Walking home this evening from the subway I could see that forsythia was already blooming in some front yards and this pleased me. Spring? Here already? Somehow I seem to feel as though this is just going to be another one of the several hiatuses we've had this past winter from bitterly cold weather. For the sake of the forsythia I hope not. Nothing makes for a sadder spring than all the flowers having died off after blooming too early and being followed by a strong frost. In NW Canada they have these warm winds that blow in from the Pacific called Schnooks (probably misspelled, pron. Shuh-nooks) that will suddenly bring spring-like weather to frozen Alberta, fooling all the trees and flowers into thinking that it's time to bloom and start producing sap. This has the ill effect of making some of these trees explode when the temperature drop back down to normal sub-zero (and that's centigrade) Canadian winter temperatures because of all the sap that's started moving around. Frankly I don't understand how this works, but I was told as a child, by my father and step-mother who lived then and still continue to live in Calgary, Alberta that this was what happened. Of course the trees don't really explode, not in any sort of violent way. But the trunks do burst it seems, there being too much sap moving around in them at that time or something. I first imagined driving down a tree-lined street and all of the trees blowing up one after the other on either side of the road like charges set to simulate a bombing run in a Hollywood movie. I think that it's really a slower process than this though.

Right, but the forsythia. It has begun to bloom around here. It looks nice and pleases me. I think that we've got that covered now.

And to speak the truth I was getting home at about 6:30 and the light was already beginning to fade. By the time that I've sat down to write all of this it's completely dark outside and I can't possibly imagine Spring or forsythia. The darkness begins to make me feel somewhat lower. Less Spring-y perhaps.

Okay. This thing's supposed to be about pizza, right? So let's get onto the whole pizza part of this damn thing, which actually happened last night. I wasn't even planning on eating pizza, but a sort of serendipity occurred and I ended up eating pizza at a friend's place after a reading and thank goodness I happened to have my camera with me. The serendipity comes in long before I was even thinking that I might be eating pizza from this place, called "Little Timmy's" or something, on the west side of 1st Avenue in Manhattan, just south of 2nd St. [I couldn't remember the name at the time, but it's actually L'il Frankie's, and they're at 19 First Avenue, between 1st & 2nd Streets.] It's not a pizzeria, it's a pizza restaurant, and I think that it's important to make the distinction. A pizza restaurant is a place where you can't get a slice, can probably order wine and beer and where you have to sit down at a table in order to eat your pizza. There are a number of such establishments around the city, most of them brick-oven pizza places. Many of them are quite fine, but I generally don't want to use this space to discuss them, because it just runs against the current of what I want to do here, which is discuss the events surrounding my having grabbed a slice at one venue or another and how the pizza was. If this wasn't already clear.

The serendipity came because I had met Kate on the corner of 1st Ave and Houston and we were walking up to 2nd St. where Brenda & Atticus live. On the street in front of Little Timmy's Pizza there was a chalk board sign with a peace symbol done in such a way so that one half of the divided lower third was a slice of pizza (not really all that geographically accurate in re the form of a pizza pie, as most pies are cut into eight slices, but I'll let that pass in light of the sentiments being expressed thereon) with some sort of slogan like "piece of pizza, not war" written along with it on the board. Of course, you can just look at the photo here and see for yourself (I'm assuming that the photo has actually come out in some sort of presentable shape, it might just be a mass of colorful noise but I can't tell because the battery for my camera is re-charging and I haven't been able to review the photos that I've taken recently). I took a photo because I thought that it was a cool sign and that I might somehow or other incorporate it into this column. (I'm trying to see how I like settling on "column" as opposed to "entry" or "journal." What do you think?)

When Kate and I arrived at Brenda and Atticus', Brenda told me that we were probably going to order some pizza from this really great place around the corner. "Which place, not that place on first just North of second St.," I asked concernedly, because they were violating one of the primary rules of eating pizza in New York: don't order pizza from a place that sells other varieties of non-Italian fast food, such as buffalo wings or cheeseburgers (I will make an exception for Jamaican Beef Patties). "Oh no," Brenda replied with the appropriate amount of displeasure after such a question, "We'll order from Little Timmy's Pizza around the corner, their pizza's great. Little Timmy's, it turns out, was the place that Kate and I had just passed on the street shortly before.

We were at Brenda & Atticus' because Brenda had given a reading earlier that night at the Zinc bar, and there was wine to be drunk, and poets to be drunker. At some point my camera was taken out of my hands by this madwoman (that's her on the left), who insisted on taking a million and six photos with it of all manner of nonsense. But that was much later in the evening. Eventually Atticus ran out and came back with three pizzas in their respective square boxes. One with mushrooms (pardon me, funghi), one with sausage and one that was your regular sort of marinara pizza.

So let's get down to it. Everyone raves about brick oven pizza, as though it's somehow going to come and save us all from eating slices on paper plates with the rabble. And I do enjoy a good brick oven pizza, although perhaps not as much as the next guy or gal. The merits of brick oven pizza are right up front, they're usually made with ingredients the quality of which will evade the budgets of most street-level pizzerias. So right there, they've got a leg up. And brick ovens do give the crust a different, pleasant taste that won't be found in slices from those large metal ovens. But there's only one pizzeria that I ever knew of that sold pizza by the slice from a brick oven, (up on 60th near the corner of Park Ave.) and it's closed now (and damn was it hot in there!) And so this brings us perhaps to some sort of class distinction between brick oven and metal oven pizzerias. If you want to eat brick oven pizza, not only is it most certainly more expensive, but you've got to order the whole damn pie! If they're only going to sell it to us by the pie, why do they even bother to cut it? How do they know that I'm not going to want to cut it up into sixths for my own personal peace pie or that I might not want to roll the whole damn thing up like some sort of enormous rastafarian mozzarella and sauce spliff and just deep throat that bad boy in one go? If the thing's been pre-cut then it would just fall apart no matter how you rolled it. What is it exactly? They think that we can afford to buy one of their pies but we can't afford a knife to cut it up? I suppose though that pre-cutting it does make it so that you can try to round up a bunch of strangers and then go to a brick-oven pizzeria, order a pie to go, divvy it up and each go your separate ways. But this clearly points to another problem that I've experienced before with brick oven pizzas and which I was most definitely experiencing last night while I wolfed down several slices of that pizza from Little Timmy's: the droopy nose.

If you were to divide up a pizza among strangers on the street, no one would probably be going very far because the front end of those pizzas almost always have no strength, and folding them in such a way as pizza should be folded isn't going to do any real good. It's pizzas like these that you always see people eating using the "flying buttress" method. That is, they don't fold it, but rather put the tips of their fingers just behind the crust, the thumb extended further out underneath the bottom of the slice to support it and then the tips of the fingers on their other hand underneath the slice and towards the very front of the pizza guiding it into their mouth. Disgraceful. Which hand are you going to use to hold your Pepsi?

It becomes clear to me the more I write here what the real purpose of brick oven pizza restaurants is. The restaurants are opened most likely to disguise the fact that the pizza being served therein isn't made with a crust strong enough to support whatever ingredients are piled on top. And how do they disguise this fact? Just what is the ruse they've manufactured especially for this purpose? Being that you're dining in the restaurant you're obligated to sit down at a table. And what is it that they set out before every plate? A knife and a fork. A knife and a fork so that when that pizza arrives and you can't figure out how you're ever going to lift off the plate the whole soggy mess that is the front end of the slice you've been served, there they are, somehow smuggled from their world of impropriety and now sitting, right there in front of you, so easy to lift and put to use.

MOM DAD DON'T TOUCH IT IT'S EVIL!

Okay, I'm getting a little carried away here. Let's get back to the pizza that was last night, at hand. I probably ate at least one slice from each of the three pies because they were very good and I was starving. At one point I feared that I was making too much of a pig of myself and so I started asking around if anyone else would like another slice. The ingredients were wonderful, the sauce, the funghi (look what's become of me!) the sausage. The mozzarella was certainly hand-made, not pre-packaged, and I assume that none of the other ingredients had ever spent any time inside a tin container. Still, the crust did leave something do be desired, whether it be that it was getting a little too soft and moist under the strain of the other ingredients or that it could have done to be cooked slightly longer. Also, as again with most brick oven pizzas, the slices weren't large enough, being probably about 3/4 the size of a slice you'd buy in some place that wasn't a restaurant.

If I was going to take some friends to a pizza restaurant in the east village, I'd probably lead them to Little Timmy's. The only other choice would have to be Two Boots, and I don't believe that that's brick oven, plus it's also got that Cajun-Italian thing going and that's a whole other story.