I've been meaning to pop down the road to bring you a photo of this fine Hyde Park eatery for a while now, then I thought I'd check the web to find out if anyone had had the same idea first. Turns out they had, and on a particularly fine website (if you're a fan of Americana).

ten million pounds of sludge / From New York and New Jersey

Hello again. I'm back from New York and New Jersey (I stayed in Jersey & commuted you see). The fact that I stayed in a very pleasant suburb notwithstanding, Jersey turns out to be just as Springsteen says: a big marsh bisected by a sole highway flanked by factories, containers, a big Ikea and the terrifying-looking Jersey City which has the most depressing skyline this side of Slough (speaking of which, the US version of The Office started last night, but that's another story). I was going to make a pilgrimage to Bruce's hometown of Asbury Park, but it proved to be too far away. Maybe next time.

So: offal. Actually, I passed up the offal in favour of a glorious cassoulet and some ok snails. The "speciality meat" on offer was trotters, you see, and I still haven't gotten over my last attempt at cooking with pigs' feet, when I deboned them in a slapdash fashion whilst drunk and consequently constructed a pie with the texture of the contents of the bowels of hell.

Did a whole bunch of sightseeing, and some sight-not-seeing, when we went up the Empire State Building in the snow and found that we could see literally nothing except cloud enveloped in a mysterious red light emanating from the building.

Bought the collected Charley's War (heads up comics fans), the legendary 2000AD World War I comic strip, which Titan appear to have reissued. This is excellent since it could previously be obtained only for hundreds of pounds in a rare 1980s edition.

What else? A whole bunch of fun stuff about which I can think of nothing entertaining to say. No Avenue Q sadly, because of no tickets, but saw a fine Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? instead. I'm rambling. But I guess that's the point of the site, right?

Well, I'll be off to New York for a week tomorrow, so shan't be updating the blog (I know, you're distraught). New York City's finest offal awaits at Les Halles on Monday night. I'll let you know if it beats my liver and bacon. Have fun while I'm gone!

Do you like liver (etc.)?

It's taken months of practice, but I think I have finally perfected liver and bacon. Here are the key points.

i) Onions -- cooked slowly with the lid on the frying pan so they exude their own oil. No need for fat, minimizing the greasiness of the whole deal.

ii) Calf's liver, not beef. Much tenderer.

iii) Bacon, again cooked in no fat. Then turn the heat right up and cook the liver 2 mins each side in the fat produced by the bacon. Bacon goes on top of the liver so it doesn't burn.

iii) Mash: mashed with my nice new potato ricer so no lumps.

iv) An unexpectedly excellent accompaniment: corn on the cob a la Nando's.

Brilliant.

Hey, it's the 80s

More old-school fun with my film paper, as many of the silent films I've had to watch this week are only available on Laserdisc. Broken Blossoms just isn't the same unless you've had to stop the movie to turn the disc over half way through. Sadly Griffith didn't keep the original title of the story he based Broken Blossoms on for his film, otherwise we'd have a silent classic entitled The Chink and the Child!

Also I watched a really strange Cecil B. deMille film called Male and Female, based on JM Barrie's play The Admirable Crichton. It's about an aristocratic family whose yacht crashes on a South Sea island where they end up establishing an alternative society where their butler is king. A key theme of the story is that aristocratic privilege is based on chance, not merit, in keeping with which there's a lot of quoting of a particular poem that reads:

    Or ever the knightly years were gone
    With the old world to the grave,
    I was a King in Babylon
    And you were a Christian Slave

You get the idea. Not deMille, however. Picture the scene: Crichton, the butler, after two years on the island, finally declares his formerly forbidden love for his employer, Lady Mary, employing the above poem as an example of the arbitrariness of social class. Then, in what I assume is a digression from Barrie's original, deMille cuts to ancient Babylon, where, lo and behold, Crichton is king and Mary is the Christian slave, wearing a bikini and a big feathered hat. After a bit of verbal abuse, Crichton throws Mary to the lions, who eat her. Then we have a bit with some dancing girls. Then cut back to the island and Mary agrees to marry Crichton. Never let it be said that early Hollywood directors ever let considerations of dramatic unity stand in the way of having a bit with dancing girls set in ancient Babylon.

Real Life Onion

This week I have been mainly doing research in old '20s issues of Motion Picture News. This is great, since it affords me the kitsch pleasure of using the microfilm machine. I'd almost forgotten what analogue technology was like! The machines have that wonderful 'space-age' feel to them -- I can pretend I'm driving the Millennium Falcon if the research gets boring!

And, in addition, one can find some excellent funny old stories, that could almost be transplanted directly into The Onion. For example, I found this in an issue from December 1928:

N.Y. Theatre Receipts Slip As Sound Novelty Wears Off

Chain Executive Declares Sound Features Prove Only a "Flash in Pan"

In the Greater New York territory a survey of the box office returns on neighborhood houses made during the last few weeks by chain executives, based on box office returns, shows that the district theatres which have had sound amplification devices installed have by this time again assumed the normal in receipts. [. . .] One of the executives of a circuit covering the Greater City stated openly that he believed that after all was said and done that the sound features were to be only a flash in the pan. His houses with sound installations were right back in receipts to where they were before sound was given to the audiences. In addition he found that sound was keeping a number of patrons from the theatres. This conclusion was reached through a circuit-wide canvass of the patrons that was made by the managers of the patrons leaving the theatre after they had witnessed sound or talking productions.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Why indeed?

Sign on the Hyde Park Union Church this morning: "Historical Jesus. What do we know? Why do we care?"

My Bellowhead EP arrived all the way from Oxford. Am very pleased with it. Can't wait for the album: you kind of feel like they could be a folk band who people actually like. There are no amplified instruments but they have a really huge sound, and great lyrics: "There are lads for the lasses / And toys for the bairns / There are fiddlers and jugglers / And folks with no arms." Good stuff.

My job turns out to be pretty damn boring. I sit in a little room with geeks. We make minor adjustments to these files which then take 15 minutes each to save. Still, I'll have a lot of time to read Chloe's Reginald Hill novels at long last.

Smoke some fags and play some pool

In a weird piece of coincidence-ality, Shatner collaborator Joe Jackson pops us this month in (you'll never guess) What's Brewing with a full-page article on the evils of the anti-smoking lobby. Jackson is convinced that passive smoking is a conspiracy dreamed up by non-smoking "maniacs", backed by the pharmaceutical industry, who "have a vested interest in selling nicotine patches." Besides, Jackson argues, "many bartenders smoke, and [. . .] people are free to choose many much more dangerous occupations" (does Joe Jackson understand how anti-discrimination legislation is supposed to function? anyhow...)

So what's the solution? Apparently, the way forward is through the installation of mega-air-conditioners, everywhere. Some air-cleaning systems are "so good that you really can't tell anyone is smoking." So "why not demand this instead of smoking bans?" Well, most ordinary, non-Shatner-loving, people, might say: "Because it's prohibitively expensive." But they'd be wrong. No, the real reason is because the maniac lobby "doesn't want smokers and non-smokers to relax and socialize together." Oh no. It wants them "turfed out on to the street." You see, "it is not smokers who are a small, selfish minority needing special treatment, but fanatical smoke-haters."

Jackson's not keen on CAMRA's lukewarm support for smoking. "With friends like these," he remarks, "who needs enemies?" Well not you, Joe, not when you've got William Shatner's phone number...