The Weekly Meat

How to Win Friends and Influence People

As summer rolls in, it's important we all brush up on the amateur musicianship that used to get us laid back in college.

You did play guitar in college, right?

Well, get the led out. Literally. Brain dump all those musty Led Zeppelin bits you learned back in high school. No one wants to hear your masterly picking on "Over the Hills and Far Away." There has only ever been one good use for Zeppelin (see Damone, Five-Point Plan), and even that is dated.

Alright. It's festival/backyard barbecue/family reunion season and you will be called upon to rally the troops, young and old. You'll need 45 minutes worth of tunes you can play and sing well. If you're lousy with lyrics, keep a sheaf of cheat sheets in your guitar case. The key is a varied repertoire in your vocal range, with no alternate tunings, and no more than a half-dozen chords.

Important!  Do not cater to children. Kids need to learn grown-up songs, not vice versa. Barney can go screw.

In compiling a solid playlist, you'll need at least one tune from the following dozen well-established musical genres:

Country: Let me be clear that I mean old-school country, not some nouveau radio-friendly crap sung by anyone remotely hot. The following are solid picks: Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried," Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho & Lefty," Jeff Walker's "I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight," or the daddy of 'em all, Steve Goodman's David Allan Coe vehicle: "You Never Even Call Me By My Name." 

Folk: First, understand that folks were more patient for six- and seven-minute epics back in the coffee house days, but that dog don't hunt anymore. No one wants to hear you go prattling on about "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" or sit for all of "Tangled up in Blue," so keep it short. Dylan, John Prine, Gillian Welch, Josh Ritter, all fine choices.

Blues: You don't need to solo, but you do need to know your basic 12-bar 1-4-5. Rufus Thomas' "Walkin' the Dog" and Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'" are brilliant tunes to get the house rocking.

Classic Rock: I've got a few, but (done well, mind you, not like this) nothing is easier or goes over better than AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long." (But for god's sake, if you insist on playing Led Zeppelin, do something like "Tangerine," because if I hear "Stairway to Heaven" I will break your guitar like Belushi.)

Indie Rock: Easy crowd-pleasers for the post-punk slacker moms and dads. "The Concept" by Teenage Fanclub, "Tennessee" by the Silver Jews, and the Pixies' "Here Comes Your Man."

Punk: No party is complete without some well-timed punk. Black Flag's version of "Louie, Louie," The Clash's "Death or Glory," Cock Sparrer's "England Belongs to Me." With the proper venom and snarl, these'll make them cough up a deviled egg.

Oldies: Gotta have a couple the AARP crowd knows the words to. Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou," Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man," Buddy Holly's "Well... All Right."

A Capella: I know. But trust me — it's critical. It's the musical equivalent of golf's sand wedge. You've gotta have it in your bag for those times when you break a string, or are too drunk to keep time, or have to prove you actually can sing, or when you're night fishing for great whites. In fact, sea shanteys work like a charm in most instances, and at these trying times, give a nod to Quint and go with either "Show Me the Way to Go Home" or "Spanish Ladies" (incidentally, an excellent lullaby for kids). Another rollicking, sea-faring song with some teeth (and a "goddamn them all" chorus) is Stan Rogers' great "Barrett's Privateers," which I learned over a campfire ages ago at the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

Bluegrass: You need at least one tune to play with a banjo- or fiddle-toting friend. And if you don't have any friends who tote said instruments, you need to take a hard look at who you're hanging out with. I can't do a lick of real fingerpicking, but I can comp chords, and tunes like Hank Williams' "Jambalaya" or the Stanley Brothers' "Man of Constant Sorrow" work well.

Johnny Cash: You're damn skippy JC's a genre unto himself, and you best know a handful. "Folsom Prison Blues," "Ring of Fire," and "Tennessee Stud" for starters.

Songs about trains: No self-respecting musical hack can have a train-free repertoire — and not just so they can satisfy my train-crazed 4-year-old nephew (who is already familiar with the rail-heavy catalogs of Hank Snow and Jimmie Rodgers). I know maybe a dozen, but in a pinch, I'll take REM's "Driver 8," Roger Miller's "King of the Road," and Leadbelly's "Rock Island Line."

Songs about drinking: Give someone their first listen to Sonny Boy Williamson's classic "Sloppy Drunk Blues," or try to do justice to The Pogues' "Streams of Whiskey." It has a built-in party chorus and still sounds hella good after many rounds. For plenty more help with this genre, fumble your way over to the brilliant and encyclopedic Barstool Mountain.

Now, beyond all that, you've got to have a single go-to song — something short that you can do in any key, for any occasion, and at a moment's notice. That song should be a genre-buster; hitting several at once. The little banjo ditty Newman does in Cool Hand Luke ("Plastic Jesus") is a great place to start.

Dust off those fingers, boys and girls. It's time to go make an ass of yourself.

Mama Tried — Merle Haggard
Hello Mary Lou — Ricky Nelson
Barrett's Privateers — Stan Rogers
Streams of Whiskey — The Pogues

Public Art

I'm part of the global warming problem. I have a ~30 mile commute to work, and I drive it solo, four days a week. I drive a '95 Camry, not some idiotic suburban assault vehicle — and I work at home one day a week — but still, it's a long drive. Oh yeah, this post isn't about being green. My point is this: the drive is boring as all hell.

I miss the days when my commute (which took the same ~45 minutes) involved bus and/or subway, and I could just read, or write, or people watch, or zone out to my Walkman (yes, it's been that long since I last worked vaguely near public transportation), or all four at the same time. But driving (well) takes some modicum of concentration, and listening to NPR, or a good college station, or AM hate radio, only gets me so far. So I listen to podcasts and audio books, and what have you. Of course, the scenery still sucks.

That is, but for several hundred yards of what might otherwise be the most uninspired part of the commute — a down-in-the-mouth bit of traffic-choked local roadway alongside I-93. Because brightening up that bit of the drive is one of my favorite painted murals of all time.

As far as I am concerned, the Mystic River Mural (yeah, that Mystic River) is the second most successful piece of public art I've had the pleasure to experience (more on the first, below). Its success in this case is due mostly to the improvement of its blah surroundings (it's literally sandwiched between a community housing project and the interstate), its staying power (new sections are added each year), and the fact that it plays such a refreshing role in my daily commute.

Public art should be just that: widely viewable, well-executed, and aesthetically accessible. Even some of the graffiti writers create great public art. (Also appreciated on many a commute.) Wish I had some better pics to link to for some old school Philly faves, but suffice to name-check "Mr. Blint" and leave it there. Dude could paint.

This mural — which stretches several hundred yards, and covers up nothing but ugly concrete reinforcement walls — actually achieves its clear mission every day, which is to remind those who take the time to see it, that there is an living, flowing river just on the other side of the overpass. The location is the subject matter is the message.

Hands down, the greatest piece of public art I've seen was Olafur Eliasson's "Sun" installation at the Tate Modern in London. Trippy, religious, almost too cool and too powerful for words. It was a feeling, beyond the sheer enormity of the space, which is bigger than most outside of Cape Canaveral.

The Tate Modern is housed in what used to be a mothballed old power plant on the bank of the Thames. The Sun installation played on the building's former life so well, filling the vast, open turbine hall space not just with a glow, but with a low hum that made you wonder if the plant was still cranking out electricity, or if it could be the "sun" itself.

At its core, the piece (now long gone) was about raw power: of the sun, of electricity, of art; the powers of perception, suggestion, and even group inertia. It drew you in — literally (the photo at right is what I saw upon entering the museum), and figuratively (respectable people lay down on the floor, as if sunbathing, basking in the yellowness and warmth).

It immediately made me want to get to museums more often; made me wish more art was transcendent, had vision, had balls, had an audience. What I liked most about the Sun was that it was free. The old turbine hall is essentially one of the world's great foyers. You needn't pay a pence to come inside and hang out.

One of the brilliant things about The Internets and our new global world is that art is increasingly more accessible than ever. The best of the best are no longer locked up in castles or salons or museums, or even in expensive textbooks.

Back in the day, NYC graffiti writers dreamt of painting "all-city" trains, so their sometimes fantastic murals could be seen in all boroughs. Nowadays we have whole marketing teams concerned with tracking "eyeballs," and we can count unique visitors to sites, exhibits, etc. Nowadays, the talk is about going viral, or going global.

Bring it on. Paintings to the people!

More of my Tate Modern "Sun" installation pics.

Spare Change

They're out there, in uniform, in the middle of busy intersections — ten- and twelve-year-old kids — scrambling between cars with their coffee tins, asking for donations. There's an adult or two around, and the tin cans say [SomeTown] Softball, or Cheerleading, or Track.

I'm sorry if these are your kids, or kids you know, but get real. Charity and good will is one thing, but when did we, as a society, have become such fat, lazy slobs as to think that we're each entitled to payment simply for being alive? And what the hell kind of adult oversees these "fund-raising" efforts? Why teach kids to spare for change, to beg — to be satisfied with living on the dole rather than working? If these adults don't have enough moxie to organize a simple car wash or bake sale, should they really be supervising kids at all?

Hey, here's a free idea. Maybe we could encourage those kids to become the writers and thinkers of the future by starting an empowerment project in which they write a newspaper, publish it, and sell it to us. Oh yeah, that's right . . . much smarter (and far more needy) people are already doing that successfully.

I grew up in a town a lot like the one in which I now live. Some folks were well-off, and some were not. But no one begged for money. They worked for it. Youth soccer teams made money the same way Smith Barney claimed to: they "EARNed it." There were car washes and bake sales and raffles. Donors got something for their trouble — and, more importantly, we kids learned the lessons of hard work. If we didn't sell enough raffle tickets or brownies, or wash enough cars, or find a sponsor, well then, we didn't get new uniforms.

A while back, AKL and I took a long bike ride on a hot, sunny day. On our way out of town, and again on our way back an hour or two later, we stopped and bought 25 cent cups of lemonade from a 7-year-old girl. She was new to the world of business, and had a little help from her mom, but that girl learned a few things that Saturday. She learned the necessity of simple math in the real world (two cups of lemonade times 25 cents, out of one dollar). Maybe her mom taught her what "overhead" is, maybe not. I know for certain she learned about the value of return customers, and what "tips" are. And she sold a lot of lemonade that day.

Seems simple enough. You want cash? You work for it.

We have become irresponsible with our money. We buy lottery tickets instead of groceries (because, surely we're all owed a big payday). And every day we open our mail boxes to more offers for another credit card we can't afford. Maybe we even get the new card to pay off the debt on an old one. And if we are fortunate enough to own a home, what do we do? We take out a home equity loan (because certainly, we deserve "free" money) to pay off our credit card debt.

But to what end? Credit is based on — often foolish — optimism: that life will be better tomorrow, belief in "the American dream," and the steadfast notion that we will one day soon have more money than we have now. Don't get me wrong, I have lived paycheck to paycheck, and I'm very fortunate to not live that way now. Yet too many of us live far beyond our means (and, of course, we're encouraged to at every turn).

It's time to rein it in. And our kids too. (There's simply no way I'm ever dressing up daughters RK and E-O in some goddamn uniform and asking them to go hassle shoppers heading into the grocery store.) Thank god our fearless leaders in Washington — like the supervisory team parents noted above — have our education and well-being in mind, and aren't leading us down a road paved in debt.

Yeah, thank god for that.

The Sandwich Hall of Fame

Sometimes a meal is far more than just a meal. Sometimes the food and the very act of eating it join to create a transcendent experience.

This is, after all, a blog, so no, I'm not talking about food as mere survival. I'm talking about gustatory excess. Because I have just eaten my favorite cheesesteak of all time.

I'm from Philly. I have eaten, literally, hundreds of cheesesteaks. This is a notable landmark.

The event in question took place at John's Roast Pork. The sandwich — a cheesesteak with mushroom and onions, sharp provolone, and ketchup — was tremendous. The meat, infused with the taste of its roll-mates. Heavenly.

The first sandwich I fell in love with was a simple one. In high school, a friend and I used to drive over to the local convenience store for lunch once or twice a week. I would get deli turkey on a kaiser roll, with lettuce, mayo, and American cheese. Boy, I dug that sandwich. But like many first loves, I have evolved, and it was inherently flawed to begin with we have grown apart.

Love, you ask? Oh, indeed. A sandwich is more than just a slab of meat (or veggies or legumes or whatever) between two slices of bread. It's convenience. It's simplicity. It's a lifestyle. Occasionally, it is even culinary perfection.

That said, I've put together a modest hall of fame, as follows. Now the great thing about the sandwich hall of fame (SHOF) is that it's an ever-expanding (perhaps to match the waistband) entity. There are certainly classic sandwiches (say, the muffaletta at Central Grocery in NOLA), which, sadly, I have yet to consume — as well as sandwiches that have yet to be created.

In any case, the honorees thus far:

Cheesesteak — John's Roast Pork, Philadelphia
Fresh, hot, not greasy, and the perfect meld of ingredients. Thank god I don't work around the corner from this joint (I'd pretty much have to be a stevedore to do so), as I'd be a little scared to find out what the repertory of a daily cheesesteak or roast pork would do to my vascular system.

Pork Báhn Mì — Báhn Mì Saigon Bakery, NYC
I stumbled (literally) onto this place only recently, on the walk to a friend's place after a successful Fung Wah experiment. The crusty, chewy baguette, the pork, the hot sauce, the sliced cucumber and carrots, the fresh sprigs of cilantro. So good that I went back 16 hours later for another to get me through the return bus trip.

Italian Roast Pork — Tony Luke's, Philadelphia
The other Philly sandwich. Succulent roast pork pulled from a bath of broth and juice, served on a hoagie roll with sharp provolone and garlicky broccoli rabe. Mercy, mercy.

Ferdi Special — Mother's Restaurant, New Orleans
When you order your po' boys at Mother's, they ask if you want it with debris. Your answer should always be "Yes." Debris is the juice, fat, and flavor-filled detritus that falls to the bottom of the pan when the meats are being roasted. It's spooned over the top of the sandwiches and soaks into the bread, making everything heavenly. Upon finishing his first debris-addled masterpiece, my good friend Spider decided that next time he might just ask for a debris sandwich.

Lobster Roll — Red's Eats, Wiscasset, ME
The lobster roll debate is a lively one, and I might cast my vote for a different place on a different day, but Red's Eats knows how to bring it, and they don't fuss with accoutrements. You're served a whole lobster's worth of meat on a toasted bun. No hacking up the meat, no obfuscation, just goodness.

Italian Hoagie — The White House, Atlantic City
Like the mighty lobster roll, the hoagie debate is strong. For my money though, good deli meat is good deli meat, and it's not tough to come by. I've had great hoagies (though they sometimes go by different names) all over the map, and passable hoagies nearly everywhere. So the deciding factors are sandwich construction and the roll. And absolutely nowhere serves better classic crusty/chewy hoagie rolls than The White House.

Turkey Reuben — The Original Turkey, Philadelphia
There is just so much to be said for a shmear of good Russian dressing and coleslaw topping a pile of fresh sliced, perfectly roasted turkey breast. I've had similar deli versions served cold — a favorite of which was a turkey/roast beef combo. But this particular goodness adds a couple slices of Swiss, puts it between good wheat bread and pops it on the sandwich press until its absolutely beautiful. This is a sandwich that simply melts in your mouth.

Cubano
I don't know that I have yet found the perfect cubano — a delicious pressed construction of roast pork, ham, cheese, spicy brown mustard, and chopped pickles — but that only serves to inspire me to continue the quest. I've certainly come close. Clearly, this may require fact-finding missions to Miami and Havana and all places Cuban. But in my own backyard, there are two places within a stone's throw of each other that do the cubano solid: Chez Henri and the Montrose Spa.

Chicken Torta — Tacos Lupita, Somerville, MA
Torta is a generic Spanish term, which, like the Vietnamese báhn mì, loosely translates to "that which makes the mouth water, the knees go weak, and the heart grow fond of foreign lands." My favorite torta starts with well-spiced grilled chicken, adds a spoon or two of beans, avocado, lettuce, tomato, a couple of jalapeño slices, and mayo. Nothing crazy, but the roll is nice and soft and the effect is outstanding.

Cheeseburger — Your Backyard, Your City
Don't let anyone make a better burger than you can serve your damn self. There is nothing more simple than grilling up your own burger, grilling it right, topping it with your favorite cheese, a perfect slice of tomato, etc.

Yes, I realize full well that the above list is guilty of a dearth of cold sandwiches. Rest assured that there are indeed plans for a future annex to the SHOF for our heat-challenged friends — once we are able to secure proper funding. Perhaps a reserved space for the buttered Parisian baguette with country ham, gruyere, hard-boiled egg, and lettuce. But for now, these are my darlings, and I'm gonna dance with them until a cardiologist looks into my heart and stomps on my soul by telling me to lay off.