It took nearly three years, but at last I’m back with another chip comparison, although in this case the chips were not purchased simultaneously and one could only in the most generous definition be considered a chip. Thankfully I make the rules here.
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The Burmese Harp (Kon Ichikawa, 1956)
The guts in question here refer to shiokara, a fermented suspension of salted sea life - commonly squid, skipjack tuna, sea urchin et al - mixed with malted rice, and sometimes kombu, to complete the marine melange. I've never had the stuff, which is favored as both an ingredient, a standalone dish and a companion for sake, but it's reasonable to assume, as this character believes, that it bears some similarity to Burmese shrimp paste (Ngapi), also the salty end product of a process designed to stretch every possible use from traditional seaside staples. This is a film concerned with exploring cross-cultural parallels between a collapsing empire and the country it briefly lorded over, and so the exchange of goods here, between Japanese POWs and a small-scale Burmese merchant-woman, is interesting on both a literal and a symbolic level. Stripped of their arms, freedom and pride, the deprived dregs of the Imperial Army are forced to consider the things which connect them and the people of this foreign land, right down to the use of salted fish guts as a flavoring and a meal base, proving that they may not be so different after all. I tend to consider the weekend food festivals which populate the outer boroughs with a bit of wariness, hoping for the best while expecting the worst. In worst-case scenarios, you end up with a fiasco like the recent opening night of the Queens Night Market, which approached Woodstock ‘99 levels of unpreparedness, the food concourse transformed into a hopelessly tangled knot of long lines wound through one another. Meanwhile (in another distinct form of Hell On Earth) the distant Porta-a-Potties had such extreme waiting times that beer-swollen men (and women) took to urinating en masse in the dark perimeter of trees that ringed the park. Yet even fiascoes can have an upside, and while I was nearly trampled on several occasions (and had to stoop to peeing in the trees) I did get to try Chimney Cake (aka Kürtőskalács), which was pleasant, if not quite substantial enough to merit a 50 minute wait. I also got to exercise some judgement, and, fleeing this waking nightmare, ferry my friends past the nearby hotspots (Tortilleria Nixtamal, where I’d stopped earlier in the day for some skate tacos and a pork tamal, was overflowing with desperate dinner seekers) and out into the safer reaches of Queens. The result was a nice, tranquil Indonesian meal of Rendang, Ketoprak, Perkedel and Rissoles at Elmhurst’s Upi Jaya.
Putting off a long-gestating India-dex post to write this, but I'm glad to report that I've finally found the heir to Vegetable Thins and the Holy Grail of not-too-sweet Asian bagged snacks. As you can see by the glasses, this bean...is one smart bean. He fits neatly into a golden-hued packaging that recalls an illustrated backdrop from a children's television program. The puffs themselves, only slightly air-leavened and with just the right amount of crunch, theoretically approximate the taste of edamame, with a subtle MSG undertone that's addictive but not overwhelming. Purchased for me as a souvenir from Little Tokyo, which means that my only problem now is figuring out where to pick up more of these. Not much other information appears to be available online, although they do have a website, hinting at a wide variety of other versions, which is notably fantastic despite being entirely in Japanese.
There’s something oddly evocative about the packaging for Marukawa’s fruit gums, with their neat little square boxes (containing three four small gums apiece) drawing aesthetic parallels to some bygone style of design (taxonomic charts? '60s-era juice bars? frozen juice concentrate packages?) that I can’t exactly put my finger on. The gum itself is equivalently mysterious, offering an ephemeral burst of faint, Chiclet-like fruit flavor, then evaporating into nothingness. The only issue with this is that, these being gum pellets, you’re left with the sallow, flavorless grub in your mouth as a reminder of the candy’s lingering connection to the cruel corporeal world. Another key reminder; the main breadwinner of the Marukawa line is not these ethereal little confections, but this garish product, which resorts to the allure of acrobatic musician bears and a free tattoo sticker to lure in a (likely juvenile?) audience. I imagine the taste is also a lot less subtle.
New York City’s Japan Society is currently hosting a two-month series on Okinawa, the country’s southernmost prefecture, home to a culture that skews far from the rigid intensity of the rest of the archipelago. Held on Tuesday the 3rd, the ‘Explore Okinawa’ event seemed like the most general of these, a broad primer on the island’s culture, history and cuisine. Okinawa is actually the largest island in the Ryukyu chain, which existed as an independent kingdom / Chinese affiliate state until being brought under Japanese control in the 17th century, persisting as largely autonomous entity for centuries afterward. Absorbing influences from all over the Western Pacific, the island culture has produced distinctive exports like bingata, a painstaking, multi-step textile form, and karate, Japan’s best-known martial art.
A page from Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow, demonstrating the Western affectations of the Japanese upper class circa 1913. In the novel this is a sign of decay, the abandonment of proud native traditions, specifically the warrior-caste pride of the weakling protagonist’s nouveau-riche family. Looking like something out of the Gilded Age, from a book written in 1965, the menu provides an interesting time capsule of an era that’s been referred to as Japan’s Jazz Age, a period of curious cultural rebellion quashed by the economic unrest and mounting nationalism of the early '30s. Years before Japanese flappers would embrace Western clothing styles, the affectations of the Taisho era demonstrate the same obsession with illicit outside influence that would make way for modern confections, from sponge cake to milk bread. Both of these seem like modern, post-war innovations, but trace back further, to the early influence of Portugal, perhaps the world’s preeminent seeder of European culture abroad, and conversely a big importer of overseas flavors back to the mainland. It was the Portuguese who originally brought bread (not to mention tempura, itself possibly derived from Indian pakora) to Japan in the 17th century, with the word pan, like the Indian pav, coming from the Portuguese pao.
The Mack (Michael Campus, 1973)
Hibachi for pimps, 1970s style, with some flung noodles for good measure. Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice takes place during a period of great, decidedly un-groovy change, set in a sun-dappled 1970 in which the dreamy hippie lifestyle is gradually being consumed by, and absorbed into, the formerly square mainstream, pulled by undercurrents of corporate greed and communal adaptation. It’s a process that’s neatly summed up by the toxic relationship of barefoot PI protagonist Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) and his authoritarian tormentor/establishment foil Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin). Here, in a fitting moment for a character defined by several instances of massive consumption, the flat-topped detective wolfs down two helpings of American pancakes prepared in Japanese eatery. “They're not as good as my mother's” Bigfoot notes, “but what I really go for here is the respect.” From a tinny radio in the background comes another signifier of this process, by which American culture absorbs foreign items, then pressures or transforms them to conform to its own narrow sense of the exotic: Kyu Sakamoto’s 1961 hit Sukiyaki, which underwent a similar progression in its American renaming. As reflected by its Japanese title (“I Look Up As I Walk”), it’s an aching song about lost love / the failures of the anti-US protest movement, and has nothing to do with the traditional hot pot dish; the title is merely a slapped-on word that sounded catchy and Japanese. Look down as you scroll for a weird promotional video for this otherwise fantastic song:
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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