Willie Nelson's (Organic) Spicy Potato and Onion Soup

After handing in my grad school thesis, and while I embark on the Great Hunt for a publisher for Monkeytown, not to mention decent editorial jobs that don't seem to exist anymore, I have a lot of free time on my hands. Most of this is spent pretending to venture out of my cave to hit up the gym and various artistic and cultural NYC destinations, working on my squash game, and playing the role of Aging Creepster at local college bars when there are drink specials. But I also get hungry. And in the spirit of being too frugally cognizant (i.e. broke) to eat out all the time (read: ever) I've spent the past few weeks finding simple, easy, and healthy (NO MORE CRACKDONALD'S!!!) recipes to which I can add my own humble twist. The following addition to the Small Drunken Cookbook is the first in what will hopefully be a short series (because once I get a book deal, I'll finally be able to score an 8:30 res at Dorsia).

Willie Nelson's Potato and Onion Soup is a spiced-up variation of a recipe I recently came across. Its name derives from the fact that with so much free time, I've been living a "green" lifestyle (as in eating healthy, sleeping late, and playing guitar, you weed heads!!), similar to that endorsed by the singer. Flavorful, hearty, and perfect for a cold, rainy spring evening, the soup's preparation is easy and wide open to personal preference, and shouldn't take more than 15-20 minutes to make.

What you'll need:

- skillet (frying pan)
- medium-sized pot
-1 organic diced (into cheese-square size pieces) potato from your local hippie/yuppie market
- 3-4 Tblsp. of diced onions
- 3 strips of turkey bacon
- a nice chunk of your favorite cheese (I prefer aged Gouda or smoked cheddar)
- 3-4 Tblsp. of chives
- at least 2 cups of milk (or soymilk)
- Bob's Red Mill Potato Flour (or any potato flour, or any flour, but potato flour works best)
- 1 Tblsp. of butter or extra slutty olive oil
- salt, black pepper, and ground red pepper
- a few drops of Tabasco sauce (for non-vaginas)

Begin by greasing skillet with butter or oil and start frying the bacon. When it's almost crispy, add the potatoes and onions. Remove the bacon when it's done; add salt, pepper, and red pepper and saute until the potatoes are a bit soft and onions are slightly brown (that's what she said). On a different burner, pour the milk into the pot, remembering to keep the heat at low to medium at all times. Stir in the contents of the skillet, making sure to include the bacon drippings for flavor. Stir in the chives, cheese, and (chopped up) bacon, then the flour for thickness (The amount of milk and flour used is entirely up to you - less flour and more milk for a thinner, traditional soup; more flour for a porridge-like consistency, which is how I like it). Continue stirring, adding more pepper or salt as you like. Cook for about five minutes or until it tastes right. As far as I'm concerned, the spicier the better.

Serves anywhere from 2-4 people, depending on your level of munchies.

Willie Nelson's can stand alone as a meal or late-night snack. I like it with pork chops and apple sauce, or as a prelude to any seafood dish. As with all the Small Drunken recipes, the soup is best enjoyed with a healthy glass of Maker's Mark and your favorite herbal blend. Cheers!

What You Got In That Bag, Girrrl?????

One of my resolutions this year is to try to stay positive and to be more "compassionate", whatever that vaguely defined state of mind means. Besides a few notable lapses, I think I've done a pretty decent job, but women/girls-with-unnecessarily-and-inexplicably-large-handbags, you aren't helping matters at all. In fact, you're making them much, much worse.

As a doorman, my night generally consists of: dealing with rich knuckleheads who NEVER have to wait in line, and continually remind me of this fact as they WAIT in line for an hour; stopping girls from running into the bathroom five at a time to stuff lines up their noses; and endlessly explaining to packs of Italian tourists what "we're at capacity" and "stop singing retarded soccer chants at full volume or I'm throwing you the fuck out" mean. And, yes, all this I can handle. I even catch a few laughs (mostly at the stupid Euros).

But then the inevitable happens. Then it happens again, and again. One, or perhaps several classily dressed (in business cash, maybe a lovely evening dress) ladies will approach the bar, cheerfully oblivious, BlackBerries ablaze, handbags big enough to fit my laundry pile, mouths watering at the prospect of LIKE, A VODKA TONNN-IC!! that is, until I ask the first one for her ID. There's the look of shock, of disbelief, then the eye roll and the angry grunt, like we're THE ONLY BAR IN THE WORLD that cards people. Then comes my favorite part - the lengthy (at least 2-3 minutes) awkward silence while I strain to hold open the door and while the woman shuffles through the numerous contents of her bulging luxury-brand sack, hopelessly flinging around god-knows-what while giving me the same devil stare and while her friends/boyfriend/fuck buddy look on sheepishly until she finally finds the golden ticket buried at the bottom of her treasure stash. She has now wasted a significant chunk of my life (that I could have spent staring at girls who are actually attractive in line), and more importantly her own, and will be too pissed off at me to enjoy her VODKA TONNNIC and her boyfriend probably won't get laid. True story.

Listen, I know it's a lot easier for guys to simply open their wallets for age verification purposes. And I'm not going to ask the obvious (and naive) question, i.e., "Why the fuck do you feel the need to carry such a monstrous load around with you?" I decided a long time ago that whatever stuff women lug around (gum, gym clothes, cell phone with glitter case, walk-of-shame clothes, tampons, various other mystery items) are somehow inextricably and symbiotically linked to the women themselves, sort of like the bionic implants fused to members of the Borg race on Star Trek. Even the most callow rookie knows that to separate a woman from her bag can have disastrous, if not deadly consequences.

All I'm humbly suggesting, ladies, is that before you go out, just put your wallet (or other weird piece of card-carrying luggage) near the top of all the "stuff" in your bag, or at least put your ID in one of the many magical pockets of your accessory where you'll remember it. That will save you a lot of time, provide you with more time for Vodka tonics, and will make every doorman you come across not hate you or hate themselves and their horrible lonely lives even more than they already do. And the last thing you want is an angry doorman Muahahahaha!!... Just kidding - unless you're really attractive, or have other really big, ah, accessories, we'll probably forget all about you and your freakishly large "purse". After a while, you all look the same.


P.S. One of my coworkers told me last night that she read an article that conclusively linked handbag size to sluttiness. Just some food for thought the next time you're on Canal St. about to pick up some knock-off Luis.

Don DeLillo and the Premature Demise of Good (read: Challenging) Prose

As I’m finishing Don DeLillo’s compact (116-page) new book, “Point Omega”, I’m reminded of an old interview he did in the 70s or 80s. In it, he says:

“Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren’t arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don’t really want to be here. This writer is working against the age and so he feels some satisfaction at not being widely read. He is diminished by an audience.”

To me, that really summed up nicely what DeLillo is (unconsciously?) doing with his fifteenth novel, one that I enjoyed massively, and one that won’t be a best-seller, one that’s already been dismissed by a bunch of critics, and one you probably won’t want to read. It’s slow-moving, frequently depressing, there’s only three characters, no real plot, nothing close to what could be considered a resolution at the end. Vaguely centered on the idea of Tipler’s omega point theory, “Point Omega” follows a young filmmaker into the desert where he attempts to film a documentary about a reclusive professor who happens to have worked deep within the Pentagon, advising military officials on the Iraq war. The filmmaker ends up chilling with the professor – Richard Elster – at his house. Eventually Elster’s daughter joins them, and besides one strange missing-person “event” that could be called the climax (Spoiler: Elster’s daughter disappears), that’s it. Nothing else really happens.

The narrative is framed nicely by an anonymous man at a MOMA exhibit that shows the movie Psycho slowed down so that the entire film takes twenty-four hours to run. Upon a closer read, one finds many subtleties between the exhibit and the main thread of the narrative, the three major characters, and the themes of time, death, and special relationships that are discussed – subtly – throughout “Point Omega”. DeLillo creates a world that is – you guessed it – full of mystery, difficult to tackle on several levels, oftentimes obscured by his unique genius. But the thing about DeLillo is that no matter what happens in his books, no matter if you “get” what he’s trying to say and do, no one – and I mean NO ONE – can craft a sentence the way he does. He’s always been criticized for being overstylized, but I think that his style is what separates him from everyone else, and always has; a style that functions almost like another character just waiting to be dissected. Burning and slashing your way through DeLillo’s prose is like eating a five-course Italian meal – it should be savored, consumed until each plate is clean, with the undeniable desire to suck up every last drop of dessert even though your stomach is overstuffed and ready to explode. DeLillo is like the asshole waiter who doesn’t even give enough of a shit about you to re-fill your water glass because he knows you’ll be back for more; you can’t help it. Below are some of my favorite nuggets from “Point Omega”:

"His face was long and florid, flesh drooping slightly at the sides of the jaw. He had a large pocked nose, eyes maybe grayish green, brows flaring. The braided hair should have seemed incongruous but didn't. It wasn't styled in sections but only woven into broad strands a tthe back of the head and it gave him a kind of cultural identity, a flair of distinction, the intellectual as tribal elder."

"It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature is meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story."

“I began to understand what Elster meant when he said that time is blind here. Beyond the local shrubs and cactus, only waves of space, occasional far thunder, the wait for rain, the gaze across the hills to a mountain range that was there yesterday, lost today in lifeless skies.”

With so much of contemporary literature feeling too oversimplified and refined, paragraphs like those give me a reason to get up in the morning and keep me from killing myself when I pass the endless brightly colored rows of James Patterson and Dean Koontz at Barnes & Nobel.

Not to say that there haven’t always been cheap dime-store novels, used exclusively for low-thought entertainment purposes, throw-away pleasures. But it seems to me that back in the day, the biggest best-sellers were usually always literary fiction, books that challenged readers as well as entertained them. Before the mind-numbing, instant-satisfaction era of TV and the Internet, people used to actually enjoy having to mentally work their way through a dense sea of prose in search of the sublime. Having the revelations handed out on a platter just wasn’t as much fun, apparently. It’s refreshing in this literary age – where “writing” insipidly about vampires or wizards is basically the only way to sell a million copies – to see that there are still real writers like DeLillo still putting out challenging, powerful books and not giving a fuck if anyone reads them. In DeLillo’s case, it does help that he probably hasn’t had to worry about money since writing “White Noise” twenty-five years ago. “Underworld” probably helped a little, too, in the get-paid department.

On second thought, maybe I’ll write a story about swamp monsters in England that use magic wands to suck blood out of unsuspecting Japanese tourists, before I get all serious and anti-commercial.