By Steve Rhodes

An occasional look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Noodle Head
“At Noodle Bar, a junior line cook had been cooking chicken for family meal – lunch for the staff – and although he had to cook something like seventy-five chicken pieces and the stoves were mostly empty, he’d been cooking them in only two pans, which meant that he was wasting time he could have spent helping to prep for dinner,” Larissa MacFarquhar writes in her incisive profile of neurotic restaurateur David Chang in the New Yorker.
“Also, he was cooking with tongs, which was bad technique, it ripped the food apart, it was how you cooked at T.G.I. Friday’s – he should have been using a spoon or a spatula. Cooking with tongs showed disrespect for the chicken, disrespect for family meal, and, by extension, disrespect for the entire restaurant.
“But the guy cooking family meal was just the beginning of it. Walking down the line, Chang had spotted another cook cutting fish cake into slices that were totally uneven and looked like hell. Someone else was handling ice-cream cones with her bare hands, touching the end that wasn’t covered in paper.
“None of these mistakes was egregious in itself, but all of them together made Change feel that Noodle Bar’s kitchen was degenerating into decadence and anarchy. He had screamed and yelled until a friend showed up and dragged him out of the restaurant, and his head still hurt nearly twenty-four hours later.”

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Posted on March 26, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“In 2003, Colby Buzzell, then twenty-six, was living in a small room in a renovated Victorian house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, doing data entry for financial companies,” Michael Massing writes in The New York Review of Books. “Raised in the suburbs of the Bay Area, Buzzell had hated high school and, deciding against college, ended up in a series of low-paying jobs – flower deliverer, valet parker, bike messenger, busboy, carpet cutter, car washer. Data entry paid somewhat better – about $12 an hour – but even so he was barely able to get by. At one point, he ran into an old friend who had joined the Marines, and, in his telling, military life sounded like one big frat party, but with weapons and paychecks. After nearly a year of feeling stuck, Buzzell decided to visit an Army recruiter. He describes his state of mind in My War: Killing Time in Iraq, an uproarious account of his life in the military:

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Posted on March 24, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“No matter how shiny and safe a city gets, no matter how high its housing prices climb, how fast its crime rates fall and how many of its corner stores are turned into buzz-before-entering boutiques dedicated to clothing the ‘urban baby’ or are replaced by franchised coffee shops with WiFi hot spots for laptop-toting Beat poets, there is one sort of room at the city’s very core whose design schemes rarely shift upscale and whose typical occupants – be they real or fictional – resist much gentrification of the soul, let alone beautification of the hair,” Walter Kirn writes in the New York Times in his review of Richard Price’s Lush Life.
“Sometimes the hands move slowly, sometimes swiftly, but when they’re controlled by a serious storyteller, they always tell the same time: too little, too late. That’s the lesson of these ugly pens. A case may be cracked and the motives behind it exposed, but the greater mysteries always go unsolved: what good are answers when what’s done is done and something just like it, or worse, will happen tomorrow?”
Is it really possible for this book to be as well-written and seductive as its review?

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Posted on March 17, 2008

By Connie Nardini

Who knew? Iceland is hot! At least it is according to one American, author Bill Holm, who has spent many summers there when he is not teaching English at a rural branch of the University of Minnesota. He fell in love with the island when he first brought a group of students there on a field trip. Being from heavily Scandinavian Minnesota, he already had the bona fides of coming from Icelandic stock. What he found was a place at once beautiful, mysterious and unique.

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Posted on March 5, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“Wikipedia is just an incredible thing,” Nicholson Baker writes in a New York Review of Books review of John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
“It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies – and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, ‘Diogenes of Sinope,’ or ‘turnip,’ or ‘Crazy Eddie,’ or ‘Bagoas,’ or ‘quadratic formula,’ or ‘Bristol Beaufighter,’ or ‘squeegee,’ or ‘Sanford B. Dole,’ and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.”

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Posted on March 4, 2008