#in particular it starts out as a sort of spiral in its intersections but as they start trying to make loops go by faster and loop faster

[arolesbianism]

I <3 making hcs abt how time works in different stories isat is a spiraling arrow oni is line spaghetti and time travel in oni is closer to legitimate time travel than isat. Source: just trust me bro

[possibilistfanfiction]

hey jude!!! just read ur last anon abt being nb and wondered if u could talk abt ur own gender experience?

well basically i didnt grow up in a very open household, like rly Zero discussion of gender, so i know i Experienced gender entirely but i played almost exclusively with the boys in my class until probably grade 6 or 7, & at puberty, even tho i was a better athlete than most boys in my class still, i started hanging out with girls more, at recess, etc. i was always into androgyny, even if i had no idea (& i didn’t) what that was—i liked some femme things, absolutely, but i wanted nothing to do w skirts or pretty shoes. i wanted to be in adidas running sneakers 24/7 if i could help it, & i wore a uniform to school w the option of a skirt/pants, & im p sure i always wore pants. at the time this, to me, seemed more functional, & it was, but it was also, as i can understand now, something that made me feel Less like a girl, although not at all like a boy.

when i was older, 12, 13, 14, my parents wanted me to dress nicer, & i was v much into like american eagle shit, although by mid hs i was into some vintage stuff. one rly big odd style influence for me was mia wasikowksa in this weird movie called restless bc it was this v soft femme androgyny & i think for me this kind of gender expression became very important to see & understand. it wasn’t that she didn’t look like a girl, or that she wasn’t a girl, but she also sometimes looked like a boy, or wore boys clothes, but she wasn’t butch. idk this movie sent me for a loop honestly lol. 

& obviously my understanding of gender expression didn’t correlate (& doesn’t correlate!) w so many gender identities, & “passing” is extremely harmful as a notion, etc. but when i was younger my understanding of gender & sexuality was very limited & began to expand when i saw very femme but still andro ppl, even tho i couldn’t articulate it at the time. 

when i was a teenager i knew i didnt want to rly have a single thing to do w any boy, which made me sure i was a lesbian bc thats the only narrative i’d rly known abt queerness, or queer women, or even queer ppl who presented as femme. there werent any out lesbians at my school (no fucking way), & the only out queer kid at all was a white gay guy a year older than me, who was popular in the way white gay boys can be popular in high school. but i read voraciously, was fascinated by the crossdressing in shakespeare (paris in the merchant of venice was a particular fixation of mine?) & anyway. i knew i was queer, i knew i liked girls, & i knew i was outrageously uncomfortable w my body, particularly my breasts. for a long time i thought this was because i was ashamed of my sexuality, when i came to sort of understand that, but ofc now i know abt dysmorphia & dysphoria, so yknow. knowledge.

when i went to college i came out big time, & it became very important to me to both be queer & look sort of queer but not queer enough to be Queer—i wanted ppl to be like ‘maybe into girls, but maybe straight.’ as im sure many of us know, this was a lot of internalized shame abt a lot of things, so that sucks. however, i cut my hair which was like the first comfortable thing i had done for my appearance in a v long time, & also smth which my parents hated & i did anyway. i wore a Lot of rly femme stuff bc they hated it tho? so this was all v confusing for me bc my parents are v homophobic, & here i was in college starting to read queer theory & gender theory & falling in love w like. the most beautiful, brilliant girl, & also spiraling into a mixed episode after i got diagnosed w bipolar I, which sort of put everything else on the backburner for a year. 

eventually tho i sorted that out (as much as u can sort smth like that out) & i started to rly pay attention to androgyny. i went to europe & i think theres a whole bunch of nuances to fashion that exist there that certainly arent here, & i spent a winter in warsaw so there were aspects to fashion & expression there that were entirely abt functionality, which i was v attracted to. in college, as well, & especially after college, gender became smth i was v much invested in bc i was (& absolutely am) a feminist, so my place in the canon & zeitgeist was one as a queer female writer. it was so so central to who i was, & what i was writing abt. every single thing i wrote in college was in some way a balm, some sort of piece abt myself, learning abt trauma & the body. sorting through a lot of hurt. i could write a theory piece abt elizabeth bishop & reading it back now i know it was also abt me, that kinda stuff.

when i went to toronto i rly rly started being invested in looking critically at gender & my experience of it bc being read as a woman was smth that was grating on me, even tho i had identified as woman for so long, & had no desire at all to transition. i know 100% i am not a trans man, so that was confusing for a long time because i sort of knew there was a space between but it was very hard to conceptualize. eventually i sort of came to understand gender is a color wheel where cis boys are blue & cis women are pink & then theres literally a ton of other colors out there, so yknow. lots of different experiences of gender. some days i feel much more strongly like i identify w women (in mostly political situations, it matters to me to be read as “female” sometimes bc rights for ppl w vaginas AND trans women are FUCKED UP in so many places). some days i hate the idea of identifying as a woman. i also never want to identify as a man. so when i was in toronto i rly started to know a LOT of queer ppl w so many different expressions of gender. & we were all young & lovely & open & fucked up & we would get fucked up but we would also go read together in the park & wander around alleys in the snow & like. there’s a Muchness to toronto that i experienced that helped me, personally, understand these intersections between my own sexuality & gender & expression as much more than just a gay woman who isn’t butch & isn’t femme. i was rly lucky to become part of a community that identified as Queer, & so i became v much understanding of these different aspects of my own identity that fell outside of binary—my sexuality, my gender. Queerness is a vital & profound thing to me & i was rly able (& so fortunate) to have a close friend group of mostly queer ppl & then a few of the actual literally most incredible allies i’ve ever known & will ever know. 

so then from there i just rly kinda thought abt things & like i got a binder & stuff in TO but rly started to evaluate my dysmorphia & dysphoria (i had struggled really badly w an eating disorder in/post college) & was able to sort out that so much of it had to do w feeling uncomfortable in the way my body was read in the world. & that will always happen bc i LOVE makeup & i have a “feminine” voice & sometimes i love skirts & i shave my legs bc i like how it feels sometimes & i dont ever want to go on T—none of these things make anyone ANY gender, but ofc theyre coded as “female.” but i’m learning to just yknow educate where i can & take a lot of solace in the community of ppl i have fostered who support & understand my Being. i’ve also allowed myself to be invested in aesthetics & fashion & how much a role that plays bc like. yah fuck Yah i look cool shit bc my friends love it & absolutely i wanna wear the same vans maia mitchell has & i want a melodrama hoodie & i LOVE local toronto designers & their angsty patches abt sad songs & whiskey but i love fashion born out of histories that is connected to smth i can understand, like queer punk movements, or smth my friends & i share, like blundstones (which are gender neutral, which is cool). i’m fascinated in how ppl express their Selves, & we are so unfortunately Finite in our bodies in the sense that that’s rly how the world, in our day to day interactions, processes who & what we are. so i invest in the care of mine by trying to listen to it, trying to make it comfortable—& clothing is a huge thing that can do that. also its fun so anyone who thinks loving (ethical, cool) fashion is vain can eat my ass

anyway lmao now i have a p decent sense, atm at least, of what makes my body its most comfortable (even if that is v far from Comfortable at times). i love my tattoos, & i basically never rly want long hair again i’m p sure, & i love makeup, & if i could wear vans or blundstones every day for the entirety of my life at this point that would be incredible. those are easy things, & i try to allow my body, in its cultural place, to have access to them as much as possible, which is so important to me in a sense of having access to a physical space that matches my mental space of gender identity. politically sometimes i feel v v much a “woman” in terms of my lived experience, & i allow that of myself as well. sometimes when i write it’s important to me that my poetry be read as a queer person but also someone who is culturally coded as a woman, bc those are still always central concerns of my work—the trauma, the power there. but day to day i’m mostly happy spending my time obsessing over other things, like what to call this new genre of music halsey & lorde are making, or why my dog stevie is a Fanatic when it comes to ice cubes. ive come to enough terms w my gender, & my sexuality—& the expression thereof—that unless someone is talking abt gender, or someone asks me a question, it’s not smth that is constantly on my mind, which is. Nice. its so nice lol. 

also i would like to point out that i know my experience being non binary is rly rly white & western in so many ways & i get that. my cultural experience of non binary gender is also v much this like. ive felt frustrated before but never in my life have i felt scared to be non-binary while i was like out & abt in the world, bc i still pass as a cis white woman literally everywhere all the time (which has its pros & cons but like, still, a lot of privilege). so i do try to keep all of that in mind as well when i try to center myself & all that jazz

& who tf knows where all of that will take me. i feel like, bc ive learned to listen to my body & my brain so much better than i did when i was younger—even when they might hate themselves—i am so much better at filling up a space in the world that occupies smth healthy. which is not smth i take lightly, & i’m also so open to changes, as long as they feel good & beneficial & true. which is sort of new for me. who knows man ur mid twenties are a wild ride 

[thiswillbereportedtomanagement]

GQ's Best New Restaurants in America, 2018Every January, just after new year's, I set out across America in search of what we at GQ call the Perfect Night Out. What does that mean? Well, that's a good question. The easy part of the answer is that I'm looking for superlative restaurants that have opened in the past 12 to 18 months, the places we deem the best newcomers in the land. What makes them “perfect” is more complicated, and figuring that out for myself anew is, in some ways, precisely the purpose of each year's travel. I could give you a list of traits that the new restaurants I love nearly always display: ambition, artistry, heart, style, humor, familiarity, surprise, comfort, conscientiousness, craft—in addition to the more traditional restaurant qualities through which those are filtered, like deliciousness, hospitality, value, service, design, and so on. But the exact way in which any number of those will come together in a particular space, on a particular night, in a way that makes you say, “This. This is the only place in the world I want to be eating right now”—that remains something of a wonderful mystery.Which is what gave me hope in a year that provided abundant reasons to be depressed about dining out, even to wonder whether restaurants should still exist at all. There have been times when it's seemed that behind every inviting dining room lies, as Boston Globe critic Devra First memorably put it, “a Hieronymus Bosch tableau of struggling operators, lascivious chefs, and broke staffers.” To those who believe the only answer is to burn it all down, the 13 new restaurants in which I enjoyed this year's Perfect Nights Out—not to mention dozens of others that offered wonderful moments and meals—are, to my mind, the best argument for why restaurant culture is worth fighting to change, so that restaurants may live on. Futures of dining are like small plates: Everybody's got 'em. The other purpose of my annual journey—this year, nearly 75 restaurants across 18 cities—is to try to tease out a picture of the dining moment, some overarching theme or through line that sums up what it means to eat out in America today. This year, I threw up my hands. On an eight-degree January day in Chicago, in search of where things might be headed, I stopped into a new branch of a fast-casual dumpling chain billed as the city's first totally automated dining experience. It was fun ordering on a touch screen and then watching a bank of high-tech Automat windows for my name to appear alongside little dancing cartoon dumplings. Then the one visible employee, tasked with helping customers order while the rest presumably toiled backstage, leaned in over my shoulder and whispered: “It's the future, bro.” My first reaction was feeling like that eight-degree wind had just blown through my body. My second was to think, Get in line, bro. Futures of dining are like small plates: Everybody's got 'em. We've got more futures than we know what to do with—big, small, formal, casual, avant-garde, nostalgic, all of it up for grabs. (You get a taste of the schizophrenia in the taxonomic mania that has overtaken menus: HOT SMALL PLATES, SMALL COLD PLATES, SNACKS, BITES; FROM THE LAND; FROM THE SEA; FROM THE FIRE. Or perhaps monsieur would just like something from BOWLS?) With a few gloriously messy exceptions, the restaurants I love are ones that approach the question with some kind of clarity, a purposeful path through the clutter. The other great part of my job, of course, is that no two of those paths ever seem to be quite the same.This was the year I saw perhaps the last thing I expected to see in any restaurant, anywhere: a comment card in a David Chang restaurant. This one came with the check at Majordōmo in Los Angeles, where Chang has been spending more and more of his time. “How did we do?” it asked cheerily, followed by a range of smiley faces like those on the International Pain Scale. None of them showed a face contorted in the kind of anguish I imagined a younger Chang might have felt had he been able to look ahead to this moment. Chang, to quickly refresh, began his career as the very embodiment of client- directed hostility. Momofuku was the Kingdom of No: to substitutions, to seat backs, to dessert, to photos. Had it not been for the inconvenience of his being in the food-selling business, you got the feeling he might have done away with customers altogether.You're greeted at Majord-omo, which sits all but alone in an industrial neighborhood on the northern edge of Chinatown, by a brigade of hosts as plentiful and polite as von Trapp children. Looking up at the bay of mullioned windows, you might think the space was used to overhaul engines by day, but below there are comfy sling-back chairs, large, soothing paintings by James Jean, a soundtrack of Steely Dan. You could argue that, for all his kitchen innovation, Chang's primary vocation has been as a restless explorer of American restaurant forms—from fast food to fine dining. This confident, comfortable place is his utopian Cheesecake Factory, an impression aided by the kitchen's use of a loudspeaker ordering system that mimics the call of “Party of two” across a mall's tiled byways.What I'm trying to say is that Majordōmo is really, really, disconcertingly, nice. On the wet and chilly night I was there, Chang was in the kitchen sending out complimentary bowls of hot soup to those huddling outside on the patio. (It was a broth of miso, peas, and Benton's ham, the kind of sort-of southern, sort-of Asian, sort-of farmers'-market-driven creation on which Chang has made his bones for well over a decade now.) Even the name Majordōmo starts things off with a punny kiss of gratitude (domo is the casual Japanese term for “thanks”). It must be maddening to other restaurateurs that Chang, in addition to all his other talents, seems to have a bag of perfect restaurant names lying around. This one manages to also evoke Chang's ongoing fascination with the intersections of Italian and Asian cuisines, a theme he attacked in a more awkward manner at his last major New York opening, Nishi. You see it play out in tapioca lo mein, a purse-shaped spiral of spaghetti-sized noodles slicked with pork fat and twirled with rapini and an underlying bass line of preserved krill. Or in the waves of fermented-fish funk coming off the “bagna càuda” bathing a wedge of braised cabbage. Majordōmo riffs on the craze for Middle Eastern dining, serving steaming bing bread alongside spicy lamb and a hummus-like dip made with a fermented-chickpea substance that Momofuku has trademarked as Hozon. I can't think of a single dish that spans more cultures than what is simply billed as California Rock Crab; from left to right you get simply steamed claws served with a Meyer-lemon mayo, a shell filled with crab-fat rice, and a faithfully spicy version of the Korean marinated raw crab called ganjang gejang. I'm not sure they really make sense on the same plate, but in that, the blend of dissonances and connections, it screams nothing more clearly than Los Angeles.And, of course, all of the components are delicious, which is Chang's gift, even if he has sometimes seemed to think of it as a curse. Majordōmo may be his most unconflictedly delicious restaurant, and his most fun. Chang has said that his generation of chefs were like child actors, unprepared for the outsize cultural role they happened to fall into and struggling to figure out adulthood while in the public eye. Some, the implication goes, are Jodie Fosters; others are named Corey. Majordōmo proves he's in the former camp.If I have any objection to Majordōmo, it's that it was part of a disturbing trend of Big Important Restaurants taking up my usually more freewheeling meals in Los Angeles—my favorite dining city of the year. It was no small consolation that one of those was David Beran's Dialogue, which has 18 seats and is located in what appears to be a repurposed storage closet on the second floor of a Santa Monica food court. Beran is an alumnus of Grant Achatz's kitchens in Chicago, most recently as executive chef at Next, the restaurant that during his tenure changed its entire menu and concept every four months. Quite reasonably, he took some time off after moving to L.A., during which he engaged in such ordinary-person vacation projects as charring, pressing, and barrel-aging hundreds of pounds of onions to create gallons of burnt-onion syrup. If anybody tried to imitate it, he said gleefully, while I sat in front of his station at Dialogue's chef's counter, they were already a full year behind.The onion syrup shows up as a deep smoky note in a dish of maitake mushrooms and smoked-date puree, but not before you've had to find your way into Dialogue's windowless hidey-hole. To get there, you follow a series of e-mailed instructions that involve a dark alley and an unmarked steel door. It's kind of thrilling, but also kind of a cheat, given that you could have just taken the escalator up past the ice cream shop and grab-and-go grain bowls.The menu is built around seasons. Beran plans to change it entirely every three to four months. Mine, perversely, began with tastes of summer, though outside it was full January. You could almost detect the joy of a recent émigré from Chicago discovering L.A.'s season-less farmers' markets in the opening act: a geodesic dome of strawberry bubbles over pork belly and caviar. We proceeded through summer—a green leaf of choy sum, stuffed with strawberry nam prik, standing like a lonely tree atop cashew puree and a dusting of freeze-dried strawberries; a finger of lobster in béarnaise sauce, tucked under a blanket of nasturtium leaves, fennel pollen, and fermented-tomato powder; chamomile shortbread with olive-oil custard and whipped honey. And with that semi-dessert, we looped back and began autumn. Too often in this kind of cooking what you miss is…cooking: the smells and sounds of heat applied to ingredients. Early on in this meal, Beran began pan-searing what I thought of as Chekhov's Duck: Appearing in the first act, I thought, it damn well better pay off in the third. This one did, in the form of crisp-skinned breast, a dish of unctuous rillettes, and a sauce made from the carcass in an old-fashioned French duck press.Despite the restaurant's name—which strikes me as being awfully close to that of a fragrance you see ads for around Christmas, probably starring Johnny Depp—I found that my dinner was strikingly quiet, without a lot of the over-explaining that often accompanies such meals. Consequently, you might miss Easter eggs along the way, like the fact that each dish contains at least one element of the one that came before, or that the sound system plays only entire albums straight through, a conscious echo of how Beran wants you to view the meal as a coherent work. No matter: The sensual pleasures here are equal to the intellectual ones; the food speaks for itself. It was my favorite new restaurant of the year.Everything you need to know about the growing meaninglessness of traditional dining categories is that $220-per-diner Dialogue is described on Google Maps as a “New American Bistro.” If that descriptor applies anywhere, it's Julia Sullivan's Henrietta Red, in Nashville, where simple dishes are made dazzling by tiny details: littleneck clams dabbed with a bright escabeche of Calabrian chile and pineapple vinegar and roofed with a single nasturtium leaf; salty cured egg yolk in a beef tartare; the touch of smoked olive in a nourishing lamb sausage with lentils or the bite of whole-grain-mustard emulsion on a simple but shining fillet of wild striped bass.Is it strange that some of the best seafood I ate all year was in notably landlocked Tennessee? Hardly. Two of the best gumbos I've eaten in years were served to me in Seattle and North Carolina—which to many old-line New Orleanians might as well be Seattle for all the kinship it has with the Big Easy. The North Carolina version was at Hello, Sailor, a fantastical midcentury-modern surf shack located on the shore of Lake Norman, in the town of Cornelius, a half hour north of Charlotte. In the summer, I gather, the area is a bustling vacation spot; boaters can approach from the lake and tie up beneath the restaurant's patio. In the middle of winter, it appeared at the end of a pitch-dark road like a hallucination—all buttery wood ceilings, candy-colored fireplaces, and sexy curves. The food riffs on the kind of dishes you might have gotten at the building's previous incarnation as a dockside joint called the Rusty Rudder: crab dip spiked with pimiento cheese and crusted with brown-butter bread crumbs and benne seeds; fried bologna on a roll topped by a near solid caul of poppy seeds; soft serve for dessert. If the haute college-food-hall presentations sometimes veer toward too cute—ribs and shrimp calabash arrive on a tiny cafeteria tray—tastes like that of the gumbo make you forgive a lot: shrimpy, slippery, deep and inky as the water of the quiet lake outside the wide picture windows.The other gumbo was equally dark and contained shrimp, fried in a batter crispy enough to hold its crunch within the murk, and with a housemade Louisiana-style hot link. This was at JuneBaby, chef Edouardo Jordan's astonishing restaurant in Seattle's Ravenna neighborhood. If the idea of a great southern restaurant in the Northwest makes you skeptical, consider the benefits. Freed from any particular region of southern cooking, Jordan can roam: from the gumbo-lands of Louisiana up to Georgia and the Carolinas, where he picks up supple strips of fried pigs' ears, drizzled in spicy honey, down to Florida, where the “rice of the day” might be an almost pudding-like confection with coconut and conch.Jordan, who is himself from the Sunshine State, also dodges the dread bullet of “elevation”—a term of defensive insecurity that still gets thrown around when people feel the need to justify restaurant treatment of supposedly low-lying southern cuisine. His food may draw on high-kitchen technique, but it feels no need to apologize or protest on the plate. There's no better example than an appetizer of chitlins, or pig intestines, here served over rice in a rich pork stock. Like the French sausage andouillette, another example of Deep Offal, chitlins provoke a fleeting crisis between brain and stomach, a moment when the mind teeters on the edge, deciding whether to react to the incoming data with revulsion or desire. Then you—or at least I—find yourself downing the entire bowl in ravenous, breathless gulps. On the other end of the spectrum, but no less boldly straightforward, is peach brown Betty, done as it should be: piping hot and barely a knuckle deep, so that each bite is chewy, buttery, and crusty at once.The chitlins, too, are representative of a restaurant that is explicitly about the story of southern food as African-American food—from a hot toddy with rum, the spirit most closely entwined with slavery, to the creamer peas, a legacy of West Africa served here alongside a thick and gravy-covered chicken-fried steak. This is a meal that is narrative without being pedantic. It could only be improved by taking reservations and avoiding the stress of a waiting-list system that keeps tables empty while crowds push up against diners in the bar. More than enough people want to taste Jordan's food; making it more difficult than it needs to be is downright inhospitable, regardless of the latitude.It was, of course, the year of Fire and Fury. Or at least, in restaurants, fire: Across the land, flames continue to blaze in every open kitchen. I guess it's only a matter of time before a restaurant actually places tables inside the fire. Until that day, there's Maydān, hidden down an alley in the U Street neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with an open-fire kitchen located smack in the center of the dining room. Trussed lamb shoulders hang above, turning amber in the smoke, which exits through a soaring copper chimney. A team of chefs led by Gerald Addison and Chris Morgan labor at primitive stations, losing eyebrows and knuckle hair as they tend whole chickens, marinated in coriander, garlic, and turmeric, and lamb kebabs spiked with pistachio. With the baffling exception of bland pita bread that is by turns undercooked and cracker-like, everything is delicious, but the fire's most salubrious effect may be on those gathered around it: Conversations break out among neighboring tables at a rate that one feels wouldn't happen if the fire wasn't activating some caveman instinct for banding together to beat back the beasts and the darkness. (Outside, don't forget, is Washington, D.C., with no shortage of either.)It's no secret that the once sacrosanct categories of High and Low were long ago cast to the wind, leaving rarefied experiential dining on the top end, super-casual eating on the low, and a great, often muddled middle. It sometimes feels as though the real restaurant divide is between Big and Small. If I may vent for a moment about a great American food city that I find myself liking less and less to eat in, what is the matter with Chicago? How can a city known for amazing architecture and amazing neighborhoods center so much of its dining energy in the West Loop, where every “concept” in every oversize industrial space looks like a multi-million-dollar version of Top Chef's Restaurant Wars—cavernous, soulless, hastily assembled, and destined to be gone by next season.What a relief, then, to land at 24-seat Kitsune, far from the Loop, in North Center. This is the idiosyncratic restaurant of chef Iliana Regan, who became a champion of midwestern foraging and terroir at her first restaurant, Elizabeth. Here she applies those principles to Japanese cooking: delicate, wobbly chawanmushi swimming with bits of clam, marinated roe, and bacon; or ramen noodles made with ramps. This isn't gimmicky, or even particularly visible, “fusion,” but quiet, careful, nourishing invention.It's the kind of small, personal, focused place that stood out in this year of chaos, and it was not alone. There are few things I take as a better omen for a meal to come than spotting a baked tarte Tatin sitting near the kitchen pass, waiting to be sliced for dessert. It was one of the first things I saw at Chez Ma Tante, in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, and I was not disappointed. The restaurant's name may come from a famous Montreal hot-dog stand, and one of its chefs, Aidan O'Neal, may have cut his teeth at Au Pied de Cochon, the High Temple of Quebecois offal-heads, but I'd say its most Montreal-like quality is a homey sense of great care and little fuss. There are soft slices of pig's-head terrine; grilled skate on the bone with classic sauce ravigote; a pork-shoulder steak, marinated in a mixture of chile, mustard, and maple syrup that imparts just the right level of heat, like an idle bug zapper. The unlikely star is kedgeree—a British colonial mash-up of curried rice and fish, here as fluffy as pilaf and studded with lightly cured cod. New York is filled with alleged “neighborhood restaurants” that are too cool, too experimental, too self-conscious to be the place you return to over and over again, say on a Tuesday night, when it's too late to cook or you want to celebrate a minor victory. If I lived near Chez Ma Tante, it would be my spot for just those days.So would Lady of the House, especially on cold Detroit nights when there's fog on the windows, Curtis Mayfield on the stereo, and a full complement of diners crowded elbow to elbow at the bar. Kate Williams's Corktown tavern feels like a midwestern twin of Chez Ma Tante, down to their coolly modern dark-wood interiors. One of my favorite single dishes of the entire year was Lady of the House's “Parisian Ham”—a simple plate of slow-poached French-style ham, shaved thin but in slices that still offer a pleasantly spongy bite. It is served on a plate accompanied by a small dish of butter whipped with Dijon mustard and fermented honey, and it takes you a moment to realize what's missing: There is no bread. You look from the ham to the butter, from the butter to the ham. You glance around: Is this some kind of test? Is there a two-way mirror somewhere? Am I supposed to just…butter the ham?So is rich, oily “shrimp butter,” served in a sardine tin in an allusion to Spanish conservas. After a few glasses of Slovenian wine, my companion, a local, began declaiming that it shouldn't be called butter at all, since the texture of the intensely orange paste is closer to that of uni; I got the feeling this was not a new monologue, but also that Lady of the House is that kind of place: where everybody knows your name and your personal pedantic demons. (Mine would be that the “Corn Dog Rillette” is really a rillette corn dog, but never mind.) There are fat slabs of pink prime rib coming out of the kitchen, but also dishes that treat plants as equal objects of lust, like cauliflower glazed with a fennel-olive marmalade and served with Parmesan sauce. On the way to the bathroom, you pass a wall covered with the staff's childhood photos. They seem to sum up everything about this happy, occasionally awkward, deeply personal restaurant.It is, of course, a blessing of our era that personal and neighborhoody hardly has to mean unambitious. That was reconfirmed for me when I sat at one of the counter seats at Houston's Theodore Rex. This is Justin Yu's re-invention of his much loved tasting-menu restaurant, Oxheart, and it reflects the easy, happy feel of a chef released from the obligation of making all his customers' decisions for them. Leon Bridges and Sam Cooke croon from the speakers; the napkins resemble terry-cloth dish towels. The food, meanwhile, is as careful and precise as the surroundings are casual: Pristine Gulf citrus is the ostensible star of a grapefruit salad, but I found myself fixated instead on the warm thin-sliced snap peas scattered across the ruby segments, an inspiration Yu says he got from an old Alain Passard pairing; tasted alone, they were sweet as sugar but, somehow, bites with grapefruit brought out a totally different set of peppery, almost horseradish notes, the way orange juice changes utterly if you've just brushed your teeth. A simple bowl of Carolina Gold rice and butter beans revealed itself as not so simple, its flavors shifting as lemon zest gave way to pepper on the way to the bottom. Steamed snapper in a smoked fumet broth thickened with spinach pistou and filled with rustically cut mirepoix managed to evoke China, France, and Texas simultaneously. I would have been happy to let Yu design my dinner; perhaps I wouldn't have ended up with three dishes that had soupy bases. But until he returns to tasting menus, I'll focus instead on his simple Paris-Brest: two rings of pâte à choux sandwiching a pillow of barnyardy Swiss-cheese pastry cream and burnt honey. I crave it more than any other dessert I ate this year.The Charter Oak, St. Helena, CA: High and low, casual and fancy: All mix delightfully by the light of a blazing hearth in the heart of the Napa Valley.Chez Ma Tante, Brooklyn: A little bit Montreal, a little bit France, this Greenpoint corner outpost is at its core all Brooklyn.Cote, New York City: The happy collision of American and Korean steak-house traditions makes for a raucous and delicious night in N.Y.C.Dialogue, Santa Monica: This tiny tasting-menu joint, tucked into a food court, is a revelation about the possibilities of dinner as storytelling.Hello, Sailor, Cornelius, NC: This midcentury-modern haven features expert cocktails and fine-tuned southern classics.Henrietta Red, Nashville: Pristine oysters and deftly cooked seafood are the anchor of Julia Sullivan's cool and comfortable joint.JuneBaby, Seattle: Southern food has rarely tasted as vital as it does under Edouardo Jordan's hand—way, way above the Mason-Dixon Line.Kitsune, Chicago: “Fusion” isn't a dirty word when it's as delicate as this mash-up of Japanese cooking and midwestern bounty.Lady of the House, Detroit: From the comfy bar to the buttered Parisian ham, Kate Williams has created a neighborhood restaurant to dream of.Majordōmo, Los Angeles: Chang's first West Coast outpost is everything you love about Momofuku, plus everything he loves about L.A.Maydān, Washington, D.C.: Gather around the blazing indoor fire for meats, meze, and other Middle Eastern eats at this literal D.C. hot spot.Theodore Rex, Houston: Justin Yu's latest—delayed by Hurricane Harvey—is an ambitious and welcome successor to his beloved Oxheart.Xochi, Houston: The breadth and depth of Oaxacan cooking is on magnificent display at this slick H-Town jewel from Hugo Ortega.Mind you, big, slick, and ripe for replication can have its charms, too. The concept at New York's Cote is the marriage of American steak with Korean barbecue—the natural and brilliant extension of how accustomed we've become to good beef and how deeply Korean flavors have become entrenched in the American palate. On the relatively modestly priced “Butcher's Feast,” you get pieces of hanger steak, 45-day-aged rib eye, and intensely marbled Wagyu flatiron before ending with slices of more traditionally marinated short rib, or kalbi, scored so that they curl and char on the grill like hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. That grill is located in the center of the table, equipped with a venting system that sucks fumes away through subterranean ducts. In the era of the all-powerful big-name chef, every member of the front of house does the cooking here—fairly leaping over one another to tend to the beef as it curls and spits on the grill before you.The table technology plays an important role, eliminating the need for venting hoods over each table and thus leaving space for such dinner niceties as eye contact and toasting. So does the fact that you end up eating a satisfying but relatively small amount of beef compared with an American steak house, while the acid of the accompanying *banchan—*kimchi, bright green scallions dressed in gochujang vinaigrette, the fermented-bean-paste condiment called ssamjang—further diffuses the impact of the beef's richness. If all this results in a room that gets a little giddy and deafening, it's also incentive to order another bottle of soju and, rather than seek a solution, become part of the problem.Likewise, the highest levels of cooking can thrive in the most sterile nooks. Xochi, Hugo Ortega's Oaxacan restaurant, tucked into a glass-sheathed corner of a soaring Marriott Marquis in downtown Houston, has all the appearances of a safe, unchallenging haven for corporate retreaters and badge-wearing convention-goers. Then you get a taste of its mole. Moles, actually—there are at least eight of them on any given night, a range as wide and varied as a rainbow. Fifteen dollars gets you a sample of four, accompanied by fresh corn tortillas, but there's nothing to say you can't double up and get the whole spectrum, spread out before you like a vibraphone: Here are the bright, clear notes of the amarillo; you'll taste it again later, ringing clearly alongside the brininess of wood-roasted oysters; next, the dusky middle tones of red coloradito and murky chicatana, which is made with ants; finally the deep, burnt bass notes of chilhuacle and chinchillo. That last one, too, will make an appearance later, on beef decorating the wide, flat, and crackling street tortillas, called tlayudas, that are served at lunch. Ortega, whose 16-year-old restaurant, Hugo's, helped revolutionize Houston's Mexican dining scene, introduces a whole world of Oaxacan tastes here. The sopa de piedra, a fish-and-shrimp stew served bubbling furiously from the last-second addition of blisteringly hot river stones, is a deep, orange blast of seafood flavor. A pool of blue-corn cream brings soft, earthy notes to a dessert of corn ice cream sculpted into tiny cobs. But it's those multidimensional moles I keep returning to. “All those famous French sauces?” my enthusiastic companion raved. “These kick all of their asses.” It was hard for me to disagree.And sometimes you just want to embrace the chaos. Witness The Charter Oak, in St. Helena, California, in the middle of the Napa Valley. This is theoretically the casual counterpart to Christopher Kostow and Nathaniel Dorn's three-Michelin-star Restaurant at Meadowood, just up the road. In fact, it's a riot of conflicting signs: The hosts wear blazers; the servers, butcher's aprons; and, for no discernible reason, the chefs, Secret Service earpieces. Cocktails come in pre-batched flasks and punch bowls for the table; water, in curvy pewter-and-glass jugs appropriate for bathing Muses on Greek urns; dessert on a modern butcher-block dessert cart.Does any of it matter? Not in the least. There are some restaurants where you get the feeling that everybody is at least momentarily aware of how lucky they are to be there, and this is one. When you enter the bank-like dining room, you're faced with a massive hearth—a place my server pronounced so that it rhymed with “earth.” Off the flames come thick pieces of sourdough, made with a 25-year-old starter, kissed with smoke and delicious with slices of homemade mortadella. “Tostones” are smashed potatoes, deep-fried and tossed with honey, vinegar, sea salt, and seaweed brown butter. These are potato skins, to be clear, and utterly impossible to stop eating. A luscious beef rib is smoked over the wood from Cabernet barrels and comes alongside blistered beets dressed in rendered aged-beef fat. The dessert cart came by, and the chef pushing it cracked a dome of meringue for a Pavlova with a sharp thwack of her spoon. We perused the whiskey menu, deciding to pass on a $240 shot of Orphan Barrel bourbon.None of it made any sense, but at that moment it was also hard to imagine having more fun. In 2018, would it surprise anyone to learn that the great American style might just be incoherence?Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.This story originally appeared in the May 2018 issue with the title "The Perfect Night Out: GQ's Best New Restaurants 2018"

https://www.gq.com/story/best-new-restaurants-2018

[deathhasnomeaning-blog]

Even Celestial Bodies Wither in the Face of Eternity

     Maple leaves are swept into a cyclone in miniature with each gust of wind, the distillation of violence and disorder into something that might be mistaken for beauty. You can faintly make out the pained yelps of your neighbor’s 16 year-old bichon frise as it struggles to make it down a flight of stairs. Poor thing, you think. Maybe one day that’ll be me.

     It is October 27th, and the block on which you live is in repose, save for the neighbor’s dog, which suffers in solitude. But you can hear it, so is it really alone? you ask yourself. But what do we weigh more strongly when pondering the existence of loneliness: the mere presence of others, known or unknown to the self, or the degree to which these others are perceived as playing some role in our day-to-day? The dog doesn’t know that you can hear it. Your reality and its reality don’t intersect, at least not at this moment.

     But anyway, it is October 27th. The sun lurks behind the veil of cumulonimbus, as your block languishes in silence, supine in the face of its treachery. The din of machinery churns somewhere far beyond the hills that mark the end of your hometown. You can recall nights spent with friends in that abandoned factory district, which even now remains caught up in some sort of simulation of life, perpetually grinding along with no beginning or end. Your old friend Daniel, who you had known since the first grade, once accompanied you to the building that decades prior had been known as the L’Oreal Factory. You didn’t know what L’Oreal was, but you insisted that the two of you check it out regardless. So you snuck out of your homes, crept through side streets and alleyways, and eventually arrived at this brick-and-mortar mausoleum. The two of you not-so-nimbly made ingress via an empty window-frame.

     You found yourself in what used to be the product-testing room, not that you were aware of this. Most of the supplies were still there, frozen in time, waiting to be acted upon by a motley crew of frustrated chemists. Daniel and you took everything in, silently making note of any details that caught your interest. Satisfied that you had done this, you turned to him and caught him looking at you with such profound, tangible sadness. Do you remember what he said? He kept his gaze level with yours and told you that he had recently dreamed of his father’s house burning to a crisp. He was riding his violet mountain bike, coming home from baseball practice, choking on the foul tendrils of smoke before he even knew that something was amiss. Then suddenly, there it was. His father’s house, reduced to a fine black ash. Daniel said he couldn’t stop weeping or smiling, and that each response only magnified the other. He was visibly holding back tears as he told you this. You hesitated for a moment and then grabbed his hand before asking yourself whether that was appropriate, partly because you didn’t know what else to do and partly because you had been in love with him for so long, so very long. Four years later he drowned in the reservoir behind the local library. Love having faded into little more than unpredictable pangs of longing by then, you wanted to cry but couldn’t produce anything more than a whimper. Your closest friends apologized to you, as if you had suffered a great loss. In some ways, maybe you had.

     The weather where you live is all sorts of fucked up. It was 80 °F two weeks ago. Today saw a high of 48 °F with a substantial wind chill.

     Putrefied garbage litters the front porch of a semi-abandoned house down the street. Semi-abandoned in the sense that it is now occupied by a corpse. The cleaners don’t come until Monday. It is currently Thursday. You wonder how much temperature affects the decomposition process, if at all.

     In the room over, a light-bulb wavers in and out of existence. You look out the window and see rays of light briefly explode through holes in the clouds, and suddenly it dawns on you that you haven’t left the house in a year. And maybe that’s because there’s a real risk in that, walking down those steps and out your front door, because you know that once you leave you won’t be able to control the outcome. But how many times have you relied on that very same lack of control as a viable exit strategy? Our rationalizations are so malleable, wouldn’t you agree? They are wonderful evidence of our adaptability. They attract and repulse us in equal measure.

     To your left sits an orange spiral notebook, its pages a distinct Joycean yellow. Near the back rests your proudest moment. During the final weeks of your Junior year in college, after you had stopped taking Xanax and started running ten miles a day, you wrote a poem that linked the Nietzchean concepts of eternal recurrence and Amor Fati to the central tenets of Tantra Yoga, because you are an intellectual first and foremost. Your creative nonfiction professor loved the way it conveyed our need to take solace in our mortality. You loved that you stumbled upon a more academic way of writing about dying.

     After some gentle prodding on the part of your classmates, you submitted it to your school’s poetry journal. What was it called? The Tribune? Something like that, I think. As always, you both loved and loathed your creation, somehow convinced that a) in comparison to the fluffy nonsense your peers had submitted, your poem was an undeniable masterstroke of subtle brilliance, and b) it was the long-sought after piece of evidence that would finally reveal you for the fraud you always suspected you were.

     The truth typically residing somewhere in the middle, what ended up happening was 25 or so of your peers picked up that copy of The Tribune(?!?), skimmed through it once, and promptly forgot about it. Everyone expect one student that is, a trans woman named Marcie who will one day go on to become a well-respected writer and activist. She read your poem night after night, lost in the throes of staggering depression and dysphoria, letting every syllable linger on her lips the way one glides their fingers across the back of a lover that is drifting off to sleep. You will never know that Marcie exists, and surely enough, one week after first reading your poem she couldn’t even remember your name. So maybe you were right all along. Maybe your intuition was spot on, and you’re really a fraud. But Marcie, the only person in the history of the universe that will ever commit your words to memory, would beg to differ.

     By now the sky has grown a dark, somber shade of blue. The lights from the nearby city ensure that you will never be lost in that perfect darkness you desire. Didn’t one of your teammates on the tennis team say something to that effect? It was late one evening, if memory serves. You were walking home from practice. You were standing on the corner of Valley and Styles, waiting for the light to turn red, when they observed that you seek a perfect darkness in which to submerge yourself. You looked at them with what I’ll call feigned surprise. They knew what it was too, because they continued, saying that nothing less than perfect darkness will ever do. Of course, you know damn well that nothing of that caliber will ever truly manifest, because in the innermost recesses of your consciousness you will always be scared to die. But what did they know? you ask yourself while staring at the branches of your neighbor’s evergreen. They moved to California after saving up money that they had earned working at the local food court, only to die a week later when their brakes gave out on the highway.

     Our rationalizations attract and repulse us in equal measure, but at all times they are just a form of system justification. The self, being a system first and foremost, and a fragile one at that, must remain properly insulated at all times, lest the universe tear it to shreds.

     You think about this for a moment. You pour yourself into something that you hope will be remembered as a work of beauty. Like all acts of creation, this process involves a mixture of performance and genuine out-of-body flow, and...well, maybe it isn’t entirely fair to paint the creative process with such broad strokes. But if creativity is an extension of the self, and the self is a constantly generated performance, why would it be unfair to characterize creation as, at the very least, a somewhat performative thing? And at any rate, if........but anyway, you spend all this time cultivating a very particular product, expecting - well, expecting what, exactly? Should people hold their breath because you’ve created something? Might the noosphere become a unified consciousness that subsequently anoints you its sole philosophical and artistic voice?

     No. No, things limp forward as always. And fuck, even if something did happen, then what? Will that make any difference when your body starts breaking down? You put something into the world. Well, what about it? Sooner or later you will die, regardless of whatever faux-profound drivel you deliriously dredge up. You never had any control. Before you know it, all traces of your existence will make their bed amongst the stars. And that is but a temporary state, for even celestial bodies wither in the face of eternity.

     A motorcycle tears down your street like an elemental force. Concrete melts away, revealing a profound, unending void where the core of the world ought to be. Now the houses aren’t connected to anything. They just hover, seemingly untouched by the passing of time. The moon presides over all of this, but only partially. It is utterly disinterested. You wish you could be such an impartial observer.

      Across the way there emerges a simple chord progression. ii-V7-IV-vi7, or something like that - your ear was never the best. But your ears perk up nevertheless, and now the drums are coming in with a steady beat. The synth is playing a familiar melody. A voice intones something in a language you don’t understand, but for the love of god you feel like you know what’s being said.

     What do you think this voice is saying? It’s saying you never had any control, and you never will, but there’s a hell of a gap between domination and passive observance. You don’t want either of these things. You know that life is nothing but a series of potentialities. Though it is tempting to believe that these potentialities can only be realized under strict conditions, the truth is we only believe this because we know these conditions will likely never come to pass. And we don’t want them to. Anything less than perfect won’t do, and perfection is an artificial construct. Comfortable with these facts, we sit stock still and don’t do a god damn thing because we are scared. You are fucking terrified of putting yourself out there because you want to preserve this image of yourself that you didn’t do shit to earn. You pay lip service to perfection and cling to the chaos that keeps it from being, because that lack of control shields you from the sting of failure, even as it opens you up to the much longer-lasting pain of regret. Maybe you want to believe that you won’t become that person whose final days are consumed by an endless litany of what if’s. But that will be you. Rest assured, if you continue to sit still that will almost certainly be you.

     So you take a deep breath and stand up. The quarter note pulse of the drums shakes the walls of your bedroom. You stand up, brace yourself, and leap out the window because by now the ground has disintegrated completely and there’s no longer such a thing as gravity. You float above that infinite void, that imperfect darkness, and before you know it the music has become a cyclone in miniature that envelops you. One year removed since you last left your house, you swear it feels like your flesh is being stripped off the bone. The air is toxic. With every breath you burn from the inside-out. But the music doesn’t mind this. Each chord cuts through the toxicity. So what do you do? You dance. For the first time in your life you dance like you are truly comfortable with yourself. There won’t be many moments like this going forward, though truth be told, there will be more of them than you probably expect. The beat persists and you keep dancing, hovering above the imperfect darkness while the sliver of moon impassively looks on, a truly impartial observer.

[staircaseenthusiast]

Staircase enthusiast?

I remember when I received the most thrilling news of my life, I cannot entirely recollect where I was headed to, maybe I was ascending the staircase and I decelerated my pace and turned around to pay heed to my best friend, I knew I was on the staircase and my bestfriend could not remain calm and enduring to break the news to me. I was over the moon and the next thing I knew was, I was jumping on the staircase. But what was the most thrilling news of my life, though? Was it the foundation of my fascination with the staircase?

No, it was not!

Yes, I have been blessed with a very extra-ordinary memory, with a very brilliant retaining ability. Let it be the most cherished moment of my childhood or, the most terrifying juncture of the early days of my life, I remember it all, I recall it all. I remember the first day at my first school, I remember the outfit my mom made me wear that day, I remember the embarrassment that I was happily honored with, I remember learning three languages at a very fragile age, I remember getting ridiculed on that day, despite being five years old I remember getting scorned and becoming a laughing stock for no apparent reason but I still know it all. I remember getting pushed into the swimming pool at a tender age of 2 and I clearly remember the day when something extra-ordinary, tricky to explain and even trickier to understand happened to me. Of course, the night too, I remember the night clear as day when something extra terrestrial happened to me. And of course, my first trauma injury at the age of 6, still captivates me and never leaves my sight, that I remember too. But I also remember my very first dream, not that it was my very first dream but it is the reverie that I still have memories of and I recall single nitty-gritty, every particular details, concerning that one dream.

I saw a staircase. What a classic way to cut the first turf that in my most memorable dream, I saw a staircase. And in that dream, I was not the four year old me that I was then, but I was the grown up, adolescent, not a 4 year old girl in that dream and I was wearing a gown. Apparently, I lacked the idea of what a gown was, so it was a pink dress, not the clichéd pink color but an exquisite, out of this world, magnificent, divine, superlatively attractive to eyes kind of pink and it was a gown and it is the pink that I happened to become bedeviled at the age of 21, forever 21. I cannot fathom that if the girl I saw in my dream was me or someone else because even at that age, I was assertive and I was affirmative, that it is unfeasible for someone to look as elegant as her. And I am no where as half elegant as that young girl who carried her beyond beautiful gown on the spiral staircase, whose rods were adorned with diamonds or some kind of precious stones and she was gracefully marking her territory on each step of the marvelously twisted and concreted staircase. But she looked anxious, she had a cagey look in her eyes, and she was holding a bracelet, that seemingly belong to her, but it seemed like it didn’t belong to her anymore. With a obdurate yet devastated look on her face, she put the bracelet on the last step of the staircase and descended back with a tattered gown, smudged eyes, bruised wrists and descended back from a staircase made of wood. Now, why would a four year old me experience such complex dream? Then of course, I gained some maturity, I experienced most complex dreams, I had nightmares, I faced some extremely life turning events and I grew up but the dream is still struck to me today and when I tried to interpret the meaning and try to pull out something, I pull out no answers out of what I dive into.

But, I knew that I had become obsessed with the staircases and that staircases had become my thing. The eventual events went something like this: in the house where I was born, in Saudi city, there used to be a bridge, obvious from its bizarre appearance, a haunted bridge. I knew that the bridge was not safe but that was the best place to be and look down and see the people of the tomorrow engage in driving cars at a very cautious speed. Or, it was the best place to be and stand in the middle of the bridge and observing the beautiful place where we used to live before we moved into another villa. But there was something bizarre yet bewitching about the staircase, the rotten and the wooden staircase, of course, with a slight shift, yet decomposed and putrid. I was asked not to go there because legends has it, the bridge was haunted  but, it did not stop me from visiting that bewitching bridge and sit on the staircase that I was attracted to. Sometimes, I would just sit in the steps, other times I would ascend the staircase from one side and descend from the other side and I would spend my time there after school. Did I mention that we had staircase in the building we used to live before, with steps made of stone? There was a small garden, surrounding the lateral side of the staircase and the most beautiful and the most wild flowers grew into that small garden, which I would often pluck from time to time. Well, long story short, we moved into NE from SE, and there we had gardens and we had backyards but, it had no staircase.

From time to time, I would visit the bridge, as it was a 8 minute walk from where we resided next. And I was no longer going to Hala International School. Yes, at school, they had decorated the staircase with faux flowers and leave that I have always wanted to try to make but it couldn’t achieve my spotlight for attention. The leaves were huge and the petals of the flowers needed some precision but anyway, I liked painting rather than the art and craft module. Next thing I knew was, I was admitted to PISJ where a new chapter of my life begun. And with a three storey building, there was one heck of a staircase to look forward to. So happy I was to be in a building full of staircase until I was constantly pushed from the staircase. Of course, they saw me at the most vulnerable and I was the most vulnerable when I was all by myself and it gave them the just right occasion to let out their aggravation on me and push me from the staircase and filch my lunch from me. Those girls were mean but not as mean as the people I know today. You had the play ground, you had the hallways, you had the classroom, you had the perfect opportunities anywhere but why at the staircase? Anyway, long story short, we sorted our priorities and I took a step forward towards friendship, near the same staircases and we blossomed into best friends and we had many of our laughs at the same staircases. When I was going through a horrible time, you saw me and you confronted me at the intersection of the staircase of 1st floor and 2nd floor respectively and I covert it, which reminds me, how brilliant I was at hiding things back then. Long story short, I spent the best and the worst 10 years of my life, hopping through those staircases.

In the mean time, Grade 8 happened and I found my best friend, through the means which were authentic yet not authentic and we took the first sip of the energy drink, Bugzy, which was very soon to be replaced by Code Red (Always remember, never forgotten). We would find a spot in some empty building and sit on the staircase and silently sip our respective cans of energy drinks. And you used to bring your music player and we would listen to the songs that you passionately listened to. I did not any song but as of today, my playlist is superior to your playlist. Then little did I know, I started to enjoy sitting and walking on the pavement [to be continued]