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People who debate about whether or not this or that pizza is the best in the world are missing the point.

Pizza is all about context. It’s different in different places because it needs to be. It reflects the unique lifestyle of a particular area.

Here’s how I see the two styles I’m most familiar with: NYC and Buffalo

NYC

Thin, wide, flat, lots of surface area. Dry, dusty, charred (in places) crust. Fold it, always fold it, but watch out for that grease trough you just made; it’ll get on your favorite sweats and leave a stain; stuff a napkin back there, or better yet, sop up that grease with a few paper towel pats to begin with.

You eat it on the go; you just arrived for a weekend tryst, hungry and cramped from sitting in a plane, then a car, for hours. You need to get to the hotel, arena, playhouse, friend’s apartment, whatever, or you’ll “be late”; there’s always that delay of game penalty you’re running from.

You’re in between things; just been shopping but have some time to kill before the opening. You’re tired; walking all day will do that. You stumble across a glassy exterior with those levels of steamy goodness calling to you from the interior. People are standing in line. In you go, “a slice of plain please”. Whatever the word for pizza chef wields an enormous wooden paddle, slings a cold slice into gigantic steel multitiered cavern, from which emerges your piping hot slice. You shake on a mountain of flavor from the “free toppings tray” as my friend Kip always called it—garlic salt, parmesan cheese, oregano and crushed red pepper—and off you go, back into the maelstrom.

NYC Pizza is NYC. It’s delicious, hot, messy, and made for the constant onslaught of the masses, hungry and late, needing a full, hot belly to keep up.

Buffalo

Fat. Doughy. Thick. Soggy, but with crispy bits strategically implemented throughout; the edges of the pepperoni, the apex of the crust, which when examined resembles the surface the moon.

You’re at a gathering: a party, an event, a celebration, and expecting to eat something. You’re pretty hungry, hangry is more like it. After all, this is Buffalo. People get hangry a lot, driving to and from these gatherings, usually through layers of ice and wind that coat everything.

Eating is a respite. I don’t know how much I want; I just want to dive in. Show me to the party; let me get my party on.

You don’t buy a slice in Buffalo. You buy a pizza. It’s either a party pizza, or a sheet, or a half sheet. It doesn’t come round; if it does, it’s usually kinda squarish, like they are so used to doing angles and can’t shake off the muscle memory for the rare round order.

The pizza is cut up into little chunks. Nothing, really. So easy to grab another one. So likely a perfect bowl of heaven will reside there: that quarter sphere of pepperoni, the rim brown-almost-black, remnants of a combination of olive oil and liquid lard swirled at the bottom, so small it is likely completely uncut, posted there in glory on a field of mozzarella.

What’s that, over there? Wings! Of course. Let’s grab a few of those; some blue cheese as a rule. Oops; my pizza dropped into my dip (or was it the other way around? Queue the old Reeses PBC commercials). All the better; the tang of blue cheese is an amazing complement to the sweet, spiciness of Margherita pepperoni-laden Buffalo style pizza.

Bottom Line

Pizza is too general a term for that staple of our diets, and can’t be compared from one region to another. It’s all about how we eat it.

This was one of the first techniques I learned when I began art school, back in fall ’89.

It was eye-opening. For the first time, I wasn’t responsible for every nuance that came along. The surface dictated what marks were left. Suddenly, I felt a sense of freedom from that burden of decision in art; micromanaging every line, discrediting hours of work based on unsound logic, those things were no longer mandatory.

I never recognized the role this technique played in my development as an image maker. Maybe the school I attended (SUNY Buffalo) was enamored with stuff built with frottage, or maybe it was the current “flavor of the day” in the academic art world. I never stopped using it, though.

Great show. Loved the sax, and seeing it live made me realize how hard it is to pull off solos like they did in the 80s. Not enough people there, which is a shame. We’re lucky they keep coming back and should support one of the most notable, iconic sounds out of that era.

3 Dreams last night:

1. I was at a church, saying something about having to keep church stuff in mind at your home. I was like preaching this, even though I wasn’t the priest. Everyone was like “yeah”. The we drove up Brookside Ave (back in LI) to a baseball diamond. There was one of Grif’s friends dads up in a tree there, in a white bear costume. But then I saw a real white bear on another tree branch. IT wasn’t a polar bear, it was smaller–weird. So it started creeping toward the dad. I yelled, he dropped out of the tree, and the real bear ddid too, and started chasing him. Then it was chasing me, into the baseball diamond (). It turned out it was another guy in a suit, but he was old and had been living in the woods around the baseball diamond. He was trying to bite me/eat me because he was some kind of rabid zombie. I think he got a bite in on my foot before I woke up.

2. I was in the backyard, and it was swampy. But under the water were like smooth stones, kind of like in the iphone app Koi Pond. The water was shallow, and I was walking around back there. It was very peaceful-winter, grey, but stragely warm. In parts of the yard, the water got deeper. Soon I was up to my knees. A goldfish swam up to me, and it wasn’t scared. Next thing I know, I’m swimming in it. It’s warm, but I wonder if it’s dirty. I go to get out, but there’s these kelp/weeds in the way of the concrete ledge. I heave myself out though, and I’m standing on the ledge. So I jump back in on the other side, and see a hand floating in the kelp. I go “Wow, a dead person!” and I grab the hand. It’s a little hand, my son Eli’s. I push him up out of the water; I’m in too and it’s hard to hold him up. His eyes are open, but his mouth is closed and I wonder how I can get him on the ledge to give him CPR; I’m panicking and grief-stricken, wake up.

3. I drive up to my house in Snyder. It’s a beautiful day, and the sun is out and warm, even though it’s winter. Maybe it’s spring. My dad comes running up to me. He’s much younger; his hair is dark and he has glasses on like me. I hug him and I’m super happy to see him. He’s come for a trip in his pickup truck. In the truck it’s really messy, with a unch of Bud cans lying around, and a sixpack of unopened bud. He wants to drink some with me and my brother Bri who has just shown up. I look around, and the garbage we put out hasn’t been picked up. Lying on the blue bin is an enormous party pizza that has not been touched. My dad wants to eat it, but my brother goes” it’s nasty, there’s little black bits all over it” and he pretends to take a huge bite by sticking his head right on it. There is scaffolding on the front of the house as the workers are residing. I wake up.

Thinking about trying to organize a Wordcamp in Buffalo some time next Spring. Anyone interested in helping out? I need to find sponsors, venue, speakers, etc. Not sure I want to get into unless I have some people backing me up!

OK all you typography snobs out there, up in arms over Ikea’s recent switch to Verdana (google ikea verdana), ask yourselves: If you had one store to shop for all of your furniture, what would it be? Ikea, right.
If you had one font to use on everything you designed, what would it be? Well, you basically have to choose a web-safe, sans-serif font to maximize utility, so here are your choices:
Arial
Tahoma
Verdana
Trebuchet MS
Lucida

Personally, I’da gone with Lucida, but Verdana’s as good as any.