Hilton Als

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1:31In this world, we need best friends. Hilton Alls, writer, critic, curator, is a best friend of two of my best friends, Katie Robin and Gordon Vanderclaassen, directors of the Michael Werner Gallery, where Hilton curated the show Postures, Jean Rhys in the modern world. Last night at the opening I saw him from a distance, a beautiful figure in an enveloping and elegant white linen suit. The past few days have been spent rereading his articles in The New Yorker, listening to his beautiful eulogy for Joan Didion, and taking his books, The Women, White Girls, from my bookshelf, keeping pin-up his book about prints next to my bed.

2:18Today, we're finally together around a table in the River Cafe. I often say that every table has a story to tell. That's what we're going to do today, Hilton and I, best friends already. Oh. So. What a tribute. Wow. It's true. You know, that's so nice. Podcast is over. We're done. So, Hilton, what we could also do is we could start, we love listening to people read a recipe in any way they want and they choose a recipe from one of our books and so I think that you chose Dover Soul with marjoram and one of the first things you said to me yesterday when I said you was that you said you love fresh marjoram yes so I thought you might have chosen it because you love the soul but you love I love them both but I have a it's an element that's not used nearly enough, I feel.

3:11And then whenever I get it, I'm always surprised. So I was so thrilled to see it in your beautiful book. Here's the recipe. Okay. And you can... And also fish is very difficult to cook at home. Wycliffe John did his in wrap. Yeah, yeah. No. I'm just, I'm way too old. I leave that to Wycliffe and to Bad Bunny. Now there's one. Okay. Dover sole with capers and marjoram, two tablespoons salted capers rinsed, extra virgin olive oil, a bunch of fresh marjoram leaves, four whole Dover sole scaled and cleaned, one lemon cut in half. Preheat the oven to 230 degrees Celsius. Brush a large flat oven tray with extra virgin olive oil.

4:05Scatter half of the marjoram leaves over the tray with sea salt and black pepper. Place the fish on top, side by side. Season, then scatter the remaining marjoram and the capers over. Drizzle with olive oil. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Test with the point of a sharp knife inserted into the thickest part of the sole. If cooked, the flesh should come away from the bone. Squeeze the lemon over the fish and serve with juices. Simple. It's very simple, but, you know, I find... Of all the recipes, so the margin was what drew you to it. But also, it was also, I think fish is difficult to handle. And this recipe gave me more confidence about cooking Dover sole at home.

4:57Gave me a lot more confidence. confidence is what we need and also yeah because if you have confidence then your imagination can I always say that about I learned to cook through the art of mastering French cooking by Julia Child and she never said take a ripey juicy tomato and squeeze it she said take a tomato that was 4 centimeters across or 6 inches across and was 2 centimeters high cut it 1 centimeter thick or whatever it was like a science recipes like poetry and science but she made it so clear that you never had a failure and that gave you the confidence that's right then you know throw the cookbook away and find that juicy that's right and do what do you think i think that i think that if you have the if you have the fundamentals down then you're able to invent so when i read this and i said oh wow i never knew that i would put the leaves down with the oil and salt so that if there's a bed so it freed me to go to the store when I get back to New York and buy some soul and say oh I want to try this because the great thing about the book too is that it frees you to improvise would you say that's true of any discipline that you know the rigor of the technique and then you can be free would you say that in writing and music I would stake my life on it, really, that once you have the fundamentals of anything, then you're able to soar because you don't have to think about technique.

6:31That's the issue for a lot of writers and artists is that they get sort of embroiled in the technique of something as opposed to the breath of something. one of the things that I always tell students and writers and actors share this the question is what is the hardest thing to do and often some people say structure or whatever and I said no, the hardest thing is to relax relax enough to sit down and to start to play with the language when an actor is freest is when they can relax and it's not a crew of people, it's just you and we're talking. And so the technique part of it has to go out of the way.

7:26You have to forget it in order to live much more fully in the moment of the writing or the acting or the podcast or whatever. But do you think the reverse then is also true that if you don't, have you had writers who have the freedom but don't have the technique to get rid of what happens then mostly they're beat poets but they're home um um there's wonderful um you know that wonderful Truman Capote comment um he was on very young and on a television program and he said um the beat writers carouac came up and he said that's not writing that's typing and um there's a big difference right a lot of people as they're discovering their voices as writers are just typing so when i'm just typing my editor deborah treisman who's the fiction editor of the New Yorker is very wise and she'll put a little note in saying, you're just writing here.

8:33You're just writing. You're not saying the thing. Do you think the same is true of an artist like Pollock or an abstract expressionist? Oh, that's a good question. Because I always enjoy when I see the drawings of an artist who's, I've just seen their paintings. And then you see the way, whether it's Rothko and the way he drew a figure. It's always very interesting to see that. I tend to trust artists who can draw. Actually, I was telling Gordon this the other day. There's not one artist in our show who doesn't know how to draw. And the fundamental strength of that is that they know how to deal with intimacy.

9:18A painting, a big painting or medium-sized painting can be a show, a display. of relaxation, technique, a lot of things at once. But a drawing is really you. It's a form of writing. And if they can draw, they can conquer the world, really. Because they have the intimacy, they have the technique, they have the relaxation, they have the imagination. It all comes together in the smaller universe that they're creating. Well, then maybe she talked more then about the show. because I saw those two Picabia drawings upstairs and I thought it was just so beautiful everything, the photographs and how compelling walking in I really urge anyone who is listening to this wherever you are to get on a plane or boat or train and go see the show and we might meet her there and Bert I was very compelled by the first slideshow I didn't go upstairs first and I went into the room and those made me very I was really emotional aren't they amazing what have we done and then to see again the dignity and the elegance from the small shack of the architecture to the way the women were dressed it's a profound relationship to women of color throughout her life and in her writing that was again something that was very important for me to explore.

10:50So we have wonderful artists, Soma Critchlow, who has given us those beautiful drawings near the Pocabias that you've seen. This show, to me, even though there are big works in it, everything feels so intimate to me in terms of what is able to to cultivate this atmosphere. Jamaica Kincaid, who's the great Antiguan American novelist, said that she was the mother of us all, Jean. And so it was important for me to end the show with the writers who have meant a great deal. So Naipaul is one of the first people to write about her. A lot of, almost all the writing about her, they all talk about, I think, the ways in which she freed them as artists.

11:45So that this question that you brought up earlier about technique and freedom, she gave them, she opened the door to talk about the Caribbean and to talk about displacement. placement, and to talk about and use your imagination about the place that you're from, which can often feel like it's kind of separate from the rest of the world, right? People go to Caribbean for vacation, whatever, and then they go back to their quote, unquote, real lives. I think someone like Jamaica, who's written powerfully about that relationship of tourism in her book, a small place, is on the side of us understanding the ways in which this literature of the Caribbean has great meaning and value.

12:32So Derek Wilcott, his great poem, Jean Rhys, is in the show. And Carol Phillips, Cass Phillips, has written a novel about her returning to Dominica. So there's this way in which she is claimed by the very people she was forbidden to know in a racially structured environment. And isn't it amazing that it's ended up this way? That circle. Yeah.

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13:50Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by public investing brokerage services by open to the public investing Inc. Member FINRA SIPC. Advisory services by public advisors, LLC, SEC registered advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Tell us about growing up in your house. What did your mother do? Your mother, your single parent, your mother.

14:24And I was also very moved by your mother because you talked about how you wished that she could have lived long enough so that you could take care of her. I thought that was something that we, through food and through cooking and through eating, we take care of each other. Oh, my goodness. Was that part of your childhood? Ruthie, you're going to love this. I'm going to love it. So as we got older, she would try to experiment with certain dishes. Yeah. And she tried to make a beef bourguignon. That's a hard thing to make. Uh-oh. But my mother didn't drink or anything. Pour in the red wine. There you go.

15:03And it's too much. And then it's rancid, right? When you cook it, it becomes vinegar, basically, in a way. The meat gets tougher. Yes. And my brother and I are sitting at the table and not looking at each other. And she's like, oh, isn't it? And she's pretending that it's delicious. And from her, I understood that food was love and that you should never, in a way, criticize what you're given. Because she did this with such love. And she was such a hard worker. And she didn't have a lot of time. My brother and I, in fact, started cooking. We would go to the library and get cookbooks. And that's how I learned to make bread.

15:48What age? Being very young. I was 11. And my brother was 9. And we would go and we would make bread for her. So that it was ready when she came home. So nice. And we just adored. That's a lot to do. Making bread is kind of a big deal. It was so much fun. I love the smell of yeast. And I thought I would make one dish this Christmas that I loved that she made. It was coconut bread. It's not difficult, but to get it right. What is it? It's like a cake and a bread at the same time. She would make this. So then you get the coconuts and we would break the coconuts in the water and grinding, you know, with grater.

16:27And she'd get the kids to grate the coconuts. So this is something your mother made, the coconut bread. And her mother had made it. Right. And then she also made fish cakes. And she made something called blood pudding, which is very English, actually. It's like blood sausage. Anyway, my plan this Christmas is to approximate the coconut bread and the fish cakes. And I'll bring them to you. Did your mother, was she born? No, my mother was born first generation. but my grandmother had an aunt whom she loved and was very close to named Aunt Bea and she was the big cook and so my mother would cook with her so they kind of brought the food with them to New York you didn't go out and have hamburgers and french fries oh on Fridays we could go she would give us well you know how working mothers are she would give us$5 my brother and I we lived in Flatbush, which was a big West Indian Jewish community in Brooklyn.

17:32And we could go get almost always a West Indian takeout. Not a hot pastrami sandwich. No, no, no. You talked about this. But with my father, that was a whole other cuisine. What was his cuisine? My father really introduced me to the world in a very profound way. He was not mindful of how segregated New York could be. so we went to eat in Germantown he liked in Yorkville in the 80s he loved foreign films and any kind of cuisine that he didn't make he was the first person I ever saw make steak tartare for instance he loved this restaurant in the village Emilio's we would go there quite a bit on the weekends he would take us around my brother and I we would eat german food we would go to cats's delicatessen and have pastrami we send a pastrami to your son in the army it's still up the sign is still up and if i feel terrible and have a terrible cold i go to cats and have matzo ball soup you have matzo ball soup chicken soup for the yeah the penicillin yeah so you did have food as food was a part of your culture whether it was eating out with your dad who didn't live with you right so he would do that dad thing or the divorced parents taking you out to restaurants did you love that did you love going to restaurants you know it's funny ruthie uh i realized how much she must have structured this relationship after my mother died i was like oh my god she made him have structure with us and that he had to come on friday and no saturday and we would go out to the park or we would go somewhere.

19:20And then we would have a big lunch together. In a restaurant. Yeah, sometimes we'd go all the way up to Sheepshead Bay and have seafood. Often he liked to go into the city, which meant you would take a bus over the Williamsburg Bridge and we would just get off. And so a lot of times he would take us to the library and walk around the 42nd Street Library or Brooklyn Heights was another favorite place, the esplanade and he would bring us um watercolors and pads and we would sketch while he read the paper oh well that's a kind of memory of food and parenting and she was amazing when you went off she was little but mighty when you were at columbia because you chose a university that was in your hometown did you But you lived on campus, but was home and food.

20:15It was weird. It's an interesting story. So when I was 16, I went to Purchase, SUNY Purchase, which was a big arts school. And the story was that my mother took me. One of my sisters, her husband drove us. And I remember we got into the room. I put the suitcase on the bed, and she opened the suitcase, and she started to unpack the suitcase to put things in drawers. And I took her hand and I said, Ma. And she realized she had to stop. Let go. It was profound. And she had to stop and let me suffer or have joy or whatever. But she couldn't buffer the world anymore. Anyway, I missed her so terribly.

21:07I got strep throat there. Yeah. And fell apart and went back home. Good. And she never questioned that. And then when she was moving to Atlanta, her sisters moved down there, she said, you can only stay in New York if you go to school. Yeah. It was one of the few demands she's ever made, and that's when I went to school. And you applied to Columbia. You went to Columbia. Yes, and met some amazing people. I did. You did. And you were thrust into the world of sort of downtown and Gennett Village. Yes, met some incredible people. Were restaurants a feature of what you did? Well, there was no money.

21:46So what did you do? Well, you go to parties and you eat food. You went to people, yeah. No, I get that. There was a place that was delicious on 4th Street and 2nd Avenue that was Ukrainian. Not Veselka, but the other place. So you get a big chunk of challah bread and pea soup. And then if you had a little bit more money, you would go up to B &H Dairy, which was the kosher restaurant. And you could have pancakes or latkes. So it was a big Eastern European Jewish community where you could eat substantially for very little money. And were you mostly solitary? And also people kind of would leave apartments in a month if they didn't like the people.

22:35It was a very wild place. It was a kind of lawless place. New York at that time. What year was that? So let's say I left Brooklyn in the early 80s. Yeah. And it was pretty lawless for a long time. I guess coming out of the 70s, coming out of Vietnam, coming out of... Yes. When was the AIDS era? So 82 to 95. Yeah, and you've written a lot about that. Yes, I have. Talk about that. Well, it was just devastating in terms of, it's hard, Ruthie, to get younger people to understand that it was like kind of science fiction, that you know, you'd be chatting with someone one day and then they would be gone.

23:19And the sad things for some people were that families abandoned them. Hospitals didn't know what to do with the bodies. they would dump them in garbage bags and it was a horrifying period. But I think a lot of, I think it sped up intimacy. Oh, it sped up intimacy? Yes, that it taught you that the value of friendship was something to value, you know, and not to take for granted ever. I saw recently, I saw on television, Chorus Line, you know, and you just look at something like that I bet every one of those beautiful dancers died. I think there may be, I guess because they had the 50th anniversary, and I think there are only like two of the men.

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25:05That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc. Member FINRA, SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC. SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. A lot of people, and I don't know if you feel that way, was they see that food, being able to drink good wine, eat good food, cook with good ingredients, was almost a measure of their success.

25:38You measure your success by the house you live in, the clothes you wear, or the trips you can take. But you might also measure it in the way you can eat. Yes. Was there a point when you realized that you could because everything... I think I've inherited something from my father. You're bringing up wonderful love feelings for him. He was a difficult person but my mother used to be in a state by how much money he spent outside in restaurants. I have inherited that from my father and didn't care how much I spent if we were having a good time. So when I moved to Tribeca, the Odeon became my living room.

26:22Oh, really? And I would meet people at the Odeon. The Odeon is great. And I don't think I even had a bank account, Ruthie. But if I earned a wonderful friend of mine at another gallery, remember she was working for Gagosian. And I had written something. And she said, oh, where can we mail the check? And I said, would you mind meeting me with the check? I couldn't even wait for the post. She said, and she remembers this, she said I was very kind, and I met her at the Odeon, they would cash the chat. And sometimes they'd let you run over tab, not much, but I could pay them back and then start another tab.

27:05So I truly inherited that kind of, it's an extension of your home feeling from my father. Yeah. I lived in Paris, we used to look when he was doing the Pompadour. I promise you every when we had checks and then you had those stubs and we always forgot to fill in the stub. But I was probably 99 % of the checks were to a restaurant. It was always around food. That's right. We basically just thought we're in Paris, we're going to spend whatever we have on eating and going out. And enjoying. Because also, let's think about going to bed at night. You're going to bed at night, do you ever think about what you're going to eat the next day?

27:41Or when you wake up in the morning, do you think about what you're going to eat that day? Only in a hotel, actually. interestingly um they've been very generous at the michael verner gallery and um and um because of jet lag you wake up at odd hours and there is a wonderful night waiter at this at the beaumont hotel and he is so sweet and shy and but he just laughs at my or he's chuckling a little bit when he puts the tray down because i said may i have two iced teas please um a bowl of berries do you have a bacon like it's sort of like that kind of jet laggy food and he comes and he says oh no problem sir and he brings the the dishes and I realized that it's it's something I've gotten from my father that it's a connection to the home that if you meet a server who's gracious to you that they become your friend and you ask about their family and they ask you and so it's always been an extension of my home i had an editor early on in the new yorker and she would say she said but you don't make any money how do you go and i said it'll come like yeah it'll just come and it was something that i deeply inherited from my father that it was a i feel very relaxed in restaurants yeah you do because of him yeah i always think that restaurants And she'd be in a rage about the money.

29:08Yeah, but you know, I watch it here, we see, I say to the waiters, you know, and we have our meetings or the servers or the, all of us, the chefs, that you never know what people, you know, what is their story of their table. So if somebody comes in and they, I could take you in that restaurant right now and you'd see people having a great time. They're all sitting there, but you don't know if yesterday their dad died. or somebody lost their job or they're celebrating a wedding or a birth of a baby or they're going to break up. You're making me feel very teary. It's a beautiful memory. And it's a kind of a story.

29:47Every table has a story. And I'll tell you what, we won't have it in the podcast because I've told it a million times, which is that a man came in once and called us before he was coming and he said, I'm going to propose tonight. so would you please write on the chocolate cake will you marry me so we thought that's so lovely and so we wrote will you marry me on the top of the cake and after their first course he came up to the uh to those kitcheners that canceled the cake oh whoa and we always wonder what was it what happened what happened she said no you know and and also people do very again i was often said very private things in a public space.

30:32So if they are going to fire somebody or they're going to announce an affair or they're going to, they will do it in a public space. So it kind of regulates your behavior. You can't throw a fork at somebody. So I think it is interesting, the dynamic. And maybe your father taking you to restaurants is because he loved them, but maybe he wanted you to be in a safe place where you could all be. I think you're completely correct. I think that him showing these places was as much the world that he could show us, right? I mean, I don't think my father got on a plane until he was in his late 60s to visit my sister in St.

31:11Thomas. So he was very interested in the world. How do you show your children the world? You don't have the means, but you want to take them places. Well, you can take them to great restaurants. You can expose them to film. I remember him taking us to see the passenger Antonioni and I was like this is so interesting he was a very weird guy but he was home I can see why she was interested in him as I get older I have a friend whose mother brought him up no matter who walked in the house whether it was somebody fixing the dishwasher or an invited guest within something like 80 seconds They had to have been asked something to eat or drink.

32:01And I think what it means is a way of stopping what you're doing and saying, I'm paying attention to you. This is interesting. My mother always said, and I pass this on to people, she said, I never went to my mother's house empty-handed, even if it was an onion or an orange, I would bring it. And so it's that kind of homage to the elder. And so it goes back to the idea that, as you said, that food is love. I never criticize it. It's a way of saying whether... It's like saying I don't love you. Yeah. As you say, I have a friend who we were having, and I don't mind, we actually like it if somebody sends their food back, if they didn't like it.

32:43And we never argue. They say my chicken is overcooked or my sea bass is too burnt or whatever. And you just say thank you and they're right. Whatever they say, you kind of empathize with if I were you, I would feel that same way or whatever. I think if we say that food is something other than teaching you about a culture, it's other than expressing love. If it's an invitation, if it's stopping you from being hungry and being in pain, it also is comfort. And sustenance. It's comfort too and sustenance. And so if I were to say to you as my last, or go on and on or sort of final questions is before we go and have some substance before we eat with Katie and everyone else and whatever they're cooking in the river cafe including a Dover soul.

33:34If it was comfort for you and you need comfort I hope you don't need comfort too often. No, I've been so nervous on this trip and I'm very happy. But if you do need comfort is there something that you would go to a memory of your mother's or someone? Yeah, I would go to they're called bakes. What's that? And it's like You know how the Italians fry bread? But these are flat. They have baking soda, and it's with cinnamon. And they're fried. They're little dollops of dough that are fried, but with a lot of cinnamon in them, and then sprinkled with sugar, and that's what I would eat. You're going to make me them?