Cafecito Cubano

It is not possible to stop by Miami without having the cafecito cubano.
I am extraordinarily sensitive to caffeine, since I do not drink coffee and consider myself a naturally hyper person. But I can't come to Miami and not have a thimble full of this fortifying elixir. I thought I was going to be climbing the walls yesterday night, but I slept quite well. And it kept me alert and awake through focus groups, which is an achievement.
I also had a fine dish of ropa vieja with perfect white rice and excellent black beans. I love good Cuban food.
Now, I look at Miami, with its sunny weather and cheaper real estate and Spanish speaking people and the thought crosses my mind that "when I get older, losing my hair, many years from now", I may want to come here to retire?
Like the rest of those tanned elderly ladies who do aqua-aerobics in the freezing Biltmore pool?
A crazy, sobering thought, but I am hereby reporting it is crossing my mind.

The Cheesecake Factory

My adventures in unadventurous eating continue, as last week I was in Oakbrook, Illinois, and had dinner at The Cheesecake Factory.
Let's say that compared to The Olive Garden, this place is like Per Se. It belongs in the category of chain restaurant that could be either a guilty pleasure or a cure for anorexia.
The interior is decorated as an Egyptian temple. Hard as I try, I can't possibly see the connection between cheesecake and the Pharaohs, except perhaps for the penchant of CF and King Tut of making everything huge.
The menu at the CF is several pages long, very colorful. It contains advertisements for local businesses. This to me is the height of tackiness, but nobody else seemed to mind.
The CF distinguishes itself for serving a hodgepodge of what Americans like to call food. There are tacos and linguini, pizzas and pu pu platters, and appetizers the size of the Marshall Islands. I can't imagine anyone making it to the cheesecakes after such gargantuan portions.
For instance, the menu promises that the "light" salads are all below 590 calories each. I guess you lose the weight just from gasping. But if you go to the CF, you should be nowhere near the vicinity of a diet. A glass of water in this place may make you fat.
Having said this, I went for their "famous meatloaf". How wrong can one possibly go with meatloaf? I was not disappointed. It was yummy. Classic, rich, the size of the Hammurabi Code and quite satisfying. It came with a very nice mushroom gravy (not with cornstarch and guar gum), a mountain of mashed potatoes and a land mass of zucchini and corn (the corn was a bit raw, but at least it did not come from a can). We ordered a decent bottle of California wine and everybody seemed happy with their enormous platters of food.
But this is what happens in restaurants outside of New York (brisk and professional, constitutionally immune to cuteness, God bless 'em). For some reason we were made to wait for the table forever, even though the cavernous place seemed able to acommodate us tout suite. They always make this big deal of gathering the menus at the door, as if you were being deployed to war and those are the training manuals. It took three people to sit a table for 5.
Then the lovely waitress volunteered her name and introduced us to Jason or whoever, who was being trained.
Not to be rude to either of them, but I don't care. I do not announce my name to waiters either. I find this custom of "I am Conchita and I am going to be your server" unnecessary and ridiculous. It reminds me of the quirky aunt of a friend of mine in Mexico who speaks like this to the waiters: "Pepito is going to have the steak, and Sarita is having the enchiladas, and Chuchito wants his milanesa without breadcrumbs." To the credit of heroic, long-suffering Mexican waiters, I never saw them bat an eye.
None of us made it to the cheesecakes, which are the size of Stonehenge.
I had lunch at the CF in the Houston Galleria and was not impressed. The one in Oakbrook is better.

Diego Macellaro

I met Diego only briefly, a few days ago. He came to New York to work on an animated commercial.
He was VP Creative Director at Saatchi Venezuela. We walked in the snow in Times Square and in the park in Dumbo, had fusion food at Koi and pizza at Grimaldi's, where he was appalled at the rudeness of the service and the Magnificent Arepa and I assured him, not very convincingly, that it was all part of the charm. He struck me as an atypical creative director. Nothing in him advertised the calculated hipness that is often customary in the advertising business. He was charming and easy going and laid back and very cool. He told us he still loved to draw. He enjoyed himself immensely, was totally not high-maintenance and he also seemed very talented.
He was 48 years old and had two young children.
He was killed by a female drunk driver as he got out of the car in front of his house in Caracas, coming back from the airport. He was standing on the curb, taking either his keys or his cellphone out. She struck him so hard, his body flew about 4 meters.
Even if I only spent a few lovely hours in his company, I am very upset about Diego.
Sometimes the untimely death of someone utterly tangential in our lives creates an enormous sense of shock and grief. Perhaps it was because I had just met him, there is a terrible sense of lost potential, and the shock and fear and disbelief of the random, stupid cruelty of the accident. The horrible reminder of how fragile we really are.
But besides a sadness I can't seem to shake off, I feel a terrible rage.
Even though the driver ended up crashing into a wall, nothing happened to her. I hear she is loaded and loaded with lawyers. So I hope guilt eats up her entrails every second of her waking life, and nightmares hound her in her sleep for as long as she breathes. Because most likely, she ain't gonna spend a minute in jail.
Car accidents are the number one cause of death in Venezuela. The roads and signs are terrible, there is not enough police and people drive aggressively and irresponsibly. There is a lot of drunk driving. Many families count 2 or three victims of car accidents. You hear people say: my grandpa, my father and my cousin all died in car wrecks. People think this is normal.
In fact, last year Hugo Chavez decided to ban the sale of alcohol over the weekend of Holy Week in order to curb road fatalities and people almost rioted against it (the one thing that could cost him his job, the people's right to drink themselves to death). I hate the macho irresponsibility, the constant flirtation with disaster, the mindless love of chaos, the childishness of it all. It's a Latin American thing, the cavalier disregard for human life, when it comes to sober, responsible behavior. It sickens me.
I feel for Diego's family: his parents, his wife and children, his friends and colleagues, who I am sure adored him.

Some Countries Never Learn

Thanks to Barry for alerting me to El Blog de Joy.

Joy reports that El Universal Gráfico, a Mexican tabloid, puts a picture of Obama on the front page with a gynormous headline reading:

"¡A trabajar, mi negro!"

Meaning roughly, "Let's get to work, my negro/black man." Or if you want to be uncharitable, "get to work, my blackie".
Of course Mexicans will never admit there is anything wrong with this. They think it's very endearing.
They love to make fun of people of other colors and races and sexual orientations and religions, but God forbid one of those should make fun of them.
Mexicans will always deny they are racists because they think being a racist is against Blacks or Chinese or Jews or gays. It doesn’t occur to them that they are first and foremost racist among themselves (see brown v. white) and about everybody else, they insist on being simply, stubbornly unevolved.
The problem with this condescending yet not unfunny headline is not in the use of the word "negro", which is not offensive in itself to describe a Black person or an African American (although in typical racist fashion, many people think it is).
It’s the entire headline, and particularly the “a trabajar”, which brings back memories of plenty of work during slavery. In Mexico they still use the expression “trabaja como negro” (to work like a black man), so I don’t think this was unintended. As some people have commented, the "a trabajar" is, to add insult to injury, a command.
“Mi negro” is indeed a term of endearment (more often than not, the endearments simply help to mask and soften prejudice), and the peeps at the paper probably meant the whole thing that way, but if it sounds iffy, it’s because it is, at the very least in very poor taste.
Coño, it’s the freaking leader of the free world we’re talking about here. Más respeto por favor.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as Aretha would say.
I wonder what Mexicans would think if they saw an American headline along the lines of:
“A trabajar, mis nacos”, “O quédense en su tierra, mis prietos” ("stay home, my brownies").
Do they like being referred to as mexicanitos, even if they are adults? Would they find it so charming and endearing?
I don't think so.

Inauguration Nation

Joy.
Lovely to see all those happy people at the Mall, (for once, it's good to go to the mall). Many proud African Americans who came from all over to witness history. Right on!
I loved Aretha. I loved her Of Thee I Sing, with that voice of hers that moves mountains. And I loved the hat. A big, huge present with a big fat ribbon to the nation. Right on!
Rick Warren was totally out of tune with the sobriety the occasion requires. It was like inviting Dr. Phil. Like inviting a game show host. Like inviting a guy in a gorilla suit. Nowhere near the same league as the rest of the proceedings. What a fake fuck. I found his mentions of Jesus utterly offensive. What does Jesus have to do with anything? Warren reminded me of those ridiculous people who pray so that the garage door opens or so they can find a lost can of tuna. Totally wrong fucking choice.
I hope Obama learned his lesson.
Particularly since he was kind enough to mention us unbelievers in the part about the religions that make up this country. And he made a point about restoring science's rightful place in America. This means we are moving to the present! Everybody, don't forget your belongings from the dark ages! Yay!
As for 43. I thought I saw a shade of pain and humiliation. He looked stunned and lost. It must be hard to sit through a most joyous, unequivocal and universal celebration of your departure. In the White House he was sheltered from the people's scorn, but outside its walls, he is defenseless, and that is how he looked. Supremely depressed and uncomfortable. I almost feel sorry for the putz. But not quite.
Now, my Hispanic colleagues, sartorial experts that they are, upon seeing Barbara Bush and Bush Pere, were alarmed by the fact that both were wearing retina burning purple scarves. According to them, people wear purple to funerals. I wouldn't put it past them. Regardless of whether it's some sort of inside snide joke or they are tasteless and clueless, they looked absurd. She seems like a rock, but he looks wobbly and frail. I guess his son's debacle hasn't been good for his health.
The speech was great.
This is the speech in essence: We are in deep shit together, so get your shit together, and maybe we can get out of the shit. I liked that he started out giving us a lengthy list of bad news. I'm no dreamer, is what he's sayin'.
It was beautifully delivered, nicely written and it had some wonderful remarks here and there. About not sacrificing our values for our safety, for instance. About his own father, who 60 years ago would not have been served had he entered a restaurant. About irresponsible greedy people. About all the touch points (Orwellian marketing speak) that got him elected.
He's promising a whole lot. God knows how he intends to deliver.
But as Malia says, it better be good.

Lo único que me faltaba

Carlos Slim is going to buy a huge chunk of the New York Times. Me, who was happy to have escaped his clutches, happy that I could live almost free from every product that man owns, now fear that the internet paper I read is going to belong to him too.
I think it's rather neat that someone is helping to keep the Times afloat, but I resent that it's him. He has to stop owning everything.

The Olive Garden

I know it may not be exciting to you, my sophisticated and gourmand readership, but the other day I had the chance to eat at the Olive Garden, a restaurant that didn't even muster a glance from me before the opportunity arose. So I was in an adventurous mood. How bad could I-talian food be?
How bad could all-you-can eat soup and salad be?
Well, you may want to make yourselves comfortable first.
Let me put it this way: If I were Italy, I'd be declaring war on the United States, or at the very least, recalling my ambassador.
Let me begin by saying that I find the culture of terrible chain food in the US absolutely fascinating.
Having partaken of food at Applebee's, whose distinguishing trait is that they apparently use the entire contents of the Dead Sea in every dish they serve, I promptly realized that the Olive Garden was kind of like the I-talian version of Applebee's.
I'm not a rube, so I know full well that within the chain restaurant world there are peaks and valleys and abysmal holes of culinary despair. I happen to love Ihop for breakfast. So sue me. Popeye's fried Chicken, yum. Haven't been to a Denny's lately, but how bad could that be? In the fancy end of the spectrum, I've been to Houston's and it's pretty good. The kind of food that's a guilty pleasure to eat.
However, this fake Italian affront, belongs, together with Applebee's, in the abysmal hole of culinary despair category.
I really do not know where to begin to assess what has laid waste to the perfectly wonderful, healthy, inspired, and not too complicated genius that is Italian food, to the human art of cooking and to the human pleasure of eating. The affronts of Olive Garden are legend.
The decor is Tuscan generic, a cross between a fancy new hospital and a corporate office where a color consultant surely suggested that beige and earth tones may help soothe frayed nerves. The place is the size of a Best Buy. There is plenty of space, but about as much warmth as you find in a car dealership in Omaha. The scale is intended, I assume, to make you feel right at home in generic, scare-the-shit-out-of-me America.
There was a huge empty table when we arrived, but the hostess decided to let us salivate for more than 20 minutes before bestowing it on us, no doubt corporate policy to make us hungrier.
Somebody ordered breadsticks with Alfredo sauce for starters. What arrived were baskets with warm, artificial-garlic-infused full sized mini baguettes, roughly 20 times the size of an actual Italian breadstick. This was no breadstick. This was bread. The Alfredo sauce was the exact consistency of industrial grade Ranch dressing, congealing crust included. Goop with Guar Gum, seasoned with the entire contents of King Solomon's Salt Mines.
This didn't bode well. I perused the menu, with luscious photos of food and thanks to the fitness obsession of Mike Bloomberg, bless our mayor, calorie counts, which were really helpful to dismiss everything above 600 calories. I settled on the meat lasagna (598) and hoped for the best.
Suddenly, our waiter brought to the table four humongous salad bowls (the famed free salad). The veggies were pale and over refrigerated, but the I-talian dressing was the most briny, overpowering, pucker and heartburn inducing glop I've ever had (and I kinda like cheapo I-talian dressing). Impossible to eat.
My lasagna seemed Lilliputian compared to everything else so far, but I seemed Lilliputian compared to the size of the soda glasses and the salad bowls. In fact, it was basically a bigger portion of the kind of pasta you get on Delta Airlines.
I'm never insulted by the pasta on Delta Airlines (because the other shit is worse). But I am insulted by the Olive Garden. I'm insulted by the gall of whoever owns it thinking you can fool people into eating such terrible food. By even calling it food. And the worst thing about it, which is true of Appleby's as well, is that it stops short of inedible, and thus people eat it. People demonize McDonald's and such, but they should take a look at this crap. It's just as bad if not worse.
In the end, it ain't that cheap either. The all you can eat bullshit is a ploy to make you spend more.
It was a bunch of us and some people had wine (perish the thought), but I paid $22 for crappy food, no matter how much of it.
I think it is quite ungenerous and cynical to serve such terrible food in such huge portions. It is unconscionable and disrespectful of people; it treats food like cattle feed and people like cattle.
Pure evil is what it is.

Enough Already

There is a unilateral ceasefire in Gaza today, finally, and hopefully the violence from both sides will stop.
As I read about the crisis, it seems evident that the problems of the area are so horribly complex, that it would take the best humanity has to offer to come up with a Salomonic solution in order to achieve some semblance of lasting peace and quiet. Instead, we get hatred and carnage.
From my humble and limited point of view, I guess that this horrendous campaign by Israel was designed to send a message to Iran about the consequences it faces shall it keep hammering away at the destruction of Israel, whether it's via Hamas or any other means.
Unfortunately, Israel, by necessity a heavily militarized state, fights this war against a guerrilla terrorist group. Israel uses traditional warfare to attack or defend itself from an untraditional enemy. The battleground is a place teeming with civilians, and an appalling place at that. Too many civilians die. Israel looks terrible in the eyes of the world. Not that it seems to care at this point.
What appalls me, besides the reports of dismembered children and 1200 deaths, is, as always, the monolithic, knee-jerk reaction of most Jews living outside of Israel.
I am all for the absolute destruction and eradication of Hamas. But I can't turn a blind eye and a cold heart to the collateral suffering of civilians caught in the middle.
I totally love and support Israel, but that doesn't mean that I have to applaud everything it does. It doesn't mean that my love and admiration and support of it make me lose all sense of compassion or proportion, or my moral compass.
It also doesn't mean that having a dissenting opinion makes me a self-hating Jew or an anti-Zionist. It makes me a Jew and a Zionist with a conscience. Which is what all Jews should be.
You may adore your spouse, or your parents, or your children, but you don't cheer them on no matter what they do because of unquestioning loyalty. You can disagree with the people you love and that doesn't mean that you love them any less. Disagreement is not disloyalty, and people who confuse the two are tyrants.
It is reported that most Israelis supported this campaign. I can understand: they live under a siege mentality and they live in fear and frustration. It's also easy to do so when the casualties and the damage on their side are not dramatic. The last invasion of Lebanon was bitterly opposed by Israeli public opinion once it was clear that Israel was taking a surprising beating. I am sure that many Israelis are viewing this current carnage with a heavy heart.
Just today, I scanned the online edition of Haaretz and found a very interesting controversy on the front page. It was a fierce debate between a journalist who strongly criticizes the Gaza campaign and a famous Israeli writer, who feels the campaign is justified. Neither of them mince words, and reading their correspondence gives you an idea of how fraught, and how morally and emotionally complex it is to live under such circumstances, if you still have a moral conscience.
To be honest, I am tired of Qassam rocket counts on facebook. No matter how you spin it, they can't hold a candle to dead children counts.
We cannot lose our moral compass.

Dear Barack Obama:

I paste the entire text of a NY Times editorial on immigration today (all caps and boldface are mine):

"A scene from the last days of the Bush administration: On a snowy afternoon last weekend, a church in New York City is filled to bursting with more than 1,000 people. Parents holding babies, teenagers, old men and women with heavy coats and canes. They murmur and shout in prayer, a keyboard and guitar carrying their voices to the height of the vaulted ceiling.

The music has a deafening buoyancy, but as congregants step forward to speak, their testimony is heavy with foreboding and sorrow. They tell of families terrorized and split apart.

A young woman from Pakistan describes humiliating conditions at a detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., where she was sent with her mother and ailing father. A mother tells of her son, an Army sergeant and citizen, losing his wife to deportation. A Mexican man, with theatrical defiance, waves a shoe at the unnamed forces that have thwarted his desire to legalize.

It is hard to appear sinister in a church, and the congregation at Iglesia La Sinagoga (THE CHURCH IS ACTUALLY CALLED "THE SYNAGOGUE" (!)), a center of Pentecostalism on 125th Street in East Harlem, seemed utterly ordinary. But as undocumented immigrants and their loved ones, they are the main targets of the Bush administration’s immigration war.

Families like theirs have endured a relentless campaign of intimidation and expulsion, organized at the top levels of the federal government and haphazardly delegated to state and local governments.

The campaign has been disproportionate and cruel. The evidence is everywhere.

On Monday, The Times reported that federal immigration prosecutions had soared in the last five years, overloading federal courts with misdemeanor cases of illegal border crossers, who are tried and sentenced in groups of 40 to 60 for efficiency. At the same time, prosecutions for weapons, organized crime, public corruption and drugs have plummeted. The Arizona attorney general called the situation “a national abdication by the Justice Department.”

And last week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in an appalling last-minute ruling, declared that immigrants do not have the constitutional right to a lawyer in a deportation hearing and thus have no right to appeal on the grounds of bad legal representation. Mr. Mukasey overturned a decades-old practice designed to ensure robust constitutional protection for immigrants — one needed now more than ever in the days of the Bush administration’s assembly-line prosecutions.

The event at the Pentecostal church was organized by local ministers and Democratic politicians to spur the cause of immigration reform this year.

It could be a difficult case to make. We heard far too little about the need for immigration reform from President-elect Barack Obama during the general election — and virtually nothing from the nation’s leaders since then. But the United States cannot afford to put immigration on a back burner and merely continue with the existing enforcement regime. The costs are too high for the country’s values. And they are too high for the economy.

Defending immigrants’ rights defends standards in all workplaces. Workers who are terrorized into submission, in families that are destroyed by deportation and raids, are more likely to undercut other workers by tolerating low pay and miserable job conditions.

Restoring proportionality and good sense to the criminal justice system also would free up resources for fighting serious crimes. Most important, repairing a system warped by political priorities into hunting down and punishing the wrong people — like those bringing their suffering to a Pentecostal church — would help restore a sense of what the country stands for, and remind us of who we are."

Dear Barack: Before you close Guantanamo (the sooner the better) you should pay attention to this. You have all but ignored and skirted this issue and come next week it won't be so easy to do so anymore. This is much more important than closing Guantanamo. Here you have thousands of decent people being intimidated, harassed, discriminated and abused by our very own government, who turns a blind eye when it so fits its own despicable hypocrisy, racism and incompetence, like employing illegal Mexicans to clean Katrina's mess -- FEMA: Find Every Mexican Available, or like baiting illegals with a promise of instant citizenship and using them as cannon fodder for your revolting excursion in Iraq.
And for those of you who shriek the mantra that being illegal is a crime, zip it. This country was founded by immigrants. If it weren't for Black slaves and immigrants we'd all be eating Lime Jell-O with mayo and listening to Lawrence Welk. You should be fucking grateful to these people. You are not good enough to shine their shoes.
And as I've always said: Don't want them, don't let em in anymore, not a one. But don't punish the ones that are already here, working hard and trying to make a life for their families. It's sheer racism, cowardly disguised as something else.

Inquiring minds want to know

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People are crazy. Blogging is fun.