An
irregular publication
Issue
number: 12
Posted
on: December 25th, 1998
The
next issue will appear, like clockwork, some time in January.
This
issue: Arts and Leisure
Dining
Nutritionists have
long recognized that a vegetarian diet is generally healthier than a meat-based
diet. Some even claim that the human digestive system is more naturally
disposed to digesting vegetables than meat. Still, we lack one important
feature: the ability to break down cellulose. Plant-eating mammals, like
cows, accomplish this by chewing and re-chewing their food until the cellulose
fibers become digestible.
Now, at last humans can enjoy
the pleasure, or at least the fuller nutrition, formerly available only to
members of the ruminant suborder. Yes, recuperated cud is now available
in health food stores. "This is cud that has been recovered from
organically-raised cattle, then purified, disinfected, pasteurized, strained,
filtered, and wormed. Oh yeah, and rinsed," explained George B. Chaw
of Flavour & Pleasure Ltd., the Amsterdam-based corporation that markets
pre-packaged recuperated cud under the "Wooden Chew" brand.
"Mixed with water and pressed, it forms a semi-soft, gelatinous mass that
many people say tastes like tofu," continued Chaw. "Mostly these are
people who've never eaten tofu before." Details on the recuperation
process were available, but our reporter was unable to continue taking notes.
And now cud fanciers have
their own restaurant in Paris: Rechux opened its doors last week to a
standing-looking-at-a-passing-train-room-only crowd eager to sample cud-based
cuisine. Taking advantage of his restaurant's propitious location across
the alley from the back doors of the 6th arrondissement's municipal maternity
hospital, the renowned Irish-Egyptian vegetarian chef Herb O'Said offers up an
enticing house specialty of Placenta-Cud Loaf, priced at a modest $16.95 for
all you can eat, which tends to make it quite a bargain for the house.
Organic food specialist Baron Fields has called it "the best dish I've
ever had help eating."
Rechux, 119 Rue de Boci, Paris 6.
Open seven days a week, daylight hours only. Tel. 42 24 23 22.
Music
Purebeat Stars do
Christmas Favorites
For those of you who are not yet
aware of this latest development in the splintering of popular music into
ever-smaller but increasingly vehement sub-cults, the trend that started with
"disco" in the 70's and transmuted through "house" in the
80's and then "techno" in the 90's has now reached its logical
culmination in what is being called "purebeat" music. Purebeat
is techno stripped of the final remaining vestiges of melody, harmony, lyrics
and even rhythmic variation, leaving nothing but a steady, relentless bass drum
pulsing away at precisely 112 beats per minute at an invariable volume of
ear-splitting. Different numbers are distinguished only by subtle nuances
of tone color in the bass drum sound (synthesized, of course) and the quality
of the reverb. As one die-hard aficionado put it, "It may sound
monotonous to you, but when you're really, really into purebeat, you start to,
like, like, like, understand the real differences between different artists and
different songs. Kind of. Of. Of. Of. Of.
Of."
Besides posing some thorny but
lucrative problems for copyright lawyers, this new school of not very much
thought lends itself equally well (or badly) to virtually any type of
music. Thus it came as no surprise when purebeat's premier record label,
The Indifferent Drummer, released this special year-end 4 CD box set featuring
the cream of its stable of composers, or rather musicians, or rather drummers,
or rather DJs, or rather programmers, or rather sound engineers doing
traditional Christmas carols. A company spokesman said that they hope to
repeat the success of last year's best-selling version of the soundtrack from
"The Sound of Music" as performed by the stars of heavy metal
(Metallica's "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" topped the
charts for eight weeks and sold 11 million copies).
In "A Purebeat Christmas",
fans can sing -- or more likely tap -- along to purebeat versions of
"Silent Night", "The Little Drummer Boy", "Adeste
Fidelis" and a rousing medley of arias from "The Messiah".
25% of the proceeds from sales of the disk will be donated to a fund for the
victims of cardiac arryhthmia.
A Purebeat Christmas
The Indifferent Drummer, 4CD set, $16.95
Cinema
of Animated
Classics for Children
Encouraged by its success with the
adaptation of Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and
the Biblical epic "Prince of Egypt", Walt Disney studios has
announced plans to produce an entire series of great books in animated versions
for young children. The five-year project will begin in mid-1999 with the
release of "Justine", based on Sade's classic, recounting the
misadventures of a sweet-natured but hapless French girl and her rambunctious
sidekick Marky. Then at Christmas time next year youngsters will be able
to see the Disney version of "The Gulag Archipelago", currently
in development with the working title "Ally Goes to Camp".
Other great classics slated to
receive the Disney treatment include "The Grapes of Wrath",
"Finnegan's Wake", a return to the Bible with "The Book of
Job", and a trilogy based on the works of Ernest Hemingway, with the
titles updated to appeal to today's young audiences: "The Sun Rises
Too", "Bye-Bye Arms" and "Who the Bell Tolls
For".
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©1998 by
David Jaggard. All rights reserved worldwide.