Finding a zest for life, one pizza at a time
Gastronomic adventure serves up a powerful, better-late-than-never coming of age story
“High concept” is a term for a piece of art which can be described — or promoted — through a succinct, punchy single sentence, the shorter the better. It’s not about nuance or subtlety; it’s about grabbing attention. While it has traditionally been the province of movies — “Dinosaurs break free and attack an amusement park!” or, the peak of high concept, Snakes on a Plane that delivers exactly what it promises — or television — “It’s Wagon Train, in space!” — it has, over the past decade or so, become the raison d’être of some blogs and other online media. Thus, Julie Powell chronicled her attempt to cook through all the recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in her tiny New York apartment, while Brandon Stanton’s chronicle of strangers on the streets of the city became the hugely successful Humans of New York.
It’s no accident that both of these online projects became hugely successful publishing projects: despite the high concept nature of the blogs, the actual work became something more significant, digging more deeply into emotional truths and revelations than one might expect.
Such is also the case with Slice Harvester, the latest blog-to-print project, from New Yorker Colin Atrophy Hagendorf. The concept for the blog was simple enough: Hagendorf would sample a plain slice (a.k.a. a slice of cheese pizza) from every pizzeria in Manhattan and rate the experience online. It was the sort of idea, Hagendorf explains, that typically exists with “the best unshot films, unpainted murals, unillustrated graphic novels, and unrecorded music . . . in the land of Drinking and Talking.”
His commitment to the project — which ended “two years and 435 slices later” — turned out to be more than a bit of selfconscious quirkiness; Slice Harvester ( the book) chronicles how the experience both facilitated and reflected a period of significant personal change and growth.
At the beginning of the blog, Hagendorf was a longtime inhabitant of drinking and talking, an aging punk rocker with a history of zine projects, fractious employment, failed relationships and a fairly significant problem with alcohol. The blog served as both an outlet and escape but, more significantly, it offered Hagendorf a structure, a direction for a life that had previously been characterized by drift and ennui.
Slice Harvester (the book) goes behind the scenes of Slice Harvester the blog, serving as a supplement to the online experience. Hagendorf recounts his own story with an admirable candour, in a workmanlike prose liberally sprinkled with pop culture references and casual obscenity.
From his roots as a suburban kid, venturing into New York whenever possible to attend punk shows (and eat pizza), Hagendorf chronicles his failings and flailings, while at the same time documenting the crumbling of an entire culture: punk bars and all-ages shows replaced by chain stores and restaurants. His journey to the bottom isn’t an attractive one, and to his credit Hagendorf doesn’t offer much in the way of excuses; instead, his seeming honesty offsets some of his less-pleasant actions and brings the reader to his side. This, in turn, makes his recovery, and his discovery of love, fulfilling and even more endearing. It’s a powerful, unique blend of a betterlate-than-never coming-of-age story and account of a recovering that is both involving and affecting.
Of course, there has to be pizza, and Slice Harvester offers not only highlights (and travesties) from Hagendorf’s travels, but also a salient analysis of the changing role of pizza parlours and their roles in their shifting communities, alongside the relationships that Hagendorf built (or expanded upon) during the course of the project.
Slice Harvester deftly outgrows the high concept nature of its roots and delivers something altogether winning, the perfect balance of crust, cheese and sauce, exactly what a reader craves. Robert Wiersema’s novel Black Feathers will be released in August.