RL424 - The Beaver, the Badger, and the Buckwheat

This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John ordered one twenty dollar thing too many, referring to ordering many small things from Amazon that add up and suck the life-force out of everybody.

The show title refers to fancy restaurants that are not easily identified as such because they are just next to another one that is not fancy at all.

The audio starts with dramatic music and Merlin narrating: ”In a world… where everything is good, nothing is garbage, and things are priced accordingly….” in reference to something John said about an hour in when they were talking about overpriced restaurants. The ”In a world…” bit is by movie voiceover artist Don LaFontaine.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Bands from Glasgow (RL424)

John has to do a hot-plug with his audio interface again. In the past you were not supposed to do that and it used to hurt your computer. Merlin has lost data to hot-plugging things that he was not supposed to hot-plug. It it going to work until it doesn’t work. John still has that hard drive that he couldn’t get to work and some nice person from Scotland offered him to fix it, but John doesn’t know about sending a broken hard drive to Scotland and back. If there is one concerning thing on there that you wouldn’t want a Scot to see… John had a very nice conversation with a Scotsman at the beginning of the year and it pushed him right over the top and Scotland can do no wrong.

Merlin likes a band from Glasgow, believe it or not. There is Roddy Frame, the guy from Aztec Camera, there is the Teenage Fanclub and BMX Bandits, which is what John thought Merlin would say. Chvrches is one of Merlin’s favorite band, they play synthesizers and sing. The say if you are from Glasgow there is always a little bit in you no matter where you go. Their shows are a lot of fun. There are also The Pastels. Merlin listens to a lot of Shoegaze, he returned to those glory days this weekend and he discovered some new things, like the Boston band Swirlies.

Kelley Deal making scarves (RL424)

Kelley Deal, twin sister of Kim Deal (from the band Pixies) knits scarves. There is some repurposing happening and there is a craft angle. John loves a scarf and he had a conversation the other day with someone who hates a scarf and won’t wear a scarf, but they say that if it is cold you wear a big jacket and if it is not as cold you wear a lighter jacket, when are you ever going to want this in-between state which would be a jacket too light for the weather plus a scarf which is too much. They are missing a point and John’s eyes were just rolling back in his head. He would wear a scarf in swim trunks. Maybe no-one in Hawaii has ever worn a scarf. Scarves is spelled with ”ve” like dwarves, The Scarsdale Diet.

She was the guitar player of The Breeders and the fact that she makes scarves fills John with joy. He has written her a few times about making a scarf for him because he really wants one of hers, but he hasn’t found one that he likes yet aesthetically because he is very particular about scarves. Merlin thinks she has almost too many options and he could get hung up on that. Like when he was in a horrible rental a couple / three years ago and they had a DVD player and some movies and he picked a Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr that he would never in a million years have picked out, but it was fine.

Merlin makes a joke and references the cartoon ad for Hanker for a Honk o’ Cheese where he says: ”Bing! You are a sandwich!”, the same one he referenced in RL403. In reality it is ”Bing! You are a banana!”, see here at 3:54.

John doesn’t want to bother Kelley Deal to ask her to do something custom because she is surely busy and she doesn’t know John, but he does want a special scarf. In his conversations with her he has been very appreciative and she said there was a lot going on right now but she was about to get back on the horse (they both laugh because ”horse” is a slang term for ”heroin” and she is a recovering addict). Later she said she had some new scarves, but there were none that John liked, he liked this about that one and that about this one. Almost certainly when she get an email to her scarf website she is not googling the person to find out who this is and John is some guy out there in the world, wanting the world, and he is not in a position to give her creative feedback.

Now he is in a situation where he has to write her again, but he doesn’t just want to say: ”Just waiting for one that is good!”

Merlin wanting to have his knives professionally sharpened (RL424)

Recently Merlin wanted his knives sharpened by a professional, a man in a van from Daly City who will come and sharpen your knives and Merlin wrote him a very good email. He has a special white glove service where he does a super-edge to a folding knife and Merlin has a couple of those. He replied from a Hotmail account, which is a red flag, but it was fine, and he botched Merlin’s name in a weird way and tried to say Marilyn, but even spelled that wrong and now Merlin doesn’t know if he wants this guy on his fancy CRKT folding knife.

He has a tactical World War I based Ken Onion knife that you can take apart and field-strip and clean. Then he big-timed Merlin and said that he would only come to his his house for 12 knives, he didn’t even ask if Merlin had 12 knives and Merlin didn’t like his attitude and didn’t write him back and now he feels bad about it. Merlin has an improbably long 15” Bowie Knife, and he has a Ka-Bar USMC in a really nice-smelling sheath.

A while back someone wrote John and said they were an artisanal knife maker with a mustache and a leather apron and they wanted to make John a knife, which he was thrilled about because not only would he have a knife, but a knife that somebody made him. He said he could do anything, but he gave John a small number of options and unlike scarves John knew so little about knives in the full breadth of what you could know about knives.

Being picky in a restaurant (RL424)

John does this all the time about everything, although he hates to be this client. His sign of a good Mexican Food restaurant has nothing to do with what is on the menu, how they talk to you, even whether or not the food is good, but if John says to the server… he doesn’t want potatoes on his plate and Merlin has seen John say that in front of Millennial Girlfriend… ”Can I get half Chili Colorado, half Chili Verde?”, if they hesitate at all, it is no good. The best Mexican restaurants are the one where he just nods and writes it down. There are only 11 ingredients in Mexican food and if you are cooking both of those at the same time it takes nothing to take one scoop out of both. But if you are pulling things out of a cooler and putting them in the microwave?

Merlin talks about the amazing famous Chinese restaurant in Chinatown called House of Nanking where they are really mean and nasty to you, they give you a dirty glass of water, the whole nine, the old guy just stands there and doesn’t even talk to you. You ask them: ”What is good?” - ”You eat seafood?” - ”Yeah!” and he just nods and walks away and whatever he brings you is the best.

John is balancing on the knife’s edge of trying to get what he wants (”What I want…”) whilst also allowing the artist or craftsperson do what they want, bringing it in at a price point that they both want, and not letting someone make him something that he is never going to use and he knows it before they even start because they have specified their taste.

Trying to get steak tartare without capers (RL424)

One time John went to a restaurant on a date with a younger woman who had grown up in the culture of the cult of chefs. At that time there were cooks and as a chef you had to live in New York or Paris, or maybe in a fancy hotel. It is the CEO-problem. Before John was 40 years old, not only had he never met a CEO, but he had never met anyone who had met a CEO. He met a lot of presidents and vice presidents of companies, or small business owners, but if you were a CEO you lived in New York or London. There was not a single one in Seattle, Safeco Insurance or Boeing had presidents.

This woman had spent her entire adult life living in a world where there are chefs everywhere, but you call them ”Chef” or you will say: ”Chef said…” without the article. They were in a fancy restaurant, but it was Seattle fancy and it had fucking peanut shells on the floor. They have wonderful Oysters in the Northwest, Merlin loves them, they are very small and crisp, a lot of them from British Columbia, a lot of them from Washington State, so they were in an oyster bar. The waiter came over and had a hoodie, just like everybody else in Seattle, maybe his hoodie cost $500, but there were peanut shells on the floor, but somehow this restaurant had 5 stars all around.

You can get a Willapa Bay oyster in a gas station in half of the counties in Western Washington for $1 a piece, but in this fancy restaurant it is the same God-damn oyster, but it is $5 a piece because Chef waves his magic hand. The waiter came over and John saw Steak Tartare on the menu and asked the waiter if they prepare it with capers (see RW148) and he had to go and ask and came back and said that the Steak Tartare had capers.

The first time John had steak tartare was in Hungary with paprika on it Hungarian style, but in America somewhere along the the steak tartare culture started putting capers on it and reading the menu it doesn’t even say that, but it just says ”Steak tartare”. The whole point is that you are eating raw meat and the meat should be so good that you can eat it raw. It is like beef or horse, you are not trying to gobble it down. It should have a raw egg on it, the whole thing. John made a classic category error, some middle-aged buffoon who walked in off of the prairie with his floppy hat, and asked if he could get it without capers and the waiter says: ”I’ll go check!” and John asked his date if she wanted to have some of it, but she said: ”I wouldn’t eat a thing that wasn’t how Chef intended it to be!”

It was a rebuke and John will take a certain amount of rebuke from his date, but after this he cooled right off. He understood it to be a culture clash because John is not someone who goes into a restaurant to serve the cook, he didn’t come here to pay his money to let them take him on a journey, although there are times for that. Merlin says that when the price on the menu is without the decimal point you know the place thinks highly of themselves.

John's friend was looking down at her menu while saying this, not looking at him, because the chef might have put something on it that she hadn’t discovered yet, some one-word description of a miracle dish where he pulled a creature out of the ocean, threw it in a put of boiling water and put it on your plate and price says AQ (as quoted) with no period in italics. She had just rebuked John and wanted the world to know.

The waiter looked at John with the look of a professional waiter who wasn’t going to get into it, bot also really appreciated that John was served by his date, and John said he would pass on the Steak Tartare, thank you, and everybody wins.

That particular relationship had evolved over several years and although there was definitely a beginning there was never really an end, like the wind whistling through the trees. Merlin says you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat their waiters. If somebody tries to boss around someone who is not in a position of power, that is really good to know. The problem is that in Merlin’s analogy John is the bad customer in her opinion and maybe the waiter’s opinion and he is what Colin Meloy would call gosh, and that he would take umbrage on it is further gosh.

John and Kurt Timmermeister being seated in the kitchen (RL424)

Merlin talks about the French restaurant Maisenette in Cincinnati Ohio where his parents might have gone twice ever and it had Baked Alaska (desert) and was famous for being the most expensive restaurants. In Seattle the most expensive restaurant had been Canlis since the time John’s parents were courting and up until 10 years ago.

One time John walked into a restaurant, his friend Kurt Timmermeister was there, John went into the kitchen because he knew the chef, and Kurt is a legendary figure among Northwest chefs, he wrote the book about the farm-to-table movement (called: Growing a Feast: The Chronicle of a Farm-to-Table Meal). John knew Kurt from all the way back when he was running Café Septieme and he was just bringing John coffee, but now he is this guy with a paper crown on him. John was not that in at the time to understand that this kitchen was set up in a way that two stools materialized and were placed in such a way that what had formerly been the chopping station had become a little bar to sit at, and they prepared it for John and Kurt.

It was at a time around 2004 when the number of restaurants in Seattle was knowable. There were the ones you knew well, the ones you had been to a couple of times, the ones you had only been to once and the ones you had never been to. There were no restaurants in Seattle John had never heard of, but now there are more restaurants in Seattle that he has never heard of than the ones he has even heard of, let alone been to. Even the Typewriter repair place near the video game place is now a restaurant called Type Face and the menu items are all ”45”.

They were chopping vegetables right in front of them while John and Kurt were chatting about the old days and about Kurt’s old Land Rover that was always on fire, before John could even afford a truck that caught on fire all the time. The chef was a friend of them both, John was 30, Kurt was 40, and they were all in the prime of their lives. The chef kept throwing little Tapas plates at them all night long and in the course of the night for every order the chef made a second helping of it and gave it to Kurt and John. They tried everything over the course of 6 hours.

There are times and places where you want to be: ”Chef, take me away! Put me on your Gossamer wings and take me where I am going!”, and there are other times when you are on a date and want some oysters and you don’t want to pay $4 extra for them because some restaurant reviewer said that the way this person waves their hands over the oysters makes them some other thing. It is for rich snorks! Wine is fine, but liquor is quicker! (lyrics of Suicide Solution by Ozzy Osbourne). Merlin doesn’t want to become a wine guy, it is worse than comic books.

Merlin thinks John was in the best situation when he was in that kitchen with Kurt: It is nice to not be noticed, it is like hanging out with Ben Gibbard: It is very freeing! MC Hammer wants to talk to him, not so much to Merlin, he is just having fun and saying ”Hi!” to Willie Brown. MC Hammer didn’t really want to talk to any of them. Merlin liked that his family was there, that was really sweat. He seemed like a nice guy. John never understood the boat. How do you have a boat in a restaurant? Merlin says it is a famous bar with very overpriced drinks. There is a body of water inside of the lounge, it is very tiki (they talk about going to MC Hammer’s birthday party, see RL80).

John wants to live in a world where everything is good, nothing is garbage, and things are priced accordingly. If you want something that is nice and good you have to pay more for the thing, but you don’t have to pay extra just because somebody waved their hands over it or because somebody heard about it. John doesn’t want to live in a world for snorks, but he doesn’t want to live in a sequestered world either. He wants the world be not be for snorks. A lot of our culture is snorks-first.

John ordering too many cheap things on Amazon that add up (RL424)

John ordered something on the company that is based in Seattle that brings things to you in 24 hours (Amazon) and it cost $20 and it felt like it was only $20. As it got here he needed something else and it was only $20, and little by little, $20 at a time, this company is sucking the life-force out of everybody. Last night he ordered another thing and it was only $20 and it was the final thing that made him feel like something desperate had just happened and he had ordered one $20 thing too many and he felt a disturbance in the force.

He had ordered some pillow cases for pillows that could be outside in the rain, he had some chairs that he sits on when he is outside, they needed some cushions, but he knew he was not going to bring the cushions in reliably, so they needed to be able to be rained on. They were advertised as pillows, but they turned out to be just pillow cases and he needed pillows to put in the pillow cases. If John had read it, he would have ordered both at the same time, but now he had to order the pillows on the following day and it felt like he had done it and gone over.

John has allotted himself a certain number of times he is allowed to order something from this company in a month, they are the only ones that can give you something tomorrow, to plug a hole, something you need desperately that you can’t get anywhere else, but now he has become someone who will just get it from the place and it will be here tomorrow, which is totally like Merlin.

Every dollar of snork money that you put into the snork machine creates more snorks. It not just makes these guys rich, but the girl John went on the date with that said that if chef wanted her to eat her oysters with a soup spoon, then that is what she is going to do, it is on a spectrum and more and more John will only be able to get what the chef wants because he is empowering the chef every day by buying little pillow cases from them because they are the only thing going.

Etiquette in modern society, not knowing anymore what is right and what is wrong (RL424)

There are so many things in life where John cannot say for sure that they are wrong because the culture has changed and he has been here for the whole time, like you put a lobster in a pot of boiling water or a frog in a frying pan and the heat goes up and you feel it is sure warm in there. Maybe John is the bad one?

Merlin was a lonely latchkey child who read a lot of books from around the house and from the library. They had a couple of books on etiquette, one of which illustrated by a young Andy Warhol. It was Emily Post’s book Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home and Judith Martin’s book Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. Merlin is the opposite of J. D. Vance and is incredibly curious about what the forks are for. It was where he first learned to stand up when a lady arrives at or leaves the table, he still does that even though it is probably sexist, but he does it for everybody.

One day he learned a truism that etiquette is not something we deploy to make other people feel bad, but it is a way to put people at ease. Just like every cook could learn from the phrase ”Never explain, never worry!”, you could also learn from the phrase: ”Just be cool!” Make people feel welcome. The worst kind of fancy restaurant is the one that is performing how fancy they are. A lot of people are mad at French Laundry (restaurant) these days because of Gavin Newsom (see here, eating in the restaurant not following COVID protocols), but the one time Merlin went there began as one of the most fraught experiences he could imagine, he was terrified something would go wrong, but he has never been put so at ease by the staff of a restaurant ever. A good restaurant does everything they can to make you feel good.

John thinks there should be a sign in front of every restaurant like the Fire Danger Today signs that says: ”Am I paying to have what I want or am I paying to be guided by the master to something I did not know I wanted?”

Merlin had bacon and eggs at his Irish breakfast yesterday that belonged into a museum and he doesn’t understand how they keep the home fries delicious, when he makes them at home it is always a disaster because he is not a chef, and how do you keep them with the bacon good while you are making poached eggs. When Merlin makes poached eggs he sends everybody out of the house because he needs to concentrate. When John makes a white sauce, not a problem, he wants everyone else to stand in the front yard and hold their hats in their hands until he is done with that sauce.

Things evolving from a trade to a craft to an art, people not wanting input on their vision (RL424)

John understands that there is a religiosity that is reverse-engineered into eating by contemporary culture that is looking for meeting, we have turned back toward eating and those basic things and imbued them with tremendous significance where probably for 25.000 years the only significance was that some food made it to you, and now we are all on bended knee about it because food is the latest thing. There are multiple axis: Am I paying extra money for this to be incredible and in paying extra money I also have less say in it? You don’t go into French Laundry and ask them to put cheese on it. But at the same time, are you going into a situation where you end up food that you don’t want? The answer from a lot of people will be: ”Then don’t go to this restaurant!” Merlin says it is a category error to misunderstand what this is.

John has discussed his feelings about computer maths a lot. There is a spectrum of things that a thing that formerly was a trade became a profession, what used to be a craft has become an art, and cooking is like this: It went from a trade to a profession to an art and yet all these things exist simultaneously: There is a restaurant where the guy thinks of cooking as a trade and right across the street in what used to be a typewriter repair place is a restaurant where the person back in the kitchen is certain that it is an art, and both places are serving poached eggs.

John knows that when somebody is doing graphic art commercially for him when he is working on an album cover with them, there are some people… like The Long Winters music video for Fire Island AK which breaks John’s heart because they spent a lot of money on it, it was an opportunity to make a music video that would be on YouTube for the rest of John’s life, like: ”Wow, you should see my video!” and instead it turned into a video that he doesn’t like to watch and that he hopes no-one ever watches because it is not very becoming and not very flattering.

When people were pitching videos to them there was a guy who pitched that Fire Island music video that was going to be a stop motion thing where some crazy guy in a room was building a house of tissue paper and the house got… he had a whole vision for the thing. He was going to tell a story in the music video that had zero relationship to the song and he had come up with this treatment and was pitching it to everybody who had a music video budget. It was crazy that if you had added one little thing, the big house of tissue paper built inside a warehouse by a stop motion crazy person would have told the story of Fire Island AK.

John wrote him very excitedly and said: ”This is fantastic, if you just had the final card say x or if you just changed the color from green to blue, then this whole thing would be incredibly symbolic!” - ”This is my vision, it is an all-or-nothing situation. No input!” It wasn’t Jim Jarmusch, but some guy who was making music videos for Indie Rock bands and this was the idea of himself and the purity of his vision, and John went with his friend Beck Schwartz (Rebecca Schwartz?), she is a wonderful friend and it is who everything panned out and John attributes a lot of the failure to himself as the performer because he doesn’t know what to do when there is a camera on him. John just objected fundamentally to his ”No input!”, his very kurt email in reply.

In this somewhere, from the trade all the way through to the art… like John would have always considered video game designers as something you learned at the career center because you weren’t going to graduate, but now somehow the video game designers are the new DaVincis and we clothe them in Ermine. John has been standing here in the world the whole time, the world has gone past, and his shoes have been size 12 since 1986, he is wearing the same boots, but the world shifts around and he still sometimes goes to a restaurant and asks them to put cheese on it when it is clear that the chef is going to take him on a journey because it doesn’t say that on the sign out front because they are both in the mini mall!

John doesn’t want to be a snork on either end of it. Canlis has been the nicest restaurant in Seattle since 1959 because it is cantilevered mid-century modern architecture perched on a cliff overlooking the bay with light fixtures that are hand-hammered out of John Wayne’s yacht. When you pull into the parking lot you already know you are in the nicest restaurant in Seattle.

When John pulls into a mini mall that has a pizza delivery spot, a nail salon, a restaurant that is called The Beaver, the Badger, and the Buckwheat and there are no prices on the menu and then there is a blown-out former nail salon that now has 4 Aeron chairs in it and a bunch of people with headsets on and they are either doing sex talk, one of them is the CEO, one of them the CFO and one them the CTO, and it is a $100 million company, which one of these will go into when he wants something to eat? He is the dumdum, the perma-snork wearing his old boots, and he reaches into his pocket, pulls out his paper crown, walks into the place, sits down and says: ”I am here at table, what does chef want?”

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