Your favorite chefs are from New Jersey; or, more shameless Garden State flackage

Massive thanks to fellow Blogspotters Amuse-Biatch for linking to this article in the September New Jersey Monthly -- not a journal I normally peruse unless I'm visiting the 'rents and have read every Gourmet in the place.

So, who hails from the same state as me?

1. Anthony Bourdain, Leonia: You know his badass attitude can only come from a state whose official song almost was "Born to Run."


2. David Burke, Hazlet: Snooty restaurants from a nonsnooty background.


3. Tom Colicchio, Elizabeth: quote: "there's nothing on earth like fresh Jersey tomatoes and corn." Amen!


4. David Drake, Madison: I am sure he is a fine chef, but his restaurant is in New Jersey. He needs to hit the road. See the song referenced in #1.


5. Alice Waters, Chatham: So often I forget that Alice Waters, the patroness of the American food revolution, grew up in my home state. And here she says she grew up getting ice cream at Gruning's! Excuse me while I have a nostalgic moment.

New Jersey, represent! Yet more evidence that much that is good and strong grows up in New Jersey, then gets the hell out to share with the rest of the universe.

Photo of Alice Waters taken June 2007, from David Sifry's photostream via Flickr.

Another New Jersey Moment

On Saturday Night Live last night, host Zach Braff, South Orange native (and, unless I am misremembering, a graduate of Columbia H.S. in Maplewood), gave a shout out to the Campus Sub Shop in South Orange -- home of an excellent cheesesteak (probably the first one I ever experienced).

Hey, it's just a sub shop, but of these moments is New Jersey lore made, and Braff sent up the Garden State amusingly, and -- more to the point -- ironically, as he sang to the tune of Long Island native Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind."

Which reminds me of the time when, in high school, my brother walked into the Seton Hall gym, only to find the aforementioned Billy Joel at the piano doing a sound check for his concert that evening. And what was Billy Joel singing, you ask. Why, he was singing Bruce Springsteen's New Jersey anthem "Born to Run."

Only in New Jersey, kiddies, only in New Jersey.

"Pale barbarian rock dude" at the Wiltern: Another triumph for the Garden State

For someone who doesn't own any Misfits albums, at least not that I can locate at this time, I sure am becoming a quasifan of New Jersey native Glenn Danzig. I guess I'm a fan more of his essence, his Glenndanzigness, than of his actual performances. For me, he just has to BE.

However, he makes his living playing music. (Gotta keep that house up.) So what a delight it was for me to read today's review by Steve Appleford in the LA Times of Danzig's concert with his current band at the Wiltern LG last night. "Pale barbarian rock dude," Appleford calls him, "stomping across the stage mucho-macho like" (maybe he's been lifting...bricks).

Bravo, Glenn! The accompanying photo was rather fetching (paleness works on stage; he's a Goth, after all) but wasn't on the website. Use your imagination.

Not so fast with those bricks...

Well, I guess it was too good to be true. Or, if not good, then too much of a sign of progress at the Glenn Danzig Haunted House. Remember the bricks I saw the guys loading off about a week and a half ago? While the guys and their pickup may have taken a few bricks, the big neatish pile is still in Glenn Danzig's front yard.

Why, oh why? Let's speculate.

1. Glenn still intends to build a patio one of these days.
2. Yes, the bricks will be ballast, but the ship hasn't been built yet. It's coming in. Soon.
3. If the bricks were gone, he'd miss them.
4. Too much change at one time is more than Glenn can handle.

Personally, I vote for #4. Ya know, you come from Jersey, you get used to things a certain way, even here in Sunny California, and then people (and who the hell are they?) want you to move your bricks. Sheesh!

Don't worry, Glenn. Los Feliz accepts you, your fine haunted house (the overgrowth is doing really well!) AND your bricks, wherever you choose to keep them.

Glenn Danzig moves his bricks

On Franklin Avenue in Los Feliz, in between Vermont and Hillhurst, on the south side of the street, stands the Haunted House of Glenn Danzig. (I can't take credit for the name; for that, see Losanjealous.) The house isn't quite the Munsters mansion, but it's close in its decrepitude; it's totally grown over with vines and flowering plants, and encircled by a cast iron fence with spikes.

Sounds gothic and scary, although usually the Jaguar of Lodi, New Jersey native Glenn Danzig is parked outside, and in fact, the flowering plants are attractive. Not everybody has to have a lawn, and just growing up in New Jersey, where lawns are an obsession, is reason enough to let your house go. For me, anyway.

In the five years I've lived in Los Feliz, there has been a large pile of bricks on the dead grass in Danzig's front lawn. The first time I saw them, I thought, ooh, a patio. But the stack stayed there, not moving, not being built into anything.

Suddenly, things are different. Late last week I was moseying by, heading to Alcove for afternoon snacks, when what did I see but Glenn Danzig himself, all pasty-faced and in black, directing two guys with a mini pickup who were....loading the bricks into the back of their truck. I did NOT call out, "way to go, Glenn," or even, "Garden State, represent!" but slithered quietly by.

I figure I have to go back this week and see if the bricks are gone. Maybe he just had them moved around the yard.

Jon Stewart on September 28

Of course, it makes sense that Jon Stewart would interview former Governor of New Jersey Jim McGreevey, given McG's book and the previous closet-induced kerfuffle. But did anyone besides me notice that McG is the third former Governor of the Garden State that Stewart has interviewed? He had Tom Kean on a while back (Stewart confessed that he worked in the State House in Trenton during Kean's administration, when--full disclosure--I worked for a major state cultural institution, and thus had truck with the Governor's office), and Christine Todd Whitman, as well (best moment was when he said to Whitman: your successor [McG] resigned under somewhat complicated circumstances...is there something you'd like to confess to us?).

New Jersey is a prime source of entertaining political figures...why not more entertainment from the Garden State? Ugly Betty is set in Queens, as was, famously, All in the Family and various other shows. You could, for example, set a sitcom in Hoboken in the 1970s and call it My Building's on Fire. Or bring back the state tourism slogan from the Kean administration, when the patrician-sounding, r-dropping Governor intoned on endless TV commercials, "New Chuhsey and you--Puhfect togethuh."

Clerks II: True love in New Jersey

No, not the romantic kind. The kind between buddy and buddy, between Randall and Dante, the clerks, played by Jeff Anderson and Brian O'Halloran, who are back in slightly more evolved form (well, sort of) in Clerks II.

Randall still says all the outrageous and offensive things that Dante would never say, and he has some real doozies in this sequel, particularly a running joke in which he confuses two famous women in history. Dante expresses outrage, and always takes the moral high road. He's the reliable one. But he's also the one who gives in and goes along before Randall does, and in this film, Randall is there to save his pal at the very last minute. Rosario Dawson more than holds her own as a woman who's another buddy to Dante--no, not the romantic kind, but maybe just the kind he needs.

A go-cart scene to the song "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" (used in the soundtrack of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the ur-buddy movie) lampoons the guy-bonding genre. But when push comes to shove--after the donkey that so offended the critic Joel Siegel, who ought to think twice before his next fit of high dudgeon--Randall comes through for his friend, in as he would say, "a totally heterosexual way."

In between, there is raunch and smartass talk galore, much of it in New Jersey dialect. New Jersey is my native state (I almost wrote "land,") and I have long held that "fuckin' nuts," along with the related two-word phrase "waddya, nuts?" is exclusive to the Garden State. As is the word "chud." (Look up the film.) Kevin Smith's characters speak in a way that's unique to his films: each always seems to be explaining his or her convoluted logic without really understanding it. And they use what to the rest of us might seem like vocabulary words: "imperative" (Dante), "nomenclature" (Randall), and "chaos incarnate" (Dante talking about Randall).

Not to go on too long about my native state, but this film sums up the Jersey ethos: feistiness, determination, creative use of bad language, and the sense that time is passing and maybe it's better elsewhere (not for nothing did someone propose making "Born to Run" the state song). Anderson and O'Halloran, both Jersey natives, embody the what-the-hell spirit that every Jerseyan has. And for someone who comes from across the river, namely NYC, Rosario Dawson does a damn good impression of a (I shudder to use the hackneyed phrase) Jersey girl.

Many traditional buddy pictures are also road pictures; think Butch Cassidy or Easy Rider. These buddies don't go anywhere, much. And I love them all the more for it. Clerks II could easily offend the self-righteous. But the film is not for them....and chances are they won't see it.