Steve Koppelman’s Catalogue of Poorly Catalogued Things, Otherwise Known as “hatless.com”

Consumer Guide, Bargain Night Edition

HAROLD AND KUMAR ESCAPE FROM GUANTANAMO BAY (2008) - While a sequel isn’t going to be as fresh and surprising as the first installment, it’s still plenty funny, moves along nicely, and the cast is game. The jokes move easily from snappy to stoner and back, and if a few gags are recycled, like the raging, hallucinating Neil Patrick Harris, didja ever see the Hope/Crosby “road” movies? Not profound, not gonna change the world, but on $4 Night at the skeevy old neighborhood theater in Sunnyside, I’ll take it. GRADE: B PLUS.

THE SKEEVY 5-SCREEN THEATER ON ROOSEVELT AVE. IN SUNNYSIDE, QUEENS - The floors are sticky, the previews are always out of focus and the top bit of the frame is sometimes cut off by projector misalignment. They also charge a lot less than the $12 the chain multiplexes around here get, the staff is low-key and on Tuesdays, most tickets are $4. Also, it looks like the only thing they may have changed since, oh, 1985, is that the seats have cupholders, making it a bit of a time warp. Being in there reminds us of when we were kids. Like we need to see the tops of actors’ heads all the time. Please. GRADE: A MINUS.

Posted in Consumer Guide, Movies, Nueva York | No Comments »

Springtime in the Bronx

Suddenly it’s spring. Yesterday and today it got into the high 70s. Having lunch outside yesterday with coworkers I could feel a bit of sunburn.

I forgot to set the alarm a little later like I usually do on weekends, so off it went at 7:15. L. and I got up, got dressed, looked at the dishes in the sink and the blankets still stacked in the living room from her parents’ recent visit and we went around the corner to the old diner instead.

When we got back home it wasn’t even 9:30. We had the whole day open to us. It was too nice a day for the Whitney Biennial, too nice for projects around the apartment. We could get out. Should we go to Coney Island? To Central Park?

I know. The NY Botanical Garden up in the Bronx. How often are we up and ready to go out early enough to get to the Bronx by subway hours before lunch?

Just like when we went to the Zoo last year, we found it was a quicker trip than we imagined. Around 10:30 we were walking the eight blocks downhill along Bedford Av. from the Grand Concourse.

We haven’t been able to find the charger for the digital camera, so L. was hoping to find a disposable camera for the day. And maybe a chocolate malted. It was that kind of morning. Scanning the stores surrounding an intersection a block away from the park, we spotted a West African grocery store. In we went, L. making a beeline for the spices and me asking if they had any cookbooks. Of the three guys working there, who also seemed to have a moving business with ties to the African emigre communities in Maryland, one didn’t know of any cookbooks, the others had seen them for sale in Maryland, not so much in NYC, sorry. We asked for help picking a set of ingredients that would complete at least one coherent dish, since the store’s spices, starches, legumes and oils covered a stretch of the continent, most prominently the countries roughly from Ghana to Nigeria. This got them going. Peanut stews, goat soup with mackerel (made with “burnt” goat, not raw stuff), grilled meat rubbed with uziza, a peppery powder from a leaf, fish soup with ground crawfish. No, said one, you have to go to one of the restaurants around here, see what you like, then come back for ingredients. Are there any restaurants close to here? None to walk to. We got addresses and phone numbers for one in Harlem, one elsewhere in the Bronx.

In the end we walked out with the uziza, the ground dried crawfish, a bag of oat flour for fufu since it was higher in fiber than things like yam and cassava. We got a bottle of palm oil and a can of a ready-made palm paste that’s a foundation for some Ghanaian stews and a hassle to make from scratch and a couple of those super-hot scotch bonnet-y peppers which I remember going great with some West African stews I had years ago.

I carried it around for hours while we made our way around maybe  a quarter of the Bortanical Garden, which is enormous and beautiful, from the 1902 crystal palace exhibition hall full of palm trees and rainforest foliage to the promenade lined with dozens of exotic tulip varietals and the stands of picture-perfect blossoming trees, petals drifting like snow in the warm summery wind.

By 2:30 we were flowered out but keen on coming back, and we left via the southern gate looking out on the Fordham campus. We walked maybe a half mile in an arc around Fordham to Arthur Avenue, one of the two intersecting main drags of the still fairly vital little Italy in the Belmont neighborhood. It’s changing, of course, like all of New York always is, but even with the ever-growing and slowly assimilating Albanian community and a clear influx of Mexicans, the dominant feel is still Italian and there is still an impossibly dense array of pork stores, pasta shops, Catholic knickknack emporia and above all, bakeries, possibly because the neighborhood’s Achilles heel, its remoteness from the subways, has served to buffer it from the gentrification and redevelopment that have coursed through so many other neighborhoods these last 15-20 years or so. We had some decent but not amazing mini pastries at Egidio, sampled some dryish but properly crisp and eggy egg bows/kichel from Gino and got a super loaf of pane di casa from the now-Albanian Terranova on 187th.  The minute we paid for it and tore off a crusty, chewy hunk of it, I bought a bag of breadsticks and two of taralli, so by the time we made it to the Madonia on Arthur, we’d filled our sensible carb quota and had to leave it for next time, got a ball of a terrific kashkaval-like Italian cheese at Calandras, some marinated eggplant, a couple of ripe, red $1/lb. tomatoes, and headed home, exhausted. We did the dishes, straightened up a bit with energy we didn’t think we had, opened a bottle of red and sat down to a feast of the Italian finds.

We must have walked something like 5 miles.

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Friday Random Ten, Visiting In-Laws Edition

1. Space DJz, “Celestial Funk”
2. Grant Hart, “Remains to be Seen”
3. The Ex, “Wall Has Ears”
4. Charlie Parker, “Just Friends”
5. Lavay Smith and Her Red-Hot Skillet-Lickers, “Honey Pie”
6. Ric Ocasek, “Society Trance” [The one dud. -Ed.]
7. Prince, “Musicology”
8. Loretta Lynn, “This Old House”
9. John Coltrane, “You Say You Care”
10. Guided by Voices, “Quality of Armor”

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Blackface and Vanilla: John Cherry and the Cinema of Untimely Kitsch

“I’ll never be a clerk. I’ll always be stuck as a janitor,” laments that most famous alter ego of James Varney early on in Ernest Goes to Jail (1990). Varney’s Ernest P. Worrell could well have been speaking for series auteur John Cherry, whose formidable body of work never brought the critical recognition, Broadway adaptations and Hollywood adaptations of Broadway adaptations accorded his Baltimorean doppleganger John Waters, his creative will broken with the tragic passing of his star and muse before achieving his critical due.

Ernest Goes to Jail captures the Cherry-Varney partnership at its apogee. Shot in the shadowy, hypersaturated mode of the 1960s Batman television series, the film masterfully evokes that style and period — off-kilter camera hijinks, cheap, candy-colored set design and all while prefiguring the electrocution-to-magnetism device later used by Michel Gondry in the recent Be Kind, Rewind. Its mistaken-identity plot, in which Fernwood 2-Night veteran Varney plays both Ernest and brutal convict John Nash, allows Cherry to explore darker territory than he had in his earlier career in making used-car commercials for local television. The cast is first rate, featuring much of Cherry’s seasoned repertory company. Multimedia artist Gailard Sartain turns in a masterful performance as the senior security guard at the bank where Ernest works, perfectly capturing the bumbling folksiness of hillbillies. Canadian Barbara Tyson (here under her original, unfortunate name Barbara Bush) brings a poor-man’s Elizabeth Daily to another of her portrayals of a quasi-love interest, and boxer-turned-actor ‘Tex’ Cobb brings surprising warmth to a jailbreak sequence.

Of course, throughout, it is Varney’s showcase. At times evoking Chaplin and Lloyd (witness the runaway-floor-polisher sequences that bracket the film), at others reanimating the folksy tradition of Will Rogers: witness Ernest’s jailhouse observations and his smoldering final line at the close of the film. Speaking of which, that final scene, in which Ernest has fallen to Earth after soaring into the heavens to detonate a bomb Superman-style finds him for the second time clad in blackface. As in an early scene in which Ernest, serving jury duty, bites a pen and proceeds to smear ink all over his face to the obvious dismay of the judge, the only African-American character in the entire film who isn’t an unredeemable criminal, Ernest’s exasperated bewilderment serves as a symbol of Cherry’s own frustration in the wake of the breakthrough success of his rival John Waters’s Hairspray. Part petulant rejoinder, part primal scream, EGTJ takes a slap to the wide-eyed optimism of Waters’s tribute to the politics of uplift and notes how much more remained to be done not just a few years but decades later.

But it is perhaps in another fleeting, seemingly incidental shot that we see the flip side of Cherry’s inner torment. When Ernest’s house is being shown for the first time, we get an establishing exterior shot that shows a front door flanked on one side by a human-scale, illuminated Potemkin soft-serve cone. The soft-serve is vanilla.

He tried blackface. He tried vanilla. He had Bill Byrge scrunching up his face, but what was missing was a definitive sense of now. EGTJ occupies a temporal world between worlds. By choosing 1966 America as his touchstone, Cherry foregoes the chaotic rock’n'roll weltangschauung and nascent air of protest of Waters’ perpetual-1962 of the mind and the psychedelic hurlyburly of the Summer of Love and its aftermath in the bloodied streets of Chicago. 1966 America, an America of candy-colored sets and shoulder-padded prison guards dressed in purple finery, was neither blackface nor vanilla; it offers neither an ideal backdrop for idealistic escapism nor for revolution, and as such Cherry’s choice makes for something more complicated and therefore more rarefied than the works of his peer

As Cherry fades into his twilight, one wonders what Ernest films went unmade. In the end we are left with Ernest, a tallish, lanky Tramp and minstrel, his face blackened with soot, evoking also a steam-locomotive fireman knee deep in coal, the lurching enterprise chuffing to a halt with Ernest declaring wistfully, “I came. I saw. I done blowed up.”

[Part of Lucid Screening's second annual White Elephant Blogathon]

Posted in Etc., Movies, Tech | 3 Comments »

Media Alert!!!1!!

Tune into the Monday, March 31 episode of the Martha Stewart Show, where you’ll see local writer, onetime Voice columnist and prominent cupcake blogger  Rachel Kramer Bussel wearing a cupcake pendant that the missus made. They’re mighty cute and you can buy one of your own at the Hey Boy! Hey Girl Etsy store.

Posted in Nueva York, Self-Promotion | No Comments »

This is the Year That Was

1. Moved back to Noo Yawk
2. Returned to software development, this time as a plain ol’ programmer, mostly writing Ruby. I like Ruby.
3. Made some swell new friends
4. MARRIED LENORE, in what was one heck of a wedding

Posted in Etc. | 3 Comments »

Flux, us

Earlier this year, L. and I moved to New York. And though we miss our peeps in Florida, and I miss my nascent career as a freelance writer, it sure is reet swell up here.
We have a joint blog that was supposed to be about the move and stuff at After Steinway, but we’ve been lax about posting to it, which brings my semi-abandoned-blog total to two.

But wait, there’s more! I have another dead blog, where I planned to post tech stuff, what with being a programmer again. Only I haven’t posted much. That one’s at stinkrag.com.

Frankly, most of my writing energy, such as it is, has been going to Chowhound. So many tacos, so much fuqi feipan to catch up on.

Posted in Etc., Nueva York | 1 Comment »

Consumer Guide, Household Cleaners Edition

SEVENTH GENERATION NATURAL DISH LIQUID (Lavender Scent, $2.89 at many supermarkets): The bottle says “If every household in the US replaced just one bottle of 25 oz. petroleum-based dishwashing lquid with our 25 oz. vegetable based product, we could save 81,000 barrels of oil, enough to heat and cool 4600 US homes for a year!” Well, sure. Unfortunately, in order to clean the number of dishes that can be handled by a 25 oz. bottle of ordinary dishwashing liquid, you’d need six or seven bottles of this stuff. It’s hypo-allergenic, non-toxic and biodegradable. So is root beer, which cleans dishes about as well as this. GRADE: C PLUS

LIQUID PLUMR POWER JET ($4.99 at most supermarkets): Everything old is new again as Clorox reintroduces a presumably CFC-free version of a 1960s standby, the single-use aerosol plunger-in-a-can. The tub was clogged solid with a few inches of standing water. I sealed the drain vent. I lined up the lines on the cap, placed the top of the can firmly over the drain and blasted away. Three seconds later, some of the gas bubbled back up. The water stayed where it was. They do have a money-back-guarantee. Too bad I didn’t keep the receipt. GRADE: F

LIQUID PLUMR FOAMING PIPE-SNAKE ($4.99 at most supermarkets): One chamber of acid, one chamber of base, a veritable pipe-bomb in a bottle just waiting for you to pour it down the drain. A few hours had passed since the last experiment, so the tub had finally more or less drained. With a half-inch of water remaining, I removed the cap, leaned back and poured this stuff in. It foamed impressively, erupting from the drain. An hour later, per instructions, I ran hot water into the empty tub. It did not go down the drain. GRADE: F

RIGID KWIK-SPIN PIPE SNAKE (Borrowed from the landlord, price unknown): It’s housed in orange plastic, has a hand crank and weighs a couple of pounds, The long, retractable spring is held in place with a thumbscrew. The broader bit of spring at the tip, which does most of the scraping, was tough to get through the split drain, but some cranking threaded it through. Let out a few more inches of spring until it hits the clog, crank some more. The clog gives. Let out some more spring until it hits clog again and resume cranking. Repeat until you don’t hit any more clog. Retract. Wash the clumps of rotted hair and plasticized grooming-products residue off your hands. Lo and behold, the pipes were clear, clearer than they had been in months, draining away water like a champ, making easy work of a full-pressure shower and nearly keeping up with a deluge from the bath tap. Which just goes to show, if you have a clogged drain, nothing beats shoving something down it and scraping away. GRADE: A

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Self-Promotion Fever

Meanwhile, over at the New Times I’ve got a full-length review of a tiny Armenian and Georgian beach cafe in Hollywood. It’s a lot like going to one of the “Russian” cafes that line the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, only without the surly staff the places in Brighton Beach tend to hire. Kebabs, spicy lamb soups, salads and dips involving wanuts and sour plum and lots of herbs, with panoramic views of the ocean and old French Canadian men in Speedos. Mmmm.

Posted in Consumer Guide, Eats, Florida, Self-Promotion | No Comments »

Niche Pandering

In the last week or so, a Fall song showed up in a Mitsubishi commercial. All right. Mark E. Smith is getting on in years and has never seemed terribly healthy, so I can see why he’d want to make a bit of money.
On the face of it, there’s much less for the Old ’97s to sell out on. Sure, they were on Bloodshot for a couple of years, but in the end those particular ex-punks made their mark as a sharp, literate country-rock band. So why am I more bothered by a Too Far to Care-ish stomper in a Chili’s commercial? Randy Newman and Dr. John do jingles. An Iggy Pop song about doing heroin is used to flog cruise vacations. A Minutemen instrumental found its way into a Volvo ad (and paid for D. Boon’s father’s late-stage cancer care). Heck, I’m more bothered that Mark E. Smith is at least a onetime wife-beater than the fact that twenty years on from Our Nation’s Saving Grace he’s indirectly pitching SUVs. Frankly, Mitsubishi’s agency probably went with the Fall song because Clinic wanted more money for a similar track.

Maybe what bugs me is that the Chili’s jingle charges harder than anything they’ve done since 1997. Their last LP, 2004’s Drag it Up was a bit of an improvement on Satellite Rides and brought a little welcome grit back to their sound, but the Chili’s jingle is even better than that. Chili’s! They’re a big chain and their food is awful!
Rhett and the band have contributed theme songs to a couple of TV shows. They did an ad campaign for tasty Shiner beer. Fine. But Chili’s? Chili’s mushy, tenderized, sugarcaoted baked baby back ribs? You’re from Texas, guys. Couldn’t you just vouch for the Bloomin’ Onion and leave that nasty fake barbecue out of it?

That’s it. It’s not that they did a commercial, or that they did a commercial for a crappy chain restaurant. It’s that they endorsed bad barbecue.

Sellouts.

Posted in Eats, Music, mostly, The Media | No Comments »