Great Minds...

The title of this post is far too self-congratulatory, but one of my favorite gourmands, Mark Bittman, and I appear to be reading the same book: My Life in France by Julia Child. I will not say that the fact that there is a movie soon to be released on the topic of the pioneering and beloved (and visually and sonorifically awkward) culinary instructor had nothing to do with both of us picking up the memoir, but I will say that I bought it well over a year ago and only recently rediscovered it as I packed up my Harlem apartment en route to my new Brooklyn abode (more on that later). Anyway, Bittman's blog entry is great, and I encourage everyone to seek out Child's book, which I am devouring with the same rapacity she exhibited on many a sole meuniere.

‘Sup, Nietzsche?

In the spring of 2007, I drove Krull’s sporty car from his apartment complex on Colorado Boulevard in Santa Monica to pick him up with a couple of colleagues for a leisurely lunch. It was a remarkably slow day in Investment Banking Land, and they had suggested some fantasy lunch destinations, such as Moonshadow’s in Malibu. We ended up going to the more practical Babalu on Montana, which is a delightful Santa Monican eatery—I am getting nostalgic thinking about it.

On the way to Babalu, with three or four young finance geeks in the car, the “shop talk” was off the charts. About 40 yards before we arrived at the restaurant, one of the young men (none of whom I had met previously, by the way) finally noticed my silence and said, “But that’s enough out of us. Let’s let Nate complain about his job.”

“I really like my job,” I returned without thinking.

“Oh. [Pause] Well, fuck you!” was the banker’s metered response.

That seems like such a long time ago. In fact, this blog is sort of a vestige of a prior phase. Disclosure: I do feel guilty for not posting to this narcissistic forum since February, but in times of transition, there are just some things that you can’t have floating around out there on the Internet…and I am sort of a miserable self-censor. I know, I know, I never finished my 25 Things About Me, but I think it was on February 5 or something like that when The New York Times ran an article about the Facebook phenomenon, and I really could not go on doing it without feeling like a douche.

Coincidentally, that date was also right about the time when Krull was offered a job in San Francisco, and life sort of just changed. Within a month, our gorgeous little house in Los Angeles was vacated, a new apartment on Russian Hill was leased, Krull was settled, and I had refocused my efforts away from blogging and vodka-ing (yes, that most certainly should be a gerund) and exploring L.A. job opportunities to apply to whatever law schools I could.

There has been very little stability in the last few weeks, which is quite a learning experience because the only things that are stable are those that sit at your core: family, values, ideals, friends, love, talents. This has been a great time to reconnect with all of those things, and I have a clarity and confidence that I feel I have been lacking recently.

So I am leaving my apartment and that job that I really like (I actually love it and have been crying for several nights thinking about leaving), and I am going back to school.

What do I think of all this? Well, I don’t really know. I know that I feel good about taking a step in a new direction and getting a degree I have considered for a very long time, but I am suddenly going to have a very different life when the end of July rolls around. While I am really looking forward to the change, leaving a situation that I have grown to love makes me curl my right nostril and contemplate whether I am doing the right thing, and whether this move will help me to build a life that will be satisfying and sustaining.

In the end, it will be a far cry from a mid-week’s lunch at Babalu, and I guess I had planned on that lifestyle being my reality for a good couple of years. I know that I am grieving on a lot of levels…the loss of our first house, the loss of Santa Monica, the loss of a return to California, the loss of a dream, and now the loss of an amazing job…and I am also proudly celebrating a new step into a new future. To paraphrase Nietzsche, to forge ahead into a new world, we must first destroy another.

N.B. RE: Nathan Kicks It—as I sit in LAX, across from the Hudson News whose attendants still recognize me, in the terminal that I entered seven months, two weeks, five days ago after having smoked my last cigarette—it is my intention, having gone public with my plans, not to be merely a fair-weather friend to this blog any longer. But the theme and context will be revised in the near future, I expect. Hey, if I have to deal with all this change, I think my blog might have to bear at least some of its brunt!

9. I am very tall but never have been able to hit a golf ball proportionately farther than anyone over the age of 10.

It's not that I don't meet expectations...well, no...it's exactly that I don't meet expectations. At six-feet, five-inches tall, my leverage should be such that I could have a hope at the pro tour, but I don't. I can't hit a ball any farther than I could when I was a freshman in high school. Maybe I should work out more? Maybe I should just play golf more regularly? Whatever the reason, I have made peace with it, as one must with that infuriating, money-pit of a game.

I also did NOT play basketball in school, in case you and everyone else wanted to know.

8. I have consumed thousands of bottles of wine, but not one of them has been an Amarone, and I intend to rectify that soon.

People think I know a lot about wine because I grew up on a vineyard. It's true; I know how to make wine, generally speaking. I know that grapes need to be in excess of 20 percent sugar when they are harvested to achieve 12 to 15 percent alcohol in the final product. I know that red wines are red because of the amount of time they spend fermenting on the skins. I know how to get a cork into a bottle. I don't really know the proper yeast ratios or what SO2 does, but I do know a thing or two about winemaking.

I also am put in tough positions whenever wine is being purchased, my friends looking to me to tell them what is good because of my viticultural background. But really, my expertise in telling a good wine from a bad wine when looking at a wine list or standing in a liquor store is just as nuanced as anyone else’s. I have a general idea about what grape variety and/or region of wine would be nice with certain foods, and I know what my price range is. I know what I like, not what label is best. My parent’s grew grapes, not labels. (That being said, I do take more than a little pleasure when my companions pass me the wine list. The fact that I might drink more than most people also might give me a leg up on selection practice.)

My cousin, Dr. Marc, arranged for wine classes as a Christmas present last year. It was a great way to spend time together and indulge in mild excesses.

I learned what is generally known: that people love to over-think wine. That was not one of the course’s intended lessons, I am sure. The instructor had devoted his entire professional life to winemaking in regions around the world, and while I don’t mean to belittle his life’s work, it just seems that the whole industry is in need of a good humbling. The difference between a Barolo and a Barbaresco: opposite sides of a river in the Piedmont. A matter of yards, arguably.

But the mystique of wine is steeped in traditions and rituals: place, vine, heredity, technique, and savoir-faire. The two European wine powerhouses, Italy and France, take two different approaches to wine, in general. The quality of a wine largely is credited to three factors: the technique used to make it, the weather conditions of a given growing season, and terroir (the idea that a specific place, by virtue of the vines growing the grapes and the soil that grows the vines, has equally specific bearing on the quality of the finished product). The French consider a great wine the product of birthright, only certain vineyards being of the caliber to produce in the highest ranks of wine hierarchy. On the other hand, the Italians are much more focused on how a wine is made. For that reason, there is no Italian equivalent to the brand names of Lafitte or Neuf du Pape or Clicquot-Ponsardin; it doesn’t matter which vineyard produced it, but rather how it was produced.

With their heightened sense of process, it is no surprise that Italians have produced some amazing things in experimenting therewith. For instance, in the mountains outside of Verona, the Italians created a wine that is pressed from grapes that have been dried in the open air and sunshine for up to 4 months. Half the water evaporates to concentrate the sugars, and when fermented, what is pressed becomes a full, spicy and dry red wine. It’s called Amarone.

I’ve never had it, but I will change that soon.

7. I get indignant when I have had too much to drink.

Character flaw or just sensitive? Potato, potahto.

(By the way, S has requested that I come up with a better name for him in this blog, so I am going to try out a few new ones in the next couple of weeks. To keep things clear until I find that new name, S henceforth will be identified by a few asterisks around whichever tester name I may be using.)

**Krull** and I came to Charlotte to see our dear friend, Taylor, this weekend, and last night I had a lot of beer and some vodka (and, I hate to admit, some shots of Jagrmeister. Ick). And everyone was smoking cigarettes, and I got mad because I felt left out. So I got very indignant and stole a cigarette from a pack in the kitchen and grabbed a lighter, and in a fit of pagentry emerged on the porch and lit it.

Some people would say that in that instant I may have thrown away more than three months of working really hard not to smoke. Krull and Taylor tried very hard to stop me, but I did it anyway. I took a drag. And it was gross. Super gross. I wasn’t satisfied at all. I put out the cigarette instantly, even though I was still pretty indignant. I definitely learned that I don’t want to smoke anymore. It just took a drag to remind me of that after three months.

Krull also says that I get exponentially more indignant if gin or tequila are involved. Sorry, Krull. You are a great boyfriend.

(And I also get really emotional when I am hung-over. Seriously, I can’t hear Pucini without busting into tears sometimes. It’s that bad. But that is another post.)

6. The first time I went to a gay party, I stepped on John Cameron Mitchell’s foot.

You might know him as Hedwig from the seminal transsexual punk rock film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but I didn’t know him from Adam.

A filmmaker, a fantastic documentarian (check him out), was throwing his annual birthday party in SoHo, which he calls the Virgo Delight Party. I had been invited by my boss at the Whitney Museum, and as I was FRESH out of the closet, this was my very first gay function. And wouldn’t you know it? A giant zit appeared directly between my eyebrows the day of the party.

That just was not going to do for my début on the New York gay scene!

So 20 minutes before the party, I phoned for reinforcements, and a girl whom I had met in the elevator of my building (who became one of my closest friends) came up with a make-up kit.

I sat on a stool in front of an overly ornate mirror in my crazily decorated apartment, and my new friend “did my make-up.” When she was done, we decided I should wear my reading glasses, just in case.

I was in my tightest jeans and a brand-new shirt, with my new Prada sneakers on…you know, the ones that had the ridiculously long toe? Don’t judge me…so the combination was sort of ripe for disaster: too-tight pants, zit making me even more self-conscious, reading glasses skewing my perspective a little, and shoes making me just a little more clumsy than usual.

The party itself was dizzying. The small SoHo loft was filled with the gay Who’s Who of New York, each wearing a thin veneer of propriety, but my tush was getting far more pats than I would have expected. I would strike up conversations with people, and…Wait a minute…Did he just wink at me? What does he mean ‘if I ever need a lawyer?’ It is so HOT in here. And someone should tell that lawyer guy that he sweats too much to be handing 22-year-olds his business card. Whoa, these glasses make me feel drunker than I am. I am getting dizzy. I need to get out of here! PANIC! Must get air. MUST get air. Thank GOD I smoke! Great excuse!

So I burst outside to see my boss’s boyfriend smoking a cigarette, too, and talking to a perfectly nice looking young man.

“Jonathan! Thank GOD! Can I get a light?”

I think it might have been that lawyer’s residual sweat on my hands, but I dropped the lighter. When I bent down to pick it up, my super-long toe caught the tree grate, and I teetered precariously forward, about to take a dinger into the gutter. But I grabbed onto the tree, thinking madly how I was going to make this debacle seem graceful in front of an entire street filled with fabulous men. I righted myself, popping up with a smile, but had over compensated and continued backward. With frantic stutter steps, I finally came to rest upon the foot of an extremely annoyed, small man. But he graciously told me not to worry about it, and I sort of half apologized, too embarrassed to acknowledge what had just happened to me. Maybe I was in shock.

And Jonathan made it soooo much better by saying, “You know who you just stepped on, right?”

And the rest is history.

5. I don’t take much for granted, especially when it comes to friendship.

Everyone is at least a little selfish. Everyone wants at least some people to think the best of them. These two truths get people into trouble.

I was supposed to have lunch with one of my dearest friends after the holidays to catch up and talk about life, spew the stories of the previous month, and generally get some face time. I got stuck in a meeting and asked to reschedule with her. Her reply (paraphrased): “I am away for the next two weeks, but as soon as I am back, we will get something on the calendar.”

That was on a Friday.

The next Friday (one week later), I had dinner with a mutual friend who had been with her earlier that day and was told that she would be at a party four blocks away that evening. I went to the party. I was seething with indignation. I was just so mad that she had lied to me and that I was low enough on her social totem pole not to merit a re-schedule within two weeks. I saw her from across the room but just could not go over to say hello. I was so angry.

She looked up from the table and saw me. She came over and cooed something about what a pleasant surprise it was to see me and S there.

I clinched my teeth and told her how happy I was to see her. And I was genuinely happy to see her, just so upset that she had lied to me and didn’t seem to remember it. I was so offended.

Then she looked at me and said, “I have something for you, but when I texted you for your address, you never wrote back.”

Excuse ME?? I thought. I never wrote back?? You LIED to me so that you wouldn’t have to talk to me or see me for two weeks!! How DARE you??

And she pulled out of her purse a postcard from a restaurant where she and I had gone every week when we first moved to New York five years ago. On the back was the cutest note about her meal and the memories, written in a lazy scrawl.

And I was touched. Not only had she thought of me, but she had kept this beat-up postcard in her purse, awaiting a text response or a chance encounter.

Most of my angst over the whole situation was really that I have felt neglected by her, and I can’t say that I have given our relationship enough of the attention that it deserves, either.

And the truth is that I do not take her for granted at all. She is luminous and special, and I really need to try to bring her back into the fold more so that there isn’t another sequel to Much Ado About Nothing.

4. At one time, I was fluent in Spanish and French.

That time seems like only yesterday, but really it was seven years ago. Where does the time go?

I studied Spanish for eight years and French for four. I wrote a thesis in college on a photographer, but my real chef d’oeuvre was a paper on how the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao affected Basque nationalism. To this day, my favorite exclamation is delivered with a perfect southern French accent: “Champagne!”

I studied abroad in Madrid and Paris, working internships at Sotheby’s, which is where I cut my social teeth. Talking art in a non-native tongue with people who are announced when entering rooms as “Excelentísima Duquesa de Alba” or “Princesse Laure de Beauvau-Craon,” does something for how a person comports himself in many other circumstances. It builds a certain aise. At least it helped me to become quite comfortable in dealing with the more brash cultures of “society” on our side of the pond.

People often look at college as the best time of their lives, but I look at those 12 months abroad as the most important of mine. While having traveled extensively with my family early in life, being in Europe by myself made me into the person I am. I identified what mattered to me and what piqued my interest in many spheres. I cooked my first meal for myself. I traveled alone for the first time and was away from my family for Thanksgiving. I gained my independence and academic, social, and professional confidence. Perhaps most importantly, I began to deal with my homosexuality.

So while my lexicons are shrinking and I become increasingly less facile with subjunctive tenses, the fact that I was at one time fluent in Spanish and French is probably one of the most important random facts that a person could know about me.

3. If I were to win the lottery today, I would treat my friends to dinner in Normandy and breakfast on St. Barth’s.

Think about it: Canard à l’orange, camembert, moules et frites, tarte tatin. Champagne on a plane. Tropical fruit salad and a nap on the beach (or as zie French say, “zie bich”). And that itinerary was day-dreamed up to be shared.

2. Clipping my fingernails and/or toenails makes me want to vomit.

True story. I don't know why, but it makes me sick to my stomach. I guess there is not much more to say about that.

1. I cannot stop eating until it all has been eaten. I call it Goldfish Syndrome.

It’s one of those crazy characteristics of the animal kingdom—like camels can go X days without water, and ants can lift X times their weight—that goldfish will eat anything and everything they find edible up to and including the point where their tiny stomachs rupture.

I am like that. I don’t know if I developed the habit out of compulsion or out of some parental nudging throughout childhood: “You know, children are starving in Ethiopia,” or “that little broccoli gave up his LIFE for you, and you aren’t going to eat him? He will have lived for nothing! He will have died in vain!”

Those thoughts sneak back into my head at very diet-busting moments, like at summer barbecues (when there is only one cheeseburger left at the end of lunch…never mind that I have had two already, as well as a couple hot dogs and probably a pound of potato chips) or after making a batch of cookies and having wrapped up most of them to be shared with colleagues and friends (There isn’t room in the Tupperware for these three, I’d say to myself).

I make conscious efforts to contain myself whenever I must and try to put my fork down at least three times per course when dining out. But it is just delaying the inevitable. I never leave a morsel unless the food is bad…and I mean BAD.

As can be expected, I eat and will try just about anything. I love the tripe at Babbo, am undeterred by liver dishes, will eat any pepper no matter how spicy, salivate at the thought of buttered snails, and will not shy away from any vegetable. I like it boiled, broiled, braised, baked, roasted, grilled, seared, sautéed, stewed, juiced, fricasseed, blow-torched, marinated, macerated, pickled, pulled, poached, smoked, salted, cured, churned, en croute, and cru.

However, I do not eat sardines or anchovies. Aside from not liking them and being somehow revolted by the thought of eating their tiny briny bones, as a sufferer of Goldfish Syndrome, eating them would seem rather cannibalistic.

February is all about Nathan

I have been having trouble with this blog recently. The posts up until this point are the culminations of a thorough writing process, lots of thought and drafting and re-drafting and editing and wordsmithing and consulting the thesaurus, etcetera. I really like what I have written, but the demands of my job have changed recently, and I just have not been able to devote that kind of time to the blog. So I am going to try something new.

The month of February likely will be very busy, and to keep active in my writing, I am turning to Facebook for inspiration. There is an initiative going around, asking people to write 25 things about themselves and "tag" 25 friends they want to learn more about, thus perpetuating an orgy of narcissistic factoid-creation. And I am getting in on the action.

However, I am not really interested in posting my 25 things for my 400 “friends” to see. Among my truest and dearest pals in that group are dozens of people whose faces I can only barely recall and with whom I have not spoken in 10 years or more. So I am going to take my list of 25 and devote the month of February to expanding on those one-liners in the limited time I have every day to devote to my personal writing. And if the Facebook crowd really wants to know, they will have to read my blog.

This little project is really sort of timely, as I am turning 28 at the beginning of March, and as my colleagues remind me daily, there is nothing a Piscean likes more than a self-love-fest, especially this time of year.

Yawn

As far as cultural institutions go, the Apollo Theater has played an unparalleled role in guiding African-American culture into the mainstream. The Theater has churned out African-American entertainers over the past 75 years, helping them to become national celebrities and international legends. This phenomenon is not inexplicable by any means: the Apollo was one of the first theaters in the country to integrate, becoming the place where black performers could stand in front of extremely diverse audiences and a bevy of entertainment professionals without wearing blackface or singing in a minstrel show. It was a beacon of opportunity that became a platform for achievement, and that reputation made it a home for change in the black community. The Apollo built a reputation for having a national voice, where Civil Rights leaders met regularly, where James Brown sang “I’m Black, and I’m Proud,” and where Barack Obama chose to have his largest New York campaign rally last year.

The Apollo has helped America get to the point where we are now because it is an entirely unique nexus, claimed as home both by African-American communities and by Americans at large. Not only introducing black culture into popular culture and serving as a center for community organizing, the Apollo also became a place where people could begin an essential dialogue about what it means to be African-American and what it means to be American, exploring the intersections of these spheres and, over time, helping the distinctions to blur.

I handed out American flags this morning in the Apollo Theater’s lobby, as the general public filed into the auditorium to watch Obama become the 44th President. Saying, “Welcome to the Apollo Theater,” always has had some meaning attached to it, as the institution resonates strongly and uniquely with all sorts of individuals from around the globe. But this morning, saying, “Welcome to the Apollo Theater. Happy Inauguration Day,” and handing each person an American flag was a significant moment. I was not alone in recognizing its significance.

A couple of white women in their 50s took their flags and looked at each other. One said, “Can you imagine? Us. A couple of flag-wavers. I never would have thought.”

An older black gentleman paused and looked at me upon my having wished him good morning and welcome. “I WILL take one of those today.”

I recognize today’s significance because we all are minorities in our own way. I am a white man, but I am gay and Jewish. People are all something that can be labeled, something that the majority is not, and that plurality is the thing that America has always claimed to celebrate but only rarely truly celebrates. Achieving a plane of respect and equality is America’s goal, and there are very distinct moments when the nation takes a giant step toward that. Today, we took one of those steps, and it was long overdue.

The inaugural ceremony was a testament to our plurality, a guide of how to respect it, and how to further our national agenda as individuals. From the mistress of ceremonies to the instrumental quartet to the participating reverends to the new President’s inaugural address, the message was clear: in basking in this moment of oneness, let us work together to make our existence better, to achieve that which we need to achieve, and to meet our challenges as one, under the thoroughly American banner of empowerment, hope, ingenuity, and will.

Among the day’s images I likely will not forget, a schoolboy of about 10 years flashed onto the screen during Obama’s speech. I thought, What a moving juxtaposition, this black kid alongside the man who achieved what many thought impossible! What a message of hope for the next generation to be watching this incredible moment in history! And then the schoolboy yawned onscreen.

That is why today is powerful. While we all can seek to learn a lesson from the calls to action from the podium on Capitol Hill, what really matters is this: that 10-year-old, African-American boy yawned while the first African-American President addressed the nation for the first time. Obama’s unlikely candidacy is over, the historic election has been won, and now President Obama is just President Obama. Kids everywhere will yawn during his speeches over the next four (or eight) years, and after that, he will become another in a long line of homework chapters to read for U.S. History. His historic candidacy will become an answer on a multiple-choice pop quiz; it will become trivia. Today is powerful because it crystallizes so much of our American story into one moment, with one hand on one bible, one man taking one oath. That’s all history. Today is about tomorrow and that which we want to be, as individuals and as a nation.

To some extent, the Apollo and Barack have served a purpose, fulfilled a duty, played a role that will be more important than anything they have left to accomplish. They have given names and faces to the very ideas of struggle and achievement, voices to minorities, provided light in darkness. To some extent, whatever either of them does moving forward will be done in the shadow of that prior accomplishment. We all start today from the ground up.

My favorite part of today’s ceremony was the poem, written and delivered by Elizabeth Alexander. It encapsulates so much of what today is about: our long and often ugly national history, the great diversity of life in our country, our common needs, and what we might take away from President Obama’s momentous oath of office.

Praise Song for the Day
By Elizabeth Alexander

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Vacation

I owe my blog some attention in 2009! But in the meantime, check out my latest post on Cookie Monsters. Happy New Year.