Stories retold: Benihana Atlanta Culture Clash

(I'm going to set down, periodically, a few of the stories I seem to keep telling, in the hope that maybe I'll stop boring people with them in person. This is an old one, from many years back. Ed.)

Back in the eighties, I went to a convention in Atlanta, as the lone "headquarters" guy, teamed up with two young saleswomen from a small company we'd just acquired. Like many acquirees, they were nervous about the future, nervous about looking professional in front of the new owners, and so on. Although they were both from the south, neither knew anything about Atlanta, nor did I.

After the show floor closed, we headed out to find dinner, not knowing that downtown Atlanta rolled itself up at 5:00 -- instead of a cosmopolitan set of dining options, the area around the convention center seemed to be mostly emptied-out office buildings. We did, though, find a Benihana nearby and open.

I assume you know what a Benihana restaurant is: a corporate-teppanyaki-style Japanese place, where you sit around large tables, usually with other parties, and a cook prepares a limited set of dishes for you on a grill that's essentially part of the table. It's a kind of dining theatre that's old hat today, but was a more or less new thing in the US, back then.

We got seated, along with a group of self-conscious, dressed-up high school kids, and were talking about the day's work, when -- the drunkest woman in the world was seated with us. I don't know why they even let her in the door, but her state of complete intoxication was immediately apparent to us, her new dining companions. She sat down, looked dazedly around, and said, "Hell, I'm in a damn Chinese restaurant." I'm not going to try to do the dialect, here -- you'll just have to keep in mind that everything this person said was in a deep, deep southern accent, complete with multiple syllables where standard English would use but one; "damn" thus became "day-um."

Next, and before anyone could really absorb the magnitude of our friend's incapacitation, our chef arrived, and unfortunately for him, he was not of the expected ethnicity. In fact, he was South Asian, not Japanese. The drunk stared at him for a minute and then pointed out, "You ain't no Chinaman -- you're an A-rab." Everyone immediately looked away.

There followed a confused few minutes during which the chef tried to explain the menu (which was just a matter of choosing the kind of protein she wanted grilled.) Somehow, he managed to get her to agree that chicken would be OK, although he could probably have gotten her to order mongoose, if he'd wanted to. But as he began to do his knife skills thing, she began to have second thoughts. She turned to me (it was my honor to have the seat next to her) and asked, "They ain't going to kill that chicken right here in front of us, are they?"

"Yes," I said, "and be glad you didn't order beef."

At this point, my memory of the precise sequence of events becomes a bit hazy. I remember the saleswoman seated on my other side elbowing me, not wanting to see me make things any worse than they were (both of my companions were mortified, it later turned out, that their new Yankee owners were seeing such a sordid side of the New South.) And I remember the restaurant staff removing the drunk -- why it took them that long to realize what they had on their hands is baffling. But it remains one of my fondest memories of that innocent time, when things were still a blend of yuppified and stupefied.

How not to write history

Make a note: next time you're asked to write the text to accompany a bunch of archival photos of pre-Dreadnought warships, do a bit of proofreading. In The Ironclads, by Peter Hore, the second sentence begins, "Then, just as the British Navy delivered the victory of sea power in 1815 at the battle of Trafalgar ..."

Hore is ex-Royal Navy, associate editor of Warships International Fleet Review (whose website could do with a bit of proofing, itself), and "eight books." His writing, what of it I've read, is full of strange assertions and bizarre opinions, (viz, streamlining bulges on today's merchant ships and chin-mounted sonar on ASW craft are somehow descendants in naval architecture of late nineteenth century rams), but I have to presume that even he knows when Trafalgar was really fought.

End of summer panic

As the summer dwindles, I get cravings for summer flavors -- knowing that soon we'll be reduced to stews, steaks, and so on, and the vegetables in particular will go to hell in a handcart. Here's last night's act of desperation, Jody Adams' grilled fish with a basil-potato puree' and grilled heirloom tomatoes. No rouget to be had, nor any striped bass, either, so we went with farmed rainbow trout instead. The brown things are nicoise olives scattered around.

More on autism

Another study on autism vs vaccinations. As we all know, you can't really prove something is impossible or something doesn't exist, and the other side of this debate (notice how polite I'm being? I didn't say something snarky like "the people who desperately want someone with deep pockets to sue," or "the people who think science consists of deciding what you want to be true and then going to look for evidence that it is.") will certainly make that point in response. But the work described in this article adds some more weight on the rational end of the teeter-totter.

plus ça change ...

An old colleague from our days in the tape backup biz was in town, and without giving it much thought (although it was Friday,) we decided to go to the fabled Old Town (a.k.a, the Odd Town Tavern, famed in story and song, but mostly in the Wood-Charles News Service.) Lo and behold, we were seated at the same old long table in the back, under the same old nude painting. The same old Liz (not that old - certainly not as old as the nude painting, anyway) was on hand, as she used to be. We ate peanuts, drank beer, and told the same old stories of life in the world of employment.

Afterward, we went to the Wine Bar at the Earle, a block away, and were waited on by Felipe, another Old Town alumnus. Except for the fact that they fled the decaying urban grittiness of downtown Ann Arbor for the sanitary tracts of Zeeb Road and I-94, we could have made a real night of it and ended up at Metzger's. The only real change of any import is that you can now see where we were on Google streets, since they've thoughtfully photo'ed the whole bleedin' town.

Labor day morning

Momentarily excited

By the headlines: "McCain chooses Palin as running mate!"

But then I thought, "Wait, he's not a US citizen."

A mind is a terrible thing ...

I was annoying an old acquaintance with this, recently, and I thought I'd annoy you, too. The concept is: song parodies based on lurking in a barn. One of them is a contribution, the rest are my fault.

John Fogarty
Left a good job in the city,
lurkin' in a barn every night an' day

Bob Dylan
I ain't gonna lurk in Maggie's barn no more

David Allen Coe
Take this barn and shove it, I ain't lurkin' here no more

Traditional
I've been lurkin' in the barnyard ...

Dolly Parton
Lurking nine to five
Hay up to the ceiling
Crouching in a barn
With a rustic feeling

Loverboy
Everybody's lurking on the weekend,
Everybody's lurking in a barn ...

John Lennon
As soon as you're born they stick you in a manger,
And everything they do just makes you feel stranger,
Till you just cultivate an aura of danger,
A lurking class hero is something to be

Herman's Hermits
Babbadeebiddy DOOO.
Well I was lurking in the barn
(Late last night!)
When all the window shades were drawn
(Way down tight!)
I heard the raucous serenade
Of idiots on parade
(Idiots idiots idiots idiots on parade!)

Bachman-Turner Overdrive
I've been taking care of business, what's the harm?
Taking care of business and lurking in a barn

Ran across my copy ...

Of Richard Campbell's book, Managing AFS: The Andrew File System, which put me in mind of the following review I wrote for the old Wood Charles News Service, back when the book came out. I asked Richard if he would mind seeing this rubbish hit the streets again, and he was gracious enough to agree.

---

CAMPBELL'S NEW BOOK SHOCKS, INSTRUCTS

Managing AFS: Andrew File System
Richard Campbell,
Prentice Hall

Reviewed by: J. Francis McLuggage

Ann Arbor: I come away from "Managing AFS," Richard Campbell's new ... what? Novel? Autobiography? Prose Poem? ... thinking of nothing so much as Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. The work shifts, sometimes gently. sometimes with wrenching suddenness, from narrative to stream of consciousness, much as Dos Passos slipped back and forth between the lives of his fictional characters, biographical sketches of Woodrow Wilson and Samuel Gompers, and the lyrical, autobiographical sections he called "The Camera's Eye." Just so does Campbell weave his tale of "Andrew," the lonely, androgynous nexus of "Managing." And as we slip into and out of the disturbing, disturbed universe of Campbell's manufacture, so we come to feel like Dos Passos' Camera -- an eye, dispassionately observing.

In the beginning, "Andrew," is born of bohemian parents, caught up in the moment of drugs and casual sex on and around the Carnegie-Mellon campus ("... clients could mount practically anything, anywhere they wanted ...") We are gradually led to know that money was tight, mostly by the author's obsessive repetition of the (oddly misspelled) word, "cash." This concern with position is echoed in Andrew's often-expressed desire to be "well-connected" -- or is it another, perhaps darker, kind of connection he wishes for? Although political dogma is not a central feature of the book, there are hints that the young Andrew may have been dabbling. For example, he muses, apparently to himself (or possibly to "Vice," one of his dream- companions), "There is no ultimate limit to the size of a cell..." A cell in cold stone reality? A cell in an underground movement? Or the cell of mind? Is this a political tactic or a despairing comment on the futility of enlightenment? We are left to decide.

By mid-book, as Andrew matures, we find him struggling with the dualities of his responsibility. He tries to justify to himself the compromises he's made with his life, saying to David, another possibly imaginary interlocutor, "The rules are simple and sensible." But he also admits his rationalization of circumstances: "Once you are on a read-write path, it is difficult to get off." And again, "If you've made your cell visible to the outside world, it is difficult to make it invisible." "... the threads continue forever once started ..."

Later on, David reappears in what is probably a fantasy sequence involving folk dancing. Campbell effortlessly, in an almost Joycean voice, encapsulates an entire evening's pastime with the two-word phrase, "klog david." The joyful abandon of the moment soon turns to remorse, though: "... poor decisions will turn into immutable legacies." The sinister Ethan threatens blackmail, and Andrew is driven to contemplate black crimes: "Ethan's personal groups can be deleted outright ..."

Particularly impressive is Campbell's subtle weaving of psychological thematic material with changes in Andrew's mood and mind. From a deep, almost pathological worry about money, his character can go to a childlike, playful fatalism over it, repeating, "dcachehits, dcachemisses...," Andrew-speak for easy come, easy go.

What bothers the thoughtful reader, though, no matter how impressed he is with the structure or craftsmanship of Campbell's work, is the theist implications that -- perhaps -- poke their heads, like unwanted philosophical woodchucks, up from the humanist mainstream of Andrew's life-tale. Is there a God? Is Andrew God? Is the commune of information a kind of God in itself? We wonder, as the book concludes with a suggestion that Andrew's destiny is to become, "... a ubiquitous resource, omnipresent and dependable."

--

Richard Campbell is a founding member (some would say the founder) of the Ann Arbor Drinking and Thinking Society and a boating enthusiast. He runs a Manhattan-area Bed and Breakfast. "Managing AFS" is his first novel.

--

Ed. note: Shortly before going to press, we received an angry note from Mr. Campbell, claiming that our reviewer had completely misunderstood his book. In Campbell's view, it's a technical volume about some kind of computer thing or other. What the hell does he know? If we allow artists to start determining the meaning of their work, think of the impact on the humanities industry. You want a lot of unemployed Art Historians and English Lit PhDs wandering around downtown Ann Arbor, getting run over by Mini-vans and undertipping the wait staff? Jeez.

-- 30 --

Art imitating life, apparently

As many devotees of Michael Palin's inspired turn as Pontius Pilate will remember, he had a couple of friends, one very great friend, in fact, in Rome whose names inspired uncontrollable mirth on the part of the common soldiery. The straight line that leads to this marvelous piece of character acting is supplied by John Cleese, who says, "It's a joke name, Sir ... like Sillius Sodus or ..."

Well, turns out that the room full of monkeys on typewriters that make up the translators of ancient Latin texts have given us at least one ancient with exactly that name: Silius Italicus. Ran across him in a book on the Etruscans, about whom he apparently had something to say. According to easily available sources (the only kind I consult,) Silius was a kind of proto Robert McNamara, doing bad things for a while, then being really sorry about it, later on. Look him up on the net, if you're interested (either of 'em, Silius or McNamara, don't matter to me.)