Au Bon Climat

Tunes and I are great fans of the Au Bon Climat winery. The other night we enjoyed a fantastic bottle of its 2003 santa barbara county pino noir.

Peachy Apple Tart

So glad NYC makes chain fast food joints post calorie counts. As a result, I found out today that Starbuck's peachy apple tart has only 130 cals. Zowie. That's almost nothing. It's hard to believe, but for now I choose to accept it as truth. Pretty tasty with a hot tea.
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Adult Kickball?

While walking through Central Park thursday night last week, I ran across a kickball game in progress. Not the kickball I grew up with as a kid in California--something else, acutally called adult kickball. Basically, a bunch of 20 somethings playing something close to baseball by pitching and kicking a large round ball. Hard to describe. Whatev'.

St. Nectaire

Murray's Cheese does it again with the enchantingly biting St. Nectaire. I picked some up the other day. You can definitely taste the influence of volcanic soil in this fascinating gem from France.

Wild Maine Grey Sole

Gave Pescatore @ Grand Central Market a try on Tuesday and I'm glad I did. The Grey Sole had the best looking flesh, so I went with it. It's Mark Bittman's wise advice to be real choosy about fish freshness based primarily on appearance.

70's Music

Some time ago I started noticing that the common denominator of ambient music in bars, restaurants and other public places is pop from the 1970's. Point of fact: Right now I'm in the coffee house Joe (which humbly calls itself the "Art of Coffee") on Waverly which has Tom Petty's greatest playing in the background. I'm loving it, of course. But I can't help but notice that when Mr. P. began rolling out his earliest hits, most of my fellow caffeine addicts weren't even, gasp, born. Joe is right near NYU. Yet, they must like what they're hearing. At least, no one seems to be seriously icked out.

Having grown up in the 70's, I had first thought that this observation was the result of my aging and chauvanistic mind playing tricks on itself. But recently I decided that the weight of (admittedly subjective) evidence is overwhelming. Something special must have been in the air during that decade.

Every generation is guilty of looking back on their wonder years and wistfully misrecalling, "My, what a simpler, more innocent time it was back in the day." It certainly seemed anything but innocent at the time. Actually, we thought we were collectively a bunch of bad asses--which is rather comical in retrospect. BTW, kudos to Richard Linklater's movie "Dazed and Confused" for capturing the spirit of growing up in suburban 70's (with a Texan twist). Too bad it's fairly unwatchable.

But in pre-Aids, pre-9/11, pre-Cheney, pre-Globalized, pre-globally-warmed America, life for the majority of us didn't have the undertone of darkness and mean-spiritedness that we have now come to accept as normal. Unencumbered fun had a higher value placed on it back then. To me, pop music from the 70's has a happy, optimistic groove that is perhaps impossible to recapture. It's a sonic time capsule to savor and enjoy for people who grew up then and, perhaps more importantly, for people who didn't grow up then.