Food: Uptown

Dara writes:

Because of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday today, I stayed for an abridged schedule at the literary agency where I work in Harlem. Many of the area's stores closed for the holiday, including the Original SoupMan, where I eat. I eat here not because this is a franchise of the shop portrayed in my favorite TV show, "Seinfeld," or because I particularly relish soup. I eat here because it is the only good-looking eatery in the immediate vicinity of 132nd Street and Lenox Avenue. If there is a reader who can correct me, I would love it.

My friend Ruth and I, spurned by our soup craving, shopped in the neighborhood Associated Supermarket for lunch goods. Lunch for two cashed in at under ten dollars, which is roughly what a "combo meal" for one--large soup, grilled panini, and a fountain drink--would have cost at SoupMan. The combo meal is pretty good. I have tried an Italian wedding soup--little pearl noodles, meat dumplings, spinach--which I usually love (especially at P&W's Sandwich Shop near Columbia University) that was grotesquely over-salted. I almost felt I could not drink for three days lest I bloat like a balloon and pop. But SoupMan flavors its butternut squash soup with freshly grated carrots and orange zest, and the grilled cheese panini is passable. Less so the fruit and bread that accompany the meal. The banana might have been sitting by the boiler in a bodega for two weeks, so soft is it, while the bread is so hard I could sign my credit card receipt on it. The woman who owns this franchise is nice but rings customers out at a rather lethargic pace.

So it is not as if I experience Le Bernardin and today had to make do with Blimpie. But Blimpie is just about what I got at the neighborhood Associated Supermarket. I did save money there--on 99 cent whole wheat pitas, flip-top cans of Bumble Bee tuna (because we couldn't ascertain if the agency had a can opener), small jar of Hellmanns, Vlasic dills, and two bananas. My friend keeps kosher, so alas we could not spring for the Oscar Mayer salami.

I have heard that development is happening in many parts of Harlem. I would say that not a ton is going on around 135th Street near Harlem Hospital, although apparently Make My Cake around 139th Street serves a wicked red velvet cake that beats canned tuna any day of the week, especially holidays.

Bi-coastal Pronvincialism

Dara writes:

I got some very good feedback on a recent post about Target from a woman in Alabama. She reminded me that New Yorkers can be very provincial; Ms. Herbitter averred that while compared to the MoMA Design Store Target might not be much, compared to Wal-Mart it is manna from heaven.

While we New Yorkers can navel-gaze, we can also forget the rest of the country and zoom right on out to California. One example of our coastal myopia is the writing of Kim Severson for the "Dining" section of The New York Times. Her role seems to be bringing dispatches from California; no wonder: until recently she was a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle. Don't we have enough voices from CA?

This past week, Ms. Severson wrote about a fire that destroyed a beloved Northern California inn. The caption below the photograph of the inn read as follows:

"RUSTICITY Manka’s Inverness Lodge was known for its quirky menu."

For a moment I thought I was going to read about a quaint little restaurant of which I would not have otherwise known. Instead, Ms. Severson informs her readers that

"Manka’s fed actors like Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt and writers like Isabel Allende and Robert Haas."

Indeed, the day of the fire, actors Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal were guests at Manka's. The thing is this: if I want to encounter Jake Gyllenhaal, I can nibble chicken paillard at the over-discovered Manhattan restaurant Pastis (as I recently did and sat next to him). If I want to read about food and scenery a bit more extraordinary, I might need to look beyond food writers whose main pipeline is the next Jet Blue flight to Oakland.

Movies: Letters from Iwo Jima

Dara writes:

Clint Eastwood's new film "Letters from Iwo Jima" is not a date movie. James proposed it as such. I should qualify by saying he and I are both interested in traveling to Japan, which interest provided extra motivation for shelling out the $11, especially when we primarily Netflix films nowadays.

"Letters" is the flip side of Eastwood's recent film "Flags of Our Fathers." Both movies depict the battle on the island of Iwo Jima during the Second World War. While "Flags" shows the American story behind the iconic image of our men raising the flag on the top of Mount Suribachi, "Letters" shows the hell the Japanese soldiers endured while they fought to their deaths.

The movie reveals what the roughly 20,000 Japanese soldiers do to prepare for the Americans to arrive on Iwo Jima, and then what happens when the Marines land. The island is inhospitable, and the General leading the troops learns quickly that no reinforcements will be sent. His soldiers know the cause is lost but must follow their military tradition of dying honorably, either at the enemy's or their own hands. This result is extremely punishing. Bombing takes up much of the movie. Many soldiers take their own lives, which is devastating. I left the movie down and pained.

Mr. Eastwood's film succeeds on several levels. He develops his characters quite well, so that we feel for them. Ken Watanabe plays General Kuribayashi. He is dignified and innovative, but many soldiers suspect his modern methods. The ancillary characters shine. The scrappy kid who doesn't want to be there, Saigo, is our hero. Shimizu, whom Saigo suspects of being a spy, is in fact, as we learn through flashbacks that round out the lives of several characters, completely honorably. And Nishi, a former Olympian, is tragically handsome. Daring and gorgeous, he is the most vulnerable of the men; he cries when his horse dies and befriends a wounded Marine, with whom he can speak of American film stars.

The deaths of many of these characters moved me to tears. The look of the movie is stupefying. Much of the action takes place in the caves the soldiers dug into Mount Suribachi to avoid attack. As a result the light is dim and gloomy. Mr. Eastwood allows us to feel as never before for the Japanese side; even though I kept saying to myself, "they sided with Hitler!," I could not help but feel for these men. (Of course, a similar movie about the hidden lives of the SS could never be staged, for obvious reasons. I wonder what certain Chinese viewers, against whose ancestors the Japanese committed atrocities, might think of this film.)

Mr. Eastwood's film falters, too. It is too long by a bit. One only needs to see so much bombing to get the point. In many scenes, nothing happens. I suppose the filmmaker captures the amount of waiting that war entails, but must the audience wait, too? Maybe. No war film, I suppose, completely escapes sentimentality. In one scene, when the soldier whom Nishi has befriended dies, Nishi reads a letter clutched in the dead soldier's hand. The soldier's mother has penned the note, and for some reason, when Nishi reads it, all the Japanese men surrounding him stand, as if to attention. The note ends, "Do what is right, because it is right." Nishi then sends his men to battle with those last thoughts as their rallying cry. This feels contrived, but the sentiment strains further when Saigo says to Shimizu (I'm paraphrasing), "I thought all Americans were savages, but that soldier's mother's words, they could have come from my own mother." Oh, really, Mr. Eastwood? Is that similarity between sides what you want us to feel?

I questioned seeing the movie when I left. I felt dogged and drained. I thought about our current world and how Mr. Eastwood might have been making a point about jingoism. General Kuribayashi and his men, almost all 20,000 of them, fight to death even though they know they have lost. Such nationalistic blindness has been ingrained. I hope we do not have such blinders on.

Postscript: "Letters" brings to four the number of movies I have seen in the theater this year. The others being "Borat," "The Devil Wears Prada," and "Sophie Scholl," about a young woman who resisted the Nazis. I am not sure if "Thank You for Smoking" counts, since I walked out of it. I actually didn't think it was so terrible, but James and I saw it squeezed in next to my parents in a tiny theater in Connecticut. We were about to get married and I think more than a satiric film we needed strong cocktails.