I Blame The Patriarchy

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Giving Banderas The Stink Eye

Leftover baby back ribs from Hudson's On The Bend

It's Oscar Night again. Time for Hudson's leftover ribs and Star Trek DVDs.

Star Trek DVDs are indicated when one eats ribs instead of watching the Oscars. Books require page turning, and TV requires constant channel flipping, and we don't want to get sauce on the remote, or on Andrea Dworkin.

I watch the episode where the brilliant but delusional Dr. Roger Korby makes an android replica of Captain Kirk by spinning him around on a giant lazy susan. A bonus: this episode also delivers Lurch in an incandescent star turn as a robot in a puffy pink leotard. The leftover ribs, while pretty good, cannot hold a candle to Lurch.

Neither can the Oscars. Every year I purposely avoid it; my frail constitution is no match for the gruesome spectacle of the world's biggest whores on parade. Yet every year, after Kirk has dispatched the evil androids, I take a quick peek.

Why, here's some generic hottie struggling under the weight of 4,598 cubic zirconia, the smallest of which can be seen from space. She is singing a forgettable, overwrought show tune, accompanied on piano by professional bore Andrew Lloyd Weber, who looks like he was separated at birth from that creepy homo Liza Minnelli married a couple of years ago. The hottie's thin voice is no match for the tedium of the Andrew Lloyd Weber ballad. I fall into a coma.

The sound of Chris Rock's voice revives me. But poor Chris Rock! He looks shell shocked. Possibly he's realized, too late, that he has officially become The Establishment's butt-boy. He laughs weakly at his own tepid Janet Jackson joke. I can't watch this anymore. It burns! It burns!

But wait! Here's rich, beautiful actress Natalie Portman, giving an award for Best Film About Autism!

For comic relief, I briefly tune in "Law & Order: SVU," the show about mutilated women. In this gripping, patriarchy-affirming episode, the nebbishy serial killer buries a woman alive because his mother, Anne Meara, locked him in the closet as a child. Women! They just don't listen!

Back at the Oscars, a corpse-like Jeremy Irons is presenting an award in the aisle, Monty Hall-style. This seems tacky, even for Hollywood, until I realize it's only one of the little awards, Best Low-Budget Documentary About Unaffected Third World Tribespeople, so it can go to a female British director who doesn't know any better. "This is the dog's bollocks!" she exclaims, cryptically.

As a female winner, she's an exception. Hollywood is Ground Zero for misogyny in the US. It's where we turn when we want to know what to think about who should clean toilets or how big someone's boobs should be. Never does Hollywood misogyny gleam with such radiant zeal as on Oscar night. Where else can you see so many hairy plug-uglies in tuxes being squeezed so adoringly by so many 22-year-old shiksas? The shiksas aren't up for any of the awards; they're just the bling. The male plug-uglies win everything, except for one or two awards specially reserved for the rich, beautiful actresses that all the plug-uglies want to bang.

Which is pretty gross, but there is nothing quite so repellent as celebrities high on celebrity, being themselves on national television. "Shucks, I'm just a little ole farm girl!" gushes rich, beautiful actress Hilary Swank.

Wait. There is something more repellent! Some merry prankster has told tone deaf Latin hottie Antonio Banderas that he can sing, and Banderas has bought it! He's slogging through a horrifying, overwrought show tune, in Spanish, in front of a brick wall, accompanied on guitar by professional bore Carlos Santana! Banderas is singing to a motorcycle! Oh the humanity!

Fortunately, I am a Trekkie. I know what to do. There's an episode from Season 1 where Charlie the alien adolescent can make unpleasant people disappear just by giving them the stink eye.

I aim my remote carefully. I may not get a second stink.

Cruel Shoes

photo: Footwear Of The Middle Ages

I blame the patriarchy for my persisting addiction to misogynist footwear. And god help me, I love the Manolo! Witness his greatness here, and here.

Smoked. Red. Exotic. Meat.

Fig. 15. Rattlesnake cakes on a slab of granite

Fig. 24-A Giant meat plate: 1) elk backstrap 2) wild game sausage 3) rabbit nuggets 4) quail 5) buffalo tenderloin

Thirty-five minutes northwest of North South Austin by car lies the swishily rustic Hudson's On The Bend, the most expensive barbecue joint I have ever loosened a belt in. Squeeze Hudson's and out will ooze thick, picturesque, lone-star-shaped globs of Texas Hill Country mystique. I would advise anybody in need of a giant meat plate there to hie at once.

I wasted no time in ordering Hudson's Famous Mixed Grill: two square feet of assorted exotic game accompanied by big, assertive, barbecue sauces (see fig. 24-A, above). With the exception of the rabbit chunks, which were hard as little stones and afflicted with a sugary sauce, the dish was superb. I never met a hunk of smoked red meat I didn't like, but the buffalo exuded a particular attraction. Exquisite! Somewhere under all the meat was a shovelful each of beer-flavored mashed potatoes and an excellent corn pudding. The entire affair was topped with a petunia. It cost 38 bucks.

Hudson's pecan-crusted rattlesnake cakes with chipotle sauce are storied. I cannot recommend them. Though the palate's first impression is one of fish tanks, this association is mercifully fleeting; the real problem is their textural similarity to instant mushroom burgers, or dirt. What gives? Why weren't there discernable chunks of rattlesnake? Is the meat so nasty that it must be pulverized and hidden? Or so scarce that it must be pulverized and stretched? Either way, the preparation raises doubts about the suitability of rattlesnakes to cakeal applications.

I must also question the wisdom of combining duck with scallops. Until further notice, my position is: two great tastes that don't taste great together.

On a technical note, the parking lot is hilarious. It was a dark and stormy night when I presented myself for my giant meat plate, and there was nowhere to shove the SUV but in an ancillary lot at the top of a muddy hill at the end of a very steep, very unlit succession of craters. Hudson's idea of pavement appears to involve chucking a few truckloads of river rock over an unexcavated armadillo colony, after which they probably smiled and went inside to skin a couple of wild hogs . Do not arrive in stylish footwear, is all I'm sayin'.

Death Looms For Prince of Patriarchy

Fusilli, leftover takeout chicken, sun-dried tomato, roasted garlic, mushroom essence

Meanwhile, self-inflicted castration falls out of fashion.

I got outside this dish while watching responsibly reported hard news on TV. "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs--Seeing Is Believing." There's nothing like watching a parade of yokels declaim "I know what I seen, and it warn't no aeroplane!" to take a girl's mind off the Pope's tracheotomy!

The Pope's doom impends. Big whoop. There's always another pope pupating in the Vatican's Pontiff Incubator. You probably already know this, but in the Pontiff Incubator they play mind-control tapes over and over. "Women are bloody, corrupt harlots," the tapes say. "They have fangs in their vaginas." Then, when the little popes pop out with their pointy little heads, they know what to do. They must fuck things up for the bloody corrupt harlots as much as possible. Preferably through domination and exploitation!

Both the papal mind-control tapes and the hatred of women in western civilization are the direct result of the greatest hits of Judeo-Christian mythology. Who could forget the Myth of The Fall? There's a jolly tale! “Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die.” (Sirach 25:24).

This Sirach mutha isn't fucking around. As you probably already know, his is the last of the Sapiential writings in the Vulgate of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament. It's like a bible or something to these Catholics.

Early Christian doctrinaires--guys like Tertullian and Augustine--building on Sirach's penetrating insights, enjoyed an unparalleled horror of women. They demonstrated their horror by constantly castrating themselves and issuing dire warnings about the "uncleanliness of the womb."

Unfortunately, people today hardly ever express their horror of women by castrating themselves. What gives? It turns out that current thinking holds the practice to be lacking in machismo and therefore psychotic, or gay. Thus is self-castration the purview of nebbishy nutjob characters on "Law & Order: SVU," the TV show about mutilated women.

In real life, discrimination, marginalization, domestic drudgery, poverty and garden-variety rape and murder are the only acceptable manifestations of misogyny.

Go Shoot Motherfuckers

Grilled lamb chops with mustard and red currant glaze, flageolets with
spinach and tomaters, and a head of roasted garlic

"You know, when I joined the Army nine years ago people would always ask me why I joined. Did I do it for college money? Did I do it for women? People never understood. I wanted to join the Army because I wanted to go shoot motherfuckers."
--attributed to a Fort Benning drill sergeant in "AWOL In America"by Kathy Dobie, Harper's Magazine, March 2005

Much like I can't remember what life was like before the internet or the GPS-equipped automobile, it's hard to recall how I managed before the Lodge Outpost Cast Iron Grill and Matching Stand arrived at the Twisty Compound.

I got outside these exquisite chops while reading an article in Harper's about deserters from the U.S. military. The story is no longer available on the Harper's website, so I'll hit the highlights for you:

Being in the military sucks.

Especially if you happen to be somebody for whom shooting motherfuckers has not been the dream that's sustained you from the cradle.

photo Thomas Hoepker, Harper's , March 2005

The Art of the Taco

Los tacos de Tacodeli: fish (left) and the peerless Frontera Fundido

Tacodeli has perfected the taco with a little number they like to call Frontera Fundido. This sublime example of the taqueriador's art is chunks of toothsome pot roast with fried onions and crisp poblano peppers. The secret ingredient is the mysterious "mouth-watering cheese glaze." I can't explain what a "cheese glaze" is.

Tacodeli appears to adhere to the usual bullshit patriarchal class structure. White male models from the Urban Outfitters catalog run the place, while the exceptional Frontera Fundidos are assembled by small Mexican women hidden from public view by a dirty curtain.

Cleaning Out Your Meat Drawer?

Orrechiette with tasso ham and peas

If you're like me, you have a vacuum-pack of Savoie's tasso lying around. And if your tasso is like mine, it cries out to be combined with a sauce of peas and shallots and white wine and cream, thereafter to be applied to a bowl of orrechiette.

I pruned a bit of fat from it, but there's no denying I stole the concept for this recipe from one of my old St. Louis haunts, Riddle's Penultimate Cafe and Wine Bar. A non-fatal encounter with the Riddles' delicious Rigatoni Tassos requires extremely fit arteries.

It is common to use brutal, galooty wines to beat Cajun flavors into submission, but I am against the practice. I got outside of this dish with the help of a Trinitas 2002 Russian River Valley Petite Sirah, an extremely pretty drink that neither hid from my excellent sauce nor challenged it to a duel.