nervous cuz

i can’t believe i never wrote about jonathan gold, the amazing food writer (nicknamed “Nervous Cuz” by dr. dre and snoop dogg!!!), who “wrote ‘to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors'” and won a pulitzer for criticism in 2017. gold passed away in 2018 from pancreatic cancer, and his obituary is a wild ride:

With cello proficiency in his favor, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Although he got his degree in music history, in 1982, he had a sideline in art; he took a class with and worked as an assistant for the guerrilla performance artist Chris Burden. For a brief time, Mr. Gold thought of himself as a performance artist, too. “A naked performance artist, to be specific,” he told an interviewer.

His materials for one piece were two bottles of Glade air freshener, a pile of supermarket broiler chickens, a live chicken at the end of a rope and a machete wielded by Mr. Gold, who wore only a blindfold. The chicken survived, and may have come out of the ordeal in better spirits than Mr. Gold, who later said, “The few minutes after an art performance are some of the most depressing in the world.”