I enjoyed the new documentary “The Sparks Brothers” tremendously in a showing today with my elder son. The film, made by the obvious fanboy Edgar Wright, oozes with enjoyment of the band Sparks, an enjoyment I share. The style of the film is what I’ll call pop-collage — fitting for a band consumed with style and that has adopted different ones throughout their 50 years. It’s bright, entertaining, laugh-out-loud funny, and at the end joyous and moving. Deservedly, the reviews have been almost universally positive.
Almost.
Owen Gleiberman, in Variety, praises the film and also aspects of the band. But there’s one important thing he doesn’t like. Here’s his entire review, should you want to read it, but this seems like the summation:
“In fact, by the time ‘The Sparks Brothers’ is over, there’s only one thing you may not actually like about Sparks, and that (forgive me) is their music. … There’s a reason why Sparks, after half a century, remained the pop music world’s best-kept secret. Their catalogue might be called ’25 albums in search of a hook.‘ “
Ouch.
This doesn’t leave me regretting the several Sparks albums I own, or my fond memories of seeing them on TV, or the numerous times I’ve seen them in concert, including in a tiny venue when it was just the two of them without a full band. His review doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm, and neither does my wife, who is of the strong opinion that Sparks “don’t know how to write a song,” and who whenever we’re riding together and one of the band’s songs comes on in my car will screech, “Ugh! Sparks! TURN THIS OFF!”
And sometimes, I do. Just for her.
Because we’re free to disagree.
And while as someone who not only admires the brothers Ronald and Russell Mael for their indefatigable devotion to their sometimes hopeless-seeming career but also enjoys their music and has at times proselytized on their behalf, I disagree with Owen Gleiberman about that music… I think he may have a point. Perhaps the brothers Mael don’t know how to write and deliver a hook… because hooks are associated with popular music, and their music is somewhat-known, but not “popular.”
I say this as a devotee of Pere Ubu, and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, and Copernicus and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and Van Dyke Parks’ solo material, and Steve Reich, and innumerable other recording acts that have rarely if ever been “popular.”
These not-popular acts are popular with me. And with other devotees. Pere Ubu, especially, sounds aimed right at me. Whatever that is, it’s right for me. I felt that the first time I heard it. A friend said he turned on their album “20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo,” an album I consider one of their most accessible, and at the very beginning of the first song, his wife implored him to turn it off. Okay, it isn’t for her. That’s fine. I still get to have it. And I can’t ever get enough of it. And neither can some other people around the globe. There just aren’t enough of those people for the band to be considered mainstream.
So it doesn’t bother me a bit that Owen Gleiberman doesn’t like Sparks. Or, for that matter, that Robert Christgau, a critic who has hailed much of Pere Ubu’s catalog, positively pissed on their album “Why I Hate Women,” which I love. Having read all his Ubu reviews, I’ve decided that he likes his Ubu in a particular way, while I’m happy to journey with them wherever they go. It’s always an exploration, and this was one he didn’t come along for.
But.
Over on the Sparks fanboy page on Facebook, of course, there are people whose hair is on fire because Owen Gleiberman doesn’t like the band. At last count there were 55 angry comments about Mr. Gleiberman and his seeming ignorance; some of them are a losing soccer team storming the field. Some of them admonished him for not carefully listening to all 25 Sparks albums so as to expand his tastes before daring to write that review of the film. Reading through the thread of comments, I finally posted this:
“Y’Know what? It’s fine. He doesn’t like them. The idea that if only he’d hear more of it then he’d like it more is naive. I love Pere Ubu, the film ‘My Dinner With Andre’, and capers on my seafood — not everyone does. His opinion doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of Sparks one bit, and it won’t keep me up at night futilely trying to overturn it either.”
A few people thanked me for that, which was nice, but a fan named David remains Very Upset that the men in Sparks still can’t get complete and ultimate respect: “no man it’s not fine after 50 years to receive that kind of disrespect?!”
To which I replied, “Sure it is. Look at the slings and arrows suffered by Robert Crumb. Or Philip Roth. It comes with putting your work out in public.”
This shouldn’t have to be said, but I did say it there, so I’ll say it here as well: If every review had to be positive, what would be the point of publishing it — or of reading it?
In one segment of the film, it comes to light that Sparks did an album with Franz Ferdinand, another band I like, and called it FFS. I have that album, and I think it’s terrific — a collaboration between two bands with overlapping outlooks. That collaboration seems to have brought Sparks countless new fans in South America and Mexico, where Franz Ferdinand are popular. My son hadn’t heard that album, and on the way home said he’d have to get that, because the song played in the movie sounded great.
And that is one way to measure this film’s success: the number of adherents it’s going to add. Owen Gleiberman’s opinion won’t matter.
My play 7 STEP PROCESS debuted last night, live on Zoom, where it went over better than I ever could have expected. More than 50 people stayed for the live virtual talkback, and flooded the cast and crew with questions and praise, making for an adventurous discussion about just what “theatre” is, especially when the actors have never even met in the same room.
I started writing that play in December precisely with the idea of getting it up on its feet — over Zoom — because not getting to do any theatre was weighing on me. Yes, I was writing all the time, but when you write plays, you want to see them get performed by actors. Plus, I wanted to explore this new medium of doing live theatre online, and turning the proscenium into a small rectangle on people’s computers. What would that be like? Would punch lines still work, in the absence of an audience? Plus plus, I wanted to write about change — because we’re in only the beginning stages of massive cultural and technological change, and not everyone is adapting well. (As we see in the play.)
The second performance starts in under an hour — and we’ve got audience members logging on from across the U.S. and other nations as well (which is thrilling) — but there’s still one more playdate, tomorrow at 3 p.m. Pacific, if you’d like to check it out. Here’s the link.
My pal Oleg Kagan writes a blog called Shelf Talks, wherein he interviews people about their bookshelves, the books on them, why they chose those books, and what they made of reading them.
As an inveterate reader, I was thrilled to be invited to be interviewed for this.
A few months ago, I sent Oleg 10 or 15 photos of various bookcases of mine. The bookcase he selected is pretty eclectic and sparked a fun conversation.
For weeks now, my wife and I have been on a fruitless search for dining chairs. I say this because the search has indeed gone on for weeks, and no, there has been no fruit.
I wouldn’t care about finding new dining chairs, except the ones we have are so broken and re-repaired that even if no one else ever notices, they reflect poorly on my self image.
Most of the spindles in the backs, which are intended to form a webbing that gently supports you, have broken over the years; once, I went to a hobby shop, found the same diameter, carefully painted them the same shade of hunter green, and inserted the new ones. This was not not-time-consuming.
More recently, the one-piece sides that serve as an overall frame as well as leg, pull apart from the seat back, despite my constant re-glueing on this attachment. This is happening on all four of them. Now, whenever I get up from one of these chairs, or even just walk by, I’m manually slamming these pieces together.
Lately, whole big pieces of the wood are cracking, which also occasions glueing and touching up with paint.
My thought about all this: I never intended chair repair to be another hobby. I mean, I still haven’t read the thousands of comic books I bought in the past year!
I should also note that the space in which our dining table fits is small, so it would be difficult to find another table that fits so well. The odds of finding a set that would work strains credulity.
So I’ve been on a hunt for new chairs. The complication: My wife has an (understandable) attachment to the dining table that came with these chairs, 25 years ago. That’s because she and our elder son personally restored it about 10 years ago, stripping and sanding it, and then staining it. I too admire its handcrafted polish. But I also want to sit on chairs that a) don’t embarrass me, and b) don’t hurt my aging ass.
This is why we’ve gone to, in my mind, countless furniture stores over recent weeks. “Countless,” to an impatient person who doesn’t exactly thrill to furniture shopping to begin with, amounts to four. One in Glendale (she wasn’t impressed); some sort of discount showroom in our own town that didn’t impress either of us; the loathed furniture store in town that promises much but delivers it late and assembled wrong; and Macy’s.
Why Macy’s? Macy’s because they sent us a book filled with furniture we could go buy — but then when we went to buy it, they had none of it. They did have one chair in stock that came close to matching what’s now our ancestral handcrafted table, but only the one. When I asked the furniture-department woman how long it would take to get those others ordered in, we had this exchange:
“How long would it take to get three more of these in?”
“Some time in August.”
“August?!?!?” I said. “I could be dead by August!” (Which, when you think about it, is rationally true. Would just waiting around for chairs to arrive be enough to keep me alive?)
She decided to hint at scarcity of supplies, which I’ve been reading about. “Sir, have you been in a market?”
“I have been in a market!” I thundered. “I’m in a market right now, aren’t I?”
My wife, accustomed to 37 years of my demands (which often work, to her chagrin), said nothing. Rather than wait for August, which may as well be the end of time, we went and had dinner.
And that’s the hidden cost to chair shopping: Not only do you not buy chairs, you buy dinner instead, which can cost more than the chairs. We wound up at a nearby sushi place — and here’s a free tip: at first blush, sushi places seem inexpensive, but don’t be fooled, because it all adds up quickly! So this particular time I came up with a clever solution to the costs of paying for dinner: insisting that my wife buy dinner. I was congratulating myself on my cleverness right up to the point when she pulled out the debit card for our joint checking account.
As we enjoyed our sushi — so fresh! and not on my dime, she having now gamely pulled out her own payment vehicle — my mind was rolling through all the coming weeks of chair shopping. When might it end? We’re having a new fence built, and the house painted, and a new oven installed, and converting one of our many rooms into a home library — where in all that would chair shopping fit? How would I ever write another play, with all this going on? There must be a perfect set of chairs for us out there somewhere — but how to find them in this lifetime?
Then, to the rescue, this morning, I got an email from a company offering chairs — dear God, how did they know? And why didn’t they know sooner? — and I looked through their website and found chairs that seem to match the sacred table! I flagged the page in my browser, showed it to my wife and, blessing of blessings, she agreed!
So I bought them. They’ll be arriving on June 9th.
Friday night at the gym while exercising my triceps on a machine, I found myself looking at a colorized episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. “Looking at it” because I wasn’t precisely watching it — instead, I was admiring how much better colorization had gotten over the years (it looked quite natural) and wondering how I felt about this and whether or not it would be somehow better if it were still in black and white. Had this colorization damaged the original, or had it opened up its possibilities for younger generations?
Just then, a voice next to me said, “Excuse me, sir, are you watching this?” It was the fit young black woman from the front desk.
“Oh, no,” I said truthfully, determined not to show my awkward delight at her nearness.
“What is this?” she asked.
“It’s the Dick Van Dyke Show,” I said. “Colorized.”
She looked at me blankly.
“It used to be in black and white. From the 1960s. That’s Dick Van Dyke,” I pointed. “And that’s Mary Tyler Moore.”
No recognition.
“And that’s Carl Reiner. I met him a couple of times. He died recently.”
“Oh.”
“He was a major comic actor. And movie director.”
No recognition.
“Rob Reiner is his son.”
Nothing. Now I understood how my father felt when he would point out old timey actors from the 1800s or something in old movies.
“Rob Reiner. He was a major sitcom star, does a lot of character acting on TV still. Pretty significant film director….” I was fishing, then landed on it! “He directed The Princess Bride.”
“Oh! Cool!”
Finally, even though separated by 35 years, we had a shared cultural understanding. She asked if she could change the channel.
“Sure.”
While I resumed my workout, she flicked around every single one of five thousand and six channels, not finding anything.
“See, this is why I canceled cable,” I volunteered. “Five thousand and six channels, and still nothing you want to watch.”
Finally she landed on something. It was a cooking show with a celebrity chef — probably the celebrity chef.
“My company is doing a project that involves him,” I said.
“REALLY?!?!?” she asked in a hushed but exclamatory tone. “Are you going to get to meet him?”
“Maybe,” I offered honestly. I mean, there were no such plans, and he wasn’t flying in for his bit, but one never knows, right?
“I love him!” she said.
Catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I increased my weights. Now I had somehow assumed my father’s role in pointlessly naming faded stars from distant ages. Meanwhile, I regularly use the Shazam app on my phone to identify every song that gets played at this gym.
This encounter also cleared up for me a mystery: why every single TV in the damned place is always tuned to the Cooking Channel. Until now, I’d thought it was intended as perverse motivation: that we should look at all these fattening foodstuffs and work out harder!
Now I realized it was the reflection of a young woman’s ardor.
So, no, I can’t end April with only one post. So here we are, with the end-of-the-month post.
I remember the years when I used to post here every day. Maybe I’ll get back to that. If it gives you any comfort* — because I’m sure you no doubt want comforting about what I’m up to — I will tell you that I’ve been very productive during our little global pandemic.
I wrote three full-length plays**, and one of them is headed into production now with an opening targeted for June. (More about that soon.)
I also devoted a lot of time to listening to, and interacting with, and researching even more about, the world’s greatest rock band.*** Time well-spent indeed!
I bought about eleventy-billion more glorious old moldering comic books from the 1940s through 1980s and carefully curated them right into my collection.
And I’ve been doing a lot-lot-lot of reading, and I’ve been working on some exciting projects and initiatives at my company, and I’ve even occasionally had friends over to sit in the back yard and smoke cigars and drink bourbon and talk about writing and the theatre.
And somewhere in all that, I went and got vaccinated. I hope you do that too, if you haven’t already.
And we’ve had lots of repair work done around the house and yard, even up until today, and even more scheduled, and… ugh.
I thought I’d just catch you up somewhat obliquely on some of these things before May hits us smack in the face in the morning. And at some point — perhaps this weekend? — I’ll write one of the two longish posts that have been floating around in my head for literally months now, one of which I’ve actually written notes for, and one of which I’ve taken a photo for. The former one involves the Bee Gees, while the latter one involves Philip K. Dick and Adam Strange.
Stay tuned!
* It actually gives me comfort, as someone raised very German Lutheran, and therefore tied to work. Work is my joy. My people, when we die, say, “I wish I’d worked more.”
** When asked how many of his plays were full-length, Edward Albee famously replied, “All of them.” (Even his 10-page ones.) But in this particular case, I mean a running time of 75-120 minutes.
*** Pere Ubu, of course! There’s always something great going on over here!
The post I was going to write was going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and would be thematically unified.
But this isn’t that.
When I was at the gym earlier, I had a different post in mind to be writing right now. But even as I think about that, what I’m really thinking is this: Dear God, it felt glorious to be back at the gym! Hooray for reopened gyms! No this wasn’t the gym that had shit in the showers — I quit that gym — this is the new gym, new to me and new to everyone, that had to close last year because you-know-why. And now it’s reopened, because you-know-what is subsiding. I was so happy to step across that threshold that if they’d charged a “convenience fee” at the door I just would’ve handed it over. I had a terrific workout, admittedly far superior to the one accomplishable in the setup in my garage, and thanked everybody there on the way out.
The gym’s been open for a week. Why did I wait? Well, on Friday morning, I got the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. The tradeoff: You only have to go once (perfect for me, because I’m generally impatient), but the reported incidence of side effects is greater. Then, very late Friday night, I started to feel strange. Like, somehow I couldn’t make any sense of what was happening in “Godzilla versus Kong,” and I mean even more than the “plot” and “dialogue.” When the big battle ended with them joining forces against a common enemy — so unexpected! — and I was trundling off to bed, I started shivering hard, and then had a very flu-like not-great time all night, resulting in my not feeling great on Saturday. I don’t think I could even tell you what I did on Saturday. Oh, wait, I finished one game of Civilization VI (playing Trajan) and then immediately started another as Saladin. That was about what I could accomplish.
But today? Today I sprang awake, ready to do stuff! Like: get over to that gym! Finally put things away, for God’s sake! And write a perhaps-one-day-print-worthy blog entry, something with pith and insight and clever word play. (This is what I aspire to, anyway.)
Four minutes before I got home from my workout, my wife texted me to say that “the painter” that I didn’t know would be coming would be at our house any minute now and did I want to talk to him. I suspected even then that she meant, “Do you want to grill and flambé him?” because that’s how she thinks I go about hiring contractors. That’s not my method at all. I just want to know what we’re getting, what our options are, how long it’ll last and for God’s sake how much it’s going to cost. I did take a liking to Robert, who spent a cool two hours on Easter Sunday detailing for us his 43-year-history as a house painter, starting with his emigration from Korea, then work in Colorado Springs, followed by Texas, and since 1987 Southern California. At age 29, he realized that he needed a wife “to cook and keep house” and so he got married. (At age 25, I got a wife because I liked her company. But people’s reasons vary.) He also volunteered that Koreans are reliable and hard-working. I actually think that many (most?) people are reliable and hard-working irrespective of nationality, but I may be in the minority on this one. Robert (not his birth name) will be getting me a bid, and we’ll see what it looks like.
(At one point, the post I was going to write was a litany of household improvements and repairs. I was already tallying it in my head: the tree service was $4225, the plumbing was about $2,000, the new dishwasher and sink came in just under $1,000, the new fence will be $8,000 to $15,000, lord knows how much Robert will want… maybe I’m lucky and his kids’ college is already paid for. But I decided that I’d rather not think about it, let alone write about it.)
Danny from the neighborhood also came over. Danny from the neighborhood is a short solidly built man originally from the nation below us who worked for the studios for years. I’ve been watching in fascination the past two weeks as he erected and stained a new fence on the property across the street. I’ve seen many, many fences in my life, around this country and in others, and Danny’s fence may be the nicest-looking one I’ve seen. So I called him over to give us an estimate on ours. The last bid we got was that $8,000-$15,000 one, and you would be right if you sense my hesitation at contracting that fellow, but it’s immaterial because he never returned our calls afterward anyway. The other unspoken pandemic problem: finding available contractors. So many people have turned to home improvement as entertainment in lieu of actually going anywhere and doing anything that these guys are booked up.
By the time Robert and Danny left, two-and-a-half hours had slipped by. So it seemed like time to pull out some of that wine we bought last week on that tour of wineries.
Free tip: If you ever want to get into the habit of spending a lot more money, one great way to go is to finally discover the difference between shitty wine and good wine. Shitty wine can be had for less than ten bucks, and sometimes for as little as two or three bucks. Our local liquor store ran a sale on cases of Spanish wine at $1.99 a bottle because it wasn’t moving, and most of it was corked. That is, after you could even get it open, and that would be with destroying the cork, the wine inside was bad. Meanwhile, the fabulous wine that rolls down your gullet and reminds you that there is love and light in the world, and that other delights await you? That wine costs many multiples of the cheap shitty wine. How do I know that? Because now I’ve bought it. And now that I’ve bought it, it’s already proving difficult going back to the cheap shitty wine.
After that one glass of the delectable pricey wine today, I switched back to water. Really trying to make this bottle last….
After that, I took our two neurotic uncontrollable dogs for a nice long walk. On that walk, I thought a lot about the post I was going to write. Now it was going to be about wine. As I watched the male dog urinate at length on his favorite bush, I wondered if I’d made a mistake sampling really good wine. Just how much was this going to cost me? Were we going to be offering this to guests? I was balancing these questions against my impulse to go online and order a case of that one red of which we already have only one bottle left!
When the dogs and I got home from our walk and our run, I decided that I didn’t want to think about the wines either and I certainly didn’t want to write about them and that’s when I pulled the water out of the refrigerator.
Next project, after dinner, in this day of projects: putting hundreds of comic books safely and securely into plastic bags with nice firm acid-free cardboard backings in them, and then organizing them in their storage boxes. Noted: these boxes of comics have gotten a lot heavier over the past 40 years. They certainly didn’t weigh this much when I was 18!
And then, because it’s Sunday night and that’s when you’ll find the best auctions ending, going on eBay to source more of these heavy comic books. And then, also because it’s Sunday night and that’s one of my nights to clean up the kitchen, cleaning up the kitchen.
So now it’s almost 11 p.m. and no, I’m not going to write the post I was going to write. What am I going to do? Do some reading, and probably get back to Civilization VI and converting the German cities to my religion; no, Frederick Barbarossa doesn’t like it, but if wants to do something about it, hey, have at it, pal.
Tomorrow’s another day. Maybe then I’ll write the better post.
The big news is that, according to the Wall Street Journal, “Ship Blocking Suez Canal Is Partially Freed“! This is great news for people who were actively concerned about this, and also of some note to all the rest of us who were sure it wasn’t going to take long to resolve. At the same time, I confess that I don’t know what “partially freed” means — isn’t something freed, or not? — but I’m not so animated about this to register a red alert.
In other news, ever since my post bemoaning the hit-or-miss delivery schedule to my doorstep of the WSJ Weekend edition, the paper has reliably been there on Saturdays. While I prefer to believe that after seeing my post, which I tagged them with on Twitter, they swung into action, the realist in me thinks they’re just continuing their mind games by lulling me into false reassurance.
The City of El Paso de Robles, also known simply as Paso Robles, has a well-earned reputation as a deserving destination for a brief relaxing jaunt, someplace ideal to take your wife who is a healthcare professional and has spent a year tending those sick and ailing with COVID-19 and other misfortunes when you can see that she needs to restore and recuperate. The city is home to olive groves, hot springs, and more than 200 wineries; with only 32,000 Paso Roblens living there (and that’s counting what one hopes are non-wine-drinking children), tourism is clearly a necessity for consuming all those libations.
While everyone talks about the wineries, far less is known about the extent of the dining choices in Paso Robles. In an attempt to fill even a gill of this oversight, I offer this list of dining establishments sampled in our four-day trip this past week, in descending order from best to worst.
Catch Seafood Bar & Grill
For the first time in a year, something you’ll want to catch
With the lamentable recent demise of Farallon in San Francisco, the unassuming Catch Seafood Bar and Grill represents perhaps the world’s only seafood restaurant that offers absolutely everything one could ever want in seafood, but done even better. YES, they have buckets of steamers — but theirs come with some buttery vegetable admixture you’d never considered, one that makes you pale when you see it, but which teaches you that the people at Catch know better than you do, and so after sampling these minuscule clams surrounded by diced tomatoes, garlic, and some greenery you cannot identify, you know you will never again think of clams unadorned in this way without a wistful sense of loss. YES, Catch proffers an oyster platter, one of mollusks so delectable that your oyster-hating wife, bowing to pressure, will not only try one, but will also exclaim a la Sam I Am, “Oh! I DO like oysters!” and then have another. Catch’s non-seafood offerings excel as well: the garlic toast is crisp but moist, the green salad is simple but reassuring, the nutrient-rich escargot, perhaps plucked off nearby vines by angry farmers, simmer deliciously on the tongue. My wife, a contrarian, ordered a steak but relished that, too. Also noted: your server will do absolutely everything within the law to accommodate your every wish.
Awarded: Top Honors
2. Impromptu picnic at Graveyard Winery
A bucolic setting with lake, wildlife, and grassy hillside — all of it outside this frame.
Graveyard Winery is called such because of its location up the hill from an abandoned graveyard, and not because it’s “spooky,” to the chagrin of your reviewer’s wife. The winery’s owner and her assistant will offer you a tasting of six very good wines for the cost of $15, which is discounted to free when purchasing wine. The economics of this did not escape me, and so we purchased wine — amply so. Because we arrived at about noon and were still happily imbibing the liquid of the grape two hours later in the lakeside shade, I inquired if there might be “nibbles” available in some way. Directed to the appropriate location inside the winery, I snatched up crackers, a block of French cheese, Italian olives, and a sampler of uncured meats, buoyantly suggesting that it all be added to our tab as I returned to our table with it all in tow. It beggars description just how good this impromptu picnic was. Free of the need to do anything or be anywhere except right there, remarking upon the tern on the lake or the squawking ducks, one is able to sink into the rustic pleasures of such a simple yet sophisticated repast. The atmosphere, the wines, the repast, the atmosphere, the servers, and the company all receive the highest rating.
Awarded: Best al fresco dining
3. Negranti Creamery
Yes, one can order a flight of ice cream samples. Heavenly indeed.
Eons after animal husbandry was invented, humankind has stumbled upon the ultimate purpose of sheep: to provide the milk needed to formulate this delectable iced treat. Less fatty than cow-milk iced cream, yet flavorful and providing an excellent base for a wide range of flavors, the sheep’s milk ice cream at Negranti Creamery adds a surprising crisp bite to an old favorite. The confectioners here are not so hidebound as to reject mixing in, say, basil with strawberry, or lavender with blueberry, and you shouldn’t be either. “Half the fat, all the flavor,” their tagline proclaims, and while it’s nice to see their desire for truth in advertising this is, if anything, too humble by half.
Awarded: Most surprising in a good way
4. Paso Robles Inn Steakhouse
Inside this unassuming exterior lurks an unassuming meal.
The Paso Robles Inn Steakhouse is not only associated with the Paso Robles Inn, it also shares a roof. Similar to the general hilly terrain of Paso Robles, the meal has its ups and downs. Your rib eye will arrive appropriately seasoned but not quite as you’d requested, while your baked potato will be intemperately cold. Your wife, again a contrarian, now that she’s in an actual steakhouse will order a salad, which she finds serviceable. The vodka gimlet is excellent, the pinot noir commendable, and the service willing and able, as when you pointedly tell both the hostess and your waiter that there’s a nice tip in it for each if they’ll just move you away from the fucking swinging doors that allow repeated blasts of cold air to suck the life from your lungs.
5. Templeton Market & Gas
When queried “Where is the best fried chicken in town?” those in the know locally respond, “Templeton Market & Gas.” And they are right to do so. Templeton Market & Gas is what used to be called a “food & fuel,” a small establishment that serves petrol and also some comestibles in an adjacent shack. Templeton Market & Gas, bearing a notable deli, also fries up its own fried chicken. The skin is crispy, the meat moist, and the seasoning perfection. Diners are encouraged to eat this chicken hot from the Styrofoam while sitting outside in their parked car. The accompanying “potato logs” are thick and dull inside, akin to actual logs, and are not to be discarded casually where unsuspecting animals might attempt to eat them. It is the chicken that one comes here for. The chicken, and perhaps the gas.
6. Buttonwillow Truck Stop Popeye’s
While technically en route to Paso Robles and not within its confines, I would be remiss not to recommend this truck stop for having the best Popeye’s chicken to be found anywhere. I speak from authority, having sampled Popeye’s chicken both hither and yon; none can compare. The service may be surly, with Hector behind the register only very desultorily providing your order or, later, a spork with which you can eat your mashed potatoes with Cajun gravy, but the meal itself is everything you ever hoped a Popeye’s box would contain. Although this is the best Popeye’s chicken found anywhere, I would be remiss if I failed to note, again, that Templeton Market & Gas serves the better chicken.
7. McDonald’s in Paso Robles
A noontime Egg McMuffin? No problem, at McDonald’s in Paso Robles! Ordered appropriately after the mad rush of earlier hours, God’s gift to breakfast food is served freshly made and steaming. Beware, though! Connor, the gangly youth who fixes your coffee for you, unexpectedly doses it with unrequested and undesired Splenda, resulting in a sticky sour taste you’ll discover miles later.
8. Yanagi Sushi & Grill
At Yanagi, the appetizers and beer will arrive instantly, but your main course waits in anticipation of the Japanese new year. The gyoza with finely minced shrimp are delectable, but the pungent clotted salad dressing earns a mixed opinion. As your beer slowly warms, the sushi is finally served, and is fresh yet somehow tasteless. If if you choose to dine outside, you will find that small groups with rambunctious children waiting for your table will look at you with menace for taking so long.
9. Homemade popcorn with beefstick
Decades of experience have left this seasoned traveler wary of unexpected interruptions in the food chain. Foreknowledge being fore-armedness, one learns to travel with “just in case” snacks, in this case liquor-store beefsticks and a quart-size baggie of homemade popcorn. The beefsticks, when still within their sell-by date, are tender and filling and mix well with bourbon or even water, while the homemade popcorn, popped to perfection in a recipe that includes carefully apportioned extra virgin olive oil, butter, and Himalayan sea salt, beats any and all comers. This meal, coupled with hot coffee from a Keurig, was devoured on the morning of the second day by your travel writer on the patio of his room as his wife slept until noon until finally he couldn’t bear it any more and gently (opinions differ) awakened her. He was admonished that in future such situations, he could make his way to a breakfast of his own elsewhere.
10. Leftovers from the only breakfast place still open
These are leftovers from the only breakfast place still open (see below), which turned out to be serviceably better than the same breakfast when it was newly placed on the plate. Now reheated via your room’s microwave oven, the eggs are better because you’re just glad to have something to eat, and because you’ve left the butter out in the room, therefore ensuring that it’s actually spreadable on the toast.
11. Park Cinemas
After almost a year-and-a-half’s absence from any cinema, you will find yourself enchanted upon entering Park Cinemas on opening night of “Nobody,” starring Mr. Bob Odenkirk in an improbable role. The cinema, with doors open and lights on and two accommodating young women behind the snack counter, will seem like a veritable wonderland, like a Brigadoon you never expected to see again. Unfortunately, Park Cinemas offers only Pepsi products and not Coke, and although the unsweetened iced tea will suffice, the popcorn, evidently popped those 18 months ago when last they were open, will not.
12. The only breakfast place still open
With more than 200 wineries, one might be hoodwinked into thinking that Paso Robles is a cultural metropolis, when actually it is closer to a scale reminiscent of Egg Harbor “City,” New Jersey. Accordingly, the town has odd hours and shibboleths of behavior; there is no need to roll up the streets at night, because there is nothing to do if one finds oneself on them. After dark, visitors are left to wander aimlessly, conjuring up visions of what might be possible another time. This also means that some places close on odd days, some on odd hours, and many have hours taped to their windows that in no way match up with the hours given on Yelp or their own websites. So, at 1 p.m., one counts oneself damn lucky to come across the only breakfast place still open, after hitting up every other potential dining spot only to discover that each of them closes at 1 p.m. for reasons that seem obscure yet somehow obvious to the locals. At the only breakfast place still open, you and your companion will agree that sometimes it is better not to find what you seek, and that neither of you has ever had a worse breakfast. The biscuits and gravy are served cold and congealed; the eggs with diced ham, although ordered lightly scrambled, will arrive with the consistency of drywall spackling; and even the grits, which seem impossible to fuck up, are dense and overcooked. Your companion may offer cheerily, “The pancake isn’t so bad,” leaving you to wonder just how one could make a bad pancake. The coffee, for an unfathomable reason, is terrific. “It’s Farmer Brothers!” your waiter will announce cheerily. Ah: the only thing not made here.
13. The Arby’s outside Tejon Outlet Mall
Technically, this is not in Paso Robles, but you may find yourself tempted, on your way away from Paso Robles, to stop at this Arby’s. Do not do it. Do not do it even though your wife has exclaimed that “There’s an Arby’s!” and that she has been craving Arby’s. (Who says advertising doesn’t work?) Whomever Arby was, and whatever he or she did, Arby in no way deserved the lasting ignominy of having this establishment named after him. Your “roast beef” (please note the quote marks) sandwich will be so heavily processed as to arouse newly fond and undeserved memories of Subway. The “horsey sauce” will turn out to be watered-down horse radish with, probably, a heavy dose of high fructose corn syrup. The curly fries have curled from shame. Carlos, your server who occupies every square inch of the window he works from, will only reluctantly take your order, give you something that resembles what you’ve purchased, or hand over that horsey sauce. Not only that, the area turns out to be a full-on dead spot for internet reception, resulting in your total loss of GPS direction. Carefully scanning the horizon and all access points to identify the entrance back onto the freeway, your wife will sadly say, “I can’t believe I remembered this fondly” as she pitches the majority of this seeming-lunch back into the bag it came in.
I hope you’re found this helpful. In a future installment, we may investigate “best seafood somehow available in distant landlocked localities.”
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Recent Comments:
Steveevike 2025-12-13 11:20:27 читать kraken сайт
Kelly 2025-12-02 10:35:18 This is the only popcorn. And your preferred preparation the only way. Upwards of a stick of butter on a salad bowl size of popcorn is glorious gluttony.
Uncle Rich 2025-12-02 05:40:32 I am working my way through a big bag of Trader Joe's popcorn that's Thanksgiving stuffing flavored. It was given to me by Tara, my favorite daughter.
Paul 2025-12-02 05:12:20 I’ll have to try some of your pop corn next time I’m out there. Whenever that may be. That is if you’ll share.
