Time with Tony

(photo cred tumblr.com)

Foie gras and the future

204 pages into my latest literary undertaking and I’m feeling a bit stressed about it. I’ve spent significant time with Tony. As my most recent and lasting obsession, Anthony Bourdain, or Tony B. as I affectionately refer to him, has become a staple in my life. I discovered him last year, when my all-too-rare free time in the Salt City was spent salivating over The Travel Channel. Salivating because I mostly watched food shows, and as a grad student spent most of my time cooking only sweet potato fries (which I do pretty damn well, by the way) and tofu.

I felt a pretty strong connection with Tony the first time I watched him. You see, I never really spent much time casting my eyes on cable before I lived in 'Cuse, but my roommate insisted we splurge on it. Now, no disrespect to Syracuse or anything, but there’s really not much to do there. And even though I didn’t really ever have time to do anything anyway, my rare free hours were spent watching Tony with my pals Kate and Leigh over a meal we cooked up, drinking vino. That’s what got us through grad school.

I love Anthony Bourdain. I love his crassness, dry, wry wit and the fact that he was such a disaster in the 80s.

Condensation in California

It’s a rainy day in LA, a rare sight in the City of Angels, and a perfect day to watch a movie and read a book. After cooking up an impromptu brunch of fried eggs, homemade home fries, disgusting turkey bacon and toast, I sat down with my friend and watched Julie and Julia. It’s a cute movie about Julia Child’s rise to culinary success while simultaneously telling the story of Julie, a borough-bound call-center worker who writes a blog (!) about her adventure cooking 524 Child recipes in 365 days, raising her to fame. In my post-movie, post-brunch bliss I curled up by an open window and read some Tony to the sound of rain pounding the pavement.

I’m reading Kitchen Confidential, a Bourdain book, sort of a memoir about his own rise to food fame. In the preface, which is funny, written in 2000 before No Reservations, Bourdain writes almost incredulously about his success, which now, almost ten years later is at least ten-fold.

The chapter I just finished, “A Day in the Life,” gave me serious anxiety, as I bet was meant to with Tony's lengthy yet frenetic prose which push the reader through a day at Les Halles from the eyes of the chef. But what links Julie, Julia and Tony is not the French food, but their unrelenting goddamn hard work, and the risk-taking fervor with which they seem to approach life and work.

Tony hasn’t yet said how he got to Les Halles, and I’m not sure he will, but I’m sure it required blind-faith – jumping in full-force, and fearless. That’s what I admire so much about these three enormously successful people, and I think, I can almost guarantee that that is the recipe for success.

Goddamned hard work, uncompromising fearlessness and taking a chance. Julia Child worked for 8 years on something that may or may not have worked for her, Julie one year and Tony, almost twenty.

And in my current Bourdain-induced anxious twilight zone, I have renewed anticipation for what’s ahead in my own kitchen.

Twighlight and Tanless Sunning

(photo cred eonline.com)

Is the vampire trend going to bring back pale-chic?

To make myself feel better about my pasty peel, I often evoke the idea, or tale, that back in the day, say Victorian times, white, pale, pasty, skin was all the rage. I’ve done some research on the topic, and it seems the reason white flesh was considered the best, had to do with class. Those who spent time working the fields, outdoors, would become sun-kissed and tanned, a marker of being part of a lower class. Those who remained fair likely spent their days indoors, away from the sun’s harsh rays, probably sipping champagne and eating strawberries (okay, I’m totally picturing scenes from Marie Antoinette). Still, in some non-western cultures, a colorless casing is considered a marker of beauty. Men and women all over Southeast Asia don facemasks, gloves (pre-MJ death), and hold umbrellas to protect their peels from the sun. But somewhere along the line in our culture, milky-white complexions gave way to bronzed bods, and those of us who are melanin-challenged were sent on fruitless expeditions, eager to enhance our epidermises.

Tanning salons are too dangerous, spray-tans too fake, and it’s really, really, tough to find the right bronzer. Now, I’ve been lucky. While my white pelt gets no color from the sun, (freckles if I’m lucky) I discovered body bronzer not too long ago.

Trying to tan without sun and cream, however, is quite the process. It involves the very careful application of face and body-bronzer, learning to add natural “highlights” and can be very dangerous for some light colored-clothes.

I think, though, there might be a glimmer of hope for us ghostly gals. And his name, is Robert Pattinson. No ladies, he doesn’t dig anemic flesh, but the whole vampire fad invading all forms of media is propping up the pasties. Pale is the new tan, and it’s all thanks to vampires.

Sure some of our pasty pals are thirsty blood-sucking, night-thriving, socially-deviant murderers. But others are becoming sex symbols. Forget the spray-tan and photoshopped complexions, it’s all about having a naturally colorless rind. Gone are the days of cancer-causing oils and reflectors; let us stand together and embrace our whiteness. If Edward and that guy from that Anna Paquin show can be paxty (a morph between sexy and pasty), we can too.

But alas, I am in LA, the birthplace of bronzed beauties. I think I actually help other people get more tanned by reflecting sun from my flesh. While I have faith that fair is coming back full-force, I’ll wait a bit to totally expose my membrane. Until then, I’ll be body bronzing.

Whispers from the West

(On the way into LA...blurry, delusional, just like the last leg of the road trip)

Lingering in Los Angeles

The City of Angels is, apparently, the City of Dreams. Flocked to by thousands of hopeful whatevers year after year, this place is a repository of unachieved aspirations. Investment bankers go to Wall Street, wishing for wealth (and up until last year, usually made a buck or two). Techies, Taiwan. Fashionistas flock to France. But it’s the dreamers who come to lala land. Hollywood. Starlets searching for roles. Writers pray for a pair of executive eyelids to land on that script, the screenplay that will change it all, if only someone in a suit could see it. Paper stacks of pilots are piled in dumpsters and washed-up one-time actresses serve burgers in Burbank.

A cab driver put it pretty succinctly the other night. He said something like, “everyone comes here thinking they’re going to be a star…that’s why there are so many people in Los Angeles.” Maybe it’s a city of delusional, and deluded, daydreamers. But it’s place of escape from the banal bankers and uptight antics of the East coast (Toronto INCLUDED).

I think, in life, those of us who are dreamers, will have a tougher time. No automatic employment after education or test to take to make you a professional. But I think it’s more exciting this way. And apparently, so do a lot of folks out here.

There is something special about this city. Something contrived; something contradictory. The Hollywood sign, for example, is meager and almost dilapidated, but still, it can sort of take your breath away. Because it IS Hollywood. Los Angeles. The City of Angels. The City of Dreams.

Where I've been...

Not here. I know. But I have been getting around, I promise. My presence on this metaphysical phenomenon we call the web has just been relegated to other places.
Here, CURRENT,for example.

And here: YOU TUBE .

Here, too: EVEN BLOGGER.

Told you I've still been spinning webs.

But I'm back HERE, now. So keep your eyes peeled, and keep fashioning that culture of yours. Go on, do it.

Sex... It Sells.

The age-old advertising adage 'sex sells' is true - even in this recession. In tough times people have always turned to alcohol, but sex, it seems, is another vice untouched by the bad economy. According to people in the adult industry, sex will always sell, and this economic slow-down hasn’t had much of an effect on the industry. From strippers to prostitutes, women and men in the adult industry say the demand for their product (and services) is as strong as ever.

Get Real!

Those of you who know me are aware of my desire to work in Entertainment Journalism. Here at Newhouse it has been a challenge to try to convince my peers and professors that Entertainment is as valuable as say, "hard" news. Over and over, I've argued that Entertainment is just as, if not more, relevant than other "important" areas of journalism. Not only are music, fashion, television and film indicators of our cultural moment, but they are also what most of us spend most of our time immersed in. Cultural items reflect the time, and telling stories about them is what I want to do as a journalist. Being the countercultural reporter that I am, I went against the Newhouse grain and did my first big entertainment package. To find out the reality behind Reality TV, hit play below.

Extra "Extra"

I produced this package in L.A. at my internship at "Extra" and it's exactly the kind of thing I want to do.

My First Feature

Jumping juniors and tumbling teens.
How the sport that captured the world at the Beijing Olympics can be simultaneously dangerous and beneficial.

Take 4: Stories from SoCal

A warped reality.


Tragedy is devastating to almost everyone on this earth. But there are some people, morbid and inhuman, who revel in it. These include terrorists, devil worshippers, and…journalists. I happen to fall into the third category. And this little observation has never been more clear to me than when John Travolta’s 16 year-old son passed away last Friday. The newsroom went into frenzy-mode. Phones ringing off the hook, fact checkers scurrying about, and newsroom bottom-feeders *urghhmm* checking the archives for footage of the child who left this earth at too early an age. It was a good news day for the entertainment organization at which I work (I use the term “work” here loosely, in reference to the fact that I am not being paid. But “intern” just sounds too…well, too obsequious).
The tragic death of the son of one of Hollywood’s most famed fathers made me realize that news organizations (entertainment, hard news, or otherwise) thrive on tragedy. I guess I always knew this to some extent, but seeing it in full force brought this twisted reality into an increasingly dim light. There’s something almost pathological about the fact that humans revel in other peoples’ trauma. And I don’t think the media are to blame. While we are certainly proponents of this, we are only feeding the beast. That is to say, we are giving (and successfully, I think) audiences what they want.
But why is it that we are so fascinated and interested in others’ pain and suffering? (Especially when it comes to celebrities?)
Does it demystify them? Does it make them “like us”? Does seeing other people in grief somehow help to psychologically mitigate our own problems?
It just seems a bit warped to me that it becomes a good day for newsmakers (ie. ratings = advertisers = money) when someone dies. And this, unlike my other observations, rings true from Hollywood to Poughkeepsie. But of course, when it’s poor, non-white others doing the dying, no one seems to care.