Dispatches from Tanganyika

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Mother of Thousands
I'm pretty sure this is my mystery hitchhiker. I see where one online nursery is selling them for $10 apiece, and mine continually puts out thousands of seedlings (one of its common names is "Mother of Thousands"), most of which I discard. Maybe we should chuck all this writing/cooking nonsense and go into the horticulture business.

(You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think. -- Dorothy Parker)

Common Sawtoothed Tallywhacker
After all the restaurant wank of the past few days, I'd like to offer you a scintillating post about something else entirely, but my mind feels like a worn-out sponge in the sink drain and I'm in one of those why-did-I-ever-quit-being-a-zygote moods. My big achievement for the day was photographing a strange plant I've been trying to ID for months and posting the pictures to

abnormal_plants:

http://community.livejournal.com/abnormal_plants/2008/07/25/

Of course, this being the Internet, I'm a little scared that somebody will respond, "You idiot! That's a perfectly ordinary Common Sawtoothed Tallywhacker. Why don't you noobs do your homework before wasting our bandwidth? KTHXBYE" A small, well-hidden, craven part of me will then remember this and feel shitty and stupid for months every time I look at my interesting plant.

[ETA: Nobody cussed me out or called me a noob yet, and I learned that my plant is some kind of kalanchoe that may produce freakishly beautiful flowers one day.]

To eBay Or Not To eBay
I finally finished the possum-skull "voodoo" doll I've been working on for a couple of weeks now. It's the most detailed and, I think, nicest one I've ever made. However, maddeningly, it still isn't up for auction. While I like most things about my new all-in-one office machine (the Hewlett Packard OfficeJet 6310), its scanner leaves a lot to be desired. When I try to scan the drawings I do in copies of my books, the images often come out streaked with weird stripes of light that aren't present on the actual drawings. As for three-dimensional objects such as the doll, it cannot scan them at all. I know flatbed scanners aren't really meant to scan three-dimensional objects, but my old one did a pretty good job of it, e.g. this Little Blue Heron skull I found on our first post-K trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast:

Obviously, before I sell any more dolls or other hand-crafted items on eBay, I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and spring for a digital camera that can take decent closeups of small objects. My current antique -- a Vivitar Vivicam 3650 I bought in, I think, 2003 -- is remarkably forgiving of my poor photography skills when it comes to taking regular pictures, but its closeups are useless blurs. I know some of you have been waiting to see this doll, and I'm sorry about the delay. I'll try to upgrade my equipment soon.

I did manage to put up some regular book-type auctions: a copy of

greygirlbeast's and my collection Wrong Things; a copy of the Gauntlet Press limited edition of The Lazarus Heart with an original ink drawing by me; a copy of the increasingly rare Con Party of Hotel California chapbook; and a copy of Plastic Jesus. As always, all items are signed and signatures can be personalized. I also added some inventory to my eBay store, including four copies of Alcool (the newly published French edition of Liquor). Please take a look and make a bid (or just buy a book) if you can -- thanks!

[ETA: Since many of you are probably at least as sick of this subject as I am, I'll just say that yes, I know all the comments are gone from the Best of New Orleans thread about Chris' departure, and I'm sure it happened because somebody got his widdle designer briefs in a wad and went crying to management. I don't think it matters one way or the other; as far as we and most of Chris' regular customers are concerned, the Delachaise is toast.]

How We Blow Our Benjamins

It's not loaded. Please don't sic PETA on my ass.

Frankie insisted on the grainy, B/W, assassin-in-the-newspaper filter. He also says his next victim is going to be a certain ferret-faced little social climber who co-owns a trendy Uptown bar and -- in the latest dramatic twist to this increasingly stupid story -- has been telling his wine guys to discourage other restaurants from hiring Chris because of Chris' alleged "unreliability" and "family problems." Of course, the wine guys just grin and nod as one tends to do in the presence of a loony, then call Chris to laugh about it.

Stupid People Suck ... But Do Their Wives Swallow?
I'm thinking of contacting one of the trash TV networks and pitching a reality show called Delachaise Wives. God knows there's enough material there to rot the brain of anyone who enjoys that sort of thing. In the latest development, one of them finds it necessary to pose as an expatriate Delachaise fan who just happens to have meticulously gleaned my blog for material to provide personal insults couched in smarmy fake sympathy. (In a nutshell, I'm a has-been druggie who takes advantage of my poor, stupid readers' generosity and blows money on guns and designer cats while whining about how poor I am. Maybe I'd be less poor if the owners of the Delachaise paid Chris the money they owe him -- or, here's an idea, had paid him what he was worth in the first place instead of using his talent to subsidize their drinking -- but never mind.)

Ah well ... if I was married to an abusive alcoholic whose bar couldn't even make a Top 85 list, I guess maybe I'd want to pretend I lived in Belgium too.

Here's a very simple message for Evan, Trace, Ed, and Joanne. When Chris departed, you told R.J. that you dreaded seeing what I would write about your place. Until the anonymous posts started, I had no intention of saying anything other than that Chris had left. Despite the hundreds of petty roadblocks you threw in his way (e.g. Trace, the Delachaise's nominal "designer," refusing to lay out and print the menus because she and Evan had had a fight), the job was a wonderful opportunity for him and I truly didn't want its aftermath to turn ugly. Believe me, I'd be really fucking happy to never think about any of you yuppie wetbrains again. There are only two (2) things you must do to get me to shut up about you and your place forever. Both of them are things anyone with a modicum of class would already have done without prompting, but since it's you, I'll spell them out:

1. Pay Chris the rest of the money you owe him.

2. Stop making cowardly anonymous posts on food message boards, blogs, etc. in which you pose as impartial customers who just happen to be building up the Delachaise by taking potshots at Chris. If you have something to say about Chris' tenure at your establishment, find the balls to say it under your own name. Even if you had the brains and/or verbal skills to disguise your intentions, you still give yourselves away by saying the same things over and over in posts that purport to be by different people. The major reason Chris left a job he had enjoyed and thrived in is because he couldn't stand to work for stupid people anymore. If you want to make your previous acts of stupidity look like drops of spit in the ocean, then by all means just keep talking.

=================================

GLOSSARY FOR THIS ENTRY, in case the addressees don't have a dictionary handy:

Meticulous (adj): Careful; thorough.

Glean (v): To gather slowly and patiently.

Nominal (adj): In name only; named as a matter of form, rather than due to any actual value.

Modicum (n): A moderate or small quantity.

Tenure (n): Period or term of holding a position.

Spit (n): Fluid produced by the salivary glands; also, what the one cocktail (a bourbon & soda) I ever ordered at the Delachaise tasted like.

Social Dis-ease
Wow, two illuminating (and not necessarily conflicting) quotes on religion in one day. This one is from

nellorat's excellent new entry about an experience, or series of them, from her twenties:

I also emerged convinced not only that there is a G-d, but that I had experienced a meeting of sorts. But being an agnostic seemed more socially acceptable. I only half jokingly wailed to a friend, "Only weak, stupid people believe in God!" And he said the perfect thing: "As weak as Martin Luther, as stupid as Augustine...."

I'm comfortable with friends who are way more religious than I, and comfortable with those have come to their own informed conclusions that the whole religion thing is a load of delusional crapola. But the "socially acceptable" aspect of it -- people who look down on you, or assume that you'll now look down on them, or expect you to be this entire new holy and insufferable person because you have joined a church -- that is a "public" aspect of religion that I find very bizarre indeed. Just as I'd never attempt to inflict my beliefs on anyone, I find it hard to fathom that anyone is bothered by my beliefs. I'm still me. Nobody brainwashed me (well, except myself, if that's how you see these things). I freely admit that the Catholic Church is a deeply fucked-up institution, but I'm not in it for the Pope or the Vatican; I'm in it for the personal comfort and peace I find in the ritual of Mass. Yet there are people who don't like me anymore simply because I am Catholic now. I've been fortunate enough not to hear from many, but it's so strange that there are any at all. And I can't help wondering how many of these same people would find it perfectly acceptable, even downright nifty, if I had chosen instead to be initiated into the hugely Catholic-influenced practice of Voodoo ... because that's, you know, cool. (Just to be clear, no one I know who actually practices Voodoo has expressed or insinuated such feelings. I suspect they'd realize how silly it would be, because Voodoo, especially as it is practiced in New Orleans, is so intertwined with Catholicism that many people -- including the famed priestess Marie Laveau -- have practiced both and seen no conflict.)

ALCOOL
I just read the following quote on (of all places) Letters From Johns, a site where men talk about their experiences with prostitutes, which I happened upon thanks to

susiebrightfeed:

... that line that Anthony Hopkins used in Legends of the Fall ... "Organized religion is for those who have no internal morality compass and need outside assistance."

I haven't seen the movie and have no idea whether this quote is accurate, but -- in my case, anyway -- it's pretty close to the mark.

Au Diable Vauvert's edition of Liquor (titled Alcool) has just been published, and there are interview questions from three French magazines lurking in my e-mail. I tried to get Chris to answer them for me and even offered to pay him, but he wouldn't go for it, that bitch.

Bat Country

Image by

dynomoose.

News From Chef Pete
Update from Chef Pete Vazquez of the late, extremely lamented Marisol on his forthcoming move to Washington, DC, where he will be doing restaurant consulting and security work, as well as a look back at his time spent on the New Orleans food scene. (Don't blame him for the screwy punctuation; this food board seems to be in some kind of format death throes.)

I knew Pete wouldn't be cooking in New Orleans again, and I knew he was planning to move (after all, he's been talking about leaving since I've known him, and he is about the only person who could do that without my offering him an immediate ride to the airport). Still, my heart sank when I read this because I knew it was finally ... well, final. Pete was easily the most talented and interesting chef in pre-K New Orleans. When I say that, I mean absolutely no disrespect to brilliant, creative local chefs like Bob Iacovone, Tory McPhail, or Gerard Maras, but for me, Pete was it. I like to think he would still be cooking here if he and Janis hadn't been royally screwed by their insurance company post-K (if I recall correctly, they were offered something like $4000). I'm not sure, though. I love my city more than almost anything in the world, but I'm not proud of the way Pete was treated here. Marisol was initially well-reviewed by the Times-Picayune, but seldom received much attention from the paper after that. His food was utterly over the head of self-proclaimed local "Dean of Food" Tom Fitzmorris, and in his usual charming manner, Tom went out of his way to insult Pete and Janis on his food forum. Lorin Gaudin gave Marisol excellent coverage in New Orleans Magazine, and kudos to her for it. New Orleans diners, though, tended more toward Tom's view. Marisol had a cadre of extremely loyal customers, but there was also a lot of resentment about Pete's almost total disinterest in New Orleans cuisine, his use of "weird" ingredients such as organ meats, and even the fact that he imported a lot of his seafood instead of using local stuff. I'm a staunch supporter of the Louisiana seafood industry and I think we have some of the best seafood in the world, but I'm also damned glad I got to eat Tasmanian salmon, those huge sweet sea scallops that tasted best raw and thinly sliced with very little adornment, great quivering ruby kaabas of sashimi-grade tuna, and more.

New Orleans is a peculiar city, foodwise as in so many other ways: we're known all over the world as a great dining destination, but in many ways we are also a very provincial and limited restaurant market. The old saw about New Orleans having 500 great restaurants but only ten recipes isn't as true as it used to be, but I think some people wish it were still true.

New Orleans still has plenty of good restaurants and a few excellent ones, but I find that I don't feel nearly as much excitement about dining out now as I did when Marisol was open. The constant sense of fun and adventure, the question of "what on earth will he be doing tonight?", they just aren't there anymore. Chris recently commented that he learned more about food from eating at Marisol than he did from working at any restaurant except Commander's Palace under the late Chef Jamie Shannon. As much as I loved Jamie and still love Commander's, I have to say that Pete taught me more.

So long, dude. I'm deeply sorry on behalf of my hometown that we had a world-class chef like you and worshiped shoemakers like Susan Spicer and John Be$h instead. I'll be hating you for getting to eat Ethiopian food at 4 AM, but if you ever decide to head another kitchen, you have my word that I'll overcome my Nolagoraphobia to come eat there.

I said "head" ...

HA HA HA PLOP
That was the sound of me LAUGHING MY ASS OFF at the fact that the Delachaise, whose owners and their wives (the latter mainly in anonymous posts on local food boards) are often heard loudly proclaiming their joint "not a restaurant but a great bar with great food," was considered notable by the Times-Picayune for the departure of their excellent chef, but did not make the paper's 2008 Bar Guide (85 Great Places to Drink). It's OK, though; not even being among the city's eighty-five (85!) best bars won't prevent them from scratching their balls and getting drunk.

(P.S. The food is still very good at the Delachaise, and I don't mean to discourage anyone from going there to eat. I just don't think it's as great a bar as they think it is. In fact, I think it's easily one of the most annoying bars I've ever been in.)

SHE IS HERE

As are my painkillers. Drugs and guns; hell, all I need now is a few bats buzzbombing me.

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends
I will be receiving a handful of good painkillers tonight, a few more tomorrow or the next day, and a prescription next week. Thanks so much to everyone who has offered aid, succor, and sympathy. When you turn into a pain-crazed whining jackass and people are willing to help you anyway, well, that's when you find out who your real friends are.

A Bunch of Misc. Crap (But With Sex!)
For anyone still interested in the Wikipedia mini-drama, ~~please get therapy~~ I just posted the following message on my entry's discussion page:

After yesterday's tempest in a teapot, I've gone over Wikipedia's guidelines and cannot find anything prohibiting the sort of basic information I've been adding to or correcting in this entry. I've also been advised by a senior Wikipedia administrator that I have done nothing to violate policy. Thus, I don't think Rimbaud 2's "request" is valid, and unless Wikipedia decides to ban me to prevent me from doing so, I will continue editing my entry when and as I wish.

In other news, I can't get an appointment with my orthopedist until July 29. That's what being a loyal patient for 12 years does for you, I guess. No word yet on whether he will call in an emergency prescription without having seen me since February, but I'm betting not. I know some folks wonder how anyone can be "stupid" enough to buy drugs on the street. I'm not considering going back to that -- it compromised my privacy beyond belief; besides, I hardly see any of those people anymore, and good riddance -- but I'm remembering very vividly how and why I allowed myself to be that "stupid."

Most of my dreams lately center around leg pain (I'm never sure if I am actually feeling it in my sleep or just conjuring it up very vividly) and trying to make doctor's appointments. Last night, though, I had a detailed (and, I must admit, extremely hot) sex dream involving a dear male friend, someone I have no business dragging into such dreams. Yes, he is as handsome and charming as they come (so to speak), and we love each other, but that's not what our friendship is about. Besides, I am a happily married man. So fie on that! Away with it! Luckily (I suppose), he is thousands of miles away and not likely to be closer any time soon. (Oh, but that moment in the mall fountain, with the silk blanket ... all right, I'm shutting up now.)

OW OW FUCK (hey, titles were never my strong point)
I've been trying to ignore the fact that both back pain and sciatica are again reaching near-crippling proportions. (It takes an invalid in self-denial, I guess, to ignore the fact that s/he has spent most of the last two weeks in bed popping Tramadol and working the heating pad.)

Thanks to the Bush-era DEA, it's not nearly as easy to find websites selling real painkillers as it used to be. (Tramadol is about the strongest thing I can regularly get online, and while it keeps the sciatica at a dull roar most of the time, it doesn't do a damn thing for these really bad outbreaks.) The mentality behind this, of course, is Protect the Children. I say fuck the children. If you're such an irresponsible parent that you don't notice your kid stealing your credit card number, receiving mysterious FedEx packages, and getting wrecked on Vicodin, you probably don't deserve to have 'em anyway. Me, I'd just like to be able to escape the pain without that extra bonus dose of humiliation I always get at the doctor's office.

But I'm at the point where I'm willing to say "Fuck my dignity" and make the appointment. Then they'll schedule me for sometime next week, if I'm lucky. Then I get to hurt so much between now and then that I won't care if the doctor calls me a talentless hack who plays vampire RPGs and fellates baboons, just so he gives me the damn script.

I hate this country, this Internet, and this body, in no particular order.

Wikipedia Weeniedom
I just received the following message from a Wikipedia administrator (according to the date stamp, it was actually sent back in May, but I don't log into Wikipedia all that often):

You are one of my favorite authors and, as a writer myself, one of my major influences. I noticed in the History page of your entry here that you have been editing it yourself. I've checked over the entry and found nothing really wrong with your edits--so I am assuming that you're not out to make yourself look better or anything. In any case, I request that you please stop editing your own entry. I request this because, not counting the few bad apples that vandalize articles, the majority of users here on Wikipedia aim to create and maintain factual, balanced, and non-biased entries.

This makes wikipedia users such as I leery.

If there is something unaddressed, or if you believe that something is false, please address it on your official website and/or provide a link to an interview or site with the info. That way, us wikipedians can put it in the entry and have a citation for it.

Thank you for your cooperation. And if you ever get the urge to edit your entry again, please refer to this wiki article about the Stephen Colbert and think about the consiquences of your actions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colbert_Report#Wikipedia_references

Yours Truly, Rimbaud 2 (talk) 17:49, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I particularly love this statement:

You editing an entry on yourself makes it unbalanced and biased because, well, your [sic] editing an entry about yourself.

This has to be one of the most bizarre examples of logic I've come across in a while: "X equals Y because, well, X equals Y." I realize the guy was trying to be nice here, but given that he's basically accusing me of making my entry unbalanced and biased, I'd just as soon he had skipped the butt-kissing.

So -- despite the fact that other contributors to my entry, while well-meaning, frequently get their facts wrong, and that I have only edited the entry to correct those facts, update bibliography information, remove occasional vandalism, and once to add a paragraph about my use of recurring characters -- I will no longer be editing my Wikipedia entry. I regret having made the mistake of being honest enough to do so under my own name in the first place.

[ETA: I removed from my entry the paragraph about my use of recurring characters. Obviously, if Wikipedia disagrees with this deletion, they can restore it. As best I can recall, this is the only thing I have contributed to the entry other than small factual corrections (e.g. misspelled titles), bibliography updates, and removal of vandalism. I've asked Wikipedia administration to clarify their policy: Are people forbidden to edit their own entries, or are they merely "strongly discouraged"? Unless expressly forbidden to do so, I will continue to update the entry's bibliography, correct factual errors, and remove vandalism, which seems fairer to the reader than creating a pseudonym or asking someone else to make the changes on my behalf. One administrator referred me to a page explaining why Wikipedia discourages autobiographical entries, but going by these guidelines, I still don't believe my contributions (with the possible exception of the paragraph I removed, though the fact that I write about recurring characters is certainly verifiable) have violated any of their policies.

This is a dull subject and I won't say anything else about it here, but I do regret that Wikipedia chose to handle this matter as they did. In the past, when I've had any reason to tangle with Wikipedia administrators, they were sympathetic and helpful even when I had inadvertently (and stupidly) violated a rule. The communications I've received from them today, while nominally polite, struck me as needlessly condescending, presumptuous, and accusatory, and did nothing to increase my regard for Wikipedia.]

Pssst -- Wanna Buy a Gently Used Rice Cooker?
OK, so it's not a limited-edition book or a voodoo doll*, but given the $1041 vet bill we just received for our oldest cat Boo** (he had to have 14 teeth extracted and has hyperthyroidism), I may soon be selling anything around here that isn't nailed down. Today's unusual eBay item is a Black & Decker 16-cup rice cooker that I've been using for a few years, but aside from the slightly battered original box, it's in excellent condition, and bidding starts at just $5.00!

I do not possess the perfect-rice-making gene and would have a hard time cooking curries, crawfish etouffee, Kung Pao Bullshit (one of my specialties), and other rice-dependent dishes without my rice cooker, but a generous soul gave me the top-of-the-line Zojirushi Fuzzy Logic Rice Cooker I've been coveting for ages as a late birthday present, and I really don't need two.

*I've been hard at work on the possum-skull voodoo doll and will have it up as soon as possible. A lot of work, detail, and nice materials have gone into this one, and I look forward to showing it off at auction.

**That's Marcel in my icon, not Boo, but I only need so many black cat icons. You can have a look at Boo (a.k.a. Boris) on my Cats Page if you like. We found him fourteen years ago on the side of a highway in St. James Parish, a skinny black kitten with shattered hind legs. Both legs healed perfectly, and while he has the curse (it's a curse in our house, anyway) of loving people but hating other cats, he has lived a happy life with us.

Lie At Your Own Risk
At least one anonymous poster who shows every sign of being the wife of one of the Delachaise's owners has been posting erroneous information about Chris and his menu on local food boards and blogs, most notably here, in the comments on a post by the always-excellent Kevin Allman (though I am not sure where Kevin got the idea that the place was called "The Delachaise Hotel").

As I said in these same comments, Chris and I would like for this split to continue amicably, if only because Chris' fine sous chef R.J. Tsarov is now running the Delachaise's kitchen and we want to see him do well. Chris is the sort of person who will take the high road no matter what. I, however, am not, and if people connected with the Delachaise begin spreading needless misinformation about Chris in order to cast themselves in a better light, there are certainly some interesting stories I could tell.

R.I.P. Blackie Campo
Iconic Shell Beach figure, famed marina owner, fishing god, and all-around great man Blackie Campo has died at age 90.

I fell in love with Shell Beach the first time Chris and I drove through it on one of our aimless jaunts through southeast Louisiana, and while I doubt I'll ever live there, I understand why he wanted to take his last breath in that beautiful place. No one loved it or, indeed, symbolized it better than Blackie.

As well as the front-page article I linked to above, Times-Picayune outdoor writer Bob Marshall had an entertaining and informative eulogy for him in today's paper.

I took this picture of Blackie at the dedication of the St. Bernard Parish Katrina memorial on August 29, 2006.

As the pre-K central gathering place and heart of Shell Beach, the marina naturally had to appear in Chapter One of Dead Shrimp Blues, which I swear to Jesus I am going to goddamn well finish one day:

They'd only bought the little fishing camp in Shell Beach a month and a half ago, as a place to escape the demands of their successful New Orleans restaurant yet still be within easy range of the city if those demands suddenly grew pressing. This was just their second stay at the camp. They hadn't installed a TV, so when the National Weather Service broke into Rickey's favorite radio sports show to announce that the tropical storm in the Gulf looked like it was headed for the Louisiana coast and might be a Category Two hurricane by the time it got here, they'd gravitated to Blackie Campo's marina to see the thing on Doppler radar. G-man supposed some of these other people might not have TVs either, but probably they'd been at the marina securing the boats they used to make their livings. Perhaps even more importantly, they had felt the basic human urge to gather in times of stress and fear, to ask each other, "What are you gonna do?", to offer each other hollow reassurances and boasts that didn't -- couldn’t -- mean anything when tested against the impartial forces of nature.

More Goldman
When I made my next-to-last post about the godawful early and much-improved later novels of Willam Goldman, I had yet to read Goldman's very first novel, The Temple of Gold. I haven't finished it yet, and God knows it has its flaws, but what he did right smack in the middle of the novel took a yard of guts and left me with my mouth hanging open in mixed horror at and admiration of his sheer audacity. (Going any further than that would be a major spoiler, but if you've read it, you'll know what I am referring to, and if you do read it, you'll know what I mean when you get there.) I understand why publishing people believed Goldman was going places even if his next couple of efforts didn't live up to this one.

Addendum: eBay
I may make a "voodoo" doll soon, too. I've got a possum skull and the urge. Watch this space.