The Mad Munchies

Food for Thought is a small restaurant along Arthur in Missoula, right across the street from Jesse Hall, that infamous and immense U of M dorm where, according to legend, a thick cloud of the most glorious and moist Portland ganja smoke hangs perpetually around the tenth floor. But this place across the street, Food for Thought, makes a mean grilled cheese. They make this masterpiece on twelve-grain bread with a blend of three cheeses, and should you desire, you can get tomato, bacon, or both added to the melty goodness. To me, part of the greatness of the Food for Thought grilled cheese with bacon is that particular dining establishment's ambiance. On a warm spring or autumn day, patrons can sit at the tables outside and watch everyone walk by on the sidewalks and be visible to those looking out of windows on the west side of the west wing of Jesse Hall. It's a kind of see-and-be-seen shangri-la. To someone from sidewalkless suburbia like me, the place has always seemed like the epitome of glamor, or perhaps the Garden City of the Northwest's answer to the Parisian cafe.

But speaking of grub in glamorous or famous locations, Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) in Ocean's Eleven really seems to have the mad munchies. The first time we see him eat in that film, he's in Los Angeles, that American pop-culture mecca to which so many people seem to dream of moving and in which so many of our movies and television shows are produced. As Rusty waits for Topher Grace to show up for the B-movie superstar poker class, he eats what appears to be an order of nachos out of one of those notorious fast-food paper boats. That food, evidently so glorious that it merits hallway finger licking, proves to be merely the beginning. When Rusty and Daniel Ocean (George Clooney) scout out Yen as part of their team, Rusty sips from a big old styrofoam cup of soda in the circus tent where Yen performs. On the way out of the tent, he's fingering cotton candy out of one of those plastic stick-bags in which cotton candy is packaged at amusement parks. Then, when he goes to Florida to recruit Saul (Carl Reiner), he mocks Saul for eating an orange and proceeds to eat some kind of jello-looking concoction with a plastic spoon in the box seats at the racetrack, a concoction which seems magically to get fuller, and by the end of the scene seems to be some kind of mixed fruit cup. But the most famous (and perhaps the most glamorous) consumption on Rusty's part has to be the shrimp cocktail at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. While Linus (Matt Damon) tells him about Benedict and Tess, Rusty munches away on a sweet-looking shrimp cocktail, the kind actually served in a cocktail glass. He even goes so far as to have the little hand towel on his arm so as not to get cocktail sauce on his ridiculously nice suit. But why all the grub? Many movies simply ignore the whole eating thing. But in Ocean's Eleven, the eating, especially the eating of such munchie-type food, creates a nice contrast with Rusty's stellar wardrobe and also compliments his laid-back demeanor. And it's glamorous as hell. I mean, who doesn't want that shrimp cocktail?

And who doesn't want that Food for Thought grilled cheese with bacon? Such thoughts remind me of Christine Scanlon's wonderful poem "The Grilled Cheese Sandwich," which was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. In it, she writes, "A well-made grilled cheese sandwich can open a vista/leading to popularity and the possibilities/for 'a good time.'" Indeed. Perhaps munching on the right thing makes us look glamorous now just as smoking cigarettes might have made us look glamorous in the 50s. And the location becomes important too. As Scanlon writes, "Where the perfect grilled cheese sandwich is/the successful party is also." So you have to look like Brad Pitt to be glamorous, then you have to munch on the right thing (a shrimp cocktail perhaps), and finally the place of your snack, something like the Bellagio in Vegas, becomes glamorous. For me, the height of glamour and sophistication is a grilled cheese and bacon on the corner of Arthur and Daly in Missoula. If you haven't had one there, I highly recommend it. It is so choice.

The Nobility of Servitude

My close friend Laura, who is also a friend to many of you, started waiting tables at some point back in the day, right around the same time I started working as as a "landscaper," a glorified title that, in actuality, is only a fancy name for someone who mows other people's lawns. These two things, occurring in rough simultaneity when they did, gave me an awareness of the plight of those who work in the service industry. As a result of Laura's experience, I always try to tip generously and in cash. From the landscaping, I began to understand why the term "customer" often can be secret code for asshole. These sympathies, mentioned here in such an unrefined manner, are drawn wonderfully and in all their complexity in the well-done film Gosford Park.

In the film's chaotic beginning, while Robert Parks (Clive Owen) and Mary Maceachran (Kelly Macdonald) arrive as servants carrying their employers' baggage into the enormous country home to which members of the nobility have been invited as part of a shooting party, the audience gets a wonderful insight into the world as it exists "belowstairs." The servants down there run around in a frenzy ironing and washing clothes, putting away and organizing guns, as well as preparing hors d'oeuvres and the evening meal. One gets the impression that without this army of manpower (if you'll excuse a word with such blatantly patriarchal roots), nothing on the estate would function. Their diligence and drudgery, of course, go largely unnoticed by the ungrateful sots who employ them and whine incessantly about how difficult their lives of leisure are.

I have seen the same thing play out in reality. For instance, I've seen people berate a hostess for the long wait when the poor hostess has absolutely no control over the crowded nature of the restaurant and can do nothing to speed the dining of those who arrived early enough to be seated or who have already completed the wait. I've seen angry customers fail to tip a waitress (who had an entire bar to wait on and was actually jogging from table to table) because the service was too slow. Who do such arrogant pricks think they are? If it weren't for those service employees they so easily frown upon, these "customers" actually would have to (shudder) cook for themselves instead of enjoying a night out. When I see these kinds of things, I'm always much more fascinated with those in service; I wonder how they deal with such things and I watch how (and how effectively) they are able to difuse the situation. In Gosford Park, Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren) and Mrs. Croft (Eileen Atkins) are nothing short of heroic in their dealings with the problems that come up. For instance, when Mr. Weissman is revealed to be a vegetarian, they arrange an entirely special meal for him without losing a step in the preparation of the ridiculously elaborate feast everyone else will enjoy.

Of course, beyond all this conceptual stuff, the costumes, the acting, the set, the rain, everything about the film is quite beautiful and easy on the eye. There are few better films to watch with a bottle of wine on a rainy, cold spring day than Gosford Park.

A Worthy Adversary

There's something unbelievably appealing to me about games of mental skill. In college, I relished the opportunity to compete with others on my floor in Civilization II, a turn-based game in which participants created and managed competing civilizations. There were far-flung commercial trade routes, secret alliances, and brilliant tactical maneuvers carried out in times of war. Imagine commanding an empire over the course of several millennia, from the stone age to the launching of the first inter-continental ballistic missile, all at the age of nineteen from your own dorm room. The length of such games as well as the intelligence of the competitors always proved mentally taxing in a rewarding, adrenaline-pumping kind of way. Sadly, my opportunities for such things have dwindled in recent years. Oh, there is always the odd game of Settlers of Catan with any of the growing number of my friends who play, and I did play a fairly interesting game of Risk something like a year and a half ago with Jon, Lope, and Don. However, those two games, while primarily considered games of strategy, involve luck in the form of dice-rolling more than I would like. And these odd instances of gaming, though extraordinarily worthwhile and fun, do not satiate my yen for extended, hard-core, nearly pure strategy competition. It is through the memory of those dorm floor games of Civ II and my current craving for such turn-based glory that I have come to love The Hunt for Red October.

In that infamous Sean Connery submarine flick, one of the earliest actions of Captain Marko Ramius (played by Connery, of course) is to announce the ship's "orders" to the crew. He says, "...and once more we play our dangerous game, a game of chess, against our old aversary: the American navy. For forty years, your fathers before you and your older brothers played this game and played it well. But today the game is different. We have the advantage, and it reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Now, they will tremble again at the sound of our silence. The order is: engage the silent drive. Comrades, our own fleet doesn't know our full potential. They will do everything possible to test us, but they will only test their own embarrassment. We will leave our fleet behind, we will pass through the American patrols, pass their sonar nets, and lay off their largest city and listen to their rock n' roll while we conduct missile drills. Then, when we are finished, the only sound they will hear is our laughter while we sail to Havana, where the sun is warm and so is the...comradeship." Firstly, the comparison of a military maneuver like the one Ramius has in mind here to chess is quite apt, no? It will involve thorough planning, the prediction of what one's adversaries will think and do, and a certain degree of mental fortitude in order to respond to the inevitable things that will not go as planned. But secondly, what a speech. Here, Ramius is addressing his crew of patriotic Soviet conscripts, an audience not as well educated as he is and far more susceptible to the blind nationalism that characterized the stereotypical, cold war era military personnel commanded by the USSR. For that audience, the mere suggestion of hot cuban women and the use of some form of the word "comrade" several times is more than enough to inspire blind loyalty toward Ramius, however misdirected it might be if the crew really is a group of proud Soviets.

As the film goes on, Ramius and his Russians sweat and smoke through the difficult ordeal of turning over an enormous, cutting-edge sub to the Americans while making the crew think it is destroyed and ensuring the cooperation of those same Americans. And I love it all. But really, it's the end scene that gets me. As they sail the Red October up Maine's Penobscot River, Ramius and Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) discuss the Russian captain's motivations for defection. The scene takes place in a blue twilight sublime enough to have post-coital connotations. This discussion reminds me of the post-Civ II glass of Chianti that sometimes happend back in those halcyon days of dorm room gaming glory. For instance, "Damn," someone might have said, "when I saw that caravan from Dhaka just strolling across Europe..." and then the hearty laughter. Oh boy; I'm a bigger dork than I thought.

How does one take down the man when one is the man?

It's no secret that I love "stickin' it to the man." But I always do it in ways that might be interpreted as, well, less than ballsy. For instance, I might stick it to the man by buying my steak from Wholey's instead of Giant Eagle. I might get a copy of Sarah Vowell's latest collection of thoughtful essays at Jay's instead of Barnes & Noble. I'll feast upon a succulent cheesburger at Tesaro's instead of T.G.I. Friday's. And these ways are all consumerism anyway; the man wants me to spend money, and that's precisely what I'm doing. I'm just not spending it exactly where "he" wants me to. Or maybe I stick it to the man by voting for the Green Party candidates in local elections. But who's kidding who? I'm just taking my vote away from the man's opposition, aren't I? But then again, Democrats are just less evil versions of Republicans, aren't they? If Republicans are 90% evil, then Democrats are something like 70% evil. Big business is big business, right? But perhaps I might look to The Thomas Crown Affair for something interesting about sticking it to the man.

Thomas Crown, who for all intents and purposes is the man, lives exceptionally well. He can eat at whatever spendy restaurants he wants to whenever he feels like it, can travel anywhere for the weekend, and can play philanthropist. Being ridiculously wealthy obviously provides a certain amount of freedom from the day-to-day concerns that the rest of us face. Simply by virtue of living well, is Thomas Crown "sticking it to the man," or is he merely perpetuating the status quo by living as the establishment dictates that the rich should live? He would seem to spend a lot of time at work, dealing as he does in the hyper-intense world of finance, and so perhaps the man has him in that way just as he has the rest of us. Crown has ridiculous sums of money, but can only enjoy them on the weekends and certain free evenings. The man has him. If I had a tenth of Crown's net wealth, I'd already be retired. But not him; something about the competition involved in finance pulled him in, and the man has him. Until, of course, he decides to leave.

At the end of the film, when it becomes known that Crown is an art theif, he leaves the country never to return. We are to understand that he takes an immense sum of money with him. Now here's the dilemma: does he, by escaping from the day-to-day snares of "the man's" system, stick it to the man? Or has he simply acted as "the man" and fleeced the rest of us by depriving the public forever of the millions he would have payed in taxes had he stayed legally in the United States?

At the risk of revealing an embarassing individualistic aspect of myself, I must admire the guy. He loves and understands good art and fine wine. And he has the means to enjoy both to the fullest because he has been able to manipulate the system to his advantage. Should all of us who possess the ability to do that act in the same way? Or should we, as so many of us do, teach at universities for poor wages, work for non-profits, etc., living relatively pauper-like lives in comparison to those of similar intellect who chose to persue the field of capitalism? Or is there some middle route? This, of course, is a question as old as organized human society. It reminds me of the Matthew 19:24, one of those Bible verses firmly entrenched in my mind as a result of attending Sunday school at a wealthy, suburban church: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Taken in the context of The Thomas Crown Affair and this blog about it, Matthew would seem to imply that Thomas Crown is himself "the man" because he remains rich, and presumably gives none of this wealth toward the general well-being of the world once he leaves the country. At least while he lived in New York, he gave substantially to a great museum. As much as Crown's escape appeals to me, I don't think I could stand for doing it myself from a moral standpoint. I'd rather just retire and be a philanthropist. Imagine how rewarding it would be to travel all over the world giving money to worthwhile causes for a career. Hell, if I had that much money, I could give half of it to the Green party, and they'd be able to compete for press attention in the next presidential election. Of course, that would probably bring another Republican president since everyone with even a quarter of a brain and a tenth of a heart already would never vote Republican. Oh well. I guess all hope has been lost and if I become ridiculously rich, I should just take my money and get out while I can.