The Big BM

There are many charms to the Chateau Marmont, including tiny, decorative details like this one. But, honestly, you could charge me $1,000 per night for a broom closet filled with pig shit, just so long as you kept the stationery coming.

Just another gratuitous pork video. Happy Independence Day!

Wong Kee Restaurant, KL

This is a continuation of the feature once, with some misfortune, titled Similars.

Penang, Malaysia

San Diego, California

With levees back in the news, it occurred to me that, until a few weeks ago, I really didn’t have a mental picture of what the hell a levee really was. I’m no expert on the mechanics of the Katrina flood, but below are a couple of pictures of the rebuilt levee wall separating the Inner Harbour Navigation Canal (which connects to Lake Pontchartrain), on the left in the overhead shot, from the Lower Ninth Ward, on the right. (Experts please correct if I’ve gotten this wrong.)

I guess I always knew it was just a big wall, but I somehow still imagined something more technologically intricate—something that made the levee’s “failure” more complicated than the simple triumph of the brute strength of water.

I was cool with five severed (or at least detached) sneaker-clad feet washing up on Canadian shores. But six? Uh-uh. WTF?

I’m reading Michael and Ariane Batterberry’s On the Town in New York: A History of Eating, Drinking and Entertainments from 1776 to the Present. Among other tidbits, I’ve learned that, following the ratification of the Constitution, it became a tradition, “stringent as a Japanese tea ceremony,” to toast thirteen times after every dinner, presumably in honor of the thirteen new states. Apparently our forefathers drank to:

• “The Federal Edifice”
• “Our American Fabius, the Illustrious Washington”
• “The Patriotic Hamilton”
• “Death Rather Than Submission To Foreign Controls of Influence”
• “That the Poor and Distressed Throughout the World Might Find a Quick and Sure Asylum in America”
• “The Day”
• “The Fair Sex”

All strike me as eminently toastable today. (I do wonder which eighteenth-century-specific toastees the Batterberrys chose to omit: “Lice”? “Slaves”?) Fill out the list as you see fit and let’s declare the Summer of Thirteen Toasts underway.

At the Jungle Dinner Club, Ville Platte, LA.

And have a great weekend. More next week. One hopes.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday June 10, I’ll be reading part of my essay on being the worst drug dealer in the history of Massachusetts as part of Post-It Note Stories at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre. I am already happy to have seen you there.

…a candidate I endorse, regardless of her politics. (Though she really needs a more creative ad department; if you’ve got a name like that, you might as well work it.)