I thought the uptick in good Mexican food in NYC was due to illegal immigration. But Idle Words offers a more entertaining story:
Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city.
As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel approaches, it’s worth taking a look at the remarkable sequence of events that takes place between the time we click “deliver” on the burrito.nyc.us.gov website and the moment that our hot El Farolito burrito arrives in the lunchroom with its satisfying pneumatic hiss. ...
Taqueria owners have tried hard to cope with the additional demand, but even they admit that it can get hectic. “The New York metro area has fifteen million people,” explains Javier Corrientes, manager of Cancun Burrito on Valencia Street. “San Francisco is barely a tenth of that size. You got all those people out drinking on a Friday night who want a burrito at ten o’clock, just when the dinner rush is starting here, there’s no way we can keep up.”
posted by Maximus |
10:04 am EST |
2008.05.23 |
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The WFMU blog has unearthed a great circa-1982 clip from a dance party program called The Scene, which aired for many years on a local TV station in Detroit:
I like the retro styles and moves of the kids -- mostly black, Jheri-curled, and dressed to kill (but don't miss the swivel-hipped Napoleon Dynamite lookalike at 3:00). But I really dig the music they're getting down to.
"Sharevari" is a classic: arguably the first Detroit techno record, and a key part of the transatlantic exchange that created modern electronic dance music. In it, you can hear the Kraftwerk and Moroder that the producers had clearly been steeping in.
But you can also hear the many Italo-disco records to come that would cop its Eurotrash-in-deep-space vibe. (For a long time, the singer's cheesy fake accent and broken English had me fooled into thinking this was an actual Italo track.)
And you can recognize the blueprint of almost three decades of hard, dark, late-night floor-fillers that have followed since.
Initial impressions: Solid, familiar. Their trendy French producer didn't take them in any shockingly new directions. I do hear some interesting gated drum sounds -- along the same lines as what Portishead's been playing around with lately.
posted by Maximus |
3:18 pm EST |
2008.05.09 |
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