It's been too long, dear readers, since last I blasted you with inanities, and for that I offer a thousand apologies. I hope you don't feel too neglected but, if it makes you feel better, I forgot to call my dad on his birthday last week.
In the hopes of making it up to you, I thought I would take a break this week from the usual diversions, i.e. dwelling on the slights of girlfriends long-since gone to greener pastures and lamer dudes, or posting pictures of our chalkboard signs - which may be overly meta, seeing that a chalkboard sign is just a wee blog on this great big internet we call Eighth Avenue, New York New York One Zero Zero One Four -, or extolling the virtues of Chocolate Bar LBI, our beach location in New Jersey. For, while there are virtues aplenty to extol, I find that, much like the breaking waves leave a thin film of sea foam on the fine beach sand, my heart is grasped by the tenacious seaweed of jealousy, given that the beach crew wakes up to this every morning:
While, here in New York, I wake up to someone's panties on the sidewalk.
And, to answer the unspoken question, no, those panties did not pick themselves up and hop into the trash can. Yours truly had to deal with it. Your pity, I assure you, is greatly appreciated.
The occasion for such frivolous blogging is past, for the time being, at least. Today, I propose a more intellectually rigorous pursuit. Of course, I might be according my intellect an undue capacity for pursuit; like a poor Franco Pellizotti gazing at the jersey of Pierrick Federigo as he peels away from his wheel to sprint across the line, my simple mind may very well plotz, as the object of my contemplation races its way to a podium finish. Trust me, it's a possibility: just assembling that metaphor nearly fried my brain.
Today - and perhaps tomorrow, as well, as I am sensing this is a two-parter - we will discuss the veritable foundation and cornerstone of the chocolate and confectionery racket, the Brownie.
If you are anything like the staff at Chocolate Bar, your brownie history probably consists of innumerable nights sprawled out on the carpet listening to a girl who calls herself Hollyhock but whose real name is Jennifer tell you the plot of some Tom Robbins novel, except half-way through it she starts confusing it with The Fountainhead, which is one of those bad-to-worse progressions akin to tuning the radio to a Jimi Hendrix rock block, only to have it followed by an entire Doors album side. In all likelihood, there are also two dudes footbagging in the background, talking about getting a jam together later on, while Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit plays on the stereo.
Which is to say, your brownies were full of pot. And you were stoned, just like the PM shift here at Chocolate Bar. Don't believe me? This is the sign on our tip jar:
Just so we're all on the same page here, that is a spouting narwhal playing a cutaway acoustic guitar while spewing fire on a medieval dagger.
While nothing would please me more than to skip gaily along Pot Brownie Lane, pausing here and there to inhale deeply of the lush undergrowth - here a sprig of Purple Haze, there a cluster of Gandalf's Staff, the kindest bud - I find it precludes a certain intellectual rigor. So, just as Robert Frost, baked off his ass on some primo ganja he had cadged off Ezra Pound, stumbled upon a fork in the road and opted for the road less traveled, so, too, shall we let Pot Brownie Lane meander on its merry way, and wend our way down Stone Cold [as in sober] Place.
You are, no doubt, as pleasantly surprised as I to find that the first landmark along our path is nothing less than the World's Colombian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. There, amid the gleaming alabaster confections of the day's leading architects, where Edison's newfangled light bulbs twinkled their golden light on the watery lagoons and canals and Ferris' great Wheel turned like slow, inexorable fate over the Midway Plaisance and the gyrating belly dancers therein, there, in such heretofore unseen splendor, did the brownie make itself known.
You are, perhaps, insufficiently moved, and thus some context is in order. Let us consider the case of Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicagoan, fledgling architect and chief apprentice to Louis Sullivan, whose Transportation Building thrust its broad shouldered modernity into the thicket of bleached, Beaux-Arts buildings like a bull in a field of lilies. Pushing past the children stuffing their faces with Cracker Jack, dismissing Canada's entry of an eleven ton block of cheese as unworthy of his attention (I imagine young, dandyish Wright thinking, "really, eleven tons of cheese?"), and foregoing a ride in the gondola on account of its Venetian overtones, the young architect makes his way to the Mines and Mining building where, in a quiet corner, spurned by the marveling masses, he finds a display of industrial magnesite, made of the magnesia of India. Some young enterprising British Imperial Servant, whose name has long since gone to dust, like the vast Raj of which he was but one infinitesimally small part, conceived of industrial magnesite as a means of creating insoluble battlements; the traditional earthwork defenses, imported from the mother country, having tuned to soupy mud under the punishing deluge of the subcontinental monsoon. Magnesite, it turned out, made for a light, durable, easily manufacturable replacement for cement. Whether or not it kept the invading hordes at bay was of little concern to Wright. In all likelihood he cared little for defensible positions, or the Raj, or the course of Empire, or the ways in which the expatriated mind works, far away from home in a place that managed to outrain rainiest London, defending against people whose country you had stolen.
I imagine he stood there, for a good three or four minutes, at least, and then thought, "you could mix this with some sort of salmony-pink pigment, maybe throw in some green for an accent, and you've got yourself a pretty nice floor." The Raj is gone, as is the World's Columbian Exposition, and the enormous Canadian cheese. No longer can you take a gondola ride on the South Side of Chicago, no matter what they might try to tell you. But not all perished. Cracker Jack is there for the eating, electric lighting plagues us to this day, and I did some belly dancing this morning as part of my daily fitness regimen. And, should you be so lucky to set foot on the ground floor of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Style masterpieces, you will be treading on just such magnesite as Wright envisioned in the cavernous halls of the Mines and Mining Pavilion.
I know what you are thinking. "Dude," you are thinking, "you've been taking brownies from the wrong plate, and I don't see what your drug addled musings on the nature of magnesite flooring has to do with the history of that treat most awesome, the chocolate brownie." Verily I reply, "dude, you are an ignoramus." For consider that no sooner had Wright left the Mines and Mining exhibition than he crossed paths with Mrs. Bertha Palmer, of the Chicago Palmers, and her coterie of wealthy ladies, painted, powdered and puffed up in their ridiculous dresses. Mark him as he steps aside with a flourish of his cap, for we leave him here at the side of the path, making way for Palmer and Company, an architect above all else, but ever a gentleman. As for Bertha and the ladies, I can't say for sure that they took any note of young Wright, nor felt the heat of his genius, free to radiate from that magnificent brain now that the hat was off the head. They had more important things on their... well, not on their minds, for those were fairly unoccupied, but their hands, well they held something momentous. For, having despaired of finding a dessert suitable to her estate among all those riff-raffish comestibles at the Exposition, she had charged the chef of the Palmer House Hotel with the creation of a novel treat, a New Thing in a time teeming with New Things. And into that fat, lace-gloved hand he placed a Brownie. A Brownie!
Frank Lloyd Wright came to the World's Columbian Exposition hungry: hungry for the gelatin that would turn the sloshing fruit juice of his ideas into firmest jello, and he found it in magnesite. And for the next two decades, in buildings such as the Frederick C. Robie House, Wright fired shot after shot over the bow of the great ship Architecture. Not for us, this Beaux-Arts frippery, these domes and colonnades, gargoyles and trompe l'oeil, Wright said. We want straight lines, open spaces, an organic relationship between space and place, and an appreciation of the beauty inherent in certain materials. We don't want buildings, in other words, that look like wedding cakes.
Mrs. Bertha Palmer came to the World's Columbian Exposition hungry, but she didn't want to eat Cracker Jack, or vulgar hot dogs, or this hamburger thing everyone was talking about. I'd like to say she wanted a dessert with clean lines, something simple yet delicious, whose ingredients were honestly expressed in the overall flavor, and that looked like what it was; but she probably wanted something more like Marie Antoinette's wedding cake. The Palmer House Hotel chef, realizing that you couldn't very well stroll about the Exposition with a wedding cake in your hand, fired a cannonball straight across the bow of the good ship Dessert. The 19th century was over, and it was time for a new treat. Napoleons, eclairs, frangipane tarts, petits fours -- you can keep it, chef said. We're a country on the move, in a city on the make, and when we want something sweet we take it without the funny business. Chocolate, butter, sugar, flour and eggs. Say it out loud, "chocolate, butter, sugar, flour and eggs." Say it again, say it over and over again until the rhythm asserts itself, like the chugging pistons of the combustion engine. Here, just in time for the new century, was a new dessert, as modern in its way as Wright's architecture. Here, with a name whose truth rang louder than a thousand Liberty bells, was the Brownie.
And it was the most delicious god damn thing you ever did taste.
