Rick's June Tirade
Great Affectations
Last weekend I had the pleasure of dining out at one of
the more fashionable restaurants in New Brunswick, New
Jersey, the city where I was born and grew to well-nourished
manhood. This noisy college town on the banks of the Raritan
has undergone a startling transformation since my student
days, when the most popular eating-house was a
sinister-looking sub shop known affectionately as
"Greasy Tony's."
Today Tony's is gone, a casualty of gentrification and
the higher culinary consciousness that has swept our
republic like a balsamic vinaigrette tornado. Sprouting in
its place here and throughout the land are the nouvelle
eateries that cater to the tastes of the gastroeconomic
elite. Such establishments claim to represent something
called "New American Cuisine," though their
rarefied risottos, pampered polentas and exotic oils tend to
suggest Italian cooking as interpreted by Italian fashion
designers. This new cuisine is kind of young, kind of now,
kind of slim and fussy. The fact is, I'm beginning to
suspect that our food might be gay. I have no objection to
its offbeat inclinations, but I'd still rather not know what
it was doing before it reached my table.
That evening in New Brunswick, we treated ourselves to a
delicately decadent high-fashion feast. My friend Anne D.
started with the arugula-and-peppered-sheep's-cheese salad.
When she asked our waiter if there would be enough arugula
to share with her tablemates, he advised her that the salad
was "essentially a celebration of the cheese." I
imagined a salad festooned with miniature noisemakers and
crepe-paper streamers, but it was merely a slab of cheese
garnished with a few verdant wisps of vegetation. The
revelers must have fled.
For my own appetizer I ordered the layered lamb ravioli,
which turned out to be a single oversized raviolus
(raviolum? raviolo? I've never had occasion to use
"ravioli" in the singular until now). It was a
memorably good specimen, a bit overgarlicked for my taste
but otherwise savory and almost rugged in texture -- not at
all the toothpaste-filled concoction that passes for ravioli
in many such restaurants. And unlike the
arugula-and-peppered-sheep's-cheese salad, it was hefty
enough to share with a few other hearty eaters around the
table. The same couldn't be said for the avocado-lobster
cake on a calamari bed; the crustacean centerpiece of that
dish appeared to be roughly the size of a hummingbird fillet
or a grape, whichever is smaller. A hungry Maine fisherman
would have looked right past it while searching under the
tangle of tentacles for the elusive cake. I could almost
hear the incredulous cries of "Wheah's the
lawbstah?" Rather than have to explain, I casually
dispatched it myself in a single bite while nobody was
looking.
Was it a fine meal, all in all? I confess that it was --
almost as fine as the company gathered around the table. Was
it also a pretentious and fundamentally silly meal? Yes, and
ten times yes again!
So many of the better American restaurants today are
temples consecrated to the nameless but much-venerated god
of social status. We're looking at the same minor deity who
smiles warmly upon Lexus sedans with window stickers from
Ivy League schools... who blesses us when we imbibe
California boutique wines or single-malt Scotches... who
causes tract mansions with Palladian windows to proliferate
across countless acres of abandoned farmland. It makes no
difference whether the devotees are old-guard Republican
country clubbers or nouvelle-hip restaurant aficionados;
they pray to the same god.
A significant chunk of American society has gone upscale
in its tastes and identity, something that has never
happened before in Yankee Land. You could almost call it a
mass movement, possibly the first elitist mass movement in
history. More of us than ever have the money to indulge in
the telltale little luxuries that lift us above those OTHER
masses. We'd rather eat our tuna fresh than canned,
preferably pan-seared and anise-encrusted; we'd rather pay
for bottled water than quaff the humble stuff that flows
abundantly from our kitchen taps. When we sprinkle vinegar
onto our arugula, we want to see decorative twigs floating
in the bottle. Not that there's anything wrong with that,
but it's beginning to seem a little -- je ne sais quoi, what
is the word in English -- shall we say AFFECTED?
How did it all get so confoundedly out of hand, this
appetite for affectation -- especially in a nation built by
unpretentious yeomen like Daniel Boone and Lyndon B.
Johnson? We Americans used to be a ragtag race of
backwoodsmen, bear hunters, cowboys, carnival barkers and
banjo pickers, fond of chewing-tobacco and honest moonshine.
Our idea of luxury was a polished brass spittoon. Can you
imagine Davy Crockett ordering porcini-risotto cakes with
wilted spinach? Maybe Will Rogers never met a man he didn't
like, but would he like any dish that featured a salmon-dill
cream sauce? When did we as a nation start to eat capers?
I suspect it's a Baby Boomer thing. No longer content
with the meat loaf and split-level homes that many of us
grew up with, we scrapped our parents' mundane postwar
tastes in favor of something more refined and sophisticated,
more sensuous, more vaguely European. After college, in
fact, many of us roamed through Europe, wide-eyed and
equipped with two-month rail passes. What we saw there
changed our notion of civilized living. After experiencing a
double espresso at a Venetian cafe, we couldn't go back to
Sanka. After sampling radicchio and frisee, we began to
judge people by their preference in lettuce.
Baby Boomers might be responsible for the current wave of
trendy Eurocuisine, but the food is only the latest
manifestation of a prehistoric impulse. Great affectations
have always been with us. They're as ancient as the blowfish
that inflate themselves to appear more formidable to their
foes. They're as thoroughly innate as the flamboyant mating
rituals of peacocks and prairie chickens. Successful
affectation convinces our potential adversaries (as well as
prospective partners) that we're higher on the food chain
than they suspected. We puff ourselves up and our enemies
back off; we display some fancy feathers and our dates fall
for the bait. As a result, we're more likely to find a
genetically desirable mate and less likely to end up as
dinner.
The history of human affectation could fill a book longer
than fifty-two issues of "The New Yorker."
Upper-class Egyptians wore eye make-up that gave them the
appearance of exotic cats, which apparently worked better
for them than trying to look like jackals or ibises.
Well-to-do Romans made sure their sons learned Greek from
their slaves, in the hope that something of the older
civilization would rub off on them like so much golden
dandruff. Fashionable nineteenth-century Russians addressed
each other in French; as for the French themselves, they
became the definitive sourcebook for ninety percent of all
European affectations from the Enlightenment onward. Back in
the eighteenth century, English fops became walking
caricatures of French aristocrats, with their ornamental
wigs and powdered faces, their adhesive beauty marks and
silky speech. They were the Liberaces of their day, except
that they didn't wink at their audience. Like today's
black-clad cafe dwellers, they honestly believed themselves
to be the apex of cool.
Traditional affectation tends to ape the upper classes.
New money has always aspired to the status of old money, and
usually not with immediate success. (Read Moliere's
"The Bourgeois Gentleman," still dead-on about
nouveau-riche pretensions and anxieties after three
centuries. For that matter, read Trimalchio's Feast from
"The Satyricon," which is sixteen hundred years
older and still worth a chuckle at the expense of
taste-impaired tycoons.) A century ago, in America's Gilded
Age, it took at least one or two generations for the
families of oilmen and dry-goods moguls to emerge as the
social potentates of their day. If they could successfully
imitate the manners of their betters -- carefully rolling
their R's and calling each other "old sport" --
they might speed their acceptance by as much as a decade.
But as the old elites toppled and gave way to new elites
over the past century, we had to revise our affectations
accordingly. Modernism discarded the genteel gingham and
gingerbread of the Victorians, only to replace them with its
own austere and dictatorial set of affectations. Hemingway
wrote in an affectedly simple style. "And" was his
favorite word out of all the tens of thousands available to
him in Webster's; he used it again and again in an effort to
simulate stark biblical cadences and sometimes it was good
and sometimes it was phony. Gertrude Stein mesmerized an
entire generation of artists with her special brand of
verbal flummery, aided by a partner who cleverly served
hallucinogenic brownies. Picasso and his fellow scrawlers
played into the hands of an insufferably pretentious
cultural elite of art critics and scholars, whose elaborate
rationalizations of Cubist and Abstract Expressionist
squiggles recall the cooings of the townspeople over the
Emperor's new clothes.
New elites continued to emerge like volcanic islands; new
affectations grew upon their slopes like ornate lichens. In
the 1950s we pretended to dig jazz and Existentialism; black
turtlenecks became the affectation of choice for aspiring
hipsters. The '60s brought a cleansing wave of social
change; the downtrodden became the uptrodden; middle class
kids got scraggly and posed as latter-day folk bards. Since
then we've witnessed an onslaught of affectations ranging
from the retro-posturing of the late J. Peterman catalog to
sitcom-inspired sarcasm ("I don't THINK so!") to
the drop-dead cool of pierced tongues and teats. The
language of youth -- what is slang, after all, but verbal
affectation? -- is constantly mutating as each succeeding
generation revels in its brief moment of cultural potency.
You wonder how long quirky little expressions like
"Duh!" will be with us before they're consigned to
the linguistic compost heap with a sniffy "That's SO
six months ago!"
Now, with the rise of the technogeeks to the top rung, we
have to endure a whole new set of affectations specific to
the Information Age: the omnipresent $500 electronic PDAs
that work ALMOST as efficiently as $40 paper-and-leather
organizers... the laptop computers ritually exposed on plane
flights... the beepers and cell phones that proclaim the
bearer's importance by going off unexpectedly at movies and
funerals.
The peculiar affectations of yuppies stir my cynical
juices because they span at least four separate (and equally
obnoxious) worlds of artifice: old-guard class snobbery,
new-money lust for status symbols, snide pop-culture
insiderism and rabid technomania. Anyone who quotes
"Seinfeld" while talking on a cell phone in a
Mercedes en route to his five-year-old's private day-school
is just asking for it.
So far you've heard me declaim on the affectations of
nouvelle eateries, Baby Boomers, blowfish and prairie
chickens, ancient Egyptians and Romans, the French,
eighteenth-century British dandies, the nouveau-riche,
Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, art critics, beatniks,
folkies, J. Peterman, sitcoms, twenty-somethings and
technogeeks armed with all manner of portable electronic
appliances. I've taken my usual potshot at smug and slithery
yuppies. And I've barely cleared my throat: I haven't even
mentioned Calvin Klein ads, white blues bands, drinkers of
latte, Stephen Sondheim musicals, New-Age holistic gurus,
"The Blair Witch Project" or devotees of
microbrewed raspberry wheat beer.
But who am I to rail against affectation, with my
willfully archaic prose style, my trademark archness and
penchant for rhetorical whimsy? Is not my very cynicism an
affectation calculated to win sympathetic huzzahs from the
disgruntled and disaffected? Who today uses words like
"huzzah," especially in the plural? Cynic, heal
thyself! At the very least I should acquire a smiling
tolerance for other people's affectations, even if they're
more blatantly pathetic than mine. We're all just blowfish
trying not to be eaten before our time. What could be more
human?
So sit me down in the nearest food boutique, fill my
plate with fennel-encrusted pan-seared tilapia, sprinkle it
with capers and wasabi-leek sauce. Bring on that celebratory
arugula-and-peppered-sheep's-cheese salad, but go easy on
the balsamic vinaigrette. And by all means give me a glass
of the Coastal Cabernet, with its spicy vanilla nose, fleshy
tannins and velvety fruit notes reminiscent of wild
blackberries and currants. I think I could use a drink.
