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So, if you travel in my circles, you probably know about Hot Doug's, the encased meats emporium located in Chicago. (Punk rock gourmet sausages, the first person fined for violating Chicago's foie gras ban, cheap and good veggie dogs named after Howard Devoto, etc.) Kuma's Corner is located only a few blocks away, does a very similar thing, only with burgers. It's worth a trip out there (the neighborhood is apparently "Humboldt Park", and it's my friends Johnny and Jen's stomping grouns) to grab some: huge and delicious burgers, friendly tattooed waitrons, good booze, and a bill that runs about fifteen bucks a person with drinks for lunch.
It's hard to say how much of the metal bar theme is an affectation (the tit-baring girlie-in-leather drawings on the wall, probably; the jukebox, probably not; naming burgers things like the Mastodon and the Neurosis, who can say? But I vote "awesome"), but it is frigging awesome. I had the Mötörhead, a yummy Greek salad-on-a-burger concoction with with tzadziki, feta cheese, and olives; Red had Iron Maiden, with avocado, cherry peppers, pepper jack, and chipotle mayo. You can substitute a chicken breast or, to be cool like us, a veggieburger for the meat on anything. The fries were pretty good, not the best I've ever had, but the pretzel rolls they came on were incredibly tasty, and the variety of offerings really is impressive. I was sad nobody ordered the Slayer, a cardiac arrester of a meal — a burger, no bun, topped with chili, cheese, peppers, and onions, resting on a bed of fries. Also non-burger options (the three-year-old in our party got to eat some mac 'n' cheese) and a quite decent beer menu (lots of Belgian offerings, Cleveland's Great Lakes, I believe some varieties of current favorite American brewery Bell's), although I had a very good bloody Mary instead. I'm totally sold on this place.
While in Chicago (Hot Doug's! Julius Meinl! Kuma's Corner! yadda yadda) this weekend, three separate people commented on my Green Lantern t-shirt, a fine joke gift ("you have my address") once given to me by Red.
- Some guy who passed me as I walked through the loop; I overheard him saying to his girlfriend "mumble mumble Lantern mumble mumble Justice League".
- A tall shopgirl at Nordstrom's. She gave me a once-over followed by a "I like your shirt." I assume she was hot for guys vulnerable to the color yellow.
- On the El, a homeless man missing his front teeth. "Green Lantern was my favorite superhero." (He also liked Shazam.) Sadly, I had to dash off the train one stop into his spiel – he pronounced himself the Masked Homeless Man's secret identity. He was clearly building up to a larger point about how people treat a big, black homeless guy, but now I'll never know what his powers were.
I'm the very opposite of a wine snob, but we were taking our friend, the sinister Professor P., out for drinks to celebrate her first day of classes, and the guy at the local wine hole recommended this, an Australian moscato called Brilliant Disguise. Holy cripes, was it good -- crisp, fruity (maybe a little peachy?), and not cloyingly sweet. It's apparently hard to come by, as the bar only got one case of the five it ordered, but I'm going to try to find some on the Internet. Yum.
I'm rather behind on this, aren't I? I just got back from a wedding in Boston, for which my friends did me the great honor of asking me to officiate. Since they are good friends who met at my wedding (and, unlike me, did not have the foresight of having a high school friend wrap up divinity school around the time they were going to get hitched) I said yes, and I hope they didn't have too much cause to regret it. Like the Vice-President, my official capacities were rather limited. As far as I can tell, Mitt Romney doesn't care what you say at the wedding, so long as you filled out the proper forms, including a testimonial to your sterling character, and remember that it's a commonwealth and not a state. The only thing I absolutely had to do to prevent my friends from living in sin for the rest of their lives was sign the marriage license request form in BLACK INK ONLY.
I wish I had been able to get a picture of the license paperwork. (Taking pictures of documents by candlelight with unfamiliar cameras is a twentieth-century problem, if not nineteenth-.) As Americans not living under a rock might have heard in 2004, Massachusetts came to an exciting and rather unexpected conclusion about who got to marry in the Commonwealth. There's been a huge back and forth about the legality of gay marriage under Massachusetts' constitution, and while I expect that eventually after much acrimony people will settle on something resembling civil unions, that's not much help for the poor bureaucrat dealing with marriage license paperwork today. Whoever it is that designs that form tried, but you can tell that things may have been a little rushed, and so I found myself looking at question 23 ("Gender of participant A: [x] Male [ ] Female"), jammed into the bottom margin, and thinking, "Wow, they didn't even try to match the font."
Over at Miranda's, some Smog discussion has broken out, courtesty of that old standard, the "what's the saddest song you know" discussion. Smog has a place at the table in that discussion, as Bill Callahan does songs about inadequacy and the grinding metal sounds of relationships going off the rails better than just about anyone. But, as Miranda says, when he's not writing about how every girl he ever loved has wanted to be hit, his songs are little hymns. (I confess that I don't find "White Ribbon" as uplifting as she does, although it's a beautiful song; I'm a simple soul.) Anyway, here's my vote for the most uplifting Smog song other than "Prince Alone in the Studio": "River Guard". We are constantly on trial / It's a way to be free.
One-time WWF wrestler Nikolai Volkov is running for the Maryland House of Delegates. I'd say people should vote for him, but I suspect that once in office he would turn heel.
The latest version of Jumpcut, my open source clipboard enhancer for OS X, has just been released. It provides clipboard buffering – that is, it remembers the last umpteen text-based things that you've cut-and-pasted. There are several other applications that do the same thing for Macs, but I think Jumpcut does it pretty well. If you're running OS X 10.3.9 or later, and you're not wedded to CopyPaste X, Quicksilver's clipboard feature, PTHPasteboard, or one of the other guys out there, try it out. The price can't be beat.
I saw a fun double feature last night (projected from DVD, alas, which always looks awful, but I suppose it helps people make these things on the cheap). The Call of Cthulhu is an homage to period Lovecraft; they did a great job with the props and costumes. There was at least one very recognizable shot of Providence, RI. I even enjoyed the fonts on the title cards. It's hard to make a movie shot on digital look like a silent; the makeup, the lighting, and the grain of the "film" all wrong. Even if you duplicated somehow duplicated the undercranked herky-jerky motion, actors today don't have the same balletic physical expression (and broad-gestured overacting) that most of the silents, particularly the serials that are third-cousins to Lovecraft's florid pulp, had. But a lovely effort nonetheless, and the film did a great job of capturing the fever-dream mentality of Lovecraft, along with hints at his snobbishness, racism, and sheer narrative incoherence. Two IA IAs up, even if they didn't nail the weird geometries of sunken Ryleh. Perhaps those can't be captured on film.
The other was Trapped by the Mormons, an entirely different affair. It's a remake of a 1922 exploitation film ("a silent British film which is to Mormonism as 'Reefer Madness' is to marijuana usage", says the IMDB review), with the campiness cranked up to 11. The lead actress, Emily Riehl-Bedford, is lovely in a period and rabbity sort of way (she reminded me faintly of Illeana Douglas), and while the movie drags in the middle, the ludicrous Mormonozombic fight scene at the end is worth the price of admission and then some. I can only assume that some of the more laughable title cards came from ("He's a... He's a... A MORMON!") came from the 1922 version. The cast and crew, a bunch of members of a DC theatrical troupe, Cherry Red, which puts on cheese and sleaze shows such as Poona the Fuckdog -- the existance of which I thank Skot for introducing me to -- has no real interest in mimicking a genuine silent, which helps account for some of the amateur porn feel of the staging. (A great deal of it feels like it was shot in someone's bedroom, although I'm sure it was on a stage somewhere in DC.) The editing is also, charitably, better than I can do. Good fun regardless, and the best movie I've ever seen in which two Mormons kill someone by gnawing through their jugular vein.
