The Law of Unintended Consequences

SO THIS TIME I was on the verge of trying to re-create one of the New York lunches, when, suddenly, I went insane. This is a chopped pastrami sandwich. Once upon a time in New York, in some deli off some avenue in the middle of the island, I ordered a patrami on rye, and the guy behind the counter grabbed a double handful of pastrami (in one hand, mind you), slabbed it on the countertop, and proceeded to whack at it with a cleaver. Then he took the resultant heap and plunked it down atop the slices of rye he had previously plastered with spicy brown mustard, wrapped the thing up in white deli paper, sliced it in half, and handed it over. So today, while tempted to try and recreate one of the recent New York lunches, I decided to try this chopped pastrami trick insetad. I also reasoned that grilling it with cheese would be a reasonable strategy, even though the only reasonable cheese I had for such an adventure was white American.

Clearly there is a kind of alchemy to the chopped pastrami, and clearly it is an alchemy of which I am unposessed. But while the thing did kind of fall apart on me, and the grilling was one helluva trick which I only barely pulled off*, it was still a really nice contraption. Chopping the meat brought out a level of savory spiciness I doubt would have otherwise been present, the American cheese went along rather nicely after all, and, to top it all off, the stuff in the container you see upscreen is the last of the blue cheese cole slaw, which, in the presence of the pastrami (and the ketchupo!) really popped. Which is all by way of saying: insanity, too, sometimes has it's benefits.

The film of the day is Ghostbusters, not in that it is on and I am watching it, but more that I feel compelled to write a little something about it. Recently, one of the Onion AV people wrote a little something about it for thier Better Late Than Never feature, in which (saving you from reading the whole thing) she missed a couple of key points to enjoying Ghostbusters. The first thing, and the most important thing, is not to expect it to mean anything. Part of the charm of the thing is that it isn't really any one thing. It tries to be a half dozen different things, and only partially suceeds at being a few of them. It is a cacahonous, schrizophrenic affair: Bill Murray is in his movie, Sigourney Weaver is in her movie, and Danny Akroyd has created his own alternate universe in which the 3 Stooges are serious scientists and ghosts are both real and animated. (Ernie Hudson and Harold Ramis are in that movie, although both are inexplicably straight men.) It was the 80's. People were trying to reinvent cinema without having any very clear idea of how to do it or why. (And there was alot of coke going around. Alooooooooooooooooooot of coke.) But this thing still hold together, for whatever reason. There is a very definite sense of harmless cool to it. This is why so many people dress up as Ghostbusters for ComiCon and DragonCon and what not. Call it the law of unintended consequences. Nothing about this movie says it should work, but somehow, the silly goddamned thing still holds together.

So do I recommend it? Never chop your pastrami. Let someone who really knows what they're doing do it. (And this applies doubly if "chop your pastrami" is slang for a particularly deviant sexual activity.) If Ghostbusters is one of those movies you can watch pretty much any time it comes on, good for you. But don't expect anyone who doesn't get it to be persuaded by any argument you might craft as to why the thing is some kind of cerulean genius. It's not. It's a pure fluke.+ Remember: for every Ghostbusters, in the 1980's, there were 34.7 Howard The Duck's.

*This was actually a rather impressive flip, in that I only lost perhaps 4% of the pastrami into the frying pan in the process, which I was later able to incorporate into the finished sandwich.

+And we should all be glad they didn't stick to Akroyd's original, whacky-ass script, which had him and Belushi as time-traveling spirit cops out to bust Einstein for ethereal fraudulence, or some such crap.

Happy Birthday To Me

SO FOR MY birthday, since I just got back from New York, and after that, Bluefield, West Virginia, I decided that I would buy some new shoes. These are the Nike Air Pegasus model, which I have taken to calling the Air Pegs, because it's easier to say, sounds cooler, and, y'know, that Steely Dan song. They are kind of the un-Nikes of my collection. All my other Nikes are super light and super squishy, while these weigh in at an apalling seven ounces (GASP!?!) and have a more substantial EVA sole platform. They are still WAY comfy, and very handsome as well.

And then, in honor of my birthday shoes, I had a beautifully poured Black & Tan.

(That's a lie. The shoes arrived after I had started in on the B&T, along with a pulled pork barbeque sandwich on a kaiser roll with blue cheese cole slaw, and French fires with kethcupo! There was no movie of the day. I have been plenty entertained as it is.)

Boulevard of Broken Streets

SO WE WENT to New York. Yes we did. This is a corned beef on rye from the Stage Deli, the Wifey's favorite. We went there the first night, showing up about five thirty. By the time we left, a little after six, the joint was packed.

What you do not see in this shot is the first of two beers I had with this meal. The sandwich-- this is half, by the way-- was fifteen bucks. The beers came to sixteen bucks.


This is me just a shade below Times Square. I include this mainly to counter the Wifey's assertion that I didn't take any pictures outside of the hotel room. This is actually one of the many pedestrian plazas recently created along Broadway, in the name of alieviating traffic. The first couple of them kind of baffled me, but the further we went Uptown, they more they grew on me. And, strangely enough, they seemed actually to be working. Broadway used to have some of the most egregious traffic jams, all the time, and in the 25 blocks we walked up and back, we didn't see a one.

(But I actually didn't take any pictures outside the hotel, for the rest of the trip. I didn't want the camera to slow me down. Union Square, Madison Square Park, Washington Square Park, Chealsea, Greenwich Village, the Hudson, Chealsea Pier Park-- I think that's what it's called-- East side, West side, all around the town.)

And here's the Wifey setting up her Command Center. (Laptop.) She was so entirely into it that she didn't even notice me taking the picture.

And this was lunch. A coupla of Carlsburgs from a bodega a coupla blocks up and a pastrami on rye from the, literally, corner deli. (Actually named the Corner Cafe.) This was the third day, by which point I had tweaked my left knee, shocked the sinews of my shinbones, and beat my feet all to hell. My reasoning was that I had better take it easy for the rest of the day. (I didn't. That was the day I stepped out the door of the Hampton Inn on 24th Street at Sixth Avenue and walked straight out west all the way to the Hudson, and Chealsea Pier Park.)

Speaking of the Chealsea Hamp, this was our view, or really as much as I could get of it through the window. (I got what I thought was a better shot, but the Wifey suggested, correctly as it turns out, that the bar in the middle of the window ruined it. It really did.

And here's where they lived. (Monty Python reference.) This is the bitchin' high rise apartment builing across the road. I didn't actually see any of the tenants during the stay. But I did toast them with my Carlsburgs.

And here's the view colored by the sun setting over the Hudson river. On this day, I believed in God.

And this is the view at night. Good night, New York.

And this is my plane home. I thought it was a kind of pretty view, for an airport. An album cover maybe. Anyways, the plane got me home, which is good. And sad. The shuttle van took us across the Queensboro bridge, across Rooseveldt Island, with a great view from Midtown all the way down the island. The plane banked high and hard getting out, giving mostly a view of the sky and the sun, but as I looked back I got a shot of the middle of the island, clear from river to river, with the Empire State Building right smack dab in the middle. Good bye, New York. I love you.

More Than Meets The Eye

SO UNDER- NEATH the eggs and ketchup and mustard is a Quirch brand Jamaican patty with jerk chicken filling. The grocers around the corner recently started carrying them, along with about seven dozen varieties of "tamale" a month and a half or so ago, with the result that all those schmucks screaming their heads off about the deliterious effects of Mexican and/or Sudamericano immigrants to our country and healthcare system can get frickin' bent.

End message.

The tater tots-- in this case, actually, Ore Ida Tater Crowns, tee em, arrrrrrrrrrrrrr, were inspired by a visit to Denny's. Long story short, we were narrowing down early dining options in the face of a trip out to the countryside for a family event, and after ditching a local on finding it crowded up with churchgoers of the first water of arrogance, we ended up at Denny's for perhaps the last time in living history. I used to like Denny's alot. My kind of place. Reliable, bacon & eggs, a few outlandish offerings, such as the Moons Over My Hammy, which is a ham, egg and cheese monstrosity that is dear to my heart in both the best and worse sense of the phrase, decent coffee, and, something which seems to often go overlooked, reliable entry level employment for a decent wage. (Or so I had word of it years ago; no idea if things within the corporation have changed in the interim.)

About five or six years ago, though, they raised the prices and started on the practice I enjoy refering to as Binge Denial: putting some things on sale to draw in those consumers who have become aware that nine bucks is too much to pay for a middling omlette. We didn't stop going there on that score alone, but it was enough to help us strike that off the menu (he he) on a regular basis. This time, though, I reasoned that I have not been out for eggs in quite a while, and the Grand Slam Breakfast is currently priced at $5.99.

To say I got had would be too much, but I was a little cheesed off by the deception the fine people at Denny's Corporate Drone Warehouse seem to think they have accomplished. The Grand Slam used to be two eggs, two sausage links, two strips of bacon, hash browns, toast, and two pancakes. I seem to think it used to include coffee as well, but that's as may be. The Grand Slam is now four items of your choice from a list of nine or ten, including "better-for-you" items like turkey bacon and egg whites. The result was not bad-- I had eggs, sausage, bacon and pancakes, which was not great for six bucks, but not a complete rip-off either-- but the dumb bastards missed one crucial step. They didn't change the shape of the plates. The pancakes come on their own properly proportioned plate, but the eggs and co came on the same oval plate designed to accomodate the full compliment, with the result that without the hash browns and toast, the rest of the lads looked positively sad and lonely.

But, hey. Now I got my eggs and potatoes. These are not proper hash browns, but they will most certainly do-- most certainly have done, rather, as I have now finished this portion of the meal. And there is yet another side of the experiment: last night we had Chinese take-out for dinner, dumplings and lo mein for me, scallion chicken for the Wifey, and for that meal I started out with the Saranac Black Forest, switching to the Brown Ale when it turned out that the Black Forest really didn't go all that well with the Chinese food. The Black Forest went pretty nicely with the spicy empanada and egg and potatoes, but the Brown Ale-- Shazam! Or, in the words of Dizzy Gillespie, Shoe-Bop-She-Bam, O-Bloog-Y-Mont!

The movie of the weekend, or, more precisely, the Saturday Night Weekend Movie was NOT Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. We made it through maybe twenty minutes of it, the first ten or twelve of which was CGI'd robots doing stuff, before we got to the going-off-to-college subplot, and then the uptight Mom eats pot brownies sub-subplot, before the Wifey began to feel her brain imploding. I was happy enough to turn the damned thing off at that point. While it might have been easy enough to appreciate Julie White's shrill schene chewery for a minute or two, after three or four, it just felt insulting.

No wonder Shia LeBouf drinks.

I can't say I recommend the Jamaican patty. I love it, but it is a very . . . singular sort of thing, I guess is what I mean to say. I came to it from several angles, initially, and I don't know that it is the sort of thing that could be leaped upon without truamatic results. But the strategic placement of a few blobs of ketchup for swabbing the tots in did bring to mind one of my favorite Kids In The Hall sketches, so I brought it up just so I could link to that. The Transformers franchise can go to hell. We watched the first one in the theater, which was fun enough just for being able to shoot "What the HELL are we thinking?" grins back and forth with the other patrons in the packed house. But after that, frankly, I'd just as soon get kicked in the shins.

Whattsa Schmatta U

NOW LOOK. I love New York as much as anybody. Which is to say I probably love it more than I ought to. I do, in fact, know a coupla people who don't love New York. One because he grew up there and spent a substantial amount of his adult life there, and I guess that can make you see the negatives in starker relief than is strictly healthy for holding romantic notions of the place. The other because, as near as I can tell, he's an idiot. But that's kind of beside the point.

The point, if I have one, and I am not entirely sure I do, is I love New York. The City. Manhattan. The clear inspiration for today's lunch, an Italian sausage sandwich with peppers and onions. (Back to construction in a moment.) The first one of these I had at the North Carolina State Fair, Road Company, when they were encamped at the local fairgrounds right outside Charlotte when I was seven or eight. They called it a Coney Island. It was good. The second one I had off a cart in New York, down in the Battery if memory serves. It was way better. Not just because it was in New York. The Metrolina Fairgrounds tends to cheapen any experience, especially food experiences, since the whole place smells like garbage. (Yeah, I know. But this was in the Battery, or at least someplace at the South end of the island, and far enough from the Fulton Fish Market-- still open in those days-- that the breeze off the harbor was all you really smelled.) The sausage was better, the peppers and onions were better, the bun was better, and the whole combination was just better.

The third one I had was in Philadelphia. It was just wrong.

For this one, the sausage is an Italian flavored with green peppers and onions the local Harris Teeter features. The onion is white, the pepper is yellow, and yes, of course, there's a drizzel of my beloved Plochman's yellow mustard. On top is a mixed layer of cheddar and provalone, which worked out even better than I imagined: buttery and sharp and velvety, providing a wonderful counterpoint to the rest of the sandwich. Part of the magic of this, I think, is that it si a bundle of near contradictions: the peppers and onion are sweet and squishy, the sausage is savory and chewy, the bun is starchy and slightly crisp (and chewy in precisely the way the sausage is not). Balanced against all that, the cheese layer makes perfect sense.

The movie of the day is this.

I had been meaning to watch this a coupla different times, but both times I came in late enough that I felt like waiting for the next opportunity. (And hey, let's face it: it's an HBO doc project, it's gonna play until their mathematical model shows every man, woman and child in America has had a chance to see it.) Today was that day. It happened to come on right about the time I had completed the day's early tasks and was ready to start lunch. And it proved to be just about exactly what I was hoping for: a healthy mix of New York porn and worker's rights history. A bit pendantic in spots, but not so bad as you'd notice if you were not looking for it-- and clearly I was.

I did have a hard time watching the transitional bits going into the fourth quarter, where the elephant in the room no one wanted to mention by name is fact that you cannot make a profit manufacturing clothes unless your workers are making, and eating, dirt. This was also the point where the filmmakers seemed to assume their audience would either appreciate the snarky contrast in the sweatshop conditions under which the clothes of celebrity-whore designers are produced, or else simply not care. I am probably reading that wrong, but I did get kind of a squirmy feeling at that point. In the end, they did seem to be awfully on the side of the textile set: pay for your clothes, people! Screw Wal-Mart!

So do I recommend it? Hard to say. I started out wearing my black Gotham Girls Roller Derby tee shirt, which no doubt helped jump start my New York nostalgia, but I do think that the sausage monster was more than satisfactory, just short of illuminating, in fact. Saranac Lager was probably the perfect match for it too. The HBO joint is probably not much you don't already know if you know anything about the history and current state of the designer textile industry-- or if you have any affinity for New York immigrant clans, for that matter. And there were some bitchin' streetscape shots too. Which might not matter. I mean, if, say, you grew up there. Or if you're an idiot.

Smart Dog

That was going to be the entire post, but as the hours ticked by I found I had more to say.

Fall is here, which in my part of North Carolina typically happens in a stuttered gathering of days, alternately unseasonably warm and gray and cold and wet and thoroughly unpredictable. The weather reports have an almost Kafkaesque, nay, Beckettian sense of irony to them. This year I let myself go and cheerfully bemoan our meteorologists' missed guesses as out and out cruelty, evil dissembling to no end save my individual suffering. One result of Fall's arrival is the annual decanting of the bed covering known in our house as The Chocolate Mousse (or Chocolate Moose, depending on mood and inflection), a synthetic down comforter I bought my wife for Christmas one year. It is so known for it's color and texture, which are respectively deep brown and marvelously, to use my wife's terminology for lack of a more wonderful descriptive, "squishy." The Dog has used her innate genius to find the best place in the house to spend the earlier portions of a cold Fall morning: my side of the bed, beneath the Chocolate Moose, shortly after my own willing evacuation from the spot.

Smart dog.

Fall also means I have brought out my beloved leather bomber jacket. I bought it many years ago, on sale, when I found it, and I have yet to see it's equal since. Everything about it-- color, texture, utility-- I love, to the extent that I usually put it away long after the season has called for it and pull it out much before it's required use. This season the mixture of rain and cold snap upon cold snap has proven my jacket's utility to a great degree, and so far it has only spent a small part of a single day in the trunk of a car, the day's warmth having robbed it of it's usefulness.

The leather jacket does not have a name, which is a bit odd for my household. It's The Leather Jacket. What else would there be to say?

Today the weather is bright and crisp and cold and clear, the low temperature for the morning setting a record at two degrees below freezing, predicted high of sixty-four, and we're nearly there already. Shortly I will be lunching, and then heading out to have my eyes examined, which, with any luck, means I will have a new pair of glasses for the trip we have planned for New York City next month. (Or if not, that will be just fine too.) My point is: my world is beautiful today, and I am grateful for it.

Put 'em In A Room Together And Let 'em Fight It Out

SO TODAY's lunch is grilled turkey and bacon on rye with mustard and three cheeses-- white American, provalone and cheddar-- largely because I wanted to use the last of the package of provalone before it went bad, and because I wanted to get closer to opening a new package of white American. It was going to be a turkey and bacon on rye with dill havarti, but the local Harris Teeter had but a single brand of the stuff, which I tought to be both over-priced and inferior in texture. So I settled on some sharp cheddar, which I have recently discovered-- referrence the previous incarnations of the grilled tuna salad on rye-- go remarkably well with grilled rye bread. Or say re-discovered, I suppose. It should come to no revelation to anyone who has previously dined on the American oddity know and the patty melt.

The revalatory element here is the ketchup sans hot sauce. No. The revalatory element here is the combination of beers. Never mind how I came about aquiring the Longhammer IPA; following it with the Saranac IPA was just astounding. The Longhammer has, as I have previously noted, a lovely, elegant, flowery high hop note, and the Saranac after was absolutely bold by comparison. The combination was just grand, stunning.

The film of the day was Appaloosa.

Eh.

It was recommended to me by the friendly neighborhood mailman, if memory serves; I had seen a good five minute stretch or so awhile back, concluding that this was something I ought to see in whole. So today I happened to stumble on it right before it kicked off, two o'clock, smack dab in the middle of lunch, so I tuned it in.

Eh. It's a morality play. Bob Parker plays ducks 'n' drakes with the mythology of the old West to answer the immortal question: just what makes a hero not an asshole? And if she's "purty," is any woman ever really an asshole, really? HAH!? In this sense it is also very much an Ed Harris flim*: all heroes are ultimately flawed. See!?! Pollack? Flawed. Beethoven? Flawed. Old West Justice? Flawed. Nicely written though; Vigo gets some really choice lines especially. And everyone in it acquits him/herself nicely. Still, pretty much seen what it has to offer, and, as near as I can tell, anything it has to offer that I have not seen already is pretty much all bullshit. Damn those Indians! They are so noble and so savage!!!**

PS: The title of this post comes from a Stephen Wright gag: "For Christmas I got both a humidifier AND a dE-humidifier. So I put 'em both in the same room together and let 'em fight it out."

PPS: and then about 3/4 of the way through, the HBO service cut out. Since the Wifey works for the cable monster, we get a gabazillion channels, so I often feel I have no real right to complain on those rainy days when the cable service goes all futzy and half to 80% of the movie channels are not available or just plain go blank. It came back after a few minutes. I didn't seem to have missed much of anything.

*Intentional. Partially based on a series of typo-derived gags Doc Nagel and I have developed over the years, same way a work in progress, rather than being a poem, is a pram. Both of these actually derive from Monty Python gags.

**SARCASM!!! You can either waste two hours watching the thing to see what I mean by that or take my word that it's funny. Taking my word may be the less painful way to go, paradoxical as that might sound.