Latent imagery

I completely forgot about Salvador Dali's "The Persistent of Memory." You know, the famous surrealist painting where the clock is dripping off the tree. Halfway through my day today, I recalled the painting that thought how cool it would be to have it as pizza box design, with the pizza pie doubling for the dripping clock.

Turns out someone beat me to it.



It's from a pizza place in Wisconsin...obviously not a national chain. According to this article, the owners let the employees unleash their artistic talents all over the store, putting a unique flavor you can't design by committee with a PR firm.

Speaking of food

A mediation at my local chain, history-theme diner. You know the kind, quasi-50s with Godzilla-sized murals featuring the four-tone cherubic newly minted suburbians glowing due to their love of Coca-Cola and all things Ike. It's a diner trying to re-imagine a time that existed before most of the patrons were born. The waitresses, all slim, white and decked out in red and white candy-stripper skirts, think the 50s happened a thousand years ago. There's a soda counter complete with stool topped with fire engine red cushions. The music from the unJukebox in the ceiling stops short of the British invasion. It’s all crooners, sexless in their sweaters and ties and cut off from guitars or an audible rhythm section. Cartoons play out of porthole TV screen installed just high enough to hypnotize toddlers. There is no "Whites Only" section. They do take Visa CheckCards and sell toys called Sputnik Spinners. The 50s, sanitized and modernized in one generic, context-free jumble, like "Pleasantville" after the color crept in.

They serve "Gardenburger"-brand veggie burgers here and "lite" fries (with 40 percent less fat). An interesting note about those certain veggie patties and Cold War politics: The Gardenburger patties you get in diners and restaurants will most likely be the original flavor, and not the few divergent strains you can find at the organic aisle at your local store. No matter where you order one, it'll be original. Try it sometime, and you'll see.

In the narrow alley of 50s thinking in America, that’s pretty Communistic. Same patty, same taste. Other burgers you can get with cheese, with bacon, with whatever. Gardenburger eaters end up eschewing bacon anyway, eventually entering a culinary cul-de-sac and trying to make up for it with ketchup and mustard to give the patty some kind of zing, some attempt at replicating the grease from a medium-well burger that coats your throat with a Cro-Magnum satisfaction. Custom-made meat burgers were what America was all about. Burger King made a big chunk of bank telling America they could have it their way, even if it meant waiting twice as long for the minimum wage-slaves to scrape off the pickles or make sure no onions were on the finished product.

Come to think of it, you can't really go into a chain diner or a fast food joint and get your order made "exactly" how you want it made. Only good restaurants can pull that off. Chain diners and fast food joints build your food like an assembly line, only maybe taking into account your customization of how much the meat is cooked. It's democracy, akin to how it's democracy when you see all the burger variations on the menu, leading you into thinking "Boy, they have a lot of options" here when really it's a simple combination of ingredients designed by the management to make cooking, and thereby delivery to your table, faster.

I'm not knocking how it's done, just the illusion that there are so many things to pick from. Frankly, fast food joints and chain diners are great for eating when you have kids. The universality of McDonalds or Burger King works because a BK Whopper in Seattle is the same BK Whopper in Cedar Rapids or Madrid or Sydney. It's fast-food security blanket in a blurring world.

And me? I'm having the Gardenburger. I don't eat red meat, but I'm always hoping for a diner-led rebellion, bringing down the old one-party system of "original" veggie patties for an election featuring multiple candidates in the form of different styles of the meatless "burger."

Today's Word: Listen

From One Word

The hardest thing to do is to listen, not to just what's being said, but what's not being said. Inflections and ulterior motives, all playing around the syllables spoken by members in your little soap opera.