The farm-to-table dining trend’s inevitable conclusion

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 4:09 PM - 7 Comments

As imagined by Jessica Allen

Welcome to Traditional & Authentic—the restaurant that takes farm to table eating seriously, finally.  Please be sure to arrive for your three-month-old reservation at 3:30 am.  At 3:45 am, you’ll meet with our executive chef—the one who trained in New York, Dubai, Paris, Copenhagen and wherever El Bulli was—and together you’ll customize a menu that perfectly reflects who you are.

Afterwards, you’ll be outfitted in authentic overalls (made from Japanese denim) and rain boots, and be driven in the back of a traditional tractor-trailer to the barn for some one-on-one time with Darla. Continue…

Meli-Melo

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 11:50 PM - 4 Comments

A roundup of stuff I’ve written recently, here and there:

For Canadian Business, I interviewed Major Marc Dauphin, a military physician who was the last Canadian to head up the Role 3 hospital at Kandahar Airfield. It was a seriously fascinating chat, I wish we could have printed the entire conversation. Instead, you’ll have to be satisVirfied with this piece. 

That interview took place the day after I served as MC at the launch of Fawzia Koofi’s book in Toronto, which I wrote about on the blog.  I also got irritated with John Ibbitson’s suggestion that Stephen Harper has a coherent foreign policy, let alone something that could be elevated to the status of a doctrine.

For the print edition of Maclean’s, I wrote about Toronto’s war on fun, which was in many ways  just an excuse to grind a well-worn axe about the need to provide immigrants with the opportunity to properly integrate.  That said, all the evidence suggests that Canadian multiculturalism is doing just fine, despite what Muslim-baiters like Geert Wilders and his estate agents over at Sun Media want you to think.

Over at my other blog, I explained why I have no intention of voting for Dalton McGuinty. It has to do   with Virginia Postrel and  light bulbs.  By the way, did you know there’s been a measles outbreak in Massachusetts?

I also reviewed a book about Jay-Z, the business, man, and saw some very cool shorts at the disposable film festival. 

Dandy in the afterworld

By Andrew Potter - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 2:55 PM - 14 Comments

Post-Wildean British artist/writer/dandy Sebastian Horsley has died of an apparent heroin overdose. The good people at Q have reposted an interview Jian did with Horsley two years ago. It’s an amazing bit of performance art, from the very start, and almost everything out of Horsley’s mouth is quotable. I especially like the exchange that starts just after the six minute mark, when Jian asks why Horsley didn’t just put his memoir online for all to read. Horsley responds that ‘The internet is loser central, and it is basically replacing masturbation as a leisure activity.” Then comes this:

Q: You once said, “It’s better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.” What do you mean by that?

SH: Do you like me?

Q: I think I kind of like you.

SH: Well then I’ll tell you what I mean, my dear.

What follows is a gorgeous defence of live lived as an open book. Turn off the soccer for a few minutes and give it a listen.

Related reading: In Praise of Gossip.

Obama's authenticity trap

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 10:56 AM - 68 Comments

One of the more pointless aspects of the whole BP spill fiasco is the ongoing debate about whether Obama’s reaction to the whole thing has been appropriate. Has he shown enough anger? Too much anger? Has he been too cerebral? Too dispassionate?Too uncaring?

Please.  The assumption that what is required, more than anything else, is authenticity is one of the most pernicious aspects of our political discourse. Of course Obama had it coming, to some extent, since his whole brand is “authenticity”. But now he, and the public, are facing the double-edged nature of authenticity as the litmus of leadership: we think we want authenticity only until we see it:

An article by Julia Kirby in the HBR does a good job of highlighting just what is wrong with this whole approach to leadership. Here’s the problem:

In the current criticism of Obama, we’re seeing another form of double bind, at least as difficult to navigate. Today Show’s Matt Lauer found him frustratingly cerebral, but how would the general public have felt if he’d been visibly enraged? As one writer, William Jelani Cobb, told CNN: “It would have fed deeply into a pre-existing set of narratives about the angry black man.”

To see the trap in action, you don’t even have to play the race card:

Rousseau as Red Tory

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 3:32 PM - 16 Comments

All should read Jacob Levy’s Cato piece on Red Toryism. For obvious reasons, I really liked this part:

The claim that commercial modernity necessarily represents a time of mutual alienation, dissolution of traditional communal bonds, decline of virtue, and perpetually increasing wealth for the wealthy and poverty for the poor — that claim found one of its most profound and influential formulations in Rousseau’s work. In short, Rousseau has as good a claim to be the founder of Red Toryism and conservatism as anything else — and much better a claim than to being any kind of founder of liberalism.

Link.

Linkage

By Andrew Potter - Friday, December 4, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 10 Comments

1. The Tories spent double what Baird said they did wrapping a GO train in propaganda

2. The Obama government is trying to help John Yoo out

3. Out-of-control monkey uprising at Yale

4. Bereft of ideas, Coke brings back those annoying polar bears

5. Authenticity Watch: Ancient surfboards:

Chad Marshall, a surfer in Malibu, Calif., known for his flamboyant longboard riding, said: “I like the friction-free vibe. I like that it slots you in that sweet spot on the wave.”

Another draw is the link to the sport’s early Polynesian history at a time when the surfing life has become heavily commercialized, and surfboards have become commodified.

The alaia provides a stripped down, back-to-the-roots alternative. They are to surfing what the fixed gear is to cycling or the bow and arrow are to hunting…

Authenticity Watch: The Hamptons

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 3:03 PM - 10 Comments

Obviously, I’m a sucker for stories that explore the subtle (and not-so) mechanisms of status display, especially when that display masquerades as a quest not for status but for the authentic. That kind of story is the meat-and-two-veg of the New York Times style section, and today’s is great.

It’s summer, so the piece is about the Hamptons of course. How do the long-time locals secretly signal to one another, behind the backs of the tourists and the arrivistes? By their t-shirts, naturally. Anyone from Jersey can pick up a MONTAUK t-shirt along main street, but there’s only one place you can find a Ditch Witch shirt — out of the back of a car beside an obscure food truck:

It signals localism, but a “friendly localism,” said Ms. Adams, who cooked for years at restaurants in East Hampton and Montauk before parking her truck in the sand. It suggests that the wearer is in on something, has the key to what Tracy Feith, the surfer and designer who operates a shop at the Surf Lodge in Montauk, called “the authenticity everyone’s trying to find in the marketplace.”

But now the Times has gone and ruined it. I wonder if the uproar from the Hamptonites will lead the Times to “unpublish” this, just like they unpublished their story about the secret climbing gym in Brooklyn?

Authenticity Watch: Street cred version

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 2 Comments

 Aspiring Florida rapper Steven Gilmore felt he needed a bit of OG cred to kickstart his singing career. So he robbed a restaurant, then tried to stick up a convenience store with a BB gun. But the store clerk fought back and took a BB in the forehead. Gilmore took off empty handed, making his getaway on a moped driven by a 16 year-old accomplice. 

Gilmore is now in jail facing multiple felony charges. Mission accomplished, it would seem. 

via TSG.

Up for air

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, February 28, 2009 at 12:34 PM - 0 Comments

Greetings, PotterGoldsters:

Some of you might have noticed that my blogging has been exceedingly light over the past few months; probably the lightest period of blogging since I started blogging for This Magazine seven years ago.

There was a reason for it: I’ve had a long-outstanding book due for a publisher in Canada and the US, a project on the culture of authenticity and the modern search for meaning. I submitted the manuscript yesterday, thanks to my fantastic agent, encouragement from my editors and — it has to be conceded — a fairly significant threat. As the saying goes, it isn’t that I work best under pressure; I work only under pressure.

Anyway, there is lots more work to be done before the book sees the light of day, but I should now be able to find time to blog. More importantly, I should be able to find time to read and think about things to blog about.

On thing I’ve wanted to do for a while is start a book club on this blog. Joe Heath has a book coming out very soon that I’m really excited about. Maybe we’ll read that first.

Meanwhile, see you all Monday.

Authenticity Watch: Organic Mattresses

By Andrew Potter - Friday, January 16, 2009 at 12:08 AM - 5 Comments

You have to hand it to the New York Times: With Americans facing what is shaping up to be the worst economic downturns in decades, they still duty-bound to give their readers this sort of stuff:

The question of what’s really in a mattress is important, at least as some people see it, because, they believe, any product made with synthetic materials carries potential health risks. “You spend a third of your life in bed,” said Debra Lynn Dadd, an author and blogger in Clearwater, Fla., who has been writing about toxic substances in household products for 25 years. “If you are interested in things like organic food and natural beauty products,” she added, “you should realize that you’re actually getting a greater exposure to toxic chemicals in your bed than anywhere else.”

 

Authenticity Watch: The Heartland

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 11:09 PM - 9 Comments

Thomas Frank’s column in today’s WSJ does a good job of setting up my piece in the print edition of Maclean’s out tomorrow. Here’s Frank:

Small town people, Mrs. Palin went on, are “the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food and run our factories and fight our wars.” They are authentic; they are noble, and they are her own: “I grew up with those people.”

link

Jesse's Gift

By John Parisella - Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 4:01 PM - 0 Comments

A big controversy surfaced yesterday over Jesse Jackson’s comment—heard on a ‘hot mic’—while being interviewed by Fox News. According to Jackson, Senator Obama appears elitist and seems to “talk down” to African Americans. It is clear that old-line civil rights leaders such as Jackson have a degree of discomfort with the Obama message.

Just recently, in a Father’s Day speech, Senator Obama criticized the African American community for tolerating too many absent fathers and not putting enough emphasis on education and family values. It was a controversial, yet audacious speech but it contrasted with the more traditional rhetoric of civil rights leaders. This is why it’s been said that Obama transcends race because he sounds more modern and more in tune with today’s reality. Back in the 1960′s, 70′s and 80′s, it was normal that black leaders talk about discrimination and the lack of equal opportunities because we were still coming to grips with the revolutionary changes that had gradually emerged since the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on segregated schools. Jesse Jackson was a candidate for the Presidency of the United States both in 1984 and 1988 where this rhetoric ruled the day among African Americans. But his candidacy was unsuccessful because he was not seen to be unifying Americans.

Continue…

'Nilla like me

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 8:57 AM - 0 Comments

Let’s face it, for all his popularity with regular black people, B-Rock was never going to win the Black Authenticity game with guys like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Whatever it was that Jackson said about BHO in the tape that Fox didn’t play (was it the N-word?) the implication of the whole exchange is clear: Obama is guilty of speaking white to blacks. Because for the gatekeepers of what it means to be authentically black in the US (and this includes liberal whites like Ralph Nader) there are some things you are supposed to say, some poses you are obliged to adopt in order to be considered black. In his 2003 book Authentically Black, the linguistics professor John McWhorter writes that “a tacit sense reigns among a great many black Americans today that the ‘authentic’ black person stresses personal achievement and strength in private, but dutifully takes on the mantle of victimhood as a public face.”

BHO’s problem is not that he represents a post-partisan, post-racial politics, it is that he’s trying to bring about a change in America’s discourse on race while running as a black man who refuses to play the victim. For professional blacks like Jesse Jackson, that just means that he’s little more than a younger, more attractive Bill Cosby.

After BHO’s big speech on race a few months ago, the best thing I read was an opinion piece in the wsj suggesting that the boldest thing he could have done was run as a white man. In addition to being a profound challenge to one of America’s longest-standing assumptions about blackness (the one-drop rule, more or less), it would have given him an easy riposte to the Ralph Naders and Jesse Jacksons who accuse him of talking white.

“Why of course, ” he could have replied. “I am white”.

Authenticity Watch: Kingsely Amis

By Andrew Potter - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 10:49 PM - 0 Comments

The deafness that we have to our own aesthetic prejudices and biases is closely analogous to our deafness to our own accent. Just as each person thinks the way he speaks is perfectly natural — it’s other people who have funny accents — we all believe that our own judgments about what is ugly or beautiful, delicious or disgusting, reflects real properties in the world. It is other people whose tastes are so obviously conditioned by their culture or their social class.

That’s from my column in the print edition of this week’s Maclean’s…

Authenticity Watch: Harlem

By Andrew Potter - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 8:25 AM - 0 Comments

I spent a good chunk of the past two years living part-ish time in Harlem, in a brownstone at the corner of 128th and Madison. And so it was with a mixture of titillation and sadness that I read of the Memorial day excitement that saw six teenagers shot on Lenox avenue between 127th and 129th; that is, two blocks away.

At its best, Harlem is an utterly magical place, the locus of the best that urban (i.e. black) American culture has to offer. The next time you’re in New York, take the 4/5 to 125th; if you’re lucky, “the captain”, a busker with the drum kit will be there, and he’ll be playing a slow shuffle while six year old boys breakdance on the platform in front of him. Continue…