About Eric and Urban Home Blog

@ericdiesel at The Formosa Cafe

Who are you?
My name is Eric Diesel. I am a writer living in Los Angeles after spending twenty-five years as a New Yorker. Aside from Urban Home Blog, on which I write about the unique pleasures of urban homekeeping, I am a member of the James Beard Foundation and a contributor to too many online and print publications to list here. For a complete list of my credits and credentials, please view my profile at Author's Den. You can also email me.

What is your education?
I have a Bachelor's Degree from Susquehanna University and a Master's Degree from New York University.

Where do you live?
In Los Angeles, we live in West Hollywood. WeHo is known for its centrality in Metro LA, for a spiritedness that is both easygoing and freewheeling, and for its importance as a center of LGBTQA* culture. We live on a street of palm trees and low apartment buildings, with cross streets of enviable bungalows. We are walking distance (yes, people walk in LA) from the Walk of Fame, Runyon Canyon, the Sunset Strip, and a lovely stretch of Route 66 where it runs concurrent with Santa Monica Boulevard. We also have a second residency in Solvang, California, a small town in the Santa Ynez Valley.

In New York City, we lived in Astoria, a neighborhood in Queens. Aside from the large and influential Greek community, Astoria is a diverse neighborhood with Italian, Mexican, middle European and GLBT communities. We lived in a community of pre-war apartment buildings that was originally built to house immigrants at a time when that area of Astoria was known as Little Czeckoslovakia. Just around the corner is a famous remnant of that time: the Bohemian Beer Garden, the largest such in New York City and one of the city's busiest destinations.

I write frequently about both places. To read more about our lives in New York and California, look for the tags New York City, Los Angeles, Santa Ynez Valley and bi-coastal living.

Where do you come from?
I was raised in a small town in the Ozarks on the Oklahoma/Arkansas border. I was raised primarily by my grandmother, who was Osage. She had grown up in an Osage settlement on a tributary of the White River where the states that would become Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas meet. She was one of two daughters in a family that also had three sons, and those five children were identified on one of the first tribal rolls from the Oklahoma land rush. My grandmother's oldest brother ran the family business. My grandmother and the other brothers all married and settled in the area. The youngest daughter went to Hollywood, where she found modest success in the movies.

My grandfather was a turkey farmer originally from the Kansas plains, but his people were only a generation or two off of the boat from France. My knowledge of him is sketchy; he died long before I was born. Interesting factoid: he and I share the same birthday (January 19). He and his wife settled in a tiny community on Indian land in Oklahoma. They lived in a green two-story frame farmhouse of the kind that you know if you're from that part of the country. During the Great Depression they opened up the land to fellow Okies, and the homestead became a working collective where aside from the turkeys they raised oats, ranched horses, cultivated the wild raspberries that are indigenous to the area and sold the jam right out of the kitchen. They had three children. My mother was the middle child.

I have memories (some quite vivid; they were a rowdy bunch) of my grandmother's siblings. They instilled in me a pride in my Osage heritage, including designating a family name upon me during a formal naming rite. If you happen to know anything about Osage history, you know that the Osage have a history with mineral rights. There are photographs from the mid-twentieth century of Osage women cooking fry bread in root fires built in the shadow of Rolls Royces. In the Osage cosmology, there is really no such thing as contradiction, there is only authenticity or its absence. Accordingly, though she was a farm woman, my grandmother had a strong element of town in her personality and her style. My grandmother's people weren't that fancy, but she was equally at home on a downtown street or her own back porch. That combination of town and country is something I have definitely inherited, and in many ways it is the backbone of Urban Home Blog.

My father's people were also from a tiny town on a border, but in their case, the border was between France and Switzerland. I know less about them than I do my French-Indian ancestors, due to geographies both literal and familial. My father's parents were both first generation American but, as befit both the era and the cultures, they were heavily identified with their European roots. They were very old world, and my father had been a late in life baby for his parents, who had met and married before the turn of the twentieth century. Not uncommon to the culture, he was the youngest of eight children who were spaced so far apart that he had nieces who had been born before he was. The family had settled in the Chicago area and were quietly prosperous. There was a second home on a lake in Wisconsin, and all of the sons -- tellingly, not the daughters -- went to college.

As a college man and in the way of the day, my father graduated into a white collar job in Chicago. Soon enough and also in the way of the day, as both a young man with prospects and being unattached, he was chosen for an assignment in a new office the company was opening in Tulsa to service big oil accounts. He moved to Tulsa and met my mother because they were both staying in the same boarding house. I swear I'm not describing an Inge play -- it really happened that way. I've even been to the boarding house and met the house mother. Her name was Stella and even at the tender age at which I met her, she recognized something in me that led her to invite me to set the table, and to show me how to make mignonette for oysters.

I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that there were powerful cultural cross-forces at play in our home. Both of my parents were products of their respective cultural backgrounds and the match was often disharmonious. Indian culture is matrifocal and my mother expected that her viewpont should be considered. Saxon culture is patriarchial, and my father expected that his privilege should be honored. They fought a lot, and as is true of most children, I interpreted disharmony as instability. Thus I sought the shelter of my grandmother's home, and she was loving enough to provide shelter and wise enough to recognize a child who expressed an interest in learning what she had to teach. Therefore she taught it. And, thank God, I listened.

Why do you write Urban Home Blog?
Nothing is more important to me than making a home, and that is the core of Urban Home Blog. Everyone from editors to houseguests had kept at me for years to write down my experiences as a homekeeper, and as a writer I began to specialize in food and lifestyle writing, so while I still write for others it was a natural transition to maintaining my own site.

As far as I know, Urban Home is one of the few blogs about homekeeping, and one of the fewer still of those written by a man. That last is not actually all that important distinction to me, but it seems to matter to some readers. Sometime I do get some static for being a man, but I don't get offended about it. I understand that homekeeping is traditionally a woman's domain, and while I understand and respect that the history of domesticity is female-centric, I neither believe that a woman's place is in the home nor that a man's place is not in it. I learned about homekeeping from a woman -- my grandmother -- but she never made it an issue that it was a boy she was teaching. To use her own vernacular, I don't think it mattered to her one iota. I think she was thrilled to have access to a student who was as eager as I was to learn what she had to teach. What a sight we must have been: an Osage Indian lady wearing a mint green (her favorite color) linen suit escorting a skinny 12-year old boy with his hair plastered down to a fancy luncheon at the downtown ladies' club. Neither of us really cared what anyone thought, and it speaks to the spirit of that time and place that, for the most part and once they got used to the sight, the ladies of the club didn't really care either.

When I write, it's always clear to me how much of my grandmother's voice comes through, so I think it's appropriate to share some of her story. She was quite a character; a study in contrasts and apparent contradictions. She had grown up in a world of city rarefication but wound up running an Oklahoma homestead. Oh, how she ran it. Everything had to be just so. She taught me how to correctly set a table and how to correctly sit at it. She taught me how to interpret color and pattern and how to put them together (or, as warranted, separate them) and to adjust what we were seeing both for use and context. She believed utterly in the power of pretty things. I still have several pieces of her depression glass, which I'm convinced she kept not just despite hard times but in order to get through them.

And, oh yeah, she taught me how to cook. Her husband had been a farmer and she had learned the skills of being a farmer's wife from the ground up. She could roast a turkey like nobody's business but that was because her husband had raised them and then when the time came, they had both worked the slaughter. She made the best apple pie ever from a tree that had been bearing fruit since before she was born. Corn from the garden was canned as relish, flash-frozen for Sunday dinners to come, made into cornbread for supper. She baked bread and raised petunias and made candy and ironed the curtains and sewed dresses for the neighbor ladies and grew pumpkins and harvested them and turned them into butter.

How did I get to being an urban homekeeper from a homesteader's grandkid? I admit it was a journey, but I don't really think it's a contradiction. We think of cities as futuristic and that’s true, but in both New York City and Los Angeles, I have found that places where people actually live respond to pace by becoming retreats from it. This is how neighborhoods happen. At Urban Home, you will read about neighborhood a lot.

On the streets, the landscape of city life is on display: the neighborhood deli, the coin laundry, the pizzeria, the coffee shop, the corner bar, the park. From the front window of our New York City apartment I could see the lights of one of the city’s most famous bridges, but it was still a neighborhood of row houses and apartment buildings. In Los Angeles, we have a patch of yard on a street of apartment buildings and some single family homes, but you only have to turn a corner to collide directly with the clamor of the Sunset Strip. Town or country, neighborhoods still have main streets and they are still strung with decorations during the winter holidays. Each in its own way, an apartment is as much of a homestead as is a tract house or a bungalow or a mansion or a rectory or an igloo. Urban homes are about their neighborhoods, and those neighborhoods are small towns in an urban context. The sacred details of daily living are pretty much the same anywhere; they boil down to pace, space and place.

I take inspiration both from the moment and from the influences around me, and to me that is the essence of Urban Home. Sometimes the inspiration is a cool breeze either spring-fresh or autumn-crisp and sometimes it’s the date on the calendar. Sometimes it’s a trove of peaches discovered at the farmers market and sometimes it’s the pick-up basketball game on the walk home. Sometimes it’s a meal at a restaurant and sometimes it’s a bag of groceries. I bake from scratch, make jam and relish, wash and mend clothes, make scrapbooks and shadow boxes, grow wormwood and bromeliads, collect haunted houses and witches, travel and study. And I write about it all. If you find anything to inspire you at Urban Home Blog then that pleases me, for that is why I write it. Time is the soul of homekeeping but generosity its spirit. Keeping a home is a gift and, yes, a talent, but it is also a contribution. I am an urban homekeeper, but that really just makes me a homekeeper.

What is your favorite thing about homekeeping, and what is your least favorite?
Truthfully? I love everything about homekeeping.

I love to cook. I love baking and canning and making h'ors doeuvres. I love setting the table and washing the dishes and putting the dishes away and taking them out again for the next meal. I love learning to cook new dishes and I love cooking dishes I've made a thousand times. I love learning about food and then putting the learning to use in the most practical and caring way by feeding someone something good to eat. I love to cook French, Japanese and Basque cuisines and I love to cook American comfort food. I love making soup and cakes and salad dressing. I love feeding people and I love, love, love to eat.

I love decorating. I love shopping for furniture and then getting the furniture delivered and then arranging it in a room. And then accessorizing the room. And then updating the room as, while out on my rounds, I see new and exciting things for the home. I love cleaning the room. I think of rooms as spaces where lives are made sacred, where living happens. So I love, love, love turning the lamps on and lighting the candles as evening falls and we settle into the room and this is home.

I love cleaning the house. I do it every Sunday. I love disinfecting the shower stall and changing the towels and no, I don't mind scrubbing the toilet. I love dusting the shelves and cleaning the windows and fluffing the pillows. I love changing the sheets and I love laundering them. I love the shine of a freshly mopped floor and the pattern the vacuum cleaner leaves in the carpet. I even love taking out the trash. But most of all, I love that sense of accomplishment that accompanies having just cleaned house and done it well.

I love growing things. I love pressing seed into soil and nurturing it with light and love to send out shoots. I love nurturing the shoots into young plants and for those that don't make it -- which, invariably, some don't -- I genuinely mourn. I love misting the plants and changing their topsoil and removing the old foliage. I love the love that these beautiful living beings return to the home in exchange for the simple, yet profound, act of care.

I love holidays. I love living seasonally and to me, holidays are markers along that journey. I love collecting decorations for Halloween and for Christmas. I love unpacking them and setting them out and I love the twinge of sadness when it's time to box them up again, tempered by the surety that their time will roll around again. I love sending cards and wrapping presents and unwrapping presents. I love birthdays and anniversaries and Sabbats and Pride weekend and as anyone who's celebrated it with me will confirm, I love, love, love Thanksgiving.

I love entertaining. I love wine and coffee and beer. And cocktails. And bar food. I love throwing parties but I'm a better host than a guest -- curiously, though I'm not a shy person, I am one at parties if I'm not the host. I love dinner parties whether the guest list is four or forty. I love conceiving an idea and setting a stage and inviting people over to experience it. I love trashy Saturday night house parties and I love piss-elegant formal dinners. I love movie night and wine-cheese tastings and jazz brunches and I love, love, love New Year's Eve.

I love making things. I love crystallizing memories onto pretty paper with mementoes and glue and glitter and affection. I love organizing these memory pages into scrapbooks and shadow boxes. I love organizing photos into albums and cutting the mattes for the photos that will be given the privilege of a frame. I love to sew and in fact one of the ways I supported myself during my college years by working in theatrical costume shops. I love embroidery and it turns out that I’m good at it but one kind of needlework for which I have no affinity is yarnwork. I cannot knit or crochet worth a damn, and always admire anyone who can.

I love collecting things. In our urban home we collect matinee cowboy memorabilia, Japanese ceramics, vintage lamps, architectural models, film art from both the silent era and French New Wave, beatniks, amber art glass, vintage airplane memorabilia, vintage tableware including mid-century America barware and, somewhat famously, haunted houses and witches. We have so many collectibles that we cannot display everything at once lest it appears that we live in a thrift shop!

Are you married? Do you have children?

New York legalized same sex marriage in June, 2011, and in May, 2012, my partner of twenty-one years at the time and I got married in that state. Prior to that, everyone who knows us always considered us married, because in all ways except the legal one, we were. As part of that, we have long since made the decision not to have children.

Did you have cancer? Are you okay now?
In the summer of 2010, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer, which in the fall of 2010 after surgery and radiation treatment I was pronounced cured of. I undergo routine surveillance, which is medico speak for getting a lot of medical tests involving needles, X-rays, ultrasound wands, waiting rooms, and being felt up by a variety of medical professionals throughout the year. This cancer has a high cure rate if caught early and managed well, and I am fortunate to be in that group. So: men, do your self-exam once a month. For instructions, click here. If you find anything other than what should be there, get to a medical doctor. Don't panic, but if you do, reach out to a good support organization -- two I like are Livestrong and Balls to Cancer.

Why do you persist in referring to "posts" as "columns"?
Along with my grandmother, my two favorite people as a child were the school librarian and the town librarian. I was writing steadily by the time I was in middle school, and published my first piece in high school. At the core I have always been a writer.

I established whatever authorly street cred I have as a freelance writer both local and national. Whatever else I was doing -- and there was a lot, from college and grad school to working in a costume shop to modeling to performing -- I always wrote. I covered LGBT issues in a small-city market back when that kind of reporting was all but unheard of. I discovered that I had a feel for the arts and for years I wrote a weekly film review column as well as covering theatre, film and local listings. I wasn't choosy; unless an assignment felt flat-out undoable, I took it. This included such pay-per-word gigs as law briefs, corporate newsletters, teaching manuals, on-air copy. Eventually I arrived at the place where I could specialize and even get feature assignments. I focused on arts reviews, food and drink (including restaurants and nightlife), and LGBT issues.

When the internet happened, as did many of my colleagues I transitioned into cyberspace. In those early days of the internet, most writers also still worked for paper media. Whether it was to a website or to a magazine, I pitched columns as columns, reviews as reviews and features as features. I totally understand that content placed on a blog is correctly referred to as a "post." But I approach Urban Home Blog as a shelter for substantive content and for the most part, I don't populate it with short, quickly digestible nuggets. I have almost thirty years and counting of conceiving, writing, editing and publishing content as columns. That's how I execute them, and that's what I call them.

Where do the photographs and illustrations on your blog come from?
I often write, "if I write about it, I've done it," and every photograph you see on Urban Home Blog is of an actual recipe, project or event from my urban home. I take almost all of the photographs that I use on Urban Home Blog, but John takes a few of them, especially for the travel pieces. I do my own illustrations (most famously, of table settings) and all of the design work on all of the printable lists, guides and downloads. To view images from, about, and pertaining to Urban Home Blog and seasonal living, follow me on Instagram.

What's your sign?
I'm a double Capricorn with Leo moon and Scorpio midheaven. I was born on the same day as Dolly Parton, Janis Joplin, Edgar Allan Poe, Patricia Highsmith, Katey Sagal, Shelley Fabares, Tippi Hedren, Cindy Sherman, and Cézanne, so I'm in excellent company.

Finally: dude, why do your recipes have so many steps?
I remember only too well the insecurities felt by someone who is just starting to cook. I write my recipes in order to minimize the intimidation often felt by a new cook, who may not have experience with something as simple as peeling or chopping or even turning on the burner, because I know that an inexperienced cook may appreciate that and I know that experienced cooks will overlook such details as they don't need instruction with. Likewise I do know that whatever a reader's level of experience or interest, so many steps can look daunting. But among the other things it is about, cooking is about a rhythm it is necessary to relax into, and so all of those detailed instructions are not just about fuss; they are about concentrating on and getting into the preparation of food. Try the recipes and you'll see that they really are simple to execute. And you will not be disappointed with what winds up on your plate.