I really dig this lady (and her cookbook too).

Jules Feiffer

From David Carr’s review in the Sunday Book Review:

Truth in the matter of memoir has always seemed evanescent and, more often lately, either elusive or absent. Memories of the self are often in service of other agendas, including the settling of scores and the creation of a hero where a mere man once stood.

Those questions, and the recent travails of the genre, seem at great remove to the reader of “Backing Into Forward,” by Jules Feiffer. Reading Feiffer, you know where the truth lies because it is there on every page — resonant, self-­lacerating and frequently hilarious. How else to explain Feif­fer’s frank admissions that he could not stand his mother, even dead; that he coveted the success of peers; that he reflexively courted fame and the famous; and that the mysterious Woody Allen was not really so mysterious to him?

Ostensibly the memoir of an acclaimed cartoonist, “Backing Into Forward” is a portrait of a certain kind of New York during a specific era: the cultural and political foment of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

Last week, also in the Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote:

“Backing into Forward” provides the reader with a sharply evocative portrait of the author’s youth in the Bronx, where he says he grew up a terrified, cowardly child, who “sidestepped arguments, fled confrontations, pedaled away from fistfights.” And the book proves just as nimble at limning the literary world of Manhattan, where this “wry, self-effacing, hard-hitting lefty” soon made himself at home, and realized he could “hold my own with Alfred Kazin, Dwight MacDonald, Lillian Hellman, Kenneth Tynan, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Rahv,” to drop just a few household intellectual names.

Perhaps funniest of all is Mr. Feiffer’s self-deprecating, self-pitying account of his Catch-22-like stint in the Army during the Korean war: after faking a breakdown, he says, he managed to get himself appointed to the Signal Corps Publications Agency, where he spent all of his free time working on “Munro,” a long cartoon narrative about a 4-year-old boy who is drafted — a project, he now recalls, that “was to determine the direction of my work and my life over the next 50 years.”

To what does Mr. Feiffer, 81, attribute his long and varied career? His success, he writes in these pages, came from “lucking into the zeitgeist,” from the happy coincidence that the personal subjects of his Voice cartoons — anxiety, confusion, anger — resonated perfectly with the concerns of his audience: young urban hipsters, alienated by the repressive mores of the cold war years and unmoored by the tumult of the counterculture decades.

I’ve admired Feiffer’s work all my life without being a huge fan. But this book looks like a fun read.

R. Crumb

Sunday is here, another fine day in New York and still number…

I’m ready for Opening Day already, but I’ll take s’more upsets at March Madness today while we wait.

Here’s a lovely spring beat for you…One time:

Sure would be a perfect day to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

It’s a stunner out there. Boids is chirpin’ here in the Bronx. Our windows are wide open, it smells fresh. I’m taking the wife out to stroll around downtown Manhattan.

Good to be alive.

Frank King.

R.I.P. Alex Chilton.

Don Mattingly Don. Featured at Go Japanese, down on St. Marks. 

Topping: Slices of tuna, strips of squid and a plethora of okra sauce are arranged as a baseball field on a bed of sushi rice mixed in with pieces of eel and avocado.

Highlights: The menu includes traditional donburi like Oyako Don ($8.50), Katsu Don ($9) and Ten Don ($9.50), and they are offered at discounted prices during lunch hour.

Peace to Iyasu for pointing this out.

Part One…

Mike Vacc on Mark Teix:

“Look,” Mark Teixeira says. “It’s really kind of simple. If you don’t want to play in front of 50,000 people every single game, if you don’t want the energy of the best city in the world behind you every day, good or bad, and if you don’t want to be in a position where you can win a championship … well, then you probably shouldn’t play in New York.”

My head turned on my way to work this morning. A skirt, a switch, bare legs. I’m just glad I didn’t walk into anything. The next few days are supposed to be lovely.

Man, how I love this city.

[photo credit: Life magazine]

Walt Kelly.

Tyler Kepner had a good piece on Nick Johnson yesterday in the Times. I love Johnson, so I’m hoping he stays healthy, cause if he does, chances are the man will produce:

He does not want to think of himself as the guy who walks a lot.

“It goes back and forth with me in my head, because when I’m not swinging well or I get in a little funk, it’s because I’m passive, and I’m 0-2 like that,” Johnson said on Tuesday, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “I don’t mind hitting with two strikes, but when those times come, I have to be conscious of it, know it, and I’ve got to be ready to hit. I can always go back to being comfortable and walking.”

Last week, I wrote about a wonderful Tuscan kale salad I had at Resto.

According to someone in the know, Nevia No, a greenmarket goddess, has the goods at the 14th street farmer’s market.

Ya hoid.

[Photo Credit: New York Magazine]

One of my early adolescent idols…

Milton Caniff.

All I wanted was a slice, is that too much to ask?

I got off the R train at Union street in Brooklyn and walked up to Fifth avenue. But the pizza shop on the corner–Fifth Avenue Pizza–was closed. So I turned left, in the direction of Flatbush avenue. Four-and-a-half blocks later I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t passed a Pizzeria. On a commercial street chock full of restaurants no less. 

I didn’t want to keep moving away from Union street, where I was eventually headed, so I doubled-back, crossed over Union Street and continued on, figuring, again, a pizzeria would be a stone’s throw away.

Nope. Nada. Bubkus. I was apoplectic, hating hipster Brooklyn like never before, when I finally found a spot, on 3rd Street just off Fifth Avenue called Villa Rustica. I went in and ordered a couple of slices and sat down to eat.

Now, unless I’m at a fancy pizza shop, one of those places that claims to be “the best,” I’m not overly picky. What I’m looking for is a representative slice. Something I could offer an out-of-towner as an example of a good New York City slice. (Talk about a new spin on VORP–value above replacement pizza!) Well, the slice at Villa Rustica was just that–and better than any of the local pizza I have around my way in the Bronx.

It wasn’t spectacular, didn’t re-invent the wheel, but it was satisfying and delicious and it made my anger go away.

Ah, the restorative powers of a good, representative, New York City slice.

[photo credit: akuban]

As I mentioned earlier, Emma Span’s first book was released yesterday. Here at the Banter we are bursting with pride at Emma’s accomplishment, because she’s one of us, and also because she’s simply one of the best writers to emerge from the blogosphere, a truly original voice. Smart and funny. I think the world of her, as a writer and as a friend–and yes, she’ll be back to blogging here in the very near future.

So join us in giving her props and don’t sleep–go pick up a copy of her memoir.

Ya hoid?