Scowl, Nu?

Every time I see a new series on HBO, I have to replace my old favorite show with a new one. Larry Sanders was pretty good, and I really, really like Arli$$ and Dennis Miller Live and Tracey Takes On and Oz, and I lo-o-ove Sex And the City, but The Sopranos….oh! The Sopranos is by far the very, very best of them all. This show keeps me on the edge of my seat for the entire 45 minutes, nay, for the entire rest of the week while I wait for a new episode. You must watch. It has a lot of violence and swearing, it being a show about the Mafia and all, but that's what makes it so good, and why HBO will always have the best, closest-to-real-life, people-actually-do-these-things shows on television. 

Janet and I made a quick stop into Mollie Stone's Market this afternoon.

Back when we used to go to Gorilla Sports (a gym in San Francisco), we used to go to Grand Central Market on our way home. We had a real love/hate relationship with Grand Central… the meat was some of the best in the city, and the deli was fantastic… but the shelves were cluttered and the aisles were really small. Add a bunch of blonde-hair-in-a-ponytail yuppie girls and the stress level outweighed the great selection of meat and fish.

This afternoon we were coming back from a baby shower near Grand Central and we decided to stop in to see how the renovations went. About 8 months ago, Mollie Stone's bought out Grand Central. Mollie Stone's is a gourmet food store chain that is known for its selection of cheeses and meats. It also is the only grocery store chain that carries Empire Kosher poultry. However, up until the purchase of Grand Central, there were no Mollie Stone's in the area.

Boy, what a change. The new market is bright, where the old Grand Central was dark and dingy. The meat selection is the same, as is the fish selection. The deli is a little different… but overall… wow. The produce is amazing and the new layout has larger aisles and a better selection of general foodstuffs.

What floored me was the beer selection. Anchor Small Beer! Anderson Valley Boont in 22 oz bottles! Oh my god… is it true? A bottle of Lagunitas Brown Shugga?!?

Now it's 10 pm, I have what might be the last bottle of Brown Shugga available anywhere in the city in my fridge and now I have a new favorite grocery store.

Because I've been having such crappy days at work, what with my entire hard drive UP and DYING, Avery told me that he had a gotten surprise for me. When I opened the cleverly-wrapped box (it was wrapped in an old Celebrator Beer News) I found a new game for the Playstation: Time Crisis (plus Guncon, which is "the most accurate gun ever for the Playstation game console!" so says the box.) At the time, low blood sugar coupled with that "I just got home from work after a long and trying week" feeling rendered me more or less apathetic, but my curiosity eventually got the best of me and I started playing. And playing. And playing. I love shooting games best of all, especially when you get to use an actual plastic gun. As a matter of fact, now that my fingers and neck seem to have unclenched since the last round of killing bad guys, I think I'll go play some more. Talk about stress relief! I'll play this one until I'm crippled, by god!

Friday night, Carlos and I decided to make our regular pilgrimage to Speakeasy Brewery to visit Forest (the President of the Brewery) and just hang out and have a couple of beers. Janet and Ian were supposed to make it, but Ian was feeling sick and Janet was stuck on Jury Duty. Too bad. Regardless, we made our way through the rush hour traffic and headed south to Mecca, which in this case is located at 3rd and Bancroft (near Candlestick Park).

We spent a good three hours drinking and talking with Forest. It's nice going to the brewery… we get to taste the beers when they are perfectly fresh (and perfectly stored). On top of that, we get to try all of the beers… even beers that are hard to find in our neighborhood bars.

Speakeasy Brews five beers, all of them impressive and some of them being the best in their class!

Prohibition Ale – The first beer that Speakeasy brewed. It's unique… both malty and hoppy. It has a wide flavor (meaning that it really fills your mouth with flavor), even wider than the Anderson Valley's beers.. which are pretty damn wide! It's called both an Amber Ale and an IPA… but whatever you call it, it's amazing. Prohibition won the Bronze at the World Beer Cup in 1998.

SF Common Beer – Designed as a "First Micro" for people not used to Microbrewed beers. It's not that outstanding, but it wasn't intended to be. It's the sort of beer that people order by the pitcher at pizza joints (where it sells very well). Still, I like it… and though I never see it on tap where I drink/eat, I make sure to have a couple of pints when at Speakeasy.

Untouchable – A Marzen (Oktoberfest) beer with the malt content pumped up to an outrageous level. My favorite beer… and the reason that I'm building a keg fridge in the apartment.

Satchmo Stout – A great stout that's extremely hoppy. It's not a mild stout like Guinness… no sir-ree! It's a strong dark, hoppy beer that's reminiscent of Lagunitas' Imperial Stout. It's like drinking an alcoholic espresso… hoppy, roasted with a light liquor taste Not an everyday drink for me… but it's certainly an occasional treat!

White Lightning – It's somewhere between a witbeer (light and sweet with a hint of curacao orange peel) and an Berliner Weisse (a sour-as-hell beer, so sour that it usually needs a shot of raspberry or woodruff syrup to cut the sour taste.) The result: a great beer, perfect to drink when you're in the park on a nice warm summer day.

Before Carlos and I grabbed a cab back to my neighborhood to meet up with Janet for dinner, we would consume an uncountable number of half-pints of Speakeasy beer while listening to stories of scuba diving and Carlos' trip to Cuba as we listened to Metallica. If you live in the Bay Area and see it on tap, make sure to try a pint. And if they don't have it on tap… tell 'em to talk to the Speakeasy Mobsters and order up a keg!

I wasn't feeling very well when I woke up this morning. At first, I thought it was because the radiator was on all night, making it extremely dry… and when I sleep in a dry climate, my throat gets all raw. So, I had a couple glasses of water and headed into the office, figuring that once I fully woke up and had some juice, I would feel better.

However, one three-dollar bottle of Odwalla juice, a banana and a bottle of water later, I was still feeling sick. My stomach was acting up, my throat was really raw and I was just feeling sort of lethargic. When 4pm came around, I knew I just had to get home and get some sleep.

One of my favorite things to do when I'm sick is sit in bed reading comics and drinking tea. Yeah, you heard me right… comics, as in Comic Books. Now before any of you start getting all high-and-mighty because I read comic books, let me give you a little history.

When I was a kid, all of my friends collected comics. Sure, what we collected was pretty standard stuff: X-Men, Superman, Star Wars and some other superhero comic stuff. But then again, I also had my secret collection of comics hidden where my mother couldn't find them.

These were my favorite comics… copies of Zap and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and a couple issues of Raw. They were underground comics… black and white pictures poorly printed onto bad newsprint paper, and I cherished every one of them (even though I didn't really understand what was going on in most of them). I found these comics from Rip Off Press had something more real about them… something that I didn't find in the four-color advertisement-filled comics from Marvel and DC.

My father introduced me to underground comics when I was a little kid. Instead of buying me copies of Spider Man and Batman, he would bring me copies of Fat Freddy's Cat, the obvious inspiration for Garfield and Bloom County's Bill the Cat. Yeah, they were a little racy… Fat Freddy's Cat had testicles and would eat Freddy's stash… but the humor was raw, and extremely funny. Even now I still have an original copy of R. Crumb's Zap Comics #0, which my father sold in his head shop before I was born. My favorite, however Raw comics: an oversized magazine which collected some of the best comics I had ever seen.

As I got older, I would go to the Trading Post in Canton, CT to get my comics. There, I would not only get my copies of X-Men and stuff like that, but the owner would also get me the latest copies of the underground comics I so loved. They knew my tastes at the Trading Post, and I would always find a surprise in my box… an international comic they got their hands on, or a reprint of an old copy of Zap. Even though I was underage, they knew it was OK with my father, and they enjoyed watching my face when I would go through the weekly subscriptions and find a copy of Boris the Bear or Flaming Carrot or the latest copy of the Freak Brothers slipped in with my normal order.

Unfortunately, when I turned 15, I stopped collecting comics… so I boxed everything up and gave it to my mother to put into storage (except for the underground comics, which I have taken with me wherever I have lived).

When I was living in Boston about 6 years ago, I was browsing the discount rack at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge and came across a copy of Maus, the pulitzer prize winning graphic novel (an oversized comic book) about the Holocaust. I had never been so shaken in my life. The story, the images… I had nightmares for days after finishing Book One, and I realized that this is where underground comics had gone. Art Spiegelman, the founder of Raw Magazine, had written something so powerful… and he had done it in a medium that never before had the respect of the academic community. Maus is now a required text in many high schools and colleges.

When Janet and I moved to San Francisco, our work schedules were out of synch… which left me with a lot of time on my hands. So, I went out and found a comic shop near the apartment and picked up a couple of comics (including Grant Morrison's cult classic: Kill Your Boyfriend)… then our schedules were re-synched and I never went back.

A few years ago, a friend at the office, Carlos, gave me a copy of Kyle Baker's Why I Hate Saturn. This was an underground comic… but now they were just called "Small Press Published" comics. I read it and re-read it. The next day, I went back to Comix Experience and picked up a copy of my very own. A few weeks later, Janet and I got a subscription box.

Janet and I now subscribe to about 15 comics on a monthly basis. Almost all of them are from either Slave Labor Graphics [Action Girl, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Lenore, Squee, Milk & Cheese and Dork] or Fantagraphics [Eightball]. We also get a number of small press comics like Optic Nerve from Drawn & Quarterly and the Jay & Silent Bob series from ONI press. The closest thing to a big-label comic that I get is from Dark Horse, which publishes the Star Wars line of comics.

Ok, I do get some superhero comics and some comics from DC's Vertigo and WildStorm divisions… but they are all created by my favorite writer: Warren Ellis. Ellis writes the seminal work Transmetropolitan. He also writes Hellblazer and the now defunct StormWatch.

Anyway, this afternoon, I decided that I should just pick up this week's selection at Comix Experience, so I could just come home and read and drink tea. When I walked in, almost all of the staff was there… and they greeted me by name. Ok, they greeted me by my last name… because that's the name on our box. I grabbed this weeks selections (a Star Wars comic, PULP and Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan). They were all giddy, so I asked what was going on. Larry just gave me a shot of Jack Daniels in a Hellblazer shot glass. I asked what the occasion was, and he said "It's Thursday." Hell, who am I to argue with that sort of logic? So, I drank my shot, paid for my comics and started the 4 block walk home.

The moral of this story: comics and tea might be good for a cold, but comics and whisky are much better. By the time I got home, my throat was feeling almost fine, and the fatigue that had been plaguing me all day was gone. Thank god for the comic shop!

I present Highlights of Our Gastronomical Tour of New York, Part Two:

Next door to H & H Bagels in the Upper West Side is Zabar's. Zabar's, a Jewish gourmet food store which started out as a little Jewish deli way back when, also had a line out the door. Once inside, all we could do was shuffle through the store amidst all the old ladies in fur coats. Like a way less yuppie, more Jewish version of Dean & DeLuca, there were acres of cheese, olives, rugelach, coffee beans, meats, baked salmon, lox and the best damn crusty rye bread I have ever had. Though many people might think "Oh, San Francisco! So open! So diverse!" that is hardly the case. Being in places like Zabar's and the Crown Supermarket in West Hartford, CT (where I could have shed a lone, happy tear when I saw that they sold things like chicken schmaltz to make chopped liver, chicken bones to make real chicken soup, and Hanukkah presents) is so refreshing after being in homogeneous, sprout-happy SF where Jewish people often pretend that they're not, and the city's exactly two so-called Jewish delis put lettuce and tomato on the corned beef sandwiches.

Our last stop in the Upper West Side was a place called Barney Greengrass: The Sturgeon King. One of Avery's co-workers suggested that we stop in here if we wanted a great plate of eggs, lox and onions. The way he described the place, it sounded like a four-star restaurant…imagine our surprise when we walked into a modest fish shop connected to a small, crowded cash-only dining room complete with Formica tables and paper napkins. We had to share a table with another couple since it was so busy, but all in all, the food was great (I had an egg salad on Pumpernickel that was to die for, and Avery had the salty lox, onions and eggs) and the atmosphere was very relaxing. The couple at our table looked like a grandfather having lunch with his grown-up granddaughter, and as they finished and talked about going for a walk outside on that windy, sunny New York afternoon, I really started to miss the East Coast. There's just something about it that feels so familiar to us.

Since we're on the topic of food, after eight years of marriage, Avery and I just bought our first real piece of kitchenware together. It's so shiny, this Williams-Sonoma pot, so big and shiny, with a steamer and pasta cooker/strainer built right in. After using flimsy $9.99 K-Mart pot-and-pan sets and hand-me-down RevereWare for all these years, it's a treat to use real cookware. It took going to three Williams-Sonomas in town to find it in stock, so for all our troubles we also got a Mexican lime squeezer. As we looked at all the gadgets, I pondered why I always feel the urge to buy things like, say, a honey dripper, when I never, ever eat any honey.