General Cinema Eastgate Torn Down

We were driving back from Bloomington this afternoon, going north on Shadeland Avenue, when the old General Cinema Eastgate stomping grounds came into view. For over forty years, the relatively small building at the south end of the Eastgate Consumer Mall property has been clearly visible going in both directions on both Shadeland Avenue and Washington Street.

It opened in 1974 as a 2-screen theatre, and then four more screens were grafted onto the building twelve or thirteen years later. When it re-opened as a 6-screen theatre in 1986 or 1987, it was one of the premiere movie theatres in Indianapolis. That lasted for all of about seven years, until the enormous new Clearwater Crossing 12 opened in 1993. Eastgate soldiered on for another ten years, enduring the encroachment of Kerasotes Theatres and the assimilation of General Cinema by Another Major Competitor, before the latter shuttered it in early 2004. (Kerasotes was also eventually assimilated by Another Major Competitor.)

Today, the theatre building was torn down. This was what I saw when we passed it on our way back from Bloomington.

This is the view of the building from the south. The rusted doors are the exit doors behind the screen in Cinema 3. What is already demolished in the right half of the picture includes Cinemas 1 and 2 (the original two screens from the 1974 opening), the lobby, and Cinemas 5 and 6.

After we got home, I drove back to the theatre with my camera. IMPD has used the old mall space as an operations center and east district headquarters for several years now, and they built a perimeter around most of the area, restricting public access. I hadn't driven by in years, so I didn't know that the perimeter doesn't quite extend to the theatre property. I was able to drive up to what would have been the front curb, had the exterior not already been destroyed. One of the guys on the demolition crew gave me leave to stay and take pictures, so I did.

Another view from the south. Note the exit doors on the grass to the right. Those would be the exit doors from the front of Cinema 1 or Cinema 2. The lower wall, center left of image, was, I think, one of the walls in Cinema 2.

Had you been in Cinema 1 and used those exit doors in the previous picture, you would have come out into the world slightly underground. These are the stairs you would have climbed to get back up to the parking lot.

The speakers hanging on the wall in the next picture are stereo surround speakers that were installed in Cinemas 5 and 6 in 1997. That year, we upgraded Cinemas 2 and 3 from stereo surround sound to DTS Digital, Cinema 4 from stereo surround sound to SDDS Digital, and Cinemas 5 and 6 from mono to stereo surround sound.

Remember the red screen lights?

I'm going to try to go back tomorrow to see if I can get some more shots. I took these pictures at around 7:15pm, so I can't imagine that they would have finished the job today. They certainly will not have carted all the debris away, so I'm sure I'll get some kind of pictures tomorrow - assuming I can still get this close.

Deep Thoughts #115

Walking along the Cultural Trail today, in front of the IRT, I’m pretty sure I heard someone refer to it as the Indiana Respiratory Theatre.

Deep Thoughts #114

Would you believe that someone who stated, for the public record, that church attendance should be mandatory, was a Republican from Arizona?

Deep Thoughts #113

When lead is pronounced with a short-E, it’s a heavy metal - not the past tense of the verb describing what a leader does. That word is led.

I've Taken My Bows...And My Curtain Calls

Beginning Our Fifth Month of Winter

According to the National Weather Service, Saturday night's winter storm set an Indianapolis record for snowfall on March 1st, and eclipsed the average monthly snowfall total for March by 5am.

NWS #Indy now up to 7.8" storm total #snow. 5.8" since midnight sets the new #record for #March 1st. Previous record 5.5 in 1963. #INwx

— NWS Indianapolis (@NWSIndianapolis) March 1, 2015

#Indy surpassed the average March snowfall in the first 5 hrs of the month. March avg 2.6", we've seen 3.1" since 12AM. #INwx #snowdoinwork

— NWS Indianapolis (@NWSIndianapolis) March 1, 2015

And while this winter has not been as bad as the one in Boston, where they have had more than double the amount of snowfall we had last winter (which set a record here), we did manage to record the third coldest February on record; and I believe they said we recorded the seventh coldest November on record. November is not part of astronomical or meteorological winter, but we had snow on Halloween, and it was so cold that we had to cut trick-or-treating short.

Jackson had fun with it, though:

I can't stand being cooped up in the house all day, but no one wanted to go for a walk with me, so I had to strike out on my own after we took care of shoveling the driveway and sidewalk and front steps. What's cool about taking a walk on a day like this is that you get to see things from a different perspective. I went downtown, parked near the canal, got a cup of coffee at Mo'Joe, and then hit the Canal Walk. Normally this is a heavily populated multi-use path for walkers, joggers, bikers, skaters - you name it. (It's also part of the Cultural Trail, so it always gets plowed after fresh snow.) But today it was deserted, and a little bit eerie - but that was kind of cool, because you never see it that way.

It's been so cold this month that some parts of the canal have frozen solid, which allowed some enterprising architect(s) to create this:

And last but not least, you never see the mastodonts at the State Museum covered in snow, either.

Deep Thoughts #112 - Special Topical Nattily-Clad Edition

Yes, the snowiest February in the long, proud history of snowy Boston is, in fact, punishment because the recidivist Patriots cheated again.

Fifty Shades of Fault Done Gone, Girl

I'm eating lunch, or what passes for lunch, at the old juke joint this afternoon (technically yesterday), and looking for things to read out there on the magic internets. From one of the recent entries on the Paris Review's blog, I come to an article posted by the Guardian, about the Sydney Writers' Festival*. Apparently the Guardian did a live-blog of the festival (the 2014 edition), so I start scrolling through the entries to see if anything catches my eye—and what does the trick is an embedded tweet by someone called Courtney Robinson, who said, "Hey poetry slammers, that wasn't guerrilla or contrarian, it was fucking rude.” (Turns out I can’t go back that far in her Twitter feed to embed this one.)

Now, two things about that tweet. First, no tiny URL getting in the way of the thought and breaking up the rhythm. Second, take a look at what I quoted (or embedded, if I can manage to make that nubbin of technology work for me) and contrast what this tweet both contains and does not contain, with what the vast majority of other tweets do and do not contain. This one contains no numerals standing in for words. It contains no abbreivated words. It does contain a single thought, expressed in one—complete!—sentence, with correct punctuation.

Oh, and the F-bomb, too. Can't forget that. That's the interesting part. Take out the F-bomb, all you have is a tweet complaining about something the writer thought was rude. Is the writer being rude right back to the people by whom she was affronted? Sure she is. Is that being fair? Hey, who the fuck am I to judge? Her F-bomb emphasizes the degree to which she felt the poetry slammers were being rude, and, provocatively, encourages them to reevaluate their behavior in light of the way it made other people feel.

Not that the poetry slammers probably received any of those signals, but I digress in order to point out why I thought the F-bomb was interesting and not just a bit of profanity used in a gratuitous way; and it did another part of its job too, making me interested in what else the tweeter (Twitterer?) had to say. I click over to her Twitter page, and the most recent tweet says, in extra-large letters, "All aboard the lube mobile." Below the words is a picture of some kind of service van, taken by a photographer in traffic a bit behind the van. Below the words LUBE MOBILE is an illustration of a hand holding a wrench. It's probably safe to assume that this is some sort of automobile maintenance or repair service.

But the name of the service can be read in a dirty way, and I appreciate it when people allow their minds to work that way, both because of the tongue-in-cheek humor and because of the willingness to acknowledge sexuality. And yet that still isn't even the main point of this meandering post. (Although a secondary point is that this is another one of those instances where one random link leads to another and then ultimately points me at something interesting that I would not otherwise have encountered.)

That main point would be the tweet immediately following the one about the lube mobile. (Admit that you're laughing about the lube mobile. Even if you won't laugh out loud, or admit it to anyone else—admit it to yourself. Do I really need to paint you a picture of what's going on in the back of that van, after hours?) That tweet, which is slightly less elegant than the one addressed to the poetry slammers, reads, "I can't decide whether to read Fifty Shades of Grey or not, to hate read/ or just more deeply assess pop culture. Thoughts?”

I can't decide whether to read Fifty Shades Of Grey or not, to hate read/ or just more deeply assess pop culture. Thoughts?

— Courtney Robinson (@courtney_ro) February 7, 2015

This may be the first time in my life that I have ever wanted to respond to a tweet and then actually considered signing up for the service just to be able to do so; and though I did not do that, I do have thoughts, because I am in something of the same boat. Over the past year, we have played Gone Girl and The Fault in Our Stars, and beginning this coming Thursday, we will be playing Fifty Shades of Grey. The novels that spawned these films are three of the most popular novels of the last three years. Without having read any of the books or seen any of the movies, I have developed strong feelings of distaste for them.

This is mostly due to the fact that they are all wide release films that have no business playing at an art house—even a fake art house like the one to which I sell my labor for a pittance. Part of the dislike for Gone Girl is because it contains Ben Affleck, someone whose acting skills I find lacking. Part of the dislike for The Fault in Our Stars is because John Green and his entourage elected to rent one of our auditoriums for a friends and family screening of the film before it opened in Indianapolis. Though I suspect that many of his sycophantic followers would doubt the veracity of this claim, the following is true: John Green is not Jesus. And word around the campfire is that author E.L. James was difficult to work with during the making of Fifty Shades of Grey, which is a novel that started life online as Twilight fan fiction and supposedly contains quite a lot of bondage porn wrapped in what everyone I have talked to who has read it has described as really bad prose.

So what’s to like? I know that Gone Girl is a Missing Wife Thriller with lots of Shyamalan-esque twists, and I have read intimations that the prose is not especially literary. The Fault in Our Stars is a YA tearjerker, and if the novel is anything like the film, the ending is a soft, fluffy cheat—though perhaps not an unexpected one, given the point of view from which the story is told. Of the three, it’s the one I think is least likely to be terrible, and I’ve been trying to convince myself to buckle down and read them all, so that I can find out whether or not my hating on them is indeed valid.

And I’m open to all three, on their merits, regardless of what I have heard going in. If anything, the fact that I have the lowest possible expectations for all three novels greatly increases the chances that I will like all of them more than I thought possible before I began. I read Twilight in the same spirit, and came away from it with a firm confirmation that the prose is quite bad. On the other hand, Stephenie Meyer does have a solid grasp on pacing, and the story was interesting enough to keep the pages turning at a brisk clip. If I read these other three novels and find that any of them contains some hidden quality I hadn’t remotely expected to encounter, I will have no problem acknowledging that.

Based on the first two thirds of Gone Girl, however, I am fairly sure that I will have nothing to acknowledge about that novel. The problem, however, is not so much with the prose as with the fact that the two main characters, Nick Dunne and his wife Amy (the gone girl), simply aren’t very sympathetic characters. Amy, in particular, is a despicable human being. There are plot twists galore, which is mostly the point, and those twists keep the pages turning; but I’m not rooting for either of them, and in a book like this, if the prose doesn’t keep you hooked, and you don’t care about the characters, then all the plot twists in the world are just special effects. And because it relies so heavily on twists and misdirection, I am certain that it will be basically unreadable a second time. Once you know what happens, all you have left is 500 pages of post-internet vernacular that is, I think, as non-lyrical as it is possible for prose to be.

Reading The Da Vinci Code was a similar experience. I thoroughly enjoyed that novel the first time around, but once all the plot mechanics were laid bare, a second reading revealed that, for all of his talent at doing research and assembling the elements of a good yarn, Dan Brown simply isn’t a very good writer. The book wasn’t bad, but it doesn’t stand up to a second reading because it has nothing left to reveal of itself apart from an unstable foundation. I think that great books need to stand up to second and third and fourth and fifth readings, that they need always to reveal new things each time you read them.

Gone Girl does not pass muster in that regard, and I suspect the same will be true of Fifty Shades of Grey and The Fault in Our Stars. Remember that tweet I mentioned, many paragraphs ago? Courtney Robinson couldn’t decide whether or not to read Fifty Shades of Grey as something to hate read or as a way to gain further insight into current popular culture. I’m not going into any of these books hoping to hate them. Just because I suspect they are whatever negative thing I think they will be doesn’t mean that I want them to be. My purpose is probably more along the lines of the gaining further insight into popular culture idea (though it is true that I am not expecting any of them to fill me with pride at the current state of popular culture in this fading republic).

Either way, my thoughts on her question ran quite a bit longer than 140 characters, so it wouldn’t have done me any good to sign up for Twitter after all.

*—After I finished this post, I went back to add the code for the links, and I realized that the path from the Paris Review blog to the Courtney Robinson tweet was more protacted than I remembered. This is the post on the Paris Review blog. The link in the second bullet point led to this article posted by the Guardian, which had a link to this story at the bottom of the page. At the bottom of that page was this link to the story about the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and about halfway down that page was the Courtney Robinson tweet to the poetry slammers, which led me in turn to the tweet about Fifty Shades of Grey on her Twitter page.

Mimi Blue Meatballs

Amy fed Jackson this past Sunday afternoon at a church luncheon, so that she and I could decide on a place to eat lunch for ourselves without having to take into consideration whether or not chicken fingers would be on the menu; and then she suggested Mimi Blue Meatballs, a new meatball restaurant that opened last week in the 800 block of Mass Ave, a block that used to sit somewhat apart from the rest of the avenue, with its mixed bag of utilitarian city buildings, a smattering of art galleries, and, all the way at the end, just before it curves away to 10th Street, the R Bistro restaurant. All of those things are still there, but they have been joined by Black Market, Indy Reads Books, The Best Chocolate in Town, Homespun, Natural Born Juicers, and a relocated Yats, among other places of business that have emerged in recent years.

Thanks to the Cultural Trail, this block of Mass Ave is no longer a dead end, but rather both a destination and a throughway: the Cultural Trail connects with the Monon Trail if you follow that curve around to 10th Street. From there you can take the Monon Trail all the way up to Carmel, if you’re that adventurous. (It becomes the Monon Greenway once you cross into Hamilton County. Those folks take pretension to a whole new level.) R Bistro and Black Market are widely regarded as two of the finest restaurants in the city, and Indy Reads Books might be the city’s best bookstore. And holy computer coincidences, Batman! Indianapolis Monthly posted an article about that end of Mass Ave on their website last week.

And now we have a meatball restaurant. Just how much can you do with meatballs? you might well be inclined to ask. They make a heck of a sandwich, or an add-on to a pasta dish—but we’ve got sub shops and Italian restuarants seemingly every fifty yards around here. I suppose the first thing to do would be to set the tone, so the only place on the menu where you see the word meatballs is in the restaurant’s name at the top. The rest of the time, their signature foodstuff is referred to as—wait for it—balls. Sometimes they’re served with a loaf, which would just be called bread at someplace less elegant and refined.

Don’t get me (entirely) wrong. I like some good toilet humor as much as the next juvenile, but I feel like they’re not even winking at you here. You use a marker on the menu to indicate which balls you want to put in your mouth (sorry—see what I mean?), but then they plop the whole thing down in a room that’s supposed to look fancy (reportedly 1940s-era New York City) and hit you with cloth napkins and two differently sized forks. Oh, and there’s a television mounted in the corner, so you don’t miss any of the game.

Now for some of the disclaimers. We don’t usually get to restaurants this soon after they have opened, and even though I’m not in the biz, I know enough about the biz to know that new restaurants are rarely firing on all cylinders right out of the gate. I’ve read more than one review that attempts to evaluate a new eatery based on the potential demonstrated by what is on offer during the first few weeks it’s open. (I don’t know if there is a term for it in the restaurant industry—in theatre, they call it previews. It doesn’t work exactly the same way with restaurants as it does with stage productions, but the idea is similar.)

We were told that the entire menu would be available eventually, but for now, the 4-Baller was not, due to the kitchen had to get used to the basic menu first. That seemed odd. The menu consists of four things. 1) Balls - This is three of the same meatball served with one sauce, with bread on the side; 2) 4-Baller - This is your choice of four meatballs with your choice of sauces, with bread on the side; 3) Sliders - This is one meatball, one sauce, one Brioche bun; and 4) Sandwiches - This is three of the same meatball, with one sauce, served inside the bread that was on the side in numbers 1 and 2 above. Also, they put cheese on it.

The same five meatballs are available for each item, along with the same five sauces. It's not like they had to learn new meatballs for the 4-Baller or anything—and it's not like this is rocket science to begin with. They're dealing in meatballs and bread, with a few sides. You know they're making big batches of each sauce during prep each day; and even if they're hand-rolling each meatball during service (from meat mixtures made during prep), a four-meatball combination should not be so complicated that they can't serve it until the kitchen gets the hang of everything else.

Mimi Blue Meatballs has a neighbor just a few doors down, the aforementioned R Bistro, that serves a brand-new menu every week. There are other restuarants around the city, including Recess, Bluebeard, and Late Harvest Kitchen, that come up with a new menu Every. Single. Day. But you know what the odd thing is? I liked Mimi Blue Meatballs way more than it sounds like I did from what I have written here. I told myself I was going to try to be nice, that I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt for having just opened all of five days before we visited; but the more I work on this, the more it settles in that they punted on fully 25% of their menu.

But enough about that. Let’s see if I can focus on the 75% of the menu that was available long enough to give you some idea of what I thought of what I actually got to eat. We each started with the Market Greens salad from the Sides menu, and it’s exactly what it sounds like— mixed greens with a few slices of grape tomato and some crumbles of mild blue cheese, and your choice of sweet or balsamic vinaigrette. This was an excellent beginning—fresh, earthy greens that tasted like they might well have come out of the ground that morning; sweet, flavorful grape tomatoes; and just enough herb-y vinaigrette to dress the salad without drowning it.

The only downside—I guess you must have seen this coming, right?—was that it was all over way too quickly, a fairly skimpy portion for the $5 à la carte price. The sliders, too, were perhaps a tad gaunt for the $3 cover charge. I went for a Classic meatball slider with garlic cream sauce, and a Vegetarian meatball slider with mushroom gravy. Each meatball is about the size of a billiard ball, and they are perched so precariously inside the brioche buns that a toothpick is required to keep the thing together; and each had both too much and too little sauce. There was too much sauce to pick the thing up and eat it like a sandwich, and too little to get much of an idea of the sauce’s flavor.

The meatballs, on the other hand, were something on the order of flavor bombs. The Classic tasted, well…like a classic meatball—a mixture of meats and seasonings so perfectly balanced that it just tastes…like a meatball. The vegetarian was not much like a meatball, except in shape—but didn’t disappoint. I have to go back to that Star article for a description of its contents, however, since the menu is as short on descriptions as it is possible to be: peas, carrots, corn, ginger, garlic, cumin, cayenne, lemon, mashed potatoes, and hash browns—and then deep fried, rather than pan fried. Those flavors all blended together too, though the cumin stood out and there was just a bit of heat from the cayenne. The texture was a little bit gummy, like a dense hush puppy; but overall, it was an interesting taste sensation—and the kitchen should be commended for at least attempting to throw vegetarians a bone. Here’s hoping that they eventually come up with something to do with tofu and seitan.

870 Massachusetts Avenue
737-2625
mimibluemeatballs.com

Deep Thoughts #111

I still haven’t read it, so maybe it ain’t right for me to be hatin’, but may I be pleased that Gone Girl wasn’t nominated for Best Picture?

Vote for Chrysten!

Got an e-mail last night from my Aunt Gloria, who wanted everyone she e-mailed to vote for my cousin Chrysten Peddie, who has been nominated for a BroadwayWorld Cabaret award for Best Debut: Female or Male, for her role in Too Damn Tall at the Metropolitan Room. The voting ends on 12/31, so not much of a window, but I thought I'd throw it out there, anyway.

So, to vote for her, you can click here, and to see a video of her singing, you can click here. (Seems like I should be able to embed that YouTube video directly into the post, but maybe that's not something that can be accomplished when posting from an iPad.)

Deep Thoughts #110

The only thing I want for Festivus this year is for some enterprising code geek to figure out a way to spread Ebola by smartphone app. NEXT!

Deep Thoughts #109

Do gasbags like Lindsey Graham stand up in public and bloviate because being wrong on camera is the only way they can still get an erection?

Now How Did We Manage This?

Coal Yard Coffee

So I heard about this whole Coal Factory thing that is supposedly going to happen here in Irvington (from here and here), but what I did not know was that there was already a coffee shop operating in a tiny little space that is part of the area where the Coal Factory will be, along Bonna Avenue, between Audubon Road and Ritter Avenue. I found out about that from here (the paper version).

Since they don’t have a real website, I had to check out their Facebook page, and I managed to surmise from that that they had been open for close to a month by the time I found out that they were there. We stopped in the very next day, and it was absolutely—well, vis-à-vis coffee shops, anyway—the best thing ever. It’s very much a work in progress, but they’ve got art on the walls, lots of places to sit, and a very old-school foosball table in the back. You may want to specify that you want your drink to go, if you’re planning to take it to go, or you may well find yourself getting served with an actual glass. You may also find an artistic design of some kind in the foam on top, if you have ordered something that has foam on top.

You will not be disappointed. Much has gone into making the space comfortable for people who want to sit around and hang out, but much has also gone into knowing how to make coffee drinks. One of the baristas behind the counter even remembered from her Lazy Daze days that I was a hazelnut latté guy. My medium non-fact hazelnut latté, easy on the hazelnut, with an extra shot of espresso, was excellent. They nailed the easy on the hazelnut and the extra shot of espresso, which not everyone does.

By the time the Coal Factory developement is done and is ready for its grand opening, Coal Yard Coffee will have been open for about a year. Things will change between now and then, but they are off to a great start—which makes the second consecutive east side coffee shop to hit the ground running, after the successful launch last year of Tin Comet Coffee. The biggest difference is that you have to make an effort to get to Coal Yard Coffee. Bonna Avenue is two blocks south of Washington Street, in a mostly residential area. That’s not going to stop the people in Irvington, who flocked to Lazy Daze when it was open—and I hope it doesn’t stop the rest of you, either. This is not a great coffee shop in the making—it’s already a great coffee shop, and it’s only a month old.

5547 Bonna Avenue
777-1161
Facebook

Deep Thoughts #108

So is it safe to assume that the Colts probably will not rechristen their pleasure dome as Lucas Oil Reichstadium? Maybe if Frau Lucas begs?

Deep Thoughts #107

WASP supremacist liars like Charlotte Lucas always say ignorant, racist things; but the dullards who believe their fake apologies are worse.

Author? I Hardly Know Her!

Recently, I have been working my way through a thick volume of the collected poems of Charles Reznikoff, which has been both more and less rewarding than I expected. I don’t remember where I found out about him or read his poems for the first time, but it was the prospect of reading poems about New York, because I had found out that he was a New Yorker and wrote about where he was from, that led me to the book; and though it turned out that some of them were about New York, but most of them weren’t, it was still mostly enjoyable.

And then, on page 367, very near the end, in a section called Last Poems, the first of six parts of poem #10, subtitled “Just Before the Sun Goes Down,” was this little nubbin:

Of all that I have written
you say: “How much was poorly said.”
But look!
The oak has many acorns
that a single oak might live.

It’s not like I’m ever going to stop writing, and it’s not like I need any especial inspiration to sit down and work a little bit every day. Inspiration to be confident about what I have written, however…that remains in short supply ‘round here. The lines quoted above acknowledge what should be common sense: not everything we write is great work—but anything we write is of value, because who knows how or when what you initially believe to be inconsequential will reveal its importance?

I read those lines by Reznikoff late Tuesday night, and then came across a poem called “Poet’s Guide to the Foucault Pendulum” in the current issue of the Indiana Review while I was out and about on Wednesday afternoon, having stopped to read for a short time in Military Park. I don’t imagine that it’s couth for me to reproduce that poem here in its entirety, but the gist of it is that progress is a matter of perspective rather than necessarily a demonstration of fact.

The world spins under you
in such quiet and purposeful ways;
you move even if you refuse to,
so why bother being so stubborn,
so convinced you’ve never made
any progress at life?

And then moments later we are asked to “witness how slow / swaying adds up to a complete / revolution. This is all you can ask / of yourself, all the world does too." In the simplicity of those lines is the same appeal to common sense that struck me in the lines from the Reznikoff poem. Like I said before, I don’t need any inspiration to go on with the work. What I sometimes lack (“What do you lack?”) is the ability to believe that the going on isn’t futile. Unearthing little gems like these, out of the blue, goes a long way in that respect.

Deep Thoughts #106 - Special Topical How Could We Possibly Ever Forget?! Edition

Did the O.D. greens hanging flags off of bridges and distracting drivers today get the courage to do that by eating Freedom Fries for lunch?

Deep Thoughts #105

Is this the one Republican who gets that his party, hurtling toward irrelevancy, must now embrace honest-to-Darwin change we can believe in?

Deep Thoughts #104

(I only just started watching Mad Men recently.) We're supposed to root for Don Draper—but how can you root for someone who's so—Republican?

Black Market

Last Wednesday night we completed the Ed Rudisell trifecta and finally got around to trying Black Market. Amy was pretty well seduced by the Devour Downtown menu that included a no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookie for dessert, and even though we didn’t do the planning very well, we pretty much had our pick of seats in the place when we arrived at almost half past seven. I didn’t ask what the building all the way at the far north end of Mass Ave used to be, but Mr. Rudisell and company did well to retain the brick walls and hardwood floors when they built it out into a restaurant.

On another night, we might not have been able to choose our seats, but that night we got to pick between individual seating on the edges of the room, bar seating, and a communal space in the middle that brought to mind eating around the long tables in the conference room, back in the ol’ Clearwater days. They’ve done as much as they can with a small space, as they have also done with Siam Square and Rook—though there is something charming about Black Market that I’ve never felt at Siam Square, and did not feel the one time we tried Rook. I’m not sure what that something charming is…but it’s there.

But enough of that preliminary crap…we need to move directly to the food, because this was one of the best out-to-dinner meals I have eaten in a long time. When we picked Jackson up at my parents’ house after we ate, they asked us where we had gone, and then what kind of place it was; and I had a hard time describing exactly what they’re aiming for at Black Market. It’s not like the other Rudisell joints, which serve specifically Asian food. The phrase I used to describe it to my parents was “contemporary American.” It’s one of those places where the menu changes regularly to take advantage of both local ingredients and foods that are in season, and it’s widely regarded as one of the best restaurants in the city.

After some hemming and hawing, Amy selected the Devour Downtown menu, three courses for $30, which started with a salad of Israeli couscous, blueberry, and melon, with sweet basil vinaigrette and goat cheese. She liked the goat cheese—no surprise there—but seemed indifferent to the rest of it. I ordered from the regular menu and started with a salad of Chioggia beets, cucumber, and feta, with lemon vinaigrette ($9). I managed to overlook the green beans and mint that were also listed on the menu, so those were a nice surprise when the salad came, as was a foundation of hardy chopped romaine. I had never experienced Chioggia beets before, so I looked them up after we got home, and discovered that it’s an Italian beet with red and white stripes on the inside. I don’t recall the thick slices in my salad being striped—which maybe means they were overcooked a bit, but they were still sweet and delicious, a nice counterpoint to the tart vinaigrette and loud, creamy feta cheese.

Amy was less pleased with her second course, described on the menu as Garden Lemongrass-Chicken Broth and Confit with Sweet Corn and Carrots, but which in actuality was more along the lines of glorified chicken soup. I went for the pulled pork sandwich, on a brioche bun from Amelia’s, with mustard-vinegar sauce and two sides ($14). The cornbread with serrano butter was a no-brainer for one of the sides, but I was torn between cole slaw and three-cheese macaroni for the other. In the end, the mac and cheese fiend in me won out, and I was rewarded with a creamy helping of surprisingly well-cooked macaroni and cheese (at least one of the three was goat cheese, but that was the only one I could identify). The cornbread was crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, topped with a wee dab of serrano butter that was intensely pepper-flavored, but not aggressively spicy. It reminded me of the Rico’s Hot and Easy cheese we used to sling on the nachos, back in the GC Eastgate days.

Does the sandwich all by itself deserve its own paragraph? I think it just might, and yet I don’t even know where to begin. The airy, perfectly grilled brioche bun? The giant mound of pulled pork, already sauced, yet not so much that it obscured the smokiest smoke flavor I think I’ve ever encountered? The way it was served halfway open-faced, like they knew even before you did that to attempt to pick it up with your hands and eat it like a sandwich was simply out of the question? That mustard-vinegar sauce, which was just as briny as its appellation would lead you to believe, yet also sweet and a little bit smoky itself? The excellent bread, which had grill marks, but wasn’t burnt, and which retained a chewy breadiness even after being sat upon by a giant pile of barbecued pork? I suspect that from this day forward, any barbecued pulled pork that I ever eat will be held up against this sandwich—and probably found wanting.

There was no third course for me, but Amy got the aforementioned chocolate oatmeal no-bake cookie with peanut butter mousse and raspberry sauce. It looked more like two lumps of brown granola to me, but she seemed to like them; and the peanut butter mousse was admirably peanut buttery.

I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m not sure there’s anything left to say—although maybe it’s worth going back to what I said near the beginning, that Black Market has had the reputation, pretty much since the day it opened, of being one of the best restaurants in the city. It’s definitely the best meal I’ve had in a restaurant since we ate at Bluebeard a couple of years ago. Is it better than Bluebeard? I’m not sure I’d go that far—but I’m not sure I wouldn’t, either. They’re really close. I still haven’t tried R Bistro or Recess, or a couple of the newer big deals, like Cerulean and Late Harvest Kitchen. The best restaurant in the city is probably one of the six—and Bluebeard and Black Market set the bar very, very high.

922 Massachusetts Avenue
822-6757
blackmarketindy.net

Second Grade

So there was a new person at our bus stop on Monday morning, which made getting first-day-of-school pictures of Jackson slightly more difficult than usual. I suspect this kid is going to wind up having a very happy orthodontist. (That sounds odd. I mean Jackson, not the new person's kid. Just look at those gaps between his teeth!)

2012 - Kindergarten

2013 - First Grade

2014 - Second Grade

Deep Thoughts #103

So who would actually be stupid enough to cite breitbart.com as a source - and actually mean it? Oh…yeah. An Indiana Republican, that’s who.

When Alexander Saw the Breadth of His Domain, He Wept - For There Were No More Worlds to Conquer.

That title is eighteen words. You get to pick the 982 others to go with this picture.

Support Recycling in Indy!

Mayor Greg Ballard, who had been doing a respectable job as mayor, for a Republican, recently signed a contract with a garbage profiteering firm called Covanta which will destroy much of the recycling infrastructure that free-thinking and intelligent people have built here in Indianapolis. The lazy and uninformed (nearly 100% overlap if you put that group in a Venn diagram with the Republican rank and file) will believe the shit that Covanta is shoveling, because they will think that 100% participation in recycling is a good thing (never mind that glass isn't included - oops!). They won't stop to consider that recyclables mixed with garbage might be contaminated and unusable, and they certainly won't take the time to consider the long-term effects of signing over our garbage - until the year 2028 - to a company that burns it and sells the steam produced from that burning for profit.

Although the contract has already been signed, the Board of Public Works still has to approve it; and there is still time to make your voice heard. You can click here to sign a change.org petition, and you can click here to contact the mayor's office directly. More information on this blatant money grab can be found here and here. Mayor Ballard will run for re-election next year, and once the details of this embarrassing environmental about-face are made clear to the voters, he's sure to lose the support of a great many voters he lied to when he said he cared about sustainability and the environment. All those bike lanes and re-paved streets are nice, but it's time to ditch the liar Greg Ballard and send him back to the ranks of the unemployed, where all Republicans belong.

Deep Thoughts #102

But then I nail a reasonably solid fake tweet and I feel a little bit better. Patricia Lockwood’s fake sext tweets make me feel better, too.

Deep Thoughts #101

I am currently reading a crappy novel with bad writing, and it’s making me question every sentence of my own. Am I that much of a hack, too?

The Pledge of the Independents

The Abbey Bookshop, in Paris, has launched some kind of Facebook campaign to encourage folks not to buy books from Amazon or any of its lackeys, due in part to the ongoing tussle between Amazon and Hachette. (Just Google "Amazon Hachette," and you'll be up to speed in about 0.36 seconds.) I don't support Facebook, or the way it assimilates people into its collective (especially when those people go about indiscriminately sharing unsourced information just because it sounds good), but every now and then you have to make this kind of exception. So I am sharing a link to the Abbey Bookshop's Facebook page for the Pledge of the Independents.

Amazon's goal of creating a commercial monopoly on goods and (increasingly) services has come to fruition in no small part because they cut their teeth selling books on the magic internets (and culling so much information from their books customers that they very quickly learned how to sell pretty much everything to pretty much everyone) and because they are willing to sell just about anything at a loss, as long as it means that they keep assimilating customers who don't care about anything except how cheap they can get whatever they want. (Walmart does the exact same thing, but with the added bonus of depressing wages in the communities where they plant their discount megachurches.)

Now that Amazon's shareholders have finally begun to bristle at the no-profits business model, Amazon has responded by squeezing yet another of its suppliers, Hachette Book Group. Most of the time when this happens, the supplier in question starts crying and tries to say no, but then is forced by Amazon to take another bump of X, shut the fuck up, and spread its legs. Hachette is putting up something of a fight, and it's starting to feel like they're building some momentum.

I'm not in book buying mode at the moment, but I have made the decision to buy what books I choose to buy from the local indie stores. We're not so fortunate here in Indianapolis to have a great independent bookstore like Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company, but Indy Reads Books and Bookmamas are not bad - and they can get you any new title that you need. Amazon needs to be made aware that its business practices are unacceptable, and that's why I'm sharing a Facebook link. (And no, the irony is not lost on me that I am sharing information about the shady business practices of one giant internet company by using the product of another giant internet company.)

It's Coming Right For Us!

This is a quick video of Jackson zipping down the brick-lined sidewalk next to the Kirkwood Observatory in Bloomington. I got two videos very similar to this one a few weeks ago when we were in Bloomington; but my timing was all wrong, and the videos were way too long. I tried to edit the better one, but wound up with a clip that took up twice the disk space of the original, despite being about 80% shorter. So...when we stopped in Bloomington this afternoon, on our way back from Mammoth Cave National Park, I was fortunate enough to get the same basic video, in a shorter, more compact version.

To wit:

Deep Thoughts #100 - Special Topical Right-Wing Fearmongering Edition

Hang on…you mean conservative wing-nuts are using entrapment and manipulation to scare people about yet another social issue they get wrong?

Seven Come Eleven and She Could Be Mine

Unfortunately, I forgot to get a picture of Jackson in the morning before school yesterday, and Amy had her two-hour choir jamboree that was already in progress when I got back from work at another mainstream cinema - and that left the unwrapping of the present we got him as my only opportunity to get a birthday picture of him for the ol' blog. Our house throws light oddly, and I'm still taking pictures with a point-and-shoot my brother-in-law brought home from the desert about a decade ago - which is a long way around saying that the selection ain't optimal.

Nevertheless, the streak remains intact for at least one more year - and Amy and I find ourselves the parents of a 7-year-old. I still can't quite get my head around that.

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

I've Been Kidnapped By a Guatemalan Banana Monkey!

I wish I had taken a picture of the driveway leading down from the main street to the gate of the River House, the donated apartment house/complex where we stayed in Panajachel. That driveway was very steep, with standing water near the bottom; and when the vans delivering us from the airport in Guatemala City pulled up in front of the River House, we could see, even in the gathering dark, that it stood behind a gated wall, part of which was topped with razor wire. It wasn’t the first wall topped with razor wire I had seen that day, though the others had been in Guatemala City, which I had both read and been told was quite a bit rougher than most of the rest of the country—and yet there we were, arriving to stay at a place surrounded by a wall partially topped with razor wire. Not that there was anything to be done about it – the drivers were already unloading our luggage from the racks on top of the vans, and one of our trip coordinators was opening the door in the gate to let us into the compound. (I never quite stopped thinking about it that way.) And even though it was dark by that time, it was still obvious, if not quite as dramatic, that what lay outside the gate of the River House was much different than what lay inside, which was this:



That was our first glimpse of what the next week, in part, was going to be like for us in Guatemala; but I had a hard time shaking some of the things I had seen on our way to Panajachel. There was all of that razor wire I mentioned a moment ago, topping the walls of not a few buildings (and other compounds—there’s that word again) we saw on the road from the airport in Guatemala City. Some of those buildings were abandoned and crumbling, and some of them had rebar jutting up along the edges and corners of the roofs. We were told that the reason for the exposed rebar was so that if money were ever raised to finish the building in question, the contractor would have an idea of where to begin the work again, so that the building would retain roughly the same kind of structure it had had at the beginning of the project. There is no system of credit in Guatemala, at least as compared to the United States. If a construction project runs out of money, they just stop where they’re at.

People in Guatemala get by with much less than we do in the United States, but it’s difficult to appreciate the truth of that idea unless you see it for yourself; and once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to shake it. We saw and did a lot of amazing things—and I’m not much for using the word amazing in that kind of context, for pretty much the same reason Sam doesn’t like to say “I love you” in the film Ghost—in our short time in Guatemala; but there was also much that we saw that brought the truth of what it means to live among the middle class in the United States into sharp relief. This is the room where the students we worked on the basketball/soccer court for go to school every day:

They attend school for five hours a day, and public education in Guatemala, especially for the least well off people in the rural communities, generally stops at sixth grade. One morning, we stopped at Nueva Esperanza, a community that had been created for people displaced by Hurricane Stan. There, we were able to see the results of a previous project that Mission Guatemala had completed—a kitchen with cinder-block stoves, seen here being used by a group of women who are making tortillas by hand (in traditional Mayan dress):

You may not think it looks like much, especially compared to what you probably have at home; but it was a major upgrade over what they had before, which was this:

I cannot properly convey the spirit of so many of the people we met during our time in Guatemala. I’m sure they’re not all happy-go-lucky, and maybe many of them put on their bravest faces for us because we were easy marks who were eager to spend money on souvenirs; but there is a warmth and kindness to these people that cannot but alter your estimation of what constitutes a full life, a life well lived.

And yet it already seems far away. We’ve been back for a little over three weeks now, and it was all too easy to slip back into my routine. It would have been very easy to sit back and write a series of posts about everything we got to see and do while we were there, everything our position of relative privilege bought us, to post pictures of mountains, volcanoes, art, the surprisingly touristy streets of downtown Pana; but I couldn’t just look away from what was difficult to see. A lot of the pictures I took in Guatemala are of scenes that would not necessarily strike one as picture-worthy. I wanted to be sure I would be able to remember everything, and what all of it meant to me, because I knew it would fade once I returned home.

I know I won’t forget the six-person tuk-tuk ride, or stepping into a brothel half by mistake, or the Spanish guitar at Circus Bar the last night we were there, or what one of the guys in the group looked like wearing the traditional Mayan skirt his wife had bought for herself, or the way a little boy named Brandon Omar (all of seven years old) ran up to me and gave me a hug out of the clear blue sky the day we stopped in Nueva Esperanza, or the guy who tried to sell me marijuana (“Weed cheap!”), or the beautifully simmered black beans and handmade tortillas and fried plantains that we seemed to eat a little bit of every day we were there. I’ll write about the touristy stuff and post those pictures later. It was the less touristy stuff we saw and did that often made the biggest impression, and absolutely made me want to redouble my efforts to “live simply, so that others may simply live.”

Deep Thoughts #99

Has anyone ever thought it a good idea to read A People’s History of the United States concurrently with any part of In Search of Lost Time?

Deep Thoughts #98

Finally, that smug wiseacre who won nearly $300,000 by playing the board the wrong way lost when his Daily Double strategy backfired on him.

The Toothless Snow-Eater and the Giant Sledding Hill!

This past Sunday, Amy bribed Jackson with the promise of letting him tackle the Sledding Hill at Fort Harrison if he promised first to go cheerfully on a walk with us. It's a fairly respectable system she has developed for getting him to do things we want him to do that he doesn't necessarily want to do himself. He was very excited when we got into the park and he could see the Sledding Hill from where we parked the car. We walked most of the 2.5-mile loop around the Duck Pond and Delaware Lake on the Harrison Trace trail, and I was able to get quite a lot of pictures of the snow-covered landscape - as well as a number of Jackson the Snow Eater.

And then once we were done with the trail, we came back to the sledding hill and let Jackson go to town. He walked his little sled all the way to the top of the hill five times and came whooshing back down. The first time was the best for sheer reaction, but I did not get a video of that one. The second one might have been more exciting, though, because he wound up shooting right toward me when he got to the bottom.

I posted a few more pictures on my photo page.

Brian Bosma is a Coward

The dishonorable speaker of Indiana's House of Representatives, Brian Bosma, has voiced the possibility of replacing members of the House Judiciary Committee who may not vote the way he wants them to vote on the legislative abortion known as HJR-3, the Indiana Discrimination Amendment. This would be the second shameful act of cowardice by the House with respect to this bill - the first being to rename it from HJR-6, in order to confuse stupid Hoosiers.

The good folks at Freedom Indiana have another convenient e-mail form you can use to write to Herr Bosma and tell him what a coward he is.

Also, anyone who votes for this bill should be voted out of office at the earliest opportunity, for abuse of power and dereliction of duty. The proper role of government is to protect rights, not to take them away. The state of Indiana would be permanently damaged if this bill were to pass, which makes passing it - and voting for it - an act of treason. If, Darwin help us, this bill makes it to the ballot in November, any Hoosier voting for it would also be guilty of an act of treason.

That's a lot to have on your conscience for something the U.S. Supreme Court is eventually going to overturn anyway, don't you think?

I Would Vote for Kim Jong Un for President of the United States If He Would Promise to Execute American Conservatives the Same Way Hong Kong Says He Executed His Uncle

The right-wing monkeys in the state legislature are so afraid of getting dragged out into the alley and beat the fucking shit out of that they changed the name of their bigoted, discriminatory hate crime from HJR-6 to HJR-3. I have thought for a long time that no other group of feces-throwing knuckle-draggers could look more ridiculous than Indiana Republicans, but now, by changing the name of their intellectual abortion in an incredibly retarded attempt at misdirection, they have shown themselves also to be cowards. People who don’t live here—and many who do!—think that Indiana is a ridiculous laughingstock of a state, and they are correct; and Indiana Republicans are the reason that Indiana is a ridiculous laughingstock of a state. You just have to feel bad for people who are so awful, stupid, and evil.

Reject HJR-6

You too can let your voice be heard in the campaign against the discriminatory piece of legislative fecal matter known as HJR-6, a hateful phallus with which the right-wing fear mongers keep trying to orally rape the citizens of Indiana. Click here, and you can write a message that Freedom Indiana will format into a neat little letter and present to the legislature when it reconvenes next week. Here's what I submitted:

I am writing to let you know that I oppose HJR-6, and to ask for your support in seeing that this discriminatory, bigoted piece of legislation is exterminated. This issue is important to me because HJR-6 would take away rights. The proper role of government is to protect rights, not to take them away. I hope that I can count on you to do what is morally correct, which is to do everything in your power to prevent the passage of this backward piece of legislative fecal matter. If you are able to do so, then I thank you for your public service. I thank you for your time.

Ten years ago, the Republicans used gay marriage as a wedge issue (along with blatant lies about John Kerry's military service), because they knew that Dubya had no chance of being re-elected on his own merits. Ten years from now, gay marriage will be legal in all fifty states, with no restrictions at all. Conservatives are always wrong about social issues. Every. Single. Time. They're just too ignorant and bigoted to admit it, so it's up to those of us with brains to drag them, kicking and screaming, into the light.

That's also a way to kill vampires. How about that?

Deep Thoughts #97

Part of me really wants to blog about how foolish the First Amendment screamers defending Phil Robertson sound; but what would be the point?

Down by the Creek, Walking on Water

Last Wednesday we went down to McCormick's Creek State Park, which is just west of Bloomington on 46 - and is, in fact, closer to Bloomington than Brown County State Park; and yet for some reason, this was the first time we ventured the other way on 46. We had an incredibly good time, and Jackson did a really great job on the two most rugged trails in the park. (Truth be told, I'm not sure we were actually on the trails so much as we were just wandering back and forth across the actual creek itself - though that was certainly as rugged as the trails would have been.) I took over 200 pictures, though many of them were action shots that were too blurry to use. I managed to cull 25 or so that I thought were worth posting on my photo site.

Rook

Here in week three of a Peddie Family Vacation Trifecta, Amy and I both have the week off at the same time, while Jackson is back at school; and that means lots of opportunities to try new places for lunch. Yesterday we knocked out one of the places that has been near the top of my list for a long time but which was hard to fit in with Jackson in tow, due to the fact that they don’t serve any type of breaded and fried chicken. There was a period there where Jackson was very willing to try new things to eat and managed to develop a taste for things like chips and salsa, hummus, quesadillas, and even broccoli. Unfortunately, that phase seems to have run its course for the time being.

But with him at school, we have the run of the city—and others nearby—and so yesterday afternoon we noshed at Rook, a relatively new Fletcher Place eatery in one of those fancy new mixed-use development deals that are popping up all over town. I can’t think of another place I have been to that uses holes in the drywall as a design element, but that’s the case here, as a “downed power line” pokes through the wall and extends out across the ceiling. You walk up to the counter and order from a lunch menu that consists entirely of bánh mì sandwiches with various fillings that evoke the flavors of Asian street food—Chinese barbecued pork, Indian-spiced tofu, and Thai sour sausage, to name a few. (All of the sandwiches on the lunch menu are $8, and a handful of sides go in the $2-$6 range. A recently-added dinner menu expands the lunch offerings and adds new items, with prices ranging from $6-$12.)

The sandwiches are topped with a delicious sweet and sour cabbage, carrot, and pepper slaw that just barely overpowered the flavor of the Indian-spiced tofu on my sandwich. The balance of flavor in the slaw by itself was impressive, but could have done with something a bit more dynamic in there—a touch of spice from the peppers, maybe; and those pillowy bánh mì rolls, while light and airy, are also not sturdy enough to soak up the moisture from the slaw and the thin coating of some type of mayonnaise that dresses the sandwich. On the other hand, tofu itself is fairly delicate and tends to get lost in the shuffle, especially when it’s added to the menu as an afterthought; and despite the fact that this is a place that serves Asian food, I definitely got the impression that this was a menu calibrated to showcase the hardier proteins favored by carnivores.

Also, because this is an Ed Rudisell joint, like Black Market and Siam Square, you may have a hard time eating economically and also feeling fully sated. We haven’t tried Black Market yet, but Siam Square is one of the best restaurants in Indianapolis, even if the portions seem a little bit anemic for the price. The same can be said for most of the restaurants in the Martha Hoover empire, but they are minor quibbles in both cases. Rudisell and Hoover are doing some of the best restaurants in the city. Rook is a nice addition, but it doesn’t hit the back-alley vibe it’s shooting for—in much the same way that Café Patachou doesn’t hit the “student union for adults” vibe it claims to be shooting for. I’m not quite sure that it gets to the level of pretension in either case (though I am closer to sure about Hoover’s M.O. than about Rudisell’s), because I think the efforts are genuine—they just seem to wind up being a little bit fancier than they aim to be.

719 Virginia Avenue
759-5828
www.rookindy.com

A Wheel of Fate, A Game of Chance (#2)

I almost didn’t go to Tin Comet this afternoon. Once I shook the cobwebs loose and got the writing to start working for me, it really started working. I figured out a scene in which I wanted one of the characters to talk about the scene in The Godfather when Luca Brasi is garrotted, and how that scene is sanitized compared to what would really happen when someone is garrotted (for example, early scenes in either Eastern Promises or No Country for Old Men); and I wanted to keep it going, even though I had limited time due to hitting the snooze button way too many times (again).

But a nip into a great coffee shop can do wonders for your day, even when your day is already humming along quite nicely. To wit: on the chalkboard behind the counter at Tin Comet this afternoon was writ the following: Happy Birthday Mario Puzo. Yes, and Matt was talking to a customer at the counter, a pretty woman with pixie hair and a gypsy skirt, who might well have been Francesca, from the carnivel troupe in Clockwork Angels. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I heard Francesca say that she liked some person’s writing, and Matt asked if she was a writer too—and for just a minute I could see through the looking glass to a place where writing is important to people.

Tin Comet Coffee Opens

Tin Comet Coffee has opened for business at 2119 East 10th Street, here in Indianapolis. Their first day of business was this past Saturday, and the only reason I knew about it was because of Facebook—which does, yes, make me sad. I’ve been keeping an eye on their real website, as well as driving by the storefront, hoping to catch some information on their opening the old-fashioned way—but it was not to be. I just happened to Google them the other night at the old juke joint, and the first hit was a Facebook page I didn’t even know they had. Therein lay the information, and due to a bit of scheduling good luck, I was able to stop in on opening day, wish them well, and get a hot cuppa to go.

I feel like I’ve been wandering in the desert, vis-à-vis coffee, since Lazy Daze closed. We have lots of fine indie coffee shops in the metro area, but I was doubly lucky to have Lazy Daze because 1) it was close, and 2) it was the best. There are some newbies that I haven’t tried yet, like the pour-over thing happening at Bee Coffee Roasters in Pan Am Plaza, as well as Foundry Provisions, up near where Herron used to be; but I’ve been to most of the veteran coffee shops in the metro, including Monon Coffee Company, Funkyard, Strange Brew, Calvin Fletcher’s, Cups, South Bend Chocolate Company, Hubbard & Cravens, and Yogülatté. I also found myself inside the evil coffee shop at Washington and Audubon after Lazy Daze closed, out of sheer desperation sometimes.

None of those places holds a candle to Lazy Daze, and the evil coffee shop is the only one close enough to walk to (but of course, they burn their beans, which fucks up the way you taste coffee and makes you think that correctly roasted coffee is weak). And while some of those other places have their points of interest—proximity to the village for Monon, the giant fish tanks and Holiday Grogg roast at Strange Brew, the art on the walls and the improbable rack of $2 CDs (and gelato) at Funkyard, the yogurt and proximity to Mass Ave and the rest of downtown at Yogülatté—none of them have the warm quirkiness that Lazy Daze had, which was dirty in a good way (like Lady Gaga or Drew Barrymore) and seemed to have grown straight up out of the roots of Irvington. I imagine that I am a little bit biased because I live in Irvington and have been connected to it, in one way or another, for all of my life; but they were firing on all cylinders at Lazy Daze, and Irvington is that much more drab and empty that they are gone.

Also, their coffee was the best. Strange Brew was second in that department, but that one is way down on Smith Valley Road, damn near out to 37. There’s just no way to justify going that far out of my way for a cup of coffee. They close at noon on Sunday, too, which eliminates them from consideration if we happen to be out and about on the south side on my day off. About the only time I get down there is on my way to or from Bloomington—and even then, I have to consider whether I will want to get coffee at Runcible Spoon, which is nearly as good as Lazy Daze was (including, and perhaps especially, dirty in a good way), but which is, in point of fact, in Bloomington.

Now comes Tin Comet, in St. Clair Place on the near east side. It’s not dirty, in either a good or bad way, but rather clean and bright—which is exactly what 10th Street needs as it inches its beautification ever further east, toward the very rotten stretch between Rural Street and Sherman Drive. It’s not close enough to walk to, but it’s just down the street from Jackson’s school, and is very easy to access on my way downtown. Jackson and I popped in today on our way downtown—my fourth visit in the five days they’ve been open. I’m a little bit biased toward Tin Comet because I am acquainted with the proprietors, one of whom was the finest barista Lazy Daze ever had; but the ambience is wonderfully eclectic, in the very best sense of that word—the music you hear playing when you walk in is coming from a living, breathing turntable, spinning those black circles—and the coffee is awfully good, too. I’ve only had the espresso drinks, but will get around to trying the drip coffee at some point. (And I’m hoping that maybe they’ll tweak that espresso machine to make the shots a bit stronger, too.)

There is life on the East Side! Get out to the Comet, people!

2119 East 10th Street
420-1025
tincomet.com

Random Jackson Pictures #1

Having now been heckled by two different family members for not posting photos of Jackson as often as others would like, and being possessed of a bit more free time these next couple of weeks, due to Jackson's being on fall break, I thought I'd have a go at doing this somewhat more regularly. So here is a picture of Jackson negotiating pizza.

Grain of Sand

I bought the new Stephen King novel at Barnes & Noble on Tuesday evening. I walked from the old juke joint over to the Barnes-that-used-to-be-a-Borders and got the book for 30% off its list price of $30. I was on the fence for a little while about whether I wanted to get the book at Barnes & Noble for a substantial discount or whether I wanted to support the local indie shop and get it for full price at Indy Reads Books. I stopped buying CDs at Best Buy (and related discount-offering corporate chains) years ago, but I can’t seem to kick the habit of buying books at...I hate to say Barnes & Noble here, but Borders is gone, and they ain’t coming back, so I guess I’m sort of stuck. I suppose I could drive way the hell out to Trader’s Point and shop at Books-A-Million, but I don’t like to be reminded that it’s possible to be a corporate chain bookstore and suck more than Barnes & Noble. Also, the selection of literary magazines at Books-A-Million is Darwin-awful. So I guess what I am really trying to say is that my name is John, and I have a problem. I can’t stop buying books at the least-offensive chain bookstore in the metro area, simply because there is no indie alternative here in Indianapolis. If I want new Stephen King the day it comes out, I. Have. No. Choice.

And yes, the correct next question is, “Do you really need that new Stephen King book the day it comes out?” If I am so excited about said new book that I plan to sit down and start reading it that same day, first chance I get, then the answer to the question is yes. But I’m still working on Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2004, and earlier this week, on the Tuesday in question, I was awfully close to the end of a new book of stories by Tom Perrotta, as well as about halfway through a book of poems I had high hopes for, but which is turning out to be way less metaphorical than I was hoping it would be. I wanted to be through with the Tom Perrotta and the book of poems, and a few days further along in the Ebert, before I set my sights on the new Stephen King. So, in point of fact, the correct—realistic—answer to the question is no. I did not need that new Stephen King book the day it came out.

Does it matter that I have been buying new Stephen King the day it comes out since early 1996? It might matter a little bit, but only if that sentence were true—and it’s not. I’ve had some misses in there. I’m not entirely sure what all of them are, but I never bought a new Dark Tower book the day it came out. The Colorado Kid had been remaindered by the time I got around to ponying up the couple of bucks needed to bring that one into the fold. I picked up a copy of Black House at some point, but that was also years after it came out. But I’ve been there on release day for most of them—and I even used to put aside whatever else I was reading at the time, so that I could start that new Stephen King book that very night, after I was through writing for the day. I kept going on those other books I was reading instead of jumping right into Doctor Sleep because I do, in fact, have a problem: I can’t stop checking books out of the library, and I spent a whole lot of years after college spending time and money buying a whole lot of books that I was interested in at the time, but then never read, and am now no longer interested in.

So no, I wasn’t going to lose that set of steak knives if I didn’t get that copy of Doctor Sleep on Tuesday. And yet I had to go over there, had to get it that day, and had to get it for that 30% discount—a whopping $9 off; and while that ain’t nothing, I am certainly not in the position where that $9 is going to make or break me. (If I were in that kind of position, of course, I would not even be considering the options for buying a hardcover copy of the new Stephen King book. If I were in that kind of position, I would, at best, put it on hold at the library and wait my turn for a copy. The hold list was, I think, at 277 on Tuesday. It probably got to just over 300 for a short while, because it’s down to 272 now, and there are a couple dozen books waiting to be picked up.) So why not spend the extra money that I’m not really going to miss, and do the local indie bookstore a solid by waiting a few days for them to get it and then buying a copy from them?

Well, that’s the $64,000 question, folks; and it’s been bothering me since Tuesday. It bothers me every time I look over at the shelf and see the copy of that Stephen King book, the one I haven’t started reading yet, the one that I won’t start reading until I finish a book about growing up in Jersey City that I just started last night—two full days after I bought the Stephen King book that I just had to have. I have no problem making charitable contributions to non-profits that I find valuable. I usually spend between $100 and $200 every year on some combination of donations and subscriptions to literary magazines (which are a kind of donation)—and if I had really given this Doctor Sleep thing some serious thought, I would have thought of the extra $9 I would have spent on the new Stephen King as a donation of sorts to the local indie bookstore where I made the purchase.

(And actually, you know what? I completely forgot about Big Hat Books in Broad Ripple. Indy Reads Books and Bookmamas are the two stores I think of immediately when I think of local indie bookstores—but both of those places deal primarily in used books. Big Hat Books, on the other hand, sells mostly [or maybe only, I really don’t go in there often enough] new books. So does Book Corner, but that’s all the way down in Bloomington. Much as I like Broad Ripple, I just don’t get up there all that often. But we’re going to check out Open Streets on Sunday, and that will put us within striking distance of Big Hat...which means that I’m probably going to have to stop in just to see if they have it, and to see if they have any kind of discount on it. And while neither Big Hat Books nor Book Corner are non-profits, they are both local indie places that are deserving of support—and Indy Reads Books most certainly is a non-profit.)

The release of a new Stephen King book is the only time I even think of rushing out to the bookstore to get a new book right away. (Generally speaking, I’ve been trying to buy fewer books while I read some of the ones I have bought over the years and don’t really need or want anymore. When there is a new release that I want to read, I rely on the library. There is often a wait involved with that, especially if the book is very popular—but as I mentioned earlier, I’m pretty much always in the middle of at least one book, and usually two or three. It’s not at all off-putting to watch the hold queue and make time for a new book when my spot in the queue comes up.) And even someone as prolific as Stephen King rarely has more than two new books out in a year. Publishers have always been wary of putting out more than one book a year, even by the most popular authors; and it would stand to reason that, in this depressed book-buying economy, those publishers are at least as wary as they’ve always been about glutting the market with multiple books by the same author.

Part of the reason for writing this lengthy missive was the hope that I would feel chastened for yet again doing my part to perpetuate the corporate price wars over new bestsellers; and in that respect I believe that I have succeeded. I will be reminded of it every time I look at my copy of Doctor Sleep, and I am sure that it will be on my mind when the next Stephen King release date rolls around. I should have thought of all of this years ago—after all, it’s been years since I bought a new CD anywhere other than Luna, and that pattern change hasn’t resulted in any lasting damage. It’s a little bit easier to justify an extra couple of bucks for a new CD than upwards of ten bucks for a book—but, again, not starving here. (Joke will be on me, of course. Dude will retire now that he’s gone and written his first-ever sequel.)

The other part of the reason for writing this lengthy missive (and for including this non-sequitur of a final paragraph) is to get back into the swing of writing a lot of words in relatively short bursts of time. November is nearly upon me, and that means National Novel Writing Month, when you have to bang out close to 1700 words a day to stay on pace. I have not been anywhere close to that kind of output since, well...last November—and this is my third stab at writing about this admittedly first-world problem that has been bothering me for the last couple of days. I wandered around some of the main points in the first two drafts before I figured out what I really wanted to say—which was the part about being chastened—but ultimately got it out of my system. (And as for part two, this little piece clocks in at 1749 words and took me a little over an hour to write.)