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.