Back from Hell

In college, there was a small parking lot near the residence hall where various of my friends who worked on campus during the summer lived. As a local, and without an on-campus summer job that provided housing, I lived at home, but spent most of my free time on campus. As the closest parking spaces to the residence, these spaces were always in demand.

There were seven spaces, which we ended up naming The Magnificent Seven. Not content with merely naming the lot, we not only went on to name the spaces after the actors who played the Seven in the 1960 cinematic classic, but we did so in order of decreasing badassitude. Thus, the space closest to the building was McQueen, followed by Brynner, Coburn, Bronson, Vaughn, Dexter, and Bucholz.

There is room to argue the respective rankings of Coburn versus Bronson. On an unweighted scale, Charles Bronson has the edge. He’s the only actor who hits the guy movie trifecta, having appeared in The Dirty Dozen, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape. That’s a strong argument in his favor. On the other hand, the characters he played in these films are all cut from the same basic laconic and competent cloth. Being badass is also about being cool, and in The Magnificent Seven, Our Man Flint has it all over Mr. Majestyk.

When parking, you always hoped McQueen or Brynner would be available, settled for Coburn, Bronson, or Vaughn, and felt cheated if you got stuck with Dexter or Bucholz. Regardless, invoking Elmer Bernstein’s famous score was a karmic necessity to securing any of these much in demand spaces.

This ritual notwithstanding, I love The Magnificent Seven on its cinematic merits as well. While I certainly enjoy the coolness of the top tier characters, I’ve always had a soft spot for Robert Vaughn’s Lee. What can I say? I’ve always liked characters with a broad fatalistic streak. Lee is a man past his prime, and he knows it. Even though he’s lost the spark that defines him, he can’t stop being what he is, even as he know that what his is will be his downfall. In the film he talks about losing that spark. He says, “You can feel it. Then you wait… for the bullet in the gun that is faster than you are.”

I spent a lot of time thinking about the whole gunslinger past his prime trope last week. My friend the Stoat informed me of the Hell Night
dinners* at the East Coast Grill in Cambridge. Fortunately, a business trip to Boston coincided with a Hell Night, and we were able to check it out.

I’m a big fan of spicy foods. I’m one of those “the hotter the better, bring the pain mother@#$%er” types. You know, the obnoxious ones. I’m not one of the obsessives with a refrigerator full of boutique hot sauces, but given the opportunity to cauterize my taste buds, I’ll take it. It’s gotten me into some trouble over the years, as when my boast about my cast iron taste buds fell afoul of a chicken vindaloo that was well within my tolerance, but which sent a dollop of sauce down the wrong side of my windpipe on the first bite, causing me to lose all face among by dinner companions. By and large though, I like to test the limits of my endurance.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed to my distress that my endurance was starting to have demonstrable limits. I hadn’t yet had my fateful encounter with the bullet (pepper) that was faster than I was, but I had to start acknowledging that such a pepper existed, and that it would find me some day.

So I was approaching Hell Night the way Robert Vaughn’s Lee approached the mission to save the village: as a chance to either face down a challenge worthy of my greatness, or to meet my end at the hands of foe worthy of taking me down.

I’m pleased to report that for one night, I found a third option: renewal. I not only faced my peppery nemeses, but conquered them.

I began my meal with habañero tequila, on the theory that if I was indeed courting doom, then as the poet says “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” Of the quality of the tequila I can make no report as the only thing I experienced of the drink was the heat of the habañero. I wouldn’t counsel drinking more than one of them, but it was a good way to start the meal. It was no so much a palate cleanser as a palate obliterator The tequila came with something the menu called sangrita as a chaser, but I can’t actually report any specifics. It was sorta pulpy, like maybe guava or tomato juice. It maybe had some flecks of chile in it. It went well with the habañero. It didn’t so much cool the flames, as provide counterpoint and restoration, making it possible to appreciate the flavors and complexities of the rest of the meal.

For an appetizer, I had spicy thai skirt stix, peppery beef skewers served with a spicy green dipping sauce almost like a chimichurri, and a thinner, but equally piquant chili vineagar. The beef was tender and flavorful, and the appetizer almost made me regret not ordering the skirt steak from the entree menu. The Stoat’s jalapeño cheddar Tasso hush puppies were terrific as well.

I chose the “Pissah Pork” as my entrée. This was a mixed grill consisting of blazing roast pork butt, an incandescent barbequed rib and a thermonuclear sausage-stuffed grilled banana. The sausage was like a chorizo made with habañero, and was easily the hottest thing on the plate. I suspect the banana was supposed to tame the heat somewhat, but it failed at this duty quite spectacularly, while providing a really interesting flavor combination. The rib was perfectly cooked, and featured both tender and cracklingly crisp bits, all wrapped in just the right amount of sticky spiciness. The butt was out of this world. The pork was rich enough to retain its own flavor, and subtle enough to serve as a delivery system for a really complex combination of herbs and peppers.

Of the various items on the entrée menu, there was only one that promised to be hotter than the pork, which was rated at five out of six bombs. There was a six-bomb lamb shank on the menu. Tempting though it was, I opted for the variety offered by the Pissah Pork. As so often happens, the decision was made easier by the choice of sides that came with each entree. The lamb came with basmati rice and spinach, both of which are perfectly respectable accompaniments, and ones I happen to enjoy. On the other hand, the pork came with mashed sweet potatoes and grilled pineapple. There are few things on this earth that will make me pass up grilled pineapple, and neither spinach nor basmati rice is on that short list. The pineapple was a terrific accompaniment. The chili mashed sweet potatoes were even better: sweet, creamy, and peppery. Both of these sides, along with the banana that came with the sausage, served as a reminder of how well sweet and hot flavors combine, and why that combination is the cornerstone of so many Caribbean sauces.

In the end, I don’t know whether this meal represented my last hurrah or a true Renaissance. As the final tolerably hot meal of my spicy food career, it was a fitting capstone. As a return to form, it makes me yearn for the next challenge. Whether I’m riding into the sunset, or merely over the horizon, this gunslinger sits high in the saddle.

*While the Hell Night writeup also uses the the chilehead as gunfighter metaphor, I thought about it this way before I visited the East Coast Grill website.

Over 1,000? Really?

I may have found the single most pointles and unnecessary book on the planet: The Ultimate Little Martini Book, by Ray Foley.

The cover of the book promises that it contains over 1,000 martini recipes. I find that interesting, given there is only one way to make a martini:

Gin plus dry vermouth in whatever ratio appeals to the imbiber’s palate, blended (shaken, stirred, or otherwise agitated) in a cocktail shaker with ice, strained into a martini glass or served over the rocks, and garnished with some number of olives, the quantity determined by the bartender, or a twist of lemon if the drinker prefers.

That’s it.

There are only three acceptable variants:

The vodka martini: replace the gin with vodka. If you must.

The Vesper, as concocted by James Bond in Casino Royale: 3 parts gin; 1 part vodka; 1/2 part Kina Lillet; shaken and garnished with lemon.

The dirty martini: the standard martini plus a measure of olive brine.

That’s it. Anything beyond that is a gin or vodka cocktail, but it is not a martini. Once you pick up a book with 1,000 recipes and start messing with apple or chocolate, or anise or orange you are no longer in martini territory. It’s a fair bet that any establishment that pretends otherwise, and offers a rainbow assortment of ersatz martinis, is a place where you won’t find a good rendition of the real McCoy.

The Stoatsack Dispatch #1: The Children of Men, by P.D. James

Toward the end of last year, my friend the Stoat came for a visit. One of the (many) reasons we’ve sustained our friendship down through the years is a shared love of, and largely complimentary taste in, books. Her shelves regularly serve as an extended foster care facility for portions of my collection, and some of her books sublet space on my shelves. Books one of us has obtained, read, and enjoyed enough to recommend get passed along, along with the responsibility for their final dispensation (continued passing down a chain of readers, donated to a library book sale, consigned to moulder in a box in the closet).

Our taste is similar enough that most things one of us likes will appeal to both of us. We’re individual enough that sometimes our tastes diverge in interesting ways. This is good. After all, if all we encountered were people who simply mirrored ourselves back to us, how much less interesting a world would we live in? Finally, there are times when a recommendation backfires: in my defense, I thought Make Love* (*the Bruce Campbell Way) was a thoughtful gift. I was wrong. While I yield to no geek in my appreciation of Mr. Campbell’s work, this book was unfinishably unfortunate.

During the visit in question, my friend brought me a largeish paper bag full of books (the eponymous Stoatsack). It’s an interesting assortment: some mystery, some fantasy, a swashbuckling pirate tale, and a few others. I decided to use the Stoatsack as a strategic reading reserve, something to dip into when I’m between books or when nothing on my reading pile grabs my interest.

Faced with both of these requirements recently, and garnished with an impending airplane trip, I started the Stoatsack odyssey with P.D. James’s The Children of Men. I’ll admit I was not a tremendous fan of Ms. James going into this book; I’ve started a few of her mystery novels over the years, but never managed to finish one. In addition, my interest in reading this book was motivated more by wanting to see the film adaptation (I try to adhere to the rule of not seeing the movie until I read the book) than in any real desire to give Ms. James one more try.

Having completed the novel, I look forward to watching the movie. I can’t say I feel any particular sense of urgency about picking up another P.D. James novel.

The book presents a world in which the birth rate has declined to zero as a result of collective male infertility. The cause of this condition is never revealed. Indeed, it is somewhat beside the point, as the novel chronicles the consequences of this reality, rather than the condition itself.

Faced with the impending extinction of the human race, global society has largely collapsed. England is largely immune from chaos, due to the machinations of its seemingly benign dictator, the Warden Xan.

Xan’s cousin, Theo Faron, becomes involved with a group of revolutionaries who want to force Xan to practice the democracy he claims to champion. Through his involvement with the group, Theo, a historian and academic content to allow the ending of the world unfold as long as it does not impinge on his solitude, finds a reason to abandon his passive stance, and becomes central to a struggle — and a secret — that may herald a new status quo.

The book is about its themes more than its content. It is about how society responds to the collapse of established order. In Ms. James case, this collapse comes in the form of the absence of children. It could just as well come in the form of rising sea levels, or atomic devastation, or any other extinction event, and the questions would be the same. How does the human race go on beyond hope? Why does the race go on? How can faith survive? Who will maintain order, and what liberties will they sacrifice in the name of order? What happens to those who refuse to look away, or to those forced to look at truths they prefer to avoid? What is worth dying for? What is worth living for? How thin is the line between these imperatives?

About ten years back, during one of my periodic re-readings of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I noticed something that had never occurred to me previously. Great swaths of the story are conveyed in exposition. Mr. Tolkien’s sense of place and attention to detail meant that the characters’ journeys where documented in exhaustive detail, with every feature of the landscape given attention perhaps beyond its due. This same level of meticulous taxonomy plagues the later sections of The Children of Men. As the novel builds toward its conclusion, the pace of the story becomes (frustratingly) tempered with descriptions of forests, and bridges, lakes, and lodges.

Detail is important. Ms. James is quite effective at establishing that while the forests and lakes will abide, the bridges and lodges will outlast their creators if nothing fundamental changes. When the change comes, why delay its arrival through fidelity to the extraneous?

Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

Follow along; this one takes some explaining.

A few weeks back, a friend of mine mentioned he was involved in a community project. He indicated that my name had come up among the group responsible for the project as someone who should be involved in the organization of the project.

I thought about it for a while, both because I would like the project to succeed, and because I have a tendency to be so flattered by invitations that I fail to give sufficient consideration to what I’m being asked to do. Or, to put it more theatrically, “I’m jest a girl who cain’t say no.”

Fortunately, in this case, I spent enough time in reflection to realize that: a) I don’t have the time to get involved in another project right now; b) I lack the skill set required for the role I was being asked to play, and; c) while I have every expectation that this undertaking will succeed, the person in the position about which I was approached would be the obvious fall guy should anything go wrong.

I shared these conclusions with my friend. He responded by saying in effect, “The fact you put thought into the reasons you don’t want to do X is part of the reason I think you ought to do Y.”

This reminded me of the sequence in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential about people who got into the restaurant game for all the wrong reasons. In particular, my friend’s encouragement (gratifying as it was) was reminiscent of the budding restauranteurs who were flattered into the business with praise for their ability to throw wonderful dinner parties, or their extensive knowledge of French wines, or their antique collections. In these cases, people who emprically have no business running a business allow ego, flattery, and the machinations of friends hoping to cadge free drinks and meals to blind them to reality. I have just enough understanding of reality to understand why my friend’s suggestion would be a Bad Idea, but enough ego that it’s hard to ignore that little, “Weeellll, maybe,” voice in the back of my head; the voice that would almost assuredly lead me to ruin.

Reflecting on this part of Kitchen Confidential compelled me to reread the book, which in turn brought me to Down and Out In Paris and London, a novel which Mr. Bourdain recommends.

In the first half of the book, Mr. Orwell’s nameless, autobiographical, narrator lives on the boundary between poverty and homelessness. He manages to pay rent, but must often go wthout food to do so. He pawns his clothes to pay his basic expenses. Eventually, he ekes out a subsitence living as a plongeur, or kitchen slave (dishwasher, and general factotum) in a Paris hotel. His insights about the inner workings of restaurants are a product of their time in many ways, but the social, cultural, and economic divide between the people who prepare restaurant food and those who consume it has a truth that transcends time and setting.

The second half of the book recounts the narrator’s experiences as a homeless tramp in London. As presented, this is a bleak existence bounded by nights in shelters, and endless cups of tea with bread and margarine, the diet of those whose welfare comes from the state. While Mr. Orwell’s surrogate views his fellows with a humanist’s eye, there is no denying their existence is dehumanizing.

Both the Paris and London sections are rich in detail, and demonstrate a keen understanding of the realities, and inequities, of class in society.

Lasagna, demystified

“Anyone who has tried to bake a serious lasagna at home knows the truth about this intricate family dish. It’s laborious, time consuming, and fraught with all sorts of potential disaster.”

— New York magazine, “Best of New York” issue (cover date March 10-17, 200

The unattibuted New York magazine contributor who wrote the above introduction to the wonders of the lasagna served at New York’s Insieme restaurant misses an important point.

There is nothing intricate or laborious about lasagna. It’s pasta sheets, sauce, and cheeses — and meat, if you’re so inclined — baked into a wondrously bubbling mass. I know the pros introduce bechamel to the mix, but I’m of the opinion that’s an enhancement, rather than a prerequisite. If you can master a few basic moves — none of which is appreciably more complex than, you know, boiling water — you can make a serviceable, even exceptional, lasagna.

Pretending there is more to it than that is disingenuous. Food can be transcendent, but the reasons for that transcendence usually derive more from craft than from complexity. In general, good food writing does one of two things. Some writers clear the obscuring mists that make the preparation of food seem like the work of divine, or at least heroic, hands. They demonstrate that the application of the chefly arts rests on skills within the reach of any cook. The chef hones these skills over time to a degree of mastery, but it is possible for the home cook to employ the same techniques, if to a lesser degree.

Others demonstrate that food we think of as simple — preparations of a few basic ingredients, employing basic techniques — can be elevated through skill into something that makes you look at food, and the world, in entirely new ways. This is the difference between the mass produced loaf, and bread worthy of the staff of life label.

The challenge for the food writer lies in knowing which approach to take. In the case of Insieme chef Marco Canora’s lasagne verde, the New York magazing correspondent went the wrong way.

“Canora makes his sheets of pasta with fresh spinach, and mingles his beef Bolognese with milk, butter, and plenty of pancetta. Instead of three or four layers, he constructs seven, each one wafer-thin, and oosing with a rich bechamel seasoned with nutmeg.”

There’s that pesky bechamel again.

I’ve not dined at Insieme, but I’ll go out on a limb and opine that the wonder of Mr. Canora’s is not that he did something difficult well, but that he did something simple with skill and imagination. That’s an admirable feat in itself. Pretending he avoided disaster in the process is unnecessary, and may even diminish the achievement this dish represents.

West Side Story (1961)

Random observations while watching a film classic:

During the opening aerial shots of the movie, I was amazed at how little traffic there was on the streets of New York City over forty-five years ago.

It’s been a while since I saw the movie, so I don’t know if I forgot or never noticed that the Sharks all wear black shoes and the Jets all wear white. On the streets, they wear sneakers. During the dance, the Sharks wear black dress shoes, the Jets two-toned blue shoes with white tops. It’s a nice little touch, unsurprising given the overall brilliance of the production design.

It’s sad that a free showing of West Side Story at an independent cinema in a college town (said college town being the alma mater of one of the creators of the work in question) and sponsored by the college drew such a miniscule crowd. If I say there were twenty people in the audience, I’d be exaggerating by a good fifteen to twenty percent.

The word I’m looking for is “editor”

Habits of mind are hard to break. It can take a long time to get used to changes in things we take for granted. Every January, it takes me several weeks of conscious effort to not use the previous year when writing the date. I’m still momentarily surprised when I get my sister’s voicemail, and she uses her married name in the outgoing message. Occasionally, I still come out of the supermarket and look for my old car in the parking lot.

Chuck Klosterman wrote a good piece about the Boston Celtics in the March 2, 2008, edition of Play, the New York Times sports magazine. In one section of the article, Mr. Klosterman reveals one of his own habits of mind:

In the Fleet Center press room, reporters are eating chocolate ice cream and talking about Heath Ledger, who died the night before. Though the parquet floor of the old Boston Garden is still used, the Fleet is not a historic building and does not feel as such. When people talk about the Celtics, they always like to bring up Bird and John Havlicek and Bill Russell, but those references always feel forced and unrelated; this facility — and this team — feels entirely modern.

The building where the Boston Celtics play is no longer called the Fleet Center. The institution after which it was named, Fleet Bank, is no longer a distinct entity, have been acquired by Bank of America. These days — and for the past few years — the arena is called the TD Banknorth Garden. It’s an obvious, and easy mistake to make. I don’t fault Mr. Klosterman for continuing to think of the building as the Fleet Center. It’s a minor detail in the article, and certainly the sort of thing one might overlook in the flow of writing.

Writers are fallible. They make mistakes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if major media outlets recognized this reality, and tasked detail-oriented individuals to review content and correct errors before items went public?

All-Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder #9, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee [Haiku review]

The goddamn Batman!
Robin kicks Green Lantern’s ass
Then the heroes cry

Spider Kiss, by Harlan Ellison

While many aspects of the world — musical styles, fashion, communications technology, and the patois of youth culture, to name just a few — have changed since Mr. Ellison’s novel was published in 1961, the role of celebrity in popular culture remains constant. Names and faces change. The pace of that change seems faster every year; projected worship has an ever shorter shelf life. However fleeting, fame is a commodity that never goes out of style.

As a result, while specific details of Spider Kiss are a product of their time, the underlying truth applies as much today as it did over forty-five years ago.

The novel presents the story of the rise and fall rock and roll star Stag Preston (a.k.a. Luther Sellers), who achieves fame and finds it the ideal vehicle for acting on his basest instincts. Paralleling this story is the struggle for redemption of his public relations man and enabler Shelly Morgenstern, who helps set Preston loose on the world, and must then try to contain the havoc wrought by his creation.

While they may have been more shocking to a 1961 audience, Stag Preston’s excesses are all too familiar to contemporary readers exposed to a 24-hour news cycle. Sexual excess? Whose video tape do you want to see? Wrecked car? Are you interested in a sports car or an SUV? Celebrities getting away with murder? Seems I’ve seen that happen before.

In a world where the custody battle following the death of a D-list celebrity is mistaken for national news, and where every slurred utterance, desperate cry for attention, and all too public meltdown of an idol for whom the spotlight has drifted a bit too far off center is dissected in print, television, and online in real time, Stag Preston seems simultaneously common and quaint.

Regardless of the time or the individual, fame has less to do with talent than with packaging. It’s about finding a vehicle that can bear up (for however long) under the spotlight, and promoting that individual in a way that enables — even commands — an investment of attention from the faithful just looking for the next focus for their devotion. In such a marketplace, the most one can do is try to limit the damage when the star burns out.

300 (2007) [Haiku review]

Shirtless Greeks at war
Less campy than expected
The king shouts — a lot