The prospect of going on holiday tomorrow has led me to dig out my copy of Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood. I was first recommended it in the summer of 1988 when we were due to drive across America from Santa Barbara to Philadelphia. Someone said ‘Get a copy of Roadfood‘. They were right. We did the whole trip by driving from diner to diner, including Craig’s Bar-B-Q and the Family Pie Shop, right opposite one another in DeValls Bluff in deepest Arkansas. In 2007, we drove from Chicago to San Francisco by way of Seattle and again used Roadfood as a guide to where to go to, including the Yellowstone Drugstore in Shoshoni, Wyoming. It was before everyone had become obsessed by food writing and we used to read out the Sterns’ long, loving descriptions of their favourite hot dog store with delight. Of course, it’s now a subscription website. And the Sterns have divorced.
Tag Archives: America
Dennis Hopper
We opened Dennis Hopper tonight: vintage prints in a display which replicates an exhibition of his photographs shown in Fort Worth in 1970. I find it almost unbearably nostalgic, all those hippies, flower power, the smoking, Jasper Johns, Hells Angels, love ins, Andy Warhol in the factory, Timothy Leary and the short clip from Easy Rider which shows them on their motorbikes riding through the desert. It’s pure sixties, undiluted and beautifully framed.
Peter Rosengard
I’ve just had breakfast with Peter Rosengard, a genial insurance salesman who transacts all his business from a corner table at Claridge’s. A few years ago, he had the idea of commemorating 9/11 by exhibiting one of the twisted steel girders from the Twin Towers. For a while, it was displayed in Battersea Park. Then, it was destined for Potter’s Fields south of the river. Currently, it is being stored in a farmyard in Cambridgeshire. The plan is that it should find a permanent home in Olympic Park.
The American Ambassador
The American Ambassador came and spoke at the Royal Academy tonight. I suppose there comes a time when it is not just the policemen, but the Ambassadors who are younger than one. Suffice it to say that Matthew Barzun is extremely nice, intelligent and highly articulate, the son of Jacques Barzun who pioneered cultural history in the US and was an expert on baseball as well as the history of ideas. Matthew conducted a very simple and effective exercise which was to ask each of us to draw what we least liked about the US. Several of us, including me, tried to think of an easy way of drawing its immigration policies, those cold, inhospitable halls by which one is required to enter the US. As many people drew guns which is easier. I hadn’t realised that there are as many guns as there are American citizens, whereas in the UK only 6% of the population owns guns. The non-resident Americans all tried to draw the IRS. The other thing expressed was a view that Americans are arrogant which I thought was a touch discourteous to someone who was so courtly and unarrogant.
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