I Miss the Old Ones

I am working on the cornet. Man, it’s weird. Every day, I feel like I woke up with a different set of lips.

Day before yesterday, I could barely play a note. Yesterday it got way easier. Today I’m struggling again. It’s as if the embouchure is developing so fast, it changes significantly every night.

I had to take a break. This is one of those days when I have to remind myself I’m practicing for the future, not the present.

Don MacLean Got the Year Wrong

I watched the tenth DVD of the ten-disk series Jazz last night. What a relief. It’s over.

I noticed something as I made my way through the documentary. It starts out enjoyable and then turns into a big drag. Why? Bebop.

At the beginning of the series, they talked about African roots and Haitian music. That stuff may be a lot of hogwash, depending on whom you listen to, but it’s interesting. Then they moved on to New Orleans and the first real jazz. Then we learned about Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke and the other early greats.

After that, the series moved on to swing, which is wonderful music. Chick Webb. Benny Goodman. Artie Shaw.

Eventually, the program made a turn. I believe it happened when they brought up Coleman Hawkins and a seminal recording he made. “Body and Soul,” I think. He abandoned the melody and went off on his own path. If Ken Burns is to be believed, this is pretty much where bebop started. First thing you know, you’re watching Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and the music just…plain…STINKS.

I was thinking about it last night. Rock and roll is not the reason jazz died. That’s a whiny excuse. Jazz died because it became unpleasant to listen to. The musicians no longer thought about the fundamental purpose music has always served, which is to please the ear while conveying enjoyable emotional content. They only thought about cleverness. Invert a chord. Mess with the timing. Shun harmony in favor of constant dissonance. Eventually, they ended up playing music that sounded GREY. It’s like a grey wall splattered with random blotches and splashes of grey paint. A paint blob may be light grey, or it might be charcoal grey, but in the end, it’s all still grey. Nobody wants to hear that stuff.

There’s a reason musicians have always used dissonance sparingly. It’s tedious, oppressive, and melancholy. It is the sound of despair. It’s fine to toss in a few flatted notes here and there, like seasoning, but when the whole tune is dissonant, it’s like a pot of stew with a pound of cumin in it. It’s too much. The music no longer conveys things like optimism, high spirits, nostalgia, or love. It conveys pessimism and alienation. If I want pessimism and alienation, I’ll watch Andy Dick and read The Catcher in the Rye. I don’t need to torture my ears with it.

Notes are like color. What happens when you take paint in the seven colors of the spectrum and stir them together? GREY, with a little brown.

Jazz musicians seem to think the heart of music is progress. It’s not. Emotion and beauty are at the heart. It’s okay to play the way musicians did sixty or seventy years ago. There is nothing wrong with playing the way Benny Goodman did, or the way Bix Beiderbecke did. The fact that they got there first doesn’t make your contribution invalid. Combinatorics is such that there is a virtually infinite number of ways to play any song. Even “Jingle Bells.” You will never run out of ways to express yourself. You don’t have to turn the music inside-out in order to be somebody. Chopin said he never played any of his pieces the same way twice.

Classical musicians still play Chopin and Scarlatti and Mozart. Thank God. What if they decided Chopin’s waltzes were no longer fit to be heard, because the ideas were a hundred and seventy years old? What stupidity that would be. Modern pianists still do beautiful, unique things with this music. Listen to Richter, and then listen to Rubinstein. Different, but equally valuable. On the other hand, modern classical music, which is infected by the progress bug, is an abomination. It’s like sitting in a room in a dreadful De Stijl building, with the walls plastered with Jackson Pollack paintings. The point isn’t to enjoy it. The point is to be seen claiming you enjoy it. And smoking French cigarettes, if at all possible.

And the things the jazz “scientists” did…are they really that impressive? Is emphasizing a different beat rocket science? Should you get a Nobel Prize for starting measures with dissonant notes and making them resolve? It’s not string theory, believe me. It may be creative, but it’s not the discovery of relativity. It’s impressive that people can do these things on the fly, but so what? If the end result is unlistenable for a reasonably sophisticated audience, you might as well be playing silently, in your head.

I could make pizza with jakfruit sauce and limburger cheese if I wanted. I could use flour made from dried yuca. It would be highly original. Would you want to eat it? Would you wake up in the morning and think, “Man, I have to have some of that jakfruit pizza today”? Jazz musicians think too much about ingredients and not enough about the dish.

The funny thing is, the thing that killed jazz was not, itself, creative. Coming up with new musical ideas was creative. Forcing people to adopt those ideas and making them choose musical pigeonholes was the opposite of creative. No musician should think he has to do what the people around him are doing. That is one hundred and eighty degrees away from the fundamental concepts of art and creativity.

I’ll bet musicians who insisted on respecting melody and chord changes were ostracized back in the bop days. My knowledge of human nature says it must have been so. Everybody wants to be original, just like everybody else, because if you’re not the right kind of nonconformist, you’re never going to fit in. That idea is as old as the world.

Jazz people love to say the Beatles killed jazz by competing with inferior music that was easier to listen to. The Beatles didn’t kill jazz. They showed up after it was dead. There was a giant hole in our popular music. It had to be filled. Besides, other musicians had been jumping into that hole for a decade or so. The Beatles did not invent rock and roll. It was the predominant popular music in America, years before they arrived. Jazz musicians who whine about the Beatles need to be made aware of names like “Buddy Holly” and “Elvis Presley.”

If jazz musicians were currently playing music as enjoyable as Benny Goodman’s, they’d do just fine. Look at Diana Krall and Harry Connick. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to call themselves scientists, and they wouldn’t hit the trashy heights of the true giants of rap and bad dance music, but they would make a good living. Instead, they want progress. They can have it. I’d trade a thousand Keith Jarretts for one Nat Cole. I’d trade them for almost anything, just to make their music go away.

I can listen to Miles Davis, and I like some of John Coltrane’s stuff, but that’s about as far as I can stand to go. I bought two albums featuring Charlie Parker, and they’re downright obnoxious. No wonder he was depressed. “It’s brilliant.” Great. Come get it. I’ll leave it by the front door. Call me a hick. That’s fine, but remember, critics used to go wild over the stuff I listen to. I guess they were wrong.

When you come right down to it, no matter how rarely you watch the Food Channel, and no matter how little your pans cost, and no matter how unfamiliar you are with the latest foodie jargon, you will be a good cook as long as you can make a nice biscuit. A good biscuit is better than bad pheasant under glass, and very few people can make one.

The same principle applies to music. Because the musicians didn’t get that, clever jazz had no chance of survival as a popular art form.

Your Choice

Here, look at Artie Shaw and Charlie Parker. Which would you rather listen to for two hours?

By the way, Parker’s song is about his heroin dealer.

More

Interesting quotation from Miles, the autobiography of Miles Davis:

Birth of the Cool became a collector’s item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy’s music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren’t a fast listener, you couldn’t catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn’t sweet, and it didn’t have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss. Bebop didn’t have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn’t even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging–but they weren’t sweet. But Birth of the Cool was different because you could hear everything and hum it also.

Improvement!

Wow, this is freaky. I started using my trumpet sheet music for piano sight-reading. It’s fantastic. Now I can sort of almost play songs at sight. Granted, one hand is missing, but that’s not the point. The point is that I finally have something simple enough to use for sight-reading, without having to play the same ten things over and over. The left-hand stuff will still be a pain, but half a solution is way better than none, and progress with the right hand will help to some degree with the left hand.

Apart from that, the music is better. It beats dismal pieces by obscure classical composers, about depressed puppets.

For anyone trying to learn to sight-read on the piano, I recommend this highly.

Slobbery Instrument Starts Making Sense

The cornet is working out well.

Until today, I couldn’t make myself practice for more than 15 minutes. On the first day, I was seeing spots and feeling like I would faint, and the sounds were positively flatulent. And all I had was the mouthpiece. On the second or third day, I managed to play a G. Yesterday I managed to play “G F E” over and over. Today, I managed D, and I also started to get a sound that almost resembled a brass instrument. On top of that, I was able to practice continuously for several minutes without stopping, and I didn’t faint. And I went over half an hour total. My lip crapped out at that point, so I sat down.

I got myself a book of standards. Man, is it encouraging. One note at a time! I can’t WAIT to be able to play an entire scale so I can try this. It’s so much simpler than the piano, and presumably, sight-reading with the trumpet will help me do a better job of sight-reading on the keyboard.

People say the trumpet (cornet, whatever) is hard to play. Okay, it is. Every instrument is hard to play…WELL. But some instruments are easy to play badly, and it looks like the trumpet is one of them. If I can learn to play badly in a month, it will be fantastic. I don’t have to be Doc Severinsen to get a lot out of it.

It takes about six months to learn to play bluegrass guitar badly, because flatpicking is a set of very unnatural motions. It takes a long time to learn to play piano badly, because sight-reading is hard, and you have to play two parts at once. Trumpet seems more like the banjo. The basic mechanics aren’t that tough.

I don’t know how long it takes to get an embouchure working. At the rate I’m going, it would appear that I ought to be able to play a whole scale within a month. Once that happens, I may be able to torture the neighbors with a real song. I mean actual music. Not the horrors found in my “Play Trumpet Today” book. On March 1st, I may be playing a whole song badly! I sure hope so.

After that, road trip to Birdland. I’ll need a beret.

If I can learn to play something really engrossing, like Summertime, it will be hard to pry the horn out of my hand. That’s a slow song, loaded with improvisational inspiration. The notes will be in my head, and if I think there is any hope I can actually play them, I’ll keep trying until I have to be separated from the horn by burly EMTs and sheriff’s deputies with bean bag guns.

I don’t know all of the instruments that are easy to play badly, but offhand, I can recommend the electric bass. I played one the first and only time I picked it up. Bass players hate to hear people say things like that, but it’s true. The bass is really easy. All you have to do is find three or four notes per measure that harmonize with whatever you’re listening to, and then you play them over and over. Nobody is going to give you a scholarship to Juilliard for doing that, but it will be real music. And the sad reality is, if you’re playing rock, you could actually sit in with a band after a day, because listeners have extremely low expectations of bass players. If you’re good enough to solo, people will notice you, but if you can only play your three or four notes, 98% of the crowd will have no idea you can’t actually play. Here’s something to make bass players even madder: for most rock songs, the bass player could turn off his amp, and most people in the audience wouldn’t know the difference.

Drums. You can play the drums right now, as long as you don’t get cocky.

I hear horror stories about the violin, although I haven’t tried it. They say the hardest part is being able to stand listening to yourself while you get the pitches wrong a billion times. People say you pretty much have to start learning the bagpipes as an embryo, because it takes so long to learn the fingering and wind control. Of course, the bagpipes are, in all respects, heinous. So I can’t say I care. Now the Uillean pipes…they would be worth the effort.

The cornet is a mystery. I thought the notes the horn could play were determined solely by the pitch the lips make, plus the length of the tube. But I noticed something odd today. When I do the fingering for a certain note, but I try to play a different note (because I’m inept), sometimes it seems like I accidentally make the horn play the correct note. How can that be possible? I would think the horn’s length and the wavelengths of the sounds would relate in a pretty rigid way.

I just found a website that explains how horns work. I can’t believe I used to be an aspiring physicist. Just looking at this stuff gives me vertigo.

I remember studying forced oscillations. You can make anything oscillate at the frequency of your choice, if you’re willing to supply the energy. I don’t know if horns work that way. You would think the volume would plummet.

Anyway, this is pretty cool. It won’t be long until I’m jamming to smokin’ beats like Three Blind Mice and Frere Jacques.

Great News

I just looked at Osama bin Laden’s latest video, and I saw something really encouraging. I made a still capture. See if you can figure out what I spotted.

I considered calling this entry “51.”

Inevitable

Not by Sight

Pizza, pizza, pizza.

I keep thinking about it.

I have my recipes fixed up, so I no longer have to make pizza every day. I used to make it every day because I wanted to eat it. These days, it’s just puzzle drive. But my gut doesn’t know the difference, so I wanted it to end. I haven’t put on weight, but it made me nervous anyway.

I have a burning urge to buy a defunct pizzeria, but I am trying to squelch it. Do I really want to work sixty hours a week, dealing with the public? Ack. That’s not an inviting prospect. I like the idea of squashing all competitors and becoming the pizza king of the Southeast, but I would have no time for myself. No tool time. No piano. No cornet. No music theory. No writing, period. Leave that stuff for the next life, because you can’t do it here AND run a pizzeria. God gave me some natural gifts, and I would have to abandon all of them, except the ability to make good food. It would be like cutting my legs off. I’d have to say goodbye to big parts of me.

I would much rather write. I got a couple of offers to write Christian books, but the people involved have not followed through. My pastor is just too busy to work on the book he and I were doing, and the other guy–the former addict turned rehab director–just wandered off. This is one of the frustrating things about Christianity. People start things they don’t finish. Even Paul did it. He started to travel to Asia Minor to spread the gospel, and the Holy Spirit put the kibosh on it, so he had to go somewhere else.

Another frustrating thing about writing for God is that you need a divine spark. You can’t just decide to write a book. God has to be in it. He has to give you the concept. Otherwise, it’s just you, doing what you think is right, without his guidance, approval, and favor. It’s not like being a Christian air conditioner repairman or a Christian car salesman. Those people just go from deal to deal without pausing. When someone comes in and asks to look at a used Taurus, you don’t have to get down on your knees and ask if it’s God’s will that you sell a car. The founder of Chick-fil-a is a Christian. I very much doubt that he requires his employees to pray before they agree to take people’s orders.

By the way, that company proves what God can do for you, if you’re receptive. I can’t understand why anyone would eat at Chick-fil-a, but they do. The food is ridiculous. A bland fried cutlet on a damp hamburger bun. Come on. How could that work? But it did, even though they refuse to serve on Sunday.

I remember seeing my first Chick-fil-a, years ago, in a mall. I thought, “Man, those people are idiots. That will never work.”

People said the same thing about the ark. “Water from the sky? Are you crazy? That will never happen. And what do you know about naval architecture, pops? Nothing, that’s what. I’m going to go home and sacrifice goats to Baal and make fun of you.”

I’ve been reading about The Book of Eli. It’s a big hit. Guess what that means? More Christian movies in a year or so. Almost all will be bad. Almost all will be packed with wrongness. Maybe two or three genuinely anointed films will squeeze out while the window is open. Is that God’s plan? Hard to say. It’s obvious, and God specializes in subtlety and unpredictability.

I read about Gary Whitta, the screenwriter. Judging by what I read, he’s not a Christian. Or maybe he is, but he’s not hardcore. He says he doesn’t think The Book of Eli is a Christian movie. He’s a video game expert. Can you believe that? But he wrote a movie that is extremely consistent with principles of charismatic Christianity, which non-Christians and even non-charismatics know almost nothing about. A mainstream Baptist or Catholic could never have the same understanding of this movie that a charismatic can have. Even if they understood, they wouldn’t agree with it. In fact, this morning I read a review by a well-known Christian blogger, and she clearly had no idea what the movie was about. It might as well have been two hours of quantum mechanics explained in Navajo.

The non-charismatic take appears to be this: God tells a guy to preserve the Bible, and God takes care of him while he does it, but there is a lot of mean violence, and there are dirty words, and the stuff that happens is not very plausible, so why are people going to this movie? That’s way off. If you’re worried about the movie’s premises making sense, you missed the whole point. For that matter, when you watch any movie, it’s generally a bad idea to let things like that bother you. Imagine trying to enjoy Bugs Bunny with an attitude like that. “Rabbits can’t talk! I want my money back!” Forget the Wizard of Oz. Forget Star Wars.

It’s kind of dangerous to start thinking God is sending you messages no one else can see. On the other hand, he does it all the time. The psalms are full of things no one could fully understand until after the crucifixion and the events in the Upper Room. Jesus spoke parables to ordinary people, and they didn’t understand, but the disciples got the true meanings. You don’t want to become a nut who thinks his toaster is commanding him to do stuff for God, but encrypted messages have been a big part of worshiping Jehovah since the dawn of history. He gave Nebuchadnezzar dreams he couldn’t understand. He wrote an incomprehensible message on the wall in Babylon. This is just how God is. It’s part of his modus operandi.

If you think God doesn’t speak in riddles, explain Ezekiel and the Revelation to me. Good luck with that.

Yesterday I heard a message from Perry Stone. He reminded listeners that Jesus predicted that many would be offended before his return. I understand “offense” to mean anger or strong disagreement aimed at God or the church. The Book of Eli may well provoke a lot of offense. Many charismatics are thrilled, and we’re saying, “We get it.” Some non-charismatics seem upset by the violence, and they think the movie is shallow. Unbelievers are just mad all the time, whenever Christianity makes it into a movie theater; they don’t need a particular reason. People like me will say, “This is what real Christianity is like. This is what walking by faith is.” Some non-charismatics will say, “Christianity is not about hitting people with swords and talking dirty!”, because they can’t comprehend the movie, and they won’t understand what we’re saying.

We’re seeing all sorts of offense already. Satan turns good into evil, in people’s minds. The church is under heavy persecution for opposing homosexuality. Millions are offended by our defense of God’s will. Suddenly, people who believe the Bible are bigots. We’re also under attack for teaching our kids that God created us. Suddenly, real Christians are ignorant. Faith equals rejection of logic. We’re anti-knowledge! We want to break into pharmacies and destroy the antibiotics. We want to smash all the computers. Evil! Evil! Christians are a plague!

One of the most plausible premises of The Book of Eli was that after the nuclear holocaust, people burned Bibles, claiming religion had caused the war. I find that completely believable. To an unbeliever, Christianity is just as silly and evil as wahhabist Islam. That’s a classic type of offense. The ancient Romans exemplified it.

This movie will probably be a powerful vehicle for offense. It will be a sword that divides. Oh, well. God took care of the fictional Eli, and he will take care of real Christians, too. People will attack us, but if you think about it, the longest any Christian can suffer here is about a hundred years, while God’s postmortem judgment lasts forever. We’re on the sweet side of this conflict, even if that isn’t obvious at the moment.

The Cheese Doesn’t Wear the Sauce

The latest pizza experiment was a success. I succeeded in trying something and finding out it didn’t work.

Some time ago, I posted some Youtubes of northern pizza guys making Sicilian. They put the cheese under the sauce. Claimed it kept the crust from getting soggy. Tonight, I tried putting cheese directly on the crust, but I also put some over the sauce. Result: silliness.

The cheese under the sauce didn’t really cook. It melted, but I wouldn’t describe it as cooked. And it didn’t mingle well with the cheese above the sauce. There was also some structural instability which made the cheese and sauce ooze over one side of the crust.

Waste of time. Still a fine dinner, but nothing like the world-class Sicilian I made last night.

My cooking method is still perfect. Worked like a dream. And the small pizza was a good idea. Fewer calories, more crust per unit of area, and easier to handle.

Hand me the Loupe

I have to quit listening to readers.

Reader HTRN mentioned certified San Marzano tomatoes, so I had to get out and drive and buy some.

Now Mike has recommended yuppie mozzarella sitting in water, and HTRN seconded him. So of course, I had a moment of weakness and bought some.

I paid $3.29. Not so bad, right? Wait. The label…can that be right? It says “1 3/4 oz.”

Arrgh.

I didn’t want enough for a whole pie, but that’s insane.

I did more research on San Marzano tomatoes. If you look around on the web, you can get La Regina brand in a #10 can for between four and five bucks. Of course, you have to pay for delivery, and you have to buy a case.

Pizza nuts claim La Regina is the best. They also say that if you get Cento, you want the ones with “Italian” below the picture on the label. I was not able to find those.

There is also a tomato known as La Bella, which is a San Marzano type, grown nearby. It gets good reviews.

Inevitable

It never ends.

Tonight I’ll be making pizza for dinner.

The other day, I realized my quest for small pans was not really necessary. You can make great rectangular pizza in a pan bigger than the pie. So tonight I’m going to make a 9 x 6 pizza, which is really the perfect size for a single diner. I want to see how it comes out. It will have a slightly higher crust-to-cheese ratio than a bigger pizza.

I also want to try putting cheese directly on the dough. Some northern pizzerias do that. But I don’t want to do it their way. They put mozzarella slices on the dough and then pour sauce on them. I want to put sliced cheese on the dough, add sauce, and then apply more cheese. The idea of sauce with nothing over it seems wrong to me.

This should be a marvelous pie. The cooking technique and other details are polished to the point where I can’t do much better.

My church has everybody on a 40-day project. Some are fasting every day. Some are doing a Daniel fast. I set aside one mid-day hour for prayer every day, and every Monday, I fast until six p.m. So when dinner time comes tonight, I think I’ll be in the right frame of mind.

There are so many things you can do to pizza, beyond what I’ve done. You can add preferments (stuff fermented in advance) to the dough. You can keep the dough several days to let it age. You can buy expensive yeast. None of that seems worth messing with. I admit, sourdough would be a nice option, but other than that, I can’t imagine anything making my pizza better. It’s that good.

Most cooks like to investigate every option and go through endless ingredients. They like to consult the foodies and crib from TV. That has never interested me. If you know what you’re doing, you can take three or four ingredients, use them correctly, and make something that will drive people wild. If you can’t make a dynamite dinner for four for $20, you have no business fooling with expensive ingredients, fancy theories, and foodies. They won’t help.

This is one reason I love Cuban food and Southern food. A Cuban joint can sell the best Cuban dinner on earth for ten bucks plus tip and make a profit. The meat Southern cooks love best is so cheap, it’s almost free. There is nothing wrong with taking the fancy route when it’s justified, but most people do it not because they’re enlightened, but because they can’t compete without crutches.

What do biscuits and gravy cost? Pennies a serving. How many people can do it right? Very few. I have never had good biscuits and gravy in a restaurant, but I make them at home, over and over. In a Southern breakfast, it’s better than the vast majority of $75 meals you can buy in Miami.

I can pay 99¢ per pound for tough pork and make wonderful barbecue. I can get ham hocks for nearly nothing. When it comes to food, “good” and “expensive” and “complicated” are things that have little relationship to each other.

Food is like anything else. There are sheep who think external trappings and jargon are what count, and then there are people who actually know what they’re doing.

I have to decide whether to have Stanislaus or Cento tomatoes on the pizza. I’m almost out of Cento. I don’t think I have enough for a pie. And it’s raining.

Stanislaus!

I am so grateful for the success I’ve had. Even if I never cook professionally, it is extremely satisfying.

Pizza is a Relentless Master

Life continues to be filled with weird “coincidences.”

Yesterday I made the best Sicilian pizza I can even imagine, and I decided to call Mike. Turned out he had left a message for me earlier in the day. Then he sent me a couple of cell photos of a Sicilian he was making. When we finally hooked up, he said he had to tell me about the phenomenal pie he had just made. He was nearly as excited about it as I was about mine.

Here’s a photo. Still waiting for him to send the photo of the finished pie to my email so I don’t have to forward it from my cell.

The way we work is so funny. I called him up and told him about the breakthroughs I had with my cooking method, and he listened, and he decided he had to make a pie. Then he ignored almost all of what I said.

For some reason, he decided to try high-end cheese. He bought some kind of weird mozzarella that comes sitting in water. I’ve never tried that stuff, because it looks pretty gross. He also got expensive provolone and romano. The pizza probably cost forty dollars to make. Maybe more. I guess it had to be more, because he spent at least thirty on the cheese, and he put a lot of meat on it.

He says he could not get the cheese to brown until he used the broiler. Nonetheless, he was thrilled with the results.

His method is a lot more work than mine. I don’t plan to try it any time soon. And that expensive cheese is not for me. I can make myself a wonderful lunch for $1.75, so upping it to ten or fifteen bucks is not appealing. But I’ll bet his pizza was magnificent.

I found something funny today on the web. Someone wants to sell a pizzeria for $14,500. I couldn’t figure out why it was so cheap. It’s in a nice location, and it’s equipped.

While I was rooting around, I found out it’s about fifty feet from a Papa John’s.

My guess? Some guy who made bad pizza got squashed by a megabusiness that makes bad pizza and charges less.

I’m seriously tempted. It may seem stupid to try to sell pizza in a facility nearly next door to Papa John’s, but I don’t think it would be hard. In fact, I think the location would be a blessing. People would grumble as they reluctantly headed to Papa John’s to pick up their disgusting ketchup pies, and what would they see? A new pizzeria a few feet away. What would you do? I know what I’d do. I’d try the new place.

Apart from that, Papa John’s doesn’t rely on foot traffic. They have no seats. So the market isn’t quite the same. And Papa John’s is in a death spiral right now because they don’t sell slices. Cheap joints like McDonald’s are killing them, because people don’t want to spend fifteen dollars for lunch. You can’t have Papa John’s deliver a two-dollar slice to you, but you can get a two-dollar sandwich at McDonald’s. I also learned that in at least in one area of the country, Papa John’s is killing its franchises by jacking up the franchise fee. If they’re doing it there, they’re probably doing it here.

I don’t even understand that. You pay 9% to Papa John’s, plus a one-time (supposedly) $50,000 fee, and in return, what do you get? The right to buy bad ingredients from their commissary, probably at bad prices, plus an obligation to serve customers bad Papa John’s pizza. You can’t make good pizza, even if you want to. You can’t sell slices.

So you’re paying for things that actually damage your business. The only positives are corporate support and the well-known name.

Fifty grand will buy a lot of local advertising. That nine percent would cover your lease, so an additional nine percent would go into your pocket. Where is the down side to going it alone?

I know why people get Papa John’s franchises. I think. It’s because they can’t cook. Franchisees aren’t cooks. They’re dentists and lawyers and businessmen who need to invest their capital. Papa John’s shows up and says, “Give us a giant amount of money, and we’ll tell you how to do everything, and you’ll get a better return than you could expect in the stock market.” So they plop down the cash and open bad pizzerias. And the pizza is just good enough to make their stores turn a profit. It works, but it’s not necessarily the best way to run a pizza joint. I think when a good pizzeria opens next door to Papa John’s, the new place is the predator, not the victim.

We used to have a bad Mexican place down here. I shouldn’t say it was bad. It was okay. It was a shiny chain restaurant. The Texas Taco Factory. The food was better than Taco Bell. It was edible.

Literally fifty feet away, some Mexicans opened a place called Taco Rico. It’s like a closet. It’s not clean. There is barely room for tables.

The Texas Taco Factory was always empty. It was funny. They had a big ol’ drive-thru sign and a freshly blacktopped lot with tons of spaces, and they had nice tables and chairs, and nobody went in. Everyone went next door, to Taco Rico.

The Texas Taco Factory is now a Starbuck’s. There is a second Taco Rico down the road, because the old one did so well. Taco Rico puts tables on the sidewalk out front, because they can’t handle their customer load.

And the food isn’t that good. It’s much better than the competition, but it’s nothing to get excited about. It was good enough to kill the Texas Taco Factory. That’s what matters.

A place that sold pizza, rolls, cheesecake, non-alcoholic beverages, and NOTHING ELSE would kill Papa John’s, if the food was really good. Near me, we have Papa John’s, Domino’s, the dubious and inconsistent “Miami’s Best Pizza,” Gables Pizza and Salad, Cozzoli’s, and Pizza Rustica. Those are all within two miles. Where would I get pizza, if I felt like buying instead of cooking? Dolce Vita, which is a ten-minute drive. I wouldn’t go to any of the closer places, unless I was feeling especially lazy. When you want pizza, you want GOOD pizza. The pizza world is a meritocracy, and pizza is never a commodity.

The Texas Taco Factory used to be a Pizza Hut. They couldn’t even survive.

I fired off an email, to the person selling the pizzeria. I could not resist. Maybe one day I’ll actually do this. But I’ll need to get Mike to totally abandon his career and his family first.

I can’t understand why he hasn’t jumped on my offer.

While Waiting to Whack Satan

Last week, I made the best pizza I had ever eaten. Then a couple of days later, I made the best pizza I had ever eaten. Today, just to mix it up and avoid monotony, I did the following: I made the best pizza I have ever eaten.

I’m actually freaked out, it’s so good. Not only is this the best pizza I have ever eaten; I did not realize it was possible for pizza to be this good. I know I sound like a nut when I say this, but I am genuinely shaken.

Funniest part: the pizza was mangled. I was lazy when I detached it from the pan to put it on the stone, and I put a hole in it. Then when I took it off the stone, an entire side tore off. I stuck all the pieces on my serving pan and ate it anyway. The torn-up, crusty pieces may have been the best parts.

The crust…

I am trying to describe it. Airy. Hot. Yeasty. Crisp on the edges. Crunchy on the bottom. Perfectly browned. Full of the buttery taste of cheap olive oil.

It got a tiny bit soggy under the cheese, and that actually made it BETTER.

I altered my usual cheese bill a little. What a change. My cheese is now unbelievably stretchy. Just sour enough to be interesting. Bland enough to work with the sauce instead of fighting it. Highly resistant to browning, but nicely crunchy at the very edges.

The sauce…I got lazy and used the Cento San Marzano tomatoes suggested by reader HTRN, all by themselves. I drained off the puree to make the flavor stronger. I was afraid they would be too weak, but the buttery cheese and yeasty crust combined perfectly with the comparatively mild sauce. I’m sure Stanislaus would have been just as good, in its own way, but this was shocking.

Let’s see. A pie has 12 ounces of cheese in it. That’s about $1.75, at Costco prices. That is not excessive. I can put that in a pizza for two people and charge enough to cover the cost. Not only would people line up to buy this stuff; they would trade their children for it. I would. Trade other people’s children for this pizza, I mean. But then I would also trade them for a glass of water.

It’s so good, I am worried about posting the changes I made. No one will use them anyway, and they are suddenly starting to look like trade secrets.

Pizza is a wonderful thing. If you open an ordinary restaurant, you don’t have to make good food, but you have to do a lot of other things. You have to pick a good location. You have to be nice to customers. You have to have great service. With pizza, quality is all that matters. If it’s good, people will do whatever it takes to get it. They’ll rappel up a cliff, to the worst location on earth. You can slap them when they order and make them pay with Burmese currency. They won’t care.

I thought I would go crazy and eat the whole pie, but I quit. When food is this amazing, you have a burning desire to eat it, but once you have a reasonable amount, you’re so satisfied, you don’t have to keep cramming it in.

This has to be from God. HAS to be. I could not do this.

Now I have to go put Shout on my shirt.

I Live the Dream

I have this pizza thing totally figured out.

Today I made a pie, and I made adjustments to make sure the crust was cooked correctly. It worked great, although I didn’t time it quite right.

Here’s what I made. First the whole pie.

Now the crust. Those indentations are from my fingers. I made them intentionally.

I made the sauce with a 50/50 mix of Stanislaus Saporito and Cento San Marzano tomatoes (no puree included), and it was excellent, but truthfully, I think either product is better alone than with the other. You gain some of each product’s strengths, but you also lose some.

As for the crust, I rotated the pan once while it was cooking on the bottom rack. I had a hot stone on an upper rack. After nine minutes, I moved the stone to the lower rack (turned out to be unnecessary) and put the pie on it. I left the pie there for two minutes and yanked it. The crust was crisper than a crust finished in the pan, and it was darker.

Oddly, pizza crust always looks more done in photos than it is in real life. This crust was just barely darker than I would have liked; I should have pulled it after one minute on the stone. But it wasn’t brown, the way it looks in the pictures.

You don’t really need a pan with steep sides to do this. The edges that rested against the pan are good, but the edge that stood on its own was also good, in a different way.

If you do this, make sure the stone is hot before you put the pie in the oven.

The reason I moved the stone to the lower rack is that I was afraid it would cool when the pizza hit it, and I wanted it over the heat. But the stone held more than enough heat to get the job done.

By the grace of the good Lord, I have utterly defeated Sicilian pizza. Now I have to find something to do with the rest of my life.

Someone Slipped Up

In pentecostal or charismatic Christianity, there is a thing called “walking by faith.” A famous verse says, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” We also refer to “the sword of the Spirit.” And we say that when we receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit, it leads to God writing his law on our hearts, so we will obey him in a very direct way, instead of relying chiefly on our interpretation of written law. We also believe the Holy Spirit makes the Bible comprehensible to us, as God permits (he doesn’t want the entire mystery to be revealed yet, so some things are withheld). A person who doesn’t have the Holy Spirit whispering revelation into his ear might as well be blind, when he tries to understand scripture. Your mind won’t get you there, because the Bible was written to be impenetrable to earthly reasoning. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or how hard you try.

Nobody outside the church understands any of this stuff. It’s like Chinese to them (unless they’re Chinese), because you have to live it to understand it. You can’t explain sunlight to someone who lives in a mine.

The Book of Eli appears to have been written by a person who understands these things. Either he’s a Christian, or God handed him this understanding for some divine purpose. Sometimes the Holy Spirit acts through unbelievers or people who are at odds with God, as he did through Caiaphas, the high priest during the time of Jesus. Caiaphas prophesied, even as he was persecuting the Messiah.

The problem with writing about the movie is that I can’t tell you much about it without ruining it for you. This is a movie which is very sensitive to spoilers.

I can say this much: it’s about a post-apocalyptic world, in which only one copy of the Bible is known to exist. A man finds the Bible, and he believes God has assigned him to carry it through a hostile world, to a chosen destination. He encounters a villain who wants the Bible, because the villain knows it can be used to control people. If you can convince people a command came from God, you can make them obey it.

While I watched, my impression was that God had authored this movie in order to reach out to people, to bring about revival. But I’m not sure that’s right. If you’re not a Spirit-baptized believer, you can’t identify with the truths the movie presents. It won’t resonate with you the way it did me. Or if it does, it will be for a different reason. If it doesn’t resonate, it won’t draw you to God, so it won’t be much of an evangelizing tool.

I’m certain of this: it will strengthen anyone who knows what it means to walk by faith. It will confirm what you think God has been telling you. You’ll look at this Hollywood-made movie, created by worldly people in order to turn a profit, and you’ll realize it could only have happened if God had brought it about.

Throughout the Bible, God tells us he will order our steps. He will light our paths. He will give us assignments, and if we take them up and try to carry them out, he will see to it that we get where he wants us to go. He will make us succeed, even when it looks like we’ve failed. He cannot be stopped, no matter how bad things may look.

It also gives a glimpse of what life in the Tribulation may be like, when nearly all believers and Jews are gone, and there is little to restrain Satan’s hatred or God’s wrath. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah tells us God withholds judgment because of the prayers of the faithful. What happens when those aren’t in place? Look at Burma for your answer.

If you’re a Spirit-filled believer, you’ll love this movie. You will see God’s hand and hear his voice in it. If you’re not a believer, you’ll still enjoy the violence and the interesting story.

There is some foul language in the film. That’s about the worst thing I can say about it. Other than that, it’s pretty safe. I highly recommend it. It will restore your faith that God is in charge of this increasingly secular world.

One Performed & One in the Works

I just saw The Book of Eli with my prayer group. I was shaken when I left. No movie has ever affected me so much. I can’t recall seeing another movie that demonstrated an insider’s understanding of Spirit-filled Christianity. Movies generally prove that the people who made them know virtually nothing about Jesus and Christians. It’s like watching Amos and Andy to learn about black people.

I don’t know if the screenwriter is a Christian, but however that script materialized, it is as though a very serious charismatic wrote it.

Unfortunately, I have not eaten today, so I can’t write about the movie until I make what I expect to be the finest pizza in the universe. I’m going to mix San Marzano tomatoes with Stanislaus sauce, and I’m going to put the pie on a hot stone for a minute or two after it bakes. If my understanding of the physics is right, this will be a pizza that has no equal. Hope it works.

The Summit is in Sight

The Sicilian I made was beyond description, and it was STILL flawed. I don’t know what to make of it.

I tried Cento San Marzano tomatoes on one half and Stanislaus Saporito on the other. I used a heavy dose of Costco cheese (13 ounces on 9 x 12). I baked it on my cheap, thin GFS cookie sheet, on the bottom rack.

This time, instead of forcing the tomatoes to stand on their own, I added sugar and white vinegar, just as I do to my regular sauce. Last time, with the fake San Marzanos, I held back the sugar and vinegar, because the tomatoes were touted as superior and fit to be served with only salt, pepper, and oregano.

This pie is now the best pizza I’ve ever eaten, beating the mark set by a pie I made earlier in the week. The heavy cheese, more than the sauce, made the difference. That Costco cheese is pure magic. I think elves make it. It brings out the best in the sauce and crust. It melts beautifully. It’s stretchy. It’s a pretty, uniform white. Can’t beat it.

The tomatoes were surprisingly good. If I am tasting what I’m supposed to be tasting, San Marzanos have a strange and satisfying aftertaste that goes perfectly with cheese and pizza crust. It adds a dimension to the pizza. Still, they’re a little weak. If I were making this again, I’d just use the tomatoes and dump the puree that comes in the can with them. As it was, I used very little of it. I suppose a real psycho would reduce the sauce.

The extra punch of the Saporito makes it better than the San Marzanos, but I would be very content to save the driving distance and use Cento tomatoes instead of driving all the way to Gordon Food Service. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say Stanislaus Saporito is 15% better.

I learned something new about baking Sicilian. You need to rotate the pie, just like they do in pizzerias. Until now, they’ve been pretty uniform on the bottom, but this one was a little off. From now on, I’ll give them 10 minutes, with a turn at 5. No, 7. The first two minutes probably don’t do anything.

Another thing I did to make it brown better: before I slid it in, I opened the oven door and let it cool until the bottom element turned on. I waited until it was red hot to put the pizza in. That way, I was sure I’d get a lot of radiant heat on the bottom of the pan.

I’m positive a disposable aluminum pan is the best thing you can use for Sicilian, but I don’t plan to try it any time soon. I’m thinking I might start using a flat aluminum cookie sheet. Aluminum carries and distributes heat better than steel, and tonight I noticed that the unsupported side of the pizza, in the middle of the pan, was very good. It didn’t have the fried nature of the sides that were supported, but it was browned more. That’s acceptable. To make good Sicilian at 550° in a home oven without a lot of aggravation and tricks, you need a pan that will get hot really fast and spread the heat well.

If there is better pizza than this anywhere on earth, I have yet to encounter it. I am astonished by it. I guess I could let the dough poof up a little more, or I could make a sourdough or something, but there is such a thing as gilding the lily.

I think I’m done making thin pizza. I love it, but it can’t compare to this stuff.

I’ll give you the sauce recipe.

INGREDIENTS

4 ounces Cento San Marzano tomatoes (real ones), beaten to a puree
1 teaspoon light olive oil
1/2 teaspoon sugar
generous sprinkle of salt
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon dry oregano
1/2-1 teaspoon white vinegar

That’s all you need to know.

Now I have to throw out half the pie. I should be arrested for defacing art.

I’m convinced God gives me recipes for a reason. Food this good, cooked by someone as ignorant as I am, can’t be a pointless accident. But what’s the purpose?