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In the end, the NYPL host quoted Milan Kundera as saying, “A European is someone who longs for Europe.” To which I will add the implied: A New Yorker is someone who longs for New York.

“Nostalgia” is made of two Greek words: Nostos, to return home, and algos, which means pain or suffering. It is literally homesickness. Maybe this is how you know if you’re a New Yorker or not. It’s not where you were born, or how many generations precede you, or how you make a living, but do you long painfully for New York? Are you homesick for this vanishing city?

-- Jeremiah Moss, “Discussing Eminent Domain,” Vanishing New York

In just under three weeks, the movers will arrive at our storage space in Woodside.  Lloyd and I will pack the truck—we’re moving on the cheap—and the movers will begin their 8-to-15-day trip across the country with nearly everything we own.  On Monday, August 4, we will fly out of JFK.  From that moment, we will resume our Just Visiting status in New York for the first time since January 1993.  At one time, the thought that we would leave was as remote as Omicron Persei 8; the idea that we would move 3,100 miles away to a place where neither of us had ever lived was beyond consideration.  Now we are here, packing boxes every night, sorting what comes with us and what gets tossed or donated or given away, living on the verge of the next moment.

We have been asked often if we’re excited about relocating, and while the answer is still an unequivocal “yes,” right now we are in a place where contemplating the future brings not excitement, but trepidation, if not outright fear.  We don’t have a new apartment yet; my student loan money has not yet been disbursed (although I’ve been told by heads cooler and wiser than mine that the money is on the way); my unemployment benefits end next week (although apparently the feds have extended benefits for 13 more weeks, but I’m not sure of my eligibility) and my savings are running out; and, most troubling, Lloyd’s company may not approve a transfer for him after all—which means that he may have to take an unpaid leave and temp for a while until they figure out whether there is still a place for him in the organization after all.  Through all this uncertainty, he has been a rock, an optimist and a dreamboat, but this kind of uncertainty takes its toll, and this week it’s taking its toll on both of us.  We know that this is a temporary state, and once we’re all settled in, optimism and good cheer will rule the day.  Right now, though, contemplating our future is nervewracking business, so I am turning away from the future for a few hours to consider the past, and to think about what brought us to this point, the point where we decided to leave New York.

I could say that the decision to leave came with the decision to attend law school, but that isn’t really true.  The school shortlist included two New York City schools, Cardozo and Brooklyn Law, both of which waitlisted me.  Or I could say that the decision came on the day I was laid off from LuthorCorp.  Even as I’d said that I had no idea what the future held, I knew exactly what a future in New York would hold:  either I could maintain our tenuous standard of living by taking another hideous cubicle-farm job, or else I could try to find more creative, satisfying work that wouldn’t begin to cover my half of the rent, to say nothing of groceries or health insurance deductibles.  (This is one reason why, to use a vile old phrase, I’ve never “done anything” with my culinary school diploma.  I just couldn’t afford it, especially after Lloyd was laid off from his job with a now-defunct DSL provider.  Even after he found another job, we just couldn’t afford to live on one full salary plus one entry-level pastry monkey salary.) I do remember thinking “it’s not a question of if, but when” on the day that I yelled at a Republican for hassling a mentally-ill woman on an escalator at Grand Central Station.  Ultimately, though, I knew long ago that our time was up.  I knew it five years ago, the first time I saw the DeBeers Christmas ads at Grand Central.  I knew it then; I knew it every Christmas after that, every time I saw the new set of ads; I knew it, and continue to know it, every time I walk by a construction site for a new luxury apartment building.  I know it every time a specialty bookshop closes and a Banana Republic opens up in its place—or when a 30-year-old bakery closes and an Ann Taylor store becomes a bigger Ann Taylor store.  I know it every time a supermarket turns into a drugstore, or a bank branch.  (There was a time when I considered it a point of pride to not have to rely on supermarkets, and, in truth, I still prefer to buy my fruit and vegetables and poultry and eggs at the farmer’s markets, and restrict my supermarket usage for cleaning and paper products.  But I also know that my experience is not universal, and that supermarket access is critical for people on fixed incomes and for the working poor, and that the loss of a supermarket can have a devastating impact on a neighborhood.)

Of course, every time someone mentions that the city is changing, and that little treasures of the city are being replaced with charmless alternatives, there is always a chorus close at hand to remind us that everything changes, that nothing remains static, and do we really want to live in the bad old days of fiscal crisis and escalating crime rates and grafittied subways and crack and AIDS and Gerald Ford inviting us to drop dead?  Of course I know that nothing remains static, and it shouldn’t.  The problem I have is not with change per se, but rather the nature of it.  I could just be projecting a romantic view of the past, but I don’t think I am.  Businesses have fallen and risen, neighborhoods have shifted and changed, for as long as this city has existed, but at least in the past it felt as if there were a place for all of us, not just the richest or luckiest of us.  There were places for the very wealthy, both of the old money and self-made varieties; for the middle class; for service workers and artists and public safety workers; for grocers and milliners and clerk-typists and photographers.  Now Manhattan and Brooklyn are being gobbled up by one luxury building after another and one high-end retailer after another, and Queens isn’t far behind.  I think of a story I’ve told here before, probably once too often, about the time Lloyd worked as a temp for a nonprofit that aimed to bring business investment into Lower Manhattan after the 9/11/2001 attacks, and how the head of the organization told a journalist that she was after serious money, and didn’t have time to talk to locksmiths.  I think of a conversation I’ve had with Julie more than once:  Is it really a sign of progress that hedge fund managers and designers and real estate moguls can live here, but their support staff can’t?

I am aware that I haven’t even begun to discuss the effect of this sort of hypertactic money-chasing on the arts-and-letters community in New York.  Of course high rents and lack of amenities are perilous for artists, musicians, photographers and writers, and New York certainly isn’t doing itself any favors by pricing them out of the area, but from where I sit, I can see the disappearance of more than artists.  One of my favorite short stories is Patricia Highsmith’s “Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out” (anthologized in both a Highsmith collection, Nothing That Meets the Eye, and an anthology edited by David Sedaris, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules), about a middle-aged secretary who spends a strained evening hosting her sister from Cleveland.  Mildred Stratton lives on Third Avenue in the 20s and rides the bus to her job in a small office; she keeps a small, neat apartment, shops regularly at the delicatessen below her apartment, loves her quiet life in a noisy city and feels bound to protect it from her sister’s unsympathetic scrutiny.  It is a funny, quiet story about a hardworking, kind woman who doesn’t necessarily want to set the world on fire.  In the coming New York, there is no room for people like Millie Stratton, and, I fear, no room for people like me and Lloyd, either.

(Dear friends, I am aware that this is a scattershot, disorganized, unfinished essay, what my teachers used to call “not your best effort, Jen,” but I felt keenly that I needed to write this.  I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what I could say here, but I do need to take a break for some exercise and some lunch, and maybe a little packing.  By all means, though, this will be continued.  Thank you in advance for your patience.)

It’s not exactly the way I wanted to break a month of blogfasting, dear friends, but I keep headbutting against false starts, incomplete sentences and general pretension.  I’ve been doing this for the better part of a day, even though there are tales to tell, tales ranging from our preparations for the Big Move West to the superb four-day weekend I spent in Pittsburgh two weeks ago.  For some reason, though, the words have been stubbornly resistant, but it is only now that I know why:  There is cake to be had, and cake will not wait its turn.

Credit for the return of cake must be given to Ragnvaeig, who triumphed over jet lag and a bad cold to meet me in the city on the stickiest, swampiest Saturday in years.  Once upon a time, I promised her a cardamom-lime cake to call her own, and on Saturday she finally got one.  Long-time PTMYB readers may remember that cardamom-lime cake was going to be the signature cake of my bakery, the one I spent years trying to open, but didn’t due to insufficient financing.  I’ve written about it for years in this space, but I didn’t realize until now that I never, ever posted the recipe for it.  Until I made Ragnvaeig’s cake, I hadn’t baked one for a long time, and I wondered whether my memory was burnishing this cake, imbuing it with virtues it didn’t necessarily have, making it better than it really was.  You could have heard me exhale for miles when Ragnvaeig deemed it good.  (Thank you, dearest.) In short order, two friends requested the recipe.  The cake, dear friends, is back.

For all that I like to pat myself on the back for this cake, it’s not like I slaved over three hundred variations, testing crumb variables with different amounts of eggs or baking powder; nope, for this cake, I stood on the shoulders of giants.  The “base” cake is a basic buttermilk pound cake, flavored with citrus juice and peel, baked in a tube pan and soaked, post-bake, with a citrus juice/sugar syrup.  Maida Heatter uses this basic formula for her Lemon Buttermilk Cake, as does Gale Gand’s tangerine cake in Butter Sugar Flour Eggs.  My version of this cake, as the name might indicate, involves subbing lime zest and juice for those of the other fruit; I also add cardamom, and lots of it, about a tablespoon and a half of cardamom pods.  (I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’ve never measured the cardamom post-grind.  If you prefer to use pre-ground cardamom, I’d go with a scant tablespoon, but I promise that if you have something interesting to watch on tv while you shell the cardamom pods, the work goes quickly, and the resulting cake tastes amazing.) Whenever I confess to abundant use of spices, I receive counsel that sometimes there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.  Sometimes, the advisor is right, but in this case, I don’t want to hear it.  When it comes to cardamom, particularly in this cake, less is not more.

Cardamom-lime cake
serves 12-16

For the cake:

After the cake has rested in the pan for five minutes, turn the cake out onto a cooling rack.  Place the rack over a large piece of foil, large enough for you to fold up the edges around the rack.  While the cake is still hot, brush the syrup all over the top, sides and center hole of cake.  Pay special attention to the sides near the cake bottom, which will be dryer than the sides near the top.  Let cool completely before eating.  No, really.  You’ll want to cut into it while it’s still hot, but doing so will leave you with a gummy, fragile crumb.  Wait until it’s cool.  You’ll be glad you did.

Now that we have cake, more can be told.  And it will, too.

From the sublime to the ridiculous; from a consideration of the wider world around us to a reconsideration of my own navel; from “Here’s Why You Should Go See Heavy Metal in Baghdad” to “Good Lord, I Hate This Apartment, Especially Now That We Have to Sort Through All This Shit and Pack What Remains!”, so are the days of our lives chez PTMYB.  I’m sorry, dear friends.  You are a kind and patient lot, and you really deserve better than this. 

In defense of both my lackluster performance and my never-ending dog-eyed apology, I blame both on the Sudafed, on which I’ve been living all week thanks to the fourth headcold I have caught in six months.  You would think that since all of my subway riding happens mostly during off-peak riding hours, I would not be so susceptible to the lurgies and virii that float about the city, but it would seem that this is not the case.  I choose to blame it on the flu shot I did not get back in November.  I know that colds and influenzae do not originate from the same bugs, and one shouldn’t have anything to do with the other, but I’ve noticed that in the years I do get flu shots, I catch cold maybe once a year, twice, tops.  There’s a mistake I won’t be making again.  That said, if you’re going to catch your death of cold, you might as well have your death of fun in catching it, and that I did.  On what might have been the last really nice day for walking around until autumn (the heat and humidity are on their way to NYC, and they’re going to kick us hard, say the weatherweasels), I went to one of my favorite walking-around spots in the city, Flushing Meadows and Corona Park, where I walked over Robert Moses’s face with great relish (and I don’t mean the stuff on my hot dog [rimshot]) and took about eleven zillion pictures of the Unisphere and the Rocket Thrower before heading into Corona proper for the best ice in the city.  I’d say it was worth sneezing for a week.

But I do not come here to discuss the hideous workings of my sinuses.  I come here because many of you have not yet thrown your hands up in disgust at my slacktacular posting regimen, but rather have asked what our summer looks like.  It’s not boring, I’ll grant you that. 

Our original plan for summer—and beyond—was that I would pack only what I needed to sustain myself for ten months of student living in a 330-square-foot apartment, while Lloyd would stay in New York through April, when he would be fully vested in his pension.  We had planned to rent a Matrix and drive it across the country, staying in cheapish hotels and taking regular driving breaks, documenting neat stuff along the way.  It would be our long-awaited Grand Vacation, the kind of road trip we’ve talked about since before we were married, something to give me memories that would bring warmth and solace when I’m ready to drop out of law school and my sweetheart and helpmeet is over 3,000 miles away.  Once Lloyd was vested and I was finished with my first year of school, I would start looking for bigger apartments, sign a lease, fly back to New York and spend the summer of 2009 helping Lloyd close up the apartment and move for good.

Three days later, Lloyd announced that there were several job openings at his level at the company’s office in San Jose.  He might be able to come with me after all.  I spent about a day whooping out of pure euphoria, followed by a day of creeping realization that, should a job come through, we would have less than three months to close up the apartment.  Lloyd suggested that we plan as if he would be moving with me, so that we’d be prepared for any eventuality.  If it turned out that he wouldn’t be able to transfer, he could still keep our stuff in storage and move to a cheaper apartment share for the duration of his time in New York.  He started interviewing, we started packing, and then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.

It’s been a month since Lloyd’s last interview, and while all signs look good for a transfer, we probably won’t know for sure until the middle of July.  Lloyd has decided that regardless of whether or not the transfer comes through, he wants to move with me this summer.  No matter how carefully we plan and how frugally we live, there’s just no getting around the fact that the cost of separate housing in two expensive cities will hurt us economically at a time when I’ll already be socked with student loan debt.  There’s also the small matter of our wanting to be together.  So the die is cast.  The moving company picks up our stuff on July 31; it should take them about 10 days to deliver it to us.  Lloyd and I fly to San Jose August 4.  Until then, I pack, I blow my nose, I try not to worry too much, I tell Lloyd, in soothing tones, not to worry so much.

Say, Jen, you know what might take your mind off everything?  Baking, that’s what! It very well might, dear friends, but so far it hasn’t.  One of the unhappiest side effects of the whole packing/moving/contemplating the move process is that our kitchen, which was never the easiest space to navigate in the world, has become a cramped, unwieldy carnival of stress in which to work.  I never, ever, ever thought that these words would ever cross my lips, but I now find the time spent in the kitchen to be almost unbearable.  Baking, once my favorite way to spend a weekend, has now become something to get done as quickly as possible.  The thought of roasting a chicken and some potatoes to eat over salad, normally one of my favorite thoughts on a Friday afternoon, now fills me with vague dread.  A clever student of the psyche might say that I’m separating from the space where I have been cooking and baking for 14 years, pushing away from it the same way that teenagers push away from their parents as they forge new identities.  Or s/he might just say that I’m sick of bumping into things and not having a clear surface on which to put hot pans or cooling racks.  There’s truth in both answers.  I *am* sick of bumping into shit.  I’m also sick of fighting with an oven that won’t maintain a steady temperature to save its life, leaving all of my cakes half overbaked and half underbaked, no matter how carefully I rotate them.  On the other hand, that same unwieldy oven sits underneath a four-burner gas stovetop that works like a dream, and has since the day we moved in.  The odds are high that the new apartment in which we’ll live when we move west will have an electric stove, which is great for baking but not so much for stovetop cookery.  Every time I turn on the stove now, even just to boil water for a cup of tea, I think about how much I’ll miss our homely little stovetop, and the sound of the Amtrak trains bound for Boston roaring over our apartment on their way to the Hell Gate Bridge.  Then I ruin another cake, and I ask Lloyd if it’s time to move yet.

Nevertheless, I have managed to do a little baking that didn’t make me want to gnash my teeth in frustration.  Behold, the cookiepr0n!

Just when I thought I could finally stop bragging about the greatness of the cashew cookies from King Arthur Flour Whole-Grain Baking, along came these little beauties, chocolate chip cookies made from equal weights of whole wheat flour (I used white whole wheat) and barley flour, which I bought from the Union Mills Homestead in Union Mills, Maryland, the weekend that Momerina and I went to Maryland Sheep & Wool.  I have made both chocolate chip cookies and a soft, cakey sugar cookie, both from King Arthur Flour Whole-Grain Baking, using this barley flour, and I am not exaggerating when I say that the scent of barley flour-based goodies as they bake is one of the most gorgeous fragrances I’ve ever been privileged to experience.  If you’ve ever gone into a bakery, inhaled that sweet heady scent, thought “mmmmm,” and then instantly thought, “gee, I hope that isn’t the smell of Creme Bouquet or one of those other nasty artificial flavor compounds,” I’m happy to tell you that barley flour and sugar, baking together, smell just like Bakery, only without the chemical overtones that would make you suspicious.  There’s no other way to describe it:  it is simply gorgeous.  It makes you feel glad for the day you ever learned to bake cookies.

Maybe I do need to bake another batch.  After all, if there is one thing Lloyd and I have been relearning these past few weeks, it’s the lesson that good things rarely come easily, or with peace of mind.  We’re not feeling easy, or peaceful, but we are feeling good.  I sort through a stack of books.  He packs them without an inch of wasted space, the way he did when he was a shipping/receiving manager and I was a buyer at the bookstore where we met.  We eat dinner.  On bad nights we talk about what we’re going to do if he doesn’t have a job, or if my loans don’t come through, or if they do come through but the bursar’s office takes time getting money to us, or the bank sits on the funds for a month before letting us touch them.  On good nights we remember that we are not alone in this venture, that we have friends and family who will not let us fall.  One way or another, we’re on our way to something really, really good.  “We have afters,” I say to Lloyd, thinking of the cookies in the kitchen.  His face lights up.

(Note:  Yes, I am that cheesy and unsubtle.  The title of this post is indeed a reference to the Frank Capra-directed World War II propaganda film series, Why We Fight.  The movies in this series are in the public domain, viewable on the internet, and well worth watching.)

It was pure coincidence, a choice among a plethora of Memorial Day weekend movie choices, 100% political-agenda-free, that led Lloyd and me to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad on Memorial Day.  In hindsight, though—and I know I will probably make more than a few people unhappy when I say this—I find it a perfectly appropriate, if heartbreaking, way to honor our fallen troops in Iraq, as well as to acknowledge the terrible, terrible price Iraqi civilians have paid over the past five years.  At first glance, it might seem frivolous to think about the war in the context of a documentary about Iraq’s only heavy metal band, Acrassicauda, but Heavy Metal in Baghdad is far from frivolous.  This is not to say that it isn’t fun, because at times, it is.  The music is terrific, the concert scenes are a hoot to watch, and the band members (Firas Al Lateef on vocals and rhythm guitar, Faisal Talal on bass, Marwan Reyad on drums and the lightning-fast Tony Aziz on lead guitar) are all affable, funny, smart and Very, Very Metal.  It is also, by turns, painful, sad, infuriating, suspenseful and just plain nervewracking.  Directed and shot by the creative team behind VICE magazine, Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti, Heavy Metal in Baghdad is both an exuberant fan letter and a street-level view of the most dangerous place in the world.  I am worlds beyond impressed at the movie Alvi and Moretti have made, but I’m even gladder that they made it home alive.  When you see this movie, you will understand just how remarkable a feat this is.

I do beg your forbearance, dear friends, if I belabor the point more strongly than necessity might dictate, but I do want you to see this movie, as many of you as possible.  At the noon screening that Lloyd and I attended, there was one other person in the theatre with us.  I hope that the turnout was better at the later showings, but I’m not holding my breath, especially considering that just up the street Iron Man is playing on an IMAX screen.  (This is not a poke at Iron Man; we plan to see that, too, but we’re betting that that one will be around for a while, whereas Heavy Metal in Baghdad probably will not be.) If you are a metalhead—I know there are at least two of you out there who read PTMYB—you should see this movie.  If you are not a metalhead but you appreciate a well-made documentary produced by smart filmmakers, you should see it.  If you are a VICE reader, you should see it (and depending on where you live, you probably already have).  If you oppose the war, if you support the war, or if you’re exhausted by the very thought of the war—particularly if you’re the latter—you should see it.  If you plan to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, it is absolutely imperative that you see it.

By the argument for invading Iraq as presented to us by the Bush administration, the four members of Acrassicauda were exactly the Iraqi-on-the-street whose hearts and minds we would win by removing Saddam Hussein from power.  Interviewed in 2003, the band recalls how, when they applied for performance permits from the Ministry of Culture, they were asked “so what do you have for Saddam?” At the time, not having at least one song proclaiming Saddam’s greatness could land your band in jail, so they dutifully included a song with “yay, Saddam!” lyrics, which Marwan acknowledges were “fucking lies,” to keep themselves out of jail.  Even with pro-regime lyrics, it was still a dangerous thing to be a metalhead in Saddam’s Iraq.  Long hair was forbidden, beards even more so.  (Faisal acknowledges, bluntly, that he is playing a dangerous game with the goatee he sports.) Wearing T-shirts silkscreened with the legends of American bands—or with any English on them—was dangerous.  Headbanging was outlawed outright, supposedly for its resemblance to the motions of Jewish prayer.  In early concert footage, you can see enthusiastic but subdued crowds, longing to cut loose and bang their heads, almost none daring to do so.  By 2005, in the midst of spiraling post-invasion chaos, Acrassicauda staged a concert at the Al Fanar Hotel.  (VICE had worked to organize this concert, but the day before the show, Eddy and Suroosh were stranded in Beirut, 500 miles from Baghdad.) Despite the power cuts, despite the logistical nightmares, the show went on.  60 Baghdad metalheads showed up, and their sheer frenzied exuberance, caught on video by their segment producer Johan, is a blast to watch.  When the band launches into their incendiary song “Massacre,” the crowd goes nuts.  The driving beat and opening power cords are thrilling, even as the lyrics, depicting civilian casualties of the war, are devastating.  I could have listened for days.

If pre-invasion Iraq was dangerous for metalheads and critics of the regime, post-invasion Iraq is lethal for everyone who lives and works there—or tries to.  VICE’s next attempt to enter Iraq, in 2006, is successful, but fraught with danger that almost defies belief:  Having hired a security detail that includes a translator, two drivers and two gunsmen (as well as flak jackets and a truck full of guns), by the end of their stay, the security company has added 13 gunsmen to their detail.  Tony and Marwan have left Iraq, crossing the border into Syria; Faisal and Firas are still in Baghdad, living 15 minutes apart from each other, but unable to see each other due to the danger inherent in just walking down the street.  To speak English on the street, or to be seen with anyone speaking English on the street, is to invite gunfire.  When Suroosh calls Faisal to arrange a meeting, Faisal’s only response is a whispered “okay;” to say any more, any louder, is unthinkable.  At night Eddy and Suroosh stand on the balcony of their room at the Al Mansour Hotel, smoking, looking out over the city as bombs explode, gunfire peppers the air and Apache helicopters fly overhead.  By day they ride down the streets of Baghdad, taking increasingly risky field trips as their translator grows visibly agitated.  One such trip is to Acrassicauda’s old rehearsal space, tiny and dimly-lit, where the band used to write and play for 12 hours a day.  A missile has destroyed the building, the rehearsal space and the band’s instruments, which are buried in the rubble.  The exuberant young men who packed their jubilant show at the Al Fanar are either dead or have fled the country.  Midway through one interview, Firas looks visibly pained.  What I took for depression, or deep sadness, was actually anxiety.  Curfew is four hours away, and the two hours before curfew are the most dangerous in Baghdad.  “Can we go now?” he asks.  This simple question is loaded with dread.

Acrassicauda’s tale is one that defies happy endings.  This may seem a facile understatement, and in fact it is, but I think it’s worth noting because the desire for happy endings, or at least a measure of satisfaction, is strong, particularly among Americans.  I’ve mentioned this story before—apologies to those of you who are tired of hearing me tell it—but about 10 years ago I read an interview with Daniel and Susan Cohen, who wrote children’s nonfiction readers until 1988, when their only child, Theodora, was killed on Pan Am 103 over Scotland.  Daniel Cohen observed that one difficulty he and his wife found in their fight for justice was that people (not exclusively but mostly Americans) need, if not a happy ending, at least some purpose to their suffering.  We want to know that someday our lost loved ones will be waiting for us over the horizon, but if we can’t know that, at least we should have something to show for our pain.  Let us be better, stronger, more resourceful, more appreciative of small pleasures.  It is enormously difficult for us to hear that sometimes there is no measure of satisfaction, that the only thing that can be found in loss and ruin is more loss and ruin.

This brings me back to Acrassicauda.  In 2007, all four members of the band have reunited in Damascus, where the only work they can find is menial, under-the-table, illegal work, as Iraqi citizens are enjoined from working in Syria.  (In an attempt to stop the flow of Iraqi refugees into the country, the Syrian government has imposed new entry requirements on new refugees, and regularly attempts to repatriate existing refugees.) There is a flash of the old Acrassicauda glory when they play a concert in a Damascus internet cafe—no mean feat when Faisal points out that there are no metalheads in Damascus—but the reality is harsh:  They are poor expatriates, unable to work legally, forced to pawn their instruments to pay bills, missing their homeland desperately but knowing that returning is lethal.  When, with VICE’s assistance, they are able to record a three-track demo, it is a psychologically rousing boost, but it is not enough of a leap forward to give their lives any stability.

Thanks to charitable donations that bought their plane tickets and covered some living expenses, Acrassicauda are now living in Istanbul.  The cost of living in Istanbul is high, however, and the band is in much the same position as they were in Damascus.  Entry visas into Europe or North America have not been forthcoming.  The band was unable to attend the screenings of Heavy Metal in Baghdad at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival or the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.  When the official film website calls Acrassicauda “literally a band on the run,” it does not exaggerate.  The possibility of an entry visa to the U.S. appears beyond remote.  (Among the appalling statistics offered in the film is that of the four million Iraqi citizens displaced by the war [two million displaced internally within Iraq, two million refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon], less than 500 have been granted legal entry into the U.S.  Unfortunately, given the current rancorous debate over immigration in the U.S., I know that to mount an argument that more Iraqi emigres should be allowed in is an extremely difficult task, but I do hope that someone will pursue it.)

Yesterday morning, as I drank my coffee and perused the news, I found, via the Associated Press, a challenge issued by John McCain to Barack Obama, inviting him to join McCain on a trip to Iraq, so that he could see what has been accomplished on the ground in Iraq.  If Sen. McCain’s offer is sincere, and if Sen. Obama accepts the offer, I would recommend that they watch Heavy Metal in Baghdad before they go.  (Since I do not have a hotline to either the McCain or Obama campaigns, I suspect that my recommendation will go unheeded.) I’d be keen to know what they think of what they will see.  I’d be particularly keen to ask Sen. McCain if turning Baghdad into a surreal and ultraviolent no-man’s land is considered an accomplishment on the ground, if the liberation of Baghdad was worth the lives of over 4,000 young Americans and over 600,000 Iraqi civilians, worth the homes and health and livelihood of millions of others, worth the safety and creativity and freedom of four young men whose dearest wish is to play fast, loud music together.

Going to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad on Memorial Day was not a political statement, but this is:  If you live in New York or Los Angeles, please see this film.  If you cannot travel to New York or Los Angeles, please consider buying the DVD when it goes on sale on June 10.  If you don’t want to buy the DVD outright, please rent it from Netflix or Blockbuster or the rental outlet of your choice.  Please watch this movie, please look at what one of the oldest places in the world has become, and then ask yourself, your family and friends and neighbors, your elected officials, and your presidential candidates:  Is this why we fight?

(If you would like to make a donation to the band, or if you would like to learn more about the Iraqi refugee crisis, which the U.N. has called the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world, the Take Action link on the Heavy Metal in Baghdad website has links to various organizations, along with a PayPal button for donations to the band.  You can also access the band’s blog and MySpace pages via the HMiB website.)

It has been a long time since I’ve had a really good—or, depending on your point of view, really bad—foodish rant around here. It’s certainly not for lack of cause.  It’s not as if, once the thousand-dollar frittata and the P.B. Slice surrendered their fifteen minutes of fame, there were no other outrageous foodstuffs to replace them.  From squeezable yogurt in a tube to those scary glop-filled Bowls O’Food that KFC rolled out last year to Paula Deen’s batter-dipped, deep-fried orange cake recipe that a dear friend shared with me, there has been a wealth of nonsense that should not have passed without comment—and yet, I had bugger-all to say about any of it. I could blame it on the law school follies, or on the months of unemployment torpor that preceded the law school follies, or the two last miserable years at LuthorCorp, when I basically lost interest in everything that makes life worth living.  Or I could just jettison all the excuses and admit it:  I got lazy.  I got soft.  I didn’t have the attention span required to get my knickers in a twist, much less spend a thousand words untwisting them.

Of course you know that couldn’t last. 

Credit is due to Pam the Beancounter, who, if you are not acquainted with her, is witty and wry and thoughtful and a consistent source of amusing conversation. (If you are acquainted with her, of course, then you already know this.) Last week Pam was at a supermarket in Modesto, California, where she found—oh, heaven help me for using this phrase, even in a tongue-in-cheek way—a display of value-added russet potatoes.  I am thankful that Pam has a blog, a camera and a well-honed sense of the absurd, because honestly, if she had tried to explain this to me, I would have refused to believe it.  It would have been beyond my ken to believe it.

Apparently a venerable West Coast produce concern has discovered that if you take a crop of russet potatoes, sort them by size, wash them twice, shrinkwrap them individually and slap both a heat-sensitive tear strip and a double-sided label on the shrinkwrap, you can sell the resulting potatoes at 99 cents each.  For 99 cents, you can buy one single, modestly-sized russet potato, the same modestly-sized russets that my neighborhood fruit-and-vegetable market, several thousand miles away from Idaho potato country, sells in five-pound bags for $2.50.  (If I want bigger russets, I can buy them loose for 59 cents a pound.  The big ones usually weigh around 9 or 10 ounces).  This new generation of potatoes, branded as Micro Baker, are essentially twice the price of bagged potatoes.

So what exactly is the added value in these value-added potatoes?  If you’re going to pay double the price for your spuds, particularly in an era of $4.00/gallon gasoline, certainly you should get something for your money—something, that is, besides more plastic in the supply chain/water table/landfill.  A little research revealed that the produce company in question is Melissa’s/World Variety Produce, a frequent fixture in my food magazines, well known for sourcing exotic fruits and vegetables worldwide.  Okay, Melissa’s/World Variety Produce, Inc., I thought, sell me.

Hmmm.

Apparently the main selling points of these potatoes are a) they are foolproof to cook in the microwave, b) you leave the shrinkwrap on during the microwaving process, so that your hands never have to touch the potato and c) thanks to the heatproofing on the tearstrip, you can open the shrinkwrap without burning your fingers.  They also have “consistent sizing,” “a label filled with valuable information,” and “a neat, clean appearance,” which, granted, is something the big loose dusty russets don’t have, although, really, it’s pretty quick work to scrub a potato clean.  If these selling points were underwhelming, though, the last ones were mindboggling:  In seven minutes you can have a “‘tastes just liked baked’ potato flavor!” You can have a potato just like the ones served in gourmet restaurants!

This, dear friends, is where they lost me, and where I got my lunatic, muttering food crank idiom back. 

Those last two selling points are just plain wrong.  When you microwave a potato, you are essentially steaming it, cooking it via wet heat.  When you bake, or roast, a potato, you are cooking it via dry heat.  Both are worthy cooking methods, but they are not interchangeable, and to claim that you can create a baked flavor via steaming, or a steamed texture via baking, is a pernicious fiction that does neither the produce merchant nor the cook any favors.  Baking a russet does more than cook it through:  it contributes to the fluffy, floury, mealy texture that makes it unparalleled for absorbing butter, sour cream or olive oil.  It also encourages gentle browning and caramelization of the sugars in the skin, giving it a deep, roasted flavor that contrasts so nicely with the fleshy interior of the potato.  To show off a russet at its best, it’s not enough to cook it; you need to dry it out as well.  There is something inimitable and fine about taking a nice big russet, scrubbing it clean, rubbing its skin with a little bit of salt and tossing it into a hot oven (preferably on the rack above or below the roast you’re roasting or the bread you’re baking), pulling it out of the oven an hour later and feeling how light it has become.  Wrap it in a towel so that you don’t burn your fingers, thump it once, hard, against your work surface, and unroll your steamy potato into a bowl, where it will happily soak up whatever you want to put on it, be it a quantity of butter or a little tub of cottage cheese.  It is soulful, restorative food. 

When you microwave a russet, you are not drying it out.  You are steaming it in its own juice.  This is a terrific thing if you are steaming a fish, particularly a lean fish, or vegetables:  you are keeping the food nice and moist, with pure, clear flavor, unmuddied by caramelization.  It is not terrific for a potato that derives its best flavor and texture from dry heat.  Yes, the potato will cook through evenly; you can cut it open and dress it with butter or cheese; you can even eat the skin, although it won’t taste like anything and the texture will remind you of a wet paper towel.  At best, you’ll have something nice enough to eat.  But it won’t have a “tastes just liked baked” flavor, and no amount of exclamation points will give it one.

Most likely it will, however, taste like a gourmet restaurant baked potato.  This is because, with few exceptions, gourmet restaurant baked potatoes are steamed, too.  I don’t know who first lit on the idea of wrapping russets in foil before baking them, but it was a terrible idea.  All of the moisture that would dissipate in the oven remains contained within the foil.  The result is the same as that of microwaved potatoes:  flavorless, paper-towellish skin, waterlogged flesh.  But hey, it certainly looks snappy in its little foil bunting when it sits on the plate next to your steak, and if the kitchen is lucky, you consider that potato to be an afterthought, little more than a vehicle for that little plastic tub of sour cream they give you.

Admittedly, I might be taking this whole potato methodology rant a bit too far.  I am not a martinet.  I realize that sometimes it’s a pain in the ass to run the oven for an hour, particularly on a swampy day in August.  I have also spent years working in offices where baking a potato wasn’t an option, but microwaving a potato was, and if the resulting potato wasn’t perfect, it was still tasty, filling, cheap and probably healthier than most of the takeout hot lunch options available to me.  I have done it before, and one day I might have to do it again.  I will not, however, be fooling myself into thinking that I’m getting something that tastes like the perfect potato of my dreams—and I’m sure as hell not going to pay twice the price for it.