Sacred Chow, West Village with Biella

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Now that geek is the new punk and messing about with computers is a route to cool not social death, there’s kudos to having been there since the start. Were you a brave pioneer of the new cool while the rest of the world was still screaming freak? Or did you only release your inner geek once the stigma had safely passed?

Biella wasn’t a geek at school. She wasn’t into maths or Dungeons and Dragons and she didn’t own a computer until she was 20. But she was a nerd – the geek’s direct cousin – and she has the photo to prove it.

Soon to be featured in a coffee table book of awkward family portraits, Biella’s favourite childhood shot shows her aged ten in goofball outfit: Pacman t-shirt, white sandals paired with white socks, slicked back hair. As she explains on her blog, growing up nerd in Puerto Rico, home to a disproportionate number of Miss World contestants, wasn’t the easiest path.

I first met Biella briefly back in early summer at a talk about online copyright. We’d been following each other on Twitter for a few months when she tweeted that photo.

In contrast to her, I’d been big on maths and science at school without being a nerd. But I did have an equally eccentric dress sense. So for Biella’s amusement, I tweeted back my own 12 year old look: bowler hat, Peruvian jumper and pink plastic mac.

Odd outfits aren’t all we have in common. Gabriella Coleman, Biella to her friends, is an anthropologist on tenure track at NYU. Anthropology isn’t just a subject, but a prism through which to view the world, so though my own anthropological training ended after post-grad, it still frames my outlook.

And if I hadn’t left academia, I’m sure I would also have gravitated towards Biella’s specialism, digital anthropology. She studies the internet tribes: the phone phreakers, hackers, trolls and griefers and most particularly, the various groups that make up the open software movement.

There was no sign of either the goofball or the Pacman T-shirt when I turned up at Biella’s apartment. She’s housed by the university in a dedicated block on Washington Place between Mercer and Greene, where she lives with her boyfriend Micah.

It’s not the university’s best accommodation – the most senior faculty live it up in private, gated Washington Mews. But it would certainly do for me. A large, white, one-bed with a generous sitting room and modern kitchen, furnished in eclectic mix of old and new, a block and a half from Washington Square Park and (though I was far too polite to ask for an exact figure) no doubt cheap as chips.

Biella’s other foothold is in San Juan, Puerto Rico where, during the long university vacations, she helps care for her mother who has Alzheimers. Biella’s mother is half Venezualan, half Russian and her father is from the US. So Puerto Rico wasn’t an obvious place for her parents to settle. All the anthropologists I’ve known have had some early experience as an outsider, so I’m guessing for Biella it was this mixed cultural background. (Though it could just have been the alienation of being school nerd.)

A few years ago, Biella caught Lyme disease and while she was recovering cut out gluten – wheat, barely, rye, some oats, soy sauce. Feeling so much better for it, she concluded she must have always been allergic and decided to stick with the diet. 

So when we came to discussing dinner, she suggested trying raw food restaurant Quintessence which she’d spotted during a visit to the Russian spa on E10th Street. I was all for it, imagining raw would make for excellent take-out but we fell outside their delivery zone, and even though I ramped up the English charm, they couldn’t be persuaded to make an exception.

Sacred Chow on Sullivan Street in the West Village was Biella’s second choice. It’s vegan, organic, kosher, using locally grown produce where possible and Fairtrade where not. On their website, which features a cartoon cow in lotus position, they also claim to follow “an ethical attitude to work and wages”.

The best dishes are small plates, tapas-style at $5.75 each or 3 for $15. Biella eats here often, so I asked her to pick a good selection. I let her choice of tofu through, despite a long-standing aversion, though I did stand my ground and veto the Brussels sprouts. How did Brussels sprouts inveigle their way into the edible vegetable category?

We had no complaints about the service, though the English woman at the end of the phone did sound a little dour. Biella had been surprised they agreed to deliver – “it’s such a small operation” – so I was prepared for a long wait.

A few months ago, I took the train upstate to Dover Planes to interview an amazing old man called John Johansen. Architect, limerick writer, school friend of JFK, and happy soul with a beautiful New England drawl reminiscent of Katherine Hepburn, Johansen was also one of a group of five influential modernists who settled in New Canaan, Connecticut just after the war (Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson were among the others).

I tweeted that I was off to meet one of the Harvard Five, and almost instantly Biella sent me a direct message in response. Was this Johansen one of the Harvard Five phone phreakers, she wanted to know. If so, she needed to talk to me urgently.

I’m sure Johansen, the world’s leading proponent of nanoarchitecture and still maverick at 93, would enjoy being mistaken for a phreaker. It was the late ’50s when a blind seven year old boy with perfect pitch, Joe Engressia, discovered that if he whistled down the phone at a frequency of exactly 2600 Hz (the fourth E above middle C ) he could make long distance calls for free. 

As word spread about this backdoor into the phone system, the phreakers were born, soon counting among their number Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And so began a long lineage of hackers – benign and malicious – that continues to this day.

Biella arrived at this world accidentally. Her subject in grad school was medical anthropology, but in 1998 she got interested in the division opening up between those hackers advocating “free” software -– with its anti corporate overtones – and those calling for “open source”.

“There was very little within anthropology being written about this stuff. And nothing when it came to this world. I saw it as a great opportunity.”

One of her current research topics is the spat between the hackers and the Scientologists. Hostilities between the two groups first emerged in the ‘90s, resurfacing again last year. When a video of Tom Cruise praising the religion was posted on YouTube, the church tried to remove all trace of it from the Internet. In response, a group of pranksters from the chatroom 4Chan calling themselves Anonymous, outraged at this assault on free speech, made their own video in which they declared war on Scientology.

Biella’s thesis is that the geeks’ hatred of Scientology is itself quasi-religious.

“If you put Scientology in a cultural inversion machine you get hacking. They’re fun-house mirror images of each other. Scientology is a religion of science and technology and so they’re really into technology. But the way they treat it is the complete opposite of the ways geeks and hackers treat it.”

For geeks, the use of technology as religious artefact – E-meters to audit people and free them of engrams, the idea of correct as opposed to incorrect technology, the Church’s claim to have the world’s only workable technology – pollutes the very idea of science and technology and is deeply offensive.

I’m fascinated by the individuals who make up the phreakers, Anonymous and the other internet tribes Biella studies. What are they like as people? Biella’s more interested in the groups and how they organise themselves: their membership requirements, their rules of engagement. But she did give me one vital piece of information when we started discussing how geeks have miraculously developed social skills.

“Oh yes, the snowboarding, artist, Alpha geek,” she said knowingly. That was a new one on me and sounded unrealistically attractive. Where could I find such perfection? San Francisco was the unfortunate answer – seems I’ve gone and picked the wrong damn town.

As I was about to express my disappointment that I was flying to London next morning when I should clearly be on my way to San Francisco, Sacred Chow showed up, defying our pessimism by delivering in good time.

We’d ordered five small dishes. The pumpkin risotto was delightful on flavour, but during the time it had sat on the back of a delivery bike had become soggy and sticky.  Since risotto is one of those dishes meant to be rushed to the table, this wasn’t the best choice for take-out.

I was surprised to be won over by the tofu. This wasn’t superfluous chunks of gunk meant to serve as some sort of meat substitute but rather lightly grilled with taste and texture.

We’d ordered the shitake mushrooms and the broccoli in place of the Brussels sprouts I’d banned. The broccoli was steamed and gently curried and the mushrooms firm, though the sauce was a little too tart. The sunflower lentil paté, Biella’s favourite, was also good.

But however accomplished this food was when it left Sacred Chow’s kitchen (within the vegan, gluten-free constraints) by the time it reached us in tin foil boxes, the hot dishes were no more than luke warm.

For her diet, Biella also tries to avoid sugar but I was in the mood for pudding. She insisted the scones were the best thing on the menu but scones to me are for summer afternoons with cream and jam and pots of tea, and not an after dinner sweet fix. So instead I’d ordered soya ice cream. Some things are just right the way they are and can’t be reinvented. Without the cream that makes ice cream ice cream this was a refreshing palate cleanser, but that was about it.

We’d agreed to make it an early evening since Biella routinely gets up at five or six to work and I was, atypically, doing the same next day to catch my flight to London. I’d been quizzing her for hours about this world she moves in, and was feeling guilty at forcing a self-confessed introvert to talk so much, when Micah arrived home.

Micah is systems administrator for radical tech collective Rise-Up, which provides technical resources for activist groups around the world suspicious of sharing data through mainstream media. Dismissive of Web 2.0 and the current social media craze, groups like Rise Up believe in using technology not to swap status updates and share party photos, but as a tool for political activism. You won’t see much written about them, Biella says, they won’t talk to the mainstream press.

As we said our goodbyes in the hallway, Micah suggested I come along to a conference that he and Biella are helping organise and  Biella threw out a few more suggestions of interesting underground techies I could approach for future Nail Soups. And instead of wishing I was moving to San Francisco, I was now looking forward to getting back to NYC. Who needs surfing Californian Alpha geeks when there’s a whole bunch of nerds right here quietly changing the world.

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Sacred Chow

Address 227 Sullivan St (between W3rd & Bleeker) New York
Phone: (212) 337-0863
Menu: sacredchow.com
Delivery range: Free delivery between 10th Street and Spring Street and between Bowery and Washington Street
Times: 11am until 9.45 pm (sometimes later on Fridays and Saturdays)
Payment: Cash on delivery, or credit card over the phone

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Images: Sacred Chow cow via aglutenfreeguide.com; Anonymous protesting against Scientology via inquisitr.com; old fashioned phone via web.cs.wpi.edu

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Filed under Vegan/Gluten-free, West Village

Tags: Anthropology, Geeks, Hackers, NYU, Phreakers, Puerto Rico, Scientologists