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Being Itinerant: St Louis in reviews—Eating and Entertainment
12 Dec 2007, 0:33

Steak n Shake

I walked to the Steak n Shake one afternoon after not having eaten anything all day. The Hardee's wasn't accepting credit cards and Imo's Pizza looked like it required commitment, like questions might be asked. I was feeling a little out of sorts and looking for a place to eat where I didn't have to sit for long and where I didn't have to talk with anybody, no questions asked.

So I went into the Steak n Shake. Four can be an odd hour to eat at a restaurant. Mine was one of three tables being tended. The visible employees outnumbered the patrons.

I didn't want to eat at a sit-down restaurant, but I did. I didn't want to make mine the platter, but I did. I didn't want to be asked any questions, but some were asked.

The waitress saw my ID somehow. California?, she asked. Yes, I said. What are you doing here? Well, I said, I just moved here. Moved here? From California? Yup. Why?

She returned to my table frequently and asked questions even when my mouth was full. She leaned against the other side of the booth and talked about the neighborhood and didn't stop when a coworker tried to tell her about his brand new car. She gave me advice on where to go. She said "So I guess I'll be seeing you around more often...?"

And after boxing half my pepper jack melt and pouring the rest of the pot of coffee she brought in a styrofoam cup, she dropped my credit card back on the table, where I had set it.

2 stars (of five)
Try the pepper jack melt!
Try the shoestring fries!
Try telling the truth next time

*

Mango

We were a party of 23 that night at Mango to celebrate three birthdays, those of Maureen, Nicholas, and Ben. Mo's grandfather sang—the first time I had heard it—the second verse of the Happy Birthday song. It follows the same pattern as the first but the line is wittier: "May you live 'til you die." And he hadn't even been drinking.

He and I never had the opportunity or inclination to talk to each other but I got to chat with those around me, being Nicholas, his roommate who did not go out with us after dinner and whose name has thus been disremembered, Ben, Elisabeth (Josh, she reminds me, was not present), and some brunette I'll recall only as "former student magazine editor at Webster." And as unnervingly attractive. And as engaged. Moving on.

Boats full of banana chips and two cups of dipping sauce, one hot and planty, one syrupy and purple, adorned each table in a kind of cock-n-balls décor. A team of four waitresses brought our dinner in sharing dishes: rice, mashed-up beans which we termed beanbarf, some kind of gravied beef in succulent coin cuts, and other stuff, all more or less delicious, for sure.

Being a birthday more than a Tuesday night, it was decided that we'd drink. That was easier to decide than to enact. I essentially had to track down and beg our waitress for a bottle of wine, one of their finest white, something Spanish called Nora. We tasted and enjoyed and shared it, and then ordered a second. Maybe a third. And then Maureen's brother picked up the tab.

Reflecting on it now, I can't defend my reaction to hearing that he'd clandestinely paid for all 23 of us—standing, for whatever reason, I pointed at him and brusquely declared "inappropriate"—but it was rather ungodly generous of him.

Four stars (of five)
Try the beef coins
Try the Nora
Try it all on someone else's tab

*

Seamus McDaniel's

Not quite on the corner of Tamm and Clayton, Seamus'—as the locals call it—is in the center of Dogtown's small business strip. Only a few blocks from everywhere, residents can walk to Seamus' and skip/crawl home. Again, I can't defend the decision, but we drove. Both ways.

Most of us from Mango rendezvou'd in the back room, in front of the fireplace, for birthday drinking. A few of us drank like it was our own birthdays. The whiskey sours were exquisite.

Elisabeth and Josh wanted to leave before the rest of us, for reasons your baudy brain can guess easily enough, so Ben agreed to drive me back, later. They were in their room when we returned. Passing the bottle back and forth while singing "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea", we finished the rosé and somehow Ben battered into their door. And then Elisabeth started shouting "Just go home!" so Ben and I hopped into his car, me at the wheel, and drove around the block.

Some time after 3, Ben passed out on the futon and I fell asleep on the couch. When we woke up to my alarm at 9, he was curled on the love seat and his jeans were in the kitchen. They were drenched. So were his socks. This is how we, after he left, recreated the scene: he got up in the early morning, drunk, and went to the bathroom to pee. And he peed when he got there, for sure, only he neglected to unzip. Floppy walking back to bed, he noticed that his pants were wet, which alarmed him disagreeably, so he dropped them in the kitchen. We can't explain why he chose the love seat over the futon, though.

Ben had a meeting with his boss at 10. It was 15 after 9 before he was steady enough to stand unassisted. Not wanting to be late, he put on the clothes he wore the day before and went in.

Four stars (of five)
Try the whiskey sours!
Try not to get so pissed you piss yourself
(But if you do...) Try explaining the smells to your boss

*

Chick pea stew and falafel

Elisabeth didn't have to work Thursday and she wanted to "make something really good for dinner," so we decided to stay in that night and make dinner ourselves.

Her chick pea stew is from a family recipe. As she explained it to me, it reminded me too much of the gazpacho I made at Sarah's apartment in Harlem this summer, which was puree'd and which I didn't eat, but drank, and which was not very filling. Falafel, then, seemed a nice match—same stuff, different consistency. With a tasty sauce.

We biked all over town to buy ingredients. We made tzatziki from the recipe on the back of the falafel box (boxes—we made two which sufficed for something over 97 balls). We popped a bottle of rosé champagne for the two hours of preparation. Ben came over with a bottle of viogner and we wached Factory Girl while we ate.

Walking Checkers after the movie, Ben apologized for Tuesday night and explained how he doesn't often get that drunk. I forgot a shit bag, Checkers shit on someone's lawn, I exclaimed oh, shit!, Ben agreed, and together we fled.

*

Factory Girl

Seems to be a character attack: Andy Warhol is heartless, never payed any of his models, and absolutely, selfishly destroyed Edie Sedgwick, who was innocent and aspiring and respectable before falling for his craftiness.

Why couldn't they use Bob Dylan's real name? In the movie he's nameless, and in the special features they refer him as Billy Quinn. Lame.

*

Joe's

Joe's isn't a restaurant. It isn't a bar. It's some dude's house that he allows people to pay him for permission to come inside and sit and listen to live music while they drink whatever they cared to bring.

We brought three bottles of wine, one bottle of vodka and one of sparking cranberry juice. We also brought three blocks of cheese, one baguette, one bag of mini wheat pitas, and one small tub of hummus. Because we hadn't eaten.

As our party accumulated, we relocated from the balcony to the basement. We drank most of what we brought before they kicked us out—I gave what was left of my bottle of shiraz, in the cold outside, in the rush to Josh's car, to a couple newly engaged. And then we relocated to Josh's apartment.

Where we drank vodka like water. Like Russians. We mixed it with Dr Pepper. We mixed it with Squirt. We mixed it with expensive juices from Nantucket. And then there was nothing left to mix it with.

Except crème de cacao. Here's the recipe.

I'm calling it a "leftover after Joe's". And I can't comment on the taste because I didn't actually drink it.

*

Night at the symphony, and afterward

Lou called me around 6:30 and invited me to a symphony that started at 8. I had been recovering from Joe's all day and had pledged to Josh's neighbor and landlord that I would be available to let a repairman in to fix a furnace in the basement. The neighbor was going to a dinner party and I was the only one in the building. But the neighbor took longer than anticipated to get ready and caught the repairman on her way out. Ben called and picked me up an hour later.

We met Lou and his youngest brother at the symphony. With David Roberston conducting, the orchestra played Stravinsky, Szymanowski, and Mozart. Lou liked the Stravinsky piece but disparaged the performance as flat. Ben liked the Mozart piece and recognized the performance as coming from an orchestra that enjoys playing it. I know shit about music, but liked the Szymanowski piece the best.

During intermission, Lou and his brother and I went to get some water in the lobby. The lady who stood to let us out said, as we edged past, "I'm surprised he stayed this long!" She was referring, we think, to Lou's brother. He's 15 and looks it. On the way back, nodding to her husband, Lou spoke those same words to her. (That's a lie. But it would have been funny.)

That afternoon at work, Ben received an unexpected surprise: the three bottles of absinthe he ordered from Italy. The next night we were to celebrate his birthday for the third time. That night, though, we decided a sample was necessary.

But before we drank, we ate. I convinced Ben to neglect his diet for the night and eat some fried chicken with me. We stopped by a Church's and ordered two combo meals to go. On the way to his place it occurred to me that we had no sugar, so we called Lou, who was already waiting at Ben's apartment. No grocery stores in the neighborhood, he went to check a gas station down the street, no dice.

You might never think to pair them, but absinthe complements surprisingly well with fried chicken. Even unsweetened. We feasted while watching Borat.

This is how St Louis does sophistication.

*

I'm Not There

The characters of most fiction, it seems, are components of the author's personality. Take the principal characters of any given novel, compile them, and you'll have a fairly complete, possibly narcissistic, probably inaccurate self-portrait.

As, nowadays, we prefer our nonfiction dressed as fiction, this is what they did with Bob Dylan.

Don't watch it to learn much about his life. Watch it to feel weirdly lustful over Cate Blanchett playing him.

*

Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?

From the top seats of the art world reign screwballs worse than Young Earth creationists.

This movie seems to be a rallying cry. The story is simple: Teri Horton, a trucker, buys what she calls an "ugly painting" from an antique store for $5. Someone tells her it might be a Pollock, worth millions. She tries to get it authenticated and sold for over a decade. But she has no provenance and the experts—the art experts—refuse to believe its authenticity. No buyers. Hardly any believers. That's where it stands today.

Here's the kink: a forensic scientist from Canada found a fingerprint on the back of the painting. He found a matching fingerprint on a can of paint in Pollock's studio, East Hampton, N.Y. And he found another matching fingerprint on a genuine, authenticated Pollock in the Tate Gallery, London. And all the experts—these are the curators of New York's biggest museums—can say is "But it doesn't feel like a Pollock. It doesn't sing like a Pollock."

Anyone whose grasp on reality is so infirm that they can't handle hard evidence that breaks with their beliefs is an enemy of truth and an enemy of the future.

*

The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream

This film is alarmist propaganda. That said, I pray that the end of suburbia comes quickly. New urbanists, rock on.

*

Hotel Chevalier and The Darjeeling Limited

Prior, in debates on art and things like that I've always quit listening to my fellow debators after they use the word "pretentious". Because, invariably, I would ask them to define "pretentious" and, invariably, they would fail to.

Before it was appropriated as a Part 1 of the theatrical release of The Darjeeling Limited, Hotel Chevalier was released as a free download on iTunes. Being a Wes Anderson fan, I downloaded it. And, by way of this short film, I defined "pretentious" for myself—at long last, I had an example. It clicked.

Pretension: an aspiration or claim to a certain status or quality. (Definition lifted from the OED.) See Hotel Chevalier

I like The Darjeeling Limited. Not as much as The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, which is one of my titan favorites. But I like it quite a lot. The moral seems to be this: if you're going to catch the train to salvation, you might need to drop your baggage.

Funny how the Owen Wilson suicide attempt coincided with the pre-release hype-building of this movie. Funny how his first interview after being released from Cedars-Sinai was with Wes Anderson. Funny how he's damaged in the movie.

During the showing, a pair of guys across the aisle were understandably laughing pretty often. An old man, seated one separated from his wife, turned and growled at them: what's so fuckin' funny, huh? I made it a point to laugh louder after that.

I rode Josh's bike to the theater to catch the last showing on that particularly chilly Sunday evening. Puddles that were liquid on the ride there were iced over on the ride back. It was worth the trip.

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