Salish Park

The Clam Box, Ipswich, Mass.

A nice thing about the Clam Box is that it’s got its own parking lot so you don’t have to go trolling for a spot as you often have to do when visiting a tourist trap in Boston. Near Fanueil Hall is the Union Oyster House where Daniel Webster went for beer and oysters and John F. Kennedy was a regular customer. I’ve read that John Kerry eats there. I wonder where he parks. Once I parked at a garage on State Street while having lunch and it cost almost $30.

So the Clam Box can pretty much charge whatever it wants for a plate of its native fried clams as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know what’s meant by native, though—I didn’t ask but it’s what’s at the top of the menu board and it seems to be the thing to get here.

While waiting in line to order I browsed through articles on the Clam Box clipped from magazines and newspapers and pasted up on the wall. It seems Miss USA 2003 Sue Castillo recommends the Clam Box for dinner. She also mentions a place in Danvers for roast beef sandwiches.

The girl who took my order said please and thank you which I thought was a real nice touch and there were benches along the wall to sit on while waiting for your number to be called. As I was waiting a car came along and parked in the handicapped spot outside the door and there emerged a man whom I’d describe as morbidly obese. The man must have weighed 300 pounds and evidently required a cane and much effort to walk. It appeared to me that a helping of fried clams was the last thing in the world he needed to be eating. Later I overheard him say to a diner beside him that the clams here were “like pieces of fried raindrops.”

The Clam Box is two and half miles north of Ipswich on State Route 1A, across the street from a church and catty corner from a vacant lot. The Native Clam Mini Meal is US$11.75 plus tax. Tartar sauce is free.

Woodman’s of Essex, Essex, Mass.

Among the Phantom Gourmet’s Great Ate for fried clams this year, one is the Clam Box in Ipswich, three are in Essex and one of them is Woodman’s.

Woodman’s is on Route 133 in Essex. They say fried clams were invented here in 1916.

There was no line at the counter when I went but there was a family of four looking at the menu board and I was in no hurry so I took a look at the menu too. While we were doing that a lady and two guys who looked like marines came in and the lady asked the family if they were in line. The family was still deciding so they went ahead.

The guys wore t-shirts and shorts and Adidas sandals and looked like they could be brothers. Maybe this was their mother. Maybe they were soldiers on leave or college kids home for the holidays, what do I know. They both had those high and tight cuts. Once I saw a picture of a soldier who was KIA from having his face blown in by an explosive device. Where his face should have been was just a crater. He’d had a haircut like these guys had and they were built the same way too.

In the end I ordered the fried clams and it came to nearly $20 and included were french fries and onion rings. Over at the bar I ordered myself a large lemonade.

A large lemonade cost $2.25 and after I was full there was still leftover clam-with-the-belly-on that I had to pack to take home.

Another place on the Phantom Gourmet’s Great Ate list is J.T. Farnham’s Famous Fried Clams on Route 133 in Essex.

Kelly’s Roast Beef, Revere, Mass.

Once I was watching Rachael Ray on the Food Network and she was doing one of those $40 a day shows and this one was in Boston. For lunch she ate a fried clam roll at Kelly’s and the way she ate those fried clams made me want to eat some too.

It’s a thing that happens once in awhile. I see Dennis Hopper smoking that Chesterfield in True Romance and it makes me want to smoke a Chesterfield too. Once I watched Pulp Fiction with a recovering addict and while we were leaving the theater he said watching that movie had left him jonesing for some heroin.

With those lips Rachael Ray can make eating anything look attractive and that little orgasm she has indicates it’s delicious too.

When I drove over to Revere Beach, however, it wasn’t like on television at all. First of all parking sucks. Kelly’s is on a street that runs along the beach so good luck finding a spot on a sunny day in the summer. What else they don’t show you are the humungous seagulls gathered about in search of french fries. If pigeons are rats with wings these are like fricking possums.

A pavilion across the street from Kelly’s is where diners can sit to enjoy their takeout but it’s difficult to find a spot away from where the seagulls have crapped on the concrete. Even with the barriers of styrofoam, cardboard and plastic it’s a gross feeling when resting a bag of food on seagull crap.

Another thing different from watching Rachael Ray: I went to Kelly’s with a headache that I’d woken up with that day for no apparent reason. It had begun as mild discomfort but by the time I was sitting down in that pavilion to eat some fried clams I could barely see straight.

That’s the thing about travel in general. While you’re experiencing new and wonderful things, you know, making new discoveries and what have you, it’s still your old miserable self that’s along for the ride and there’s no escaping that. Waking up with a headache that day meant that headache was coming with for the clams. What do I know, the fried clams at Kelly’s might be great but my lunch included parking and seagull shit and a headache and nausea. That’s a nice view of the beach, though.

Wood’s Seafood, Plymouth, Mass.

The Clam Box says it’s been operating since 1935—says so right on the sign—Kelly’s has been around since 1951 and Woodman’s first opened in 1914. But the fried clams you get at all of these places are prepared by kids who could be working at any fast food joint.

I like Wood’s Seafood best for fried clams.

In a July 2000 interview with Charlie Rose Henri Cartier-Bresson says as he often did that he never crops his photographs. He says that his 1948 photo taken in Delhi at Gandhi’s funeral might not have been shot by him, that it might have been an AP photographer friend of his using his camera. And he says he never crops.

But the May 1998 issue of Photo magazine contains this picture of his negative for Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare, Paris 1932:

On the left is the negative. On the right is the print as I’ve seen it displayed. The black borders indicate it has been printed full frame; there are even sprocket holes visible along the left edge.

What gives?

Last month I went to a lab in Needham and picked up three rolls of film that looked like this:

I learned in art school not to agitate excessively during processing because that would force the developer through the sprocket holes and result in what you see above.

It’s hard to get worked up about this. Reportedly when Robert Capa was told a lab technician had melted his negatives from D-Day he was pretty mellow about it. If you ask me, though, the biggest advantage of digital is not having to deal with labs.

The cheapest of the bunch is the Olympus Epic Stylus, $79.95 at B&H. That’s what I got at first. It has a 35mm f/2.8 lens that is consistently described as sharp by the reviewers and it has a spot metering mode if you want, five flash modes including flash-off, everything else automatic.

That’s all fine and when the camera works it’s great but the one I got also had an annoying tic: Two or three frames of every 36-exposure roll came back all blurry. It wasn’t even that the camera was focusing on the wrong thing; nothing was in focus.

Operator error is the first thing to come to mind and that’s what I thought. But then I’ve been reading in the reviews that this tends to happen with this camera. It’s that or it’s a quality control issue. Even when I made real sure to release the shutter only after depressing the button halfway first—a steady green in the viewfinder indicates focus lock—the blurry pictures kept coming.

Two or three frames per roll doesn’t sound like a high failure rate but it’s not like I’m shooting fashion or something. There aren’t 68 other frames to choose from. I’m taking snapshots and an unusable frame means that shot is gone. And anyway who wants to take a picture and always be wondering if it’s going to be a picture of anything? Not me.

With an SLR you know what you’re doing: aperture, shutter speed, focus. With a P&S it’s bad enough being in the dark about what aperture/shutter speed the camera has selected for you but not knowing if anything is going to be in focus—that totally sucks.

So I went out and bought a Contax T3.

A couple of years ago I decided the thing to do was get a small camera for carrying around. The Nikons were bulky and heavy, they were loud and they attracted attention. What I wanted was a Leica rangefinder but those things cost, like, a lot. Realistically speaking what I wanted was a 35mm point and shoot.

Being lazy about research and reasoning that whatever they used must be good enough I thought I might look into what the professional photographers shoot with, or have shot with at one time or another, for their work.

In a 2002 interview, Juergen Tellers says he likes the Minolta O-Product, the Leica M6 and the Contax T2.

Ellen von Unwerth and Jason Nocito have said they use, as well as other 35mm and medium format cameras, Contax T3 point and shoots. Once I saw a picture of Mario Testino with Kate Moss and he’s holding a black T3.

There’s a picture taken by David Douglas Duncan of Henri Cartier-Bresson in his later years and in it he’s holding a Leica Minilux to his eye. There’s also a BBC documentary that shows him using one.

A couple of pictures going around of Helmut Newton show him with an Olympus Stylus Epic. Also Dennis Freedman says Juergen Teller once used two of these little cameras to shoot haute couture for W magazine. I saw some of the pictures from that story blown up huge, six feet by four feet, hanging at a gallery in Chelsea.

During an interview, Daido Moriyama pulls a well-used Ricoh GR1s out of his pocket. More recent sources indicate he now uses a Ricoh GRD, the digital version of that camera.

Stephen Shore went around the country with a Rollei 35 for his book American Surfaces before going to large format.

Yashica T4: Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley. Martin Parr is seen shooting with one in a BBC documentary.

It’s also true that Quentin Tarantino handwrites his scripts with Flair pens made by Paper Mate and Ernest Hemingway wrote with a pencil. It’s not the equipment. But sometimes that’s what you want to know.

A difficult thing to find in the Boston area is a good and hearty bowl of pho. That place in Coolidge Corner receives the rave reviews from the magazines for some reason; I’ve tried the pho there. Also there’s a place in Malden that I thought was all right; lots of cinnamon in the soup. And I like what they have at the food court in Super 88 in Allston. In the end, though, the best bets we seem to be left with are the chains: Pho Hoa, which has locations around the world, and Pho Pasteur, a local chain that’s in the process of changing its name to Le’s; we’ve sighted Mr. Le bussing tables at the Chestnut Hill location and Mrs. Le has shown us to our table several times, in Chestnut Hill, in Cambridge, in Allston.

When we’re in Chinatown we go to Pho Hoa but parking in Chinatown sucks. So if we’re sitting at home and feeling like pho we go to Le’s at the Atrium Mall in Chestnut Hill. Sometimes it’s hard to get your water refilled there but they’re nice and the pho is good as long as you stick to the medium or large. A few times when I was extra hungry I ordered the extra large and what arrived was an extra big bowl containing the same amount of ingredients as the large, just more broth. And by now I’m thinking soft tendon must be real expensive because most times you really have to dig around in your bowl to find the puny morsel they put in there. Once I tried to order a large with extra noodles and extra soft tendon and all it did was create confusion because the waitress kept wondering why I didn’t just get the extra large.

You would think that with all the Asian restaurants around it would be easier to find a decent bowl of this stuff. When I was going to art school in Seattle, the thing to do on a Friday night was to go around the corner from where I lived in the University District, buy a magazine at Bulldog News and read it while eating some great pho at the place across the street from there. It was always the number 14 with everything in it, extra noodles were 50 cents and afterwards they brought a cream puff. There were a couple of months during that period I didn’t go at all because once while eating the pho I was distracted by a cockroach emerging from the pile of bean sprouts. I watched it go crawling across the table. That grossed me out.

When looking for a place for pho, though, I’m looking for what that place in Seattle had, minus the cream puffs and the cockroach. The most common problem is too much soup and not enough substance. Also if a place doesn’t have soft tendon or tripe on the menu, just meatballs or something, it’s a good chance the place isn’t serious about their pho. The noodles can’t be too mushy, though that’s just a matter of preference, I guess. I like lime and also I think there has to be sriracha. That place at the Super 88 is chintzy with the stuff so if we go we try to bring a bottle of our own. I’ve never yet met anybody who likes that dark brown sauce. I’ve been fine without it.

It’s ten o’clock on the dot on a Friday night in May. It’s raining outside and I’m sitting in a coffee shop somewhere near Central Square. I think it’s Central Square. It’s in Cambridge and down the street is MIT. It’s 10:01 pm, May 19, 2006. The coffee shop I’m sitting in is called 1369 Coffee House because of nothing that’s obvious to me. Street address maybe? It’s not the street address and it’s not worth the thought I’m giving to it but what the hell, when are my thoughts worth anything.

Over there are three middle-aged men. One of them must have said something very witty because they’ve all just burst out into that kind of laughter that jars from the general murmur. There’s something I’m reminded of, written by forksplit, one of her earlier entries, about a guy she knew, Funny Uncle Frank. They were at a bar and Frank pulled a dollar bill out of his pocket and poked the loud one on the shoulder. “If I give you this dollar, will you shut the fuck up for five minutes?” That sounds about right to me.

It’s a full house and I’m fortunate to have found a table. It sucks when you order a coffee to stay and then find there’s nowhere to sit and there you are with a mug of coffee. I’m sitting at a table in the back. If you walk in the front doors and you keep walking as far as you can go and find yourself at a table just a step from the door to the ladies’ room, that’s where I am.

At the next table over is a guy exhibiting some quite advanced male pattern baldness, prematurely it appears. He’s doing something on an Apple Powerbook, he’s leaned back in his chair and he’s talking on a cell phone now. Over there is an older lady who’s wearing a black scarf wrapped over her head and a coat that’s too big for her but she’s got the sleeves rolled up and she’s spooning liquid from a paper cup into her mouth with a white plastic spoon. In her lap is a plastic bag and in the plastic bag, visible through the brown transluscent material, are three stacks of paper cups and over there is a guy and he’s got white gauze taped to the side of his head.

Now the lady with the black scarf and the oversized coat, both hands clutching the plastic bag filled with paper cups, stacks of them, she’s falling asleep where she’s sitting. Now she’s woken and she’s drinking the liquid straight out of the cup. There are indications, in her posture and in how quickly she is emptying the cup, that she intends to leave the coffee house. Now she’s back to using the plastic spoon. False alarm.

A blond girl came walking past out of the restroom and she had her skirt, the hem of it in the back was tucked into her underwear. A lady was sitting with her friend at a table. She went, Oh my God, miss, miss. And the girl untucked her skirt from her underwear and walked outside into the rain.

In the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine there’s an advertisement for Dolce & Gabbana and it’s a photograph of a model gripping a meat fork, holding it close to the exposed throat of another model. Also there’s a handbag.

Opposite the advertisement is the editor’s letter and in it Graydon Carter says this: “… kids cooling off under the spray from opened fire hydrants. I don’t know where they find them—in almost 30 years of living in New York City, I have yet to see one of these quaint urban scenes with my own eyes.”

One place where to find them is in front of the hovel where I lived, five and a half miles from 4 Times Square. You get on the downtown N or the R and transfer at Union Square, take the L into Brooklyn to Lorimer Street, walk past the gas station and down a few blocks. Or you can have your driver take the Williamsburg Bridge, outer roadway, second exit after the bridge.

It’s not as dangerous as it used to be but it’s not quaint and it’s still the crappy part of Williamsburg. Sometimes you have to watch so you don’t step in the piss in the front vestibule of the apartment building and you have to watch out for the dogshit out on the sidewalks. Once I saw a squashed rat in the melting snow.

We were lucky not to have rats in the apartment, not any that I saw, but we had mice and cockroaches, not the little cockroaches. If you see one of those little ones you know you have a cockroach problem. We had those big ones that fly in from the streets through an open window. They were shiny and ugly and had hairy legs. I preferred the mice except I didn’t like to kill them. Once my roommate got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and some steps away from the bed he stepped on a carcass. He said it felt soft and furry under his bare foot.

Often the hallways smelled like feces and the Verizon would go down. A technician said the sewage was backing up into the basement of the building and shorting out the wires. It occurred to me that I’d like to move away but the rent everywhere else was too goddamn expensive and not all of us can grow up to be the editor of Vanity Fair magazine.

The plan had been to ride mules down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. If you go to www.grandcanyonlodges.com you can read about how you can do that and down there is a lodge where you can crash the night and they’ll have breakfast for you in the morning. If you’ve got something against mules or you don’t want to spend the money there’s the option of hoofing it down the face of the canyon yourself. That sounded all right to us but when we called to ask about staying at the lodge they said it had been booked up for six months already.

So then my brother and his wife suggested Las Vegas and when they said it I thought that sounded even more touristy than riding mules, which was fine by me.

Once I was sitting on a beach at Hanaeuma Bay in Hawaii and someone suggested renting some snorkeling gear and looking at some fish. Snorkeling in Hawaii sounds like one of “those things to do” but now having shared in that experience I’m more apt to think those tourists may be on to something. Seeing those fish was pretty cool.

Don’t you hate it when you come back from a place with something nice and then you go to Dean and Deluca and there it is on the shelf? It’s like, dammit.

You look at those glossy magazines and they’re real big on the idea of authenticity in travel. Get off the beaten path, they say, be a traveler not a tourist, here’s where to go, here’s where to eat. This summer there has been a slew of articles in the magazines on where to eat lobster rolls. New York Magazine says this: “Like the hot dog before it and the pizza slice, New Yorkers, at long last, have made the lobster roll their own.” Sometimes you’ve got to wonder, where do these people get off.

I ate a lobster roll that tasted like Windex. That was in Provincetown, Mass., during the offseason in 2001. The only other time I ate a lobster roll was last month when my youngest brother and his girlfriend were in town and we drove over to Cambridge, ate dinner at Jasper White’s Summer Shack. The lobster didn’t taste like Windex but Boston Magazine gives the Summer Shack’s roll three out of five stars, says there’s too much scallion in it. The review gives five out of five stars to two places in Boston: B&G Oysters, where the thing costs $24, and Neptune Oyster, where I went once two years ago and didn’t order the lobster roll.

I lived in Brooklyn for five years and there was a bagel shop but the bagels weren’t anything to write home about and nobody I knew had been to H&H either. Where to buy bagels in the morning was at one of those little silver coffee carts that pop up on sidewalks around the city in the morning. They sell a medium coffee with cream and sugar for a dollar and a quarter and they give it to you with a paper napkin on top. Then they disappear to wherever they came from by afternoon.

I went to Katz’s once with my friend who was visiting from Montreal, sat at the table under the sign that says where the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally was filmed. The hot pastrami sandwich I ate was delicious but it cost $13 and I think that’s a lot for lunch except for when you’re on vacation.

If travel writers were more honest they’d talk more about eating at McDonald’s. That’s where a lot of locals all around the world go for lunch. It’s a disappointing thing to see the Golden Arches at Tiananmen Square but if you’re asking for what’s real, the reality is that more and more consumers eat at McDonald’s, drink Coca Cola, buy Nikes. The more you go along the more you find that those smart people with the Harvard MBAs are doing a real good job for the corporations they work for.

Disneyworld but for grownups

One year my roommate at the time went to Las Vegas for a bachelor party. When it came time to have his own bachelor party he thought Disneyworld would be a good idea and that didn’t go over well with the guys. The hip thing to think is that it’s bad enough that Las Vegas has become like Disneyworld. Hipsters don’t want to see Disneyworld.

I’d been through Las Vegas once while driving from Vancouver to Brooklyn via Phoenix but I don’t remember that I stopped even for gas. And in February there was a stopover at McCarran International Airport. There are slot machines in the airport near where the gates are. I deposited five dollars worth of quarters and called it a day, went wandering around to see what they had in the gift shop and bought a fridge magnet.

Apparently there’s old Las Vegas and there’s new Las Vegas—not that old Las Vegas is old, not compared to Rome or even Boston. It wasn’t incorporated as a city until 1911. The popular thing to believe about Las Vegas is that it exists as we know it today because a New York gangster named Bugsy Siegel had a dream and the will to make it real. Most articles on this topic, however, point out that hotels and casinos had been around for decades by the time Bugsy came to town and even on the Strip where Bugsy built the Flamingo there were already two hotels: the El Rancho—that vacant lot across the street from the Sahara, that’s where the El Rancho used to be until the 1960s—and the New Frontier, which opened in 1942 and is still around but not for much longer. It’s slated for demolition in 2007.

If you’ve never been to Las Vegas before, going up Las Vegas Boulevard on a late afternoon is some introduction. The first thing is the traffic. Times Square has got nothing on this because at least the traffic in New York moves. But also the energy is kind of the same too. It appears, considering that the Ginza is kind of like this too, burning all that electricity does something to a place.

Our stay in Las Vegas was three nights and my brother wanted to show us old Vegas and new Vegas. We stayed the first night at the Riviera, which opened in 1955 and is where Liberace and Dean Martin were headliners at one time or another. You would think that after all these years and what Las Vegas used to represent there would be a seedy cigarette smoke-cured quality to the place and you would be right. When we visited there was a nine-ball tournament going on and without knowing anything you know that wasn’t something you were going to see at the Bellagio.

The hotel messed up our booking despite a previous confirmation saying otherwise so they upgraded our rooms to suites and you can’t complain about that. Suite 2812 was bigger than the two-bedroom apartment I shared with my roommate in Brooklyn, though that’s not saying much either. It contained one and a half bathrooms and a bar, not a minibar, a dry bar with stools and mirrors, like what you saw in basements during the seventies and eighties, with the wood paneling and the shag carpeting, and there was a dining room table and over there against the wall were two plush chairs and a table and also there were two sofas and a coffee table and a television.

From the balcony there was a pretty decent view of the Strip. Across the vacant lot from us was the Wynn: $2.7 billion, five years to build, opened in 2005. There was the New Frontier and in the distance beyond that the desert. Looking at the city this way gave a real sense of how the city has been plunked down in the middle of sand and dirt. That Bugsy Siegl, even if he didn’t think up the idea he sure saw a good one coming.

Prime rib

When you’re visiting a place like Las Vegas your hotel room is where you’re going to sleep and shower and not much more than that. There’s a lot of shopping and gambling and eating to do out there.

The first thing to do after dropping our gear was to get something to eat and at the Riviera that wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. There’s a steak house and a buffet but the buffet had specific hours and now wasn’t within those hours and most of us didn’t feel much like steak. Where the buffet is, though, they didn’t have the buffet but they had a menu you could order from and that’s what we did.

The dining room was half empty when we went and a little depressing but in a comfortable way. The tables were covered with checkered oilcloth and the menu featured a lot of roasted meats. I ordered prime rib cooked medium rare with coleslaw and mashed potato.

The thing about ordering prime rib cooked medium rare is that the meat tends to arrive at a tepid temperature. It would be nice to have a sizzling chunk for once but instead there it was now kind of limp on the plate. But what’re you going to do, send it back because it’s cold? They can cook it some more but then it won’t be medium rare. It’s the predicament you face when you happen to like prime rib cooked medium rare.

The Ford Mustang and the root of all evil

After eating our various orders of cooked meats we went out through the casino of the Riviera—I don’t remember finding much remarkable about the casino itself. That might be because I was having a conversation about something I’ve since forgotten but also I’ve read the casino at the Riviera, unlike those at the other places in Las Vegas, is described as themeless and wikipedia.org says this makes it a popular place for film shoots. The wikipedia entry says the movies Casino and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery were filmed here, even though the casino in Casino is based on the Stardust, which is just down the street on Las Vegas Boulevard.

We walked out the doors and there were bronze sculptures of dancers and a couple of blocks down was the Wynn. The sidewalk along the way is narrow and walking along it in the crowd I half expected to see some poor sap being spit out into the oncoming traffic. That didn’t happen but coming up on the Wynn we saw that there was a driveway leading up but no sidewalk that we could see so our experience arriving at the Wynn included a lot of moving aside for taxi cabs and limousines. The lobby sure is elegant, though. There were trees and in the branches were balls of flowers.

After getting back to the Riviera those guys went to do some gambling and I don’t gamble so I wandered around outside under the bright lights with the vague idea that I had seen this place in a movie once.

Circus Circus is across the street and after a wait at the lights I crossed over to it. There was a Ford Shelby Mustang being displayed as a prize over there by the slot machines and I thought what a nice thing it would be to drive across the country in that Mustang instead of in a ten-year-old Dodge Shadow with bad struts and springs and no air conditioning. Whoever said money is the root of all evil got it wrong. It’s the love of money, is what it says in the Bible, and while I stood there in front of that shiny new car it hurt my stomach a little to know that realistically speaking I would never own a car like this. And this is on top of knowing that the Ford Motor Company, if my experience with my Focus is any indication, is capable of putting out some real pieces of shit.

Fatburger and the Soup Nazi

The next morning we checked out of the Riviera and ate lunch at Fatburger. One thing about placing your order there: it’s an experience and not in a good way. I don’t know where food establishments got this idea that they ought to be more like the Soup Nazi and don’t get me fricking started on In ‘n Out Burger and their secret menu, whatever that is, Animal Style and what not.

I’m not much for lollygagging either and it irritated me as much as the next guy watching that high-maintenance Sally doing her thing in that movie When Harry Met Sally. When Harry says at the end of the movie that he loves that she takes an hour and a half to order a sandwich, what a load of crap.

I’d like to see Sally Albright pull her crap at some of the places I’ve been bum rushed through. Here’s ordering your burrito at Ana’s Taqueria in Boston, for example: Rice? Beans? What else? Only it’s more like, ricebeanswhatelse? and I’m like, rice, no beans, everything else, and give it a rest already, I’m the only one in line here. If you’re going to order a cheesesteak at one of those places in Philadelphia you’d better be prepared with your order before you get anywhere near that counter because that guy will be barking at you before you know it. Pizza and hot dogs, that’s simpler.

Once I took an advertising class at MassArt and during a lecture the instructor happened to mention that the marketing executives at McDonald’s were “terrified” (his word) of the possibility that their product may be becoming America’s comfort food and I didn’t raise my hand because I’m not the type to speak up in class but I thought there are worse things to be terrified of. You walk into any McDonald’s in America—it could be in Laramie, Wyoming, or Waltham, Massachusetts, or Miami Beach, Florida and it doesn’t matter because within those four walls it’s all the same. There’s some comfort in that. What you don’t want is to walk into a diner in Wisconsin for some country fried steak and discover that this particular diner happens to be owned and operated by a proud member of the local chapter of the KKK.

There was that television commercial for Texaco awhile back: it’s night and a family drives along a route in unfamiliar territory but then up ahead they see the star on the side of the road and everybody can breathe a sigh of relief. This was before Texaco got sued for being racist.

After lunch at Fatburger we got back into the rental and coming out of the garage we found that we were going to have to go up on Las Vegas Boulevard even though where we wanted to go was south and not only that there was some real congestion and even getting onto the street would be a real challenge. Once I was able to navigate through the pedestrians on the sidewalk, that just left me hanging halfway into the street waiting for a merciful motorist who might decide to let us into the flow of traffic. Then we took the first possible right turn after that and then another right after that took us southward toward Tropicana where we made a left and drove along until we saw the Gun Store on the left. We had to make a u-turn to get to it and from the outside that place was non-descript. There was parking. The spots out front were all taken but there were additional spaces in the back.

Guns in America

Walking into a store like the Gun Store was a new thing for all of us. We didn’t know where to go at first but the guys behind the counter were helpful and we said we wanted to shoot some guns. The guy asked if we wanted to shoot automatic rifles or handguns—as it happens they have available for rent M16s, AK47s, Uzis, what have you—and we said handguns so then the next question was what handguns and among the five of us no one could name a handgun so the guy said he would give us an assortment. The first one he brought out was a Glock and then there was a Beretta and so on. I don’t know what gun I got to shoot. Maybe it was a Beretta.

We also got to pick targets and most of us got the standard ones with the blue outlines and a red dot where the face would be and one in the middle of the torso and another one lower down than that. We also got one target with a picture of Saddam Hussein on it and also one with Osama bin Laden. We each also got a box of ammunition containing fifty rounds. We collected our targets and our ammunition and we went over to where we were directed to put on safety goggles and ear protectors and once we were properly geared up two guides led us into the firing range. They instructed us on how to attach our targets and push them back, how to eject the magazine from the handgun, how to load the magazine, how to aim, how to pull the trigger with the tip of the index finger. The instructions were pretty complete but to us it felt a lot like suddenly we were on our own. This was my first time holding a firearm ever in my life and now I’d been left alone with one in my booth.

Holding a gun doesn’t get old quickly. It occurred to me while holding that Beretta or Glock in my hand and feeling the weight of it that I was holding equipment that was specifically designed to kill people and that was something. We asked the guide about how we see in the movies, how the gangsters do it in the movies, like sideways, and the guide said if you held it like that in real life you’d find that with the gun kicking like it does you’d find that you’ve shot your buddy standing next to you. But then I remember reading a witness’s account of a shooting that happened on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side a few years ago and the witness describes the shooter holding the gun in a raised position over his head and shooting downwards at his victim. You would think that holding the gun like that is a good way to break your wrist and maybe this shooter suffered some pain afterwards—they never did find out who it was—but at least in this instance doing it gangster-style seems to have got the job done.

Bellagio style and Ansel Adams

After we’d finished shooting the guns it was later in the afternoon and we could check into our rooms at the Bellagio. So we did. And we weren’t the only ones with that idea. There was some line at the check-in counters but also the lobby is real nice and there are a lot of things to look at so it’s hard to complain a lot. There’s the glass sculpture by Seattle artist Dale Chihuly. It’s a thing to look at but what’s really impressive is thinking that somebody paid $10 million for it.

My brother booked us into the Bellagio after taking a survey among his friends: what’s the nicest hotel in Las Vegas? The answer that came up most frequently was the Bellagio despite the fact that it’s neither the newest or most expensive—that would be the Wynn—nor is it in Las Vegas. The city limits are a few blocks north, placing the hotel, along with most of the Strip, outside the city and in Cook County.

When it was built in 1998, the Bellagio was a big deal and almost ten years later it’s still something to see. There’s all that art in the lobby but there’s a gallery too. The gallery costs $15 to get into and when we were there the current show was an exhibition of photographs by Ansel Adams. I’m a big fan of photography, not a huge fan of Ansel Adams although I was one in art school.

Once I spent a whole day at the International Center of Photography gaping at the photographs of W. Eugene Smith. A lot of the pictures I’d seen in magazines and books but there’s something about going right up to a fiber print and seeing the detail and the texture. W. Eugene Smith and Ansel Adams are two photographers known for having obsessed over print quality. W. Eugene Smith is said to have taken as many as five days to make a single print and Ansel Adams famously said that the negative was just the score, the performance being in the printing—or something like that. Photographs aren’t about print quality and tonal values but when you see a master print from either of these guys that’s something.

So it was a strange thing to find that paying the $15 to look at these photographs wasn’t something I did right there on the spot. Instead I bought two key chains, $8 each. I spent time drinking watermelon juice at a bar that sold mojitos for $12 each. In retrospect I think it may have been a good idea to check out that exhibition. But then it appears I wasn’t the only one to have missed out. The gallery is across the hall from where you go through the doors to get to the pool and all those times while walking back and forth I was walking past that gallery and those people manning the counter were real idle. It must have been boring.

Did Steve Wynn overestimate us?

Once at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston there was an exhibition of portraits by David Hockney and we went to go see it during its second or third month. It cost $25 to get into and there was a long fricking line just to pay your $25 so I had some time to look around at the people in the line with me and wonder if they were thinking the same thing I was, which was that I must be some sort of victim.

In a 1998 article in Vanity Fair, Steve Wynn wonders if the public would recognize deKooning or would he be hanging a $2 million picture for nothing.

Also there was an interesting article in a recent issue of the New York Times, June 18, 2006, If a Little Genius Lives in the House, What’s on the Fridge?

“Picasso’s childhood drawing ‘Bullfight and Pigeons’ features realistic-looking birds (a specialty of his father, the painter Jose Ruiz Blasco). But that’s not what makes it remarkable, Mr. Fineburg argues; it’s the 9-year-old Picasso’s confident, playful scribble that defines the crowd in the corrida’s background.

“’It’s not about skill,’ Mr. Fineburg said. ‘It’s about the unique qualities of seeing. That’s what makes Picasso a better artist than Andrew Wyeth. Art is about a novel way of looking at the world.’”

That night we went for the buffet

The buffet at the Bellagio was gluttony times two and a little grotesque in its excess—people with wide eyes piling food on top of food; that was me too. My first plate was loaded with a good-sized chunk of Kobe beef, sushi, tuna rolls, fried rice, shrimp cocktail, a slice of pepperoni pizza, some smoked salmon with capers, a wedge of lemon, some things I don’t remember and some things I didn’t look up the names of. Later I went back for Alaskan king crab legs and for dessert I got a couple of chocolate-dipped strawberries, a slice of cheesecake, a fruit tart.

At the table over from us there was an older middle-aged man dining with two women, one who appeared to be older and one who appeared to be younger. He was a funny one to watch. He was dressed in a short-sleeved checkered button-down shirt, like the ones Beaver Cleaver wore, and his shirt was tucked in at the waist into some tan chinos and for shoes, gray sperry topsiders. He was sporting a neatly trimmed graying beard and he wore spectacles. He was thinning a little on top and what there was left had been combed neatly.

When he ate, he had a meticulous way about it, elbows off the table, feet flat on the ground next to each other and there was definitely no slouching. He coughed a little bit and took a sip of his water through a straw and after placing the glass down he adjusted the position of his plate by a fraction of an inch and he rubbed the tips of his fingers with his thumbs as if brushing away any debris that might have been on them and it was all very precise and meticulous. What had got my attention at first was the sound of his fork tapping down the wasabi in that little thing of soy sauce and it was like a little tattoo needle going.

Once when I was staying at a hostel in Tokyo we got breakfast included and in the dining hall was someone who appeared to be a young monk in training: his head was clean-shaven but what suggested this more strongly was the very very deliberate manner, precise in every single movement, with which he consumed each morsel of his food. It was something to see.

There’s something zen, as they say, in the way one can devote full concentration to the act of eating. I suppose it’s a way of getting outside of yourself. People have described rock climbing, meditation, getting lost in a good book, in similar terms. I can’t do it.

Fountain

After dinner at the Bellagio, bellies filled, we walked out through the casino and into the lobby. I didn’t know what was happening at this point and was just following where the crowd was going and that was out of the revolving doors and down the left side of the driveway that sweeps up to the hotel from the Strip. There was a crowd lining the edge close to the water and there were the fountains we’d heard about, the largest water fountain in the world, as seen in Ocean’s Twelve.

The show ended as we arrived but it didn’t seem like anyone was moving—somebody said the fountain starts up every fifteen minutes but it seemed more frequent than that. We maneuvered our way through the crowd for a view and at one point found ourselves mixed up with some tourists visiting from France—or so I assume based on their speaking French but they could have been from Canada or Algeria or somewhere else, now that I think about it. One of the tourists got my brother into a conversation so he got to practice some of the French he’d been learning in night class.

Then the show started. Frank Sinatra played from hidden speakers—Luck Be a Lady, I think, if I’m remembering correctly—and the water went shooting up in the air from the lake and swayed back and forth and sometimes wiggled like when you take a garden hose and shake it back and forth. If you’ve seen that video with the Diet Coke and the Altoids, it’s kind of like that but on a bigger scale. These jets go up to 20 stories at speeds of up to 600mph according to the literature, which all sounds very impressive. What I saw was that they go really high.

Sometimes the fountains all shot up at once so it was like a curtain and there was a mist and sometimes there was something that resembled a wave at football games. There are beams of light shining into the fountains so you can see it all and the choreography is controlled by computers programmed to open and close valves in intervals of less than a second sometimes. Humans would be too slow. I also read that there are 4,798 lights and 1,023 nozzles and 213 speakers. The New York Times reports the show opened at a cost of $40 million; M Magazine says approximately $50 million in construction costs. Whatever the exact figure, the thing cost a lot.

One day in Vegas

The next morning we met at the pool downstairs, ordered mojitos and pina coladas and lounged around the pool. Most of the lounge chairs and all of the ones in the vicinity of the two swimming pools were occupied. You have to get there pretty early in the morning to get a good seat. But then a couple left and then another couple and we took their chairs.

Then after awhile it was time to go. My brother and his wife had been to Las Vegas many times before but it was our first time so they wanted to show us some of the sights. After going back to our rooms and changing into street clothes we walked over to the Caesar’s Palace, going through the Via, I think that’s what the mall is called, past the oversized replica of the Liberty Bell, past Todd English’s Olives, across the street via the overpass and down the stairs into Caesar’s Palace and over there off the lobby was a place called the Augustus Cafe. We looked at the menu posted outside the door and agreed it looked fine for lunch.

We got seated and then were forgotten about for awhile but then some assorted breads and a bowl of olive oil arrived and then it was another while before a waiter came by to take our order. We got chicken pot pie, a burger, spaghetti and meatballs and another burger. Above us was a lantern shaped to look like a giant sphincter.

After we’d finished our meal we paid and then we were on our way again outside and then across the street towards the Venetian and the Grand Canal Shoppes, making a stop along the way for a $1 margarita that came in a plastic cup and looked good and refreshing. We made a stop at the Sephora and while waiting I flipped through a magazine with Pamela Anderson on the cover and then wandered around outside on the sidewalk. There was a walkway that led up to Madame Tussaud’s and the veneer made it look like it was marble but it was chipped along one edge and you could see that it was actually plywood. It made me think of that part in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and also lots of places in Seoul, Korea.

Then the errand at Sephora was done and we walked past the wax museum where you could see Whoopi Goldberg and Simon Cowell replicas. My brother went and posed with Whoopi for a picture and when he went to put his arm around it I thought a staffer would say something about not touching the wax but nobody did.

The Grand Canal Shoppes is where the Sands used to be. There’s that photograph of the Rat Pack—in my head it’s in black and white but I think it’s really in color—and they’re standing in front of the sign that says Sands and there’s a marquee with their names on it. It appears to be early in the morning. It’s five guys standing in front of a sign for a picture and they’re squinting in the sunlight, looking cool and elegant and relaxed. You don’t see pictures like that being made anymore. Now it’s all styled and lit and art directed.

Where the Sands used to be is a shopping complex complete with food court and there are people along the way who approach you and ask if you’re going to be in town that next day. I was sorry to say that I wasn’t even though I had no interest in hearing about their time-share opportunity. We bought some beverages to drink as we strolled and I looked in at the camera store to ask if they sold Tri-X and the guy looked at me like I was weird.

We also looked in at some very upscale stores, Chanel, Dior, John Varvatos—I don’t even know if I’m spelling that correctly. The security guard standing at the door was pleasant about not allowing our coffees into the store and there was a silver platter right there to rest your beverages while shopping, or as in our case, browsing. There was an exhibition of photographs by Danny Clinch on the wall and also there was a portfolio you could flip through and I was flipping through that when those guys had seen enough and it was time to go.

We bypassed the Montblanc store and Gucci and then it was straight back to the Bellagio. Along the way on the sidewalk we collected a few of those business cards advertising some service, I don’t know what, for $35 and on the cards were pictures of women in bikinis and lingerie or underwear in various states of undress. Some cards had just one woman and some had two.

For dinner we went to one of the fancy restaurants downstairs at the Bellagio. We had to get dressed up for it—they said no shorts. I can’t remember the name of it but it was posh and the waiters and servers wore jackets and ties and we’d had to make reservations even though only three tables were occupied when we went. They seated us at a table next to the window and we had a pretty good view of the fountains. My brother wanted to order some wine so the waiter sent the sommelier over and he must have asked where we were from because we said Boston and he said he’d gone to BU, graduated in 1988, I think he said.

Then the waiter came by in awhile to answer questions and the thought occurred to me that some people, by their nature, were never meant for working in fancy restaurants and it was just their bad luck they weren’t working as a cop or a construction foreman somewhere else. While my brother asked a question about a certain item on the menu, a server came up to the waiter and said something into his ear—I couldn’t hear but somewhere in there was the word “bill”—and my brother was left hanging there wondering whether to continue with his question or what. Then the waiter said he would be right back and I guess that meant my brother could finish asking his question at a later time. I hate it when my wife tunes out while I’m talking but it’s also true that we’re married. As a general rule I think it’s rude.

We shared a cheese plate that I thought was delicious. It came with a selection of some mild, some sharp, with mold in it, some soft, some hard, some stinky and there were fruit preserves too. I can’t remember what I ate for an entree but it was expensive. Then we left.

What the hell

The next day it was time to leave Las Vegas and go our separate ways to where we’d come from: Vancouver, New York, Boston. After breakfast we went and collected our gear and checked out, drove over to the airport.

The thing that I’ve never been able to figure out is when you’re at the airport and you’re checking in for a flight that’s going, for instance, from Vancouver to Boston but there’s a stopover in Ottawa, do you check in at domestic or do you check in at international?

My brother and his wife were flying from Las Vegas to Vancouver but they were connecting through Phoenix. Based on past experience we were thinking the thing to do was check in at the domestic terminal. But they were flying Air Canada and that counter was at international.

Finally we got it figured out that although it was true they were flying Air Canada their connecting flight was a code share with United Airlines so therefore what they had to do was go out the doors of the international terminal where they were and make way over to domestic departures and arrivals, check in with United Airlines.

We had no such problems. We played some slots, we shared a bowl of chili at the Chili’s and when it came time we boarded our flight for Boston Logan.