Wilfrid

Could have avoided trouble by (1) calling the book The Masters of Rock and (2) not saying stupid stuff. Hard to argue that Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone or James Brown should be in a book with that title. I am also wondering whether he ever interview Black or woman musicians in any case.

I don't even remember reading interviews by Wenner in Rolling Stone, assuming that's where they were published. And I was a regular reader in the 1970s. Maybe these came later.

I do like "menu as menagerie."

Very, very intolerant audiences following that generation of punk bands.

Racism is speculative. Support bands of all kinds got a bad reception from punk audiences. Suicide had shit thrown at them when they opened for The Clash in the UK and they’re pretty white.

Cool, Helen is a good writer. Will settle down and read it later.

Always a fool outside of his business acumen. Histories of the magazine tell the story. The new fools are the people who would publish this.

No, you’re criticizing the video. Complaining would be asking for your money back. Happy to have cleared all this up.

I think I can help here. Mitch might be saying either of the two following things (or he might not be distinguishing between them). 1. If you know something is going to be bad but you spend time and/or money on it anyway, then you should not complain about the waste of time and/or money. 2. If you know something is going to be bad but you spend time and/or money on it anyway, then you should not criticize it afterwards. The first is "complaining," the second is "criticizing." If Mitch is saying 1, he has a point. If he is saying 2, then I would disagree. I can think of many occasions, including restaurants, where I have embarked on something I expected to be bad. I shouldn't complain about the waste of time and/or money but I am entitled to tell people how bad it was. (I did realize, when I was going to restaurants for the Pink Pig that I expected to be bad, that it was not a good idea to tell my dinner guest "This is going to be dreadful.")

I would not have bothered to watch the video had I not come across the comments here. I don't expect the Stones to have much to offer at this point. They were great at Earl's Court in 1976 (and I was at an age where having sweaty teenage girls crawl over me to get to Jagger was a delight. Come to think of it, I might still be that age).

In better news, Lepore’s review of the new Musk bio is savage; brutal to Musk, not kind to the author. Suffice to say that the person who comes out of it all best is Douglas Adams.

That is great but the scope is appropriately narrow. I really did take frequent music, art, movie etc recommendations from the New Yorker, but if they are listing just one movie instead of six, it’s rarely going to be useful.

Maybe I am right about the paper. It's not just that a currently useful resource has been ruined. It's that the rich, priceless archive of city life, going back to 1925, has simply been turned off. Not enough to make me unsubscribe, but plenty enough to make me angry.

You have to read the Rosner piece online. The paper copy includes a hideously truncated version in the miserable ruins of Goings On About Town. I can't imagine why the New Yorker destroyed a genuinely useful section of the magazine. The paper feels cheaper too.

I was drinking Marques de Riscal verdejo with pulled pork tacos last night. These things happen (it was open and needed to be drunk).

I have added Bronx River to my rotation. Found it in the Harrington book. Very nicely balanced. 2 oz gin 1/2 oz sweet vermouth 1/4 oz lemon juice Dash of simple syrup I am using a very low carb Agave syrup as simple syrup. A very small amount will sweeten a drink, but there's no strong flavor to it.

Whither I could understand...

The Taylor Swift of Spanish wine tutors.

I have one of these stories. 1986, Jack Lemmon starred in the London stage in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” To my surprise, my father bought tickets. He would not know O’Neill from a pork pie and indeed spent the long evening paging through his program. He just wanted to see Lemmon, who he did know. Lemmon was great but I was impressed by the then unknown actors playing his sons. Would I ever see them again? Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher.

But you are not flying economy, right?

I did enjoy Rosner's piece on Cecchi's. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-food-scene/the-eternal-question-of-food-versus-service

"Ghost Light," latest episode of Only Murders in the Building, both hilarious and quite intense. At least one jump-out-of-your-seat moment. And no Streep/Rudd.

I mentioned he was self-taught. He started late after a career in something completely different (advertising and PR). He was about 40 when he started cooking in a restaurant kitchen, which is obviously very late. So a case of the Deborah Harry Phenomenon. Adding from the Guardian:

I would not have guessed the fermented rhubarb.

He joined the UK pantheon of the Roux brothers, Bourdin at the Connaught and Pierre Koffman back in the day. But he was self-taught and started in a ramshackle space in south London. One of the first London chefs to get on the front pages, for better or worse; he was ahead of MPW in chasing critics out of his dining room. The memoir and apologetica which fills the first part of his book Nico can be re-read endlessly. The recipes are trickier, although I have mastered one or two. 89, to my astonishment.