Miss Edith on Art, with help from Roger Kimball

Monday afternoon found Miss Edith, Notarius, and our dear, gorgeous, clever friend M. lolling about a café, drinking fancy drinks with foamed milk, reading our books. We were all taking the day off from work. It was lovely.
I voiced aloud, apropos of what I can no longer remember, my disgust with the whole idea of going to museums, of going to highbrow concerts. “I’m convinced,” I said, “that all these people who think they like going to look at art, who think they like going to listen to chamber music, are kidding themselves. They should be honest and admit they’re bored out of their skulls.”

Suddenly, as I write, I remember what inspired my vitriol. It was an “art installation” on a city street here. It was something I’d watched being put together, and initially just thought it was someone being sort of weird, entertaining himself with some bullshit or other. Which was stupid, but fine by me; it wasn’t hurting anyone, at least. Then I read about it in the local arts weekly. “I thought it was just bullshit, but it turns out, it’s Art,” I said, disgusted. M. laughed.

If piling up pieces of junk and some bricks in an old canal is Art, then I am Madame de Pompadour.

We headed home, to our fairly artless apartment, and M and Notarius discussed the question of Art and Music and true appreciation thereof while I stewed.

Here’s the thing. I am bored going to concerts and museums. Concerts are better: at least you’re sitting down, and you can space out, and sometimes you can sneak in a book to read while you’re there – yes, it’s rude, I realize, but better I read a book than scream in frustration; and would you prefer to have a quiet reader next to you or someone with a beeping squawking cell phone, anyway? But I refuse to believe that all these people who claim to be so moved by such things actually are. I look at a painting of almost any type and immediately wish I had something to read. There are, I believe, five paintings on God’s green earth that I actually enjoy looking at. I don’t own any of them. Hence, I don’t think about them much, and it’s just as well.
I can sort of deal with painting if it’s of something solid: a person; a flower; a landscape. I can be bored by that, but at least I understand why someone wanted to paint it.
Then there’s this stuff, I believe often termed “abstract” art, for which I really can’t find much excuse. Sure, some colors look particularly nice against each other – but then why not pretend that they’re matched in someone’s costume? Or located in a garden? Why just blotches and splotches, or strange angry-looking grids that don’t signify anything except possibly extreme skill with rulers? I just don’t get it. What’s worse, I think the people who say they get it are just really, really, really full of it.
And then there’s arty photography and film and sculpture. These media, in the last few decades, have evolved into media that are often supposed to be pushing some kind of envelope, with “highly charged” erotic content, or something. I don’t get it. Outside of the kind of prurient interest generally served perfectly well by pornographers, I don’t see a reason for making images of people getting anally reamed or whathaveyou. I’ve never understood how people earn degrees by producing images of stuff like this. My mind boggles when I think about it: this is a discipline? I understand how it’s bondage and discipline, but really, my friends: is it Art?
I say no, even taking into account that the model might be named Arthur.

Having spent maybe twenty minutes batting all this around in conversation, it was time, we realized, for M to hit the road, which he did, driving back to his drool-worthy loft in the North country. Notarius and I draped ourselves on our fine upholstered furniture and vegged out for the rest of the evening: quite pleasant.
The next day, I came home to find Notarius waiting for me, holding the latest issue of The New Criterion. “You’ve got to read this,” he said. “There’s an essay called Why the Art World is a Disaster.” “Oooo,” I said, “Hilton Kramer?” “No, Roger Kimball.”
“That’ll be fun,” I said, putting down my bag. I got dinner set up and when it was simmering nicely I fixed myself a drink and sat down to read.

I can’t really remember the last time I felt so vindicated. I found myself wanting to invite Roger Kimball to dinner, and said as much to Notarius. (Immediately, we began to dream up a guest list. Mr. Kimball, if you’re ever planning a trip to New Haven, please drop me a line.) The essay is not only completely correct, in my view, but it’s funny, and there’s nothing better than a bullshit-slashing essay on a subject I favor that also makes me laugh out loud, which Mr. Kimball did several times. He discusses almost every aspect of Art that drives me insane: the incoherence; the falsity of its being challenging or subversive (as Kimball says – I think we’ve reached a point where, frankly, anyone who says anything is really subversive is delusional); the idiotic language used by art people to discuss their product; and the way in which it’s all tied to financial matters at heart.
New Haven is about to host its annual International Festival of Arts and Ideas, a street festival which is wonderful for the city in so many ways that I’m not able to be against it. I think it’s just great that lots of people come to New Haven to talk about art and ideas. But I must admit that in all the years I’ve watched the festival come and go, not once have I attended an event in which I was truly interested; and the events I’ve attended, with the exception of seeing the Metropolitan Opera perform on the city Green (which was boring, but at least I could feel smug about attending, and I was allowed to eat takeout Chinese during the event), I have never seen so much arty bullshit concentrated in such a small space. The woman who now runs the event is charming and intelligent and all of my encounters with her have been lovely. But at heart, I know, I will never understand her. She believes in this stuff. She believes it’s really the most important thing in the world. Whereas I can only see it as a reason to get out my rapier. I think Roger Kimball would agree with me. If only the Arts and Ideas festival would book a speaking engagement with Roger Kimball; that’s an event I might actually pay to see.

I think M was right when he said that most people who look at Art or attend highbrow concerts or go to serious plays go not because they’re truly interested, but because attending is part of the package of being a certain kind of cultured, educated person. A nice person will want to see the latest production by Whatsit; a nice person will want to have attended a performace by the Whoosit String Quartet. Well, fine: then I’m not a nice person. Miss Edith will stay home with her Ramones records and her Liz Phair Cds and re-read Morningside Heights for the sixth time. Miss Edith likes to turn an elegant figure in public, but if it involves being utterly bored, and surrounded by fundamentally dishonest pompous gits, she’ll be just as happy at home. I may be pompous, but at least I’m honest about it.

Meatballs to Nuts, Pt. II: Pimiento Cheese, for mi reina...

Neither Miss Edith or Notarius have any Southern blood in us at all; why is it, then, that nearly every social occasion at our house involves my putting out a bowl of pimiento cheese? It’s quite inexplicable, but we keep doing it, because it’s easy, and good, and people keep eating it, and asking, “What IS this? Can I have a spoon?” so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

Our friend M., who is an astonishing cook, appeared at Rosalind Russell’s party the other day bearing trays of food – even though I’d told her, Don’t worry about it, just come and hang out and have a good time – and the guests and I were all stunned and shamed by how excellent the coconut chicken wings were, until we tasted the goddamned cupcakes she’d made. CUPCAKES! In summer’s heat! These were double-frosted cupcakes, topped with hand-made-by-M chocolate-covered maraschino cherries. I don’t see how pimiento cheese can compare to that, but M. asked me to please provide her with the recipe for pimiento cheese, and so I will. After I say the final word on those cupcakes: they were really, really good.

To be honest, when I make pimiento cheese, I tend to just sort of toss stuff in without measuring too closely, if at all. Hence, my recipe will seem very sloppy. However, many many cookbooks contain recipes for pimiento cheese and if you look, you’ll see they’re all mostly the same – minor variations here and there, but nothing to get het up about. You’re supposed to go buy a jar of pimientos, which is fine, but I never do it… I admit that I roast red bell peppers and use those instead.
My basic method is as follows:

Acquire six excellent long, fleshy red peppers and roast them. When cool, remove skins and and seeds that might still be hanging around. Take about 4 ounces of the peppers and put them into your handy-dandy food processor. (You’ll probably have peppers leftover, which is always an excellent thing.)
To this add:
1 lb. Cheddar cheese, diced – I like something fairly sharp; a nice Cabot is swell
1 cup Hellman’s mayonnaise (do not use some goddamned “salad cream” or whatever the hell they call Miracle Whip; just don’t do it)
1 or 2 medium cloves of garlic, with any yucky bits and stem-bits removed
a few shakes of Worcestershire sauce
probably something like 1/4 tsp. Cayenne

Whizz this in your food processor until it looks like lumpy cottage cheese. You can do this by hand, of course, but it is a lot easier – oh, so much easier – when you use a food processor; I recommend the device highly.
Scrape into an attractively-colored bowl, something that’ll set off the cheese’s bright color well, and serve with crudités or chips or whatever floats your boat. A spoon might be a good idea.

Sometimes I add Colman’s mustard, or Rooster sauce, or nothing else at all, depending on my mood.

There you go. If you want more formal recipes, I would turn to the latest Joy of Cooking or another one of my favorite cookbooks, James Villas’s From My Mother’s Southern Kitchen.

From Meatballs to Nuts, Part I

There were many homely but tasty items being served chez Edith and Notarius this past Sunday, and I was asked about the preparation of nearly every one of them. We didn’t serve soup, so I can’t say “from soup to nuts,” but we did serve meatballs, and we did place around the house bowls of these sort of candied, sort of savory nuts. So let’s say I was asked about nearly everything we served, from meatballs to nuts.
I found the recipe in the latest edition of The Joy of Cooking, which reads as follows:

1 lb. Unsalted mixed nuts
salt and black pepper, to taste
2 tbs. Butter, melted
3 tbs. Finely chopped rosemary
2 tbs. Brown sugar
2 tbs. Light corn syrup

Basically you stir all this together and then spread the nuts on a baking sheet (put down parchment paper first, please) and bake at 350 for about ten minutes. JoC says seven minutes; I found this insufficient.

I doubled this recipe, which I think turned out to be a bit of a mistake; I think the proportions need to be altered when doubling. I’d lose some of the butter – I think I’d stick to the 2 tablespoonsful, and not double the grease, and maybe lower the amount of corn syrup a bit. The trays I made of these nuts ended up a little gloppier than I’d anticipated, though they were still pretty tasty. Anyway, this is the kind of recipe that can stand a lot of tinkering.

Rosalind Russell's birthday

Well, friends, Miss Edith threatened to do it. She was annoyed that no one else was doing it. She sent emails, she went shopping, she spent a day in the kitchen, and Sunday, she did it.
This past Sunday afternoon, far too many people crammed cheerfully and willingly into our humble apartment to celebrate Rosalind Russell’s centenary*. Hats were not required for admission.

I’d spent the last week busy with preparations for this event, which is in part why I hadn’t posted so much (I’m sure you needed the break, anyhow). I consulted at least five different cookbooks for recipes, and read several others merely looking for inspiration, including Elsa Maxwell’s wonderfully pragmatic yet simultaneously totally bonkers How To Do It, or The Lively Art of Entertaining. (This book is helpful if you want to take recipe recommendations from Diana Vreeland. Not that I’m sure I’d want to; I admire DV, I really do, but she didn’t look like a woman who really enjoyed her food, whereas Edith, I must admit, looks like a woman who enjoys her food. A slave to the scale, Edith is not.) I sent an email to Franklin Café, asking for help and advice – and the utterly wonderful general manager there replied to my email and solved my problem. (I had a question about the preparation of the drink du jour, which we’d decided had to be that Pimm’s and ginger beer drink I enjoyed so much when we were in Boston a couple weeks ago. I wasn’t sure about proportions; Franklin Café came through for me, god love ‘em.) Notarius and I flung ourselves across upholstered pieces of furniture, thumbing through books and making lists and finally, finally, it all fell into place. We cooked like crazy on Saturday, did a little more prep on Sunday, and then like clockwork, at four o’clock Sunday afternoon, the first guests arrived.
Things are kind of back to normal now; it’s Tuesday.

I had a number of requests for recipes that I used in preparation for this event. I’ve decided that the thing to do, for the common good, is to post the recipes here at Edith. Same bat time, same bat channel, but no pickled rattlesnake.

*Since scheduling this event, I’ve since read several different years cited as Ms. Russell’s birth year. I didn’t have the heart to reschedule fhe party. Maybe it’ll have to become an annual event so’s I can save face.