The 234 Apartment

Dasa Drndic. The capacity to see the bricolage of a reticent, morally compromised, elegiac past —and, more unsettlingly, how that past might see us — is a central feature of the work of the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic . “I have arranged a multitude of lives, a pile of the past, into an inscrutable, incoherent series of occurrences,” one character says in Trieste , Drndic’s most acclaimed novel to date. “I have dug up all the graves of imagination and longing … I have rummaged through a stored series of certainties without finding a trace of logic.” Drndic adorns her novels — ostensible fictions encircling the Holocaust — with rich archival materials : photographs, biographical sketches, transcripts, testimonies, making a kind of blackened garland of twentieth-century history. It is as if, for Drndic, the atrocities of the recent past overwhelm the capacities of both fiction and fact, that only in braiding the two can our proximity to such horror be countenanced. Her most recent novel...

San Francisco is celebrating the Summer of Love’s 50th anniversary. Most of the celebrants are probably dead and buried by now, especially its high priests like Allen Ginsburg who passed into Eternity in the dingy East Village , Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, Emmet Grogan of the Diggers (remember them). In truth, there hasn’t been much of a to-do about the historic occasion. Today’s “with it” residents of the Bay Area live in the moment. Vintage refers to their last but one smart phone; antique is their pre-updated software from Microsoft. The “Summer Of Love” – if they can recognize the name at all – belongs to the Neolithic Age or whenever it was that the skies were filled with flying dinosaurs instead of Amazon delivery drones . Only the De Young Museum has done its civic duty in bowing to the past. A mile away from the Haight-Ashby, they have organized a nostalgic exhibition that features the vivid psychedelic posters from Bill Graham’s Fillmore Ballroom concerts and the accoutre...

The best restaurant cookbooks are like time capsules, preserving a moment, a feeling. That’s what this year’s stack of restaurant- focused books achieves — with variable levels of success. Don’t miss chef Wylie Dufresne ’s look back at wd~50 or the new two-volume set from NYC’s highly lauded experiential dining room Eleven Madison Park . Casual restaurants, from the Publican in Chicago to Juhu Beach Club in Oakland, also got the book treatment this year. Each collection stands alone as a testament to the hard work of a team pushing for one pristine goal. Cheers to the Publican: Recipes and Ramblings from an American Beer Hall Paul Kahan, Cosmo Goss, Rachel Holtzman Lorena Jones Books, September 19 Starting with the first time I ate at there, shortly after its opening in 2008, the Publican has been my favorite restaurant. It was an instantaneous love — the room, the food, a swirling feeling of commensality and broad-shouldered abundance. So for me, the promise of this book, Cheers t...

In March of 2016, having recently been let go from the Cleveland Browns due in part to truancy and public drug use, Johnny Manziel applied to live in an apartment. The property manager who processed his application was at first delighted that she would have the opportunity to rent to the Heisman Trophy recipient from Texas A&M. But she was quickly disheartened when she realized that, due to a criminal background screening policy that she had helped create which immediately disqualified applicants who had been arrested for or charged with a crime, she could not rent to Johnny Football. His criminal background check revealed that he had been arrested for domestic violence three months prior. But since she was a fan, and because it was her personal opinion that he was innocent, she successfully lobbied her building’s ownership to restructure their screening policy to disregard arrests, and only screen for convictions (using the logic that arrests are not proof of wrongdoing). ...