Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 33 of 288 · 20 per page

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I'm sure that there were beautiful churches, fabulous museums, incredible public parks with unspeakably lovely waterfalls, a rich and fascinating history to be discovered. But I hit the beach. I had, I told myself, solid investigative reasons for this decision. In Brazil, and in Rio in particular, it is said there is no figure more important to the culture, no creature more admired and emulated, than the carioca. The carioca is a role model and the ideal state of being is his. What is a carioca?. Simply put, he's a lovable scamp, a guy who somehow finds a way, always, to avoid legitimate toil in favor of the popular Rio diversions of going to the beach, flirting, making love, dancing, and hanging out. He is a man who survives on charm and what are called jetinhos, improvisational, amiable hustler/joker strategies to avoid work and keep doing what he's doing, which is basically nothing. Rio is filled with cariocas: crowded around cafe tables, playing volleyball with their feet on the beaches, surfing, tanning, swaying to music, hanging out at lanchonetes and barracas, usually with fabulous-looking women feeling them up—in general behaving like aristocratic rogues in Speedos. Whether they go home at night to the walled compounds of the rich, or take the bus to a hillside fa vela, all cariocas—in fact most Brazilians—are shockingly sophisticated about fashion, culture, the events of the world, and stratagems for survival. Everyone, rich or poor, seems to know how to dress stylishly (even on a budget), handle themselves in most social situations, and make the most of their charm, winging it through life. Is there appalling poverty? Are there organized drug gangs, squalid housing, and rampant prostitution? Yes. Do I oversimplify? Yes. Remember, I didn't get too far from the beach. In fact, I confined my investigations exclusively to the coast, beach-hopping from Copacabana with its tourist hordes, big hotels, nightclubs, and family beaches, to the slightly more segmented Ipanema. In Ipa, there are beaches for surfers, beaches for gays, beaches for aging leftists and artists, a beach with a band shell for live music. The surf is stronger, and the social strata more intricate. A few blocks back from the beach, it's like Sutton Place. Ten blocks beyond? Slums that make the South Bronx of the 1970s look like Club Med. I traveled down the coast, through mountain tunnels to Barra (another one), a Montauk-esque beach community with even wilder waves and a less crowded beach—a sort of dress-down-if-you're-stinking-rich enclave strip of cafes and shops and modest but well-kept homes, a few full-bore pleasure palaces.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  57 Beliefs are not limited to the realm of the mind, but are capable of being lived out through the realities of a life which they both inform and enrich. An exemplar is someone who has internalised a way of thinking so that it becomes their way of living. Instead of telling us to be good, they show us what a good life can and should look like. We need a definition of goodness that is not framed in the language of ideas, but in terms of the character, and an exemplar shows us what goodness is like, rather than telling us how it is to be understood. There is an important connection here with Pierre Hadot’s account of some schools of ancient philosophy. While there is a degree of overstatement in Hadot’s analysis, 58 he has clearly identified an aspect of earlier philosophical practice which has not found its proper counterpart in post-Enlightenment thought – the development of certain personal disciplines which help people assimilate and enact their vision of a good life. These transformed modes of seeing and being in the world were exemplified and lived out in the figure of the sage. In the ancient world, philosophy was eminently concerned with self-criticism and self-improvement. Plutarch spoke of ‘weaving’ or ‘painting’ our lives; Plotinus suggested we see ourselves as a sculptor, chipping away at a block of marble to allow the statue within to be seen. Philosophy is about seeing our potential, and guiding us as we try to achieve this, in company with appropriate mentors and exemplars. While ancient schools of philosophy were concerned with the development of argument and reasoning, they also developed what Hadot calls ‘spiritual exercises’ as a means of enacting their ideas and values. Aristotle’s discussion of the question of how we should live focuses on the idea of eudaimonia , a Greek term often translated as ‘happiness’, but which perhaps is better rendered as ‘flourishing’ or ‘fulfilment’. During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment was seen as enfolding a single coherent manner of thought and life, valid for all places and times, so that its leading representatives might be regarded as sages – figures of wisdom with universal appeal and significance. Today, as the limitations of a purely rationalist worldview have become apparent, there is much greater interest in respecting the distinctiveness of different human understandings of rational and spiritual virtues, and retrieving older ways of thinking that had been sidelined during the Age of Reason. British Enlightenment philosophers – most notably, John Locke and George Berkeley (and to a lesser extent, David Hume), have also been scrutinised and reappraised in the light of their involvement in the slave trade. This does not, in my view, discredit the philosophical beliefs of such leading representatives of the Enlightenment, although it certainly complicates attempts to present this as an emancipatory social movement, and raises some awkward questions about the connections between its philosophies and forms of life.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  But even in towns as conservative as ours, people were dying of AIDS, and local groups sprung up to help them. When Jerry got sick, my mother went to meetings and marches, began to volunteer. The entire family, all across the country, got involved. My aunt Tina was a “buddy” to men with AIDS, driving them to doctor’s appointments and caring for them as they died. My cousin Katie made a panel in Jerry’s memory for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, and my grandmother made another. Twice, in 1989 and 1992, we traveled—me, my mom, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins—to Washington, DC, to volunteer when the Quilt was displayed on the National Mall. I got white jeans for the occasion. We volunteers all wore white, an army of ghosts walking the tarpaulin pathways between sections of the Quilt. Each morning, we worked as Unfolders, teams of volunteers unfurling the panels over the grass. There was a beautiful ceremony to it, the way we unfolded a square of stitched-together panels, held it taut, and lowered it to the ground. During the unfolding, no one spoke. The length of the Mall was silent, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Every panel was the size of a grave; each day, we made and unmade a cemetery. During viewing hours, we took shifts as Monitors, walking the perimeter of a section of panels, making sure no one harmed or defaced them. I had just turned eleven, but they let me sign up for shifts like anyone else. I had a Swatch watch and a neon-pink fanny pack stocked with Kleenex and granola bars, and the only thing tethering me to my family was the marvelously thin rope of an agreed-upon meeting time. I had an important job to do: me, skinny hips and moussed bangs and too-big teeth, guarding an epidemic’s graveyard. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Most of the other volunteers were gay men who’d lost friends and lovers. These men became some of my mother’s closest friends. Kids at my school talked about queers, called one another fags as an insult. Kids said you could get HIV from the water fountain. I had a black ACT UP sweatshirt with a pink triangle on the front and SILENCE=DEATH written beneath, and I wore it like a challenge, hoping someone would ask me about it. I liked being the know-it-all, explaining that gay people are born gay, the same way I was born with white skin and blue eyes. It’s not a choice, I told them. No one would choose that life. But back at home, my mother’s friends, these beautiful out gay men—they were like celebrities to me.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  In narrating the final story of the Sixth Day (VI, 10), Dioneo for the first and only time, unless one takes seriously his curious claim that the Griselda story (X, 10) exemplifies munificence in the person of her husband, conforms to the prescribed topic by portraying a character, Friar Cipolla, who displays verbal ingenuity of a very high order indeed. The remarkable dexterity shown by Cipolla in turning an awkward situation to his advantage represents the apotheosis of the day’s talking point, which covers those who have ‘avoided danger, discomfiture or ridicule’ through resorting to a ‘prompt retort or shrewd manoeuvre’. Cipolla’s capacity for thinking and talking on his feet, comparable, according to the narrator, to the oratorical skills of Cicero and Quintilian, is not the result of a refined upbringing and education, but is simply an inborn and natural gift which he exploits to the full in persuading a not very discerning audience that his flights of fancy are nothing less than gospel truth. In his handling of the provincials who flock to hear his annual sermon, he displays all the qualities associated with a market salesman and many more besides. His triumphant escape from a precarious position, sealed by his daubing of black crosses on the clothes of his hearers, is made possible only because of the lack of sophistication of an audience whose lives ‘still conformed to the honest precepts of an earlier age’. As in the case of the holy friar who is taken in by Ciappelletto’s confession (I, 1), there is no real criticism, either open or implied, of the victims of the deception, but rather a sneaking admiration for the ingenuity of its perpetrator. Quickness of wit is the distinguishing quality, also, of most of the adulterous wives whose escapades are recounted in the stories of the Seventh Day. Although several of the narratives are traceable to other literatures, notably the French fabliaux, Boccaccio’s elaborate re-working of his source materials renders them distinctively Italian in tone and atmosphere. With the exception of the ninth story, a version of a medieval Latin text, which Boccaccio sets in ancient Greece, the locations of these tales are representative of the flourishing commercial life and prosperous bourgeoisie of fourteenth-century Italy: Florence, Naples, Siena, Arezzo, Rimini, Bologna. One recent commentator has argued that the stories of the Seventh Day reflect the ‘battle for the control of domestic space’68 that inevitably arose in a society where arranged marriages were the norm and where a woman’s only way of preserving the status she had brought to the marriage with her dowry (which passed at once into the hands of the husband) was to establish herself as mistress of her own household.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  You have come a long way and still have far to go, and merchants take a pride in their appearance.’ The gentlemen could scarcely believe their eyes. It was abundantly clear that Messer Torello was bent upon doing them every possible honour, and for a moment they suspected, seeing that the robes were more sumptuous than those of any merchant, that he had seen through their disguise. However, one of them answered the lady as follows: ‘These things are so exquisite, madam, that it would be difficult for anyone to accept them. But how are we to refuse, when you press them upon us with so much eloquence?’ Thus her gift was accepted, and since Messer Torello had now returned, the lady took her leave of the three gentlemen and went away to see that their servants were likewise supplied with garments, of a style suited to their condition. Meanwhile, in response to the earnest entreaties of Messer Torello, the gentlemen agreed to spend the rest of the day with him, and after they had taken their siesta, they donned their new robes and toured the city on horseback with their host. And when it was time for supper, they were splendidly dined and wined in the company of numerous eminent citizens. In due course they retired to bed, and when they rose at daybreak, they found that their tired old nags had been replaced by a trio of sturdy and splendid-looking palfreys, and that fresh, strong horses had also been provided for their servants; on seeing which, Saladin turned to his companions and said: ‘I swear to God that there was never a more perfect gentleman than this, nor any more courteous or considerate. And if the kings of Christendom are such excellent princes as this man is a knight, the Sultan of Babylon will be powerless to resist a single one of them, let alone all those we have seen preparing to march against him.’ But realizing that Messer Torello would not take no for an answer, they thanked him most politely and mounted their horses. Messer Torello, together with several of his friends, escorted the gentlemen for a goodly distance along the road leading out of the city. But eventually Saladin begged him to turn back, being unable to tarry any longer, though it grieved him to part company with his host, whom he had come by now to regard with the deepest affection. And albeit Messer Torello was no less loath to part company with his guests, he said: ‘Since you want me to leave you, gentlemen, I shall do so. But first I should like to say this: I know not who you are, nor do I wish to know more than you are willing to tell me. But whoever you may be, you cannot persuade me to believe that you are merchants.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  born ladies, the nuns spoke Norman-French, and that was the language of their statutes. In later centuries, their successors in England went on conscientiously learning this archaic tongue solely to understand and follow their founding ordinances, as one of Thomas Cromwell’s staff noted with fascination in 1535 at the admirably well-run nunnery of Lacock in Wiltshire, during the early stages of Henry VIII’s dissolution of English monasteries. The Lacock nuns ‘understand well and are very perfect in the same, albeit that it varieth from the vulgar French that is now used, and is much like the French that the [English] Common Law is written in’. [52] One hundred and fifty years earlier, the same phenomenon had been gently satirized by Geoffrey Chaucer in his portrait of the Prioress in his General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales : she spoke French ‘full fair and fetisly [elegantly], / after the school of Stratford atte Bowe / for French of Paris was to her unknow[n]’. [53] Scholars and literary critics have puzzled over and usually misunderstood Chaucer’s phrase. It was clearly a London joke of the 1380s that posh nuns such as those in the twelfth-century foundation of St Leonard’s at Stratford-at-Bow had no knowledge of the French language beyond their weird-sounding private archaic Norman-French. How symbolic that is: refined ladies conscientiously observing intellectual limits laid on them by a long- dead man. It is not to be expected that any such restrictions could constrain the mental energies of women who sought God, but they would have to express themselves in other ways. They were distanced from formal Latin intellectual training in doctrinal propositions or in the argumentative clashes of scholasticism, but they could still use their imaginations to enter divine hiddenness, in the free explorations of the human mind that stretch across world religions in the form of mysticism. Of course, in this as in every period, there were male mystics as well as female, but the preponderance of women is striking. A man might draw on a library of previous texts going back centuries; the texture of what the mystic says does not depend on such learning. The same themes to describe the indescribable – water, fire, light, silence – recur unsourced over millennia in the thoughts of mystics even if semi-literate or technically illiterate. Often in medieval Europe this would result in texts written in the vernacular language that a woman used. A female mystic might often pair with a male cleric to record what she wanted to say in Latin, but that was in order to spread her message more widely, and she had no automatic need of a priest to let her imagination range freely. Such messages, unrestricted by professional theological training and detached from the clerical authority of the Gregorian revolution, ranged riskily beyond the structures of the institutional Church; it was easy to step into the realm that inquisitors labelled heresy.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Most prominent on the international scene, perhaps the first Pentecostal to make an impression on the wider public was the redoubtable Canadian Mrs Aimee Semple McPherson, who in 1927 set up the ‘Finished Work’ International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, in which eventually 40 per cent of the pastorate was female. She chalked up a number of evangelistic firsts, including the first Christian radio station and the first sermon preached by a woman on the radio, not to mention her ministry of scattering Christian leaflets from an aeroplane, and she was probably the first preacher of any gender to enter the worship arena on a motorbike. McPherson was also honourably prominent in combating racism and the commerce in drugs. Colourful sensation ranging between a shrewd awareness of showbiz and some dubious personal episodes characterized her public career, and indeed also her eventual death from a prescription drug overdose. [31] Evangelicals took note of such successes and promoted an extraordinary evangelistic phenomenon in the inter-war period: dramatic public testimony by prepubescent and adolescent girls, who provided a Fundamentalist riposte to the popular image of the hedonistic young ‘Flapper’. This was, after all, the period in which the child star Shirley Temple burst onto cinematic screens, and an analogous pioneer was Uldine Utley, a protégée of Mrs McPherson, who for a decade or so from 1923 enjoyed as much name recognition as some of the most celebrated contemporary evangelists. Her career as a Fundamentalist preacher was as sadly meteoric as many equally well-known starlets of Hollywood, effectively over at twenty-four before six more decades of obscurity fighting recurrent mental illness. Pentecostals consciously turned against the promotion of girl evangelists just before the Second World War, and in north America at least, a familiar pattern of gender institutionalization emerged. The proportion of women in the ministry of the Church of the Nazarene declined from 20 per cent in 1908 to 1 per cent in 1989, and in the Church of God in Christ, from 32 per cent in 1925 to 15 per cent in 1992. Worldwide in Pentecostalism, the picture remains a good deal more varied. [32] Inevitably, these twentieth-century stories of world Christianity as they project into our own time leave undecided an overall view of their consequences or any sense of finality. They intersect with a set of new ethical and moral directions that gathered strength from the 1960s: the period within living memory, during which Christian Churches, particularly in the West, have had to face a dramatic set of transformations in the way that humans behave – generally in reactive mode against developments that few Christian leaders anticipated or discussed. It is hardly surprising that theological reflection in Christianity has hardly begun to take coherent forms, confronted by it all. Nevertheless, we must finally turn to survey what can be made of such reactions so far, both positive and negative.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Not too long after this article was written, she got a monster-size advance from a major publishing house to write what will presumably be a memoir. It will no doubt be better and more interesting than Kitchen Confidential. Every day that Gabrielle Hamilton likes me? It's reason to live. WHEN THE COOKING'S OVER I'm sure Ruth Reichl got a lot of angry mail from Gourmet readers about this piece. It's something of a departure from their once traditional territory of bundt cake recipes and restaurant roundups. There's a dark, perverse streak to Ms. Reichl I'm very grateful for. I mean, the scuzzball strip club, the Clermont Lounge, in the pages of Gourmet? I think that's a first. THE COOK'S COMPANIONS Some of my favorite books on The Life. To which I'd now add Ludwig Bemelmans's Hotel Bemelmans. When I finally became aware of it, it was both delightful and dismaying to discover that I'd done nothing new when I wrote Kitchen Confidential—that Bemelmans had been there before me, and done it better and with more authority. CHINA SYNDROME China is great. China is BIG. China is FUN. And it's hugely frustrating to know that even if I dedicated the rest of my life to the project, I'd never see all of it. There's little question in my mind that as China continues to emerge as an economic superpower, and as we find ourselves increasingly dependent on its manufacturing—and its credit line—that it will eventually pretty much rule the world. To which I say, "Welcome to our future masters!" With China as our landlord, we will, at least, be eating a hell of a lot better. NO SHOES Also written for a Brit magazine, hence the reference to the loathsome and inexplicably popular Michael Winner—a shit film director turned shittier food columnist—and the Gordon Ramsay references and the egregious use of Britspeak. I stand by my Sans Footwear Theory, though. Food indeed does taste better with sand between your toes. THE LOVE BOAT Happier times . . . Written a while back, this was my first assignment for Gourmet. They send me on the coolest jobs. This one was a real punisher. IS CELEBRITY KILLING THE GREAT CHEFS? I think I was perhaps being a little disingenuous in this piece. I'd myself, by this point, become quite accustomed to nice hotels and flying business class. And I was a little harsh on poor Rocco, who now hosts a local radio show in New York where he answers telephone calls from old ladies who want to know where to buy the best kosher chicken. Remembering how talented a cook Rocco once was, and no small amount of self-loathing, infused this piece with a little too much bitterness—and bullshit. Looking at Rocco's painful progress, I have to admit that I see—if not for the grace of God and all that—myself . . . minus the cooking talent. Let's face it. I'm pushing fifty. If I had to go back to the kitchen now?

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  medieval liturgy and imperial sovereignty based on the assent of the people. The Pope’s journey north provoked extraordinary public excitement and reverence, not so surprising in Italy but in France far beyond expectations, even on the streets of the capital. Pius was revealed as an international popular celebrity, which was confirmed when, seven years later, relations with Napoleon broke down and he suffered arrest and exile like his predecessor. His tribulations, near-fatal illness in prison and then triumphant restoration to Rome as Napoleon’s power collapsed only affirmed what the Paris coronation began in shaping the charisma of the modern Papacy. [12] Alongside a revival of Catholicism in the parishes, the regime allowed a minimal restoration of male monastic life, but it considered that it had much less to fear from female religious Orders, particularly those that could take up the educational and charitable functions so prominent up to the Revolution. In fact, a remarkable number of new Orders were now founded for the same purposes, and Napoleon’s regime had too much else to think about to do much to stop them. These Orders took advantage of a relaxation in the Church’s rules on female religious from before the Revolution. In 1749, Pope Benedict XIV had arbitrated in a local row in Bavaria between the Bishop of Augsburg and a group of religious women in the diocese: as the ‘Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, they were still obstinately carrying on the work of Mary Ward, the would-be founder of a female equivalent of the Society of Jesus a century before (above, Chapter 14). Rather surprisingly, the Pope ruled against the Bishop and allowed his opponents a continuing existence as an ‘Institute’: effectively he recognized them as more than just a group of pious laywomen. In the post-Revolutionary era, women gleefully seized on this breach in the Council of Trent’s decree of female enclosure for their own purposes. [13] The Concordat was not designed to give women a greater active share in the life of the Church, but the vacuum was there to be filled – and not merely by nuns. The nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable re-enchantment of the world that the Enlightenment had sought to govern by reason; this reflected priorities among devout laywomen. The French Revolution was not the first time that women had guarded Christian practice through difficult times through observances they cherished (above, Chapters 10 and 14). Women kept the Church going through the worst phases of Revolutionary de- Christianization; they sustained their faith through their loyalty to Catholic customs that pre-Revolutionary clergy had often despised but did not now have the power to discourage – the cult of saints and pilgrimages, for instance. Such practices had a rich future at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I'd really better think about this. Fortunately, the evening progresses without senseless butchery. Ainsley even sits down at the same table briefly, gives me a friendly smile and a knowing tap at a copy of my book—which either means he has the forgiving nature of a saint, or I simply haven't been nearly enough of a shit. Rick Stein, the very likable celebrity chef, restaurateur, and serial pyromaniac, sits across from me. Rick is apparently on a mission to burn down Australia, one cooking demo at a time. No television chef is as charming when confronted by sudden, unexpected columns of smoke or flames leaping from a pan. I like Rick. He's a veteran like me, a chef with book deals and a television show, and over drinks we pondered the mysteries—as I often do with other chefs—of the "celebrity chef" phenomenon, both of us feeling maybe a little bit guilty about traveling around staying in hotels for free, while our comrades of old still sweat and strain day after day in the infernos of real kitchens, making real food, for real customers. Is it a good thing? Why now? What does it all mean? First of all, what is a "celebrity chef"? Well, it's a celebrity—meaning well known, bordering on famous—who is, or was at one time, a chef. This definition would exclude amateurs, neophyte cooks, and sous-chefs plucked off the chorus line by TV producers and elevated through the magic of television to "chef" status. If you're a comely young fry cook with an adorably boyish forelock and you get yanked into a TV studio, given the moniker of, say, the Adenoidal Chef, and suddenly housewives in seventeen countries are squirming in their caftans while you make green curry, that doesn't make you a chef. After fame comes, if someone is silly enough to build a restaurant around your stupid, well-known mug, good for you. It still don't make you a chef. Britney Spears has a restaurant built around her persona and image. That doesn't make her a chef. Why now, though? What the hell happened? What is wrong (or right) with society that even a son of a bitch like me gets a damn TV show? Why do people even care about chefs? What changed? When I started cooking back in the seventies, the prospect of it becoming a glamour profession was laughable in the extreme. Cooking was something you did between other jobs; it was the last refuge for scoundrels, misfits, and tormented loners. Full-time employees of the "Hospitality Industry" did not enjoy high status or require the services of publicists, voice coaches, elocution tutors, dermatologists, and hair stylists. They required only free liquor, as much food as they could pilfer, a few shekels at the end of the week, and maybe the occasional blow job from a sympathetic waitress.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  His Ondine in Melbourne is easily one of the best going; his tuna a la ficelle with horseradish cream, oxtail ravioli, fennel, and oxtail broth (a playful take on the beef classic) is one of the best goddamn things I've ever eaten in a restaurant. But it's very hard to picture Donovan with his own television show. While his contemporaries took elocution lessons and learned front-of-the-house survival skills, Donovan kept his thick accent, bounced around Michelin-starred restaurants in France (his French is an amazing thing to hear, believe me), and peppers his sentences with the real language of chefs and cooks. He cooks like a Michelin-starred Frenchman and looks like a football hooligan. When I dropped in on him unannounced, he was standing behind a busy stove, cranking out meals, personally working the saute station. He is absolutely obsessed with flavor—and sauce making in particular—and seems to want to talk about nothing more than the nuts and bolts of emulsion, reduction, fortification . . . all in delightfully non-TV-friendly terms: "You reduce the fucking jus, right? And you don't bloody skim it. You emulsify the fucking fat right in—at the last second. If the sauce breaks? What do you mean if the sauce breaks? If the sauce breaks—you're a fucking cunt." That's a celebrity chef I want to see on TV. MY MANHATTAN I'm a New Yorker, so it should come as no surprise that I think my city is the greatest city in the world. I like living in the city where so many of my favorite films take place, where nearly every street corner reminds me of some piece of lurid personal or criminal history. "Crazy Joe Gallo was shot here . . . Big Paul Castellano got whacked there . . . Used to score there . . . That place used to be a speakeasy . . . My old methadone clinic . . . That used to be an after-hours club . . ."It may not be the most beautiful city. It's not the nicest city (though it is, sadly, getting nicer). And it's certainly not the easiest city to live in. One minute you're on top of the world, and the next—like when you wish to light up a smoke at a bar and can't—you're wallowing in misery and self-pity, unable to decide between murder and suicide. But it is exactly those famously manic highs and lows that make New York, and Manhattan in particular, like nowhere else. I mean, you can talk London or Paris or Barcelona all you like, but we're open all night: I can pick up the phone around midnight and get just about anything I want delivered to my apartment: Chinese food, Lebanese, sushi, pizza, a video, a bag of seedless hydro, a human head. I think I know what I'm talking about here. I've been other places. I travel a lot —about eight months out of the year.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  SALTY SYSTEM D Debrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A debrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se debrouiller—get it done somehow. —George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London He was a master of the short cut, the easy way out, the System D. D. stands for de as in debrouiller or demerder—to extricate . . . and to a hair (he) knew how to stay out of trouble. He was a very skillful cook, and a very bad one. —Nicolas Freeling, The Kitchen I stumbled across my first reference to the mysterious and sinister-sounding System D in Nicolas Freeling's wonderful memoir of his years as a Grand Hotel cook in France. I knew the word debrouillard already, having enjoyed reading about the concept of se debrouiller or se demerder in Orwell's earlier account of his dishwashing/prep-cooking at the pseudonymous Hotel "X" in Paris. But what sent chills down my spine and sent me racing back to my weathered copies of both books was a casual remark by my French sous-chef as he watched a busboy repairing a piece of kitchen equipment with a teaspoon. "Ahh . . . Le System D!" he said with a smirk, and a warm expression of recognition. For a moment, I thought I'd stumbled across a secret society—a coven of warlocks, a subculture within our subculture of chefs and cooks and restaurant lifers. I was annoyed that what I had thought to be an ancient term from kitchens past, a little bit of culinary arcanum, was in fact still in use, and I felt suddenly threatened—as if my kitchen, my crew, my team of talented throat slitters, fire starters, mercenaries, and hooligans was secretly a hotbed of Trilateralists, Illuminati, Snake Handlers, or Satan Worshippers. I felt left out. I asked, "Did you say 'System D'? What is 'System D'?" "Tu connais . . . you know MacGyver?" replied my sous-chef thoughtfully. I nodded, flashing onto the idiotic detective series of years back where the hero would regularly bust out of maximum-security prisons and perform emergency neurosurgery using nothing more than a paper clip and a gum wrapper. "MacGyver!" pronounced my sous-chef, "CA . . . ca c'est System D."

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Now take off those panties!" Guys who wake up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, shave, then go to work at the serious business of committing felonies, these are the characters who continue to dominate my reverie—and my fiction. Bank robbers, spies, enforcers, contract killers, loan sharks, confidence men, and racketeers . . . it's their consistency over time, their relentless adherence to the requirements of the job, that makes me, in my way, love them. Take a guy like Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, the former boss of the Genovese crime family, who I used as an inspiration for a character in Bone in the Throat. Here's a guy who, for thirty years, played the public role of a doddering, schizophrenic old man, appearing on the street for walk-talks with his soldiers in bathrobe and slippers, talking to himself, behaving erratically, moving his eyes and head in such a way as to indicate insanity—and all the while was running with an iron grip the largest and most ruthless criminal enterprise in the country. This crazy act kept him out of jail for most of his life—though the Feds did catch up with him in the end. You have to admire that kind of work ethic. They never caught The Chin on tape, telling a subordinate to "whack somebody out" or "put a rocket in his pocket." You never heard The Chin's voice playing over the courthouse speakers, talking about how he was going to "sever [somebody's] motherfuckin' head off" (one of my favorite Gotti-isms). The Chin played his part to the end. Gotti, to his detriment, surrounded himself with those other fascinating creatures of the criminal netherworld: informers. Listening to recordings of the embattled don in his Little Italy social club, berating his crew, bemoaning his gambling losses, contemplating the machinations and intentions of his rivals, there's a poignancy to the experience: Not only was the poor bastard being secretly recorded by the FBI, but sometimes three out of four of the close associates in the room with him were, or later became, government informants. It's hard these days, it seems, to get good help. So for purposes of fiction, organized criminality offers plenty of drama, plenty of situations in which characters find themselves in extreme circumstances with presumably difficult choices to make: Should I shoot my best friend today? What happens if I don't? Can I trust Paulie? After I kill him, when his kids come over to play with my kids, what should I tell them about Daddy's disappearance? Should I cooperate with the prosecutors? Can I survive the rest of my life eating jail food? These are the Big Questions in my kind of crime fiction. And of course, crime can be funny. The line between crime fiction and real-life crime becomes fuzzy, often hilariously so. All the real gangsters have seen The Godfather, One, Two, and maybe Three. They've seen Good-fellas.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Perhaps the best thing chefs can do is to cook, whenever possible, with heart. Where poorer nations have a tradition of cooking well because they have to, we have choices. If we can take something lasting from the Blood cause, it is that it is always better to make the most of what's available, to cook well. If a chef's unique vision and identity is associated closely with a particular area or local culture, great. He's doing God's work. If there is good, local skate available, then there is no reason to fly in the endangered, mushy, and oft-frozen Chilean sea bass. A good chef imports an ingredient from the other side of the globe because it makes sense—not for its novelty value or its rarity. Why bother to make Mexican food in London if the end result is nothing but soulless sour-tasting caulking compound? Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a fashionable ersatz dim-sum emporium and then bleed out all the happy sloppy informality that makes the dim-sum experience so much fun? However horrifying it might be to see some young, fresh-out-of-culinary- school novice bombarding his guests with dende oil, Thai basil, yuzu, and chipotles, it's nice to know that others for whom those ingredients are more familiar can find them at will. But I'm not giving up my white Italian truffles until the last one is gone. Show me a bootleg ortolan and I'm there, crunching bones with only a minimum of guilt. I'll just be sure to not overcook it. VIVA MEXICO! VIVA ECUADOR! Let's be honest, let's be really, painfully honest: Who is cooking? Who is the backbone of the American restaurant business? Whose sudden departure could shut down nearly every good restaurant, nightclub, and banquet facility in every major city in the country? Whose sweat and toil allows annoyingly well-known white-boy chefs like me to go around the country flogging books, appearing on TV, writing obnoxious magazine articles, and baiting their peers? Who, pound for pound, are the best French and Italian cooks in New York? If you're a chef, manager, or owner, you know the answer: Mexicans. Ecuadorans. Salvadoran guys (and women) from south of the border, many of them with green cards they bought on Queens Boulevard for thirty dollars. Ex- dishwashers with no formal training, minimal education; people who have often never eaten in restaurants as good as the ones they cook in.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  When pressed, she grudgingly concedes a fondness for "their cheese, wine, and perfume." But here, I think it's Hamilton who is full of shit. Prune exudes France from every pore. She can run from French terminology and French menu descriptions, she can lard her menu with nostalgic Americana of long-ago summers and still- remembered meals with friends, mix in some rural Brit and a little country Italian. But Gabrielle's French mother's cooking hangs over the place. Prune looks French. It feels French. Before the smoking ban, it was a smoker's paradise. Even the laid-back bistro attitude is stealth French. Perhaps eager to put the boot in again, she agrees enthusiastically that Spain is indeed "the New France" but shrinks from the tiny bite, pinchos/tapas thing: "I still have an attention span. I can eat a meal." At the end, "I want to feel fed" (words most Frenchmen would probably agree with). Pressed to name some chefs she admires, she gives me the biggest, warmest smile of the day as she names Veritas's Scott Bryan (heavy French influence) and his one-time underboss Mark Ladner (okay, he's cooking Italian at Lupa, but there's a French cook in there somewhere). "I love what they do." Like a lot of chefs I know who can date their careers back to the good old/bad old days of the eighties, Gabrielle Hamilton is a survivor and a cynic, and like all cynics, a failed romantic. Sorry Gabrielle. I can smell the French on you. It's the radishes with butter and salt on the bar that gave you away. You can run from the past, but you can't hide. None of us can. She feeds me some braised lamb before I leave, and once again (and I've been trying for years) I attempt to convince her to write the women's version of Kitchen Confidential. "You'd make me look like a freakin' manicurist!" I insist. "This is a book that needs to be written. Isn't there enough testosterone in this genre?!" I point out that she's already a writer, having been published many times in Food & Wine magazine, and that publisher pals of mine have been asking. She waves away the idea and stands up, ready to get back to the downstairs prep kitchen where her crew are setting up for dinner service. "I'm not going to write the Great American Novel," she sighs. "But we'll feed a few people." WHEN THE COOKING'S OVER(TURN OUT THE LIGHTS, TURN OUT THE LIGHTS) Food and sin are two words that—in the English-speaking world, anyway—have long been linked. Food is a matter of the senses, a pleasure of the flesh, and when one anticipates eating a good meal, one's body undergoes physiological changes similar to those experienced prior to . . . other functions. The lips engorge, saliva becomes thick, the pulse quickens.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  People now choose to be chefs. It's clean, educated, squeaky." Though she is seven months pregnant, avoiding alcohol (and the smoke from my cigarette) assiduously, Hamilton clearly still misses the bad old days. She misses "sitting at the bar after closing, drinking for a few hours. It's amazing how you can get a third wind after you've been covered in meat juice all day." Her particular road to becoming a chef and owning her own restaurant was not an easy one. Hamilton grew up one of five kids in Lambertville, New Jersey, an industrial town of lumberyards and factories (now undergoing something of a renaissance as a weekend getaway). Her father, a theatrical designer, and her French mother split up when she was eleven. After a year with her mother in Vermont, she returned to New Jersey to live with her father. By age twelve, she was working in restaurants. "Were you a problem child?" I ask. She gives me a very dry, sardonic smile and replies, "Only if you consider kleptomania and drugs a problem." After school, and for summer jobs, she began washing dishes at The Picnic Basket in New Hope, Pennsylvania. "I needed the money," she says. "I wanted the money." Restaurants were "the only thing I knew how to do." Fortunately, her mother, an excellent cook, had given her and her siblings "a lot of skills already." At various establishments, she continued to wash dishes, bus tables, wait on customers. "I did everything," she says, "bartended, pastry . . . everything." At fifteen, she got her first cook's position. She rolled into New York in the early eighties and worked as a food stylist and catering employee until 1999, when she opened Prune. When Hamilton says she did "everything," it's sort of like Keith Richards with sleepy understatement telling you he "used to party a little"; her description is tantalizingly inadequate. Stories of Hamilton's long hard road of "wilderness years" between dish jobs and later chefdom have become something of an urban legend. According to who you talk to, there were brief stints in everything from stripping to murder-for-hire. Of course, I believe them all. She's hard-core. Example? Much later, when I ask her what she first looks for in a potential employee, she responds with, "First thing? If I'm standing there in my whites in the dining room, and they ask me 'Is the chef here?' They're not getting the job." You should probably know that she is, by turns, ardently feminist, reactionary, and refreshingly (even painfully) candid. She is absolutely devoid of artifice, and she has a very low tolerance for bullshit. New York's freebie paper, The New York Press, included her in its list of New York's fifty Most Loathsome People last year, and it's not hard to imagine her stepping—if not stomping—on some toes. It's no surprise that I like and admire her tremendously. Had she written her version of Kitchen Confidential before I did, I'd probably still be flipping steak frites.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  But, under the regularly changing header of "Something Strange But Good," they have managed to sneak in that beloved old warhorse, "Normandy-Style Braised Tripe"—incredible. The central irony of a subject already overloaded with ironies is that the market is, perhaps, beginning to come around full circle. Cult hero-to-chefs Fergus Henderson of London's offal-centric St. John just rolled out a widely touted new edition of his classic Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating cookbook, and was feted by Alice Waters in San Francisco, Charlie Trotter in Chicago, and Mario Batali in New York. A posse of chefs, including Eric Ripert, Marcus Samuelsson, Mark Ladner, Gabrielle Hamilton, Patti Jackson, Mary Sue Milliken, Maurice Hurley, and Kerry Heffernan (as diverse a mix of modernists, traditionalists, Francophiles, and Francophobes as one can imagine) gathered to eat tripe and cassoulet and talk about a shared love of the old school with Henderson. Pork belly is now a "hot" menu item on both coasts. Duck confit has permeated menus across the nation and "house-made" charcuterie is everywhere. Does this mean that Le Veau d'Or will suddenly find itself "hot" again, after all these years? Will air-kissing trendoids in little black dresses and loud-talking yuppies with beeping cell phones flock to their doors, looking to experience calves' brains in beurre noir? I kind of hope not. They might have to hire another waiter. DIE, DIE MUST TRY MY FIRST TIME IN Singapore, I hated it. The heat punched me in the chest every time I stepped outside, a thick, penetrating humidity made worse by relentlessly broiling sun. Three-shower-a- day, change-your-clothes-at-noon kind of heat; yet, whenever I ducked inside for a beer, the bars were refrigerated, with locals happily sipping Tiger beers in their T-shirts in the bone-chilling, meat-locker cold. R.W. Apple Jr. has referred to Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty," and for good reason. The list of things you can't do (spitting, littering, gum chewing, jaywalking) is as endless as it is hard to believe, and the government's mania for relentless social engineering and development has left much of what you and I would find charming replaced by ultramodern rabbit warrens of interlocking shopping malls. They censor the Internet, you do not want to get caught with drugs within its borders, and yes, technically, even blow jobs are illegal (though thankfully, readily available.) But now I love it. And I go back whenever I can. Because Singapore is probably the most food-crazed, lunatic-eater's paradise on the planet. We're not talking about "gourmets" here. Singapore's "foodies" are nothing like the annoying, nerdy, status-conscious variety one finds in New York, chattering about Jean-Georges's new place, or how such and such a restaurant lost a star. Singaporeans do not collect dining experiences like stamps, to be discussed or bragged about later. Singaporeans are not gastronomes.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  By drawing to themselves the best spirits of the time, the convents became in their good days, from the tenth well into the thirteenth century, hearthstones of piety, and the chief centres of missionary and civilizing agencies. When there was little preaching, the monastic community preached the most powerful sermon, calling men’s thoughts away from riot and bloodshed to the state of brotherhood and religious reflection.544 The motto aratro et cruce, "by the cross and the plough," stood in their case for a reality. The monk was a pioneer in the cultivation of the ground, and, after the most scientific fashion then known, taught agriculture, the culture of the vine and fish, the breeding of cattle, and the culture of wool. He built roads and the best buildings. In intellectual and artistic concerns the convent was the chief school of the times. It trained architects, painters, and sculptors. There the deep problems of theology and philosophy were studied; there manuscripts were copied, and when the universities arose, the convent furnished them with their first and their most renowned teachers. In northeastern Germany and other parts of Europe and in Asia it was the outer citadel of church profession and church activity. So popular was the monastic life that religion seemed to be in danger of running out into monkery and society of being transformed into an aggregation of convents. The Fourth Lateran sought to counteract this tendency by forbidding the establishment of new orders.545 But no council was ever more ignorant of the immediate future. Innocent III. was scarcely in his grave before the Dominicans and Franciscans received full papal sanction. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the important change was accomplished whereby all monks received priestly ordination. Before that time it was the exception for a monk to be a priest. Extreme unction and absolution had been administered in the convent by unordained monks.546 With the development of the strict theory of sacerdotalism, these functions were forbidden to them, as by the ninth oecumenical council, 1123. The synod of Nismes, thirty years earlier, 1096, thought it answered objections to the new custom sufficiently by pointing to Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, and Augustine as cases of monks who had priestly ordination. On the other hand the active movement within the convents to take a larger part in the affairs of society was resisted by oecumenical councils, as, for example, the Second Lateran, 1139, which forbade monks practising as physicians or lawyers. The monastic life was praised as the highest form of earthly existence. The convent was compared to Canaan547 and treated as the shortest and surest road to heaven. The secular life, even the life of the secular priest, was compared to Egypt. The passage to the cloister was called conversion, and the monks converts, conversi, or the religious.548 They reached the Christian ideal. Renouncing the vow was pronounced turning to the company of the lost, to the lion’s mouth, and to the realm of blackness and death.549

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  As a preacher, Bernard excels in the glow of his imagination and the fervor of his passion. Luther said, "Bernard is superior to all the doctors in his sermons, even to Augustine himself, because he preaches Christ most excellently."650 In common with his other writings, his sermons abound in quotations from the Scriptures.651 They are not pieces of careful logical statement nor are they keen analyses of the states of conscience, but appeals to the highest impulses of the religious nature. His discourse on the death of his brother Gerard is a model of tender treatment652 as his address before Konrad was of impassioned fervor.653 The sermons on the Canticles preached within convent walls abound in tropical allegory, but also in burning love to the Saviour. One of the most brilliant of modern pulpit orators has said, "the constant shadow of things eternal is over all Bernard’s sermons."654 His discourses, so speaks his biographer Gaufrid, were congruous to the conditions of his hearers. To rustic people he preached as though he had always been living in the country and to all other classes as though he were most carefully studying their occupations. To the erudite he was scholarly; to the uneducated, simple. To the spiritually minded he was rich in wise counsels. He adapted himself to all, desiring to bring to all the light of Christ.655

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  In the twelfth century there were at least two other ecclesiastics of the first order of genius, Anselm and Innocent III. The former passed away a few years after the century opened. Innocent began his papal reign two years before it went out. Anselm has pre-eminence as a profound theological thinker and dialectician. Innocent ruled the world, as pope never ruled it before or since. Between the two fall the intellectual genius and activity of Bernard, combining some of the qualities of Anselm and Innocent. As a mystical theologian he is allied to Anselm, whose Meditations give him a high place in the annals of devotional literature. And Bernard was also a statesman, although he did not attain the eminence of Innocent and shrank from participation in public affairs which were so much to the taste of the great pope. Contemporary with himself was Peter Abaelard, whose brilliant mind won for him enviable fame as a teacher and thinker. But Abaelard never won the confidence of his own age, and is not to be compared with Bernard in moral dignity. By preference a monk, Bernard figured, with almost equal prominence, in the history of the papacy, the Crusades, mysticism, monasticism, and hymnology. In the annals of monasticism, the pulpit, and devotional literature he easily occupies a place in the front rank. He was called the "honey-flowing doctor," doctor mellifluus. Twenty years after his death he was canonized by Alexander III. as "shining preeminently in his own person by virtue of sanctity and religion, and in the whole Church by the light of his doctrine and faith."627 Pius VIII., in 1830, admitted him to the select company of the doctors of the Church. Both Calvin and Luther, who ridiculed the Schoolmen as a body, held him in high regard.628 Bernard was descended from a noble family of Burgundy, and was born at Fontaines near Dijon. He was one of seven children, six of whom were sons. His mother, Aletha, like Nonna and Monica, was a deeply pious woman and planted in the son the seeds of religious faith.629 Carried away for a time with enthusiasm for scholastic learning, the son was overwhelmed, while on a lonely journey, with religious impressions, and, entering a chapel, resolved to dedicate himself wholly to God. He entered the convent of Citeaux, two of his brothers following him at once, and the rest later into the monastic life.