City of Gold is a documentary about the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic, the late Jonathan Gold. The movie by Laura Gabbert shows Gold driving all over L.A. in his green pick-up, looking for places people make good food: an Iranian sandwich shop in Westwood, a Chinese restaurant in Alhambra, a Oaxacan restaurant in Koreatown.
I, too, spent a good deal of time driving around L.A. looking for something to eat, but as a delivery driver, I was always in hurry. I envy Jonathan Gold's investment of time, eating at one restaurant dozens of times before filing his restaurant review.
So today, I'm going to take some time to retype a poem that was in the anthology Poetry 180: A Turning Back To Poetry but is not on the current web page. The poem--"A Hunger" by Benjamin Saltman--wants to get beyond food, much as Gold himself seems to want to do in his reviews. In the spirit of Billy Collins' anthology, I'm not going to say more than "A Hunger" makes me hungry...in several ways.
Do you seriously want peace or a good meal
in a restaurant opening onto a garden?
A garden with lights strung in a tree
and raccoons visiting every night,
cleverness in little hands? The raccoons
ignore the lights and people watching.
The light gleaming along wet telephone
wires and collecting on the white
stone bench.
Inside the restaurant I think
of reading my book or tarring my roof,
knowing I can still do one but not the other.
For five years I've been waiting to die
and trying to think of something significant.
I wait for a key to slam into a door,
and I sit straight with folded hands.
At least I know how to imitate peace.
Earlier when I saw a man in a black coat
standing in the cold with his children
it was as if they had been standing forever
on a little island. How could they not be
significant? The man would touch his children
on the shoulders at times as if to say
that people would not be this way forever,
that he would forget peace for a meal.
The pre-screening discussion for City of Gold begins at 1:30 p.m. on November 10 in The Schulman Auditorium at The Dove Library.
