Watching the wheels

I went to Sonic a few nights ago for a late night milkshake. Why there? Because it’s open till midnight and they have a very large drink selection. Though this restaurant and its menu are not the point of this post, there’s no getting to the point without discussing the scene.

Sonic is distinguished from its fast food brethren by its drive-up stalls, where you order from your car while parked, a stationary variation of the ubiquitous drive-thru (which Sonic also has), but with a lick more personality. Winsome girls on roller skates wheel up to your driver-side window to deliver your tater tots and limeades. This set-up is obviously meant to conjure a nostalgia for the 1950s era of drive-in burger joints, soda jerks, sock hops, girls with bows in their hair – real Back to the Future stuff that may or may not have ever existed.

I order a pineapple shake and a short while later, I hear not the whirring of roller wheels, but the clompety-clomp of a lead-footed pedestrian walking (walking!) up to my window. What gives? Maybe this late at night, they figure there won’t be any photo ops with Governor Schwarzenegger, so they lock up the skates and trot out their second tier Bettys. Indeed, the girl who delivered my shake was not exactly what you’d call a “looker.”

So be it, I thought, at least the edible half of the Sonic experience should be tolerable. And then my delivery girl spoke: “I made it myself, so I hope you enjoy it.” By that, you mean you took a cup of vanilla ice cream, tossed in some canned pineapple chunks, and mixed it all together in a machine, according to a company formula? That’s what the cynic in me was thinking. And yet, she seemed completely sincere, like she had done this just for me, and truly hoped I would be pleased.

It’s been said that minimum wage workers, especially in the fast food industry, tend to be looked down upon by customers, and yet I can’t stay that they treat their customers much better. I know this from personal experience having worked in a miserable minimum wage job at a very large and deplorable retail store. But it wasn’t the fact that this girl was nice to me that astonished me; it was the strange notion that she was actually taking pride in her work, in what was surely a minimum wage job.

I’m sure she didn’t need me feeling sorry for her, not for her late shift or her “not-asked-to-dance” appearance or her attendant social status, and none of that is the point of this post. I think somewhere in the writing of this post, I lost track of what my point was.

I came away from that exchange thinking that dumping on people like her is essentially dumping on those who are in some sense helpless. But at the same time, it seems patronizing to try to protect or defend them. Ultimately, the most worthwhile thing to do may be to try to understand, and let understanding guide my feelings. My experience at Sonic made me think about the fact that the vast majority of our encounters with other people are one-shots, so what feeling do you want to leave people with?

Those of my readers who are more inclined to gastronomic than sociopolitical matters are probably wondering: how was the pineapple shake? Quite acceptable, though for a more thoroughly enjoyable and less gimmicky shake, try the definitive pineapple shake mixed at Which Wich.

"We are sold out of the Double Down"

No, they didn’t really say that to me when I went to the nearest KFC to finally get my paws on the biggest thing to hit fast food since the McDLT. But they may as well have, considering the gluttonous demand for the thing that was evident at this particular outpost (which almost certainly reflects an equally ravenous demand nationwide).


The first thing I noticed when I entered the establishment (other than the utter lack of counter service for walk-in customers) was a girl behind the counter informing a guy in the drive-thru lane that they were out of the fried chicken fillets, and whether he would be “all right” with the grilled Double Down. Noting the man’s lofty carriage, I found it hard to believe he would be “all right” with the grilled. Maybe “kinda okay,” but certainly not “all right.” He reluctantly acquiesced.

This clearly wasn’t that guy’s first Double Down, or else, like me, he surely would have stood his ground and waited for the fried one. I was told that I’d have to “wait a few minutes” for them to fry up some new fillets. They even gave me a free soda to apologize for the wait. Well-played, Colonel.

During this intermission, I should note that the Double Down “sandwich” (if it can be called such a thing) costs $4.99 a la carte, which puts it squarely in the realm of “premium” fast food items, alongside McDonald’s Angus Third Pounders (which are disgusting) and the Carl’s Jr. Six Dollar Burgers (also gross). The economy being what it is, I ordered merely two Double Downs, and resigned myself to having to ration the portions out among myself and my friends and family.

Unlike some critics, I was actually rather looking forward to the Double Down’s release, partly because of culinary curiosity, and partly for its symbolic slap-in-the-face to organic food Nazis and sanctimonious Fast Food Nation-reading drones who have of late terrorized the hungry populace. (FYI: I am currently reading Fast Food Nation. Best thing about it: the relatively thorough discussion of the history of the fast food industry and how it is related to other trends in mid-century America. Worst thing: the author’s arrogant expectation of your moral outrage.)

Back to the chicken: I watch as a girl tongs a few chicken fillets onto some paper wrappers, squeezes some sauce onto them out of a plastic bottle, and tops them with two slices of cheese and a strip of bacon torn in half with her bare fingers. And so, after about 20 minutes in this “fast food” joint, the Double Down is mine. How does it taste? Delicious. How could it not be delicious? It’s two KFC chicken fillets hugging bacon, cheese, and a creamy sauce that (like the rest of this hunk of gustatory delight) has been chemically engineered to be pleasing to normal human taste buds.

Is this the end of human civilization? Hardly. The Double Down is no worse than a double cheeseburger with bacon and mayo, and most people consider that perfectly sane. Or think of it this way: the last time your mom, er, ahem, your significant other, brought home a bucket of KFC, how many pieces of chicken did you eat? Two? I rest my case. Yes, there’s bacon, as well, but as any anthropologist will tell you, bacon has long been an essential food in every human civilization. It’s a common denominator, like wine or potatoes. As it says in Deuteronomy, “Therefore eateth ye of the fat of the swine, and your generations shall be fruitful upon the earth.” And let me quote Leviticus: “Verily, a man shall cleave unto his poultry, and his hoggish brood shall comfort him all the days of his life. I am the Lord thy God.”

KFC Double Down – the chosen sandwich.

They’ll Go Gaga at the Gogo: The Second Coming

Some months ago, I went to see Lady Gaga in concert. This was the second time I had seen her, the first being when she opened for New Kids on the Block and fairly stole the show (and that’s no mean compliment, as the New Kids were Block-tacular). Though she was the headliner this time, and though she performed well, I must admit that this second experience was a lesser one overall.

I endured a smorgasbord of emotions at this one.

Confusion – at the labyrinthine queuing on display at the venue (San Diego Sports Arena) that had me hopping around trying to figure out which line led to which door for which ticket-holders.

Searing rage – at waiting for some 20 minutes in one line just to find out that I was in the wrong line and would have to find a different one – twice.

Lumbar pain – I’m about five years too old for the kinds of shows that have you standing elbow to elbow with Bud-swilling, 7-foot-tall douchebags as you wait two hours for the main attraction to get on stage.

Elation – at finally seeing Gaga perform in all her Gaga-ness.

She played every song of consequence, aside from duets (like her current hit, “Telephone,” featuring Beyonce). Though it was hard to tell what was live and what was lip-synced, I would say a far larger portion of the show featured live singing than the Britney Spears concert I went to a few months prior. The dance routines were aggressively primitive and scandalous, and the special effects were appropriately flashy.

And yet the show was a bit disappointing, and at times, a real drag. Though it may be unfair to give too much weight to peripheral issues like a maddeningly incoherent venue and loutish rabble – things that have nothing to do with the performer – a concert is more than just the music; if it weren’t, I would just stay home and listen to my CDs. A great concert is more than just a stellar performance; it’s the feeling that you’re in a special place where you and the performer share a unity of purpose that brings that performer closer to you.

Lady Gaga didn’t necessarily help her own cause when she repeatedly baited the crowd with cries of “Hello San Jose!” I’ve always loathed this cliché of the touring circuit – calling out the name of the city you’re playing to elicit gratified hee-haws from your slavish audience – but if you’re going to do it, at least you could bother calling out the right city. She yelled out “San Jose” about six or seven times before the surely mortified crowd started chanting back, “San Diego!” Then she said “San Jose” about two more times before switching to “San Diego.” About three songs went by before she started bantering with the crowd and finally issued a shockingly sincere mea culpa, which I didn't expect, or at least I thought if she were going to apologize, it would have happened right away. She said she didn't want to "pretend it didn't happen," because she "respected her fans too much." I appreciated that, I guess. More mystifying was when she said her people had told her before the show that she wasn't in San Diego. I guess when you lead a diva’s life like hers, you rely on other people to tell you where you are, what year it is, what your name is, etc.

She later embarrassed herself and the more knowledgeable fans in the house when she announced that just one year ago, she opened for New Kids on the Block in this very arena. Har har. She didn’t – she opened for them at Cox Arena across town, now known as Viejas Arena. Whatever.

* * *

During our interminable wait for Gaga’s appearance, they (the house? her handlers?) had the audacity to play only Michael Jackson songs. For concert-going veterans, this will surely come as a surprise. They will wonder, “What, you mean they didn’t just blast awful crap from bands you’ve never heard of?” No, they played a known quantity, and a monarch at that. This was fun for the first few songs. Then, frankly, it became awkward. Perhaps this comes as a shock to no one, but the longer you pump out the MJ, the more unfavorable the comparison will be when you play your own music. I have to believe this is why most concerts entertain you with the lousiest music available – they don’t want the intermission music to outshine the actual performer.

And yet, part of me thought there was another force at play here. Maybe this was Gaga’s not so subtle way of announcing that she was Michael’s successor, a fittingly nutsoid Princess of Pop. After all, one of the questions that arose in the aftermath of Jackson’s death was: who is his successor? It’s like asking who the next Jordan or Gretzky is. Everyone has a nomination, prefaced by vehement proclamations that no one could ever replace the original. And yet the questions keep coming.

Well if you have questions, you’ve come to the right place. I know my readers don’t come to Czardoz Contra World for wishy-washiness. They come for straight answers from a straight shooter. So here it is: Lady Gaga is not the next MJ. But that doesn’t mean she’s not the next something. Something a little more obvious.

What made Michael Jackson the King of Pop was not just the extraordinary talent, but the singular strangeness that he embodied. He couldn’t help being Wacko Jacko any more than he could help being a brilliant artist. This sense of the inevitable hasn’t been seen since, not even in Gaga.

Gaga has a much more calculated sense of world domination. She’s a freak, yes, but you get the feeling that she could dial it back if she wanted to. She could dial it back, drive it deeper, sprout antlers, grow a penis – whatever it takes to stay one step ahead – in fashion, in music, and especially in controversy. In short, Gaga is the next Madonna.

Madonna was Jackson’s contemporary and near-equal in fame and fortune, but it was always clear that hers was a different sort of mania. For Michael, it was all unaffected: he was as natural doing the moonwalk as he was dangling babies over balcony rails. Madonna, on the other hand, was the ultimate salesman selling the ultimate product: herself. All the shapeshifting in her career has been about getting an edge and keeping people’s eyes focused squarely on her, even when other shiny objects were fighting for some of that attention. They copied her hair, so she changed it. They copied her moves, so she came up with new moves. They even tried to horn in on her controversy, but how could they? Look at “Papa Don’t Preach.” Look at the “Like a Prayer” video. The “Justify My Love” video. The Sex book. Oh, the controversy!

Like Madonna, Gaga isn’t the prettiest starlet. She doesn’t have the most range in her voice. But she has the larger than life persona that turns a star into an icon. I don’t care what adherents of Beyonce or Britney or Taylor or any other diva may say. As respected, beloved, or well-known as those artists may be, none of them dominates pop culture the way Lady Gaga does. Just turn on the radio. I can’t remember the last time I heard a single artist with so many different songs played on so many different stations. I can name six Gaga songs that are in current, regular play on any of four radio stations in San Diego alone: “Poker Face,” “Just Dance,” “LoveGame,” “Paparazzi,” “Telephone,” “Bad Romance.” No other artist commands that kind of appeal, both broad and deep.

The Britney-Madonna kiss (to Christina Aguilera’s everlasting dismay) at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards was widely seen as a passing of the torch from a pop icon to her heir apparent. I’m not so sure that the right person took the torch. Britney is huge and Britney is great, and I even preferred her live show to Gaga’s (at the same venue). But Britney is a product of other people’s imaginations, whereas Gaga, like Madonna before her, seems to be a product of her own.

In fact, I’m most reminded of the ashen body of Optimus Prime on his deathbed, passing the Autobot Matrix of Leadership into the hands of Ultra Magnus, who (in a brilliant piece of foreshadowing) fumbled and bumbled it into the hands of Hot Rod, who would later become Rodimus Prime and turn out to be the true successor to Optimus Prime, leading the Autobots to victory and salvation.

Roll out!

Like a pork chop in a synagogue

Just the other day, I was trying to remember the idiomatic expression, “get along famously,” and rather than rack my brain, I decided to give the good ol’ Internet a whack at it. I kept thinking the expression went “carry on like . . . [something],” so I typed into my Google toolbar, “carry on like.” Lo and behold, the auto fill-in feature, known as Google Suggest, so memorably featured (albeit as a supporting character) in the recent Super Bowl ad, offered this right away:

“carry on like a pork chop”

Like a pork chop? This was too good to resist, so I went with it. It turns out that this is an Australian expression that means “to behave in a silly or excited way,” or more generally, “to behave foolishly.” It’s believed to be derived from the older (also primarily Aussie) expression, “like a pork chop in a synagogue,” defined by one source as being “highly inappropriate, embarrassingly out of place, and quite unwelcome,” pork being, of course, forbidden to Jews.

Why these hammy sayings are the peculiar province of the Aussies, I have no idea. But the next time you’re in Melbourne, sipping on a Foster’s while riding a kangaroo, listening to a koala play the didgeridoo, please do look in the mirror, mate, and raise a cold one to the English language, for you are indeed carrying on like a pork chop (in a synagogue, at that).

O Captain! My Captain!

For those of you who were looking for a reason to spring for that Disneyland 2fer ticket, behold:

After a 13-year absence, Captain EO returned to Disneyland yesterday, February 23, for what is described as a “limited engagement,” though some sources report that the stay will be indefinite. Good riddance to Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, which this replaces.

I saw Captain EO more than once when I was a kid, and I remember not one jot of detail from it. But when news of Michael Jackson’s death broke back in June, one of the first stray thoughts that moonwalked into my mind was, “I wonder if they’ll bring back Captain EO at last.” What? You didn’t wonder the same thing?

Notes from Vancouver: Vicarious Edition

Men's Figure Skating

It’s sad that figure skating is a sport where the controversy is more interesting than the sport.

I shed no tears for Evgeni Plushenko or his countrymen, who think he was robbed of a gold by Evan Lysacek. Plushenko’s whole appearance here was predicated on the idea that he could just waltz into the Olympic Games and de-pants the field with his quad jump, and if anyone didn’t want to put his Russian cream and sugar in their coffee, then they were idiots. That self-important attitude doesn’t fly with me. The fact is, Plushenko knew what the rules were before he came, and he lost because the rules didn’t favor (flavor!) what he was cooking.

I understand that without this particular scenario of him losing this way in this place before this world audience (to an American, no less), there would have been no reasonable platform for Plushenko to criticize the advancement, or lack thereof, of his sport. If he had held a press conference before the Olympic Games to say, “Without the quad, you can’t be considered the true Olympic champion,” it probably would have elicited a collective (?) over the heads of viewers. Nevertheless, if he had won, do you think we would have heard such a well-articulated philosophy of the future of men’s figure skating? I don’t think so, and to rip his sport and his rival after losing the competition is a pretty shabby thing to do.

I wasn’t fond of Lysacek’s “rebuttal” interview with Bob Costas on NBC, either, but that has more to do with that network and its stable of preening commentators than it does with Lysacek. When I first saw the interview on TV, I thought it was a passive-aggressive slap in Plushenko’s face, all of Lysacek’s talk about how Plushenko had come back after a three-year absence to miraculously win a silver, as if to say the old dog still remembers a few tricks, so maybe we don’t have to put him down just yet. Watching the interview again online, it didn’t seem so bad. Costas tries his best to bait Lysacek into saying something clearly derogatory, but the youngster is apparently well-coached in the peculiarly bland vocabulary of big-time athletes.

But then came the second televised interview. Why on earth did we need to see Dick Bottoms and Scott “Bald Eagle” Hamilton plop themselves into a couple of easy chairs to tell us how wonderful Lysacek’s “package” was, and how ridiculous it was to even question his victory? Really? I can’t even suggest that a judged sport can produce questionable results without it sounding like sour grapes? Even after years of criticism of its jingoistic coverage, NBC still panders to the most xenophobic tendencies of its viewers.

Plushenko’s right about one thing: the skating federation needs to decide if this is a sport or a show. The sport is based on looking good while performing difficult figures. Fair enough. But it’s already subjective enough by that definition, and when the judges and the federation can’t even convincingly decide whether it’s more important to look good or to perform ever more difficult figures, then the subjectivity overcomes legitimacy, especially when the scoring system is notoriously inscrutable for the typical Olympics viewer.

Forgive the delicious pun, but I don’t understand why these skaters, men and women, insist on sticking to jumps that they just can’t stick. Maybe some day, someone will come along and do six quad jumps and throw in a quint, landing all of them perfectly, and it’ll be the most thrilling and exquisite figure skating performance of all time. Until then, though, I feel like the performances would be much more enjoyable to watch if the skaters didn’t overreach their abilities. Hence, why the Stars on Ice don’t tour the country charging you $50 a seat to watch them fall on their hindquarters on failed quad jump combinations. They want to look good in a show. Maybe the sport could stand to look a little more like a sport.

Coming from a ballroom dance background, I can appreciate the distinction between a sport and a show. I would love to see ballroom added to the Olympic roster, but the line between sport and show is so blurry, even by the standard of judged sports, that I don’t think ballroom would have sufficient legitimacy when placed alongside other sports.

Given figure skating’s illustrious history, I’d hate to see it lose its marquee status because of the growing discernment of its rapacious viewers. Plushenko thinks that the quad is the future of men’s skating, but the sport’s future relies on more than just bigger, tougher figures. It relies on a viewership that understands the sport and will continue to take it seriously, if only once every four years.

UPDATED: QUAD IS QUAD
February 22, 2010

Looking at some more barbs slung between these two men, I feel like I should clarify exactly what I think men's figure skating should be (because my opinion, after all, is the one that counts).

Plushenko: "I think we need to change the judging system because quad is quad. If the Olympic champion doesn't know how to jump a quad, it isn't men's figure skating, it's men's ice dancing."

Lysacek: "If it were a jumping competition, they would give you 10 seconds to run and do your best jump. But it's a four-minute, 40-second program, and it's about sustaining that level of skating and excitement from start to finish. And that's what I've been working on every day."

Lysacek is more or less right, but he's dodging the issue, isn't he? Can he or can he not do the quad? Obviously not. The Olympics challenged him to work within some arbitrary rules, and he succeeded, so congratulations. But why hide behind the rules when a rival makes a direct accusation?

Maybe it's more fun and entertaining to watch beautiful skating in competition, even if it dumbs down the competition a bit. Or maybe it's more of a gas to watch exceptional athletes wilt like daisies before figures that they just can't hack. I don't know.

But in the future, even if the rules discourage it, I think there will be skaters who can do quads, and lots of them, and with consistency and grace, and when these skaters come along and start hitting them at the Olympics, then the rest of the world will have no choice but to follow suit, rules be damned. Will things be more fun to watch? Again, I don't know. But that's sport, and sport isn't always pretty.

Hype does not a legacy make

Before seeing Avatar, I had read a quote by director, James Cameron, in an Entertainment Weekly blog:

On the legacy of Titanic: “It’s like nobody admits they went to see Titanic, like it was something you did when you were a kid that you’re not too proud of now, like wearing bell-bottoms.”

I didn’t expect to follow up my last blog post about Avatar, but after I saw the film (and especially now as the movie is set to take over the top all-time box office spot, and in light of the recent announcement of Oscar nominations), I immediately thought back to the above quote, and it made me think that Avatar really is the next Titanic, yes because of the box office records and the awards, but more relevantly, because its eventual irrelevance is assured.

Despite Cameron’s penchant for over-portraying himself as the maligned underdog genius of Hollywood, what he says about his last mega-movie is not really an exaggeration. Think back. You know you saw Titanic, and you probably liked it. Maybe you even remember it fondly. But ask yourself: Who shows Titanic at movie night? Who names their beagles Jack and Rose? Who rocks “My Heart Will Go On” at the karaoke bar (disregarding the fact that you probably know all the words)? Maybe it’s not because you’re ashamed of having liked the movie then, but because you have so little concern for it now.

Until the hype machine started hammering Avatar into the collective consciousness, most people probably hadn’t thought of Titanic in over a decade. Sadly, the release of Avatar triggered as many memories of Dances with Wolves and even Ferngully as it did Titanic. And the interest wasn’t regarding whether Avatar would be as good a movie as Titanic, but whether it would make as much . . . what’s the word . . . cheddar?

Titanic was a whale at the box office, approved by critics, glazed with awards, and yet in the end, it was just a movie, and not even a particularly great one. It certainly didn’t become a cultural reference point, not even by movie standards, and neither will Avatar. And exactly what high horse am I riding, you ask? Well, just off the top of my head:

• “May the Force be with you.”
• “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
• “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” (pilfered, like so many other things, by Avatar)
  
• “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
• “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

What does Avatar bring to the cultural lexicon?

• “So, you find yourself some local tail, and you just completely forget what team you're playin' for?”

Yeah, I’m not sure about that.

***

As a side note, I’ve railed against the Oscars (and praised James Cameron) in the past, and it’s not worth giving that freak show of upturned noses and meager intellects any more breath than it deserves. I’ll just say that anyone with a hankering for an effects-laden sci-fi spectacle starring Zoe Saldana would do well to reach not for Avatar, but Star Trek, thank you very much!