Get Used to Kelp Is this all you know? Toeing on melting ice floe, Anxious for the next cold wafer in hoped-for chain of white to dunk up into air from black sea like a line of shocked eyes? The next step will meet wave, not wobbling raft, get used to clam and kelp.
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
The Slowmen Slowmen are Unconnecters, Monotasked, Watchful from forgotten slots, Plug-ends missing socket, Following shadows’ carve of light, Letting themselves statue, Golem-lumber too slothy for eyes, While bee bombs buzz and vaporize.
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
I’ve lived in Washington Heights for three years, and there are three restaurants that keep me consistently grateful for their existence: Park Terrace Bistro, Garden Cafe, and La Estufa. I’ll be reviewing them in ascending order of foodlust, La Estufa being somewhat slutted after, and Park Terrace being the most likely to reduce me to a grub-rutting fool. First up’s La Estufa.
I love La Estufa more and more with each visit. They serve healthy fare, loosely Italian-American, presented unassumingly, priced reasonably, and delivered with gracious & attentive service. It’s not often I feel this taken care of in New York during the course of a meal — & in a way that’s free from unctuousness, irony or uncomfortable fastidiousness.
La Estufa excels in simple grilled meat, fish & vegetable dishes, & has a solid wine list to pair these with. The restaurant doesn’t wow with innovative plating, striking flavor combinations, ambitious dish structures or arty ambience — and it absolutely doesn’t need to. Every dish I’ve had there has been tasteful, tasty, proportioned well, seasoned properly, fresh & wholesome (but not bland), & presented with sincere smiles & follow-up.
Food highlights include their bread (grainy & dense but moist & touched with what tastes like honey); their vegetables (zucchini and squash often accompany the meat entrees in a lightly oiled, garlicked, thin-sliced fan-spread); and their transcendent Pear Cabernet tart: silk-textured, simple & seductive.
My carps are minor: for starters, their brunch dishes I’ve found sparse — especially egregious was an over-priced & meager strawberry & apple fruit-dish. I also feel their dinner entrees could use a touch more creativity, daring, innovation — a signature dish here, a novel bit of flavor-alchemy there — something to set La Estufa apart in what’s increasingly becoming a competitive, Wahi+Inwood eating hub.
Still, with consistency, service & prices like these, I’m happy to keep coming back whether or not they change a thing. In an eating market like New York’s, cluttered with gimmick & forty dollar finery, graceful, honest basics like these stand out with very little need for improvement.
La Estufa
5035 Broadway (between 214th and 215th)
New York, NY 10034
La Estufa’s Website
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
Next up: Garden Cafe
Cathedralling Washington Heights Rice and chicken on Riverside Drive, Q-Bert-face graffiti on the wall, Debussy’s “L’Cathedrale Engloutie” floating from the mouths of leaves, Rice and chicken splattering the sidewalk, A bird watching rice and chicken, Debussy floating from the mouth, Rice spraying the sidewalk, Chickens pecking at leaves, Debussy walking down Riverside, Huffing Gauloises & tracing his fat hand along gang tags, Eating rice-chicken, Brushing leaves from his face, Laying down on the sidewalk, scratching his beard like a chicken scratching dirt, tapping his boots to “Gasolina,” halfdreaming of drowned cathedrals.
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
“A black eyed dog he called at my door
The black eyed dog he called for more
A black eyed dog he knew my name
A black eyed dog he knew my name
A black eyed dog. A black eyed dog.I’m growing old and I wanna go home
I’m growing old and I don’t wanna know
I’m growing old and I wanna go home.A black eyed dog he called at my door
A black eyed dog he called for more.”
Nick Drake’s “Black Eyed Dog”: the narrow bed upon which fear of death and longing for death sleep side by side:
Nick Drake - “Black Eyed Dog”
(from the anthology “Way to Blue”)
Drake’s quavering voice, ageless, simultaneously 9 and 99. Singing from within this life, and at the same time from outside it. Voice that’s prophet of its own extinguishing. The hunger for release (”growing old and I wanna go home”) and anxiety around the details of that release (”and I don’t wanna know”). The push and pull of death and life while breath and blood moves in us.
Then the extended guitar line: the agitation, the energy, the gorgeous stop-muted syncopated run of it, expressing perfectly that vacillating agitation of fear of and desire for end.
This Swans cover of “Black Eyed Dog” features Jarboe’s haunting vocal:
Swans - “Black Eyed Dog”
(from the collection “Various Failures: 1988-1992″)
I don’t love this cover, but I like how it takes the urgency & fear of the original and turns it into spit-flecked seething.
So many narrow passageways into and out of this song with its bone-lean lyrics, raw and elemental as a myth: The dog, the door, the name, the home; the asking for more, the not wanting to know. It seems there’s not much here.
But there’s everything here. Everything we need to know about living, dying, wanting not to die and wanting not to live. Fear of the unknown and hunger for whatever blackness lurks beyond that door.
The moment I heard this song I felt myself fall apart in grateful and scared recognition.
Years later — tonight — it does the same. Comforting me even though everything about it lyrically and musically should do the opposite. Out of death, out of time, that weird keening voice sounding as tremblingly alone as humans can be helping me feel less so.
Thank you Nick, Swans & Jarboe; thank you dog and door and name and home.
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
Let’s put it another way. There’s a hall.
There was one entrance to this hall, and there will be one exit, way up ahead. Right now behind you there is a stream — it was once a trickle — but it’s miles behind, and maybe it won’t ever reach your feet.
We are all born with this stream in tow. We are all born to try and outrun it. The stream is yourself, which you flee from. The Hall is your life.
But right now, you can barely hear the stream. And when you start to hear it in muffle & murmur, you get antsy. And you drink, you shoot up, you watch bad movies, you eat a box of doughnuts, you masturbate, you go out in crowds, you stay at the office til every one’s gone, you call up 10 friends in a row, you read 20 blogs and bookmark 30 more. Anything to stop the slow creep of that splashing rushing noise. And it works for awhile. You’re fine. You forget it’s behind you.
Now, at this point, you have choices. You can run harder and harder as the years pass to keep outrunning it. Run & do whatever you need to to distract you from all that wild pour gaining on your heels.
Or you could do what few of us ever do: stop running.
Stop running, turn around, stand still. Let it hit you, the years’ mass of it all. Stream to canal to river. It’ll hurt when it hits. It might bring you to the brink of drowning. But it won’t be as bad as if you waited til the end. At least this way you’ll end up being carried along by it, joining it in one forward & integrated motion. You and the river. You and the parts of you you have never been able to look in the face. And it will carry you to that final Door, without violent rush or blow, & you will unlock it and feel the river’s firm nudge forward, and you will flow out with the water into your soft final splash and float & drift to whatever shore.
The graceful motion of you as the river’s vessel is what it feels like to own up to yourself, face yourself, your fears, integrate with the parts of you that you most hate to feel and encounter and live with. It’s not easy at first. But you will spend the rest of your life in — and end it with — peace. And what comes after will be peaceful too, beyond measure. The soul come to terms with itself.
But you won’t choose that will you? You won’t ever turn to face the water. You’ll say you will, but you won’t. Years will pass, and more and more often you’ll hear it clearly, unmuffled, unmurmured. Stream to canal to river. Ignored and shouted over. Louder. Undeniable.
It’s chasing you now. The racing lures you’ve chosen don’t work so well — they don’t help you to outrun it any faster. The smack and booze and flesh. You even recognize what you’ve done in setting up your own racing rabbits, but you’re too weak or stubborn to change it at this point.
And then the little river grows to a wider, deeper one. Now it fills the corridor fully like a truck, bearing down on you. You still have time to face it, minimize the impact. But you don’t. You let your last chance slip. You just keep running. You run and let it gather momentum. Run down your last few years, trailing flood & fury. All that river is a lifetime, splashing & resentful that you’ve failed to acknowledge it. Kept your back to it.
Now you’ve dropped your bottle. You’ve dropped your pills. You’ve dropped your cellphone, your hypo, your laptop, your sweets. Now you’re running just so you can reach that exit. That silver locked door. And your iron key in your sweating shaking palm. You race right up to the door, banging your forehead against it, fumbling with the key. Dropping it.
Almost there. The pursuing roar of you popping your ears to permanent still. And just as you set your key level with the keyhole, just as your shaking hand focuses grip, your wave will shore, will embrace your life gratefully, will explode you. It will twist you to nothing with endless cold fists. You will break to foam.
And that Last Door will fly off its hinges with a crack but you won’t softly sail out into some last bath of peace. You will drip over the lip of the spout of your life like slime from a gutter.You will disperse in droplets and dry up as you fall apart to mist. And whatever follows this life we know will be to you your long black cipher of wasted scatter.
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
I should have worn earplugs. It’s been four days and when I stop and listen to my skull there are still saws & scraping sheets. Muffled some by time & days of quiet music. Like floodlights absorbed by but still mostly soaking through heavy curtains.
Boris is a metal band from Japan, and I saw them at the Knitting Factory last Tuesday. They’re a 3-piece, they’ve been around since the mid 90s, & they just play catastrophically loud music which, whether fast or drone-slow, feels traumatically unhealthy to be standing in the presence of.
Their first song was “Farewell,” and after a few moments of set-up drone & swirling fog, there was this moment that still makes me shiver a little to remember. It was this breach, like the room split open. This vast gonging annunciation, this elemental sundering, and I was completely done in. Up until then I had been debating buying some plugs or snatching a bar napkin to tear into bits for my ears, but after that Rubicon all-chord I had no fucking choice. I just stood there, appalled and in love with all that snarl.
Then came Michio Kurihara’s solo (of the Japanese band Ghost, joining them for their whole set): gorgeous and wild, winding & carving in and out of “Farewell”’s ocean of sound like an arctic sea snake.
Their whole set was just like that, a seductive corrosion, like some Rothko in rust; an irradiated cathedral that you probably shouldn’t kneel in for very long.
That acid-etch of it all, for me, is the music’s appeal. It bathes ears and skull the way whiskey washes the throat: the scrape & burn’s the draw, and what the burn confers: that moment of loss of self in bright blinding sear. Because artful noise — like Boris builds, like Sonic Youth or Swans or Les Rallizes Denudes deliver — can be no less than another means to achieving non-being. Pure noise can grant a kind of death, and that’s the brass ring we yearn for, knowingly or not, in arranging our moments of transcendence — a moment so deafeningly beautiful that it pauses life and all its fears and troubles, blacks it out, stops its breath.
But still, I should have worn some goddamn earplugs.
I think about my tiny ear bones — the stapes, the malleus, the incus — all still outraged by what I subjected them to, and I’m vaguely nauseous and almost ashamed. I want to assure them I won’t do it again, that I got caught up in it all. I want them to forgive me, as ridiculous as it sounds. The way you want your guts to forgive you after you’ve puked up half of dinner and a carafe of cheap white wine.
But then I think of being happily lost in pure noise’s red garden maze: standing there and feeling my substance shift while this terrific cocoon of crackling static closes in around me. Getting wombed in noise until you can’t even think.
And I just don’t think I would have done it differently if I had another chance. I’d probably still stand, close my eyes, feel that vast amped palm scoop and cradle me for an hour. Gentle & motherly & torturous & redemptive. Until the lights hit, the sound’s clipped and the last twist of maze is echoing behind me.
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008
Photos from the show
Buy Boris Albums
Boris’ website
“Dear Town,
We had our hopes for you.
Everywhere you were marked with stars and red ink. You were settling into late youth, like us, and we thought you might not mind our scuffed heels if we polished them first. You were our Special Occasion with your floating sterile fireplace and three story front door.
The boy’s soup was amazing; Vietnamese-style lobster bisque gussied up with western cream and ocean bits. I had vegetables pickled in rainwater which soaked my salad into wan watercolor.
Then the weird sea preparations: his stingray wing lopped off into pot pie crust and my bass draped over beans and fungi that slithered away under its muddled eyegreen sauce with every bite.
But dessert is where you lost us, despite your good wishes looped in chocolate letters on the rim of his plate. My little cake sat deflated on one side and deffered to the hard Chinese Checker sauce bumps to its left. His cherry crisp wasn’t and the fruit huddled outside its crepe.
Where was your joy, Town? I looked at your plump walls and thought about climbing them; I wondered if your spiky palm was real. But I didn’t think about you at all. And I wanted to.
Love,
M.”
Town Restaurant
at the Chambers Hotel
15 W 56th St
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 582-4445
Town’s Website
