“my copy of white noise apparently used to belong to david markson (who i had to look up). he wrote some notes in the margin: a check mark by some passages, ‘no’ by other, ‘bullshit’ or ‘ugh get to the point’ by others. i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer.”
-Hurry down to the Strand if you want to pick up what’s left of David Markson’s heavily annotated personal library.

The Prada SoHo store looks like a gay army threw up.

“They can be trained to do things like turn off lights and open faucets and so on, but eventually that breaks down. If we’re talking about animals going out into the field or a fortress with an AK-47 or whatever, it seems very, very implausible.”
-Psychologist and professor emeritus at UC David William Mason casts doubt on a newspaper article suggesting that the Taliban is training an army of warrior monkeys in Afghanistan.

by Nilay Gandhi

It was my first “fine dining” experience-somewhere between 10 and 20 courses with a bottle of wine for each. We were celebrating, thanks to the gracious manager of a boutique wine shop where I once worked. The meal was at one of my favorite restaurants in the world. I’d picked a hell of a time to be a vegetarian. I was that vegetarian, and I sat across from a cured meat expert who ate prosciutto by laying it flat on his face like a hot shave towel so the lardo could melt into his bottom lip. He didn’t just eat meat, he infused it like a tab of acid through his skin.

Meat course after meat course came out for everyone and, for me, a vegetarian alternative. The produce with the protein stripped out. Probably a pasta with extra European butter-or the non-meat part of what my friends were having, but fried. The chef even claimed to have made the risotto with just water.

Let Them Eat… Air
Then, the course everyone had been waiting for: “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” Which was exactly what it sounds like. The meatiest of meat courses. This wasn’t just meat, it was pest control.

And in front of me, the chef placed a tall glass full of red wine. No plate. No Laguiole knife. No fork. I’m surprised there wasn’t a straw.

The wine was called la Tyre, and it tasted like one. A tire, tyranny, exhaustion. Like la Grippe, the wine was a sickness of magnitudes so great that to this day (obviously) I talk about this wine and the scars it left on my tongue.

It was great. And I had no business drinking it, but I did.

But wines like this demand something carnal. Not just meat: meat. Squirrel, moose, maybe even a side of sinister Russian spy. Everyone at the table loved the meal and went on about how well this bone-dry, musky, murky, tannic wine went with it. The tannins cutting through the rich meat, the broth-ey earthiness of both, something about blood and intestinal biopsies… it went on.

And then there was me. Sitting in my little Herman Miller chair, all quiet, my nose two inches beneath the rim of the glass. I don’t know what exactly they smelled, but I picked up on the fresh soil just after the dew. I tasted the leather of my grandfather’s old briefcase, the one where he kept all his pills and balms because he didn’t trust the doctors in America.

It went on and on. It was one of those wine experiences that changes you, makes you understand maybe there is more to this stuff than Two-Buck Chuck.

When I glanced up, there was saliva on unexpected parts of the table, glinting in the moonlight that was by then rippling through. It’s probably just how I choose to remember it, but that course was ravenous. People pointed at me with knives when they asked what I thought of the wine. It’s the only course I remember from that night. Trauma can be a powerful mnemonic.

Nobody asked me if I was hungry. I wasn’t. Some cheese, I’m sure, followed. Maybe biscotti or tiny cookies from the brilliant young pastry chef. I have no idea.

The Point is, There Are No Rules
I try to remember that, now that I am a serrated-card-carrying carnivore, when I sit down to dinner with vegetarians today. What do you do when a vegetarian hits the table? Do you need to change the wines you serve? Or, if you are a vegetarian, when can you try those high-scoring reds your friends keep raving about?

We can all feel a little restricted in our wine choices when meat is off the table. You look at the list at the nice vegetarian restaurants and the reds usually top off at delicate pinot noirs. Great wine, but the kind of stuff Ted Nugent cleans his guns with. After all, they aren’t having steak, lamb shank-better shelf the Bordeaux and Chateauneuf du Pape. Another night of white wine and lapsang souchong tea?

Not at all. While food pairings can be transcendent, I’ve rarely found them requisite. Here’s one good almost-rule guideline: pair good with good and bad with Scotch. Exhibit A: haggis. The rest will work itself out.

Our taste, when it comes to wine, is really just based on references. You think old Bordeaux tastes like pot roast to anyone in India? Or that you’ll ever really understand the smell of sauvignon blanc without adopting three kittens from the shelter?

We find ways to describe things based on what we’ve been through. So putting “meat” wines next to vegetarian dishes, or next to nothing at all, is just another opportunity to explore these expanses in a way that carnivores, actually, just aren’t all that well equipped to do.

Provided that by vegetarian, you mean more just salad, the advice is no advice at all. Drink whatever wine you want. It will usually pair just fine with your friend’s meal, especially if you’re on the lookout for a few key and common veggie victuals.

Salt of the Earth

Starch is a vegetarian’s saving grace, and their backstage pass to all things red. As much as folks seem to insist that vegetarians eat mushrooms or processed gluten and soy products everyday to satisfy their supposed meat cravings, the truth is that carbs get most of them through the day.

And the “meatiest” of carbs are root vegetables. Potatoes, turnips, the somehow-trendy-despite-tasting-like-just-really-terrible-old-celery celeriac-they’ll all stand up to your burliest reds under almost any preparation. (See also: gourds and squashes.)

Root vegetables are wonderful flavor carriers, quickly infusing themselves with whatever fat and herbs are laying around. And salt. You ever have “too-salty” mashed potatoes? They don’t exist. In fact, next time you’re making soup, if you accidentally overseason, toss half a potato in there and pull it out before you serve. They’re the kidneys of the food world, processing and regulating the sodium balance. (Although I suppose with the new haute-butcher craze, kidneys are now the kidneys of the food world.)

Normally, when salt hits the dry tannins in your big red wines, well, babies die. Galaxies collapse. Iago enters stage left and scrapes your tongue with a hot comb. As Robert Harrington writes in Food and Wine Pairing: A Sensory Experience, “salt magnifies the negative aspects inherent in wine.”

But the root vegetables hide all that, balancing the seasoning well enough to give you a tasty dish without overwhelming your tongue.

Setting aside our vegan friends, no vegetarian worth her salt makes root vegetables without loads of butter. Think of that richness as you would the marbling in a great steak. Fat mellows a wine’s toughness, like hot oil rubbed into a late-shift knot in your shoulders, calming an otherwise aggressive red wine and making it easier to drink. (For the vegans, the right olive oil can do something close.)

At the end of the day, I would probably want my young Barolos and Brunellos with a charred, truffle-flecked Chianina T-bone-but some tender gnocchi (with some truffles, if you’ve got them) would actually do just as well.

The Smell of Success
Like I said, the first thing I did at that dinner of mine was dive my nose deep into the wine glass-before I even said thank you. Whether out of compulsion or lust, it’s what we all do. It’s why they make such crazy-enormous glasses in the first place.

So odd, then, that this “red with meat” thing has gone on so long, considering that meat itself smells like either nothing, its vegetarian-friendly seasonings or death. As much as we might think we’re pairing our burly reds with equally beastial corpses and the surging adrenaline of slaughter, we’re actually often pairing more the aromatics than anything else.

For instance: take the smoky char of the grill against the tar and leather smells of some small-market Tuscan wine or Napa cabernet. The garrigue of provincial herbs and black pepper-on a piece of moose meat or eggplant all the same-beside the spicy earthiness of a brooding southern French tannat.

See, at that dinner of mine, while everyone assumed the poor little vegetarian couldn’t experience the great pairing, there I was taking it all in. Smelling not only my wine and the blank placesetting in front of me, but also their Rockies and Bullwinkles, which even in its absence was great with my wine.

Previously: How to Face Down the Wine List and Win

Nilay Gandhi is the proprietor of the excellent wine blog 750 mL; he even gives personalized wine pairing advice on request.

Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case Gillette; advertisers do not produce the content.

Photo by Jessica Spengler and Noël Zia Lee from Flickr.

The thirsty souls on Knifecrime Island have their priorities straight: More than one in five British men surveyed said it was more important to live in a neighborhood with a good pub than good schools. (Knifecrime Island’s ladettes favored schools, but a not insignificant one in ten also expressed the same preference for pubs as did their beery bepenised counterparts.)

“Much like Lynn Hirschberg’s brutal May profile of M.I.A., Horyn’s [profile of reality TV star Snooki] neatly encapsulates everything most despicable about the Times and its cultural coverage — its snotty, keep ’em at arm’s length, can you believe these people? attitude, the way you can practically feel the reporter holding her nose while she writes.”
-Um. People are actually somehow boarding the Leave Snooki Alloooone!11!!! bandwagon. I think they’ll be disappointed when they discover where it lets them off.

Mmm, look at that, Jeb Bush out hosting private fundraisers. For none other than former teabagger darling and current sort-of teabagger sell-out Rand Paul! I’m not sure who beats whom in the rock-paper-scissors of Big Republican Dynasty v. Teabag Radical Upstart, when a Rand Paul and a Jeb Bush meet. Or do they both lose? I mean, this is weird, as they actually don’t have that much in common! Bush is also speaking today at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“This is my maternity leave hobby. While my baby is taking her nap, I try to imagine her dream and capture it.” Babyphobes out there will want to stay away, but everyone else should click through and get ready for a big bowl of “awwwwww!” [Via]

As the cable cognoscenti renews its romance with the midcentury executive class, the fashion world is observing its own long-running dalliance with a perennial 20th-century marker of privilege: the global prep complex. As Guy Trebay notes in yesterday’s Times Fashion Notebook entry in the entitlement-addled Sunday Styles section, all things prep are staging a robust comeback in international fashion-from the 30-year-later sequel to Lisa Birnbach’s irksomely iconic 1980 bestseller, “The Official Preppy Handbook,” to the successful launch of a Ralph Lauren restaurant franchise in Paris (with a menu that has to be heavy on Cape Codders and crocodile meat).

But the main preppy currency remains, of course, the look, and its coordinates remain reassuringly familiar: sunglasses, wool vests and the array of male-fashion brands that seem so unchanging as to be virtually scriptural: “Gitman Oxford cloth shirts and Sperry Top-Siders and Quoddy moccasins.” In a saner world, of course, these male preppy accessories would serve as a handy bestiary for waging a social revolution-or at the very least, treated as the half-stigmatized calling cards of predatory murderers, the way that Bruno Magli shoes and ill-fitting gloves are in Brentwood.

However, in the pits of fashion, the insouciant draped-sweater-and-khaki set remains cognate with the ever-dubious notion of “American classic”-an idea that becomes yet more unstable when one ponders its Japanese provenance. As Trebay notes, the allure of prep began with the 1965 publication of a photo study called “Take Ivy.” Japanese designer Kensuke Ishizu dispatched a photographer and three writers to chronicle the mid-60s WASP scion taking his leisure in the Ivied wild.

Ishizu briskly distilled the intrepid crew’s findings into his own ur-preppy fashion line, called Van Jacket (hewing faithfully to the bastardized American phrasemaking style of “Take Ivy” by again crafting a non sequitur coinage that seemed to be drenched in status-making cachet while actually saying nothing whatsoever). From there, as Trebay reports, it was on to hectic fashion renown. “Take Ivy”’s limited print run in Japan made the odd cultural document roughly as coveted among fashion arbiters as 7-inch Japanese Pavement singles had been back in the indie rock heyday. “People spent years hunting down rare copies,” Trebay writes. “They traded them online for prices that reached into the thousands. They photocopied and distributed them in design studios like fashion samizdat”-only, you know, without the general strikes and troubling popular revolts that actual samizdat tended to promote.

Retailer turned designer Michael Bastian, likewise never at a loss for bombastic overstatement, characterizes the photo source as “more influential as a myth or Holy Grail that no one could their hands on” than as an actual reference tool. When Bastian broke into the business as a Ralph Lauren assistant, he recalls, his boss “was one of those people who passed ‘Take Ivy’ around in back alleys for a long time.”

But for all this rudderless fetishizing, “Take Ivy” seems to have served as a rather wan blueprint for fashion innovation in Japan, where designers adopted it as something other than a myth and a Grail. As Times fashion David Colman noted in a remarkably similar dispatch last summer

, “Ishizu was a kind of Ralph Lauren avant la letter”-churning out chinos and topsiders at the same time that the Japanese market for youth garb was made for Levi’s jeans and Red Wing books. As Trebay writes, the hotly coveted preppy look book-which is finally being issued stateside in a 45th anniversary edition by powerHouse Books-showcases shot after shot of “handsome young Ivy League men in slim-fitting flat-front khakis, madras Bermuda shorts, anoraks, blue button-down Oxford cloth shirts and… well, essentially all the stuff you’d see in a current J. Crew catalogue.”

Which makes the insatiable interest in the damn thing all that greater a mystery for the ages-to say nothing, of course, of the broader, never-ending preppy revival that “Take Ivy” has sparked since its first appearance. Trebay makes a half-hearted effort to account for the enduring appeal of this enormously influential yet content-challenged offering. “Is it just nostalgia? Is it the vision of a bygone world populated by young men who, as the writer Malcolm Gladwell once noted, were sometimes selected by admissions officers as much as on the basis of patrician beauty as an elevated I.Q.? Is it the fantasy of upper-class belonging, the one Ralph Lauren has parlayed into a multibillion-dollar empire?”

Well, not that last thing, it turns out-since social class can never determine any feature of American life, even one so self-evidently hegemonic as preppiness. “The preppy look now signifies little in terms of class,” Trebay concludes with palpable relief. “Everybody’s a preppy when all it takes to achieve the appearance of having descended from generations of Groton men is a flipped collar, a pair of Top-Siders and checkered shorts.” It’s mere coincidence, of course, that graduates of Princeton and Dartmouth-the clubbiest and preppiest schools going in the Northeast, both overstuffed with Groton punks-top the list of salaries earned by graduates of liberal-arts institutions, according to the most recent survey findings of PayScale.com. But a far better thing to suggest that the American class system is an empty conceit than to note that the fashion system might be.

After all, wouldn’t you rather our social hierarchies be felled in an instant by a upturned collar and a carefully chosen pair of shorts than to think that maybe, just maybe, the continual rediscovery of a rakish patrician “look” betrays a telling lack of imagination in an industry predicated on the continual marketing of fake novelty? That’s just not the sort of notion that Ralph Lauren would be caught dead trading in a back alley.

Chris Lehmann is wearing socks under his shoes.

“The name ‘Hurricane’ had originally been given to him on account of the impatient anticipation with which he approached the next shot. As he declined from his peak of the 1970s and early 1980s, and swapped the title of world champion for the more dubious sobriquet of ‘People’s Champion’, ‘Hurricane’ increasingly appeared as a reference to his destructive streak. Though he exhibited no prejudice against drugs, Higgins’s principal hobby was alcohol. When Oliver Reed offered him some Georgio Armani scent, he drank half a pint of it off pat. As for women, his habit of alternating violent rows with lachrymose apology afforded unending fodder for the tabloids.”
-Snooker champion Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins died this weekend at the age of 61. Higgins, says a colleague, “rewrote the book on misspent adulthood. He was a dreadful gambler and I cannot remember him winning one bet — he would go through his pockets and bet every single penny, and the evening would always finish with him asking ‘you could not lend me £50 for my train fare home?’ and you would obviously never see that again.”