A Horse of a Different Color

On The Office last night, the eternally pathetic character, Toby, indicated by phone to his daughter that she might be getting a Princess Unicorn doll for Christmas to audible shrieks of delight through the receiver. Princess Unicorn was presented as the must-have toy in Scranton and is Barbie-esque in every respect—packaging, plastic hair, pink ball gown, etc.—except that she has a unicorn horn protruding from her forehead. Hysterical. Thank you, NBC.

It so happens that the conniving dweeb, Dwight, had been stockpiling the dolls for months, buying out the inventory of the entire city and selling them at a big margin. When Toby got off the phone with his daughter, the brilliant stockroom worker, Darryl, was handing Dwight cash for a pink box, which turned out to be the very last of Dwight’s hoard. Toby was mortified, wanting desperately to please his daughter and even more to piss off his ex-wife with this coveted toy, and begged Darryl to sell it to him. When Darryl coolly acquiesced to re-sell the doll to Toby on a payment plan for twice what he had just paid Dwight, Toby hugged Darryl and thanked him profusely, visibly relieved. Well, relieved until he took the box and realized that it was the “African-American” version of the doll, complete with mocha skin, ebony “textured” hair, and chocolate-colored unicorn horn. Toby obviously was expecting the blonde, white-horned version of the doll, and when Darryl sardonically asked him, “What, is something wrong?” Toby swallowed hard and answered that he liked this version even better.

This is funny on so many levels. First, it's funny for the obviousness that Darryl likely would not be buying the white-person version for his child, that he had swindled Toby so skillfully, and that there was absolutely no way that Toby could get out of the scam with any grace or without a fight. Second, because the viewer to this point only had been shown the white-person version of the doll, I had the traditional Barbie in mind—not to mention that I don’t think the notion of a black unicorn ever had crossed my mind—and was as surprised as Toby to see the black-girl version. Finally, Toby’s response that he liked this version even better is so funny not only because he did not want to get a good thumping by Darryl, but also because it is great social commentary as a sign of the times, as though it is almost de rigeur to be pro-black right now.

This Office interaction hits on what appears to be a cultural extension of The Obama Effect that had pollsters so worried in the recent election. But instead of simply an outsized enthusiasm for the candidate, it appears that the President-Elect’s victory is generating a new enthusiasm for his race. Has anyone noticed that there seem to be more black people in television ads (no, I do not have DVR, folks, so I do still watch commercials)? I don’t know if my own enthusiasm lately has just highlighted how many black people are in ads, but the Princess Unicorn storyline’s dénouement makes me think that it’s not just me.

Looking back on the campaign and election, it really is sort of surprising that the Obamas’ race did not play a larger role. Whether it wasn’t addressed more directly because of senses of taboo likely never will be known for sure, but what did become evident is that the American majority is cool with a black president. So I am sure that there is a new page in the advertising playbook that says the black community no longer is a niche market exclusively, and that Americans in general identify black people as part of the whole, quotidian public.

I think that it will be interesting to see how this slight shift in the perceptions of those who cultivate perception might impact our culture. And thinking about just one sphere—consumer retail—would a shift of this nature begin to draw traditionally “black products” out of niche markets, as well? For instance, I am told there are some products, which are used commonly by African Americans but remain generally unknown to the broader marketplace, that work like magic for razor burn. Or might evolving notions of consumers change market shares dramatically; will Sean Jean gain in popularity while the FUBU brand becomes irrelevant?

In any case, I think that it is worth commenting that even though Toby’s surprise and disappointment in seeing the black Princess Unicorn were funny, in this day and age, his white daughter may not be as dismayed as one initially might expect to get a Princess Unicorn of a different shade.

A Cookie Is Worth a Million Words

If cyberspace were our pantry, we all would die of scurvy. In our cultural propensity toward junk food, I know I am not alone in saying that I have spent entire days living off of spam alone in Virtual World, and for the most part, I certainly am not the better for it. If anything, I am a little lazier, slower, fatter, and further behind because of it.

My friend, Lisa, stumbled on a wonderful way to spin these e-lemons into e-lemonade, therefore, when she suggested that a small group of us begin a collective blog, dedicated to the simple things that we find wholesome. Being generally food-oriented people—I will call us “discriminating consumers”—we have encapsulated the theme of this new blog into the notion of cookies, which for us signify understated, milk-dunkable, soul-soothing, slightly decadent, homemade goodness.

Check out The Cookie Monsters every Friday for a new post. And if you feel so inclined, feel free to pen your own and make a contribution. Lisa’s first entry tells you how to join us.

Hopefully our reflections will only sweeten your Internet snacking.

In which I am thankful for LaGuardia Airport

LaGuardia airport is just gross. Everything about it is gross. And worse than gross, LaGuardia is undependable. I once sat on the tarmac on a flight to Maine in the middle of July for three hours because there was a warning of rain. On another occasion, I almost missed a flight because the security line was so long that it stretched out of the building and onto the curb. So in preparation for a flight to Palm Beach this Thanksgiving, I gave myself ample time to account for any undependability and ended up sitting in the gross terminal bar for five hours before my delayed flight boarded.

As I made John Wayne faces while swilling martinis with too much vermouth, I was planted in front of a wall of television screens of varying sizes. Even though there were about 20 monitors behind the bar, they were each tuned to one of three channels: CNN, Headline News, or ESPN. It just so happened that terrorists had wrought havoc on Mumbai earlier that afternoon, so about 16 of these monitors were showing the burning Taj hotel while the others featured an obscure soccer match.

There is very little to do in an airport but drink, especially in LaGuardia, where everything one sees has that dingy, unsanitary look of something that could make you one of the first casualties in an international flu pandemic. For some reason, that day I had decided to wear a bowtie (I think I was excited for Palm Beach), making me unusually aware of my appearance. So I tried to read the latest issue of the New Yorker, in which the luminary historian Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates had written an article about his family’s history, living as light-skinned blacks in Maryland.

But my reading was continuously interrupted by breaks in the story out of Mumbai, where a hundred people were thought dead, and by travelers occupying and vacating the bar stools next to me. I was annoyed and jealous that these people were whispering to their companions and laughing and smiling, and galloping off to their on-time flights, hand-in-hand. I couldn’t help but wonder if their private, cooing conversations, included giggles about that nerd at the bar by himself with a bowtie.

Paris Hilton’s Stars are Blind came over the radio while I was ordering my third martini, an action that elicited a couple of raised eyebrows from the bartender. I shrugged it off with an ego-stroking thought about how she works in an airport bar, and then felt guilty for my elitism and decided I would order the turkey club, which I had heard was the second best thing on the menu, after a foul-looking quesadilla that had been delivered to some now-departed barstool neighbors an hour earlier.

The turkey club was prepared atrociously, but in a fashion not uncommon to airport eateries: they had reheated a pre-made sandwich with the lettuce and tomato intact. Warm lettuce is grosser than LaGuardia. But I took a bite anyway, and found it to be as expected: gross. My second bite reminded me of a Thanksgiving eve three years prior.

My family’s tradition has been to spend Thanksgiving with my paternal grandmother in Phoenix. Three years ago, I was the first to arrive in Phoenix, having taken a morning flight from New York and arriving at Grandma’s at about noon. I was famished and wanted nothing in the world more than a good Southwestern burrito. Grandma said she knew just the place, and she drove me in her huge Cadillac past what seemed like a thousand corner burrito shops to a place called the Five-and-Diner, which was across the street from a perfectly yummy-looking Del Taco.

The Five-and Diner did not offer burritos on their menu, and when asked if they could make one especially for me, they said that they did not even have wraps. Devastated with disappointment and seething with incredulity, I ordered a turkey club, to which my grandmother remarked that I was foolish to order a turkey sandwich the day before Thanksgiving. She went further to admonish me for not getting enough fiber in my diet, citing the digestive tract’s need for the “weight” of fiber. My diet being sufficiently ridiculed, she turned to my spending habits and wondered why I was not responsible enough to live in New York City solely off of my $28,000 salary from the Whitney Museum. Finally, when I had eaten a quarter of my sandwich, she asked for a to-go box and had half of it wrapped “for later,” saying that I didn’t need to eat the whole thing just then. When my parents arrived later that afternoon, I told them that I never, ever wanted to be left alone with her again.

This Thanksgiving, the family congregated in Palm Beach, as two of my cousins had babies in the last eight months and were not traveling with their infants to Phoenix. Grandma didn’t make the trip, for among the many things that just aren’t done in her opinion, 88 is far too old for a lady to travel by air. I held her great-grandson, Lawson, and marveled at the next generation, while her great-granddaughter, Taylor, giggled in my sister’s arms nearby. While that night’s meal did not contain a lot of fiber, it did feature a 1999 Dom Perignon and a 2001 Saint-Emilion. My cousins and aunt had been in the kitchen for hours, making every Martha Stewart recipe they could get their hands on, and the meal they presented was out of this world. Deep fried turkey is as moist as they say. I finished the evening with a single-malt scotch and watched my cousins fight their progeny to bed.

And wow am I fortunate! It is so easy to feel self-conscious and put-out (especially in LaGuardia), but looking at the reactionary smiles of my new cousins, one can’t help but consider the world they inherit and the place we have in it. Taking my airport delay as a microcosm, I have the following for which to be thankful:

• That those closest to me are safe and not abroad and under attack by terrorists;


• That my small cousins will grow up in a time when they will not see the discrimination that Skip Gates’s family did;


• That, like the couples who came and went during my sojourn at the terminal bar, I have people whom I love and who love me in return;


• That I have the luxury of knowing that warm lettuce is gross, as is LaGuardia;


• That my education and other opportunities I have been afforded allow me to work in places unlike airport bars;
  
• That the clothes I wear to mortification are made of cashmere and silk;


• That my grandmother, for all the battiness and preaching that she has assumed with age, is in good health and still playing golf; and


• Burritos.

Peyton Place

Even though it has been in its fancy new building for nearly a year, I recently went to the New Museum of Contemporary Art for the first time since it re-opened. The building has some high points and some “meh” points. Most strikingly, the elevators are very high-tech and painted in a vibrant green, which is very cool, even though it makes everyone look a little sickly. The galleries themselves are nothing to write home about (but in that they spent nearly $100 million on the building of a New York museum, the fact that the galleries are sub-par actually is worth mentioning). I can’t tell if the design includes adjustable fluorescent lighting, but the hum of the overheads distracted me while I was looking at the art. The gallery rooms are pretty small in general. I suppose that could have been used to the rooms’ advantage, creating intimacy, but the soaring ceilings negated any headway to be made on that front.

Whatever the building left to be desired, the art satisfied. The premiere show at the moment is a two-floor, mid-career retrospective of one of my favorite contemporary artists, Elizabeth Peyton. Peyton is the heir apparent of the great Los Angeles portraitist, David Hockney. Like Hockney, Peyton’s works are vibrant, sumptuous, and deliver an ethos of the subjects that is at times light-hearted and at times darkly brooding. Although she is a young artist, her work is endlessly engaging, and her talent is so immense, her background so well informed, and her skill so cultivated that one can't consider her beautiful oils without recalling masters from Raphael to Renoir. I don't mean to overstate things, but let's just say that I am fan.

I could write a tome on Peyton’s paintings, but for just a little catharsis, I only want to talk about the intimacy of her paintings. In dimension, they rarely exceed about 18 inches, making them a thoroughly engaging scale for the viewer, and most of the scenes she depicts are from a viewpoint of about one to four feet…very intimate portraiture. Her style is at once painterly in broad strokes of rich color, and delicately linear in representing the refined features of her young, often androgynous, models. Her subjects frequently are in vulnerable, quotidian situations, sometimes asleep, sometimes eating out of a take-out tin, sometimes sightseeing abroad. Still others are taken from tabloids and historic or archival photographs, especially of royalty, rock stars, and early feminists. No matter the individual, whether one of her lovers or Elizabeth Arden, the paintings have a spontaneous quality that can be breathtaking and elicit a range of emotions. If you have the chance to see this show, I highly recommend it.

On a personal note, the title painting of this show, Live Forever, was the anchor image for the advertising campaign during the 2004 Whitney Biennial, for which I had a marketing role beyond my years. I worked with Ms. Peyton for a short time in ironing out the details for the Museum’s use of the image, and our interactions were extremely enjoyable. I cannot be happier for her in seeing the first American presentation of a survey of her work. The show is lovely, as is she.

In God We Trust

Religion has played an important role in my life, but not for the usual reasons. Instead of providing me with the consoling or motivating faith of a divine presence, it has helped me to understand society, to build my cultural values, and to engage history from a third-party perspective. I guess I should explain.

The community in which I grew up was not terribly diverse, and in my High School class of 200 or so, I was one of two Jews (mind you, my mother is Jewish, my father a non-practicing Methodist). It didn’t really bother me, as I had no formal Jewish upbringing, attending bar mitzvahs only two or three times by age 18 and only sporadically attending casual Seders with family friends in the area. The first time I remember religion having a great impact on my life was when I was about 16 years old, and one of my classmates—a daughter of an evangelical missionary—found out that I was Jewish, pulled me aside between classes, and earnestly told me that she was afraid for me because I was going to hell.

Well, since then, I have made peace with my damnation, and I know it might be cliché to say it, but there is no way we all are getting into Heaven, and if there is only room for Christian radicals or exploding Islamic extremists, I feel more comfortable taking my chances with eternal fire. I am a Jew and a homo, after all, and the people “down south” likely will be more interesting anyway.

In all seriousness, the gospel in my household was Science. My mother holds degrees in Chemistry, Biology, and Geology, and my father is a practicing soils scientist. Chat around my house centered on watersheds and sandy loams. My parents left for weeks at a time, not to convert the heathens in Africa, but to map the soils of the Grand Canyon. Family vacations were spent looking at alluvial fans from the Pleistocene and trying to find glacial polish on granite throughout the American West. Sundays were anticipated, not for weekly sermons, but for the escapades of wildebeests and lions on PBS’s series, Nature.

With this background, I took a more cool and calculating approach to religion than most people might, and I really began philosophizing my beliefs while in college, when my exposure to diversity and drive to contemplate were at the highest levels to date. I came up with a system of beliefs that is not spiritual, basing my understanding of religions on my scientific upbringing, believing that all things ultimately are explainable. Sociology is the underpinning for my religion, which boils down religion to the most basic parts that have guided society for many millennia. So it is little wonder that the oldest of Western religions is the one with which I identify most readily. I consider myself a Jew, but my faith is not so much in a higher power as it is in humanity.

I believe that some Biblical accounts are historical and that some are fable. I believe that the Ten Commandments are the underpinning of Western society, not because God gave them to Moses with a mandate, but because they are the tenets that allow people to function as a group: don’t kill one another; don’t take things that aren’t yours; respect others; don’t lie; remember you need your rest. Really, I believe that the last seven commandments are the ones that have helped Western society to function for the last 3,000 years and that the first three are the imposition of beliefs on non-believers (There is only one God, I am it, and I will get angry if you worship anything else).

What is really interesting to me is that in the text, both in Exodus and in Deuteronomy, the Bible uses the notion of freedom from slavery as the reason for which this single deity should be worshipped:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…; (Exodus 20:2)

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm…. (Deuteronomy 5:15)

I do not pretend to be a scholar in backing up these beliefs. I am no holy man, I do not have an advanced degree requiring years of study, and I have not read the Bible cover to cover (though I think I might try). So you can imagine my fascination last night in watching PBS, which presented three programs on Western faith. The first, on Nova, blew my mind. It took a critical look at the first five books of the Bible—the Old Testament or Torah for my tribesmen—and sought to discover what could be factually substantiated through archaeology in order to devise an hypothesis about the beginnings of Western religion. It was captivating, and for people who are not entirely blinded by their inherited faiths, extremely plausible.

Without going into it in detail at all, the theory presented is that:

1. the book of Exodus is the oldest book of the Bible;
2. most Israelites were actually Canaanite slave classes, who rose up and conquered the elite classes, then spreading throughout the hills of modern Israel (or per Exodus, wandered the desert for 40 years); and
3. the idea of a single God and freedom from Egypt came from a small band of slaves who actually did escape from Egypt, eventually joined the Israelites, had a religious experience along the way, and shared their experience with the newly free Israelites, who were thirsty to establish a new society.

This theory is intriguing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that this new society, which spawned Western religion, was based on a tale of freedom.

Is it unthinkable, therefore, that in our current age when political systems hold at their center the idea of freedom, Democracy might be replacing religion as the tie that binds people together? After all, according to Exodus and Deuteronomy, freedom is the reason for which we should believe in God in the first place. Could it be that participating in Democracy is really being in the presence of God? Is this Heaven? If we could ask a Canaanite slave what his heaven would have been, could it have been Democracy?

And in the discussion regarding civil liberties—especially right now surrounding Proposition 8, in which hell-bound Americans are up against the Catholic and Mormon churches—what should we be valuing above all else, freedom or God? And what if those are the same thing?

Unh-Unh. Not O.K.

So I started taking Chantix exactly four weeks ago today to kick the smoking habit, and that means that I have been smoke-free for three weeks.

Chantix is nothing if not well packaged, foregoing the ugly brown pill vial for a very sleek set of cardboard contraptions that organizes your dosages by week, day, and meal. I thought that the idea was borne of great wisdom, Pfizer recognizing that quitting smoking shakes up a routine and, therefore, sought to replace it with an easy and temporary regime of pill popping. Now that is something worth paying for, and when I went to fill the first month’s “starter kit,” I paid the hefty price for the meds, thinking, Well, I probably spend about that per month on cigarettes anyway, so it’s a wash.

I even got over the fact that my UnitedHealthcare plan doesn’t cover the medication, which is no easy accomplishment for a Jew working in the arts. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely complained plenty about UHC, for under my plan, Viagra costs $10 per month, but they don’t cover smoking-cessation products. It makes no sense for very obvious reasons, the most ironic of which is that smoking can cause impotence, but I will leave it at that and say that I found an inner peace in paying for the long-term benefits that Chantix would help me to attain.



So I regularly swilled down the pellets in the most elegant and satisfying ways I could—be they with a good cabernet at Peter Luger’s, or with orange juice after a poached egg on toast, or with a tequila shot at a friend’s dinner party—all the while collecting the “Good for you!” comments that have sustained me from supporting friends. I am pretty pleased with myself, I must admit, and patting myself on the back all the way to the pharmacy this morning, I braced myself for another hit to the bank account as I got my first refill of the medication.

Well, I learned this morning that Pfizer is at once wise, crafty, and opportunistic, as I swallowed my pride, did some quick computing in my head, made several Duane Reade staffers triple-check the price, and felt my face turning red. In her sweet sub-continental accent, the pharmacist told me, “Sure, the starter month is expensive, but the regular kit costs this,” indicating the label staring me down from the countertop. This=DOUBLE THE FIRST MONTH.

So what argument am I supposed to come up with now? Shucks, no big deal. I didn’t want to have dinner at per se this month anyway?

What is really disturbing is that Pfizer is profiting from my addiction, weaning me from cigarettes and increasing my dependence on their drug, just to boost the price after one month. Isn’t that sort of like what the tobacco companies did: created or increased addiction to turn a greater profit? Talk about something that could drive one to smoke again!

“Does this come with some company stock?” I asked the pharmacist, as I swiped my credit card.

Lucky Me

S and I have been dating for almost 4.5 years, and we have yet to spend Thanksgiving together. So I thought it was so sweet of him to suggest that on my trip to California this weekend, we throw ourselves a decadent little meal and call it our own Thanksgiving. S is Americano through and through, especially when it comes to food. His taste is a hybrid of down-home meat and potatoes, bearing the brand of his Chicagoan patriarchs, and creamy and fried goodness that is the hallmark of his Carolinian matriarchal line. For international flare, throw in a noodle, a truffle, or some Dijon, but variation is unnecessary to make him as happy as a clam.

Naturally, when S suggested that we have Thanksgiving, I started planning a turkey feast and turned to Ina Garten’s recipe for the perfect roast turkey. I really trust Ina (a.k.a. The Barefoot Contessa), and I have made many of her back-to-basics meals that are at once elegant, simple, and delicious. After having compiled the shopping list, S realized that we didn’t have a few of the necessary items with which to make the meal, thanks to our Santa Monica kitchen that reflects my residing in New York, S’s demanding work schedule, and our reticence to furnish it in anticipation of a major renovation. While oftentimes I have had to bite the bullet in order to get some necessities to make the kitchen functional at all (I am calling cookie sheets, strainers, and ramekins “necessities”), purchasing a roaster just for this meal seemed a little over the top.

So it was back to the drawing board, and then I remembered that my parents had given us a crock pot last year for Christmas. An odd gift to be sure, but I think they won it at a corporate party and, already having one themselves, were looking for someone on whom to unload it. And I am so glad they picked us, for last night’s meal was divine and easier than most things I ever have made.

Braised Beef Short Ribs
(serves 4)

Ingredients

• 4 short ribs of beef
• 8 peeled baby carrots, 4 roughly chopped, 4 whole
• 8 crimini mushrooms, quartered
• 1 yellow onion, very roughly chopped
• 4 celery stalks, roughly chopped
• 2 cups of beef cooking stock
• One bottle of good red wine (syrah, cabernet sauvignon, or other “big” wine)
• 8 robust stalks of fresh thyme
• 5 fresh sage leaves
• Salt
• Pepper

Directions
Liberally salt and pepper all sides of the short ribs. In a hot frying pan, sear all sides of the short ribs until they are golden brown, starting with the fat side (to render some moisture into the pan). Add the short ribs to a slow cooker, placing them in the center of the basin. Add all of the vegetables around and between the short ribs, filling in the spaces so that the ingredients are evenly distributed throughout. Tie the sage and thyme together into a bundle with kitchen twine and add them to the slow cooker. Add the liquids to the slow cooker proportionally so that all ingredients are just submerged. Give the mixture a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper. Cook on low for 8 hours. Remove bundle of herbs, and serve.

12:30 P.M.

8:30 P.M.

The above recipe is very similar to a dish that my dear chef friend (and culinary partner in crime) served to 10 of her closest friends last fall, after we had spent the day at the Bronx Zoo. I mention that now because she certainly was the inspiration for our “Thanksgiving” menu, and after I had turned on the crock pot, I checked my BlackBerry to discover that she had become engaged the evening before! Coincidence? I think not. Mazel tov, sweetie!

So S and I took the rest of the day and did some shopping and saw the new James Bond movie. It was very entertaining, but A.O. Scott’s review had it right in pointing out that it lacked some of the classic Bond-ness. Most notably, the gadgets have all but disappeared, along with one of the greatest characters of the movie franchise, Q. The elegant side of Bond was not at all present, and for the majority of the film, his escapades were carried out in blood-stained suits and tuxedos (and that poor Aston Martin!). A must-see in theaters, to be sure, but not the Bond of yore, or even of Casino Royale.

When S and I got home, the house smelled incredible, thanks to the woodsy stew in the kitchen. We had a couple scotches and whipped up a variation of Tyler Florence’s mashed potatoes, opened a good Chianti, and paused to think about how lucky we are.

I passed out on the floor of the living room before dessert.