Shattered-- Shadoobee!

SO THIS thing is still not behaving the way I want it to, but that's alright, I suppose. After all, I have been talking about having a chili cheese omlette for, well, frankly I don't even know how long, so there must have been some reason I was resisting, back in the back of my head. Turns out this cannot be turned, which is to say the attempted flip was utterly whimsical, a flight of fancy that resulted in little more than a sullied spatula. At that point, at any rate, the eggs were cooked enough, although not as tight and fluffy as my usual omlette-- my usual omlette is a thing of absolute alchemy, and although I am sure that sounds like bragging, it isn't. As any alchemist will tell you, turning straw to gold is more luck that it is ever either art or science. And this probably shouldn't turn out like any other omlette. The chili cheese omlette should be a beast as much of myth as reality, sighted often enough so that tales of its existence are creditable, and rarely enough that some mystery remains; the chili cheese omlette may exist, or it may exist only in memory and legend, or it may not ever have been at all, the product of nostalgia and longing.The Sierra Nevada was great with the eggs, but the Endless River, a very new craft brew made in Kinston, of all places-- I have no idea what I mean by that-- is a kolsh style lager, and it goes with the chili, like, well, just wow. Like Briscoe and Green, elder son.

This, well, I think I have written about this before, but it would have been some years go. This became the movie of the day because I caught it right at the top, literally moments before it started. And I love it. It's just adorable, especially the segments with Jon Stewart and the ones with Amy Ray and Emily Saunders.* And the competition segment gets me every single time. In fact, I reflected while watching it, I had a far better time watching the competition segment of this-- for probably the third or fourth time-- than I had watching this years's F1 race from Valencia. Sebastian Vettel took off from the pole and maintained a 20 second lead over the pack, with Roman Grosjean in second, his best performance so far in his FIRST SEASON in F1, but then Vettel's car failed in the 34th lap, just after being released from a full course caution, and Grosjean's engine failed some time after that, leaving Fernando Alonso's Ferrari to finish first. Which, good for him, and good for a Spaniard to win in spain for once, but dammit. Yeah, that sums it up. Just dammit.

This is SO not the film of the day. I am still watching it, I mean right now, but Jesus. It's painful. Earlier on, they broke what I call the Cassavettes Rule, which is that a chacter gets treated in a particular way by the world which is both cruel and unrealistic. It comes from the scene in A Woman Under The Influence, which I largely quite enjoy, when Geena Rowlands' character faces the impossible task of getting strangers on a crowded street to tell her what time it is while she slowly unravels. I mean, its' great acting, and kind of a riveting scene, and painful in the way only Cassavettes films are, but, dammit, somebody would have told her what time it was. They just woulda. I mean, at no point in history, not iven in 1977, could someone stand on a street corner, even in New York, asking for the time and not have someone, SOMEONE eventually tell them. (Although in New York, the likely response would have been along the lines of "It's ten fucking o'clock in the morning, whatya STOOPID?" Or "LOOK UP AT THE CLOCK, MORON!" This thing broke that rule by having the main character ask for a taxi in the Shanghai airport and not have a half dozen people respond in English simultaneously. (Although he did get a taxi, in the very next scene.) This thing lives and dies on quirk, and motly dies. At several junctions it flatly contradicts itself, and at some point, you have to ask yourself: how fdumb do I think people, especially Americans, are? ("Fdumb" is a typo, but I'm keeping it.) I mean, after awhile this is just xenophobic and mysanthropic and, frankly, un-American! I love my country, and I know that some dumbasses do live here, buit, oh, for crying out loud! Like we elected Bush again!

*Of The Daily Show and Indigo Girls, respectively. And the title to this is from a Rolling Stones song, which you either didn't need explained or don't get anyway, but as I reflected on the failed flip, I found myself singing "What a mess-- this egg's in tatters! I mean shattered! Scattered all over Manhattan! Shadoobee.

Because It Is Bitter, And Because It Is New York

(If you get this title, based on the best line of a pretty bad poem, I can only say: I'm sorry.)

I often find myself defending fast food for entirely the wrong reasons. Mainly that fast food gets a far worse rap that it really deserves, because, come on, people, it's crap. McDonald's burgers are not made of worms, the corporation is not responsible for South American deforestation, and even if KFC is called KFC because what they are serving isn't legally chicken, you really don't need any vast conspiracy theory or grotesque inference of the origin of the meat to indict the product. It's crap. It's stuff that developed and thrived because people travelling to far flung places on the highways and byways of America had to eat something. And while I have my objections to, for instance, Patton Oswalt's critique of the failure pile in a sadness bowl-- come on, dude, you took it home? You tried this fucking thing to go? Of course it sucked. But it sucked more because you gave it a chance to cool down. That's the kind of crap that, if it's got any chance at all, you gotta treat is like adamantium: you gotta keep it hot.

On the other hand, all it takes for me to curse at the TV is some fococta spokesman proclaiming that KFC uses real chicken to make its-- wait for it-- popcorn chicken. Oh, come the fuck on! For fuck's sake! Who the fuck would ever know or care if those little greasy breading balls were made of anything besides breading and Styrofoam? In fact, given what they end up as, I'd be slightly comforted knowing that they weren't real chickens, after all.

Of course McDonald's is bad food. That's all ye know in this world, and all ye need to know. But the fact that McDonald's is bad food because it's processed does not make my pastrami, not to say my rye bread, unprocessed. (And don't get me started on the mustards! That's right: plural.) But the cheese curls were a really odd choice. Not to say that they don't dance along with the deli in their own odd way, but it's not something I would do on a regular basis, I don't think.



This is something I have been trying to get my head around for awhile. I've known of Louis CK as a comedian and as a comedic theorist for quite awhile, but I shied away from his show from the get go, for no reason I could put a pin in. I have been trying to catch up with it, but so far, it's been a little painful. As I noted to the Wifey, if nothing else, it's pretty good New York porn, getting in a fair amount of gritty, cheap, street-level shots-- just my kind of thing-- but the plotz are all self-induced cruelty humor, which is in keeping with CK's stand up material, comedic theory and life in general, but so far, it's a little hard to take. Not that I am giving up on it, or even worse, hoping he'll change. Just that I have to say, as a fan, watching it is more a labor of love that a joy to the heart. So it goes.

On the other hand, if one is to be a fan of New York, one has to admit it can be more than a bit of a miserabilist place. It's easy to be very happy in New York; it is also very easy to be pissed off and depressed and convinced that all the forces of the universe are aligned against you.


That's better.

I Know What I Like

So I finally decided that I needed to update the Work In Progress page on my web thingy, which means the following poem is no longer a work in progress, but rather a work.


BAKERSFIELD

Sometimes you can gauge the size of the mountains in the distance
Through the desert haze; sometimes
They’re inert ghosts. Sometimes
The desert is a placemat with a maze on the back

Leading you here.

The floor of the valley, flecked
With mechanical mosquitoes, sucking the black blood out of the earth,
Even a hundred years later, still thirsty
For the wealth beneath the weepy end
Of the River Kern.

Here are the bastard offspring of a truck farmer
Who knew a good thing when he saw it:
An outpost for weary travelers, a green slash on a canvas of brown,
An oasis in the desert.

An enclave in the nowhere that is now here,
An outpost, in what might be
The last, best place in California,
Just a speck on the edge
Of fly-over country, where the bad habits born of desperation
Fall away like the memories of yesteryear’s World of Tomorrow,
Pre-cast concrete balustrades fitted with faded aluminum fins.

Decades away
From the eager immigrants
Ready to begin the beguine, produce the produce,
Sluice the juice from the crust of the earth,
Now suburban commandoes, ready
For supper.



Which is, after all, fairly silly, but at least it reflects how I feel about the place.

Friggin Blogger

Friggin Blogger.

I go to upload a picture, get all the way through the process, and what do I find missing?

The "Upload Image" button.

Kinda makes it difficult.

Friggin Blogger. No wonder everyone's cluster-flocking over to Wordpress.

Anyways, the only point to this entry is to announce that I will be, yet again, absent for a few weeks. Yes: algebra. What can I say, they bark, I jump.

But it won't be long. And in honor of that fact, here's a poem I wrote about running into an ex-lover back in my college days. Actually, it was largely inspired by Doc Nagel's pointing out that, much to his annoyance, I have a serious habit of saying "anyways" when I should say "anyway," since "anyways," semantically, makes no sense. It is entitled:

ANYWAYS

Anyways
what matters
knowing you are the train I missed
and as your memory speeds byI can put a hand on the ladder
suddenly an airborn man
embryonic in a cocoon of wind
watching a short, fast landscape beneath me
and hoping for either fast death
or a hot
cup
of tea.




Chris also gives this poem the distinction of prompting one of my favorite criticisms of all time: "I don't think you're getting a cup of tea." True. True.

Anyways, I might find the space-time to sketch a thing or two, but don't expect to hear from me between now and Valentine's. Peace.