05/10/04-05/14/04

From: Sarah Lindner e-mail me

I feel Lucky

Lucky is obsessed with obsessions. Variations on the word form about 50 percent of the magazine's text. (The rest? Earl Jeans, Nanette Lepore, Tracy Reese.)

The most fevered obsessions belong to Andrea Linett, Lucky "creative director," and it would seem, a real piece of work. Here is the difference between Andrea Linett and me. Say you gave us both the same pair of sandals . . .

Me: These sandals make me feel pretty.

Andrea Linett: In these sandals, I'm a driad!

Andrea Linett is straight-up crazy, but she's also got the sexy cool part down. She's a Southern girl, and they're good at that (I wasn't, and I had to leave). Sure, she's always babbling something like "This is what a mermaid would wear to a party," but she believes so much in it, you want to play along. You want a day pass to Andrea-land where mere earrings can cause such ecstasy.

So I was kind of happy this week to realize that, finally, I had an obsession. A friend of mine bought me a CD holder from Pylones in Paris (the No. 6 color scheme), and it's so cute that I loved it even before I figured out what it was. I'm not going to treat just any CD to its velvety goodness, so I've been happily obsessing over who gets the call. So far, I've decided Patti Smith, Yo La Tengo (June 5!) and Nina Simone. But there are five more slots. I wonder what a mermaid would play at her party . . .

I am not among them, but plenty of people are obsessing about the end of "Frasier," coming as it does right after the end of "Friends" and, apparently, signaling the end of humor with a sophistication level beyond "Punk'd."

In the Times last week, Alessandra Stanley wrote:

The jokes on "Frasier" were aimed more at Mensa members than at the masses. In an episode in which Christine Baranski played Dr. Nora, a cruel, dismissive radio shrink, Frasier exclaimed, "This is a woman who thought the Spanish Inquisition was just tough love for heretics."

Really? You've got to be in Mensa to get a Spanish Inquisition reference?

"The Simpsons" can out-allusion "Frasier" any day, and besides, Sideshow Bob was really Kelsey Grammer's best role.

I blame all my sitcom hate on the fact that I worked nights through most of the '90s and never imprinted on Ross and Rachel as required by law.

Instead, I watched a lot of late-night TV, including "Dick Van Dyke Show" reruns on Nick at Nite. That was a sitcom. I loved the office banter, the theme song, Laura's clothes. I loved how Rob and Laura mixed glamour and goofiness, how they sang and danced and had swingin' parties, how they were perpetually, well, frisky.

I knew better than to watch "The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited" and I should have turned it off as soon as totally extraneous host Ray Romano (not everybody loves you, Raymond) set foot in the sacred Petrie living room, but I was weak. What followed was just terribly sad — all stilted dialogue and the specter of death. I've seen "Six Feet Under" episodes with fewer funeral references. The only good that could come out of it is if the casts of "Friends" and "Frasier" were watching and made sacred vows: no reunions.

I'm going to rent some DVDs of the show to put the reunion out of my mind. And maybe flip my hair up, and wear ballet flats. Actually, I'm a little obsessed with early '60s glamour . . .

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From: Omar Gallaga e-mail me

The honeymooner

(Fodder. "Fatherhood." Too esoteric the almost-pun? Yeah, I think so too.)

But I have issues writing about that stuff here. For one thing, it was a wedding, a personal thing you share with about 150 people, that is, nevertheless a roller coaster of emotions (Good!) and endless thank-you notes (Bad! But polite!).

For another (two, and counting) thing, who wants to hear me babble about Paris? What writer who's visited the City of Lightening Your Pocket of Bad Exchange Rate Euros hasn't written boring observations about their time in brasseries (the cafés not the lingerie) or about how Parisian women have a special way of tying a scarf that makes Francophile Americans all tingly?

I know this to be true because one of the books I took with me to France (I took about six books because I didn't take a laptop. Me Caveman. You on 220 volts.) was a collection of essays about the city gifted to me before the trip by a close friend.

It's one of those "Travelers' Tales" books that collects essays from novelists and travel writers about their Deep Experiences With French Pastries and name-dropped Rues and Avenues. The essays ran from entertaining to mystifying. In one, a guy talks about how he used to hang out as the Deux Magots (literally: "The Two Maggots") restaurant with a former agent of F. Scott Fitzgerald and you start to think, "Wait, how old is this guy? And why is he writing about women's stockings? Cah-reeeeepy!"

I didn't take a notepad with me on my trip, and I was later glad. What's more clichéd than a writer in Paris, trying to demystify a country that seems largely pragmatic about its own sense of style and mystery? When you go to the Louis Vuitton on Saint Germain des Prés (there I go, name-dropping posh city blocks), the sense you get is not, "How in holy heck is someone spending $10,000 on a leather tote?" Paris does things to your mind where you agreeably acknowledge, "Well, if you're a millionaire in Paris, of course you're going to need a $12,000 laptop case. Makes sense to me."

The book I found myself devouring on the trip instead was Bruce Wagner's, "I'll Let You Go," Part 2 in his dense Hollywood trilogy. The first, "I'm Losing You," is one of my favorite books, and I go way back with Wagner. His "Wild Palms" warped my fragile teenage mind when I was in high school and on this trip, "I'll Let You Go," with its playful, sometimes hammily overt nods to Dickens (Wagner lays it on a little thick with his authorial asides and footnotes) put me in another world. I find something entertaining about Wagner's earnest love of primary characters and seeming abject disgust at nearly everyone else in the world (the foster care nightmare in the book's middle is so profanely rendered that it would get a person fired were it read on a Clear Channel radio station).

Wagner's L.A.-by-way-of-Victorian-England was an odd literary companion in France, filling my dreams with images of deformed boys in luxury transports and of a giant William Morris making pomegranate pastries.

Wagner is about as literary I get with my reading. I was born with a Stephen King book in my hands, and the stuff I devour is mostly popular fiction, the occasional tome of humor (Michael Moore, though he's getting tiresome and whiny as a figure of pop culture fame), books of short stories and lots of magazines. I want to read "Middlesex" and "The Corrections," I really do, but what usually ends in my lap on the plane is "The Lovely Bones" or "The Da Vinci Code" — books that may be middlebrow, sure, but middlebrow I know I'll finish.

My single visit to a Paris bookstore brought me to the English-language section where, like a vastly expanding dandelion patch, books excoriating our president (most eye-catching title: "FRAUD!" with a photo of George W. Bush plastered on its cover) commingled spinal DNA with Bob Woodward and Richard A. Clarke's more reasonable recent U.S. best sellers.

On every international news channel was Donald Rumsfeld, explaining Iraqi prisoner abuse. My modus operandi before the trip was that we would assume the identities of Canadians, Françoise and Paco, or maybe Argentinians, Imelda and Don Julio.

But we could barely hide that we were simply Americans abroad at a bad time, ambivalent about engaging a culture that so recently associated us with stacked, naked bodies and women's underwear, not on the bodies of Bob Dylan-ogling Portuguese beauties in garish commercials, but on the heads of humiliated captives.

I stuck my nose in a book on the plane back home, deciding on a cover story if I accidentally called myself Paco or Don Julio while showing my passport at customs.

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From: Joe Gross e-mail me

'Coxsone' Dodd, R.I.P.

Dodd can't quite be accused of literally inventing the music that became reggae the way that, say, Bill Monroe invented bluegrass. But as much as anyone, "Sir Coxsone the Downbeat," as he was known, nurtured it into existence.

Born in Kingston on Jan. 26, 1932, he started spinning jazz records in his parents' liquor store. According to the legend, his dad worked on the docks and gave his son R&B and jazz records from ships passing through. The younger Dodd spent time in the United States, collecting records for his soundsystem, Sir Coxsone Downbeat (soundsystems were essentially mobile DJ crews and competition between soundsystems was, to say the least, fierce).

He started recording Jamaican knock-offs of American R&B hits and in 1963, a year after Jamaica gained its independence, he opened his own studio, Studio One.

It soon became the Motown or Stax of Jamaican music, the mark of quality in a music industry that would soon become one of the world's most prolific and influential. Extraordinary studio musicians such as the Skatalites and the Soul Defenders became Dodd's Booker T and the MGs and his Muscle Shoals house band and with them, Dodd created and codified rhythms, pioneered production techniques and made a mess of the best ska, rocksteady and reggae albums of all time, not to mention the fact that he tracked the first songs by an amazingly young Bob Marley.

I would recommend picking up Horace Andy's "Skylarking," Ken Boothe's "Mr. Rocksteady" and Alton Ellis' "Best of" for fans of '60s soul, and any of the Studio One collections on Soul Jazz Records are pretty great as well.

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From: Chris Garcia e-mail me

Eat, Drink, Man, Chicken Head

I won't dwell on the culinary escapades I just enjoyed in China, though allow me to discourage you from boiled silkworm chrysalis, a single bite of which left me reeling with nausea.

In fact, I'm not going to dwell on my trip to China at all, lest I become the neighbor with the holiday slide show, or parent with a toddler: a presumptuous anecdotal drone.

I take that back. That's exactly what I'm going to do.

What do you expect? I've been back only a few days and laid up with a wicked strain of cold (SARS! Avian flu! Sorry, no), so the bulk of my material springs from one of my best trips ever. If you'd rather hear about pop-cultural matters, such as how swell Mahler sounds on an iPod as one strolls a museum, or my new, swooning crush on Natasha Melnick from "Freaks and Geeks," come back another day. Like this day next year.

I was dying to eat snake meat — once, that is, I appraised the pearly, dimpled flesh that looked so much like translucent fish fillet skewered on a kebob. That's how most of the creepy-crawly munchies by Chinese street vendors is served, from starfish and male goat genitalia, to whole grilled sparrows and huge, crunchy fried scorpions: impaled in neat rows on a foot-long toothpick.

I first spotted pieces of snake at Beijing's storied Donganmen night market, same place I almost ingested insect. (Silkworm, insect, right?) Had I known the overpoweringly foul odor around some vendors was issuing from the boiled silkworm bulbs — golden-brown ovoids so perfectly formed they looked fresh off a pottery wheel — I would have walked. But I wanted to try something exotic — just a bite or two, to say I did it — and those chrysalides seemed easier to get down than the shiny black beetles or nefarious-looking scorpions.

They stank. The fetid stench of the silkworm is corroborated in Jeffrey Eugenide's insinuating, history-hopping novel "Middlesex," which I was conveniently reading on the trip. (And there's your pop-culture nugget.) One traveler has described the bouquet as "a cross between the boiling jockstraps of a football team and broccoli."

The broccoli part is generous. Try wild animal droppings.

Problem is, they taste exactly like they smell. You know when a bug accidentally flies into your mouth, and you immediately do that pursed-lip spitting reflex thing? That's how my snack went. Some excellent pork dumplings couldn't erase the horror. I took a walk and thought about candy.

From Beijing I went southwest to Xi'an, then farther south to Chongqing, and that's where I tried to swallow a snake. Chongqing is famed for its (unbelievably) spicy hotpot, essentially a gurgling cauldron of red chili oil, butter and unforgiving spices into which you drop kebobs of raw meat and vegetables, where they marinate and cook in the molten broth. I dropped in all sorts of stuff the nice lady who seemed to be running the dilapidated joint pointed out to me, including a healthy cut of snake meat. (What kind? No idea. Just generic mid-sized snake, the kind you see in cartoons, I suppose.)

Half of the meat I ate stumped me — hot dog? pork? mutton? Fido? — but I recognized that marbled white flesh. I dropped it in, let it simmer. Then I ate the other meats and veggies. My tongue smoked, my eyes watered, my nose ran. Cold beer helped in no way. Finally I pulled the snake kebob out and it came up a naked stick. It had slithered away into the fiery depths.

The street food fascinated me in every city, from Beijing to Hong Kong. Later that night in Chongqing, I bought a grilled rat head just to study it with clinical revulsion. I didn't eat it — I wouldn't know how — though I got vaguely adventurous on another occasion in Beijing. In the capital's notorious "Bar Street" area, a band of young people who sold grilled meats outdoors cooked me up a kebob of chicken hearts that were delicious. (They had to point to which organ I was about to eat, as they spoke not a word of English.)

And then I gave in and tried a bite of the girl's intact chicken head, grilled with beak and all. Crunchy, greasy. And not bad for food that's watching you.

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