Faster Food

We have ways of letting you have it your way.

The trouble with hiking, or indeed any outdoor activity, is, as everyone knows, that there are so few McDonald’s in the wild. For who among us does not yearn to sit down with a tasty cheeseburger after tramping about the hills, skipping over streams, and wandering in the woods?

At last, a German company, Trekking Mahlzeiten, has come up with a solution. The cheeseburger in a can.

Clearly, this is an idea whose time has come. So much of modern cooking is simply not convenient enough — but happily, we live in an age of miracles, and innovations never cease. Witness the Campbell’s Soup company’s recent development, soups that come in plastic jugs. Because obviously, it was just too much trouble to add water, now we can squirt, heat, and serve. The excuse behind the Trekking Mahlzeiten Burger in a Can is indeed that hikers might like a burger, but I’m confident that folks at home will be serving them soon.

Apparently one does have to go to the trouble of boiling a pot of water, and throwing the can into the pot — and if one is hiking, one therefore has to start a campfire. But it’s hard to see how the hamburger could be made more accessible. And I can easily imagine hung-over college students eating them cold.

I haven’t sampled the burger in question, although I’m told the bun is pretty scary. (It looks good in the picture — but what doesn’t?)

As a sometime student of German culture, I’m delighted to see that the home of the hamburger — named after one of Germany’s most important cities, lest we forget — is reclaiming its prize and wresting the crown of dominance away from the Americans.

And above all, remember this: if Lost in Space taught us anything, it is that we are what we eat.

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The Season of Muguets and Colza

A muguet nosegay

Spring has taken its sweet time coming, this year, but at last the season has committed itself. My street is perfumed now with lilacs and wisteria from the neighbors’ gardens; my own garden in Beynes has seen the forsythia burgeon in brilliant yellow, then fade, then shake out its green leaves. The lawn was briefly carpeted with primevères and tiny violets, but we had to mow them down already, as the grass is growing fast. The lawn needs mowing again, as it happens, but the temperamental skies won’t permit that. It rains at least a little every day.

The flower du jour is the lily of the valley, or muguet. It is tradition in France, every May Day, to purchase a little bouquet of these beauties and to present it to one of the ladies of one’s acquaintance. If one is acquainted with more than two ladies, one can drop a wad of change at the florist’s shop, because muguets, though neglected 364 days of the year, run about 1.50 € a stem on May 1. The tiny, bell-shaped, exquisite blossoms are fragile, and one buys them in the certain knowledge that they will have wilted before May 2. I’m sure there’s a philosophical lesson to be drawn there. I just don’t know what it is.

Yet for me, the flower that announces May most reliably is not the muguet but the colza, which is cultivated in profusion all around the country. When in bloom, the colza turns whole fields a brilliant, Crayola yellow, in striking contrast with the deepening green of adjacent fields. When viewed in late afternoon (particularly when the sun emerges, golden and stabbing bright, from an otherwise steely sky), the most ordinary French countryside in May is almost unbearably beautiful, its great blocks of color like a painting Cézanne died too soon to paint.


We admire snow because of its ability to transform the familiar: suddenly, our humdrum surroundings are made smooth and clean and strange. The colzas do something similar, and yet the fields of France will be dull again in a few weeks — until the sunflowers begin to bloom. And what is the colza? In America, we call it canola. You know, the stuff cooking oil is made of. It’s beautiful and low in cholesterol.

In France, May Day is a national holiday, the equivalent of Labor Day in the United States. The French do more than merely celebrate their workers, however: they celebrate the fact that their workers aren’t American. The holiday originated as a display of solidarity with American labor leaders sentenced to death following the rioting that erupted during a demonstration in Chicago’s Haymarket, in 1869. That’s right: Americans were the cause of May Day, with all its attendant labor demonstrations and holidays, around the world, not to mention its Soviet military parades, too. Who’d a thunk it?

Perhaps tellingly, the French version of Labor Day inaugurates a month that typically includes not one but four four-day weekends, seizing on any pretext. When the government suggested a few years ago that the Pentecost holiday might be dispensed with, a general strike ensued. (“We’ll show you — we won’t go to work, no matter what you say.”) It’s basically impossible to get anything done until June, when you have to hurry, hurry, hurry, because the entire universe goes on vacation in August.

We were denied a summer last year, and apart from a few tooth-clattering days in December, our winter proved characterless, too. Mostly, the seasons in France have flowed from one to another in a kind of chilled soup, grey and rainy, for as long as I can remember. I crave sunshine now. At least I can look at the canola in bloom — and look forward to Joyce DiDonato’s return to Paris. We must seek our sunshine where we can.

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A Pledge

Twentieth-century icon: Madonna will not appear on this blog.
Excepting perhaps in an art-history context.

My brother is the technical wizard behind this blog. If your computer does not begin shooting sparks and emitting grinding yelps every time you drop by, you have him to thank. Left to my own technological devices, I would not have a blog at all. It is only recently that I learned to use a Post-It note. But only the yellow ones. I need more practice before I move on to other colors.

One of my brother’s recent “improvements” to this blog is a site counter. (There it is, over on your right, under my profile.) Thanks to him, it is now possible to tell how many people have visited. And that’s not all. My brother can tell where you are and how long you stay, and in some cases he can tell where you were browsing before you got here.

So I am now aware that this blog is being read (or briefly glanced at) by people I do not know, in places I have never been. I am now aware, too, that a great many of them have come looking for pictures of Robert Mugabe to download. I wouldn’t have thought the Zimbabwean dictator to be a pin-up on the scale of David Beckham, but the numbers don’t lie. They also don’t explain: for better or worse, the site counter doesn’t tell me why you want to download pictures of Robert Mugabe. Really, I’m not sure I want to know. I’m not sure I want any of this information.

Portrait of Mugabe: Back by popular demand?

The mere mention of Mr. Beckham prompts the realization that, by the ingenious and cynical use of celebrity photographs, I could increase traffic on this site. It makes no difference that I am largely ignorant of Mr. Beckham and have absolutely nothing of interest to say about him; in the rough-and-tumble world of blogging, one must engage in all sorts of nefarious shenanigans. Now that I know that I have readers I’ve never met, won’t the temptation become strong to acquire more — and more — and more of them?

I hereby pledge to resist that temptation. You will never see a photograph of David Beckham — not in street clothes, not in his sporting uniform, not in his underwear — on this site. You will find neither Britney Spears nor Justin Timberlake here, not because they stopped dating years ago, and not because I want to talk about fresher, trendier personalities instead — but because I am upholding a principle. A sacred, inviolable, unyielding, unwavering, steadfast principle.

Shirtless footballer Cristiano Ronaldo:
Another shirtless person I will not be writing about.
(Did you know “shirtless” is among the most frequently Googled words?)

Let me give you a few more examples. You’ll find neither Pamela Anderson and her extensive library of private sex tapes, nor Daniel Radcliffe and his photoshopped weenie, nor French pin-ups like M. Pokora, nor Maxim and Jenifer and their heart-breaking break-up, nor any of those people the mere mention of whose names result in a steady machine-gun fire of Google clicking, usually followed by dragging.

No! It is not for me, the trashy celebrity tattle, the panegyrics to the semi-talentless, the endless obsession with one-dimensional, mass-marketed pop-culture yahoos! (A word coined by Jonathan Swift, by the way.) My mind is on loftier subjects, such as Jonathan Swift, and so long as you’re on this blog, yours will be, too.

Singer Amy Winehouse: I have nothing to say about her.

You there — in Indiana! Yes, you. Don’t think I don’t see you. I know you came to this page only because you Googled the name of teen idol Zac Efron. Well, the joke is on you. There’s not another word about him on this site. Ha! Not even a single reference to his much-publicized addiction to bronzing creams or his much-photographed abdomen. Ha! Ha! The rest of us, those who came here for my estimable opinions on Classical music and nineteenth-century French literature, we’re laughing at you now. Ha, again, I say! (And by the way, you should be ashamed of yourself. Does your mother know what you were looking at, three minutes ago?)

And for those of you — in Saskatchewan, I believe, and in South Carolina — who are at this moment accusing me of including all these names in an experiment to see whether my site counter goes up as a result — well, I will not dignify your claims with a response. Except perhaps to quote the rising Brazilian fashion model Miro Moreira, who once observed of the late Anna Nicole Smith, or possibly of the not-late Eva Longoria: “Life is chunky.”

Model/philosopher Moreira: Shirtless

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Update: Wharton Wins Reprieve

Look at that face. How could you possible refuse her anything?

According to this morning’s New York Times, the Edith Wharton Restoration has been granted an additional month to raise the funds to continue to maintain the author’s home in the Berkshires, The Mount. That means we have until May 24 to pledge our contributions.

This really is a Frank Capra situation here. Remember in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, when Jimmy Stewart proposes to fund a national summer camp with the pocket change of children? If we all chip in a little teeny bit, we can win. Please click on this link now.

I’ll bet you thought I was going to quote one of her books, in order to try to persuade you. But no, I rely instead on pop culture and the rhetoric of Capra. I’m tricky that way.

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Edith Wharton and The Mount

Every now and then, I give myself a little treat. I read a novel by Edith Wharton. No one is fresher, no one is funnier, no one more moving. The clarity of her prose is an absolute marvel. At the moment, I’m reading Twilight Sleep, a social satire of New York in the Twenties, that reads as if she wrote it yesterday — instead of 1927, long after she left the city for the last time. She immigrated here to France, where she died in 1937.

A friend alerted me to the imminent foreclosure on Wharton’s home in the Berkshires, The Mount. The house and its gardens are not only a shrine to one of the most important writers America ever produced, they’re also a testimonial to her gifts as an interior designer, open to the public during the warmer months.


Although the pending foreclosure is catastrophic news, I basically shrugged, reminded myself that I have no income, and assured myself that other people would take care of the problem. But a quick visit to the Edith Wharton website informs me that the problem has not been resolved; the Edith Wharton Restoration, the organization that runs the place has until tomorrow to raise $3 million, and they’re still far short of that goal.

To hell with it — I made a pledge. Please click on this link and pledge a contribution, too. And it’s only a pledge. Matching funds have been promised, but if the Restoration can’t raise the money, we won’t be charged a thing. A little bit from a lot of people could make the difference, and preserve not only a living monument but the public’s access to it.

Because, after all, I’d like to visit the place some day. Thank you.

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Billie Whitelaw

Billie Whitelaw is hot.

Sure, you may think of her as one of the United Kingdom’s most dis- tinguished actresses, the muse of Samuel Beckett, a gifted artist — and I’m getting to all that, I promise. You may think of her as Olivier’s Desde- mona. (Although Maggie Smith got the movie, the two ladies alternated in the role onstage.) You may think of her as an ardent champion of political virtues, or as an insightful chronicler of stage life, author of the memoir Who He? You may also think of her as the Nanny from (literal) Hell in The Omen, but I never saw that picture, so you will have to conjure up those associations on your own time.

But what struck me, the first time I saw her, was the same thing that struck me when I met her, after a Beckett evening in New York several years ago. The woman is hot.

I first saw her in Start the Revolution without Me, a zany movie in which she plays Marie Antoinette. As you’ll see from this clip, the bodice of her gown played up her frontal assets in what, I now realize, was a costumer’s surest way to arouse my prepubescent lust. A similar décolleté had me enthralled by Shani Wallis in Oliver!, a few years earlier.



When I began to study Beckett’s plays in college, mostly under the tutelage of my friends Andy Weems and Rick Moody, it took me a long while to grasp that the woman who played Marie Antoinette was the same woman who played so many of Beckett’s heroines. She was his actress of choice, whom he directed many times, and for whom he wrote pieces specially tailored to her abilities.



As you see, the contrast couldn’t be more pronounced.*

Studying Beckett was an indispensable intellectual credential: one couldn’t be taken seriously among my friends without a thorough grounding in his work. And I desperately wanted to be taken seriously. I turned to Beckett at first out of nothing more than peer pressure.

But it’s a curious thing about Beckett. The more one delves into his intellectual side, especially if one is an American academic, the more one loses the writer’s frequent humor and his constant humanity, the very things I admired most about him. Indeed, Americans who are serious about Beckett are the most serious people on earth. They refuse to admit his lighter qualities or to concede his complexities, the possibility that he might just be attempting to depict more than one thing. (This is one reason that university productions of his plays are so dull.) For them, it’s all about the despair.

Even if you’re not hardcore, his writing is potent. Once, I told Teresa Stratas that I was reading the Trilogy; she gasped, “Be careful, honey!” When she read the books, she told me, she’d fallen into such a funk that she walked off the film set where she was working and disappeared for a week. (It was as if Teresa herself didn’t know where she’d gone.)

Billie Whitelaw had her own experience of that sort, while preparing Not I, a kind of nervous breakdown brought on as she was reduced to nothing more than a long, difficult text and her own mouth, the only visible element on a blackened stage. Yet such was her charisma that she could bring audiences along for a ride they might otherwise have resisted: I suspect this is one reason Beckett admired her.

As Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days.
Without Whitelaw, Andy Weems directed this play in college.

When Whitelaw brought her Beckett evening to New York, Andy Weems and I were at a pretty low ebb. Money was tight. It was a three-bedroom apartment, and our previous roommate had left, taking all the dishes with her — they were hers, after all. One night we found ourselves eating Chinese food with the one fork and single chopstick we owned between us. In lieu of a plate, one of us ate off the lid of a fruitcake tin, while the other ate directly from the take-out carton. I vowed that, at the earliest opportunity, I was going to buy a dish. Maybe two. Since neither of us cooked, there wasn’t much call for pots, of which we had none, either. We lived off of coffee and cigarettes, and apart from my opera records and some books, we had few possessions of any kind. A malfunctioning radiator had turned Andy’s bedroom into a blasted wasteland, empty of any belongings but a beat-up mattress, a book, and his only pair of shoes.

In short, the severest Beckett scholars would have endorsed our real-life interpretations of Vladimir and Estragon, or Hamm and Clov — but those same scholars would’ve been aghast when they saw us dancing with glee at the news that Whitelaw was coming to town. The plate would have to wait.

We pooled our resources and bought our tickets. We sat eagerly, and we watched with reverent absorption as she read a short story, “Enough,” and performed two plays, Footfalls (pictured at the top of this essay) and Rockabye. Whitelaw alone onstage, no props at all save a rocking chair (for Rockabye, with the hypnotic incantation “Time she stopped” rocking in time with the chair), her every gesture and inflection distilled to its most precise essence: I will never see a more disciplined performance, and for that reason, I will never see a more expressive one in the spoken theater. As Whitelaw spoke of death and decay and isolation, she summoned up images and emotions that anyone could identify with. Not for her the alternate reality of detached ideas and conceptual fragments. Whitelaw permitted absolutely no barrier at all between us and the playwright’s genius for humanity. No matter how odd, how stylized, this was real.

So, naturally, we went backstage to shake her by the hand.

She’d scrubbed the black circles from her eyes, and the cracks and wrinkles from her face; she’d freed her hair from the stark white wig of performance, and she’d shed the tatters of her costume. We gushed over her with a carefree loquacity that Beckett probably would have disdained, though Whitelaw seemed to like it.

Whitelaw in rehearsal with Beckett

She chatted easily with us, like a neighbor, and yes, she said, she was pleased to hear a friendly word or two, because when she returned to her dressing room after this evening’s performance, all her jewelry was gone. 42nd Street was especially dangerous in those days, and she’d been robbed.

That news made us pause to look at her. And indeed, she wasn’t wearing jewelry. She hardly needed it. Her blond hair tumbled around her shoulders, and she wore a sleek, olive-grey jumpsuit, open at the throat. And, as I looked lower, I heard myself saying, “I’ve been a fan ever since I saw you in Start the Revolution,” I heard myself saying. “That costume — your breasts.”

At least, I think I used the word “breasts.”

And at that moment, thoughtlessly, I forever resigned from the hardcore brotherhood of Beckett. Set aside that I just made a remark about a woman’s tits; a number of Beckett characters do that, albeit seldom to the face of the woman who owns the tits in question. However — and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough — one does not describe oneself as a “fan” of anyone having anything to do with Samuel Beckett’s work.

In the world of Beckett, we have “students.” We have “scholars.” We have “authorities.” In a few, dire cases, we have “admirers.” We do not have “enthusiasts,” and we most certainly do not have “fans.”

I was already on probation, for having ad-libbed during the unauthorized world premiere of Beckett’s Catastrophe, but this really sealed my doom.

Whitelaw burst out laughing. “It was a good dress, wasn’t it?” she said. (Very gracious — as if she had nothing to do with the impression she made.)

I don’t remember much after that — I was too embarrassed. I think she begged off on the grounds that she had to go file a police report. (Not on us, presumably, but on the thieves.) Andy escaped with his dignity and his Beckett credentials intact, I’m certain. And yet, as we made our way through the cold, dark night to our blasted, potless, plateless apartment, he lit a cigarette and mused.

“Man!” he said. “Is she hot!”



*UPDATE: Checking back on this entry, I see that the YouTube clip of Whitelaw’s Beckett performance no longer works. Copyright issues, or somesuch. Of course, if you were serious about your Beckett, you’d already know the performance in question, and you’d have memorized the speech, too, while you were at it.

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An Explanation

Stop picking at your food!
Pennsylvania-style snout, photo by Kara Lack

You may have noticed that I have posted illustrations of truly disgusting pork products (Spam, scrapple, etc.), just as the Passover season begins.

This is intentional. It is my purpose to make it as easy as possible for my readers to keep Kosher.

Breaded trotters, also known as pig’s feet:
When served with cream sauce, these are quite good, actually.

Regrettably, I don’t have any pictures of the cheeseburgers at Loui’s Family Restaurant on Thayer Street, in Providence. Arguably, they were made of beef, not pork, but they might have served my purpose. For Loui’s cheeseburgers would have inspired Adolph Hitler (whose birthday coincided with Passover this year) to keep meat and dairy separate.

However, it has been brought to my attention that, since no actual milk products were used in the “cheese”, Loui’s cheeseburgers were not technically trayf. Nevertheless, as the late Brian Greenbaum once observed, “Once you’ve eaten at Loui’s, the food everywhere else seems so dry.”

Happy holidays.

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