Salon.com > Alan Deutschman

Doing the Sundance shuffle

Wed, 23 Jan 2002 20:00:00 +0000

The cherished conceit of the Sundance Film Festival is that out of 120 independent films shown over 10 days in the ski village of Park City, Utah, the cognoscenti will discover a brilliant new writer-director who had struggled in obscurity. The legend was inspired by the success of Steven Soderberg, whose "sex, lies, and videotape" conquered Sundance in 1989 and became a big commercial hit, and Todd Solondz, who won one of the festival's jury prizes in 1996 with "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and went on to make "Happiness," the most daring and disturbing masterpiece of our era. The great hope is that the newfound auteur will be shockingly young and will have languished as a video store clerk, like Quentin Tarantino ("Reservoir Dogs," 1992) or rented his body for scientific research as a way of raising cash, like Robert Rodriguez ("El Mariachi," 1993).

The carp in the bathtub

Wed, 11 Apr 2001 00:39:00 +0000

As I was earning my reputation as a foodie in Manhattan in my 20s, when my gluttony was goaded by a ludicrously permissive Time Inc. corporate expense account and aided by the mega-burning metabolism of youth, when I was a habitué of Bernardin and Bouley, when I once shared the corner banquette at Le Cirque with the owner, Sirio, himself, I secretly harbored a deep embarrassment: While I acclimated to the delights of nine-course, wine-paired tasting menus and performed something akin to Talmudic scholarship on the Zagat's guidebooks, I suffered from a sense of guilt about my continuing passion for the comparably crude Eastern European Jewish cuisine of my childhood holidays.

It undermined my pretensions of culinary mavenhood to have such an unremitting lust for food that would be considered bad, if not awful, by the gourmand crowd. It was as if the chef at Lutece were caught pounding Ring-Dings. How could I overcome my humble roots in the Ashkenazi shtetlach and assimilate into America's ruling class of elite WASPs if, on the way to hearing a string quartet at Carnegie Hall, I swooned outside Carnegie Deli? What good were my Princeton degree and my rumpled khakis and button-down oxford broadcloths and Top-Siders if I still craved matzo balls and stuffed cabbage?

Gefilte fish from the “Jewish Alps”

Tue, 10 Apr 2001 18:27:00 +0000

When I asked my mother how to make gefilte fish from scratch, she confessed that she didn't have Great-Grandma Minnie's recipe. Instead she went to her kitchen shelf and picked out her yellowed copy of "The Art of Jewish Cooking" by Jenny Grossinger, the culinary maven at Grossinger's resort hotel, a bastion of gastronomic excess during the post-World War II heyday of New York's Catskill Mountains resorts (aka the "Jewish Alps").

My parents actually spent their honeymoon at Grossinger's, where the guests would gather three times a day at large tables in a grand dining room for marathon waiter-served meals, as if they were attending a bar mitzvah. The hotel is now defunct, alas, killed off by today's young couples' strange preference for windsurfing at Club Med rather than gorging on chopped-liver appetizers. And the authoritative 1958 cookbook -- "it's as close to Grandma's cooking as you'll find," my mom said -- is out of print. But Mom still has her copy of the 18th printing from October 1969, bought soon after we moved from Queens to a Levitt tract house in the goyish wilds of central New Jersey. Its recipe for gefilte fish goes like this:

George Soros

Tue, 27 Mar 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Last year, when the great investor George Soros retired, at 70, from his career of speculating with billions of other people's dollars, it was as if a legendary athlete -- his fingers covered with championship rings -- had grudgingly given up after a couple of humiliating losing seasons. Soros' lifetime record was astonishing: If you had invested $1,000 in his Quantum Fund when he started out in 1969, he would have turned your paltry grand into $4 million by the new millennium -- a cumulative 32 percent annual return, the financial equivalent of a major-league slugger batting .400 not just for a single season but for three decades.

Like John D. Rockefeller in a previous generation, Soros found making his billions to be very stressful, and he took much more pleasure in giving them away. Even though he has already given $2.8 billion to his foundation, Soros is still worth around $5 billion. He has promised to give away the rest of his wealth before he turns 80, meaning that his legacy as a philanthropist and reformer could be even greater than it already is.

Buy our movie. Please.

Wed, 31 Jan 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Today, on this crisp Friday afternoon in January, Sidney Sherman walks down Main Street in Park City, Utah. He's a prime specimen of what the locals call the PIB (People in Black), the L.A. film players who overrun this laid-back ski town for 10 days every winter for Sundance, the mother of all indie film festivals. Sherman -- who once worked as the stand-in and body double for Keanu Reeves -- is now 33 and an accomplished producer, and he has a documentary in the festival. "Go Tigers!" is a 103-minute feature about the extraordinary craze for high school football in Massillon, Ohio, an economically depressed Rust Belt steel town that has little else to give it pride.

Furniture buyers of the world, unite!

Wed, 22 Nov 2000 20:30:00 +0000

Though it's still early on a Saturday morning, there are only three remaining parking spots among the hundreds in the lot at Ikea in this freeway-hugging "edge city" that spills over from Oakland. Trekking across acres of asphalt, I begin to comprehend the awesome scale of the store itself, a gargantuan box painted in a garish blue that's obviously intended to impart a warm fuzziness.

"Something for Everyone" promises the monumental sign, like a cheerful message from Big Brother himself. From Interstate 80 Ikea looks big; up close, it's so intimidatingly huge that even the extra-special blue can't compensate for the inhuman banality. And that's when I first realize what is happening to us: My girlfriend and I aren't just shopping for a couple of tall wooden bookcases for our living room. No, we are subjecting ourselves to the socialist shopping experience, exported directly from Sweden, a subversive paradigm offering a radical alternative to the social rifts that polarize arch-capitalist America.

The recklessness of the nerds

Thu, 12 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Roger Lowenstein's "When Genius Failed" is a kind of '90s sequel to "Liar's Poker," Michael Lewis' celebrated tell-all memoir of Wall Street in the '80s.

But aside from the uncommon lucidity they share, the two books couldn't be more different. "Liar's Poker" portrayed the trading floor of Salomon Bros., then the hottest firm on the Street, as a pinstriped version of "Animal House." Lewis' milieu was a raucous, macho fraternity where slobbering, swaggering dudes like "The Human Piranha" (who shouted the "F" word in every breath) prided themselves on cajoling and intimidating clients into buying "dog shit" bonds. It was a realm ruled by balls, not brains, and the story line was how Lewis -- an urbane art history major from Princeton -- learned to fit in with crude boys and establish himself as one of the "Big Swinging Dicks."

The once and future Steve Jobs

Wed, 11 Oct 2000 19:30:00 +0000

On Sept. 16, 1997, Steve Jobs announced that he would serve as Apple's "interim CEO." He moved into a conspicuously small office, close to the boardroom. He inherited Gil Amelio's secretary, Vicki, and told her that he didn't like the pens that Apple kept in stock. He would only write with a certain type of Pilot pen, which he proclaimed was "the best."

He took to walking around the Apple campus barefoot in cutoff shorts and a black shirt. One day he accosted Jim Oliver, a Wharton Ph.D. who had been Gil's assistant.

"What do you do here?" Steve demanded.

"I'm wrapping things up."

"You mean that in a while you won't have a job?" Steve shot back. "Well, good, because I need someone to do some grunt work."

What a strange way to motivate people, Jim thought. Then again, it was a chance to work for a legendary figure.

It turned out that the "grunt work" would give Jim a close-up view of Steve's deliberations about how to save Apple. The job was to take notes at the meetings where Steve would review every part of the company and decide what to keep and what to kill.

Wall Street schmooze and spin

Tue, 26 Sep 2000 19:00:00 +0000

If the media is a moral Inferno -- a tortured realm of commonplace conflict of interest, hidden manipulation and pervasive deceit, betrayal and megalomania -- then Howard Kurtz is its Dante.

With each new book, the tireless Kurtz (whose day job is as media columnist for the Washington Post) descends to an even deeper and more damnable level of media hell and serves as a knowing guide. The last time around, in "Spin Cycle," he showed how our favorite White House correspondents got spun by the Clinton propaganda machine. Where could Kurtz possibly look next for an even stickier pool of moral muck ready for raking? The answer is Wall Street. And in his latest book, "The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation," he takes on the proliferation of media outlets, like CNBC and CNN, that traffic in advice and rumors about the stock market for a public hooked on frantic speculation.

Bring on the misfits

Wed, 30 Aug 2000 18:38:00 +0000

When Wall Street Journal reporter Gregg Zachary abandoned the Silicon Valley beat and said that he was going to travel the globe covering labor issues, his friends in the media wondered whether he had gone Marxist on us. For aside from his day job at the great capitalist bastion, he moonlights as a contributor to lefty publications such as Mother Jones and In These Times. Sure enough, Zachary wound up writing something truly radical, although his ideas will challenge accepted wisdom on both the left and the right.

In his new book, "The Global Me," Zachary spins a theory of why countries will succeed or fail in the global economic struggle, sort of a "Wealth of Nations" for the microchip era. His argument is that innovation depends on the cultural collisions that come from an ethnic and racial mixing of the population, which is exactly what happens in places like California. Outsiders and misfits are the ones who provoke change, he says. Immigration and intermarriage are economic boons because they create "mongrels"--hybrid personalities who are exceptionally creative: "They have more perspective than the one-dimensional person and are more willing to rebel against tradition or question habitual ways of thinking or doing." Nations that remain homogenous and closed off, like Japan, risk getting clobbered. Countries that are starting to encourage diversity (like Ireland, surprisingly) are the ones that stand to win.