Remembering Jonathan Gold

I was immensely saddened last night to learn of the untimely passing of Jonathan Gold. I regret never meeting him, but we shared a love of food and of our city, and Los Angeles will not be the same without his intelligent, insightful guidance on our dynamic food scene. As a regular guest on the KCRW “Good Food” podcast with Evan Kleiman, his voice was a regular guest in my car. His column in the LA Times food section was the first thing I would consume on Saturday mornings. Los Angeles has become one of the most vibrant food scenes in the world, and if any one person could claim credit for making that happen, Jonathan would be a top contender. This vast and dynamic city, fueled by the confluence of streams of human migration from the south and the east, a megalopolis of ethnic pockets, ever-transitioning neighborhoods, and cultural mash-ups, has a staggering array of food cultures on offer that can be bewildering and overwhelming. Jonathan provided us a map. For his avid readers, he inspired us to visit unfamiliar neighborhoods, enter establishments sometimes beyond our comfort zone, persevere past menus in languages we couldn’t always read, and put things in our mouths we never dreamt of before (but would dream of after). When he started writing, food critics generally only paid attention to white table cloth, mostly French or “Continental” restaurants, measuring shortness against a particular idea of perfection, their prose often filled with attitude and the caustic cleverness of a Scalia dissent. Jonathan smashed that mold. While he appreciated and lauded the finest high-end restaurants, he could find equal appreciation and praiseworthiness in the craft of an immigrant who sells street corn from a cart on a corner in Lincoln Heights made in the specific style of the particular region in Mexico that he came from. He famously started his career by eating at literally every establishment on Pico Boulevard (one of LA’s long boulevards that stretches 15 miles from downtown to the beach). And by the time he was done, he no longer spoke of Mexican food or Chinese food, but had taught himself -- and went on to teach us -- about the wonderful differences between the styles of Oaxaca, Jalisco, or Guerrero, or the specifics of Chengdu distinct from other parts of Sichuan. He was a scholar and guide to the food regions of Thailand, Korea, and Vietnam, and the subtleties of Honduran vs Guatemalan vs Salvadoran foods. He probably knew more about Korean food than most Koreans in Koreatown. His infectious enthusiasm inspired non-Koreans to venture into K-town, and non-Latinos to venture into East LA. He fomented an openness and an invitation to cross-cultural exploration in this city, and I might venture that he did as much as anyone to cultivate the appreciation and create the cultural space for someone like Roy Choi to take LA by storm with his Kogi truck, mashing up Korean and Mexican food. And Jonathan’s smashing of the cult of the white table cloth paved the way to a city where some of our top-rated restaurants are food trucks whose location you need to follow Twitter to pin down. I am deeply grateful for how much he has enriched my own life, as he has countless Angelenos, with his insights, his encyclopedic knowledge, his contagious enthusiasm, and his delightful prose. His death – way too soon – leaves a huge hole in the heart of our city.

FILM: Postcards From London

It’s always fun to see Outfest films at the Ford, an outdoor theater that is lovely for a summer night screening. This year, we enjoyed Postcards From London, an unconventional story of a young man coming to London with little money but big dreams, and falling in with a group of high-end male escorts who are aficionados of baroque art, and who serve clients who want discreet sex and sophisticated conversation. (“We’re not prostitutes, we’re raconteurs.”) Though the film is mostly dramatic, it has some good comedic breaks, particularly a very amusing scene where the young man is in a hotel room with a client reenacting the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. The lead is beautifully played by Harris Dickinson, whom we met in last year’s film Beach Rats, which makes for an interesting comparison. While Dickinson gave great performances in both, Beach Rats was full of destructive self-loathing and was painful to watch. Postcards, in contrast, is free of shame for being gay, for enjoying role-playing, or even for doing sex work. The only shame in this film is for those who fail to appreciate great art. The film is stylish and surreal, including flashbacks to the time of Caravaggio, who is the ultimate hero to the “raconteurs”. While there are a few glimpses of the art itself, director Steve McLean doesn’t give the actual paintings as much camera love as one might expect for a film about art lovers (unlike, for example, the way Mike Leigh featured paintings in Mr. Turner). His focus is more on evoking the look and feel of Soho street life and bar life, and though it is done in quite a stylish way, somehow the style struck me as more reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick (think A Clockwork Orange) than the painterly Peter Greenaway. Similar to another great Kubrick film, Postcards ends with some kind of transformative breakthrough, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened. In any event, we did enjoy the film.

Lamp Beside The Golden Door Extinguished

The Statue of Liberty was sent back to France today. The plaque with the famous poem remains, with amendments. Emma Lazarus was deported posthumously when Jeff Sessions discovered a misdemeanor committed by her great great grandfather in New York in 1743.

The Underminer

I haven’t seen the new Incredibles film yet, but at the end of the first film, we get a preview of a new villain, the Underminer, who emerges from underground declaring “I am always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me.” What a perfect symbol for the current U.S. president, who not only is presiding over a pandemic of repugnant and ill-informed policies, but is actively undermining core values, principles, and institutions that have made our country great. To prove this (in honor of the Fourth of July), let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

• His personal business interests remain a massive ongoing conflict of interest. His charade of putting his personal business into a blind trust run by his sons is about as blind as a surprise present wrapped in cellophane with the purchase receipt taped on the outside. His taxpayer-funded summits at Mar-a-Lago and his other properties line his own pockets while providing ongoing product placement opportunities. And what foreign dignitary courting favor doesn’t stay at the Trump Hotel in DC? It’s an emoluments extravaganza, and an in-our-faces flouting of basic business ethics.
• Petty corruption is rampant, as we’ve seen a steady parade of his cabinet secretaries taking personal trips at government expense, often in first class, spending lavish amounts on office furnishings, and using government employees as their personal servants.
• He (and his press secretary) have a reckless disregard for truth and facts. Politicians have always engaged in spin, but this president has taken it to a whole new level. We are in Orwellian “newspeak” territory when a president can outright lie to the American people so casually, openly, callously, and egregiously, even so far as to claim not to have said things that anyone can see he said just by scrolling back in his Twitter feed. His very relationship to reality is demonstrably pathological.
• He has alienated allies so solidly longstanding that such alienation was inconceivable before this administration. Who could have imagined we would pick a fight with Canada? Or question our commitment to NATO? And to what end? He has gained us nothing while damaging the very core alliances that we need to help keep the world secure. Suddenly those who would never have questioned the alignment of our interests with theirs are raising those questions, and that can only be to our detriment.
• He has not only given regard to odious dictators but openly expressed admiration and envy of dictatorial powers. When President Xi Jinping became president for life in China, he said we should try that here. In appraising Kim Jong-un as a “strong head of his country”, he was envious of how deferential the North Koreans are to their “dear leader”. “When he speaks, they sit up at attention!”
• He dishonors treaties with wanton disregard. He cynically and disingenuously claimed a “national security” exemption in “justifying” his steel tariffs – against Canada and Europe. He essentially abrogated the Iran Treaty by falsely certifying that Iran was not in compliance. He pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, often threatens to renegotiate NAFTA, and now is indicating he wants to pull out of the World Trade Organization. Whatever one thinks of the pros and cons of particular deals, it shouldn’t be hard to understand that making a practice of reneging on treaties undermines our national integrity and devalues our ability to make treaties in the future, if other nations cannot take us at our word, or cannot rely on treaties to be any more enduring that the administration that made them. I guess integrity wasn’t covered in The Art of the Deal.
• He has no discernable core values, principles, or even strategic goals. Nobody can speak for or rely upon what he wants, because it changes daily or hourly with whoever last got his ear and played to his ego. The presidency is transformed into a personality cult rather than an administration, and one even has to feel a little bit sorry for the Republican Congressional leadership who dance and tip-toe around him like an abused and battered spouse desperately trying to guess from which direction the next smile or strike will come.
• He has given comfort and encouragement to the most vile expressions of racism and nativism. White nationalists, once marginalized by decent society, are now coming out like cockroaches when the lights go out. They speak and march openly, as this president sees “very fine people on both sides”.
• He has stoked baseless fears that immigration is dangerous to our country and harmful to our economy, working actively to repress all immigration, legal or otherwise, and turn away those seeking asylum. He has employed the most vicious and inhumane tactics, such as jailing asylum-seekers and separating children from their parents, in attempts to discourage them.
• To some agencies, he has appointed leaders bent against the very charters of the agencies they lead. The head of the EPA opposes regulation to protect the environment. The head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau doesn’t want the government protecting consumers. The Secretary of Education is an opponent of public education.
• To other agencies, he has appointed leaders who are incompetent and unqualified. The Secretary of Energy had no idea what the Department of Energy did when he was appointed to it, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development is lead by a man who has no experience whatsoever in housing, urban development, or running a large organization. Competence and expertise mean nothing in this administration (which is hardly surprising, since the president himself has no competence or relevant experience for his own job).
• Through a combination of sheer maladministration and malice to government itself, he has hollowed out the agencies of the federal government. Career civil servants, many who served faithfully through numerous administrations both Democratic and Republican, have resigned in droves if they haven’t been sacked out of paranoid fears of “the deep state”. (Those are the real witch hunts.)
• When any governmental organization or institution challenges him, he takes to Twitter to malign their overall integrity. When the FBI investigates him, he declares the FBI is corrupt. When a federal judge restrains his action, he declares the judge partisan. When members of Congress oppose him, he hurls personal insults and accusations. When newspapers report accurately on his malfeasance, it is all “fake news”. His mudslinging not only degrades the reputation of his own office, but it slowly corrodes general faith in public institutions.

The stone walls of a castle are strong and durable, but can be brought down when the ground beneath them is weakened and the mortar of their foundations is corroded by undermining. Under the administration of this Underminer-in-Chief, I fear for the future of our republic.

Roe Is In Danger, But It Doesn't Stop There

On a bright note, last week the Iowa Supreme Court struck down yet another of those unending legislative attempts to chip away at women’s rights to make their own reproductive choices. The decision was 5-2. On a less bright note, one of the two dissenters, Justice Edward Mansfield, is on the published short list of potential nominees to replace Justice Kennedy on the US Supreme Court. Being the constitutional law geek that I am, I thought I would take a look at his dissent. It was terrifying. Not only does he show thinly veiled hostility to Roe v. Wade, but he is completely up front in his opposition to “substantive due process”, the constitutional theory that certain fundamental rights may not be infringed by government. Mansfield is not distinctive here. This philosophy is a hallmark of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal society that has been diligently recruiting a whole new generation of “textualists” and “originalists”, and to whom the President has completely outsourced his pool of Supreme Court nominees. Hiding behind these academic terms of legal interpretation, their goal goes well beyond overturning Roe v. Wade. They would basically overturn every great landmark decision of the last century. That’s where their “war on substantive due process” inevitably leads. Think that consenting adults have a constitutional right to have sex in the privacy of their own home? The Federalist Society does not. Lawrence v. Texas, which declared sodomy laws unconstitutional rests on substantive due process, and they would overturn that. Think that you have a fundamental right to marry another unmarried adult of your choice? The Federalist Society does not. Not only does Obergefell, the 2016 gay marriage case, rest on substantive due process, but so does the 1967 Loving v. Virginia, which affirmed the right of people to marry across racial lines. Do you think a lawfully married couple has the right to use contraception? In 1965, the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut found a fundamental right to make such intimate and personal decisions in our Constitution, but the Federalist Society thinks that was a grave mistake. They believe it’s completely constitutional for the state to legislate what you can and can’t do in your own bedroom. Make no mistake, Roe v. Wade is in danger, but that’s not nearly the end of it.

BOOKS: Less

On a friend’s recommendation, I thought Andrew Sean Greer’s “Less” might be a fun audiobook for a long road trip. Indeed it was. This artfully told tale chronicles the mid-life crisis of Arthur Less, an author of modest repute who mostly lives in the shadow of his much-more-famous ex-lover, and who arranges a quirky round-the-world trip in an attempt to avoid facing a milestone birthday and some fearful self-examination. His misadventures nearly rival Candide, the characters he encounters are droll, and the whole tale is told with crisp prose in a distinctively detached, wry style, the verbal equivalent of a perfectly arched eyebrow. Good gay fun.