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Waffle House - FFSR
Fast Food, Slow Reviews - Sam's ongoing mission to review all of the USA's fast food establishments, one at a time, over the course of years of trips to the States.
We’ve been before but not done a FFSR so we returned to the notorious breakfast diner joint. It was a bacon, egg and cheese hashbrown bowl for me and an all-star special for Charles (eggs: scrambled, toast: white, waffle: plain, meat: bacon, side: grits with cheese).
I thought the hashbrown bowl could have been better seasoned and the cheese could have been either more plentiful or more powerful. But the bacon was really tasty and was the standout item. The hashbrowns are something I just can’t get at home so it’s always a pleasure. And of course the eggs were cooked just right.
I had some of Charles’s cheesy grits and yum yum yum! Again the cheese left something to be desired but grits have such a wonderful texture. Smooth and creamy but with a little bite in there too. I think I’d like to try adding grits to a Full English back home and see how it works. Maybe include some American diner-style hashbrowns to complete the melange.
Pecan pie was our dessert (which we needed like a hole in the head but when in Rome 🤷🏻♀️). Sara Lee does some fantastic things with sugar. The texture is of molasses or tar or something but with a deep sugary, nutty flavour. And then there’s the candied, crunchy pecans on top. A real treat :)
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Empire of the Sun
It’s good! It’s Spielberg so it’s going to be good. I watched this basically entirely on the premise that it's adapted from a J. G. Ballard book: the last J. G. Ballard book I read was a bit of a trip.
The pacing of The Empire of the Sun was a little weird, it kept going in fits and starts. There’s a big time skip in the middle that I think was the right thing to do. But also a lot of what we would now recognise as tropes that seem a little bit facile.
The kid on the other side of the fence basically just got used as a prop, and multiple props at that. I don’t know what the story was with his stand-in parents, Natasha Richardson and that other bloke. For a little while I thought they were his parents and I couldn’t understand why they weren’t reacting more powerfully to seeing him again.
On the other hand, boy oh boy can Christian Bale act. Seeing his face, already so expressive but so familiar from his adult work, was a real treat. And John Malkovich’s character was terrific as well, always ready with a bon mot. I appreciated that his disappearance in the end actually turned out to be a bit of a blessing: if Jamie had gone with him then I suspect that things would have gone poorly. Davy, the other boy that John Malkovich's character was close to, was nowhere to be seen later on (I think).
Although geographically I just could not figure out how everything hung together, how people showed up or disappeared. I guess that’s just the Magic of Moviemaking (tm)!
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Perfume
by Patrick Süskind
Published 1985 263 pages
When I read Crash last year, I wasn’t prepared for a book grounded in monomania and a lot of what makes it good sailed over my head. No so with Perfume.
Perfume is the story of a little smell goblin called Grenouille born with a preternaturally sensitive nose and his quest to create perfumes so exquisite that they transcend smell and start to verge on mind control. To this end he sinks to some pretty shocking levels of depravity.
Perfume is fun. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s immensely sensual and plot bounces along at a quick clip, Grenouille moving from one master to another as he learns and grows and slowly works towards his plan of using smells to control people.
But Baldini was not content with these products of classic beauty care. It was his ambition to assemble in his shop everything that had a scent or in some fashion contributed to the production of scent. And so in addition to incense pastilles, incense candles, and cords, there were also sundry spices, from anise seeds to zapota seeds, syrups, cordials, and fruit brandies, wines from Cyprus, Málaga, and Corinth, honeys, coffees, teas, candied and dried fruits, figs, bonbons, chocolates, chestnuts, and even pickled capers, cucumbers, and onions, and marinated tuna. Plus perfumed sealing waxes, stationery, lover’s ink scented with attar of roses, writing kits of Spanish leather, penholders of white sandalwood, caskets and chests of cedarwood, potpourris and bowls for flower petals, brass incense holders, crystal flacons and cruses with stoppers of cut amber, scented gloves, handkerchiefs, sewing cushions filled with mace, and musk-sprinkled wallpaper that could fill a room with scent for more than a century.
The whole book is like this.
Eventually Grenouille abandons humanity and achieves godlike powers via the perfume he's created—but finds this brings him no joy, no satisfaction, only utmost despair. Like I said: fun!
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My Brilliant Friend
by Elena Ferrante
Published 2011 331 pages
Photo by Freysteinn G. Jonsson on Unsplash I read My Brilliant Friend on the strength of the no. 1 spot on the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century. I’d heard it mentioned on their podcast, and read later about the mania for Ferrante’s books that emerged from the first English editions of the Neapolitan quartet in the early 2010s.
The book follows two girls as they grow up in a poor neighbourhood in the suburbs of Naples in the 1950s and 60s. Elena, the narrator, is diligent if uninspired; Lila is fiery and full of insight. Elena gets the opportunity to continue her schooling into adolescence, and thrives in the structured environment; Lila leaves school but (at least for a time) pursues an informal education by proxy, often mastering Elena’s subjects before Elena can. The two girls grow apart as they age—Elena investing more in studies and writing, while Lila attracts the (perhaps unwanted) attentions of the neighbourhood boys. By the end of the novel she’s cornered into a marriage she has serious misgivings about.
It’s good—it’s heartbreaking in slow motion. Like in life, there’s no way to look forward to predict the end; but in retrospect the events of a life seem to unfold inevitably to produce the people that Elena and Lila become. Does that make sense? I’m trying to get at something here. Lila ends up worse off than Elena—and that’s not because Lila makes bad decisions or anything—but the things that happen to Elena, and the things that happen to Lila, add up to what their lives become.
Some of the tension of the book—the tension of the friendship between Elena and Lila—comes from their underlying competitiveness, and from Elena’s implicit belief that Lila is somehow better than she is. For much of the book we believe that the eponymous Brilliant Friend is Lila—but late in the book (almost right on queue) we learn that to Lila, the roles are reversed:
She was silent for a while, staring at the water that sparkled in the tub, then [Lila] said, “Whatever happens, you’ll go on studying.”
“Two more years: then I’ll get my diploma and I’m done.”
“No, don’t ever stop: I’ll give you the money, you should keep studying.”
I gave a nervous laugh, then said, “Thanks, but at a certain point school is over.”
“Not for you: you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”
What else? The prose is very comma-heavy, though whether that’s an artefact of the translation or of the original work I’m not sure as I don’t speak Italian.
I had the impression, from the way she used me, from the way she handled Stefano, that she was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being, all her own, that was still obscure to her.
I enjoyed my time with the book, though at no point did I ever really feel compelled by it. Sometimes I struggle to put a book down and read to distraction. Here, I didn't.
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Florian Gadsby makes pottery
A balm for my sour millennial soul: Florian Gadsby (a posh London name to match his posh London accent) makes beautiful handcrafted ceramics, and films much of it. He gently intones over close-ups of pottery wheels, he shoots with extremely short focal lengths, he pans nonchalantly over a shelves of visually-cohesive vases, bowls, mugs, and teapots. He wears French chore coats and heritage leather boots around his meticulously organised studio. At the end of this video, he makes his own tape.
His videos include all of the Millennial Aesthetic Greatest Hits—casual references to time spent in Japan, man buns, an appreciation for fine pens, premium prices, cRaFtSmAnShIp. If someone hit the Gen-Z talking points this well everyone on TikTok would think they were an industry plant. I'm so Here For It.
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