If David Chang’s band of renegades are the Red Sox of the New York restaurant world, Bloomfield’s cooks are the Yankees, square and conscientious. When I asked her what kind of people she likes to hire, she replied, “Nobody weird. Nobody with dreadlocks.” She paused a minute, and added, “Well, no white guys with dreadlocks.” Her cooks wear black pants and black shoes. “People with chile peppers on their chef pants shouldn’t be allowed in the kitchen.”
I also thought this was interesting, about why a restaurant would want a farm. Status symbol.
They both want a farm, where they can grow vegetables and raise livestock for use in their restaurants. A farm is attractive for two reasons. The first is that Bloomfield can’t always procure the calibre of ingredients she wants, since many of the city’s top suppliers are beholden to more established chefs. “They get all funny,” Bloomfield said. “I’m not Daniel Boulud.” The second is that a farm, in the hyper-competitive New York restaurant world, is a sign of clout and longevity, the breadbasket of an empire. Bloomfield and Friedman have been looking at land in New Paltz and Wassaic.
Sagatrope pointed to an interview Tom Scocca did with David Foster Wallace in February 1998. Excerpts of it were published in the Boston Phoenix then, but on a cruise (get it) for Thanksgiving, Scocca took the time to transcribe it. It's in 5 parts, and entirely worth reading.
I think Esquire, Esqiure did leave a couple of those in, and I remember my mom, you know, reading that and just, kind of, her eyes being very wide the next time she saw me. There was something about Brooke Shields looking like somebody you'd masturbate to a picture of but not have sex with, that was really one of those four-in-the-morning, 15-cup-of-coffee-really, if I'd been in my right mind, I wouldn't have put it in the final draft, but I did. And then Esquire, I remember, left it in. Being Esquire. You know, wanting to create as much unpleasantness as possible. So.
Q: How do you handle being responsible for facts, writing nonfiction, after writing fiction? Coming to a genre where the things you say have to be on some level verifiably true?
DFW: That's a real good question. And the first one of these that I did, in order, the first one I did was the very first one, about playing tennis as a Midwesterner. Where I had some shit that I just, that was like impressionistic, and I didn't know, and I'd never dealt with a fact-checker before. And they're like, "We discovered there is no yacht and tennis club in Aurora, Illinois, what are we to do?" And I was like, oh, God.
So after that I just started to take better notes and be willing to back stuff up. The thing is, really—between you and me and the Boston Phoenix's understanding readers—you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there's going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.
Not to mention the fact that, like, when people tell you stuff, very often it comes out real stilted. If you just write down exactly what they said. And so you sort of have to rewrite it so it sounds more out-loud, which I think means putting in some "likes" or taking out some punctuation that the person might originally have said. And I don't really make any apologies for that.
The footnotes, the honest thing is, is the footnotes were an intentional, programmatic part of Infinite Jest, and they get to be kind of—you get sort of addicted to 'em. And for me, a lot of those pieces were written around the time that I was typing and working on Infinite Jest, and so it's just, it's a kind of loopy way of thinking, that it seems to me is in some ways mimetic.
Q: There's one other thing that I wanted to ask you about, which was the relationship between footnotes and hypertext.
DFW: I've had people say that, and I would love them to think that there's some grand theory. I sometimes use a computer to type when I've got a lot of corrections to do, but I don't have a modem, I've never been on the Internet. There's a guy in my department who teaches hypertext, but I don't really know anything about it.
In a post about a Japanese food showcase at C.I.A., this nugget:
American water is apparently harder than Japanese water and has high mineral content, which chefs consider unusable. “It’s unacceptable, particularly for the chefs from Kyoto,” said one Japanese conference staff member.
I wonder if this level of attention to detail among Japanese chefs is why Japan is now tied with France for number of Michelin 3-star restaurants. Both countries have 26.
If you believe Popular Mechanics and their metrics, it's the USPS. They measured the number of sudden drops, among other things, and the USPS came out on top.
One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked "Fragile" or "This Side Up." The carriers flipped the package more, and it registered above-average acceleration spikes during trips for which we requested careful treatment.
3 teenagers who were lost at sea for 50 days, and presumed dead, have been rescued. The boys, who had begun to drink seawater because it hadn't rained in several days, had drifted more than 800 miles. Most amazingly, they were rescued in an area of the Pacific not usually traveled by commercial vessels.
The boys reported having just two coconuts with them when they set out. During their ordeal, they drank rainwater that collected in the boat and ate fish they had caught. Once, they managed to grab a bird that landed on the boat and they devoured that.
4 years before Charlotte's Web was published, E.B. White published an account of failing to save a pig he was raising for slaughter.
I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting.
I used to hate Jimmy Fallon the same way I hate Dane Cook. Well, a little less. Dane Cook is the worst ever. I didn't like Jimmy Fallon in movies, I didn't like him on SNL, and his work on Weekend Update was deplorable. However, since he's had his own show, I've seen a lot of Jimmy Fallon that I've liked. Dane Cook stays in the dumpster, but I'm welcoming in Jimmy Fallon with open arms. A couple weeks ago, Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake gave us The History of Rap, spot on verses from important hip hop songs of the last 30 years. Here he is with spot on impersonations of about 10 comedians. Skip to 1:25.
In general, moralizing sucks. It gets especially annoying when cultural commentators talk about how much society has changed, for the worse, with the advent of technology and the internet. Ezra Klein:
So if you're someone who likes to spend Saturday in a quiet room with a good book and a long time to think about it, you might find Facebook unnerving. And Zadie Smith and Ross Douthat do. Sometimes, I'd guess, we all do. Conversely, if you're someone who likes people but has trouble meeting them, or gets shy in unfamiliar social settings, you probably don't think the Internet has made you less human.
Matthew Yglesias argues that the coming royal wedding in England is a good example of the need of the benefit of a constitutional monarchy. Basically, all of the identity politics and the 'would you drink a beer with that guy' personality tests get transferred to the royal family, and the politicians can go about the business of running the country.
We follow the royal family with fascination, they participate in weird ceremonies, they have dignity, they symbolize the nation, we all talk about them respectfully, etc. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister gets to be just another politician.
In the Esquire article about Roger Ebert a few weeks back, Ebert mentioned his interview interview with Lee Marvin as one of his favorites, and now they've republished it online.
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