Search Results for: food

Trump Properties As Symbols of American Mediocrity and Lies

AP Photo/The Press of Atlantic City, Vernon Ogrodnek

From golf courses to vineyards, Donald Trump has invested in and licensed his name to many ventures around the world. They are not only gaudy and expensive, they often fail to live up to their hyperbolic promise.

For the Washington Post, travel writer Jason Wilson visits five Trump properties ─ in New Jersey, Virginia, Panama, Scotland, and Canada ─ to experience them as a customer and reviewer. He eats the food and sleeps in the rooms and describes the experience (though not the whole suckling pig for $495). What he finds is that these Trump businesses provide a dark vision of America and of Trump as “someone who would promise you the spectacle of a horse diving into the ocean, and then deliver a mule diving into a swimming pool.” This warped portrait includes classism, pettiness, poor taste, skeleton staffs, cosmetic bookshelves, unnecessarily tall structures, financial struggles, and false public narratives. In Vancouver, a woman drove past the Trump International Hotel & Tower and yelled, “Fuck you, Trump!” In Charlottesville, Wilson paid $15 to taste wine.

“Can I taste the sparkling rosé?” the young woman next to me asks. No, she’s told. She has to be a member of Trump Winery’s Wine Club to taste the sparkling rosé.

Trump-brand properties do not simply give tourists a taste of the good life or a successful business model. They’re portraits of exploitation and failure. The clearest image of salvation comes during the moment Wilson walks from Trump’s failed Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to the abandoned Trump Tower. “Here,” Wilson writes, “every mention of Trump has long been removed from the building, and grass now grows up through the pavement of the empty parking lots and entranceways. The Plaza will soon be demolished.” The best thing about Trump businesses is when they close.

Back in my room, still hungry, I open a container of honey roasted peanuts ($8) and a Mexican beer ($11) from the minibar, flip on CNN and lie on the bed watching reports on the first indictments in the Mueller investigation. As a jaded travel writer, someone who has stayed in many soulless hotels and eaten in many overpriced restaurants in many disappointing places, I’m completely at ease with a certain exquisite idleness and ennui. But there’s something profoundly unsettling about the sort of boredom that I’ve been feeling in the Trump properties over the past many weeks.

To be clear, none of my experience has been terrible, and some of it has been pleasant. Mostly, though, I’ve been overwhelmed by a relentless, insistent, in-your-face mediocrity: the scolding “Notice to Guests” in my room at the Trump MacLeod House & Lodge in Scotland, warning that I will be charged punitively if I take the lint brush, shoehorn, coasters or other Trump-branded amenities; the strange card displayed in my room at the Albemarle Estate in Charlottesville explaining that “Countryside stink bugs” will “occasionally be found” inside and the jar of stale chocolate chip cookies I’m told was the only food available later at night; the eerie near-emptiness and peeling paint of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Panama, touted as the tallest building in Central America. And it’s this mediocrity that’s the most disquieting.

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The Friend That Got Away

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Beverly Donofrio | Longreads | March 2018 | 11 minutes (2,860 words)

 

A year or two after we graduated, my best friend from college went through a breakup with a two-timing cad who nearly broke her. I knew from conversations that there had been epic fights and that she’d kept a journal through the worst of it. I was trying to be a writer in the middle of my own epicly bad relationship and asked if I might borrow her journal to read. I thought there might be some knowledge, some insights, and perhaps even some good lines I might ask to use in the novel I was planning but never actually getting down to writing. Katherine handed me her spiral notebook, one hand on top, the other on the bottom, like a Bible for swearing on, and asked me to promise I’d take good care of it. And I did promise.

And then I lost it. Katherine hid her disappointment well.
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How Pop-Ups Took Over America’s Restaurants

Longreads Pick

“High turnover is now a virtue” in the restaurant business, “which means the latest food trend isn’t an ingredient or a cuisine; it’s a length of time.” GQ sends Ryan Bradley to eat his way across Los Angeles in an attempt to help readers (and his 96-year-old grandmother, Bam-Bam) get to the bottom of our trendy attraction to ephemeral dining experiences.

Source: GQ
Published: Mar 7, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,300 words)

The Billionaire Philanthropist

Photo: AP Images

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | March 2018 | 9 minutes (2,268 words)

 

 

During the political chaos of the last year, one American institution has emerged stronger than ever. As its revenues soared, Amazon’s stock price has steadily ascended, cresting $1,500 and beyond. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO, has experienced what The New York Times described as “what could be the most rapid personal-wealth surge in history.” His net worth hovers somewhere around $130 billion. His 400,000 acres in land holdings — much of it in west Texas, where Blue Origin, his space company, is based — makes him the 28th largest landowner in the country, according to the magazine The Land Report. By any standard, Bezos is one of the richest people to have ever lived, while Amazon exerts an impossible-to-overstate influence on a range of fields, from retail to publishing to cloud computing. As part of the highly touted HQ2 contest, twenty North American cities — finalists winnowed from a list of hundreds of applicants — are falling over themselves to offer tax breaks and other inducements so that Amazon will choose their municipality for its next headquarters. The power of Bezos, and Amazon, seems unbridled.

Reckoning with Bezos’s influence means approaching Amazon and its “notoriously confrontational” culture, as Brad Stone described it in The Everything Store, with a critical eye. Paging through Stone’s 2013 book on the ecommerce giant and its founder, and watching the many Bezos interviews available on YouTube, yields a picture of a smart, cunning, singularly driven executive with total confidence in his vision. Amazon is run on lean budgets, almost like a startup, in an atmosphere of high expectations and continual performance assessments that cause some employees to “live in perpetual fear.” Stone explains that if you’re seeking the source of this tense, high-achieving environment, you should look to the founder: “All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world.” Read more…

Giving Tex-Mex Its Due

AP Photo/Larry Crowe

Texas’ size and cultural diversity have blessed it with delicious geo-culinary diversity: chili in the west, barbecue in the middle and east, and Tex-Mex in the south. Yet somehow barbecue gets most of the attention.

At Eater, Meghan McCarron lavishes praise on Tex-Mex, the state’s homegrown style of Mexican food. Derided as cheese-covered food for white people, Tex-Mex gets overlooked or mocked for being more Tex than Mex. McCarron argues that the culinary establishment doesn’t treat Tex-Mex, both beloved and maligned, with the respect it deserves. Tex-Mex isn’t all frozen margaritas and fajitas, estúpido. This is a proper rural tradition, she says, and “the most important, least understood regional cuisine in America.”

Adding insult to injury, while corporate chains like Applebees serve bowls of queso and bland fajitas, the demand for low prices — and the white food media’s barbecue bias — threaten the family restaurants that serve fresh, scratch Tex-Mex. McCarron’s thoughtful, deeply researched call for canonization cannot be ignored.

What does barbecue have that Tex-Mex doesn’t? It has meat, it has fire, it has an aura of mastery — and, currently, it’s associated primarily with Anglos, and the area in and around Texas’s famously progressive, and also profoundly segregated city, Austin. The state has a robust tradition of black pitmasters; Franklin Barbecue is located in what was formerly Ben’s Long Branch Bar-B-Q, a black-owned business in a historically black neighborhood, originally created by Austin’s segregationalist 1928 city plan. Black pitmasters at restaurants like Sam’s Bar-B-Que and Hoover’s still smoke nearby. And Mexican pit-smoked barbacoa, a weekend staple in the Rio Grande Valley, existed before Texas was Texas.

But the “easy story” of central Texas barbecue, as Daniel Vaughn calls it, disseminated across the country, is about, and told by, people who are almost entirely white, and male. Each of these cooks and obsessives are individually passionate and often brilliant — and some, like Aaron Franklin, are downright leery of their own fame — but the aggregate effect is Texas barbecue being treated with almost comical importance, driven by a self-perpetuating cycle where tastemakers champion genuinely wonderful food made by people who look like them. (This isn’t an issue just in Texas barbecue, but that obsessive model kicked off our smoke-worshipping zeitgeist, and created a model for, say, the Ugly Delicious barbecue episode, which featured no black pitmasters).

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The Myth of Authenticity Is Killing Tex-Mex

Longreads Pick

It isn’t all sour cream and cheese. It isn’t just for white people. Don’t treat it like a joke. Tex-Mex is a distinct regional food tradition, and it deserves respect and wider appreciation, especially now that many traditional mom-and-pop forms of it are endangered.

Source: Eater
Published: Mar 7, 2018
Length: 19 minutes (4,827 words)

The Man in the Mirror

Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait

Alison Kinney | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4,156 words)

 

1.

In the foreground of the early Netherlandish painting stands a couple, holding hands, amidst the comforts of their cherry-upholstered, brass chandelier-lit bedroom. The husband, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini, raises one hand in greeting, but neither to his unnamed wife, who clasps one hand over her belly, nor to the lapdog at their feet: behind the couple, a small, wall-mounted convex mirror reflects two other men, facing the Arnolfinis in their room yet visible only in the glass. One of these men may be the artist himself, Jan van Eyck.

Like many other paintings where looking glasses, polished suits of armor, jugs, and carafes expand or shift the perspectives, The Arnolfini Portrait shows us how many people are really in the picture. Painted mirrors reflect their creators, or at least their easels, in Vermeer’s Music Lesson; in the Jabach family portrait, where Charles Le Brun paints his mirror image right into the group; and in Andrea Solario’s Head of St. John the Baptist, where the reflection of the artist’s own head gleams from the foot of the platter. Mirrors reveal the whole clientele and an acrobat’s feet in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère; the two observers of a couple’s ring purchase in Petrus Christus’s Goldsmith in his Shop; and, regal in miniature, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Sometimes mirrors invite us to regard the artist’s reflection as our own; as John Ashbery wrote of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,

What is novel is the extreme care in rendering
The velleities of the rounded reflecting surface
(It is the first mirror portrait),
So that you could be fooled for a moment
Before you realize the reflection
Isn’t yours.

The mirror’s revelations surprise everyone except the artist, who, in The Arnolfini Portrait, paints his signature over the mirror, like a graffito on the wall: “Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434.” Jan was here.

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The Stuff That Came Between Mom and Me: A Story About Hoarding

Getty / Illustration by Katie Kosma

Susan Fekete | Longreads | March 2018 | 13 minutes (3,541 words)

 

I lived in Atlanta for six years after college. I only went back to St. Pete twice in that time, and both times I stayed with my aunt Linda.

Mom would make excuses about not having cleaned the house, not having done laundry, and therefore not having clean sheets on my bed. It made me sad, a little, because I knew they were lies. I knew her house was full.

Full — floor to ceiling, windows to walls — of stuff. Her mass of belongings included objects de art, trinkets, furniture, memorabilia, books, magazines, journals. And many cats, especially ones with extra toes. Although no one was sure anymore how many of those — or of anything else for that matter — she had.

When I visited, she came over to my aunt’s house, and we hugged and laughed and loved each other greatly and talked for hours on end. About everything.

Everything except the stuff in her house. My mother was a terrific metaphysician, passionate about the world around her and the lives of others. She was spiritual even at her darkest moments, and funny even in her greatest sorrows. She was a joy to be around, if you could avoid the stuff.
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Doomed in Nashville

Scott Boehm via AP

Monica Drake | Longreads | March 2018 | 19 minutes (4,778 words)

 

When my second novel came out, Chuck Palahniuk invited me, along with best-selling thriller writer and friend Chelsea Cain, to share his book tour. We’d make a joint venture of it.

Chuck is established, the author of the novel Fight Club, of course … “and 15 other books,” as he says. We’ve workshopped together for decades. A tour with Chuck would be a roving literary rave! My only hesitation? At 8 years old, my daughter was still young. She wasn’t a baby; still, I was her daily support.

Her father spent long days earning an hourly wage, leaving our house mid-morning and coming back too late to manage her life. A 40-minute commute on public transit added to his workday. He regularly stopped off at a bar before he made it all the way to the house.

When my first novel, Clown Girl, came out, she was a toddler. I’d brought her along on a homespun, couch-surfing road trip of a tour. She and I darted every which way in an old Nissan sedan, sharing bags of chips and sleeves of Oreos, driving between small towns. We met fabulous people. In other words, I juggled indie lit and parenting, and managed without childcare because as a family, we ran on a very slim budget.

Consequently? She attended 43 readings in 52 weeks, pre-kindergarten. It was boot camp; she learned to sit quietly and color while grown-ups did their thing. She learned patience.

This round, my daughter would stay with her grandmother — and she’d be fine — but still I had a clutch of apprehension. If anything were to go wrong, I’d be across the country, reading stories, tipping up a drink, laughing with strangers. The mother-guilt was thick and ready.

Hesitantly, I released myself, temporarily, from the obligations of daily parenting, and went, joining the team.
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The Case Against Tipping

Longreads Pick

Data shows how tipping in the restaurant industry fosters sexual harrassment, labor exploitation and racial profiling, and it widens the opportunity gap. Then again, anyone who’s worked in food service can tell you that. Why is America so committed to this damaging practice?

Source: Eater
Published: Feb 22, 2018
Length: 10 minutes (2,555 words)