Judge the livability of your city using the White Castle Index

At a proud moment last year, I won the Literary Open Mic competition hosted by my comrade-in-arts and Renaissance man Filthy Phill Lentz at The CobraClub. I decided to celebrate my victory with a late-night snack before heading home. I drove to where my navigation system indicated was the nearest White Castle, only to find a construction site in its place.

It is at least the second White Castle to be purged from the popular and overrated borough of Brooklyn. The much-valued Castle in Williamsburg on the corner of Metropolitan Avenue and Humboldt Street was closed nearly two years ago to make way for more overpriced apartments.

Before I got married, I made sure my bachelor party ended with a visit to White Castle to cap off an evening of Yankees baseball, strippers and punk rock. When my band plays shows near a White Castle we are sure to stop by for some sliders on the way home.

I wouldn’t advocate eating junk food regularly, and I limit my White Castle visits to special occasions and balance with attempts at a healthy diet and regular exercise. But after a night of victorious effort, whether that be in producing great art, achieving a career or personal victory, or otherwise exerting yourself above and beyond the call, it is suitable to indulge with some excellent excess, and you should be able to safely do that in multiple locations around any major American city.

New York City has fallen behind in its White Castle Index, meaning that low-cost good food at all hours is increasingly unavailable. Williamsburg was once a haven for artists; it’s now home to the $150 doughnut. Williamsburg managed to strike it rich and still slide into the sewer.

I prefer White Castle, and I’d be happy to expound on its excellence both culturally and calorically, but there are other options that are similarly convenient and meaningful. Regionally there are many differences and the White Castle chain does not ready many parts of the U.S. But every region should have its own version of White Castle. Waffle House often fits the bill in many parts of the country. It is open 24 hours a day and has plentiful offerings of quickly made indulgent food at a relatively low cost (it might be useful to call this the Waffle House Index in the Southern U.S. I don’t know any Waffle House restaurants north of Pennsylvania). And diners are a great American institution that are being priced out of existence as well.

Everyone should be able to have an all-night restaurant that they can go to relax among their own kind (leaving it up to each person who counts as “their own kind.”)

If the all-night party isn’t available at an affordable cost, then something is wrong, and we are getting to the point in New York City where only the extravagantly wealthy can afford to live life to the fullest. That leads to a decline in the character and long-term viability of the city. Without strong, vibrant, working and middle classes, the cultural and physical rot of its society becomes evident very quickly.

The world’s best artists do not emerge from the pampered class that looks down their noses at the common people. The arbiters of taste and culture should not be people who’ve never waited tables, washed dishes, or dug a ditch. With fewer and fewer working Americans able to find a rewarding life in our urban centers, cities will cease to be engines of creativity and genius.

As goes the working class, so goes our city. Luckily, there are still numerous White Castles to be found in the outer boroughs. I’ll see you at one. 

A Father’s Day Quest for Laziness

This Father’s Day my quest is to be as lazy as possible without appearing to be ungrateful or a bad father. If I could move my couch and laptop to the nearest White Castle and camp out for a day feasting on delicious burgers and watching hunting shows.

There were days before I had children that I enjoyed extreme forms of laziness. I have spent some days doing nothing but eating and watching ‘Law & Order’ reruns. I’m not proud of being that lazy, but sometimes you just have to be. I spend the rest of my time trying hard to achieve ambitious things, so a day here and there of intense couch warming is not out of line.

But having children means that those days of restorative sloth are behind me for the time being. If you are the father of small children you have some kind of work to do just to make sure your children don’t wander into traffic and get themselves killed. Children have to be fed every day, and if you don’t change their diapers with regularity they begin to smell bad and behave strangely.

This coming Father’s Day I will relax as much as possible and I plan to travel with my family to Staten Island to the Punk Island festival. This will be the first time in several years that our band Blackout Shoppers is not playing the all-day FREE festival (our guitar player will be out of the country). I’m eager to be able to go and enjoy it without having to worry about bringing equipment or being ready to play. My wife and I plan to bring ear protection for the girls and they can walk now so it may be a chore keeping them out of the mosh pits because they love to dance when they hear music. But any stress will be well worth it.

I am very lucky to have the father I have. He raised me with a good sense of right and wrong and a love of reading and the arts. Not everyone is so lucky, but having a good father is not a prerequisite for being one. I’ve discovered that fatherhood is a lot like hunting. If you have good instincts and are willing to put in the time, you’re chances of success will be much greater.

At the end of the day Sunday I will have relaxed as much as I can and my children will have survived my indulgent slacking off.

Of course I’d like to do better than having children that merely survive. I want my daughters to be willful and strong, and smart enough not to be subservient to the societal groupthink that is slowly choking the life out of the American intellect. I want my girls to be able to be legendary warrior-poets and forge their poetic souls to the cause of their people and be among the elite of their future world. But I’ve got to get them potty trained first. 

Avoiding the Poison of Excessive Nostalgia

The once-celebrated East Village bar the Yaffa Café announced that it is closing its doors for good. It was initially shut down in September by the Department of Health for health violations. The coverage sent up its standard lament; another “iconic” landmark crushed by cruel fate.

It’s a familiar pattern now. A well-known music venue, bar or restaurant announced its closing and there’s a chorus of objection to it, a scolding clucking about how shameful it is and how the city isn’t what it used to be. But this is a pattern that’s been going on since the 1600s.

Many friends and colleagues are correct when they say that small businesses closing represents a danger to the soul of New York. But let’s also remember that constant change and reinvention is also a part of the soul of New York.

While we ought to make sure small businesses have a fighting chance, we also must be careful not to fall victim to the poison of excessive nostalgia.

Nostalgia is deadly because it leaves people to believe that the best part of their lives are behind them. I don’t care if your eight or 80, if you’re not looking forward to something in the future, you’re not really living life. The promise of something in the future is what keeps people alive.

If any place can’t maintain its relevance for its ever-changing clientele, then it’s simply running on the fumes of nostalgia. The fumes of nostalgia may start off smelling sweet, but are composed of an underlying rot.

New York exists in its current form today because it is unforgiving and values nostalgia very little. The constant churn of commerce is always inquiring: ‘What have you done for me lately?’

I was among the chorus of voices that bemoaned the loss of CBGB’s seven years ago. The famous club helped birth punk rock and when I played there with Blackout Shoppers at our very first show in 2004, it was a dream come true. I saw many great shows there and had many good times and memories. But CBGB had not kept up with the times or even lived up to its own history. Bands who got their start there chose not to return and played other clubs in the area. The Ramones played their last New York shoes at a venue called Coney Island High, also long gone, which was a few blocks away from CBGB. The throngs of people who crowded into the club during its last days were curiosity seekers and tourists, people seeking to tap into nostalgia for its own sake, darkening its doors during its death throes so they could boast that they had been there. 

So let it be with the Yaffa Café. I went there once when I was younger and I thought the place was overwrought and pretentious, and this was a time in my life when I was happy to put on airs as a hopeful young writer and therefore had a higher threshold for overwrought pretension.

Places like the Yaffa Café attract people who don’t so much want to live the life of a writer or artist as much as they want to play-act being a writer or artist. Ernest Hemingway went to the cafes of Paris because he was dead-broke and those cafes were dirt-cheap. Hemingway is celebrated today not for the time he spent time at a café but because of the time he spent at his typewriter.

I enjoy sidewalk cafes to a certain point, but squeezing my overweight frame into a tiny, crowded space so I can imagine I’m F. Scott Fitzgerald is a ridiculous idea. A writer or artist is too busy writing or making art to invest a lot of time on nostalgia.

The White Castle in Williamsburg has done a greater public good than the Yaffa Café in my opinion. Its demise is the one that ought to be mourned. I’ll indeed miss filling up on delicious White Castle burgers when I am in Williamsburg, but I can’t begrudge the decision by the owners to sell the place. They knew that they’d make more money selling the land to condo developers than they’d make selling burgers, and it followed that it made more sense. It’s a for-profit business; they weren’t giving away burgers for free.

I’m sure the Yaffa Café had its strong points. If I remember correctly the coffee wasn’t half bad. But the past is littered with better businesses that could not stand the test of time. Let them all rest in peace.