7. Don’t Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World’s Greatest Cheds, edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman

An anthology of things that didn’t go according to plan, Don’t Try This at Home demonstrates that while amateurs may fail, it takes a true professional to fail spectacularly. There’s something hearting about this notion; even experts get things wrong. Indeed, when experts get things wrong, they’re playing on a sufficiently high level that their mistakes are correspondingly large.

That said, many of the chefs who contributed essays to the book look back to the early days of their career, before fame and celebrity and television shows and eponymous restaurants, when they knew just enough to be dangerous, and frequently were.

Through these personal essays, which are simultaneously frank and (one suspects) exaggerated for dramatic effect — because while watching the mighty fall on their face is practically an American spectator sport, rooting for the underdog is ever so slightly more popular — several common themes emerge:

1) Culinary disaster! Followed by “of course, this was in the days before cell phones, so I couldn’t just call someone to bail me out.”

2) Cross cultural hijinks: “At some point after starting to make my bones in New York, I decided it was time to do a stage in France. It was simultaneously utterly humbling and a definitive moment in my career.”

3) I @#$%ed up. Fortunately, I got away with it. If they happen to read this, it will be the first time such and such a person learns the truth behind my error.’

Or some combination of the above. Indeed, if there is a single common thread running through the forty or so essays in the book, it is this: biting off more than one can chew. In the kitchen or out of it, I suspect that if there is a formula for success in life, it includes healthy doses of both hubris and humiliation, garnished with just a sprig of breaking the odds.

Brick o’ Harryhausen, redux: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

If Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was sublimely ridiculous, then The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is ridiculously sublime.

Unlike Patrick Wayne, John Philip Law at least makes a feeble stab at making his Sinbad seem like a denizen of a fictional Arabian world. His accent is cheesy (although in a world where Costner attempted an English accent, every other actor in the history of film gets a free pass on this one) but I give him points for the effort.

As with Eye of the Tiger, one of the Doctors Who appears in Golden Voyage. In this case, Tom Baker (of whom I believe it is mandatory to note that he is the best known Doctor among American audiences, although with the recent relaunch getting airtime on both SciFi and BBC America, this may no longer be entirely accurate) plays the evil wizard who bedevils Sinbad and his band of all but indistinct crewmen.

Sinbad and Co. are joined by the golden-masked vizier/regent of their kingdom (or, rather, the kingdom they visit after their ship gets blown off course). The Vizier and Sinbad each hold one-third of a mystical golden disc that leads to a fantastic treasure. Much of the movie is taken up with the quest to secure the final piece of the disc. Sinbad also acquires, and frees, a slave woman (and later, Obligatory Love Interest [tm]) after she comes to him in a dream. Rounding out the cast is the drunken, callow son of the merchant from whom Sinbad acquires the slave. To the degree that any character in Golden Voyagehas an arc, it is the merchant’s son. Over the course of the movie, he goes from being drunk and whiny and lazy to almost useful. In the low expectations world of the B movie, this qualifies as an almost Campbellian feat.

There are three big Harryhausen set pieces in Golden Voyage: Sinbad and the crew battle the figurehead of their ship after the wizard brings it to life. Pretty tepid as these things go. Later, they throw down against a six-armed statue of Kali that is brought to life by evil magic. Somwhat more impressive, if only for the six-armed sword duel that ensues. I have to wonder whether George Lucas looked to this scene for inspiration when conceiving of the Kenobi-Greivous battle in Revenge of the Sith. Finally, the climax of the film includes a battle — symbolically, a battle between good and evil) between a cyclopean centaur (with inexplicably Donald Trump-ish hair) and a griffin (which, for reasons that surpass understanding, lives in a subterranean cave). For my money — or, rather, for the money of the friend who bought us this DVD collection — this is the strongest sequence in the film, as it removes the human actors almost entirely from the equation, leaving two Harryhausen models to face off in pure Dynarama awesomess. Indeed, there is one sequence in the battle where Sinbad attacks the centaur; no sooner does the actor leap into the fray than he is replaced by a Dynarama model.

Days are saved. Villains are vanquished. The hero gets the girl. Were you perhaps expecting a different outcome?

6. Coyote V. Acme, by Ian Frazier

In the area of humor, there is funny, and then there is clever. Dave Barry is funny. Chuck Klosterman is funny. Woody Allen bridges the divide, and manages to be both funny and clever; don’t believe me? Read Side Effects or Without Feathers.

Ian Frazier, on the other hand, is merely clever. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just turns out to not be what I’m looking for in a humor book. This collection of humorous essays never prompted more than an appreciation of the writer’s insight. I appreciated the comedic intent, the strength of the language, and the wit behind the wordplay. I completely missed the funny.

The title piece is a perfect case in point. Frazier clearly understands and is conversant in both Looney Tunes cartoons and legal jargon; or at the very least conversant in the TV courtroom drama version of legal jargon. However, even allowing for the cleverness of the combination, the execution fails to rise to the potential of the premise. This is true throughout the book; it’s a series of funny ideas where deftness is mistaken for comedy.

Again, I find myself confronted by an author who is a stronger reader than they are a writer. I was prompted to check this book out on the basis of hearing Frazier on the radio. Read in front of an audience, his material was brilliant. On the page, it just fell flat, at least for me.

5. Candyfreak, by Steve Almond

Since I outed myself as a Follower of Almond a couple posts back, I should go the full nine and confess I was re-reading Candyfreak at the time I had my Dark Chocolate Mint Kit-Kat epiphany. Almond is the high priest of chocolate obsession (and, apparently, possessed of a metabolism that allows him to pursue his ministry without worrying about his waistline, the lucky mother@#$%er), and the book is his account of tracking that obsession across these United States. He focuses on small, regional confectioners of products that were once mainstays, but which teeter on the brink of culinary extinction, muscled out by the economic might of the major candy companies.

If you like chocolate, this is a book worth reading, if only because it will turn you on to the wonder and glory of the Five Star bar. Indeed, while I whole-heartedly recommend the book to anyone who enjoys a good piece of food writing or memoir, the real take away from the book is this: the Five Star caramel bar is, quite possibly, the reason we evolved taste buds. Trust me on this.

Kelly’s Heroes

How much of a badass is Clint Eastwood? Enough of a badass to stare down a German tank. It didn’t hurt that he had Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland — who adds little in the area of badass, but brings a heaping helping of bat%$#@ insane to the table — as his wingmen, but in the end, it’s the flinty eye and gravelly voice of The Man With No Name who wins the day.

Granted, The Man has a name in this film: Kelly. Despite that, the scene where he faces off against the tank calls to mind his career in the Westerns. Composer Lalo Schifrin scores the showdown with an homage to Ennio Morricone. It’s cheesy, but it works.

It certainly works better than the song “Burning Bridges” by the Mike Curb Congregation. The song is one of those poppy, peppy, Up with People-y tunes that really has no place in either a war movie or a caper flick. It takes the prize from “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the most incongruous and inappropriate blend of music and content.

Equally out of place is Oddball, the tank commander played by Donald Sutherland. Sutherland plays him as, essentially, a burned out hippie with a talent for lethal devastation. In terms of cinematic chronology, Oddball sticks out like a sore thumb, marking Kelly’s Heroes as a product of its time in a way that other performances (Savalas as the tough as nails sergeant, a restrained Don Rickles as the scheming supply officer, etc.) don’t. The semi-stoned chill he brings to the character is grating, although I will confess he grew on my by the end of the movie. On the weirdness meter, Oddball ranks somewhere above Sutherland’s Hawkeye Pierce in MASHand below his Pinkley from The Dirty Dozen.

It’s a good war movie, with cardboard cutout German soldiers doing their part to serve as cannon fodder, providing just enough of a challenge — and exacting just enough of a price — to make the film sporting. Ultimately, the outcome of the Kelly’s scheme to push deep into German territory to steal $16 million worth of gold is never in doubt.

In some ways, that’s the problem with the movie. It’s a good war movie, but not much of a caper film. Kelly is sharp, and improvisational, but again, I never for a second doubted that he would succeed, or that he had a plan that included moves I couldn’t see. The problem is a caper film needs a good antagonist. It needs to be a cat and mouse game, and there’s no cat in Kelly’s heroes.

Great Googly Moogly

Dark Chocolate Mint Kit-Kat.*

Chocolate and mint: after chocolate and peanut butter, this is arguably the greatest confectionary tandem in the known universe. The combination of slightly bitter chocolate and the cool, almost astringent, cleanness of mint is one of those things that make life worth living.

And Kit-Kats? They are, hands down, my single favorite candy bar on the planet. Chocolate and wafers, simple, yet elegant. I know the Hershey people have screwed around with all manner of bastard varieties in recent years — Triple Chocolate, White Chocolate (blergh), Mega Fudgey, Choctastic Laxitive**, and so forth — but I’ve never really been tempted to stray from the one true path.

Until now. Dark chocolate, mint, and wafers? You got me, Hershey’s. I’m not made of stone here. Bitter, cool, and crispy? I’m sold. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not looking to get my heart broken here. I know this is just as likely one of those temporary test marketing things. I have no doubt that no sooner will I let the dark chocolate mint monkey climb on my back than it will get snatched away, leaving me aimless and adrift, a shambling, muttering wreck of a sugar junkie.

* In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that The Lovely Wife, reading over my shoulder, has observed that Steve Almond called, and he would like his culinary obsession back. So yeah, read Candyfreak. It’s good.

** I’m lying about these last two.

Brick o’ Harryhausen: Clarification

My rant about the apparent passing of the B movie failed to account for two factors:

1) Lloyd Kaufman – Movies don’t get much B-er than those made by Troma. In fact, calling Troma movies B movies may be elevating them to a plane above their pure merits.

2) Sam Raimi – Sure, he’s gone on to the big leagues with the Spider-Man trilogy, but the man behind the Evil Dead series, and Darkman is a master of the B film form.

I apologize for the oversight.

Brick o’ Harryhausen: Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger

I have vivid memories of seeing this movie at the drive-in when it came out in 1977, although I can’t say I had vivid memories of the movie itself. This seems fair, as childhood memories of going to the drive-in offer plenty of nooks and crannies into which the soft butter of nostalgia can melt, while movies like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger are so lacking in memorable features as to be all but mnemonically frictionless.

I doubt I would have had occasion to remember it at all, had we not received a Brick o’ Harryhausen (proper title: The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen – Legendary Monster Series) as a Christmas gift. But there it was, tucked into the collection along with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and The Three Worlds of Gulliver. Throwing chronology to the wind, I began with the one film in the set I have vague memories of seeing.

You know, it’s really too bad that the concept of the B movie no longer holds much sway in Hollywood. I suppose things like low-budget horror movies fill a similar purpose, but I don’t imagine they have the same simplicity or innocence of a good schlocky B-movie. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was one of the last gasps of a dying breed. Indeed, Ray Harryhausen only made one more film after Eye of the Tiger, and that was Clash of the Titans. Movies don’t get much B-er than that. In the wake of Clash, the B movie form got an influx of star power and directorial vision in the form of Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg with Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Eye of the Tiger, on the other hand, has all the essential elements of a good – for the value of good that really means not very good at all – B movie: An undistinguished cast [I doubt Jane Seymour puts this dog on her resume these days]; a nonsensical script; and cheesy special effects. It’s a movie that makes not one damn lick of sense from beginning to end, but still manages to be enjoyable despite – perhaps because of – its many failings.

Unlike John Philip Law, his predecesor in 1973’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Patrick Wayne (son of The Duke himself, demonstrating once again that heredity alone is no guaranteed wellspring of talent) does not even pretend to affect an Arabic accent. The actor has a voice to match his Richard Crenna-James Brolin looks. This Sinbad’s crew is a similar melting pot of races, ethnicities, and logically incongruent accents and dialects, ranging from African to Cockney, making various station stops in between.

The accents don’t really matter all that much, as most of the characters are sufficiently undeveloped to render keeping track of them moot. At one point, one of Sinbad’s men is killed by a rampaging beast, but it hardly matters which one (I think it was the Cockney guy) as he still had plenty of interchangeable sidekicks left.

In the area of rampaging beasts, the movie features a typical Harryhausen menagerie of creatures ranging from the fantastic to the mundane, rendered in the finest stop-motion Dynamation the 1970s had to offer, including a baboon, a bee the size of a Thanksgiving turkey, a giant walrus, a sabertooth tiger, and a 12-foot prehistoric troglodyte. Some are companions (the baboon is actually a Sultan transformed by evil magic), others are bested in combat, but all of them – in all their low-tech glory demand a level of active investment on the part of the to render them real.

Are these creations remotely believable? Not in the least. I suspect a moderately computer literate 12-year old could use today’s technology to create something more virtually real. A mainstream director working today, with the budget, the staff, and the processor power required to realize their vision could come asymptotically close to reality in a way an effects engineer like Harryhausen couldn’t begin to imagine. It’s impressive, to be sure, but it’s also passive. Part of the fun of movies lies in giving yourself over to the magic, forgiving the errors when they occur, and being a willing participant in the illusion on screen. Contemporary effects take the magic off-stage, and takes the audience out of the trick. The results are inarguably spectacular, but I would argue that something gets lost in the process.

Once you accept the illusion, you forgive the things that don’t make sense. In the case of B movies, this includes such minor elements as plot, and characterization. While Eye of the Tiger contains no shortage of howlers, the character of Melanthius, the seer/alchemist/wizard played by Patrick Troughton – of Doctor Who fame, which in retrospect makes Eye of the Tiger my first encounter with Doctor Who, predating my discovery of the show on PBS by a good three years – provided a concentrated dose of script ineptitude throughout the movie.

Melanthius is a preseted as the Wise Mentor Character, a role he fulfills ably, except when the script veers off course by requiring him to instead play the Bumbling Comic Relief. He is the character who, having (temporarily) captured the evil sorceress who is out to destroy the Sultan/baboon in order to place her son on the throne, proceeds to taunt her by showing her the map of his ship’s destination, information the sorceress did not previously have, thereby giving her, and her pouty weasel of a son, a chance to beat them to the prize.

It will come as no surprise that despite this, and other, similar setbacks, Sinbad and his intrepid crew – except for the poor bastard who bought the big one in the third reel – save the day, restore the Sultan, triumph over evil, and live happily, or at the very least sequellessly, ever after.

A pointed question

The other day, I had occasion to replace the staples in my Swingline knockoff stapler. In looking at the box of staples, I noted that each strip of staples contains 210 staples.

Why 210? Why not 200? Why not 250?

I mentioned this to my friend The Stoat who suggested that it may be that the standard Swingline stapler staple reservoir was designed to hold 210 staples, or perhaps that was the number of staples that could fit comfortably in the standard stapler, and therefore became the standard.

Only here’s the thing: why didn’t the nice folks at Amalgamated Swingline Industries Incorporated ever redesign the stapler so that it would accommodate either 200 or 250 staples (or some similarly round number), rather than falling back on what sure as heck seems like an arbitrary as all get out standard?

Because let’s be honest: the 210 staple strip standard isn’t. Odds are you either have a stapler with a capacity of less than 210 staples, in which case you end up breaking off (and in all likelihood discarding) part of the strip, or else you need to break off (and in all likelihood discard) part of a second strip to completely fill sthe staple reservoir.

This leads me to the assumption that there’s intentional inefficiency in the staple business. All those small strips of extranous staples that get thrown out — because who the hell wants to fill their damn stapler with somebody else’s staple chaff? We’re Americans, dammit; we’re entitled to a fresh strip of staples every time — may only represent 2-3% of the staples in a given box, but in the aggregate, that 2-3% of waste (over and above the staples that get wasted in the normal course of stapling) adds up, and requires offices to order staples sooner than absolutely necessary to account for this waste and inefficiency. So someone has to make the staples, and someone has to package them, and someone has to warehouse them, and someone has to fulfill staple orders, and someone has to ship the staples, starting the whole cycle of 97% staple efficiency over again.

So, in a very real — and depressing as hell — sense, wasted staples (and the guy who uses three stirrer straws to add the milk and sugar to his coffee, and the three extra knives that always seem to get left over in any box of plastic cutlery; paperclips, too) are responsible for the success of the entire American economy.

It’s things like this — and the certainty my coffee maker is trying to kill me (but that’s a story for another day) — that keep me awake at night.

4. I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This! And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny, by Bob Newhart

There aren’t many books I’ve read that I would prefer to experience in audiobook form, but this was definitely one of them.

Bob Newhart is one of the funniest damn comedians I’ve ever heard. Of the various debts I owe my Dad, introducing me to Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby routines ranks right up there. Newhart’s stuff is amazing, but, apparently, it requires Bob Newhart’s voice and delivery. His memoir, which includes transcriptions of some of his most famous routines (including a sadly abbreviated version of the Sir Walter Raleigh conversation), is not terribly funny. The words on the page lack the power of the words coming over stereo speakers; the timing and delivery are keys to his work. Of course, they were written to be delivered out loud; the rhythms of written and spoken comedy are entirely different animals, and the disconnect between the routine in its native form and its, shall we say domesticated, incarnation is telling.

This isn’t unique to Newhart, of course; try reading Brooks’s and Reiner’s “2000 Year Old Man” or Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?” They don’t have the same punch, because they lack the catalyst of the performers’ energy.

All in all, there’s not much to this memoir: very little inside baseball about the world of comedy, precious little dish about the bizarre realms of TV and film, and, again, very little that is actively funny.

On the other hand, between picking my way through the novel, and Newhart’s brief comments about the making of the film, I’ll be adding Catch-22 to my Netflix queue, so the book wasn’t a total loss. Kelly’s Heroes, too, although that had nothing to do with Newhart (except that he namechecks Rickles quite a bit in his book, and Rickles is in Kelly’s Heroes, although I wasn’t aware of that fact until I added it to the queue); it’s just I’ve never seen it.

3. I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, by Amy Sedaris

While I generally enjoy the various mass media works of the Sedaris clan, this book left me flat. It’s not funny enough — even allowing for the fact that Sedaris makes the point that she’s not out to write a gag cooking/entertaining book — to qualify as humor, and not serious enough to be the kind of book that provided me with any terribly useful recipes (all right, I’m tempted to try one of the cheese ball recipes, although god knows when I’ll feel kitschy or retro enough to want to serve a cheese ball) or entertaining ideas. Granted, this may be more of a confirmation that I’m not exactly Mr. Entertainment (also, unlike Sedaris, I don’t own a rabbit), than a reflection on Sedaris. Bottom line, cute but forgettable.

2. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, by Bill Bryson

Bryson’s tales of Riotous American Kidhood were more interesting when Jean Shepard told them. Bryson’s touchstone accounts of early television — or the ris eof the postwar consumer and car cultures, or the Red Scare, or Duck and Cover drills — present no new information, not a perspective that sets Bryson’s world apart from other cultural studies of the era. Indeed, the tone of the book is schizoid: hyperbolic personal memoir in some places, didactic history in others, inconsistent across the board.

Of course, as someone born in the 70s, I can’t embrace Bryson’s era as anything other than a curiosity. I didn’t live in those times, and I haven’t lost what Bryson lost through the passage of time. By the same token, I can imagine the things from my childhood that are as fundamental to my experience as the touchstones of Thunderbolt Kid are to Bryson, and I can empathize. More to the point, reading a book like this serves as a reminder that the problems we wrestle with today as though they were new problems — political polarization, geopolitical willies, social inequality — have deep roots.

1. World War Z, by Max Brooks

In his essays on science fiction, Isaac Asimov lays out the characteristics that make science fiction — or speculative fiction, which is a slightly more useful descriptor for my current purposes — science fiction. Asimov boils the field down to a representation of the world in which a change from the norm — a change that is somehow scientific in form or origin — leads to a cascading sequence of changes. Speculative fiction, therefore, represents a chronicle of those changes and consequences. I’m paraphrasing here, as my copy of Asimov on Science Fiction has gone missing, loaned out, or moldering in a box somewhere. Asimov’s version was far more detailed and eloquent, but this basic overview should get the job done.

In Max Brooks’s World War Z, the precipitating change is the existence of zombies. The novel, “An Oral History of the Zombie Wars,” depicts the impact these creatures have on the world — socially, economically, militarily, politically, and most of all, emotionally.

Brooks cleverly sidesteps the question of how zombies came to be. He details the outbreak that leads to a worldwide infestation of the undead, but he wisely avoids explaining how Patient Zero is first infected. It’s what happens once the genie is out of the bottle that drives the story forward.

And it’s a hell of a story. Once you accept the central implausibility, everything that follows proceeds logically from that initial premise. The way individuals, communities, armies, and governments respond feels realistic, depressingly so.

Although the novel is categorized as humorous, World War Z is not a funny book. It’s satirical in places, it pokes fun a sacred cows, both real and composite, but the reality of civilization pushed to the brink is too grim, too painfully depicted in places, to prompt much more than the occasional knowing smirk. This is especially true in the cases where Brooks references — disparagingly — his own earlier Zombie Survival Guide. Beyond these few moments, the tone of the book is far more The Day After than Shaun of the Dead. It’s hopeful, albeit in a smiling through the tears sort of way.

The desperate circumstances carry the reader through the book, first with a mounting sense of dread, followed by an all too real horror, followed by the action movie (but in a good way) inspiration of being caught up in a turning tide.

Brooks cites Studs Terkel in his acknowledgements, and it’s obvious World War Z owes an enormous debt to the legendary social historian. However, where Terkel’s genius depends on drawing extraordinary stories out of ordinary people, Brooks had to not only plot the story he wanted to tell, but create dozens of unique, distinctive, and above all believable voices to carry his narrative along. He succeeds admirably, so much so that I was left wondering what stories he didn’t tell, what narrative he could have constructed had he fabricated different voices.