Posts by Johanna Lewis

Pretend you’re just outside Tompkins Square Park. Enter the park on Avenue A, at 8th Street. Take the windy path through the park towards Avenue B. Okay, now sniff. What do you smell?

You smell dogs.

The Way it Is or Eurydice in the Avenues opens early morning summer in the Park. Three feckless dog walkers stand over the dead body of a girl in a polka-dot dress. Who else is going to find a dead body in Tompkins Square Park? Okay, drug-addicts, probably, but still. Dog walkers. Brilliant.

Permanent Vacation opens with a moving crowd of New Yorkers, still dressed '70s groovy. It might be a camera trick, but no one appears to be rushing. The music is slow, diffuse horn and bells. We meet 16-year-old Aloysious Christopher Parker, already dressed '80s rockabilly cool. His body is like a marionette's — all long limbs and loose joints. His voice is like an oboe, and his delivery is like slow air out of a tire. He dances to Earl Bostic's Up There in Orbit, on a toy phonograph, on the floor, in a narrow Lower East Side tenement room painted thickly yellow-white.

I went to high school in the East Village from 1983 to 1987. This might sound kind of punk rock. Unfortunately, I totally missed out on CBGB in the late Seventies (see also: Punking Out) and early Eighties. And let's face it, I didn't go inside any real club for most of the Eighties either — I was underage, and too busy studying for the SATs. But I remember how the outsides looked. The streets and lines. The cars, still squared off boats from the Seventies. Of course, three-card monte. And lots and lots of vacant lots. Dirty, over-painted apartment facades with broken front doorknobs. Vinyl miniskirts. Wanting to look like Debbie Harry, not Madonna.

Every morsel in The Manga Cookbook is so freaking cute and delicious looking I couldn’t decide what to cook. This kind of copious edible cuteness must be how the Bento box came to be. The bento is a combo of small treats stuffed together attractively in a box or tray. In fact, stuffing the tray is compulsory, as the bento is meant to be portable. If there’s even a little space in the box, contents will shift and the omotenashi (eating with the eyes) will be ruined. In any event, I was compelled to make a variety of adorable things:

Last night I made Lettuce Wrapped Beef 'n' Mushroom Stir-Fry, from Sam Stern’s Real Food Real Fast. My co-blogger, Anne Rouyer, says Sam Stern is the teenage Jaime Oliver. Like Jaime, he is physically adorable. Like Jaime, he is British. Also like Jaime, he writes cloying, chatty recipes for bland meals. Not so bland they can't be saved, but unmistakably, Britishly bland.

Last night I made Orange-Molasses Sticky Pork with Blasted String Beans from Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs. Naturally, I was intrigued by the word blasted. Blasted is nothing but roasted, it turns out. They say even bad advertising works, and the proof is that I still made this dish.

I learned to move a tablecloth without breaking anything. I did it with a can of soup, a thing of hairgel, and this book.