Hi there. It’s been a while. I’m still here, hanging in and chugging along, and I hope you are, too.
Regular Sunday night updates are kind of a pipe dream when you are running the daily mental health equivalent of triage, a reality I’ve come to grudgingly accept over the past few weeks. I am still walking around, mostly within the confines of our little one-bedroom, feeling like an open wound. Trite an observation though it may be, I thought this year was going to look very different. I thought this blog was going to look very different. I never thought that listening to rock music — my greatest, most reliable refuge — could take on an element of anguish. For a while, the idea of writing about it seemed about as appealing as dunking myself in a vat of acid.
Now, to quote my favorite Queens of the Stone Age song, I’ve resolved to go with the flow, wherever that takes me. I’ll post what I want, whenever I want, and if my pretenses at any sort of topical coherence and insight were feeble to begin with, well… just you wait!
I’ve adjusted to the point where I’ve mostly stopped spontaneously bursting into tears, which is good. And I’ve been cooking a lot. Cooking, in fact, is how I am staying sane. It is also how I am learning to experience music again without pain.
For someone who was raised mostly on delivery orders, neighborhood restaurants, fast casual lunches, and the occasional Shake ‘n’ Bake, I have fashioned myself into a respectable home chef over the past 15 years, an accomplishment of which I am very proud. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I am a bonafide David Chang of the shrunken apartment kitchen — well, maybe more like Brad Leone if you count the regular episodes of total brain derailment. Whatever. I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but I think I’ve sharpened my skills more in the past seven weeks than I have in the past seven years. My husband is the primary beneficiary of this development, and though he has to hand-wash a few more stainless steel pans, he seems generally happy about the situation.
I love food almost as much as I love rock ‘n’ roll, which is to say… a lot. I am the restaurant obsessive of the family, checking Eater and Grub Street as religiously as BrooklynVegan and Stereogum. Prior to this whole lockdown nightmare, dining out factored prominently and necessarily into my series of live music rituals. Fueling up before a gig: essential. Making sure it’s delicious: non-negotiable! Capping off the festivities with a midnight snack before racing to catch the last train out of Grand Central Terminal: extremely probable.
I miss scarfing down noodles at Ivan Ramen, Ichiran, Ippudo, Cocoron, Momofuku, Little Tong, Madame Vo, or Xi’an Famous Foods before a show downtown; I miss curries and teishoku on Sixth Street; I miss hot pot in the East Village and dry pot in Bryant Park. I miss spilling out of Penn Station after crazed pilgrimages to Philadelphia, and the night shift server at Sarge’s Delicatessen who has only ever seen me at 1 AM, downing pastrami and matzo ball at light speed during the brief gap between trains. I miss the couple nights a year I would splurge at Wollensky’s Grill, which is sort of like Smith and Wollensky’s slightly less stodgy, insomniac cousin, and ordering a filet at the bar — rare, side of baked potato, while mowing down three or four Cokes in the glass bottle — even though I stuck out like a sore thumb beside the jetlagged lawyers and finance guys, who I figured had been flown into town and put up at the nearby Midtown hotels, and who benevolently tolerated the sweaty, frazzled urchin in their midst.
I was a well-oiled, timetable-memorizing, power-walking machine, ricocheting among my favorite haunts like a slightly drunk and highly motivated pinball. My favorite haunts are all closed now, some potentially permanently, so my options are limited to what I can recreate in the kitchen. I have been stubbornly, impulsively ambitious in that regard. Check it out:
My plating and food photography could use some work, but it’s not like I’m serving meals at Eleven Madison Park, right? Already I’ve got mapo tofu and blisteringly spicy lamb vindaloo, two of my favorite restaurant meals, down to a home-cooking science (thanks to a lot of repetition and fine-tuning). A life without Sichuan cuisine and Indian curry is not a life worth living, after all.
I never cook without music on, and on weekends in the spring and summer this was my most-indulged stay-at-home recreational activity: throw the windows open, pop the cork on a bottle of wine, crank the tunes, make dinner and drink and dance and sing. Unfortunately for Adam (husband) and Ernie (the cat) I carry a tune about as well as Keith Moon, but they put up with it in service of my culinary greatness.
Now that every night is a stay-at-home night, cooking dinner is the way I unwind, and a blessed reprieve after a day spent working remote and browsing nerve-rattling headlines. It is one of the few happy fixtures of my life that has prevailed, almost entirely unchanged, since the world as we knew it turned upside-down. It is the one fossilized fragment of a previous existence that I can contemplate without horror, without invoking torturous reminders of what we had and have no longer.
Yesterday evening I was listening to Chris Carter’s British Invasion on the Underground Garage, as I was simultaneously pulling pots and pans out from the cupboards and arranging my mise en place for a white chicken chili (JKLA’s best, in case you were wondering). One of the things I did after the lockdown was sign up for satellite radio, because I wanted to listen to music but felt too fragile to be in control of it, if that makes any sense. Somebody else had to take the reins; I knew that if I went back to my usual roster of playlists and albums, most of which were centered around upcoming and now-canceled tours, I would be right back to swimming in a pit of despair.
So, I was listening to Chris Carter’s British Invasion, and half-listening to Chris Carter’s commentary, when I heard him mention all four Beatles, with Eric Clapton, and Nicky Hopkins on the keyboard. I had a moment, that rapturous moment of immediate recognition and giddy anticipation, where I knew exactly which song he was about to play — one of my favorite songs of all time — and I was genuinely excited and happy to hear it. No strings attached, no qualifications, no wistful and peripheral fantasies about hearing a band playing it in a dimly lit club. I was just so fucking stoked to hear the song, in and of itself, in the most blissfully uncomplicated way.
I cheered and I danced and I sang along, terribly, in the kitchen. I roasted some poblano peppers with garlic and onion. And I felt, for a few minutes, totally contented. You might even say I felt hopeful: cautiously but resolutely optimistic. I had a sense that I could excavate these bits of joy, no matter how scary or uncertain things have been, or are, or are likely to continue becoming.
Oh, that’s right! The song!
Here it is. You should listen to it.
Until next time, whenever and wherever: stay safe, stay sane, and keep dancing.
-Bux