When I Say Hillshire, You Say @#$%!

THIS IS NOT today's lunch. This is a picture of Sebastian Vettel, this year's winningest F1 pilot, behind the wheel of his wounded RBR7 after spinning out due to a tire puncture in the second turn of the Abu Dhabi Yas Marina course. Due to the fact that I cannot not watch the re-runs of the race any time they come on, I have now watched Seb spin off the track and dig in the dirt three times now. It hurts. Every time.
Today's lunch was a tuna quesadilla, which is a weird-ass thing I like to do now and then for the sheer hell of it. Yesterday's lunch was-- well, lemme get to that in a minute.
First, I want to apologize for having been gone a month. I could cite many things, but the fact of the matter is that my sister in law has absconded with my camera, and I have not been able to bring myself to blog here without a lunch pic. Yesterday, however, lunch was not something that I feel I ought to foist pictures of upon an unsuspecting public. For whatever reason, I thought I had an obligation to see what Hillshire Farms' laboratory workers thought this thing called "pastrami" was supposed to be like. After determining that the result was a peppery, vaguely beefy version of ham loaf, I decided I could better my odds by adding American cheese and grilling it on rye. I eventually concluded that, at the very least, I couldn't lose by adding anything to it. When I say Hillshire, you say @#$% those @#$%ing @#$%ers! Go Meat Like Substance!

This very much wasn't the film of the day. One of Hitchcock's last thrillers, made in the 70's, taken from a book which was very clearly set in the immediate post war London-- but still, set in the 70's!-- from source material that dates back to the 30's and 40's, including the notion that continental cuisine is insanely complicated and easily ruined by incompetent British housewives . . . Alright. That last part is probably true. Anyways. I have tried to get through this about a half dozen times over the years, to almost no avail. As Hitchcock flicks go, this is one of the most disturbing, not least because the psychology is so dated and dodgy, but more so because Hitch finally had leave to include nudity. So we get plenty of opportunity to ogle the breasts of women who are dead. Or about to be dead. Just plain creepy. This time I managed to cringe my way through about 75 or 80% of it, meanwhile washing dishes, checking the mail, and generally wandering about the house, with the result that I managed to sit through most of the long, talky portions and skip most of the murder scenes, before noticing that Dear God! Oh, dear God, NO!!!-- the thing still had forty five minutes of bad European fish stew jokes to go. (And that scene where the killer tries to retrieve his tie pin from the corpse of his latest kill while trapped in the back of a moving potato truck! HILARIOUS.)

So do I re-- oh, who the hell am I kidding? If you know what meat tastes like, you won't like anything Hillshire Farms makes. And I think Hitch was trying to be funny-- I HOPE Hitch thought he was being funny-- but the naked bodies of fetishistically murdered women just aren't all that amusing, no matter what kind of funny faces he got the actresses to make. Or maybe I'm just not getting the joke. Because there's eels in the soup. Those whacky French! Go Mush!

We Have Both Kinds-- Country AND Western

TODAY's lunch I have decided, in my infinite wisdom, to call "The Swaze."

"The Swaze" is kind of an ironic hipster nick-name for Patric Swayze, one which, I have it on pretty good authority, he relished. When he finally succumbed to cancer earlier this year, having worked right up to the point where it was fuctionally impossible for him to continue working, the internet was full of earnest lamentations by adorably earnest hipsters (and, in some cases, hipster douchbags) mourning his passing. The man is well and truly missed.

The sandwich here is a culmination of several influences, not to say inspirations, not the least of which is the experience of having ordered a hot ham and cheese sandwich from a fast-food chain and realizing, in consumption, "Hey, this doesn't suck!" (And yeah: rare experience.) The least of which is watching Tony Bourdain eat some gaudy monstrosity down in Central America-- least because, first of all, the sandwich he was eating was mortadella, and, simply put, ham is not mortadella, and secondly, in the words of Mr. William H. Joel, there's a new band in town, but you can't get the sound from a story in a magazine.

The beers were a flukey choice at best, the second to last Tsing in a six pack and the remains of a Saranac Trail Mix. They didn't go, they didn't not go . . . Or, well, I guess they went along with the sadnwich and tots in their own unique ways. Not that it matters: that is a pile of ham right there.


Which brings us to this, which is most definitely NOT the movie of the day. I tuned in to this earlier, after taking the dog for a semi-abortive walk around the block (hey-- it's hot out there, and she's old). I remembered watching it and loathing it years ago on HBO, on the grounds that the critics had absolutely brutalized it but the public absolutely lapped it up, about which more later. This time there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE ON (that I felt like watching). So, out of a perverse curiosity, related to the perverse fascination which lead to my perverse first viewing, I watched it.

It's really very bad.

The production values are patchy, and the plot is really bullshit, the issues are all cowbells-- MIA's who are really POW's! Our useless government! Those inscrutible Asians! Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is really alot like putting on a pantomime play!-- and, God bless 'em, only about three of the actors in the whole ensemble were able to ladel a decent performance out of the swirling, steamy soup.

Swayze isn't one of them.

The first time I watched I spent the whole time going "This is pretty bad . . . Hey! There's Gene Hackman! This is really very bad . . . Hey! There's Robert Stack!" (Who blusters with the best of them.) "This is actually horrible, borderline immoral . . . Hey! Who's that guy?" (Fred Ward, who even made the hammy, shadow-infested PTSD sequences semi-cogent.) This time I spent the majority of my attention reading artcles on the web, but I did manage to zero in on Swayze's performance. He was playing a guy who was going in despite his own self doubts and insecurities, but it came off as an actor who wasn't sure when to lean against the tree or chew its bark. It wasn't his fault, I don't think: it was a valid choice for the character, which could have been played way more straight up and macho, but the other guys hamming it up macho made it come off as just weak.

In 1983 there were tons of American who were desperate for reasons that our involvement in Vietnam was not futile and wrong, and believing that there were prisoner who had been deliberately listed as missing in action, either by the enemy or by our own government, so that they could be kept in prison and tortured beyond human understanding seemed like a good enough way to go about things. Which is a crying ass shame, because it's a lie, and an ugly, immoral motivation.

But I can recommend the sandwich.

Oh, and as to the name: part of the reason Swayze was, and remains, so vastly, widely loved, is that yeah, he gave us ham, but he also gave us cheese. When he was doing a role that ought to have a wink behind it, he held the wink in reserve, and then he stepped next door and did To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. And was the baddest son of a bitch in drag you ever saw.