Ocean's Five-Twelve

     Everybody loves raiment

Highlights from The Atlantic for May 2012: Clive James on Dwight Macdonald ("Style Is the Man"),

The recent flurry of books about the Bible could all have done with a chapter on a single contrast drawn by Macdonald as an example. He pointed out that “And why take ye thought for raiment?” in the King James version was simply better than the Revised Standard Version’s “And why are you anxious about clothing?”—and would have been even if the new sentence had been the more accurate one.

... Macdonald could be so concerned with the toxic effect of a Norman Rockwell painting radiating from the cover of The Saturday Evening Post that he would start echoing [Frankfurt School theorist Theodor] Adorno’s ideas about capitalism creating taste. But Adorno was exactly wrong about, say, popular music. A hit song has never been imposed on the people. The people choose, and record-industry executives knock themselves out guessing where taste will go next.

A supreme author of critically gifted prose, Macdonald at his dazzling best was just as open: anything produced by anyone, he would examine for its true quality. That’s what a cultural critic must do, and there are no shortcuts through theory. But deep down he knew that, or he would never have bothered to coin a phrase. Back again because they never really went away, Dwight Macdonald’s essays are a reminder that while very little critical prose is poetic, great critical prose always is: you want to say it aloud, because it fills the mouth as it fills the mind.



James Parker on "how the comedian Louis C.K. ("The Filthy Moralist") became America's unlikely conscience",

This, 2012, is Louis’ moment. Rewind a couple of years and his voice was higher, his face narrower and more worried. He was connecting, but only just. Now he’s expansive, authoritative, with bags of rough-edged charm. After years of roadwork, of small clubs and refractory crowds, Louis has experience. Middle age, fatherhood, divorce—he has that kind of experience too. He’ll talk about how annihilatingly boring it is to play with his young daughters. Louis means this, but he means it in the context of a nearly disabling love. During a podcast interview with the comedian Marc Maron, he remembers the birth of his first child: “She seemed angry to me. And upset. I was expecting, like, when the kid’s crying in the delivery room, everyone’s smiling …” It sounds like he’s doing a bit; Maron is chuckling. “But I was really upset for her. They put her on this little table, and they’re putting stuff around her …” And then, to everyone’s surprise, he chokes up. He can’t go on. “It’s all right, man,” says Maron. Louis takes a sip of water. “Water’s good,” he says at last. “It washes away your love for your children, so you can talk without a shaking voice.”

and the latest essay in FTBPL (Foodstuff Tight Bright People Like) by Tyler Cowen - who once, along with his economist pal Randy Kroszner, laughed at my cassette-derived Ludwig von Mises imitation at the counter of Laissez-Faire Books I ran on weekend afternoons in lower Manhattan in the fall of 1984, before, pace Cowen's dining strictures below, stopping for cheap Indian dinners on East 6th Street en route to the northbound LexAve subway and thence to my tiny room on East 88th Street just off Madison Avenue - "Six Rules for Dining Out", adapted from his new book, An Economist Gets Lunch:


Tyler Cowen, right, at an Ethiopian restaurant in Virginia, believes foodies have created myths about food. - from an NYT dining-section profile on April 11; review by Dwight Garner*; each article is, as Tyler likes to say regarding the ration-risking NYT links at his blog Marginal Revolution, Worth One of Your Twenty - or now, per the paper's new constriction, Ten

... Get Out of the City and Into the Strip Mall

... The larger the number of restaurants serving the same ethnic cuisine in a given area, the more likely the food they serve will be good. Why? Restaurants that are competing most directly against each other can’t rest on their laurels. They are also typically appealing to an informed customer base. And finally, they can participate in a well-developed supply chain for key ingredients. In other words, a town that has only a single Indian restaurant probably does not have a very good Indian restaurant. In Houston, looking for clusters of similar restaurants will lead you to Mexican and Vietnamese food; in parts of Michigan, it will lead you to Arabic cuisine. Competition works.

... Side tip: When in Manhattan, choose restaurants on the streets over those on the avenues.

Manhattan’s avenues tend to have higher rents than its streets. Given the long, thin shape of the island, the north-south avenues carry more vehicular and foot traffic. A Fifth Avenue spot will be seen by most city residents and many visitors at some point or another. A storefront on 39th Street will be seen more exclusively by neighborhood locals and people who work in the area. If you are stuck in Midtown, and you want good, cheap ethnic food, try the streets before the avenues. Opt for narrow passageways rather than broad ones. That neat Korean place can make ends meet on 35th, but it would not survive on Fifth Avenue. No matter where you are, turning just a bit off the main drag can yield a better meal for your money.

... Exploit Restaurant Workers

Quality food is cheaper when cheap labor is available to cook it. In a relatively wealthy country like the United States, cheap labor can be hard to find. We have a high level of labor productivity and a minimum wage; in some cases even illegal immigrants earn more than the legal minimum. But one obvious place to find cheap labor is in family-owned, family-run Asian restaurants. Family members will work in the kitchen or as waiters for relatively little pay, or sometimes no pay at all. Sometimes they’re expected to do the work as part of their contribution to the family. The upshot is that these restaurants tend to offer good food buys.

The polar-opposite case is when you see a restaurant replete with expensive labor. There’s a valet-parking attendant, a host to greet you, a person to take your coat, a sommelier, a floor manager, a team of waiters, and so on. If you go, for instance, to the Palm, a fancy steak-house chain, you’ll see a lot of people at work. Everyone is scurrying around, and you have the feeling that management puts a lot of time and effort into coordinating the large staff. The restaurant attracts a lot of celebrities and politicians. I’ve enjoyed the three meals I’ve had at the Palm, but I worry about what I’m paying for. I like quality service, but only when I am steered toward better items on the menu or when I reap some other concrete benefit rather than just feeling fancy. I’m not sure what I am getting from the service at the Palm. I already understand the menu (steak, lobster, and so on); it seems to me that the staff members are there mostly to make the customers feel important. When I visit the Palm, I immediately think of cigars, not dinner.

... Prefer Vietnamese to Thai ... Corollary: Prefer Pakistani to Indian.

... [W]hy does the Pakistani food turn out better? I think it has to do with cultural associations. When Americans hear Pakistan, many of them think of bin Laden, drone attacks, terrorism, Daniel Pearl, and the sale of nuclear secrets. When Americans hear India, they likely think of Gandhi, or brightly colored Bollywood movies with lots of happy dancing. Whether or not these portraits are fair or representative doesn’t matter. Common images of Pakistan nudge away uncommitted customers. Many Pakistani restaurants also serve no alcohol, limiting their American audience and making them turn more to Pakistani customers. That’s another plus.

*Dwight Garner, NYT:

... Reading Mr. Cowen is like pushing a shopping cart through Whole Foods with Rush Limbaugh. The patter is nonstop and bracing. Mr. Cowen delivers observations that, should Alice Waters ever be detained in Gitmo, her captors will play over loudspeakers to break her spirit.

... Reading Mr. Cowen ... is like watching a middle-aged man in a blue blazer play Hacky Sack at a My Morning Jacket concert.

...The quality of Mr. Cowen’s prose varies wildly. Many of his sentences read as if he composed them before entirely waking from a nap. Here’s an example: “The more fundamental problem is that labels do not encompass the same economywide information that is communicated by the price system in its assessment of competing uses for resources.”

... Mr. Cowen presents the wisdom of the ages as if it were a series of dispatches from the gastronomic front lines. To find good food and not get fleeced, he recommends, leave the city centers and seek marginal areas. [Calvin] Trillin has been saying this for at least 40 years. I suspect Thucydides preferred the little joint on a side street to the place with the fountains where the waiters peeled customers’ grapes.

... Deep down there’s nothing foodies loathe more than other foodies. Mr. Cowen’s prose is animated by his dislike of sanctimonious, more-organic-than-thou types — the foodie liberal elite — but his book is its own elaborate exercise in conspicuous consumption and reverse snobbery. He flies around the globe, eats at the most expensive restaurants and sneers at nearly all of them.

“For a few years running Noma, in Copenhagen, has been judged the world’s best restaurant, but my meal there bored me,” he declares in a typical formulation. Soon enough he’s back home slumming around in decrepit neighborhoods for food carts and talking about the four spice grinders he owns.

... He disagrees with the ethos that one’s meals are only as good as one’s ingredients. Many ethnic cuisines deploy cunning spices and sauces to enliven mediocre ingredients. This is good food that everyone can afford and enjoy.

In relating all this, however, Mr. Cowen comes perilously close to suggesting that we shouldn’t care about where and how our food is grown. As long as we can cloak the test-tube mush we’re given with some fish sauce and peppercorns — and I have nothing against fish sauce and peppercorns — our souls and stomachs will align in delight.

To give Mr. Cowen his due, he made me smile a few times. When choosing a restaurant, he suggests that if the people inside look happy, “run the other way.” He prefers spots where the diners “appear to be fighting and pursuing blood feuds.” Bitterness and gloom bespeak seriousness of purpose.

Yet I felt gloomy reading “An Economist Gets Lunch.” It’s an argument for exoticism that tastes like paste.