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Showing results for tags '1908'.
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John's Grill is a pretty good restaurant. The bar is small, and so is the rest of the place, but scoring a seat and settling in is one of the better ways to enjoy a feeling of old San Francisco. First, let's get some history out of the way. It was the backdrop of The Maltese Falcon, and its walls are covered by celebrity pictures of those who dined here over the past 110 years or so. Think of a place where the Postal Service rolled out its commemorative Humphrey Bogart stamp here, with Arnold Schwarzenegger joining a rendition of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" at the ceremony. I've eaten (and drank) at John's on every one of my annual visits over the years, and the food is quite good. This isn't fine-dining, but for those of us from the Washington DC area who enjoy the The Monocle on Capitol Hill, Martin's Tavern, Old Ebbitt Grill, or the Occidental Grill, it's somewhere in between all of these sorts of time-worn establishments. I've had an absolutely perfectly executed Negroni at the bar, and I've enjoyed some truly great Cioppino in the dining room. This is also a good restaurant for steaks and burgers, at a good price. And a club sandwich for lunch one day was worth ordering again, as was the perfect side of fries, hot out of the fryer. I'll continue to frequent John's whenever I'm in town. The ongoing subway construction is an impediment, but if you're on foot, it's not much of a problem.- 7 replies
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- Union Square
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I remember reading about this as a kid, and just did a search on it - the internet is amazing.
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"The Turnaround Thing" I object to what figure skating has become: an athletic event akin to "who can do what the highest and the hardest." In particular, I object to what I'm going to call "The Turnaround Thing." This is the bastard cousin of "The Tongue Thing." The Turnaround Thing occurs when a figure skater does a two-staged jump, and the second stage results in them essentially making a U-turn on the ice. For example, someone will launch into a triple Axel, and then follow it up with a triple toe-loop (or whatever - I have no expertise here), and because the combination is so athletically difficult, the second jump results in them doing a 180, carving out a "U" in the ice, and ending up going backwards, against the direction in which they were skating when they launched the initial jump. This is just, plain ugly, and has nothing to do with the ballet-like grace that should be (but is no longer) associated with figure skating. Does anyone know what the heck I'm talking about? If not, what can I do to explain it more clearly? Do any skaters agree? Disagree? I don't object to athleticism per se, but I don't like it at the cost of grace, especially in a non-quantifiable event such as figure skating (which I put more in the "dance performance" camp than I do the "tennis match" camp) - the former being an ongoing display of beauty; the latter being "win the match, and it doesn't matter how you look." I need therapy.
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This reminds me of the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, who without Vietnam would be unquestionably one of our greatest presidents, in the same class with Lincoln and FDR. It just makes me weep when I think of it. Of course I hated him at the time, but that was all about Vietnam, which overshadowed everything. You younger people probably can't even imagine how Vietnam distorted and disfigured everything about our civic life as it crept into the crannies of our souls. You couldn't even fuck without Vietnam obtruding into the crevices of your pleasures. I look back on LBJ's presidency now and can only see what midgets his successors have been compared to him.- 1 reply
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- U.S. President
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For several years, I was a Big Brother, until my little brother, Ali, his mom Iris, and his sister, Naimah, moved to San Diego to stake out a better life for themselves. I remember taking his family to the airport, and had to pay for their cat to get on the plane because they didn't have the money. I only saw Ali once more after that, a few years later when I went to visit their family out in San Diego. We drove up to Los Angeles because Ali wanted to go to the Spike Lee Store, where everything was overpriced and of questionable quality. I bought him a T-shirt, and paid twice what it was worth - I didn't want to drive back to San Diego without a momento from his hero. A few years before that, I had flown in from Moscow. Exhausted after traveling the better part of 24 hours, I was ready to collapse into bed, but checked my answering machine first. There was a message from Iris: Ali's best friend Frankie was shot and killed in a drug deal gone bad, and the funeral was in about one hour. Somehow, I found the strength to throw on a suit, and drive to Seat Pleasant, where I was the only white person at the funeral. Frankie's mom came up to me, and asked me to say a few words. To this day, I have no idea why - what the heck was I supposed to say? Fighting lack of concentration because of sleepiness, I fumbled through my speech, turned to Frankie lying in his coffin, and told him we all loved him - that won the audience over, and things went as well as they could have under the extreme amount of pressure I was under. Six years ago, I wondered what Ali had been up to, and I searched his name on the internet, only to find his obituary. I posted this. Frankie and Ali were both the finest young men. I loved them and miss them terribly to this day - their premature deaths are 100% attributable to the neighborhoods they grew up in - even though Iris tried her best to escape, it just wasn't enough. She didn't have the money. I did things with Ali and Frankie about once a week, and remember one day asking them where they went to school. "Taney Middle School," Ali said, which meant nothing to me, or to him, or to Frankie. But a few years later, I did a little research, and found that Roger B. Taney was a Supreme Court Justice. 'Okay,' I thought to myself, they had gone to a middle school named after a Supreme Court Justice. Then, I found out that Roger B. Taney was actually Chief Justice from 1836-1864, and was the person who wrote the majority decision in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857. These children were going to a school that was nearly 100% black, and the school was named after the Chief Justice who tried the Dred Scott case? I couldn't believe it, but over the years, I forgot all about it. Until recently, when it popped back into my mind, and I Googled to see if that school was really named after the same man who wrote the Dred Scott ruling - the ruling that said, blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Fortunately, in 1993, someone had the common sense to change the name of the school from "Roger B. Taney Middle School" to "Thurgood Marshall Middle School": "School May Change Name to Thurgood Marshall" on articles.orlandosentinel.com This column came out today: "Out with Redskins - and Everything Else!" by George F. Will on washingtonpost.com Will mixed up some valid points along with some reductio ad absurdum, as he seems to have a tendency to do - he's a smart guy; I wonder what he would say about Roger B. Taney Middle School educating a nearly all-black student body.
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- American History
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Continuing my series on 20th-century chanteuses, here is the wonderful Lee Wiley singing "Manhattan" (1925) by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (Rogers and Hart) in a recording from 1951. How anyone can listen to this material and prefer Rodgers and Hammerstein is bewildering to me, but apparently there are such people. The lyric to this song has been commonly "updated" to reflect newer Broadway shows. This version refers to "South Pacific." The original lyric, which is much smarter than any of the subsequent revisions, is Our future babies We'll take to Abie's Irish Rose I hope they'll live to see It close (At the time (1925), this was a comment on the show "Abie's Irish Rose," which was a long-running Broadway hit universally derided by the critics. The early 1970s sitcom stinker "Bridget Loves Bernie" was sort of based on it.) The first line of the chorus is also often changed from "We'll have Manhattan" to "I'll take Manhattan" for unknown reasons. Anyway, listen to Lee Wiley. Her style of singing was already old-fashioned by 1951, but so fresh and lovely and loveable.
