February 1, 2012

A Case for Lana, In a Storm of Shit

Ed. Note: This piece was originally written for and published on http://underwaterminefield.com/, 2/01/2012.

I knew I would love her the moment I saw her face. Those dead, unblinking eyes. That dream nose, like pinched into her flesh by the thumb and index finger of God Himself. Those lips – sneering while simultaneously evoking no emotion whatsoever. Blood-red and curling. That hair, whipped below her clavicles as if squeezed like frosting from a pastry bag.

And the voice – emanating from a throne in a castle among a pastiche of indulgent themes (Victorian, Byzantium, Pen and Tellerism, Americana) – what a voice! What an arousing and dangerous voice, especially to be trilling lines from Lolita and lyrics about “putting on a show for you, Daddy” and exhaustively detailed descriptions of acrylic nail art, down to the last diamond-studded palm tree.

But after the proverbial glow of the flashbulbs fades and you get a listen to the entirety of Born to Die, released Tuesday (hereafter referred to as “Lana Del Day”), you find out for yourself that even though you have no usable knowledge of music and tastes that fall into the category “generally questionable,” not to mention, an affinity for thinking that a person’s beauty ultimately determines her talent, the album is… sigh… not that great.

Don’t get me wrong – pre-Lana Del Day leaked demos will never stop being wonderful to me. Grandiose ballads “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans” will be, for years to come, in the running for musical background to the climactic scene in the movie about my life (a scene in which I gallantly pluck a dropped Cheeze Ball from the floor and eat it), while cheeky pop ditties like “Diet Mtn Dew” and “You Can be the Boss” anchor a welcome jolt of girly joy to my morning commute soundtrack. It’s the deeper cuts that bore me, filler songs like “Dark Paradise” and “Summertime Sadness,” arriving on Born to Die overproduced and underwhelming, lacking any of the kitschy charm and saccharine wit of “Blue Jeans,” et al, and just about confirming the billions of volumes of criticism already developed about her by my more-informed peers.

But I don’t want to hate Lana. I want to love her – I mean keep loving her, I want to love her with the pureness and innocence and raw desire with which I loved her the moment I heard the first few febrile bars of “Video Games.” How do we save Lana for ourselves – I mean, me? – and keep her around for a bit longer, based on the way she made us – I mean, me? – feel when we first met her? What can stay, of all that Lana’s given us?

What people hate is her voice, most notably in her live performance on Saturday Night Live that fateful evening. What people also hate is her fakeness – lips about to burst with Restalyne, nymphet behaviors, aloof eye-rolling, inauthentic grins; all of it a great departure from her former bleach-blonde self, Lizzie Grant. People hate that she talks about trailer parks when she is the daughter of a millionaire. What does that leave? Lyrics – and hers are inarguably decadent, albeit inconsistent and sometimes nonsensical. Standing alone, pieces of them are beautiful confections, rising three-dimensionally from headphones and building themselves into direct representations of the clichés we all are loving, wearing, drinking, driving, doing with our friends. With her lyrics, regardless of whether her voice is always the appropriate vessel, Del Rey carries the sentiment of our generation and paints pictures of everyone’s favorite version of life: Old-fashioned Americana, riddled with modern influences, broken-down cowgirl-esque appeal, a touch of Appalachia with a glamorous, nail polish patina, all through an Instagram lens. Scatterbrained, unsure and occasionally inauthentic? Sure, but we all are, too – seen an Urban Outfitters catalog lately? Read Vice magazine lately?

Analyze the lyrics piecemeal, and you have a feast of us-ness. What do any of us want more than to be told we “taste like the Fourth of July,” or that when we “walked into the room, we made [someone’s] eyes burn”? Don’t we all want this to be what we look like and what we see on a Friday night out in Brooklyn: “I do my hair up, all high and wild / white flowers tied high / green swimming pool, pink flamingos, high Christmas lights / blue base spreading, silver tinsels”? And do you think “let’s take Jesus off the dashboard, he’s got enough on his mind” could be our very own Millenial motto?

I’m serious – as a writer, I admire these lovely turns of phrase and the scenes they set; Del Rey’s craftiness. You’re lying if you say you don’t. So what does Lana do best, then? Tell stories. Are they fantastical, a little weird, sometimes a bit plastic? Sure – but since when does that make for bad writing? Not to mention – since when do we turn our noses up at the subversive?

And like phoenixes from the flame that is the burning fuselage of Del Rey’s post-SNL career, so rose from her own pretty, mismatched words a host of critical insight with prose poised to match, as if music writers felt they had to step it up a bit, when it came to assessing our Queen with the Hydrangea Crown. When was the last time an artist got critics so riled up that they actually tried to make their reviews creative and beautiful, as if to compete? Like, fucking never. I mean, but I hardly read music reviews.

From Chris Richards at The Washington Post, we get this gorgeous summation: “So let’s remember this collective blush on our cheeks. At worst, this music is a black hole that’s swallowed far too many keystrokes and listening hours. At best, it’s a wide-open slab of meaninglessness — a space for us to project our anxieties about what pop stardom means to our shrinking attention spans.”

“The big theme: femininity as a scam, as lost girls preen for the gaze of imaginary sugar daddies,” Rob Sheffield writes for Rolling Stone, and it’s a statement oozing truth. Whether being a lost girl preening for the gaze of imaginary sugar daddies is a bad thing, though, I am not so convinced – sounds like a nice life to me, but then, I’m weaving my own hydrangea crown as we speak. And what an image to give us, Mr. Sheffield – sort of recalls a certain someone singing, with equal loveliness, “Sweet sixteen and we had arrived / Walking down the streets as they whistle, “Hi, hi!” / Stealin’ police cars with the senior guys / Teachers said we’d never make it out alive.”

“It is an island, this album, part of no movement,” begins Jon Caramanica of The New York Times, beautifully. And we then get to imagine Miss Lana on an island in the tropics, in the perfect dress, writing poetry, not an album, maybe humming to herself now and again, but letting that be enough. And then she rolls each piece of prose up and, not before kissing a lipstick stain onto each one, slips them into bottles and floats them off the shore, “in the tiki-lounge way of overemphasizing noir culture.”

And in his endlessly humbling review for SPIN, Rob Harvilla coins the phrase “Miley Cyrus noir” just for our girl, and chides us, “This record is not godawful. Nor is it great. But it’s better than we deserve. We broke her; we bought her.” Chills!

So what, then, has Lana given us in the end that may last beautifully? Some relevant writing, a bible of verse for us 20-somethings, a few gleaming sentences to slip into our cannon – even for the ones who are too cool to admit that they love the idea of someone tasting like the Fourth of July. Better yet, she gave us a lot of interesting writing for critics to write interestingly about. From her oeuvre sprung of the most insightful and most engaging music writing we’ve seen in a long time. Is she a champion of feminist theory? Is she a brilliant musician, an icon, a role model? Jesus, God, no. But she is a writer, in a sense, and she gave us all something to write about. That makes her an industry darling to me – just one who chose the wrong industry.

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October 21, 2011

Je Mange Comme un Fou: CO-OP Food + Drink

Despite being two ugly, broke, unseemly clownfrogs, A and I found ourselves trolling toward a table at futuristic-retro-70s-Japan-pan-American-can can-boutique-sushi-house-popcorn-club-cum-neo-meat-palace-and-craft-cocktailerie CO-OP in the Lower East Side on Wednesday evening after I got out of work – after the hostess, thinking it over, I mean, really thinking it over, figured what the hell, I’ll seat the creatures in the corner, I’m bored and my phone battery died twelve minutes ago.

Gosh, what a place.

I, having long digested the horseflies that I had snapped out of midair with my hyperextendable tongue for lunch, was ravenous, and A even moreso, having not consumed anything since he sucked dry the blood of an innocent several hundred years prior to our LES date.

The place was pretty empty except for some Real Humans, businessmen rallying at the bar, womenless and flaccid, real successful types, drinking lipstick-colored cocktails that cost only half of what they make in an hour, yet make them twice as interesting with every steady hour of consumption.

Ashamed of ourselves for not being such Humans, we hauled our respective steaming vessels of flesh and rot toward the banquette and sat, casting off umbrellas, bags, a scarf and our collection of kidnapped and maimed schoolchildren and settling in. Someone beautiful and not at all an illegal immigrant hired to be a silent and obedient busboy and paid off-the-books brought us garlicky truffled popcorn in a little tin bucket, and it was nice.

The waitress arrived wielding menus. She was a flaxen-haired Tank Girl type, confidently sporting what we assumed the restaurant’s dress code for Babely Waitresses – a tight black bandage dress, sheer black stockings, combat boots and a high ponytail. It made a lot of sense, as did the menu – Sushi! Sliders! Steak! Tacos! – as did the décor – Photomosaics of celebrities! Darkness! A photobooth! Sushi? – as did the whole experience. Lots of sense. Everything made sense! Well… we assumed it would make sense, anyway, if we were the chic, wealthy, never hungry, always having fun, cocaine-blowing New Yorker types that the place was clearly meant for. But we aren’t, you know? We’re just two goblins, two amoebic amputees with rats for pets that we take with us everywhere we go – including CO-OP. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into – we only went in because we thought it was a cooperative soup kitchen for the homeless, and I like I said, we were fucken hungry, brothers and sisters!

Waitress asked us if we needed help with the menu. We asked her what other flavors it came in and she said, no, no, you pick things off of it that you’d like to eat, and we bring them to you.

“Oh,” we said, mauling the popcorn tin like the rabid dogs our parents were.

We placed an order for the Mini Ceviche Tacos ($12) and a “bamboo” of unfiltered Rock sake (made the authentic way in OREGON???!!!) ($30)

We sat there sort of grunting and picking at our scabs till the ceviche tacos came. They wore a crispy, wanton-like shell – and gosh were they ever mini! – but so, so delicious, guacamole-ey, a little sweet (cinnamon?), chunky, amazing. I wish I had known what fish comprised the ceviche – I would have gone to my nearest pond, found it and thanked it. There were only three little tacos on the huge plate, and in a blink of an eye (my only eye! The other one is a maggot-infested socket) they were gone.

We went for sushi as mains because it was the easiest thing on the menu (after “ceviche”) to pronounce without teeth, which neither of us have. We chose the CO-OP Roll (spicy tuna topped with tempura rock shrimp [18]), the yellowtail sashimi (topped with japapeno [$14]), the Rivington Roll (shrimp with cherry tomato [$16]) and the salmon sashimi (with roasted tomato and shallot [$13]).  Truth be told, it was an insane amount of money to spend on dinner, especially dinner made out of tiny slices of fish that WADN’T EVEN COOKED, CONFLABBIT!, but we did it because we had blown our brains out with meth and crack for the past 12 years, and we didn’t know any better.

The man presenting our dishes to us, we assumed, was unfortunately the manager – Where was Waitress? At a medispa? He brought them with such kindergarten fanfare that even our poor, drug-addled minds could understand — THEY GON BE GOOD!

“Awesome! Tuna with, see that, we’ve got this tomato! And all dressed in an aoli! With the shallots! It’s gonna be awesome, guys,” he’d say, and we’d nod like two filthy unmatched socks who had just been given the gift of life for the evening, which would then be promptly rescinded at 12 midnight.

“How is everything guys, awesome? Is it awesome? How’s that salmon! Freshest salmon ever, RIGHT?” He’d say.

We’d nod. Being human would be amazing.

All told, the yellowtail sashimi was skippable and uninspired, came two soaking slices atop a soy wetness with too-hot-for-the-dish jalapeno-slice hats. The CO-OP roll sang perfect arias of crispy-smooth, spicy-nice. The Rivington Roll had a hollow taste, kind of watery, kind of pallid. The salmon sashimi was lovely and strange, the pink pieces curling over a very western-tasting, savory bed of chopped-and-marinated tomatoes like two gentle horizontal commas. What?

The “bamboo” of sake we ordered was gone too soon, however. For example, it would have been nice to have some left when another one of the awesome managers asked me, practically choking on vomit as he did so, to move my bag and umbrella from beside me on the banquette so he could seat two Real Humans next to us.

“Do you want me to check that for you?” He asked. He might as well have said, “Why the fucking sweet fuck are you here shitting all over my restaurant like literally shitting all over it oh my god REBECCA WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU ROLLING ON TO MAKE YOU EVEN LET THESE PEOPLE IN?”

I told him checking it was unnecessary; although I appreciated the offer, and no, it didn’t at all interrupt my consumption of over 100 dollars worth of his average sushi, and by the way, how does one quantify “a bamboo” of something?

I didn’t actually say all that because I am too much of a cracked-out lawn gnome, so A and I just chewed away at our food and nodded, nodded, nodded.

Everything was just too awesome.

By the time we had finished dessert (trio of ice cream sandwiches, $12, orgasmic) and stolen the plate to sell it later on the street, our table had been so obsessively cleared, piece by tiny ceramic piece, by the entire Back of House staff and possibly some members of the Lower East Side Social Culture Police, we assumed it was time to depart from our fantasy vacation into Real Human Bourgeoisie World and pay our bill. I paid with a stolen credit card and didn’t tip, and before we left we both turned our table over on its side and cursed the entire place with goblin magic.

We cast out into the night, full and content, wishing we weren’t the detestable freaks we were (a bartender and a copywriter), wishing we could have been human for real, so that we could hang out at places like CO-OP all the time.

To eat overpriced fish bits without being verbally assaulted by the staff. To not be confused by a restaurant that sells tacos, sushi and steak all on one menu. To enjoy a leisurely dessert, perchance to dream.

CO-OP Food + Drink

107 Rivington St.

New York, NY 10002

212.796.8040

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks: Yes (new brunch!?), DILLIGAF, yes, yes.

Patio: No, but a picture of Moby in the main dining room.

Availability of chicken: Low

Fernet: Who knows?

Temperature: Hot like the breath of Satan himself.

Closest MTA Stops: Delancey St (F), Essex St (JMZ)

Attractiveness of Staff: One MILLION BAJILLION

Fancy mac and cheese?: Natch


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October 13, 2011

On sandwiches

Our parents forgot to mention, or maybe they did but we chose not to listen, that when you grow up, lunchtime – once very momentous, what with the crunchiness, and the orangeyness, and the remnants left on fleshy finger pads – becomes a anxious fiasco at best and a dismal plopping of whatever down the gullet at worst.

You have a one-hour lunch break every day. Its promise once glowed, blood red and low, at the beginning of your shift, then rose and yellowed like the sun before you as the day progressed, until around 1:30 it would beam into your corneas with such blazing volition you had little choice but to yield to it. Not so anymore.

For there is little promise to tuck into an opaque black bag from the bodega near your house, into which you have stuffed foil-ensconced Sandwich, baggie full of Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers and Applesauce. The Sandwich, you know, is not a sandwich really.

Sandwiches, you recall from halcyon memories, are cleverer than that – with Mom-found things folded inside them like Cracked Pepper Turkey, Hot Pepper Jack Cheese, Lovely Strange Mayonnaises… but the sandwich of today has no meat, because there are no gleaming white delis from which you would feel comfortable purchasing meat, and no sliced cheese, because the rubbery sorts that come in blocks are cheaper, and no strange mayonnaises, just the regular kind that oozes out from the crust’s slumping frame like swollen larvae.

The sandwich you carry, you know, became a sweating mass of Taste around 11:15 am, in the office fridge, so that now its layers soak into their upper and lower neighbors – wilting lettuce has become sodden cheese, sodden cheese has become pale tomatoes, pale tomatoes have become blackened avocado. In the mouth, the bites enter beslimed and bloated, everything different from the way it was this morning when you made the sandwich in the early daylight, different because of the way refrigerators generate condensation. You swallow reluctantly. Taste sticks to your backmost molars, Taste rolls down the throat, trailing Bite, stomach grimaces — you continue to read your book.

There are Things that exist that adults take along with Sandwich in their daily lunches, but you have not yet discovered what those Things are. They are not, you don’t think, Applesauce and Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers.

You buy a banana from a man on the street corner on the way back to the office, for 35 cents, aroused by how impossibly urban and grown-up you have become.

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October 4, 2011

Je mange comme un fou: Alewife Queens

I know I’m going to love a new restaurant when they surprise-bread me. You’re sitting there, say, with your bearded and bespectacled fellow diner, called A, and you’ve been sitting there for what, eighteen seconds? And by the nineteenth second, you’ve ripped through the whole menu and planned drinks, appetizers, entrees, sharing dynamics, condiment requests, everything – and you’ve prepared yourself, smiling yet begrudging, to wait the fifteen, sometimes thirty minutes till you actually see something edible arrive before you.

And then, out of nowhere, they surprise bread you.

At freshly minted Long Island City beer hall Alewife Queens, the first New York City endeavor by beer bar maestro Daniel Lanigan, A and I were surprise-breaded and then some. We were right tasteraped. We were slow-served. We got drunk.

Princessy little cocktail bungalows of NYC, meet your butch new bully – Alewife Queens is a giant, drafty, dark and lumbering thing, a desperately-in-need-of-tea-lights-atop-its-reclaimed-wooden-communal-tables thing, a thing so new it still smelled like fresh paint when A and I traipsed in for the soft opening on a recent Friday. Between the nearly thirty taps of no-fucking-around rare beers, the Ball jar water glasses and the tatted-up staff artfully sporting threadbare excuses for millinery, there was nothing so soft about this opening.

Except for the surprise bread, and its date, a little black puck of squid ink butter. Strange and shiny to the point where our bread looked a bit cartoonish after we’d slathered it with the stuff, the medium tasted like salted licorice and coated the throat just the way we supposed squid ink might. I found a few bites to be quite enough, but A delighted in it like a child who has just woken up to a greasy, black Squid Ink Christmas morning.

The menu featured some inspired and not so inspired small plates and snacks, none of which were available, totally derailing A’s plans to oyster himself up like a damn fool. In fact, with only a few other fish dishes that were all spiked with meat, a pescetarian’s only other option on the entire menu would be the tofu dish. Which I’ll get to in a moment. (Vegetarians, that means you. Vegans, go cry somewhere.)

Without the oysters or cheese plate (which our quarterback of a server told us about in gorgeous detail, coming back a long four moments later to tell us it was all unavailable [sad surprise]), we went for the “risotto” appetizer ($11), a soupy orzo-kabocha-black truffle bowl of mush that was so good I would have stripped naked and rolled around it if I weren’t in the company of such distinguished guests as squid ink butter. A said it was too rich and heavy, but that’s because he pretends to be a healthy person and pretends to not love the way butter can enrich an otherwise typical evening out. The kabocha (Japanese pumpkin, you idiots [Surprise!]) presented a mildly sweet autumnal sensation, emboldened by the black truffle oil (barely detectable) and dragged down to earth by the ample portion of butter, which wore the whole thing like a pair of fuzzy boots. Mechanically, it made for a strange appetizer, that cereal bowl full of buttery, slimy orzo (reducing the diners in question to two gummy, spoon wielding babies) but it would have made a fine husband or vacation home. I would have loved it for a long time.

An eternity and a whole second serving of bread later, our entrees arrived. I want to tell you that I went for the strange veal pasta dish with the poached egg on it, like a big girl, but (surprise?) I actually went for the burger ($17), because I get an incredible sexual rush from smashing a dripping ball of beef into my face while I’m sitting across from a pescetarian who wears smaller pants than I do.

It wasn’t a bad choice, friends. It was a short rib-brisket burger, and it came to the table medium-well, with a charred, spherical shell, inside of which gyrated an orgy of molten animal fats, seasonings and other tiny meatloaf-worthy miracles. The patty (more of a Patrick, really) was crowned with a thick skin of Dorset cheddar, and the bun was a pretzled brioche. Pretzeled. As in, given the pretzel… treatment. It was brown, glossy, cockroach-brown and so ludicrously, pointlessly good. The whole thing was a divine manifesto of savory, with a smattering of pickles ogling it from its cutting board plate. There were no fries available during the soft opening, which made me silently panic for approximately three minutes. But I was surprised to eventually find myself grateful for the absent side dish, for had it been there, I may never have left that restaurant due to surprise diabetes.

Practically in tears because he couldn’t get anything but the pan seared tofu with the miso-glazed eggplant ($19), A got the pan-seared tofu with the miso-glazed eggplant. It tasted like pan-seared tofu with miso-glazed eggplant. It was fine – one of those pithy “for vegetarians” dishes, the kind served on a rectangular plate to make it look even healthier. “But the texture of the tofu is admirable, and it’s so white!, and eggplant is always a nice thing, and fuck, I don’t have to eat it,” I thought to myself as I blew through my sample of it so I could get back to my burger. A worked his way through it with the quiet, terse respect that people who patronize butter reserve for things like pan-seared tofu. I was glad I wasn’t him.

We forwent dessert for something we always agree on: a second selection from the not-surprisingly intimidating beer list (Alewife Queens comes to us as the youngest sibling to established beer-soaked gastropubs Alewife Baltimore and Lord Hobo [of Cambridge, MA]). We chose the Green Flash “Le Freak,” a combination IPA-Belgian Tripel, which, funky, bitter, spiced and softly malted, rolled around in my mouth like a fat, joyous baby. It was 9% ABV, and we split the 22 oz. bottle in record time, after each having a sour glass of some Belgian whateverweiss with dinner.

By the time we were done we were each feeling a strange drunken way particular to our own unique circumstances – he, loose because he had only really eaten soybean curd, and I, simultaneously manic and comatose, very aware of the grapefruit-sized mass of beef slowly breaking down in my stomach, which had first been simply sloshing around with lots of butter, and now too, was  sloshing around with lots of beer.

Overall, Alewife Queens was a classic Lanigan experience (huge, goth, meaty), but riddled with a few surprises – we didn’t know we’d be getting bread, for example, but we knew without a shadow of a doubt we’d be getting drunk.

It’s a good thing we humans are highly adaptable.

Alewife Queens

5-14 51st Avenue

Long Island City, NY 11101

718.937.7494

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks: No, no, yes, yes.

Patio: Yes

Availability of chicken: Low

Fernet: Duh

Temperature: Breezy, chilled

Closest MTA Stops: Hunter’s Point (7), 21st – Van Alst (G)

Attractiveness of Staff: 5

Fancy mac and cheese?: Yes

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July 20, 2011

Je mange comme un fou: Area Four, Cambridge

Reviews of Area Four’s chef de cuisine Jeff Pond predated my dining experience at the super-hyped new locavore kitchen/coffee shop/bar. Few chefs are particularly kind or personable, but when an inside source told me that Pond’s kitchen demeanor was downright Full Metal Jacket, I got excited, prescribing to the age-old algorithm that the more absolutely soul-sucking and bone-crushing a chef is, the better the food. Based on what I’d heard about Pond, then, I expected each item on the clipboard-menu (which is reprinted daily) to be a different variation of a culinary manifestation of Christ… What?

Turns out that Pond might just be an asshole, because his food was kind of an Area Bore. Being the type of person who likes to eat lots and lots of different tastes in one sitting (a glutton who plays it off like she’s an adamant foodie), I appreciated the Small Plates menu, which comprised a diverse list of tapas-appetizer options that one can choose individually, or in combinations of three or five (like at Arbys!). My dining partner and I chose three ($15): the soy marinated mushrooms, the house mozzarella with spicy fennel-tomato tapenade and the sweet pea hummus, none of which reduced me to tears of bliss. The mushrooms were decent, but I could have easily plucked ones of similar complexity from the olive bar at Star Market and eaten them for free while shopping for shampoo. The hummus was an unsettling green color and was a bit too sweet where too much sweetness was not welcome –– a balance, verily, had not been struck. It did, however, arrive in a precious little cast-iron skillet that positively delighted my date. The mozzarella was the best of the three plates, with a topping more smoky than spicy. The cheese itself had a lovely mouthfeel, very smooshy and basic, like a savory marshmallow. I could have done without the chopped-up-baby texture of the tapenade, but then, I’m not much of a sociopath.

Because Area Four touts itself as a pizza kitchen first and foremost, we ordered the margherita pizza ($12) as a main dish. It arrived flaccid and amateur; eight pale slices speckled with torn up basil and pinkish tomato discs. The alleged pizza bore the texture of what I imagine Dakota Fanning’s flesh to feel like. And like Dakota Fanning, the thing was completely uninspired –– sad, even. I asked my server for a plate of olive oil to up my spirits a bit, but there wasn’t much to be done for all that the pizza lacked. To add insult to injury, all pizzas served at Area Four are placed on elevated wire platforms in the middle of the table, a metaphor, perhaps, for a public gallows, where a poorly made pizza goes to die, cold and ashamed, for all to see. This isn’t to say that my date and I didn’t eat the whole thing, because we did… eat the whole thing… while talking about how ungood it was.

The silver lining around all this is that an underwhelming dinner without question justifies dessert, so we (I) demanded the day’s sundae special ($7.50), which, before arriving, necessitated an introductory fanfare of two of the loveliest long-handled silver spoons. Between the spoons and the tiny skillet, Area Four is novelty dinnerware heaven –– I’ll give you that, Pond. The sundae, a gorgeous pirouette of house-made raspberry-buttercream soft serve dressed in chocolate, marshmallow, chocolate cookie crumbles (!!!) and mixed candied nuts, came shortly thereafter, all snuggled up in a chilled metal sundae goblet. It was a joyous turn of fate –– an apology, perhaps. The ice cream, which the server told us was somehow Greek, was tart and smooth, the saltiness of the nuts was a witty foil to the sweetness of the other toppings, and girl, girl, the homemade chocolate cookies were, oh my god, just –– girl. Aroused and rapturous, we dug into the swirling pink thing like two young princesses who get whatever we want, and just as we thought we couldn’t be any gigglier, we discovered that the dessert chef/angel had cleverly cuddled some toppings in the bottom of the dish. So finishing the sundae was as merry an occasion as beginning it! Toppings, bottomings! My only complaint is that the chocolate-mallow drizzle was too sparse, but then, it always is down here on Earth.

Don’t expect a sharp draft list –– instead your options include Rapscallion Honey and maybe Wachusett Blueberry and other beers that should actually be pie fillings. And they do that hilarious thing, also in the vein of pie, where you must choose between a “small” or “large” beer. There’s wine on tap and a full bar, so don’t get a beer at all, unless you’re a pussy bitch.

I won’t begin to describe the look of the place, because I don’t allow myself to say phrases like “urban rustic” or “industria-chic,” but nonetheless I appreciate the long, shared, cafeteria-style tables and the exposed wood-burning ovens. There is outside seating, and the grassy lawn outside would make a great place for post-meal cartwheels or public fornication –– that is, if the ice cream sundae doesn’t get you off first.

Area Four

500 Technology Square

Cambridge, MA, 02139

617.758.4444

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Patio: Yes

Availability of chicken: Moderate

Fernet: No, but something like it

Temperature: Frigid

Closest T Stop: Kendall/MIT

Attractiveness of Staff: 7

Fancy mac and cheese?: Yes

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June 26, 2011

Pajamas

Nobody told me

that in your twenties

you don’t wear pajamas anymore;

Instead you must favor lacy spidery things

with black legs that lash around your ribs and strangle

keep your shoes on

or dress your bones in only skin.

And the chances of you making it home in time

to fall asleep at all

are slim in your twenties ––

I want to be thirty

and get a great big sleep every night

in pajamas.

I’m tired

and cold wearing nothing.

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June 23, 2011

On Landsdowne

Outside of the opened kitchen door of a mildly authentic taqueria (inside of which, in a wet, industrious heat, a handful of Dominicans are mixing tiny pickled cabbage salads with naked fingers), a young woman has passed out upright on a signpost spiking from the sidewalk. I lean against the brick to take her in, so tightly coiled around the post marking the intersection of Ipswich and Landsdowne that her stiff, useless limbs appear like the helices of a great human-sized uncooked rotini noodle, one with two eyes flirting with consciousness, heavily lidded and lashed oil-black, sometimes opening with the sluggish ungrace of the inebriated, sometimes slumping closed with the listless surrender of a newborn.

Around her, the whole world seems to have begun to take notice of this gorgeously perverse sight –– is she (and the mouth lubricates, the cheek flushes) dead? Across the street, a wayward empty take-out container winks in the sordid, miserable breeze that swaggers down from Fenway Park. A few feet away, two beefy, reddish men stuffed into Red Sox shirts have posted on a nearby railing, smirking, their drumstick forearms crossed, their pink eyes watching her like a TV. Abler young women walk by, all nimble ankles and gently drunk, laughing at her expense. The kid who washes dishes for the taqueria emerges, drags his gaze down her sadly, following her flesh around the post as if his eyes are two marbles sliding down a winding chute, and then he turns to me, looking so, so sad. He doesn’t speak any English. He doesn’t need to. He is calling me a coward in every language.

I shake her shoulder hey are you alright? She opens her eyes, and her whole face, as if she has just woken up beside me in bed, and it is a Sunday morning, and the whole house smells like pancakes. Not undoing herself from the post, she assures me imperfectly that she is totally fine I promise but thank you so much. I promise. I promise you.

Her mother is miles away, maybe in Topeka, maybe in Salt Lake, maybe in Redondo Beach. Her dress is a gossamer excuse. Her bones threaten to pierce right through her blue skin. I imagine the hands of those two men watching –– their hands all over her the same hungry way her limbs, like four gripping fingers, feel up the post. I imagine horrible things, hours and hours worth of terrible things, all imagining themselves in the twelve generous seconds of consciousness she gives me.

The girl needs water. I am a waitress. It’s all I can do. I breeze past the dishwasher, triumphantly filling a plastic cup with tepid water (from the same sink where the lamb flanks are rinsed), and none of the Dominican cooks even notice, as they mix tiny pickled cabbage salads with their naked fingers. And then, with the two large men watching, the take-out container watching, the bouncers from the neighboring bar watching, and Jefferson, the unspeaking Dominican dishwasher watching, I give her the stupid cup, more for myself than for her, I shove it at her, just drink this, it’ll make you feel better, and in my mind the water will flood down her throat and wash into her gut and flow into the tiniest annals of her cardiovascular network, soaking her all clean.

She takes a tiny, kittenlike sip, and passes out again. I look at Jefferson. Jefferson shrugs at me. I look back at her, and Jefferson doesn’t notice, but she’s put on a subtle smile, just for me –– a very young-woman thing to do to another young woman –– the feeble, wrapped-around-a-signpost-wasted equivalent of a pregnant woman on the bus saying, chin up and clear eyes elsewhere, “No, thank you, I would not like to sit down.”

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May 2, 2011

Dear New York City Craigslist Job Posting #2334390818 Seeking “Webmaster / Content Manager for Large Adult Website (Flatiron),”

My name is Lauren Rodrigue and I have a bachelor’s degree in Magazine Journalism from Boston University’s College of Communication. My scholarship in communications, along with my various web-based internship experiences and deep interest in social media, make me a qualified candidate for your webmaster position. Likewise, my minor concentration in Women’s Studies has provided me with extensive insight into the adult entertainment industry and the sexual politics therein. Having twice been an editor at Boston University’s esteemed student newspaper The Daily Free Press, I am seasoned in working in a fast-paced, deadline-laden environment, and I am comfortable both leading and following instruction. Verily, Large Adult Website, I am nothing less than intrigued and exhilarated at the prospect of being employed at your company.

However, prior to my official application, I do wish for further information on the joggling responsibility mentioned in your job posting. As I have come to understand, through tedious research –– another of my marketable skills –– joggling is a competitive sport in which the joggler juggles three objects, usually balls, usually red in color, while jogging, or running at a pace that flirts with the median between sprinting and speed walking. I regret to inform you that in my four years of post-secondary instruction at one of the nation’s top schools of communication, I, embarrassingly, never once encountered joggling in the curriculum, neither by compulsion nor election. I can comfortably assure you that none of my peers have learned nor practiced joggling in their jaunts throughout the industry either, though many of them have held prestigious internships at such publications as The Boston Globe and Vice magazine. I ask that you do not receive my confusion over joggling as a testament to an unwillingness to learn and grow as a professional, however. On the contrary, I eagerly write this letter to further grasp the parameters of this exciting and novel job responsibility, in the hopes that I can adequately prepare for the interview process.

As an entry level joggler, I assume I will be juggling two to three cordless keyboards, or a combination of other relevant computer hardware, at once, although I may venture that upon mastery of three or more keyboards, I will expect a raise in compensation or perhaps the addition of a dental plan to my company healthcare package. I have not yet tried my hand at juggling, but as a waitress I feel I have acquired all the necessary digital agility to become a decent, if not outstanding, juggler. I posit that the juggled hardware will be networked wirelessly to a computer in your home office in Flatiron, where all of the work I accomplish while joggling will be cataloged and saved to a central hard drive. I ask that I am allowed to view this catalogued product daily before leaving the office for the evening, for, as a former newspaper editor, I am a stickler for spelling and grammar –– two things I imagine may suffer slightly while I am still getting used to the dynamics of typing while juggling while jogging. On that note, will I be liable for the costs of any repairs or replacements to the hardware I will be juggling? The answer to this question will, naturally, influence my salary requirements. Additional questions revolve around the World Joggling Championships, and whether I as an employee and representative of Large Adult Website would be encouraged to participate.

Presumably, this position calls to a communications professional in top physical shape –– a stipulation of which I am, admittedly, wary. I am currently a bicyclist of moderate skill, in addition to living in a fourth-floor walk-up, but my physical fitness regime errs on the side of paltry, those exceptions notwithstanding. I have never routinely jogged, ran, sprinted, walked, galloped, lurched, swaggered, traipsed nor moseyed for sport. But with an insidious history of heart disease running though my family, and an irascible personal taste for complex carbohydrates, I can solemnly promise that I have every inclination to embark on an exercise regime of my own in the very near future, with or without gainful employment at your company. I hope to achieve a 10-minute mile by the time we have scheduled an interview –– a standard I have only approximated for average joggling speed per mile, since you regrettably did not include such a criterion in your job posting.

Also missing in your job posting is the prospect of blog joggling, which I imagine is an indispensible part of the job requirements of webmaster. If Large Adult Website does not yet have a blog, I would be both proud and humbled to take on the extra task of blog joggler, as I feel that social media is the bloodline to any successful web-based business today. Any open-source format could be easily tailored to update seamlessly while I joggle, and so long as there were a visual recording device that I were able to juggle as well, the bloggle would surely flourish. As you can see, I am anything but shy when it comes to the prospect of multitasking and proposing new ideas, and I’m not afraid to speak up when I have an idea. Add to that enterprising attitude the projected spatial coverage of 20-30 miles per day and a juggling goal of five airborne items simultaneously by the time of my third-month performance review, and you can see that I would be an asset to the Large Adult Website team.

This concludes my list of questions, concerns and conjectures regarding the joggling stipulation in your job posting for webmaster / content manager. Please respond with any additional information as soon as is convenient for you, that I may accelerate my training plan accordingly and become a savvy joggler worth your interviewing. In the event that you decide not to choose me for this position, I am, regardless, grateful to have applied, for I will forward this exciting new development in industry communication with largesse to the Boston University registrar in the hopes that never again will a freshly minted graduate face the embarrassing reality of not knowing how to professionally joggle.

Respectfully,

Lauren Elisabeth Rodrigue

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April 27, 2011

Reflections on Meeting with my Professor of Holocaust History while Wearing Baby-Pink Hot Shorts that just Barely Suggest Women’s Panties from an Earlier Generation of Lingerie Standards:

Unwise.

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April 20, 2011

Pills

I sleep next to a 250-count bottle of Ibuprofen every night, and I keep a dozen or so on me at all times. When I walk they make me rattle. I use Ibuprofen for headaches, mostly, fever, arm aches and leg aches, or for fear, or for growing pains, or for when I worry that I’ve moved my shoulders the wrong way inward, causing my clavicles to collide in the middle and make a barely detectable bone-rubbing sound that only I can hear, or for when I think my knees are threatening to bend the opposite way, or for when my ribs feel brittle, or for when I am positive that my smallest two toes bend too stupidly much under the outermost part of the balls of my feet and that that is what is causing everything else to hurt so much north of my neck. When I bite my cuticles too ravenously and they weep blood three or five fingers at a time I take four Ibuprofen; when I, for whatever reason, have pressed my left heel too passionately against the windowsill that is to the left of my bed, I take six. I take 10 per morning I haven’t slept well, or ten per evening when I need to sleep well. When I think I might be pregnant I take 12. The recommended dose on the 250-count bottle is two every four to six hours, but I surely need more than that.

I have a prescription for Relpax, or, eletriptan, for migraine headaches. The doctor had such a look of medical pity on her pretty new-mother face when I told her I’ve gotten migraines all my life, and that so has my mom gotten them all her life, and that when I get them the pain is a 12 and I have to stop moving and curl up in a coil and sometimes throw up. Relpax, a robust orange little thing, is very romantic in its mechanism of action –– it restricts the blood vessels in your brain, reduces swelling, and blocks pain receptors. Just turns them right off, like the best boyfriend you’ve ever had. I take two Relpax every time I feel my brain swelling against the inside of my skull –– you can feel the vessels all beating a split second after your heart does, willing themselves to burst, too full of blood and think and moan and steam. You feel your power about to go out. Relpax curls in fresh from the corotid, winks and whispers shhhhh. I take two to make sure it works; I’m sure one would not do. Nowadays I only really need Replax when I’m hungover, which is almost every day, so it happens that I’m running out. I keep the pills in my desk drawer and the boxes, of which I had 12, are all empty but two. This gives me anxiety, which causes migraine headaches.

Zofran came with Relpax when I told my doctor that my migraines make me vomit. I have developed quite an undisciplined love for Zofran, née ondanestron, an anti-nausea pill that is tiny, chalky, white and prescribed primarily for chemotheraphy patients. Zofran is the quiet and respectful janitor that cleans up all the messes I make in my body –– I take it after a bout of overeating (as a milkshake chaser, say) or alongside Relpax when I wake up most mornings, and claw through a drunken residue to find my stomach creeping up my esophagus with a will to punish. Zofran, the darling, works by politely blocking serotonin, the chemical that causes nausea. I can only imagine the way that gorgeous process must look when it’s happening –– like shoving the stem of a fresh daisy into the barrel of a machine gun.

There’s a bottle of Vicodin I salvaged from someone’s recent operation. I’d take one –– just one, maybe in two halves over an hour –– if I felt maybe my arms were too heavy and I’d rather they be weightless. I like the way the word Vicodin sounds, spiky and bitchy, and I like the way the pills look –– big, clumsy, deaf and oafish –– quite opposite to how they might make you feel. Vicodin relieves pain by assembling itself into a string of lovely rainbow Christmas lights and winding around opioid receptors in your brain and spinal cord, like a faux fur coat for your insides, like the best goddamn cough syrup you could ever suck down, like a dose of snow for your hot blood. But it turns out that if you take Vicodin and drink alcohol your liver, which must process both, gets exhausted and shuts off, and you die right there at the party, in some stupid little skirt, with your hair doing who knows what.

I took Adderall just once and wrote a six-hour-long love letter.

I take one multivitamin every day, for the maintenance of my general health.

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