valley while the poorer areas are clustered in the hills. Cable cars were introduced in the last decade to cut travel time, so there would be no more two-hour bus rides down the winding mountain roads. Protests sprang up, however, because there were some who saw this as an effort to keep the poor out of the wealthy areas. Similarly, the city of Rio De Jeniero had stairways and bridges built across the ravines in order to cut travel time by the residents of the Favelas, but some saw this as an excuse to avoid improving sanitation and sewage. It’s cheaper to build a steel and concrete bridge than to make regular garbage collection, and certainly cheaper than to build housing for the poor in what is considered a wealthy area.

    Every city has its own unique history regarding urban improvement. No matter what country you’re in, whether it’s New York City, London, Paris, Rio, or Medellin, efforts are made to improve things and some people get left out in the cold. But if children in a wealthy area are simply walking to school, while the children in a poor area do so with submachine guns pointed at them, then who’s to say either side benefits?

   

    

Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids and How to Break the Trance

Let me confess that my memory has gotten worse thanks to technology. The contact list on my cell phone eliminates any need to memorize numbers, so after having one for 13 years, I only know three phone numbers. However, I never use GPS and still navigate the old-fashioned way, by using a map and recognizing landmarks. Google Map is great for directions, but I still keep a map in my bag, and I often enjoy looking at maps, thinking of where I might go on my next vacation. They give me a desire to go out and see the world.

   

Glow Kids is written by Nicholas Kardaras, a neurologist who studies the effects of computers on memory and mental power. On one hand, he writes that there is little concrete evidence on the connection between screen addiction and mental disorders. However, the signs are omnipresent, with outdoor activities neglected in favor of video games and internet use. He places a lot of the blame on keeping kids indoors out of fear that they’ll hurt themselves. There used to be lots of wonderful playgrounds in the USA, built like army obstacle courses with ropes, slides, jungle gyms, and monkey bars. They’ve all been torn down in the last 15 years, because of the numerous playground accidents. So where do the kids go to play? They don’t go anywhere, they sit in front of the TV or the computer. Schools have been getting rid of outdoor recess because they’re afraid of accidents. The result is that the kids never get out. Videogames are the only thing to keep them busy.

    

Dr. Kardaras discusses how some kids, usually boys, are so addicted to video games that they never leave their rooms. One of the cases involves a 20 year old who ceased going to school, never leaves his room, and his mother leaves his meals by the door. Getting him out to go to the doctor takes several people to wrestle him out. I’m sure that there’s a lot of enabling going on here, because the parents could refuse to cook or clean for him, and they could always cut off his internet connection, cancel the cable, and stop buying him the games. Maybe the root of the problem is that these young people are emotionally troubled to begin with, and the video games are a way to avoid reality and shut out the world?

I got my hopes up in the chapter Brave New E-World, because for years I sought out games that would improve my memory and eyesight, powers that diminish under constant computer usage. Then I read Dr. Kardaras’ study on the London cab drivers, and there, in their training program, is the solution. Anyone coveting a hack license in London, England, must spend a year riding around on a scooter with a map mounted in front, memorizing streets and landmarks. Dr. Kardaras finds that the minority who pass the test develop a very dense hippocampus, meaning that their studying does to the brain what weight lifting does to muscle – it strengthens it!

    

The book concludes with a list of efforts to wean kids off the screen. There are wilderness camps, arts, music, physical activities, all of which get the kids out of the house and using their bodies. But he doesn’t mince words or promise miracle cures, he makes it very clear that it’s a hard sell and it’s up to the grownups to make outdoor activities more attractive. He also says that the US Surgeon General needs to study the problem with greater detail, end the hyping of useless technology as an educational tool, and put a freeze on technology in the classroom.

    

Kardaras cites the Sydney Grammar School in Australia as an example of a school without technology. The Cambridge-educated headmaster requires all papers to be hand-written until 10^th grade, forbids laptops, and makes writing a priority. Writing, according to him, breeds creativity, and creativity it fostered when the kids need to create. Let the kids be bored, Kardaras says, because when they’re bored and there’s nothing to do, they will make things to do.

New York Rock: From the Rise of the Velvet Underground to the Fall of CBGB

New York Rock is music writer Steve Blush’s presentation of the city’s old music scene, from the 1960’s to around 2006. He describes himself as having spent a good deal of his youth working at his grandfather’s Lower East Side printer, at a time when the 1980’s bands like Talking Heads and Blondie were on the up-and-coming. The book is full of primary sources, mostly quotes from magazine articles of the time. Lou Reed, Richard Hell, David Johansson, and others reminisce about the “hot summer” years of Manhattan’s golden age. Wait, maybe that’s not right, more like a “trash-strewn, grimy, filthy, and vomit-smelling.” It was great for bohemian life, but throughout the book, there’s the constant pull between two aspects of city life; the run-down neighborhood that foster bohemian living, versus the desire to live in the city without being attacked.

    There’s a short chapter about the demise of Tin Pan Alley, just like the old New York jazz scene which ended decades later. The small venues of show tunes that came from Tin Pan Alley gave way to big musicals (see The Great Parade) which is how the small theatres of 42^nd Street became porn houses. The 45rpm record made recordings cheaper, and the sheet music business was no longer profitable. Now we have foreshadowing; the demise of a music scene would be repeated 40 years later, as CBGB’s would close the way others had gone before.

    Next comes the chapters on CBGB and that’s probably the mainstay of the book. Despite the small size, it lasted over 30 years (or longer, if you count it previous life as just another Bowery bar) so we might as well give Hilly Cristal credit for tenacity. Bob Gruen (who shot the iconic photo of John Lennon in a NYC tee shirt) describes the Lower East Side as a “seedy, Spanish, and scary fucking neighborhood.” You’d probably get mugged down there, so looking dirty, messy, scruffy, and crazy would make all the other crazies think you had no money. If you made it there and back alive, you were considered tough. It was art of the lore of the place.

    With each new generation, Blush adds new quotes. Rob Zombie, in a quote from 1986, says he hates being called a sell-out, because that’s exactly his intention, to get famous and rich. Lou Reed, who once claimed he took drugs to free himself, had since cleaned and sobered up. The people who disliked the gentrification of the neighborhood kind of gentrified themselves. You can’t be a long-haired crazy rebel when you’re 45 years old, you’d run out of things to rebel against. That’s why so many rappers become producers; they can’t rap about “the ghetto” once they start living in high-riced condos and gated communities.

    While New York Rock is full of well-researched material about rock music in the city, a lot of it was already covered in an earlier book titled Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, along with a book called Art After Midnight, about the East Village art scene of the 1980’s. If you want to learn more about this era, there’s a documentary called NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell.

    I’ve met NYU students in $250 punk rock outfits who decry the “fake” music scene. They’ll trek from Avenue A to Driggs Avenue, looking for authentic punk rock shows, and they’ll end up crying into their $20 drinks. The punk rock bands they’ll find are either balding middle aged me or a strictly amateur act. My question is, what made them think they’d find it here in New York? When I ask, they’ll say they read about it in a book or saw it in a documentary. But the New York City punk scene is gone now, the Ramones are all dead for cancer or heroin. CBGB got forced out by high rent and the store that’s there now sells designer jeans. Hilly Crystal, the owner of CBGB, died of old age soon after the place closed. In the last ten years of its life, CBGB was only half full, and the last time I went there was back in 1998. Until the death of Joey Ramone in 2001, nobody cared about the place, and CBGB shirts were never seen until the years 2002-2007. After that it was forgotten again.

    In the book’s epilogue, Iggy Pop laments the whitening of New York City, but I say “so what?” Iggy Pop wasn’t even from New York, but Detroit, a city that had some great music in its history. He moved to Berlin because he thought New York wasn’t decadent enough (actually it was, but he was probably too stoned to tell the difference) which means he’s just another out-of-town transplant who thinks he’s the prince of the city. Well not in my book he isn’t. He’s just another celebrity with money who wants to enjoy the scene and leave when it’s no longer luxurious. That’s probably why the punk scene ended anyway; bohemian life is not possible when your money goes to (a) high rents, or (b) a drug habit.

The Arab of the Future 2

I think the lasting impression I’ll have from Sattouf’s graphic memoirs is the bleakness of his life in Syria. He makes the land look bleak, the Syrian people look bleak, and finally he makes his home life look bleak. The only exception is the part where he visits his mother’s family in France, at least that gives him a window of hope. But everything else in the book is like being stuck at the bottom of a hole.

    In the previous book, Riad Sattouf begins life as a cute well-spoken blond French kid, the son of a French woman and a Syrian Arab academic. First they move to Libya (lousy) and then Syria (awful) where they’re trapped in a society of dirty fields, dirty streets, abused kids, and animal cruelty. His father, a follower of Ba’ath philosophy and Pan-Arabism, is completely delusional. He turns down positions at British universities to take a low-level professorship in Syria, all because of his Pan-Arabist fantasy. Meanwhile, his wife just tolerates it. The people are filthy, the relatives are awful, and the local children are abused at home and take it out on other children. As for Riad, the kids at his school are either abused at home or spoiled rotten.

    One of the most prominent things about the story is the difference in Syrian and French child-rearing practices. In France, the toys are all constructive, while in Syria the toys are all plastic soldiers and toy guns. The plastic soldiers are meant to represent Israelis, with reptilian features and nasty expressions. They have a white flag of surrender in one hand, and a knife in the other hand, hidden behind their backs. In France, the children are cared for, while in Syria they’re neglected and beaten constantly. The boys in Riad’s school all have burn scars on their faces, and the teacher sends more time hitting the kids than teaching them. The only ones who befriend him are the dirt-poor kids who are usually on the receiving end of their parents (or the teacher’s) beatings. The children of his father’s wealthy friends and relatives, however, are spoiled rotten and treat him terribly. I can really relate to this personally, because my wealthy friends and relatives were like that too, it was always “stand over there and don’t touch my stuff.” Back in school, the best friends I had were all dirt poor, and they’d give you the shirt off their backs.

    Nepotism also comes into play in The Arab of the Future, because in Syria (and probably in most developing countries) the best jobs are given to people with connections. Professor Sattouf has a degree from the Sorborne in Paris, but he’s given a lower-level academic job because he’s got no insider to get him into a better post. He’s from a poor peasant family, and the only member with an education, but nobody in Syria cares. It’s one of the reasons that the country was a mess then and has become an even bigger mess now. Keep in mind that Syria’s army officers all got their jobs through nepotism, and it led to Syria getting beaten by Israel in every war.

    Artistically, Riad Sattouf book is great, because he makes use of colors to convey they mood. In the Libya sequence, everything is yellow, so you get the feeling of a scorched desert. France is colored blue, which makes everything feel calm and balanced. While you might find the blue to be depressing, keep in mind that the French are shown as having greater self-control than the Syrians, who are portrayed as borderline savage. The Syrian part of the story is red, because firstly the ground is red from the iron, and secondly, red conveys anger.

    I’ll sum up by saying that this is a great book about a horrible life. By the end of book #2, it’s clear that nothing’s going to get any better, because the father is delusional and the mother can’t put her foot down. She can’t be bothered to walk her six year old son to school, and the father can’t be bothered to buy his son the right clothing. There’s also a sad scene in the book, where the mother is fascinated by a cousin’s collection of gold (nine pounds of it), a gift from her rich husband. I was fascinated too, because this is a woman who gets dragged by her husband to a horrible country, where the food is bad and she has nobody to talk to. What reward does she get? Nothing! Her husband hasn’t given her anything but a leaky roof over her head.

Art Since 1900

Art Since 1900 opens each chapter with a momentous event in art history, and the first one is Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Using the events as a springboard, we see how modern art began (according to the authors) with new ideas on thinking. Radical styles in painting actually began years earlier in Paris, with Van Gogh and Gaugin pushing the limits of acceptability, but in this book it was Gustav Klimt’s open defiance of the establishment. Klimt’s dark subject matter is a proof, along with Freud’s work, that Vienna could be a place of rebel thinking. Preceded by artists like Gaugin and Toulousse-Lautrec, known for bizarre colors and strange subject matter, we can deduce that modern art was decades in the making.

    Another source of the change in taste, according to the first chapter, is the rejection of cliché. Years earlier, Auguste Rodin created his famous Balzac statue as a formless column, with no indication that the subject was a writer (Balzac wears a bathrobe, because he often wrote late at night.) Similarly, Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon removed the original plan to include a sailor (the client) and the medical student with a skull (memento mori). The chapter does not go into detail about the African symbolism in the painting, though it’s discussed in another essay titled Dread, Desire, and the Demoiselles.

    The second volume (it’s a two-book set) begins in 1945, when New York City and Chicago were becoming ground zero for the art world. Paris and Vienna were no longer the art capitals of the world, thanks to WWII driving the artists out, but keep in mind that years earlier, Paris and Vienna had pushed out Venice, Florence, and Rome. Where Paris was known for Chagall and Picasso, New York was now home to Pollock, De Koonig, and Mark Rothko, many of whom began in the WPA era. The authors make use of contemporary journalism, with sources from Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg in the chapter on American abstract-impressionism, followed by realism making a comeback.

    I’d read a similar book, titled Art Since 1945, back when I was in college. It ended with the 1980’s artists like Harring and Basquiat (both of whom were proteges of Warhol) and Barbara Kruger. In every generation the textbook gets bigger, giving more attention to artists who, fifteen years ago, got no love. Take for instance Nicole Eisenman, whose 1996 works are included here, but would not have been included in this book in 2000.

    The Young British Artists are another movement that got more extensive coverage since their 1990’s debut. However, the book’s discussion of their origin is a bit slim, attributing them to Margaret Thatcher’s increased support for business, and the resulting British neuveau-riche class that sponsored Britain’s emerging artists. It is an accepted fact that early 20^th century Britain didn’t have millionaires like Guggenheim and Rockefeller who bankrolled modern art, so Britain’s artists were a bit slower in their emergence. It wasn’t until the 90’s that the new British upper class would sponsor artists like Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread. I remember the YBA show at the Brooklyn Museum back in 2000, where Charles Saachi displayed his collection, aptly titled Sensation, as a way of introducing NY’s audiences to his country’s artists. It was like The Armory show 90 years earlier, where American audiences were introduced to Europe’s modern art. However, I was not ignorant of the YBA before the Saachi show; I’d seen the Chapman Brothers show at the Gogosian, and Whiteread’s pieces were displayed publicly back in 1994. Mayor Giuliani’s harsh criticism of Chris Offili’s Holy Virgin Mary With Elephant Dung only added to the publicity.

    The use of newsworthy events to begin each chapter makes sense, given that history will always be the biggest influence on art, and not the other way around. You have changes in economics, which leads to patronage, and then you have museums that can launch an artist’s career by giving him/her a platform. Not discussed in the book, though I would like to see it, is the subject of the artist neighborhoods in different countries. New York City had Soho, and I don’t know what the equivalent would be in London or Beijing. Chinese artist like Ai Wei Wei come at the end of the book, with a small entry, though Asian artists have been gaining ground for 15 years.

    I would read this book alongside Sanctuary (the studios of the YBA) and Dark Matter (how art has gone from commercialism to activism) in order to gain an understanding of the role of art in modern history. The authors make no effort to hide the fact that the scholarship is Eurocentric at the beginning, and US-centered after 1945. However, the USA had the Ashcan school in the years before 1945, with artists like George Bellows and his boxer painting, and then you had Edward Hopper’s streetscapes, but these guys don’t really come into play in the book. They were well-known in the USA, but rarely got any attention in Britain or Europe. I doubt that any of the artwork’s in the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing are well known outside of the USA.

    Let me sum up by saying that this book can satisfy an entire course on modern art. It makes great effort to include non-US artists, though there’s little attention to artists from Latin America, the Middle East, Australia, or Africa. That could change, however, and I imagine this book will need a third volume in the next decade.

Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal

Gowanus Canal is a fetid, polluted, smelly waterway that runs through Brooklyn, and by all accounts it’s nothing but a drainage ditch. For years the locals complained about the stink, and nothing was ever done. The area was so unpleasant that the inhabitants deserted in droves. This book explores a question that a lot of local residents have; how did this useless canal become an object of fascination?

    Joseph Alexiou, a NYC tour guide, tells how the area went from a natural hunting and fishing ground to a farming community, an industrial zone, and now a high-priced neighborhood. Originally a treeless marsh, it was bought by Dutch farmers from Indian chiefs. As for the name, nobody knows how or where it came into being, it could mean “Thorny Bush” or “Sleep.” Throughout the book, the author repeatedly discusses the drainage problem of the area, and even uncovers unused plans, going back to the 19^th century, to cut a direct canal to the river, providing sewers as well. The problem was that the area is ungraded, meaning there’s no downhill anywhere. The area is flat, so gravity doesn’t pull the water towards the river. The first thing we learn of in this book is how the hurricanes cause the Gowanus Canal to overflow and dump sewage all over peoples’ basements.

    Alexiou spends some time discussing the actual neighborhood, but it gets a little repetitive. The area was industrial, and because of the stink nobody wanted to live there unless they had no choice. It was always a high crime area, and as soon as better housing became available, people left. The artists only moved into the area because it was convenient to Manhattan by subway. He ends the book with the Superfund designation, which would not have happened without the large number of wealthier people moving in, but so far hasn’t amounted to any real effort. There were some plans for cleanup back in the 1970’s, but the city was bankrupt at the time, and by the 1980’s most of the people had moved away.

    I’ll give Alexious high marks for his research. He dredges up old engineering plans, old maps, drawings from the 1800’s, and lots of information from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. As for the neighborhood, I don’t go there much myself, but the canal doesn’t smell as bad as I imagined. It smells more like a stagnant bayside area, not a sewer, and it’s even less smelly in the winter. But even if the Gowanus Canal stinks in the summer, keep in mind that the beautiful city of Venice doesn’t smell much better. It’s full of nasty stagnant canals, smelly for half the year, and flooding for the other half, and this is Europe’s priciest tourist attraction. By comparison, Gowanus is nowhere near that bad.

   Besides, the living cost in Gowanus is a lot lower. And best of all, you can get around by subway.

Generation Chef: Risking It All For a New American Dream

Things should be looking good for Jonah Miller. He’s an NYU grad, former sous chef, worked in restaurants since he was a teen, starts his own Spanish restaurant, has to open with a bang. The problem is that he’s starting an expensive restaurant with high prices, where the chance of failing is high. He can tell right away that the customers must have money; they have wide-gauge holes in their ears, which aren’t allowed at most day-jobs. In the first chapter you already get the feeling that he’s in way over his head, even though he clearly has the work ethic and the ambition. Now you see that things are not looking good; on the contrary, they look unsteady, and soon they look bleak.

   A little about the chef; obsessed with cooking from a young age, he got into it before cooking became hip, apprenticed in restaurant kitchens, lots of internships, and he was clearly an excellent chef by the time he opened Huertas. The problem, at least from the way the author puts it, is that he’s big on the cooking and short on the business sense. The first, and funniest chapter, is called “Stampede,” where the opening night makes them all crazy. He rebukes the head waiter in earshot of the customers, which pisses off the staff. Then customers start sending back medium rare chops because they’re too pink. Then they start asking for substitutions, which is always trouble, and the problem graduates to customers trying to make their own menus. You want to say “for crying out loud, enjoy what the chef creates, don’t dictate how you think the artist should paint the picture!” But this is a problem that a lot of restaurants have, where the customer demands customization. What chef Miller needs to do is follow Marco White’s example and toss these whiners out.

    The good thing about this book is that it shows you how the restaurant is as much about business as it is about food. Whole chapters are devoted to finding a place for the restaurant, then getting the alcohol license, building it, and dealing with the politics of the community boards. The first problem he has is that he doesn’t want to buy an existing restaurant, because he’s afraid the reputation will carry over. This is called a “vanilla space,” where you’re building it up from scratch. Then the landlord won’t rent until he sees the alcohol license, because it’s the only way he can guarantee that the lease can be sold. That means dealing with the downtown community boards, always hostile to alcohol-serving establishments. Then he has to find a contractor who can renovate in time and give him a good price. Then he has to deal with permits and ordinances. Everyone involved resents dealing with this 26 year old.

    I get the vibe that Miller started the restaurant out of resentment. He was clearly overqualified to be a sous chef, and I know from experience how frustrating it is when you don’t get promoted. I could really relate to how this guy would feel, I would be thinking “come on, I’ve proven myself, give me the chance to move up will ya!” But then it doesn’t happen, and he feels like there’s no choice except to strike out on his own. Maybe his real problem is that he confuses thinking with feeling? Following your heart and not your brain can ruin you.

    Generation Chef is one of many chef biographies that have come out in the last 15 years on the coattails of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Unlike that, and Marcus Samuelson’s book, it doesn’t have all the humor. Other chefs would rather be hired by someone else’s restaurant, rather than have to do everything themselves. The only thing Bourdain and Samuelson ever had to do was cook, at the worst they’d have to manage the kitchen. But Miller, he has to raise the money, find the place, get the license, find the contractor, get it built. He may be a great cook, but he’s no builder, and definitely not a businessman. It almost reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School, where he questions the professor about building a factory. “Why build?” he asks, “when you can lease it for a buck and a half a square foot?” He’s right on that one, the building costs can deplete the entire investment.

    The story is a little confusing and hard to follow. The introduction, with the opening night debacle, should’ve been restricted to one page. There’s also too much back-and-forth in the story, so you get distracted by trying to keep things chronological. It might have done better as a multi-article series in the New York Times.

Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill

   Before I discuss this book, I’d better remind you (no, more like warn you) that the great adventurers were all upper-class Englishmen. Lawrence of Arabia, Richard Burton, George Orwell, they all had upper-class manners and fancy schooling. Maybe their families didn’t all have money, but they weren’t Cockneys. They were all well-bred and educated, like Lawrence who was an Oxford grad, and Churchill, who went to Sandhurst. Churchill, however, was something of a “poor relative” of nobility. He was related to the Duke of Marlborough, born at Blenheim Palace, and even though the family were nobility, they were financially poor. They were always needing money to keep their mansion going, and his ancestors all had to marry rich American heiresses in order to eat. I wonder if these men, since they were too upper-class to become doctors, had to become adventurers in order to prove themselves?

    What always fascinated me about Winston Churchill was that he was born to privilege, yet he managed to graduate from the Sandhurst military school and handle all the rigors of army training. Then again, Sandhurst is more luxurious than West Point, and it’s not an engineering school, so passing isn’t as much of an effort. He didn’t buy his commission like the officers of old, so we can guess he’d be qualified to lead troops. But at the same time, he didn’t really have to pay his dues in life; he was always guaranteed a place at the top table.

    Candace Millard believes that Churchill’s military career, from India to Africa, was just a carefully engineered stunt to promote himself. She starts with his service in India, where he chose a conspicuous gray horse, and constantly put himself in danger so his superiors would see him. He wasn’t that great a soldier by the way, because his men usually ended up getting massacred. In India he was an Englishman in charge of native troops, and their lives were not considered to be worth as much as his. He wouldn’t be faulted for getting them killed, and whatever heroics they did on his behalf would be ignored. The cards were always stacked in his favor.

     One could call this a book about the younger Winston Churchill, kind of like a “before they were stars” biography. But it’s really about his self-promotion and how he had a talent for drawing the spotlight on himself. After each deployment, he wrote a book about it (India, Sudan, South Africa) and used the publicity to get himself elected to Parliament. Though not expressly mentioned, Churchill’s exploits could easily have been fabricated. His escape from a Boer prison camp could’ve been embellished (he might have bribed a guard) and there may have been people helping him that he didn’t credit. Maybe he stole a horse to help in the escape? As for his heroics in South Africa, much of the fighting was done not by Englishmen, but by natives in the British employ. Mohandas Gandhi, then a (mistreated and abused) lawyer, organized an all-Indian regiment of stretcher bearers, and he, as the regimental Sergeant, required them to save soldiers of both races. The usual British policy was to save only the English and leave native troops to die.

    The writing is good, thorough research gives it credibility. However, the story isn’t especially interesting, not his military career nor his escape. I’m sure his lecture tours, with lantern slides and battle trophies, must have enthralled the London audiences. But the details are not fun to read about. Much of the “escape” was spent hiding in a coal mine and being smuggled across borders in a coal cart. In his “daring escape” it’s actually the civilians that are risking their lives to get him out, not the other way around. The wealthy classes, who sat in rapt attention, must have gasped when he brought out a Pashtun scimitar. I can just imagine the look on their faces when he said “and then, the screaming bearded savage charged at me, yelling “Alahu Akbar” with murder in his eyes.” But let’s keep in mind that brave Lieutenant Churchill would’ve been first in line to be evacuated, leaving the Sikh and Gurkha soldiers to die on the battlefield. Same thing with the Boer War, except that Sergeant Gandhi’s stretcher bearers had to (at Gandhi’s insistence) carry out both the English and the natives.

   Churchill was a self-promoter, no doubt about that, but I guess it’s like the saying goes; history is written by the victors, and to the victors go the spoils of war.

Festivalland by Cleo Campert

 The carnival atmosphere of Cleo Campert’s work is a sharp contrast to the forest on the cover. Throughout the book, he photographs hoards of young people flocking to outdoor concerts all over the Netherlands. For each of the photos of the concerts, he provides a photo of the same space, but without the people.

Ever since Woodstock, and perhaps more so since the breakup of The Grateful Dead, there has been greater effort to replicate the spirit of these events. In the USA we have the Burning Man festival, held in the Southwest deserts, among other events. But in Festivalland, Campert’s photographs are from a much cooler climate, and they often take place in the woods.

Campert began his career by photographing nightlife, but in this book all the action takes place outdoors. There’s a picture of Zwarte Cross, which resembles Coney Island more than a music venue. Perhaps that’s the point of these photographs, that outdoor pop-up concerts have taken on more of a carnival atmosphere than before. The juxtaposition of the festival goers against the deserted forests also creates a more natural feeling, one that the attendees are uniting with the natural environment.

Cleo Camptert’s photographs recapture the spirit of Woodstock, in his perfect combination of the music venue and natural landscape.

Introduction to Islam By Carole Hillenbrand

    Carole Hillenbrand writes of how Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam, but also writes how the crucifixion is omitted. The Quran hints that Jesus wasn’t physically killed, rather that he was taken to heaven while still living, similar to Enosh and Elijah. Joseph is also a prophet to the Muslims, and the story of him and Zukilyah (Potiphar’s wife, not named in the bible) is used as an example of resisting temptation. She leads him through multiple rooms, each one decorated with erotic artwork, and in the artwork provided, he wears green clothing, symbolizing purity.

    Introduction to Islam, from Thames & Hudson Publishers, is a book that creates a realistic, balanced portrayal of one of the three great religions, both venerated and maligned at the same time. This book is clear in that local customs always influence Muslim practices, as in the chapter on prophets. The author includes a 14^th century illustration from Iran, depicting Mary and the angel, where she sits in a Buddhist cross-legged pose. Most of the Persian artworks have Chinese influence, in the faces, the colors, and the animals. Rashid-al-Din’s World History has a painting of Jonah and the Great Fish, using Chinese elements such as the fish as a thrashing carp. The style of the splashing water also has similarities to Chinese brush painting.

    The author doesn’t mince words in discussing negative aspects of Islam. For instance, no authority in a Muslim country would tolerate blasphemy or disrespect towards Mohammad, and even in tolerant Muslim Spain, Christians could not speak of him negatively. She discusses Satanic Verses and the backlash to Rushdie’s book, and the death threats, book burnings, the ban on its sale. She does, however, note that most of the men who burned the book had not read it. Next we have the 2006 Danish cartoon controversy, where a depiction of Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban sparked violent protest. But the author states that the violence was the work of radicals, who are (according to her) only 7% of all Muslims. The most destructive protest was the Muslim boycott of Danish food.

    Diversity, in the form of the Sunni-Shiite split, is discussed, with good explanations of both philosophy and tradition. Hillenbrand also writes a few pages on Islam in Europe, and how the French Muslims are mostly from North and West Africa, while Germany’s Muslims are from Turkey, Britain’s Muslims are from India and Pakistan, etc. We also learn about the Sufi orders, and how their practices are different depending on whether you’re in Africa, Egypt, or Turkey.

   What disappoints me about this book is that Islam in China and South Africa are left out. I’ve seen depictions of Cape Town Muslims, descended from Indonesian captives (known as Cape Malays) and the men and women pray side by side, not with the women behind the men. It would be interesting to hear Arab Muslims view on this. I would also have liked to read about how the Chinese Muslims in Taiwan go about preserving their customs in a non-religious society.

Bread Givers

    It seems that lazy narcissistic parents make for a great story these days. Back in 1997 we had the good intentioned, yet perpetually drunk father in Angela’s Ashes. Then came The Glass Castle, a crazy family saga. Next comes Fiction Ruined My Family, where the father spends years refusing to work, pipe-dreaming of the day he’ll become a great writer. All of them were predated by a lazy, good-for-nothing Rabbi, the protagonist of Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, written in the 1920’s. I can tell this is going to be funny and tragic at the same time.

    The story begins on the dirty, smoggy, crowded, noisy Lower East Side of Manhattan in the days before the car. Sarah Smolensky slaves away, as do her sisters, so that her “scholar” father is free to read the holy book. Their mother? She slaves too. They could take in a boarder to help pay the bills, but no, they can’t do that, the scholar in their home needs a room for his books. Take a job? How dare you expect a Rabbi to work! You’d think his wife would say “work, or you eat last” but that doesn’t happen either, she always serves him first. But don’t blame this lazy, callous husband and father. Back in the old country, his wife was taught to put up with it.

    As the story progresses (or goes downhill, depending on how you look at it) her sisters marry lousy men, Sarah moves out on her own, enrolls in school, her mother gets sick and dies because she can’t afford a doctor. Sarah goes to an upstate college, becomes a new person, and in the meantime, her father marries a gold-digger. It ends well for Sarah, terribly for her family. But there are funny parts, like the one where her landlady yells “no, I won’t rent to students, they keep the lights on too long to read and waste electricity!” Then Sarah gets to college, and she’s shocked by the clean air; she’d never experienced anything but pollution (this was discussed in Supreme City). As for the boring college meals, they’re a luxury compared to her previous diet of bread and herring.

    My problem with this book is that the last chapter should’ve been extended. When she returns to the city as a schoolteacher, you really get the feeling that this is a triumph. She has a steady paycheck, a decent room, and she can afford to dress well. Everything from here on is a breath of fresh air to her. It gets funny when she tries to get her students to pronounce the words right; they call a pearl a “poil” and to drive her nuts, they pronounce the word oil as “earl.” Unlike the teachers of today, there’s no trip to the bar after work, women in those days couldn’t drink in bars anyway. At least not the “respectable” ones who come up from the slums.

    I hadn’t heard of this book until recently. The author Anzia Yezierska was born in Poland in 1885, moved to New York City as a child, spent time in San Francisco as a social worker, wrote lots of stories with rags-to-riches themes. Hollywood studios took interest in her stories, one of them made it to the screen. But most of her income was from college fellowships, or later the WPS writing program. By the 1960’s, it was mostly the feminists who were interested in her work, as part of the women’s studies programs that were sprouting up at the time.

    As a Jewish American, I was always taught that we were the model minority, always free of problems, and any mention of less-successful Jews was hushed up. This book kind of un-hushes a lot of problems that Jewish immigrant families had. There were many Lower East Side families destroyed by poverty, and many of them didn’t do well. The whole stereotype of the “smart Jew” is just that, a stereotype. At the time Bread Givers takes place, Jewish immigrants scored very low on IQ tests, and very few went to college. My grandmother’s family believed in education and hard work, but there were some dysfunctional families too. Bread Givers is just that; a dysfunctional religious Jewish family whose success (aside from that of the protagonist) is still a generation ahead of them.

Stop and Frisk: The Use and Abuse of a Controversial Policing Tactic

    White and Fradella are both criminology professors, and the write this as a history of a controversial police tactic, not as a law book. One of the reasons for the controversy is the tactic’s feasibility for the police, and the lack of work it involves. Searching a house, computer, or business files would take a warrant, and that would mean long hours of observation, waiting for the judge to see you, presenting your evidence, and in the end, you might not even get the search warrant. The stop-and-frisk tactic requires less prep work, but there is a drawback; as shown in the book, there are forms that the police department makes you fill out for every stop made, and that can be even more tedious.

   The authors cite the concept of “reasonable suspicion” as a factor in the Supreme Court cases that ruled in the police officer’s favor, such as Peters v. New York. An example is a tenant who sees unfamiliar people in the building and calls 911, which the police respond to by stopping and frisking the suspects, and the reason they give to the judge will be “we were told by the tenant that they didn’t live there, they were tiptoeing around, and we thought they were burglars.” In the case of Terry v. Ohio one can argue that the street is a public space, so no warrant is required to be there. Then there’s the “reasonable suspicion” which came from their behavior, which made the police think they were casing the stores for a robbery.

    In the chapter on benefits and consequences, the authors do not draw any solid conclusions. The graphs show how the stop & frisk declined after 2013, but there’s been no proven uptick since. There’s no doubt that minorities are a substantial target, though the authors don’t devote the entire book to race. Another problem highlighted here is the mass hiring of cops in a short time, which leads to lowering of the bar when it comes to standards and background checks.

   Some might blame the whole problem on having the police do too much. Take for instance NYC Mayor Bloomberg, and his bright idea to have the NYPD search kids for cellphones. It came as a relief to some educators, fed up with smart-mouthed kids and disruptive sounds. To other educators, the cell phone sweeps were a burden; they resented the intrusion and the loss of class time. All of them wondered later if the heavy-handed tactic had accomplished anything. Does this go to show that the “massive sweeps” are detrimental?

   Achievements of stop & frisk have been hard to gauge. At the time of the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, there was less rampant drug crime, and the 1968 case wasn’t creating paranoia on either side. The citizens weren’t up in arms, and neither were the police. Now fast forward 40 years, and you have drug crime going on, and that means more suspects, so the police have their hands tied. Then you have affluent residents moving into gentrified areas, and they want the police to take care of the problem. Both sides end up in a bind. But as for stopping everyone you can, what are the consequences?

Food and the City: New York's Professional Chefs, Restaurateurs, Line Cooks, Street Vendors, and Purveyors Talk About What They Do and Why They Do It

Anticipating another history of the city’s eating habits, I was pleasantly surprised to find the chefs doing the talking, not the critics. Food & the City gives the chefs, vendors, waiters, and restauranteurs a chance to tell their stories of New York City. Ina Yolof does for the food service professionals what Chorus Line did for dancers, just without the music.

    The first story in this book is about Dominic Ansel, who began his baking career as a teenage dishwasher. He invented something called the “cronut” by accident, while experimenting with pastry, and after giving one to a writer for Grub Street, it went viral. Now I have to wonder if this story is really about how blogs and social media have replaced newspapers. The baker casually gives someone a sample, then it gets reviewed with a short blurb on a blog, then by the next morning everyone who reads the blog is coming to get one. Does this mean that food blog readers will eat whatever the writer suggests? If only she could do the same in getting kids to eat spinach.

    Noel Baltazar, a tortilla maker, grew up doing just that – making tortillas! He got a job in a Brooklyn tortilla factory, then it closed, and he struck out on his own. He leased an old factory in Flushing, bought second hand equipment, and there you go. He says that tortillas are basically corn flour and water, not much else, so the ingredients are few. The way Chinese eat rice, the Mexicans eat tortillas, and wherever they go, they can’t eat without them.

    Sam Solasz, the Hunts Point butcher, has a less pleasant story. He came here as a Holocaust survivor at age 16 in 1945, but he was already a skilled butcher, which he’d learned from his father back home. He tells how he worked 18 hour days, impressed everyone with his skills, spent decades in the Meatpacking District, then moved to Hunts Point when the rents went up. His children later joined him in the business, including a former physician who got fed up and wanted a career change. At the age of 80, Sam is still chopping meat.

   There’s a common theme throughout the book; everyone here learned their skills on the job, and had someone, usually a relative or family friend, willing to give them a chance. It’s difficult for a lot of young people, especially minorities, to get a start on food service, and unless you know someone in there, you’re not getting in. Sammy Anastasiou, who came here for the higher wages, easily got a job in a Greek-owned diner. He admits that it’s easy to get work in the USA, if people from your own ethnic group are already in the business. As for Americans, he says they’re too well educated and they’ll quit after one day. Even the children of Greek restauranteurs, they don’t want to go into the business, and why would they? Why would they want 12 hour days and no time off? Almost all the people profiled in this book are immigrants, and they’re not distracted because they’re not aware of “what else could I have been?” Perhaps college education isn’t what today’s young Americans need.

    All of the food service professionals in this book started from scratch. None of them went to cooling school, none of them had trust funds, rich parents, or rich benefactors. Noel Baltazar, originally from Puebla, sums it up by saying “when I got here, someone like me, with nothing, could go into a hospital and they’d take care of you, then after that they’d ask how much you can pay, but in Mexico you have to pay first, and if you can’t pay you go outside, they don’t care if you live or die.”

Everyone Loves New York

First off, I have to disagree, everyone does not love New York. Everyone does not love a cramped city with a high living cost, no matter how much culture and style we have. But in this book from teNeues publishers, eighty five artists celebrate New York life with an illustration. The first, by Laura Amiss, is more on the technical side, with the city skyline clearly defined, yet there’s nothing memorable about it. Similarly, the R. Nichols illustration is just blocks of color, with no background, but it has an edge; a skinny woman yells at the moving man as he deftly carries her furniture into her apartment. The only thing missing is a tiny dog!

   I’ve come to judge illustration of New York City not by the quality or imagery, but by the subject matter. Brenna Thummler shows New York City as a street full of cabs, with a woman trying to hail one. While the quality is good, there’s nothing unique or ironic about it. The illustration isn’t even a realistic one; in real life, she’d be in a war to get the cab away from other potential fares. There are lessons to be learned from this book with regard to quality, like the Stephen Wiltshire drawing of the Guggenheim. While the perspective is fine, it doesn’t have anything original about it, and it isn’t well drawn. Topher MacDonald, on the other hand, draws the Strand Bookstore with less technical proficiency, yet he does a better job. Why? Because the Strand Bookstore is anything but perfect. It’s an old building on a dirty corner, and the red awning and banner stick out like a sore thumb. MacDonald’s drawing captures the imperfect essence perfectly.

    When it comes to the food, most of the artwork doesn’t capture anything distinctly iconic about New York. Kendyll Hillegas’ bagels and Bella Pilar’s coffee cup are just that; a bagel and a coffee cup, nothing more. It’s the same thing with Rebecca Clarke’s table, just food and nothing more. And despite the stereotype, oysters are NOT a New York City staple, most New Yorkers can’t afford them. Emma Block’s hot dog wagon works better, with more attention to detail, but could benefit from a background.

    New York City is not a boring place to be – on the contrary it’s vibrant, colorful, dirty, grimy, hostile, and friendly at the same time, and maybe that’s why we like it so much. Shari Blaukopf’s watercolor of Pearl Paint, now closed, captures the color of the old façade, but not the mood. The old store on Canal Street may have been painted red and white, but it was also faded and rusty, and the street was dirty, crowded, and noisy. Her painting of the store, however, reminds me of a deserted Edward Hopper cityscape. Her work is beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it’s in a watercolor style that I see all the time. For all I know, the Pearl Paint in her illustration could be on Main Street in Mayberry.

    There are some illustrations here that do in fact capture the city’s essence, like Anne Higgie’s great piece on Chinatown. She makes a tiny street look rain-drenched and grimy, and the facades are crowded with signs. Though the signs are colorful, the street still looks gray. It is both beautiful and hideous at the same time.

    I think there’s a certain quality that’s expected when you illustrate New York City. It doesn’t have to be technically perfect or slick, nor does it have to be attractive, but it does have to capture the mood. I recently reviewed Paris, Paris! Which was illustrated by Ronald Searle, and the illustrations were perfect because they capture the nook & cranny aspect of an old city. Now in the case of Everyone Loves New York, I expected to experience the city’s towering office blocks, crowded streets, empty side streets, the earth tones of the West Village, the majestic buildings of Harlem, and the colors of the people, just like we got with the photo essay Humans of New York.

    Everyone Loves New York could have been an update of M. Sasek’s This Is New York, one in which the old neighborhoods are gentrified, the men aren’t wearing neckties and raincoats, and there are more children around. Perhaps that’s why I find the illustrations lacking in this book, because they don’t do enough to show the city’s people. The famous New Yorker covers, for instance, do a lot more for the city’s subject matter, with their fashion-obsessed women, tiny dogs, the fedora craze, the in-shape Citybike commuter watching the more affluent (and heavy) gym-goers on their exercise bikes. They give us an ironic and comic view of the city without sacrificing quality. New Yorker covers are an example of the type of illustration we could be getting from Everyone Loves New York.

   I’m not sure if the title of this book is appropriate. The guy sitting next to me said “that’s a lie, when I do conferences the folks from the south can’t wait to leave.” Pointing to Mark Ulriksen’s illustration, he said “now that’s the quintessential New York,” referring to the woman bringing the huge dog in the elevator. I agree. Tiny dogs on long leashes are a pain on the street, and big dogs are a pain indoors. It makes me want to leave the city and never return!

The Lams of Ludlow Street By Thomas Holton

I remember this photo series from the New York Times way back in 2003. A Chinese immigrant family lives in a tiny, cramped, Chinatown apartment, and you can tell how crammed it is by the coats hanging over the table. The photographer, Thomas Holton, is half-Chinese, and in the book’s preface he writes how he felt like a stranger to his Chinese relatives. Maybe this project was a way of “reconnecting?”

    The photos aren’t interesting at all; the kids ignore the camera (typical American kids who’d say “whatever”) and the parents are always preoccupied. Nobody seems happy at all, the mother looks worn out and the father looks depressed. In the text we learn that the father went through periods where he lost his job and had to move away for work. I wonder if being out of work damaged his standing in a traditional household? With succeeding entries, the kids get older, the parents separate, the father visits when he can, the kids become teenagers, the older ones go off to upstate colleges. Hopefully the apartment gets roomier. Lack of privacy must have pissed off their daughter.

    There is one photo that got me thinking about what the Lams lack. In it, Mrs. Lam cares for an elderly Chinese woman, while the kids sit by themselves doing their homework. I wondered if lack of extended family was part of the problem, seeing as there’s no mention of the Lams having any relatives in New York. I see lots of immigrant families where the older relatives care for the kids while the parents work, but why is that not the case here? Were the Lams here with no other family? I also wonder why they stayed in that tiny apartment in the Lower East Side, when there must have been better options. They could’ve had a bigger place in Queens for the same price, and the husband left to work in New Jersey, so they could’ve lived there. The Jews who lived in their building 90 years earlier had no desire to stay, in fact they left as soon as they could, leaving the neighborhood half-empty by the 1930’s. The Lams look less like a family and more like a depressed group of people trapped in a box.

    I would like to have read what the kids had to say about their lives. How did they like being crammed in there? What’s the secret to them getting along so well? What kind of schools did the kids attend, and did they ever visit kids who lived outside of the neighborhood? If so, did they notice the contrast?

    I will give this book high marks, but I think the author still has work ahead of him. His own life story, of being an outsider to his mother’s ethnic group, would make a great premise for a book. As for the Lams, it would be interesting to see what happens to them as the children leave the nest. It remains to be seen if things will improve, or whether the kids flee the city.