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the story of your hot pot
Thursday, December 1 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
For Chanukah, Gretchen's parents had gotten us tickets to a Manhattan event for PCRM, the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine. That's one of several charities for which Gretchen is an enthusiastic donor (another is The Organization that I work for). I'd arranged with the head of IT for some flex time today and tomorrow, and Gretchen wanted to start our drive down to the city as early as possible to avoid rush hour traffic. First, though I had to make it through our weekly videoconference. There was a lot of unnecessary chit chat and finally had to cut in and say that I we needed to focus.
We dropped Ramona and Neville off at Ray & Nancy's house for the night, where Jack the Dog was delighted to discover he would be hosting a sleepover.
For some reason Google sent us into Manhattan via the Holland Tunnel. West of that, in New Jersey, is a long stretch of buried roadway rooved in places with a grills admitting sunlight (and air).
Once we were in Manhattan, our progress slowed considerably. That's just how it is just before 5:00pm when you're trying to drive cross-town (literally, unlike in the Jimi Hendrix song). Gretchen seems to almost delight in driving in urban environments, but for me just imagining doing it is terrifying. When Gretchen asked how I'd feel about driving in this scenario, my response was "I'd just drive into a brick wall and be done with it."
Gretchen had gotten us a room in a hotel called the Blue Moon, and while she dropped the car off at a parking place, I sat on one our room's three beds communicating with my colleagues about javascript sorting of tabular HTML data.
We had an early reservation at a fussy vegetarian (not vegan) tapas place called Dirt Candy. Our waiter was a nice unassuming guy. He was so unassuming that he didn't assume I was vegan, wondering if he should put non-vegan ingredients on anything I would be eating (I'd barely spoken, and perhaps he thought I was being held hostage by a mouthy vegan lady; he should've whispered "blink once for non-vegan"). Gretchen ordered a bunch of things, the best of which were the jalapeño hush puppies the broccoli "hot dogs," and the hot pot, a sort of do-it-yourself culinary adventure. The broccoli hot dogs consisted of a long-stemmed floret of broccoli in a bun. The broccoli had a smoky sauce that made it taste a lot like a hot dog. That flavor was also in the broth that came with the hot pot. You start with a bowl containing noodles, and into this you pour the broth like serving yourself a cup of tea. To this you can then add sauces (there was a mild hot sauce) and various vegetables and such (lotus root, kimchi, radish, gelatinous cubes of sesame "fu"). You just keep pouring in broth and adding things until you're done, and the last sip from the bowl is (as we were told), "the story of your hot pot."
We also had fancy expensive drinks. I had a "Brass Band" featuring bourbon, fennel, and sparkling wine. It was a good cold-weather drink. Gretchen had a DC Pickle back: a shot of vodka with a separate shot of pickled beet juice. It was so good (and earthy) she got herself another one.
For a tapas place, it was surprisingly good experience. And I even felt full at the end. Dirt Candy is one of those new-fangled no-tip restaurants, so, though the tab was $120, there was no tip to leave.
From Dirt Candy, we walked to the PCRM event, which was at some old New York theatre. At first we just stood around in the front hob-nobbing, chit-chatting, and making note of celebrities (at this point there was only one, the woman who founded PETA, and Gretchen sort of knows her). A fair number of people we knew were there from the New York vegan scene, and the PCRM event organizers saw to it that we had cups of wine.
Then we were all herded into the theatre itself to watch music videos. The guy who founded PCRM is, it turns out, a musician, and this event was more of a CD release party for his band CarbonWorks than anything else. I would go on to describe CarbonWorks as "a kind of post-punk neoclassical world-music band with a soupçon of newage." Unexpectedly, given that I was sort of a hostage, I rather liked the music, which only occasionally tried to muscle its way into the unpleasant realm of avant-garde classical. The singing could occasionally be ethereal, as in the best of, say, Dead Can Dance, and musicianship was impeccable. Also, the production of the videos was entirely top-end. Strangely, only one video appeared to have much of an on-topic message (one related to PCRM).
Early in the show, I realized my bladder was full, and to get to a bathroom meant stumbling past numerous cameras on tripod set up to record the one live music performance (a woman in a shiny red dress was singing in Spanish, Catalan, or Portuguese). But I was desperate. So between two of her songs, I made my way to the back. But by then the woman in the shiny red dress had begun singing again and the woman manning the door didn't want it to open because of the light it would let into the darkened space. So I stood there and waited for the song to end. I probably could've made it, but when someone from outside the theatre entered through the doors I was waiting at, I took the opportunity to escape. Sweet, sweet relief!
When I returned, PCRM's founder Neil Barnard was telling how music releases dopamine in our brains, something we might otherwise get from eating unhealthy food. He then did the math on the caloric content of Beethoven's entire musical output (zero), and we all had a good chuckle. Somewhere in this, Alec Baldwin took the stage as the biggest celebrity in the room. (His most important gig these days is as a Donald Trump impersonator on Saturday Night Live, something that is always answered by an angry tweet from Donald Trump himself.) He said a few kind words about PCRM and PETA, though it was clear from what he said that if he had ever been on the wagon with regard to unhealthy and unethical foods, he'd fallen off multiple times and was probably not on it now. There was also an alarmingly-thin actress (aren't they all?) present who was, according to Gretchen, also a celebrity, and she also got a turn talking from the stage. These organizations depend on their celebrities every bit as much as Scientology does, and I understand it as a necessary evil. That doesn't keep it from being just a little bit gross.
Back out in the lobby, the hob-nobbing, chit-chatting, and wine-drinking continued, though now there was some question of what we would be doing next. Perhaps we'd be going to a vegan pizza place. Or a bar. Nobody seemed to have any strong preference or motivation one way or the other. Also, among those in our social circle, I happened to be the only man present.
In the end, everyone went home directly from the event, and Gretchen and I headed back towards our hotel. On the way, we thought we might stop at Dirt Candy for another drink, but that place was packed. So we wound up at a neighborhood bar called RPM. We sat at the bar and it was perfect; it wasn't crowded or noisy, and the light was murky in the best possible way. I had two rounds of Jameson on the rocks, and Gretchen had a top shelf vodka with a slice of lemon. In addition to gossiping about the people we'd just socialized with, we also discussed my recent series of tiny paintings done on credit cards. Gretchen likes them but doesn't like the visible numbers embossed in their surfaces. As for me, those numbers are part of what I like about them. Initially it was a purely æsthetic thing, since that's how it usually is with art. But later I've come to like other creepy aspects, such as that it reminds me of the tattoos inscribed on the prisoners at Nazi concentration camps. When I mentioned this to Gretchen, she was both horrified and intrigued, and wanted me to elaborate. I couldn't immediately come up with anything to say about that, to which Gretchen said, "If you're saying it suggests concentration camp tattoos, you'd better have something more to say about it." Eventually I offered that animals themselves are suffering like concentration camp victims in this commodified world they find themselves living in. Gretchen seemed to accept and even be a little impressed with that explanation, though it's not going to make her start seeing æsthetic value in those embossed numbers.
[REDACTED]
At some point before we fell asleep, we discovered that the heat did not work in our room. The hotel eventually gave us a noisy space heater with a highly non-intuitive user interface; it was like something out of an episode of Black Mirror.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?161201 feedback
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