Bad Food
August 2 1998		Are the Cooks worse? or am I just more picky?
The task of the day: More Reading		I'm sitting on the banks of the Hudson River as I type this. (Portable computers are great.) The Hudson is a Real(tm) River. People in California call anything with water in it a river. Actually, the LA River often doesn't even have water in it. Most rivers in California are also constrained to a concrete ditch. The Hudson brooks no such confinement. Half a mile across, still and slow moving. Pleasure boats drift up and down. A barge trudges along. The weather here has cooled off quite a bit. A jacket is needed at night sometimes. The days reach the upper 70s. Humidity has dropped. One can actually be outside and enjoy things. This is all a major improvement. * * * I've noticed that my eating habits now include an awful lot of poking around at the food I eat. Today I went to the local diner for some Eggs Benedict. I sat there and thought about the Hollandaise sauce, and how I would have done it differently. It was incompletely emulsified, and close to breaking. There wasn't enough lemon in it. I still ate it. It was okay. Would I have noticed something like this before? I wonder. Tried to have a decent dinner last night and completely failed. Just about no places here serve decent wine unless they are also overly stuffy. Yet Another Thing I miss about California. Actually, I did find one place, but foolishly decided not to eat there. I've learned my lesson for next week. Hell, I can't be going down to NYC every time I want to eat something other than a hot dog! I'm sure that once I get out of here, this sharpness of focus will dull down a bit. I sure hope so, otherwise, I'm going to either have to cook everything myself, eat out at places that cost too much, or waste away. None of these have appeal to me. Besides, I'd be even more insufferable than I am now. * * * Couldn't find a movie worth seeing yesterday. I would have loved to find "pi", but there does not appear to be a single art house anywhere within 100 miles. So instead, I picked up a bunch of light reading. Copy of Cinescope about the upcoming Star Wars movies. Natalie Portman plays the queen. Cool. Details Magazine with lots of high fashion and cheesecake shots of females I'm supposed to know about. Podkoyne of Mars which I never read before. I figured with all of that cheese, I had to balance out. Also grabbed the latest issue of Granta, which I've read about half of now. Granta is a short story fiction magazine. Lots of famous authors write for it, also lots of up and comers. Dani Shapiro's story The Mistress was excellent, as was The Separated by Tim Lott. I should probably read Granta more often, but I forget about it. It's also darn expensive.
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