Socially Distant Cuisine

Just started reading my first for-fun book of the holiday season... The Russian Debutante's Handbook. I'm not very far in, but this paragraph, from one of the first pages, portends good things. "Janus-faced sandwich"? Delightful! Meanwhile, in the cluttered back office, junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin-the immigrant's immigrant, the expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times-was going at it with the morning's first double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. How Vladimir loved the unforgiving hardness of the soppressata and the fatty undertow of the tender avocado! The proliferation of this kind of Janus-faced sandwich, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing about Manhattan in the summer of 1993.

Really interesting article in NYT today about Rick Lowe, an artist living in Houston. His work with young single mothers, artists, and low-income renters boarders on urban renewal, and gentrification of a low-income neighborhood is following his work. Will be interesting to see whether the project (and its multi-constiutency coalition) can work to maintain some diversity in the neighborhood in the future. I liked the quote: “We can approach our lives as artists, each and every one of us,” he said. “It’s a choice people have. You don’t have to make houses the way people always have. If you choose to, you can make every action a creative act.”