| I LIKE TO THINK THE YAKISOBA I MAKE IS INTERESTING |
[29 Nov 2004|02:38pm] |
I LIKE TO THINK THE YAKISOBA I MAKE IS INTERESTING.
I like to think the yakisoba I make is interesting. I think everyone who makes yakisoba and spends more than, say, ten minutes doing it, is most likely making yakisoba that they think is interesting. What I do is fry an egg sunny-side-up. Then I, using the power of Japanese cooking chopsticks -- which we will call saibashi, for that is their name -- I pick the yolk out like a crow picks out a dead body's eye. I then gently set the egg soft-side-down on the frying pan and let it scream for a moment. Then I drop in the yakisoba mix. The Maru-chan stuff, of course -- "Japan's most famous noodles." Except I don't use their shit powder. I have my own. We won't go into what mine is made of. We'll just say it is tasty. All I will say is that I mix the noddles in with the now-discombobulated egg, and eventually throw in some shredded mozzarella cheese. I add a splash of extra-virgin olive oil, stick the saibashi into the middle of the mixture, and spin like a clothes dryer. With my free hand, I splash in Tabasco, and then turn up the fire. Eventually, the cheese starts smoldering, and when it starts smoldering, I let it smolder hard, until the kitchen is full of the stink of it. Then I flip it all up into the air like a noodly pancake, and then slide it onto the plate. Remember! Don't drip that oil into the sink -- that's extra-virgin olive oil. That for eating, not for cooking!
In the end, you have a choice of side-dishes. I usually go with a vegetable korokke from a little bakery in Ueno, or -- or! this is the good part! -- a cream-cheese korokke from a hippyish bakery in Asakusa. Yes, korokke are Korean (not Japanese) croquettes, essentially consisting of mashed potato (and corn, and carrot, and pea) paste, breaded, and then fried hard in tempura oil. Most korokke have beef and pork in the paste. Mine don't, because I get them from weird places. I usually put some plain and nasty shredded mozzarella atop my korokke and then leave it to bake in the toaster oven while I tend to my soba. The cream cheese korokke, I don't top with cheese, because that violates the laws of kosher. I simply heat, drip on some Tabasco, and eat!
Another popular side-dish choice is Punk Rock Salad. I taught you about that before, in an earlier entry. It's just finely shredded cabbage smothered in aojiso and/or gomadare, peppered with some coarse black pepper, and served on a plate with tomato slices and/or a soft-boiled egg. However, when you eat it with soba, you shouldn't use a soft-boiled egg. Too many eggs isn't good for you, you know.
The soba takes around twenty minutes to prepare. This is because the powder is delicate. That, and the egg must be slow, slow fried. And the side dishes take time preparing.
TODAY'S SOBA, OF COURSE, WAS DIFFERENT. That's why I'm writing this. To tell you how and why it was different. The side-dish was Campbell's Vegetarian Vegetable Alphabet Soup, which I bought in a pop-top can at the Yamato Dry Goods store in Okachimachi this morning on my way back from a successful bank transfer. (Thank you, readers, for paypaling me enough to get the airplane ticket. I have paid foor it, and have about three dollars eat while in Korea. So keep paypaling, to the address I link whenever I say paypal me, and I'll keep letting you in on the rad-awesome short stories.)
The Yamato Dry Goods store kind of creeps me out. They have these folding tables in front, these tables that are just covered in dented cans of American Campbell's soup and half-crushed boxes of Keebler Graham Crackers. They used to have Honey Maid. I don't know what happened to them, though. I like Honey Maid better. I bought some Keebler, the other day, at Yamato, and the box disturbed me. It says:
GOOD SNACKS FAMILIES GO FOR
That's a fucking snippy thing to say to me. I mean, what the fuck? What the fuck is wrong with America? We make fun of things like Japanese Engrish on signs, band names like "Thee Michelle Gun Elephant" or "Bump of Chicken", though hell, maybe English really is at its most endearing -- or try this, Jack -- meaningful, when it's being used by someone who doesn't, necessarily, speak it fluently. When the lead singer of Sambo Master screams "KAMMoN, PRAY ZA GITTAaa!" in the middle of "Utsukushiki ningen no hibi," it is actually rather powerful, and kind of interesting. When Keebler says their graham crackers are "GOOD SNACKS FAMILIES GO FOR," I feel like telling that smug little elf to fuck himself in his pointed ear. I can enjoy them alone, thank you very much.
THE BEST WAY TO ENJOY GRAHAM CRACKERS
Is shabu-shabu-style. Shabu-shabu is Japanese raw (okay, so maybe not raw) beef dipped in this hot kind of sauce, and then pulled out. Shabu-shabu is a Japanese sound word indicating something being dipped into liquid, swished around, and removed. The best liquid for graham crackers is good, unsweetened cocoa.
GRAHAM CRACKERS TASTE BEST SOFT
To soften them, you must leave them opened for three days, and then check back. Look! They have grown stale. I've said this a million times before.
TODAY'S EGG WAS A FAILURE
I cracked it open, and then, feeling melodramatic, let it drop into the frying pan from my shoulder height. When the egg was in mid-flight, I recalled that these kinds of eggs always end up as failures, because when they hit the pan, they tend to spread out; the yolks shatter. Well, this didn't happen. This XXL-sized brown beauty (226 yen for ten at Itoyokado this week) hit the pan with a smack, and then proceeded to do the frying-in-sesame-oil equivalent of freeze solid. It just wouldn't move. It wouldn't budge. It had stuck solid to the pan, the work of a miracle I've never seen yet with an egg. It started to burn. The pan (a wok, in actuality; work with me) was not yet too hot. It was kind of amazing, yet kind of not amazing. It kind of just made a big smell that made me mighty thirsty. I turned the flame way down, drank some mugicha (OKAYSORRY!! and stared at the egg in silence. Then I put on some music, went back, and looked at the egg again. Using the end of a saibashi, I was able to coax the yolk out and drop it into the oil. I then used the same saibashi to break the hell out of the white. Then I dropped in the noodles and the powder. I blorted in the olive, I sprinkled in the pepper, and I splurted out the Tabasco. I splonked on some cheese, and what resulted from the hissing that came with the savage, cavemanly frying of noodles while listening to music about passersby disappearing in the streets and love blooming on battlefields was a gorgeous, cheese-crunchy situation. The failure egg had hatched, and produced the very epitome of "tasty." I sat, and ate, and drank my Campbell's soup, and almost crumbled. It was too delicious.
I DRANK A CHERRY COKE
 I bought five of them today at Yamato. I plan to share them with a woman, kind of, though I drank one already. I put it in the freezer before I started cooking, and I tell you, that thing must be broken or something, because boy that thing was frosted when I took it out! My fingers stuck to it like little kids' tongues stick to flagpoles in the winter. When I drank it, it filled my body, my dead center, with a kind of freezing-coldness that makes me feel like I, too, like Kazutoshi Sakurai in his song "Yasashii Uta," have a dark cave within my chest, where my true self, the one who remembers what love is like, and remembers what love is for, sleeps beside a horrible monster. The Coke was nonetheless perky and crisp. I am remembering, fondly, cold American carbonation. I like it. That's what America is. It is a carbo-nation.
CARBO-NATION. AMERICA IS A CARBO-NATION.
I like to move.
MYSELF AND DREW COSNER HAD A GOING-AWAY PARTY AT OUTBACK LAST NIGHT
We had a coupon for a free onion. The Blooming Onion, as it were. So we went to Shibuya. He drank a beer. Two of them, actually. He paid something like 1,400 yen for the pleasure. I paid 300 yen for refillable Sprite. It was the American variety. The Outback, the newest in Japan, is in Shibuya, and it is huge like a natural cavern. It's an Outback Grill, this place. It's a new line -- a new breed -- of Outback. Their Blooming Onion is different -- they call it a "Typhoon Bloom," and it tastes exactly like a Blooming Onion, only it is about three thousand times more impossible to eat. It has no easy-grabbing handles for pulling the pieces of onion out and eating. It's all in chaos. It clashes with the airbrushed, matte'd, vaguely Vegas-lounge-bar-like not-at-all-Australian atmosphere of the place. We sat in there and talked about women, and rock music, and the politics of pop, until it was time for us to go. We reasoned that the place would have been a wonderful one for meeting sweater-wearing girls who listened to folk music with attentive ears -- especially for two guys wearing V-neck sweaters and hip neckties, one of whom is carrying a guitar (that was me, last night, the one carrying the guitar) and on our way back from checking out an art-gallery opening with Japanese magazine editors -- if we weren't also foreigners who were breathing through the mouth at the mere thought of a big fucking sick loaf of onion that made our hands greasy up to the elbows and faces oily flush up to the bottoms of the eye-sockets.
Said Drew, breathing through the mouth, of the onion:
"IT TAKES AN AMERICAN RESTAURANT TO HOOK YOU UP IN THIS COUNTRY."
Said me, breathing through the mouth, of the onion, in correction:
"IT TAKES AN AUSTRALIAN-THEMED AMERICAN RESTAURANT IN JAPAN TO HOOK YOU UP ANYWHERE."
I was perhaps wrong. Then again, so was he.
I chanced across Final Fantasy Dog, who needs to get a new cellular phone already, in Shibuya's Sentaa Gai. He was shamelessly macking on Yamambas ten years his junior in front of Gaspanic while some old black dude with way too much fucking pimp skill played the drums until he was finished playing the drums.
When I went home, it was without a guitar -- for I had deposited it somewhere, from whence I will pick it up again. I had my drum sticks in my guitar case, and seeing as I have a drumming appointment in Korea, well, I will take them with me. I tucked my drumsticks behind my punk-rock belt, and slid them into my pocket, and then folded my sweater over them. I felt like a cop must feel when he carries a gun. I entered the Hibiya Line at Ginza Station, and there were these two cornrowed Japanese hip-hop (we don't yet say "J-hip-hop," and I'm hoping the trend dies before we have to start; I'd propose "J-hop," at any rate) girls sitting on the floor in front of the doors. They looked up at me. I stood against the opposite doors. The girls were talking about me, in Japanese.
"I think he's looking at us."
"He totally is."
One of the girls was so ugly, with such disarranged teeth and so much visible scalp between her braids, that I just about tossed my Typhoon Bloom on the train floor. It would have been the regurgitation equivalent of a throwdown, is what it would have been. It would have been like, "Look at this, bitch, look what I can doBELLLLRACGH." I didn't do it, because I needed to keep that onion up in me what because I had a bank transfer to do the next morning, and a right important one. The girls kept looking at me. I kept looking at them. It was a staring contest straight up to Ueno, where I figured they'd get off. They didn't. I eventually flipped up my sweater, showing the girls my Dr.-Pepper-can-colored dress shirt underneath. You could see the black (Tama, Teflon-coated Yoshiki signature model) drumsticks coming up out of my pocket, tucked behind the belt, and pressed against my shirt. I stroked the sticks with one quick index-finger gesture, all the while locking eyes with the less repulsive of the two girls. Then I flipped the sweater down over it. The girl kept staring until eventually she busted out laughing. I got off the train at Minowa, and the ugly girl waved to me.
"Bye-bye, motherfucker," she said, in English so perfect it was, well, perfect. The other girl slapped her on the leg. Then she spoke, in California English, "You live in Japan?" The doors closed in her face. As she was sitting on the floor, well -- that was the last I saw of her. Good-bye, then.
THE NEXT DAY, MY EXCRETIONS ARE ODD COLORS
My mucus, which I sneeze regularly when I have a cold, as I do now, is black. It must be that I was in Shinjuku and Shibuya last night.
THE MOST GROSS AND OFFENSIVE PHRASE TO USE WHEN TALKING ABOUT BATHROOM DUTIES
"The Neopolitan."
Example: "I need to go do a Neopolitan. Be back in a half an hour."
Explanation: the strawberry is whatever you make it out to be. It varies according to gender, mood, and state of illness.
THE BEST WAY TO DESCRIBE THE SAUCE SERVED WITH OUTBACK BLOOMIN' ONION
"Liquid God."
AN ILLOGIC PROBLEM
Walking with a woman in Tokyo's Aoyama City, we come to a highway-width science-fiction street. There are two ways to cross it. A metal bridge and an underground tunnel. She says, "Let's take the tunnel." I say, "No, let's take the bridge." She says, "I'm tired." I say, "Me, too. Let's take the bridge." She says, "The tunnel is better." I ask, "Why?" She says, "Because we're going down stairs, not up them." I say, "Well, at the end of the tunnel, you have to go upstairs, anyway. The tunnel is as deep as the bridge is wide. I'd rather go up stairs first, and then go down stairs at the end." She says, "No. I feel less tired when walking up stairs after walking down stairs." I say, "No you don't." She says, "Yes I do." We ended up taking the tunnel, just because.
I STOLE A BUNCH OF HELLO KITTY LOLLIPOPS FROM A KARAOKE PARLOR
The Hello Kitty character appears on the wrapper. The lollipop itself is just a plain, solid-color deal. It tastes like a lollipop. No white-frosted Hello-Kitty-face on it at all. It's just a plain old lollipop. It's not interesting. Yet, it is a worthy symbol of Japanese "character."
OBSERVED AT A LIBRARY IN TOKYO ON SUNDAY MORNING
This was in a library Shitamachi on Sunday morning in November, the Sunday that came before this Monday, which is today. The sun was shining in through the pasty windows and everything looked gray. Some old men were standing and looked over newspapers which were tacked up to easels with signs that said "Do not remove." In the quiet reading area, two dozen old folks and young kids and schoolgirls and middle-agers were sitting in folding chairs, keeping their elbows away from one another. They were reading novels and picture-books. I was chewing a lollipop stick. I stood in the corner by a utility phone and stared at the seated crowd for a second, perplexed. Something had attracted my eye immediately about the people there. I lost sight of it soon, however. What it was, I couldn't remember. So I stared for a while. Then, like something out of a puzzle for children that you'd see printed on a cereal box or somewhere, I spotted what was wrong with the picture: a leather-faced old man in dirt-caked work pants, a blue-and-white flannel shirt, and a green mesh baseball cap was seated, legs-akimbo, in a chair with a fat stack of phone books by his left leg. With his pink tongue sticking up and out of the corner of his mouth, he was balancing a phone book opened to the yellow pages on his knee. With his right and left hands, he held a rectangularly prismatic digital camera in a "let's take a full-body portrait" vertical position. He snapped a photo of the phone book page. He looked at the camera, studied the screen, and then steadied another shot. He turned the page, and took another two pictures. He turned the page again, and took another two pictures. Soon, my lollipop was finished, and I was out of there.
What do you think was up with that?
I MENTION A LOT OF OBSCURITIES AND BRAND NAMES IN HERE.
People of the internet, comment with links. I hold neither the witpower nor the time to do it myself. Continue, then, with this:
I SAW THE MOST PECULIAR SIGHT
In Harajuku, why, just yesterday afternoon. It was more of the periwinkle time when a November afternoon turns into a November evening, though you get the idea. Anyway, I saw this guy -- the lime-green-Old-Navy-fleece-wearingest, painter's-smock-colored khakiest, Nike-Air-i-est, Pete-Sampras-hairiest, bald-spottingest, LURPiest, slackedest-jawed, bigass-camera-wieldingest foreign greasefuck walking alongside a girl with a beehive of frosted hair, tanned like a Thanksgiving Turkey, dressed in what was essentially a bikini with the extension plan installed. Her boobs were more like "melons." She was smiling at him with these big, perfect teeth. He was speaking Japanese and waving his hands.
I LIKE HEARING SNIPPETS OF CONVERSATION, JUST SNIPPETS, FOR I HAVE NOT THE ATTENTION TO HEAR THINGS IN FULL PIECES
The best one, ever, perhaps, was heard with Livejournal's own Dan, who was in Tokyo for a while a few weeks ago. We were walking around Tokyo, from Akihabara to Uguisudani, and I told him about my conversation-snippet thing. I said, you just listen to the words of the people. "It's like falling asleep during a symphony; you absorb the most meaningful pieces of the world when you're not paying attention." So we're walking through Ueno Park, ONE HOUR LATER, and this regular sporting chap in his mid-twenties or so was leading his limping, mentally handicapped younger brother down the fountain square, and a conversation snippet popped out, and lord bless it, it was a complete sentence:
「無駄な話になるよ。」
"A needless conversation will pursue."
Another great one came from a man walking down Meiji-doori from Yoyogi toward Shibuya, under some graffiti-painted bridge, at about six one morning. I crossed paths with him -- I was headed for Shinjuku (well, Shin-Ookubo, eventually) -- and heard him say
「今、歩いてるんですけど」
"I'm, uh, walking right now."
That was great.
WHAT THE FOREIGN MAN SAID
Was this:
「私は日本料理好きですが」
WATASHI WA NIHON RYOURI SUKI DESU GA
"I (feminine, . . . "poofy") like Japanese food, yet"
What the hell? What the hell, I asked, is up with that?
I asked Drew Cosner, and he told me, "Maybe he has money."
I said, maybe.
Then Drew revised his idea so it felt more correct.
"Or maybe she's about to take him to a hotel and beat the ever-living, mother-fucking shit out of him."
THAT WAS A GOOD ONE
It really was.
It made me remember something Ryuunosuke Akutagawa said about people and animals -- "Humans love animals because animals, for the most part, cannot transitively hate humans."
I then got hit on at an art gallery, very severely, by a queer yet 面白い Japanese woman who publishes some magazine about . . . something rather odd. We will cover it later. It was interesting, to say the least. Something will develop.
I THINK IN MONOLOGUES SOMETIMES
I used to write plays, and then not do anything with them. They were mostly nonsense. I've told you about them before. Plays like two things, both orange, which begins with a detective behind a desk in front of rainy windows intoning to the audience, "She called me one rainy Friday evening. It was about a job. A l33t haxx0ring job." The girl then comes in, wearing a red dress. "I knew when I first laid eyes on her that a woman like that could only do two things for a man like me. And they're both orange."
It is about the internet, the end of the world, and ninjas. In a noirish setting.
Anyway, I thought of a good monologue this morning, on my way to get delightful Campbell's soup, which yes, I ate with shredded mozzarella cheese dropped in, after letting the soup cool so that the cheese wouldn't melt. It was chunky and tasty. I thought this up:
"Evolution, schmevolution. Pe Yon-Joon is just a chimp who got lucky. That's all any of us are, Schlotzenfeld -- chimps who got lucky. I want you to remember that, and then think real hard about that question I asked you yesterday, and then I want you to comb your goddamn beautiful hair, and then I want you to tell me: are you in, or are you out?"
THIS ENTRY WILL END SHORTLY
I had a few more things to cover. I was going to type them anew. I will not. I will instead cut and paste something from a comment I made on a girl named January's journal. It's about boobs:
My guitarist Drew and I aren't the type of guys to talk about boobs. The reason for this is because I know I like boobs and he knows he likes boobs. More importantly, I know he likes boobs and he knows I like boobs. When we "talk about" boobs, normally it's in a kind of safety-warning sense. "Look at that." "Look over there." "Check that out." We are usually careful not to express opinion on what the other is about to see. It's a good enough system.
However, sometimes, girls don't like guys that don't talk about boobs. That's why we have been, this year, making a conscious effort to talk more about boobs themselves. This makes us men who are more in touch with manly desires toward women. I don't know if it's working in all the ideal ways. The most we've done -- the closest we've come to movie-level dialogue -- is our invention of something we call the "fifteen-in-twenty rule." This rule states that, for every set of breasts, there is an English noun that fifteen out of twenty English-speaking males will use, without fail. It's interesting, to look at girls, sometimes, and make that silent judgment of what her boobs would be called by fifteen out of twenty males.
BAZOONGAS
BAZOOKAS
KNOCKERS
HOOTERS
TORPEDOES
[MELONS]
ET CETERA
The point of this is to say that, well, certain breast shapes have certain names, names which no one has ever really bothered to categorize anywhere.
Usually, Drew and I speak the answer at the same time. We've never -- never -- differed in our opinions. Therefore, for the most part, the fifteen-in-twenty rule is on its way to becoming a law.
Therefore, I tell you, happy birthday, ma'am, you are the owner of BOOBS.
SO THERE YOU HAVE IT
Kind of.
Here's one more:
I ARRIVED "HOME" LAST NIGHT TO FIND TWO FERARRIS AND A LAMBORGHINI PARKED IN FRONT OF MY APARTMENT BUILDING
I emailed Drew on my cellphone, while I sat on the toilet. It's a good place for emailing with the cellphone, you see.
I said:
When there are two Ferarris and a Lamborghini in front of YOUR apartment building at one in the morning, you know only the BEST child prostitution is going on across the street.
IF I EVER START DIRECTING PORNO FILMS, I'M GOING TO USE THE NAME "ALFRED BITCHCOCK."
I think I might have said that before, a long time ago. I repeat it now, because it is pertinent.
I'm done.
YES, I AM FINISHED. I AM DONE. THERE WILL BE NO MORE OF ME.
As usual, the moral of the story has been "Ask advice of a fool, and eventually someone's going to get punched by a kangaroo."
Brought to you by graham crackers. Graham crackers: as a food, they're light and sweet. As a concept, they make my mouth dry. Good while alone, and probably less good when eaten with your whole family, because I seen those bitches, and they devour shit.
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This entry brought to you by the big spider statue at Roppongi Hills. 
