Xark!

Nine Quick Thoughts from the Road

Having just gotten back home from two quick trips--one to the University of North Carolina where I was giving a talk and meeting with grad students in the Communication Studies Department and one to New Orleans for a colloquium with Brazilian scholars where I gave a short talk about research concerning cell phones and driving--I would like to offer the following observations and recommendations:

1. To the Charlotte NC airport:  Get the attendants out of the Men’s restrooms.  The last thing I want to do when I travel is get harassed by a guy handing me towels and expecting a tip—especially when you have automatic towel dispensers in the restroom.  No, I don’t need a splash of cologne nor do I want a breath mint.  I’m not hitting on anyone; I’m just trying to get to the next town.  Honestly, I would almost book a more expensive flight to avoid this.

Who was in the Focus Group?

Throughout his brief 17 years on earth, my son has routinely looked up at me after seeing an advertisement on television for a product he didn't like or understand, and ask, with incredulity in his tone, "Why would they make something like that?  No one will ever buy it." 

As a former advertising major and a person who briefly worked in a marketing firm, I always say with confidence, "Oh, they've tested this product.  They've taken the ads through focus groups; they know what they're doing.  While you might not like it, it'll most likely sell.  These guys know what they're doing." 

After watching--for the fourth week in a row, mind you--that Taco Bell ad for their new "Ultimelt," I'm not so sure.   You know this ad--two guys are jumping around in their office cheering about the Ultimelt, their boss walks in and, suprise, surpise, rather than firing them, she starts cheering just as loudly.  How clever. 

The ad borders as close to uninspired inanity as I can imagine .  I can't imagine the types of folks who made up the focus group for this one.  Who looked at this ad and said, "Yes! You've got a winner on your hands here.  Show up ad nauseum and watch your franchises overflow with people dying to be part of the Ultimelt cheerleading squad."  You tell me.

I can't take it anymore.  I invite you to join me in a worldwide boycott of Taco Bell until this ad stops interferring with my Sunday afternoons in front of the television. 

 

Talk to Me, Quietly

Last weekend, I went to see Talk to Me, the new Don Cheadle film about Washington D.C. radio personality Ralph "Petey" Greene, an ex-con who became a radio personality, political activist, and alcoholic. This combination of attributes constitutes a wonderful character sketch; the film traces out Greene’s ups and downs, as well as his relationship with Dewey Hughes, who becomes his best friend after a troubling beginning (Dewey has his own family issues and problems with his understanding of what it means to be a “successful black man” in the early 1960s). I can’t imagine anyone not liking the film.  Cheadle’s been a miracle of the screen ever since Picket Fences; the story is engaging but not heavy handed, and the pacing keeps you engaged throughout the film.  More, if you have any sense of the history of the 60s through the 80s, you’ll certainly find the soundtrack, styles and events seductive.  In short, I endorse this film; I can’t imagine you leaving dissatisfied with your decision to see it.

But I’m not writing this post solely to endorse the movie.  It’s more of my entryway to rant about a number of aspects of going to see films.  At the risk of disappointing Brittney Gilbert, who hates lists, I’m going to provide a rant list of five aspects of going to see films that irk me, all of them occurring in a perfect storm at this one film, almost ruining the experience:

Esquire ruins my bar

From the "Best Bars in America" piece in the June issue of Esquire:

MOE'S CROSSTOWN TAVERN
CHARLESTON
YOU'RE HAVING: Hand-cut fries and a Bass
Moe's is a dark, dirty, old neighborhood bar with crappy service and not enough room, and it's impossible not to love. Good beer, great food. (714 Rutledge Avenue; 843-722-3287)

Time out: Crappy service? Maybe if you're some pretentious prick from Esquire magazine. When you're a neighborhood regular who doesn't walk around with a stick up your ass, they treat you great.

Not enough room? Yeah, because it's a neighborhood bar with a larger-than-neighborhood clientèle on the weekends and half-price burger night (when neighborhood people like me either go early or not at all).

Anyway, with all the bars in America to choose from, why would you pick one that's "dark, dirty, old... with crappy service and not enough room" anyway? Why not suggest a cool Charleston bar that can handle the extra traffic? Like A.C.'s, maybe...

NEWS FLASH: Moe's used to be Jimmy Dengate's, and Jimmy Dengate's wound up moving down to Cumberland Street, into the place that used to be Squeaky's. Now Jimmy Dengate's on Cumberland is closing to be replaced by... a second location of Moe's. Does this make sense? Not to me. Do I care? Not unless it takes some of the crowd out of my bar --  in which case, thank you.

God's Own Road Food

One of the secret pleasures of any road trip is the freedom the traveler has to eat and drink foods that they would normally avoid at home.  After a ten hour trip, my car is often littered with Diet Coke bottles, chip bags, and an array of fast food wrappers.  Despite my affection for all of these delicacies, the greatest of all road foods can only be found at QuikTrip convenience stores.  While I’m sure that there are also fine imitations, QuikTrip’s Chicken Taquito is God’s own secret road food (I cannot speak for its cousin, the Beef Taquito, because I’ve never eaten one.  Why do so when the Chicken is God’s own little snack?).  Some of you may want to nominate other foods, but you’ll have to match, and overcome, the following Taquito strengths:

Maybe THAT'S why I like her show

Well, this might explain why I'm strangely drawn to her show whenever I'm surfing past it.

Yum Yum's: World's Best Hotdog

The memory of loving a hotdog is kind of like that of a charming but alcoholic ex-spouse. Sure, you know they were bad for you, but O When Things Were Good, They Were Great.

So it is with the all-the-way dog at Yum Yum, the ice cream and hotdog joint on Spring Garden Road in the College Hill section of Greensboro, NC.  I spent six years growing up just a few blocks away in the 1970s, and a Yum Yum dog with an RC Cola remains one of the most pure memories from my childhood.

Here's why they're different -- and for my money, better -- than any other hotdog on the planet: The Yum Yum all-the-way is a fusion of dog, chili, slaw, onion AND BUN into an enigmatic culinary unity, an elemental combination inexplicable by deconstruction into its original component parts. It comes wrapped in plain paper, two to a white paper bag, and each sells for just $1.50.

And so far as I can tell, the only thing that has changed about this meal is the RC Cola. Today it comes in a plastic bottle instead of a glass one.

Soul food

Mama Brown's fried chicken. Hot fush. Turkey legs. Salisbury steaks. Rice: red, dirty and white. Cornbread. Biscuit.  Macaroni and cheese and butterbeans and blackeyed peas and green beans with bacon, diced yams and bread puddings.

And the chicken today? Perfect. Perfect light crisp brown perfect thigh and drumstick. No heavy seasoning. No absurd breading.

Hot food line. Piggly Wiggly. Meeting Street. Charleston.

You can dress this stuff up as haute cuisine. You can put down place settings, offer up real flatware, send out waiters in white jackets.

Won't make it any better.

Processed American cheese food

It's Christmas season in Charleston, and that can mean only one thing: Autumn has finally arrived.

What leaves we have are still in that three-month process of changing colors, and going for a swim in the Atlantic is starting to get uncomfortable. And while we still haven't gotten our first frost, the nights are occasionally cold enough that you can see your breath. Which means it's time for comfort food.

Two weeks ago I made chili, but this past weekend the kids wanted macaroni and cheese... or at least an improvised rotini version of said culinary standard. So I figured it was time to buy the annual brick of Velveeta and bask in some down-home, bad-for-you, Red-State  obesity.   I don't know what Velveeta is, mind you, but it doesn't take a degree in nutrition to recognize that whatever it is, it didn't come out of a cow. Cheddar is cheese. Velveeta is processed American cheese food -- not cheese. Cheese food. This isn't a dairy product -- it's more like the product of Betty Crocker's unholy union with The Military Industrial Complex in a secret Dow Chemical laboratory, circa 1964.

Last night, whilst trying to come up with something I could make with the last of the Velveeta, I invented this recipe for a kind of cheesy-chicken-corn-chowder, basing it on stuff that I happened to find lying around the kitchen. And man, it made me love some cold weather:

Road Trip Part Deux: The Madison

So it's Saturday afternoon and Janet and I have driven up the mountain from Spartanburg to Black Mountain, where a guy named Scott at a place called The Madison Inn is holding us a $119 suite for $79. We'd picked Black Mountain because Janet wanted to see it because she wants to go to LEAF (The Lake Edens Arts Festival), and I wanted to stop by Song of the Wood, the famous hammer dulcimer shop of Jerry Reed Smith. And besides, it was not too far from where we had been and on the way to where we were headed.

When you call up The Madison's website, the first thing you notice is that it doesn't look like any of the stereotypic "bed and breakfast" resorts that you tend to find advertised from the Southern Appalachians. Which is to say that The Madison doesn't look like and isn't marketed as a cross between a Shoney's megabar and a Thomas Kinkade painting.

Aug. 27-29 Roadtrip: The Index

Leave it to a hurricane and vast human suffering to trivalize a really good time. 

Janet and I are just back from a two-night road trip, during which we repeatedly wished we had a laptop and a wi-fi connection, because we wanted to record it as we went.

Instead, I'm going to break it up into segments and post them individually, but add links to this post so that it can serve as an index to the "chapters" and photo galleries.  If Janet winds up posting on the trip, too, I'll add her links as well.

It's not significant on the scale of what people in the Delta are experiencing right now, but...

The trip
We left on Saturday morning, drove up to Spartanburg, ate lunch and drafted my 2005 MFL team. After a beer with the boys I called a place I'd found online in Black Mountain, N.C., and we got a marked-down rate on a suite at The Madison Inn, one of the coolest and quirkiest places on Earth. We got in Saturday evening, stashed our stuff, and ate a good dinner downstairs.

Sunday morning we had a huge breakfast, knocked around Black Mountain and then headed north up US Highway 221 to Valle Crusis and The Baird House, a B&B run by our friends Tom and Deede Hinson. We spent the afternoon hiking at Price Park, got something to eat in downtown Boone, then came back to sit on the porch overlooking the Watauga river and catch up with Tom.

On Monday we had coffee with Tom in the kitchen and then drove out of the valley via the "back way" down the Watauga River Road. We left the Blue Ridge the same way we came in, but continued down through Rutherfordton and back to Interstate 26.

Candy, candy, candy!!!

I am shamelessly going to pretend that "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, " is the peg for this, but the truth is candy is kind of a theme in my family of  mom and 2 sisters. (Dad has a weakness for plain, untainted chocolate, but doesn't like to rhapsodize about it like we do.)  My man is convinced that anytime my sisters and I are together long enough, the conversation will turn to candy.  Are Skittles as good as Mike and Ike's? Should gumdrops be sweet and fruity or spicy? It's serious stuff.

I have come to the conclusion that our fascination is far deeper than a blood-sugar spike.  In fact,we like to talk about it more than we eat it. The love of candy is rooted in childhood and thus flowers long and beautifully. Here's why it is a holy symbol for all that was right and good ...

1. Candy is tasty. There's just no denying the power of sugar. It's way cheaper than crack and you can do it in public. In fact, it's often encouraged.