zombie flashmob causes mayhem in san francisco

Photo by Jason Appelbaum. Complete coverage here.

caveat lector + the county of queens, part two

The best part of the whole Lemon Ice King of Corona experience is eating your ice while watching bocce in the little park across the street. The park is tiny, and feels more like an old-fashioned town square than like New York City. With festive multicolored electric lanterns illuminating the nighttime scene, it even reminded me of certain zócalos in Mexico.

The whole town seems to come out to watch the balls fly. The court itself is of impressive construction, complete with ceramic lion busts adorning the low concrete walls (I promise to go back and get some pictures) and a beautiful green clay playing surface. On the far side of the court was ranged a veritable peanut gallery of old Italian men in short pants and garters, wheezing and muttering and occasionally crying out eccola quà! after a particularly good play. To my immediate left was a young Mexican boy wearing a purple Zorro mask, sitting on the ground with his chin resting on the wall, intently watching the balls fly hither and yon. Next to him a Chinese boy discussed the game excitedy with his grandfather.

I felt very far from the velvet-rope madness of Manhattan on a Saturday night, and was glad for that.


Pope John Paul II playing bocce, probably after enjoying a peanut icie at the Lemon Ice King of Corona.

The players all had their distinctive personae, from the superagressive "shooter" who would hurl the ball with such force that we'd all instinctively duck, to the distinguished old gentleman in white shorts and black kneesocks who would gently and precisely roll the ball to exactly where it needed to go, to the mustachioed young buck who had the same wheeling arm and crouching knee of a bowler throwing at ten pins. We watched, transfixed, for an hour, maybe two, before moving on.

My friend David had once told me that it was great fun to bike amidst the abandoned relics of the 1964 World's Fair at nearby Flushing Meadow Park, and I thought that it might make an interesting nightime walk, as well. This was the same Fair that had introduced the world to the concept of the Belgian-Waffle-as-dessert, after all, so there was no telling what we might find.

Entering the park, we encountered the Jetsons-like New York State Towers, seen below in a contemporaneous View-Master image.



At night, with their blue lights illuminated, the towers still have a certain Unidentifiable Flying Intrigue.

Then it was on to the famous Unisphere, beacon of World Peace and Understanding Among Nations.



Although the Unisphere ultimately failed to eradicate the scourge of war and misunderstanding, its grates and walls did become a popular proving ground for skateboarders, and we watched a couple of them rip and shred in the Fountain of Continents until the wee hours.

Eventually, we ascertained that there was still a little space left in our stomachs, and realized that we were ideally positioned to track down the elusive Sainted Arepa Lady, known to frequent Roosevelt Avenue beneath the 7 train in Jackson Heights late on Friday and Saturday nights, selling her ambrosial Colombian corn cakes from a little cart. Jim Leff once wrote this about her arepas:

The arepas [...] are snacks from heaven. Coursely ground corn, fried in pancakes about 6 inches in diameter and an inch thick, slathered with butter and topped with shredded white cheese, they're brown and crunchy, chewy and a little bit sweet, the butter and cheese imbuing the whole with salty dairy meltiness.

With those words, Leff set off a stampede of clueless but eager gringos to the neighborhood more avid than anything since than the Jackson Diner. The real lure of it, of course, was not simply that the arepas were great, but that tracking them down was so difficult, almost even dangerous. To confound matters further, there are several arepa ladies who frequent Roosevelt Avenue in that area, but only one Arepa Lady.

I first tasted the magic a few years back, with the aforementioned intrepid David, but this was Emily and Matt's first time. They got a single one to split, and I (stupidly) declined to get my own, because I was feeling stuffed. In the end, I think they were slightly disappointed with the arepa (the mythology surrounding the quest makes for very high expectations), whereas I think I actually enjoyed it more than I had before, probably because I had already lowered my expectations to more earthly levels, or perhaps simply because we want what we don't have. Unfortunately, I also made the mistake of getting a Colombiana La Nuestra! Kola Champagne to drink, which seems to consist nearly entirely of corn syrup, artificial flavors (bubblegum?), and food coloring (FD&C Red #40, FD&C Yellow #5, FD&C Blue #1, to be exact). To make matters worse, I had made the mistake of ordering the same drink only a couple of weeks earlier at the godawful new Bogota Bistro, seduced by the name La Nuestra. Word to the wise: Colombians make great corn cakes, but give their sodas a pass.

One final note:

The little old "Arepa Lady" is better known in her hometown of Medellín as Judge Maria Piedad Cano. As the New York Times revealed in an article last year:

She didn't prepare these traditional snacks until 1986, two years after she fled her home in Medellín. She was a judge, she said, and the drug wars made her beautiful town, and her job, too dangerous.

Colombia's loss has been our gain, but I do hope she gets to go back home someday.

caveat lector + the county of queens, part one

It seems fair to warn any readers who might happen upon this blog not to expect anything in the way of enlightenment, entertainment, or consistency. No, for now at least, this is merely a means to organize my links in one place, play around with blogger code, and perhaps ramble on about something that strikes my fancy once in a while. In other words, to procrastinate.

And since I have so very many other delightful means of procrastination, I'll probably be too busy tending to those distractions to pay this one much heed. So if you find something that pleases you, well, that's a felicitous accident, and you shouldn't count on it happening again any time soon.

With those disclaimers firmly in mind, then, on to the first (and perhaps the last) post. This is as good a time as any to start, I suppose, because my weekend was so eminently blog-o-licious (except for the fact that I didn't have a camera with me, so all of the photos you see below have been shamelessly stolen from somebody else. Copyleft, anyone? Hopefully this problem will be remedied very soon, once I start using the camera that Sari so kindly lent me while she's in Berlin.)

The weekend began, as all my best ones do, with a medium-sized iced coffee from Gorilla. For the highest quality java, New York coffeegeeks may go to Gimme Coffee, in Williamsburg, or Joe, in the Village--both of which serve wonderful coffee and are also great places to see real latte art--but for my morning cup of iced coffee Gorilla does the trick just fine. While their normal hot coffee tends to be a bit overroasted, I find it's just right over ice. Plus, not only is it two blocks from my apartment, but it's also all organic and fair trade certified. This makes Gorilla one of the very few all-organic, all-fair trade cafes in New York. Another is Grounded Coffee, on Jane St. between W. 4th St. and Greenwich Ave., where I used to work. Grounded gets most of their beans from the excellent Dean's Beans, run by the maverick coffee importer Dean Cycon. At my suggestion, they also get some from the Zapatista Mut Vitz cooperative. If you (imaginary reader) fnd yourself in the West Village, please do stop by and pay them a visit. They've got great coffee and delicious food served up in a lovely sunlit space.

So I had planned to spend the weekend excavating my bedroom from beneath mouldering mounds of old New Yorkers, ridding the refrigerator of cheese that's gone from "good moldy" to "bad moldy", and maybe sorting my socks, but Saturday turned out to be such an unbearably gorgeous day--one of those handful of truly perfect ones we are blessed with a few times a year--that I jettisoned those plans in favor of meeting up with Emily and Matt in the park instead.


While the three (and one-half) mammals pictured above are not us, this image does illustrate one of my favorite features of Prospect Park: Dog Beach! Some people dream of swimming with dolphins; I want to swim with the dogs.

After sitting in the shade for a couple of hours decrying the paltry advances that academic presses pay their authors, wondering whether our old scratch-and-sniff books still work, and speculating about the marketability of a proposed Dolph Lundgren workout book, we decided to move on.


Dolph-uh-cize!

Having access to a set of wheels, we suppressed thoughts of the imminent Peak Oil-induced apocalypse and drove out to Astoria, where we met Michael & Co. at the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden for the eponymous beer (and kielbasa and pierogis). My kielbasa + fries combo looked a whole lot like this, and tasted even better. Yet, although there's something great about a parking lot-sized biergarten in New York City, it started getting increasingly crowded and rowdy back there, so we decided to move on. Just in the nick of time, too. On the way out, we actually spotted a couple of cops trying to keep order among the fratboys at the gates.

Feeling rather bloated, we decided that it would be a good idea to cleanse our palates with some icies from the Lemon Ice King of Corona. Michael's friend Deirdre made us promise to each try to eat at least six to eight icies apiece, and to be sure not to miss the peanut butter ice. We mumbled our assent, a bit skeptical about the idea of peanut ice.


Don't even think about trying to "exchange" your shitty backwash peasant ice for the King's ice.

We wended our way over to Corona in a state of typical Queens-driving-induced discombobulation, and eventually made it to the Ice King. Like the Bohemian Hall, the Ice King is one of those well-known Queens destinations that Manhattanites love to shlep out to for a frisson of Outer Borough street cred, whilst the chowhounds look down their snouts. While LIKC is a lot of fun, it doesn't hold a lemon to Mario's on Taylor Street in Chicago and isn't even vastly superior to the noxious Dummer-driving, Uncle Luigi (though it's true--the King's peanut ice does kick ass). No, as "alpha dog" Jim Leff helpfully suggests, if you want real italian ice you need to go to "Ralph's in Staten Island. Or, better yet (but summers only), J&W's ices in back of J&W's bagels on amboy road at hugeneot ave. Or best of all, Rex's Ice (run by an extremely eccentric high school principle, random days summertime only), opposite Patsy's Pizza at 1st and 117 (skip strawberry!)"

This is, of course, vintage (and maddening and beautiful) Leff: breathless rumors of an eccentric and unpredictable purveyor of the best food in the city, located at an address so ambiguous it's not even clear what borough it's in, and with the great likelihood that, after trekking to the address in question, or, at least, what you think is the address, you will return home hungry and frustrated, yet more determined than ever. Remember: skip strawberry!

It's street food qua Holy Grail, and it's exactly the sort of pointless and generally futile quest that I'm helpless to resist.

To be continued...