Movie & Lunch, Bifurcated Edition

I KNOW that this blog tends to be photo-heavy, and especially so about things you couldn't possibly care about. This is largely because I insist on taking pictures of food, and, while they are not bad pictures of food, they are pictures nonetheless. And, in the words of Our Hero, William H. Joel Jr., you can't get the sound from a story in a magazine.

But this really is kind of special. I had to take this picture in res, in order to show that this sausage sandwich contains two different mustards, a gag that frequent readers will find not uncommon at all. But better than that:

Due to the recent purchase of a 12 pack of Saranac Trail Mix, I consumed said sandwich with a Black Forest followed by a Pale Ale, which combination proved to be downright magical. Especially in combination with the sandwich, which has so far given me waves of nostalgia, in a very odd way.

The sausage in this sandwich was the result of some vaguely ill-advised bargain shopping. An off-brand of kielbasa which we did not recognize, on sale for basically a dollar, the first application-- baked with sauerkraut and served alongside mashed potatoes with a little mustard for dipping-- proved distinctly odd, in a way I could not quite pinpoint.

After a courtesy nibble, the Wifey managed to approximate the oddness: "It tastes like bologna."

Which it does. It tastes distinctly like bologna. Not baloney, but bologna. In fact, a species of ring bologna that registers a tad low on the garlic scale, which is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as there is garlic present. And that approximation led to the supposition-- again, the Wifey's, all crediot where credit is due-- that the best application for this might be fried, in sandwich form, which is what we have here. On the lower laye* of the Kaiser roll is Grey Poupon, on top of which the sausage, on top of which a slice of white cheese, mainly as a binder, on top of which warmed kraut, and on top of that, my beloved Plochman's mustard. The nostalgia factor is that it reminded me, as I was eating it, of the supposedly kosher hot dog I used to get from the Cambodian guy who ran the lunch stand in the half-defunct mall where I used to work. Minus the beer and the cheese and half the mustard. It was uncanny in a way that I am loathe to even attempt to describe.

Anyways.

The movies of the day were not quite October Sky and The Hi-Lo Country, neither of which I can actually, creditably watch. October Sky because the sourcework is veritable, but the execution is specious. Homer Hickam, the subject of the flick, says that his Dad supported him alot more than the film suggests, and that the film plays up the union-anti-union folderol a fair amount, and on and on, but the film has a definite atmosphere which caputures post-war Appalachia is a very faithful and loving way, and all the performances are solid, especially from Chris Cooper, on of my favorite actors, and Jake Gyllenhall, who, for all I care, can rot in hell.

(Because he is a fine actor, but he tends to take fish-in-a-barrel roles. Donnie Darko? Fuggedaboudit. Who can't play an emotionally tortured adolescent? Besides Christopher Walken, I mean.)

The Hi-Lo Country I keep trying to watch, but it's just so mean spirited. The whole film seems predicated on the notion that betrayal is not only inevitable, but somehow honorable. I mean, I have respect for films that have a gray moral tone, but when Woody Harrelson is your choice to play your moral chorus, well, I think it's clear that you have serious issues with your choice of ethos.

(On the other hand, it has one of the few truly authentic Harrelson performances, so for that reason, it's nearly hypnotic, Harrelson being one of those actors whose performances I equally enjoy whether authentic or in. Alongside Christopher Walken.)

*Laye is a term I recently coined to mean "the slices of bread in the sandwich," so your standard sandwich would have a lower laye and an upper laye, where your club sandwich would have a lower, middle, and upper laye. Big whoop.

There Is No Movie Of The Day

NOT BECAUSE I am not in the mood for a movie per se. I watched the latter two thirds of Hot Fuzz, then the first part of Deep Impact, before concluding that I simply was not in the mindframe to sit through the meat-hammer that is Deep Impact, and then caught The Good German in time for lunch. But I will probably switch to something stupid like Law & Order before too long. Stupid only because I have seen them all twice. But I am still a sucker for that show. Good New York porn.

Today's lunch is potstickers & lemon grass chicken wraps with ginger sauce, hoisin sauce, and Chinese mustard, which is something I have determined I will never do again. Chinese food should come from a restaurant. Period. At home, I don't have a wok, if I did I couldn't get it hot enough to operate properly, and if I could I wouldn't be using it enough to properly season it. So what I have here, frankly, is fine enough. But it isn't . . . right. Alright. That's that: you either know what I mean or you don't. De gustibus non disbutandum, largely because at a certain point it's impossible to describe why you like or dislike what's on the plate.

But the real reason that there is not movie of the week-- aside from my inherent fickleness-- is that it is almost my birthday.

This year, the Wifey decided that rather than hand her a list of CD's and stuff, I could go ahead and go on a spree at Amazon, handing me the arbitrary limit of 100 bucks. Which is great: I ordered the stuff, and it came in most of a week before my actual birthday, which means I get to listen to the stuff this week and go do something else on the actual day. Whatever my faults, I am amazing easy to please.
So yesterdays's selection, for my listening pleasure, was The Alan Parson's Project's Eye in the Sky. This is one of those albums I owned way back when; I bought it on the strength of the hit single title track and defended it to all who told me it was a rotten piece of ofal that would damage my soul. This is the musical equivalent of a novel written by a literary critic. Alan Parsons is a noted engineer and producer, most noted for working with Pink Floyd at the heighth of their prowess. His chief collaborator, Eric Woolfson, is a singer-songwriter-producer-etceteragrad. And the album sounds alot like what you would expect from guys who know how it's done. Most of the numbers are extremely well done, others seem over-written, or over-producted to the point of sounding like aural mush. But it's a good thing to hear in its entirety. It is very much a concept album, not inasmuch as the songs all confront a singular theme or tell some kind of narrative story, but rather inas each track represents a particular kind of aural layer in the overall cake. And if that's not a murky and ineffective metaphor, I don't know what is. It's very easy (and was done often back in the day) to think of this as Pink Floyd Lite, largely because it is.

But the real treat here was the bonus tracks. Now, these days I don't go in for bonus tracks much. I have a copy of Santana's Abraxas that I have to jump up and turn off because they included a bunch of crappy live tracks at the end. And all studio versions are supperior to live versions, unless, and I mean this, you are Cheap Trick, in which case the exact inverse is true.

In this case, the bonus material is alternately illuminating and ridiculous, almost precisely. The real treats are the first two bonus tracks: a demo version of the opening theme, "Sirius" (if you're a sports fan you know it: it's that piece that goes "Bow-dow-burkr-dirkr-bow-dow-burkr-dirkr"); and a version of the ballad "Old and Wise," voiced by Woolfson, which perfectly illustrates the fact that if a ballad is written broadly enough, it doesn't matter who sings it. But the real treats were the last two bonus tracks, an instrumental re-working of several of the albums themes and an orchestra rendition, respectively, which go on for freakin' ever.

The next offerings will be Billy Joel's albums 52nd Street and The Stranger, and then after that Leonard Bernstein & The New York Philharmonic's performances of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain. Oh, wait; what was that I said about live versions?

PS: Oh, year: and Brad Paisley's Play, which I have already read the liner notes for.

PPS: But now, I am watching The History of the Joke with Lewis Black. So pretty much everything else will have to wait.

Delicious Contradictions

SO TODAY's lunch was Chinese take-out from Hop Feng II. Even if you're from Charlotte, I doubt you would be able to find Hop Feng II with a map and a compass. (Hop Feng I, I am fairly certain, no longer exists.) But it's the best Chinese take-out in this little metropolis. Here I have house lo-mein, fried dumplings, and yet again more Kona Longboard Lager, about which more in a moment.

Today's film was Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, which is something I decided I needed to see fairly recently. I got it in the mail a coupla days ago, and kind of put off watching until I had the proper ingredients assembled. At first I was a bit unsure as to the politics of eating Chinese take-out while watching a movie about perhaps Japan's most prolific and--arguably-- best writer, but it actually made a fair amount of sense. Especially including the Kona beer, which I have convinced myself is the invention of still more pasty-faced Round Eyes money-grubbers, regardless of whether that's the case or not. I dunno. It just makes me feel better about myself. The Onion AV Club review (which, of course, is what prompted me to see this) describes it as director Paul Schrader's magnum opus, and praises the score by Phillip Glass for being at once remarkable and at the same time immersed in the film and its subject matter. But then the first title card informed me that this film was made possible by the efforts of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

Who are both individuals of great accomplishments, but also incredibly egotistical people capable of being enormously silly and self-important. But on the third hand, if they were actually intrumental in making it possible for me to see this, I must offer my thanks. For it was lovely. Gorgeous. Terrible to watch in parts, yet impossible to turn away from. Mishima was a man of incredible contradictions, fascinated by both life and death, a militarist who evaded military service, and a dedicated family man and deeply closeted homosexual. (Hell. Mishima wasn't closted; he was garaged.) And the film was astoundingly kind to him, attempting to invite as complete as possible an understanding of this incredibly complex man.

Of course, I fancied that I had a pretty good understanding going in, having read quite a bit of his work and having read as much as I have been able to find about him. Of course, the film opens with a biographic text informing us that Mishima wrote, over the course of his adult life, 35 novels, 25 plays, and over 200 short stories.

Gagph. I've barely scratched the surface.

Anyways. The film uses the events surrounding Mishima's death as a framing device, and then uses a precis of four of his major works as supports for weaving the tapestry of his life. Some of the techniques Schrader used as cues for separating the sections-- the end story is all shot in color, the biography bits are in black & white, and the story segments take place on abstract sets that look like a cross between cabaret and kabuki-- could have come off jarringly, but instead meld almost seamlessly together. It is long though-- two hours, which turned into 2:20 because I had to rewind to catch a couple of subtitled sections I missed because I was busy wrestling with dumplings and noodles and chopsticks, and yeah, it definitely felt like two hours-- but it was time well spent. Especially since I ate all eight dumplings, the entire carton of noodles (which the lads at Hop Feng pack in like a parachute), and uncustomarily cracked into a third beer before the whole thing was said and done.

So do I recommend it? Have a dumpling.