It’s not really accurate to say The Simpsons has been a continuous cultural influence for all of the past 22 years. Though they still churn out new episodes, I haven’t really followed the show for at least a few years. I don’t really know anyone else that does, either — even my most Simpsons-obsessed friends gave up on it years ago. As far as I am concerned, they really could have stopped making new episodes around 2004, and I wouldn’t have noticed. Most fans would even consider 2004 pretty late, but one of my all-time favorite episodes, “I’m Spelling As Fast As I Can,” the one with George Plimpton and the Ribwich, was from 2003. So I was still watching it and enjoying it regularly as late as 2003.
The first episode I ever watched was “Some Enchanted Evening,” which is the one where Bart is kidnapped by an evil babysitter played by Penny Marshall. Wikipedia tells me it premiered May 13, 1990. That means from age 10 through about 24 or so, I watched The Simpsons at least once a week. Actually, probably more, since I watched it in syndication once or twice a day (usually at 5 or 6 on the local UPN or FOX affiliate) well into college and actually into 2007 or ‘08, when I got rid of my TV. That has to be more one-on-one time spent than with any other television show, movie, book, piece of music, or most people.
If you were born after 1985 or so, I think it’s hard to understand just how massive an influence The Simpsons was on day-to-day life for a pretty long time. Just in the way people talked to each other. In the early ’00s, I dated a succession of girls where a large percentage of our spoken communication was made up of Simpsons lines thrown back and forth at each other. Or in the music world, where I spent my entire early 20s, the influence was pervasive. Obviously, there an endless number of bands named for Simpsons lines (the ones I remember best were the Pointy Kitties, the Kung-Fu Hippies, and of course, Monorail, who actually opened their shows with the song of the same name). And despite the fact that many bands I knew held rehearsals on Sunday nights, you never heard of a band rehearsing at 8 p.m. EST. My own band observed this rule; we rehearsed from 6:30 or so until 8:00, and then always stopped to watch The Simpsons. One of the markers of the show’s declining quality, around 2001, was when we stopped breaking to watch, and just rehearsed through that half-hour block. Such a thing would have been unthinkable a few years earlier.
At some point, the show will go off the air, and who knows how old I will be then? Probably in my thirties; possibly even my forties. I may even have kids at that time that are the same age I was when I started watching. Maybe I’ll watch the series finale with them. Imagine how meaningful that will seem.
The show has still turned up at interesting times, even well after its heyday. When the I-35W bridge collapsed on August 1, 2007, at around 6 p.m., I was sitting a few blocks away at the Aster Cafe next door to the theater at St. Anthony Main, waiting to go see The SimpsonsMovie, which started at 7:30 or so. In the panic and noise that followed, I couldn’t decide whether to actually see the movie as planned or not; what’s the appropriate response to a situation that enormous, that close by? In the end, I decided to go see it anyway, since I couldn’t get back across the river to South Minneapolis, cell phone service was shut down, and there was nothing to do but sit in the bar next door and get drunk watching the TV reports, which seemed unproductive. It seems weirdly incongruous, looking back, but it was really comforting to be able to sit in that theater for an hour-and-a-half and spend time with characters I knew.
At the end of August, Sergio Vucci and I held our final Common Room event of the year, which involved taking a group of around 30-60 people on bicycle to see four sites around the city that everyone often speaks fondly of, but that even many longtime residents have never actually experienced themselves. I’ll post the full list later. There’s some good photos.
One of these was a trip to the observation deck at the Foshay Tower, to see the city at night. Cheryl Wilgren Clyne, the curator of the museum up there, had made arrangements to let us in, and provided party hats in celebration of the building’s birthday the day before.
It was a beautiful, warm summer night, and people milled around the deck, looking out at the city lights coming on just as the sun was setting around 8 p.m. On my walk around, noted friend of S. 12th Brad Zellar stood at one of the four viewfinders on the deck, looking at some object in the distance.
“My gosh, Andy, come here, quick!” he yelled at me, voice bubbling with enthusiasm and gesturing wildly. “You will not believe this!“
“What? What is it?” I asked. Brad has a great eye for the amazing and the sublime, so I knew whatever he’d come across would be worthwhile.
“You have to see this! This…this…wow! It’s like we’re not even in Minneapolis! It’s like being…in…LONDON or something!”
“Oh my gosh, wow!”
“It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen!”
I was getting impatient. “C’mon, man, lemme see!”
He stepped aside, and I looked into the peephole, ready to have my mind blown. Here is an artist’s rendition of what I saw, perfectly lined up the center of the viewfinder:
I looked back up at Brad, with what I’m sure was an expression of bewilderment and probably mild disgust.
He had the broadest grin I’ve ever seen on his face. It was and remains my favorite joke of the 2011 calendar year.
Since I haven’t used this space for much else recently, I figure it’s time for you to hear another boring story from my youth. I spent the weekend in Louisville, my hometown, and on Saturday, my brother Danny lent me a bicycle. I took Saturday afternoon to bicycle around the coffee shops and bookstores of the Highlands, where I lived in my early 20s. This boring story from my youth in particular is prompted by the large concentration of tattoo parlors in my old neighborhood.
On September 20, 2002, Kentucky Governor Paul Patton held a press conference admitting to an extramarital affair with a nursing home operator that he may or may not have bestowed with political favors. He had spent the past several weeks denying the affair after the Louisville Courier-Journal broke the story, but finally came clean, and came clean in a manner befitting the hammy, overwrought quality of politics in the South: with big, fat tears streaming down his face. The next day, the Courier-Journal ran a half-page, full-color photograph by AP photographer Ed Reinke on the front page of Governor Patton’s tear-streaked visage. Here it is:
I remember the glistening in the nostrils quite vividly.
The next morning, I saw the photograph (online? or in a physical newspaper? I don’t remember). I immediately thought what any heartless 22-year-old painter would think: wow, this would make a great painting.
(A pre-Sheperd Fairey side note: now that I think about it, at no point did it occur to me to credit Ed Reinke, or even significantly alter the image, though I used his exact cropping in the finished piece. I don’t know what you were learning in art school in the early 2000s, but I sure never heard a word about copyright and fair use until my schooling was well over. Then again, maybe you went to a better art school than I did.)
Working fast, in order to keep up with breaking events, I stretched a 4’x4’ canvas, gridded the drawing on top of it, and then impasto’d the hell out of a bunch of cadmium reds and yellows and zinc whites until I had a messy, meaty sub-Francis Bacon portrait of the governor’s tear-drenched face completed. I carried the enormous painting from my apartment on Gaulbert Avenue to my school’s art studio on foot. The whole way, cars stopped on the street to honk and people shouted their approval. It felt great, though also quite weird, as I wasn’t sure what, precisely, passers-by were approving so vocally. Presumably they just approved of the bloodsport of the whole thing.
The painting went over well with the art school crowd, and was subsequently forgotten as I forged ahead in my work and began painting series of cigarette butts and coffee stains. It languished in storage until I graduated a few semesters later, in early 2004, where I transferred it the studio I was renting in Butchertown (so named for the nearby hog butchering plants that made the rents in the neighborhood so affordable — at night you could literally hear thousands of pigs screaming as they were sent to their deaths a few blocks away).
It was in Butchertown a fellow visiting the studio saw the painting and decided he had to buy it. Amazingly, Patton had refused to resign, and remained governor until 2003, so the following year, memories of his scandal were still fresh in people’s minds. This fellow, like most Kentuckians, would still immediately recognize the image. He contacted me, expressed his interest in purchasing the piece, and asked for a price.
Besides not learning about fair use, another thing I didn’t learn in undergrad was how to price work. Honestly, the problem with painting as a medium is that you’re stuck with them if you don’t sell them, and 4’x4’ paintings take up a great deal of space. So I was happy to move this one to what seemed to be a good home. I gave him an arbitrary number: $500. Five-hundred dollars in that place and time would have covered my studio rent for almost half a year.
He didn’t blink at the number — it is a fair price, and in fact, a little on the low side, which I believe he knew. The problem was, my patron didn’t have that kind of disposable income. He instead wondered about the possibility of an in-kind trade of some kind. Professional services, perhaps. Labor for art.
My patron was the proprietor of a well-respected tattoo parlor. “Do you like tattoos?” he asked me.
“Uh, sure,” I said.
“Do you have any tattoo work?” he asked.
“Uh, no.” I said.
“Well, tell you what,” he told me. “I would like to offer you $500 worth of tattoo work.”
I knew almost nothing about tattoo art at that time. I did know, however, that $500 worth of tattoo work was an enormous amount. A few hours, at least. I believe that’s a sleeve’s worth. Or if not a whole sleeve, a lot of one.
Of course, I accepted. I was mostly just happy someone was interested enough in my work to offer money, goods or services in exchange for it.
The problem now was I had $500 worth of credit at a tattoo parlor I had no idea what to do with. As I told him, I had no tattoos. I didn’t really ever consider it.
Lots of people had ideas for me. My friend Dave wanted me, my brother, and his brother to get four matching tattoos. This seemed like sort of a good idea, but no one could agree on a design. Dave’s idea was to commemorate the neighborhood we grew up in, but the problem with that was the neighborhood we grew up in was quite boring, and I was less eager to commemorate it the more I thought about it. After all, if my parents didn’t still live there, I’d never have a reason to go back. The idea eventually fell away.
The possibility of $500’s worth of fleur-de-lis tattoos for a whole gang of Louisville friends was also floated. A fleur-de-lis tattoo is de rigeur for any Louisville native worth a damn.
My girlfriend at the time told me she thought I should give the credit to her, since I didn’t apparently need it.
“No way,” I told her.
Our relationship was then in its waning days — she was preparing to take a job in a rural part of an adjacent state, and I had no intentions of following her there (nor, frankly, did she have any intentions of inviting me). We would break up within a few weeks.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because,” I said, “I don’t want you to think of me every time you look at your tattoo.” Listen: I don’t have any tattoos, so I really don’t know how they work, emotionally. I figured whenever you looked at your tattoo, you would reflect on the circumstances through which you came to have it. I figured if she got one using the $500 credit, she would think of me whenever she saw it, and feel sad, or angry, or however it is ex-girlfriends feel when they think about me. That seemed unfair and a little creepy.
She was not happy. “That is absolutely ridiculous,” she told me. A few years later, I came across her blog during one of those late-night regret binges and discovered a post making fun of me for selling a painting for $500 worth of tattoo credit, and then not giving it to her, and then justifying that decision in a manner befitting the hammy, overwrought quality of relationship politics in the South. I still think that’s completely ridiculous, but it’s likely she did have a solid point. She would, after all, have a pretty thorough tattoo now if I’d given her the credit, as opposed to no one having the tattoo.
I sat on the patron’s business card, not knowing quite what to do with it. He’d told me to come in anytime to have the work done, and I think for a while I planned to, though I never figured out what exactly I’d have done. About nine months later, I moved to Minneapolis. The business card is long gone, and though I am sure the offer still stands, I don’t remember the fellow’s name, or what the tattoo parlor was, or where it is, or really any other details.
A good deal of your early thirties is spent coming to terms with the questionable behavior of your early twenties. There are a few lessons here, I believe, I’d be wise to reflect on.
First of all, it’s not right to rip off the work of photojournalists. If I owe anyone an apology, it’s AP photographer Ed Reinke. The fact that I did not profit from his work is merely a byproduct of my own inaction, and certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. If anyone deserves the $500 tattoo credit, it’s him. Unfortunately, Ed Reinke passed away just last month in Louisville following an accident sustained covering a motor race.
Secondly, there’s the tattoo artist, to whom I also probably owe an apology. If he still owns the paintings and has it hanging somewhere and looks at it, he must feel pangs of guilt, knowing he obtained it without compensating the artist. And not even as a result of his own actions! He tried to compensate me! I inadvertently undervalued his work by not taking him up on his offer, which seems almost like a slap in the face. I still am not sure what would have been the best course of action here: should I refused to take compensation, knowing well I’d likely not have use for that amount of tattoo work? Or should I have gotten the tattoo, using the opportunity to do something I might not have otherwise? I don’t know where that painting would be if he’d not come into possession of it. Probably at my parents’ house, in the basement, in that neighborhood I didn’t want immortalized in ink on my forearm.
I wonder what the tattoo artist’s guests make of the painting now: ten years on, the Patton scandal and its subsequent tears are a little-remembered footnote in Kentucky political history. I wonder how many remember the story. I’d only remembered it biking around this weekend, and seeing a plaque on a building commemorating the former governor.
Maybe, all things considered, the girlfriend was right. Perhaps I should have just given her the credit as a gift and let her do as she wanted with it. Perhaps tattoos don’t work that way, emotionally — perhaps at some point the tattoo’s origin is divorced from the tattoo itself. My patron willed a $500 tattoo into existence when he purchased my painting, a tattoo that does not exist anywhere. All would be better, perhaps, if it did exist somewhere. As it stands now, all that remains is a 4’x4’ painting hanging somewhere, the meaty impasto teardrops reminding all who see them of the painful emotional economies of artmaking in the Upper South in the waning days of the Patton administration.
Recently, I’d read Rush Limbaugh invoking on a mass scale the sort of cheap class warfare rhetoric that gets tossed around art schools, rock clubs, and other places where youth come together to take drugs and collectively sort out questions of privilege and authenticity among themselves. That is, referring to Occupy protestors as “trust fund kids.”
This was a phrase I heard a lot by the time I’d got to college, and I knew by the time I was twenty it was essentially meaningless, because none of the artists, musicians or scene people I knew socially had a “trust fund” in the formal sense. It was a term used to refer to “kids” — that is, people younger than twenty-four or so — that may have had well-to-do parents paying for their Orange amplifiers or their private education. But that’s not quite the same as having access to the enormous amount of family money implied by “trust fund.”
I am sure it was different in New York City. But rich people in Louisville were not rich to the degree that people on the East Coast are rich, and if they were on that level, they certainly weren’t sending their dumb kids to college in Louisville, where I’d be hanging out with them. Louisville is a city with only two schools: one incredibly crappy private Catholic college, and one sprawling, commuter basketball camp disguised as a land-grant research institution (I studied at both, running out of money to attend to the former and earning my degree from the latter). Any kid with an actual trust fund was being educated somewhere else. “Trust fund kid” was just a blanket term meaning “mom and dad pay their rent and the costs relating to upkeep of their Jeep.” It’s effective as an insult because it suggests sinister machinations of old money and lawyers, of hidden bank accounts and secrecy. In addition to that, it’s agreeably infantilizing. “Kid.”
The private college in question. Rich kids? Maybe. “Trust funds”? I doubt it.
My suspicion is that this term began gaining currency in the flyover states with the advent of the Internet, and the ability of people to read about “scenes” of various kinds in New York City, and then project the class conflicts of that arena onto their own local class conflicts. Louisville is an intensely class-conscious city — if you meet anyone from Louisville, the first thing they’ll demand to know is where you grew up and what high school you went to, and then mentally assign you to a socioeconomic bracket based on your answer. So any language that can be used to talk about class and privilege, whether it’s accurate or not, is easily co-opted. I imagine a bunch of pretty canny scene kids in Louisville reading whatever NYC-based blogs people read in 1999-2000 (I don’t even remember myself) and coming across some griping about “trust fund kids” fucking up the music or art or lit scenes there, and thinking, “ah ha!” and then sneering in public the next evening that what does so-and-so know anyway, he/she is just a trust fund kid.
Very unlikely that any “trust funds” were involved here, either. Image courtesy here.
Anyway, it’s a ridiculous term that’s been drained of any meaning it may have once had. It was ridiculous when I was twenty-one and used it to describe upper middle-class peers, and it’s even more ridiculous when used to describe the vastly heterogenous mass of people that have committed to the Occupy movement. I’ve known Rush Limbaugh was stupid since I was thirteen years old, but I didn’t realize he was stupid enough to co-opt the language of art school students from the early 2000s. I didn’t think anyone was that stupid. It really makes you consider just how crude this “class warfare” bullshit him and the rest of the Right are peddling.
All of this made me wonder where the term came from. This is going to sound like one those made-up things I post here sometimes, but this is all completely true. I am not really much of a journalist or a researcher except in the most amateurish, dilettante sense, so I really couldn’t think of any way to proceed except by doing a Google Books search for the phrase. That would, at least, pinpoint it somewhere in time.
There’s a smattering of references from the late 1980s, and quite a few from the 1990s, mostly in reference to rock bands and in articles in New York.
However, the very earliest reference to the exact phrase “trust fund kid” dates from 1985. It’s used few times in a novel by Abby Robinson called The Dick and Jane, published in February 1985 by Doubleday. Robinson is a photographer, and writes that the book was “loosely based on my experiences working for a private detective.” From page 26 of the novel:
Parker was a tall, skinny, horsefaced trust fund kid. He had so much dough, he was a retiree from birth.
There is a trust fund in this novel, though!
Abby Robinson has worked on a lot of really fascinating projects; she has the sort of polymath career I dream of having. As I noted, her work is primarily as a photographer, though she write this semi-autobiographical novel in the mid-1980s, and has also written extensively on photography in Southeast Asia, and has contributed to The New York Times and Ms. Currently, she’s in the graphic design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is working on a photographic residency in China.
All of this is on her website, as is her email. So I emailed her, asking as delicately as I could where she might have heard the term or, if, you know, she invented it. (There’s no not-dumb way to ask that kind of question, but I did my best.) She was kind of enough to send a nice response, saying in part:
Alas, I don’t think that the term’s earliest use was in The Dick and Jane, though it’s fun to think that it was. I think it was already common parlance by then.
The term I like even better is “trustafarians.”
So there you go. It was already out there in the mid-1980s. If you have any ideas for how one might investigate the phrase’s exact origins further, I am open to hear them. But it’s unsurprising to me that the earliest usage comes out of the New York City of that time period.
It seemed certain to me that the self-promotional possibilities inherent to the Internet must mean it is positively crawling with people calling themselves “Hundred Dollar Bill” — used car salesmen, event promoters, smalltime playboys, aging radio DJs, corrupt government functionaries, anyone named “William” whose career or lifestyle might be burnished by associating themselves with the idea of having immediate access to $100.
Who were these men? I wanted to find out.
I thought a Google search for “faces” with a “pink” dominant color choice would turn up rows and rows of portraits of smiling Bills, all winking or giving a thumbs-up sign or holding up etchings of Benjamin Franklin and seeming to say, “You bet I’ve got a hundred dollars, son. That’s why they call me Hundred Dollar Bill.”
Like forgotten 1990s alternative rock bands, however, Hundred Dollar Bills belong to those class of people whose chosen names render them invisible to the all-seeing eye of Google. Because I didn’t turn up a single one. There’s lots of free photo clipart of guys holding up hundred-dollar bills and winking and snorting and guffawing, but they don’t seem to directly represent people who’ve chosen to call themselves “Hundred Dollar Bill.” There’s also lots of people whose work involves hundred dollar bills in one capacity or another, but none choosing the exact sobriquet I was looking for. The closest I found is “Dollar Bill” Lawson, an Alabama radio DJ. But nicknaming yourself after a dollar is different than nicknaming yourself after a hundred.
I hoped to look closely at these men and the name they’ve chosen for themselves. What makes a man call himself “Hundred Dollar Bill”? How has it helped his career? How has it hindered it? In one of those painful ironies of the electronic age, though, the name they chose to make them stand out from the rest of their field has rendered them completely undetectable. The hungry young entrepreneurs that have been snapping at Hundred Dollar Bill’s heels for the past decade or so know that you’ve got to find a personal brand that lands you at the top of the Google Search food chain. His young competitors know that driving in those web hits is the way to rise to the top of the field. Barely anything else matters. The only thing that matters is being easy to find on Google.
Hundred Dollar Bill is still living in a world where good word-of-mouth and a corny, winking gimmick were all you needed to make a name for yourself.
Hundred Dollar Bill is getting tired. Hundred Dollar Bill is getting really tired. After all, what does a hundred dollars even get you in this day and age?
As mentioned yesterday: recovered from the personal archives, it’s my make-out guide to the Twin Cities, originally published in The Rake magazine in the September 2006 issue. I think you can peg the beginning of my personal cultural production in Minneapolis right about here.
Yesterday I was at the Central Library assisting my friend Scott Nedrelow on some new projects, when I noticed a plaque on one of the private rooms on the 3rd floor: The Rake Study Room.
Much like The Soap Factory, I can’t say enough good things about The Rake and the formative role it played in my making a living as an artist and writer here early on. The Rake was a free glossy magazine, full of short profiles of local oddities, and beautifully written long-form pieces, published between 2002 and 2008. Sometime in 2006, I met the editor, Julia Caniglia, at The Soap Factory, and she invited me to come up the their offices in the Warehouse District and pitch her some ideas. (This is without, I am pretty sure, actually having seen any of my work.) I was scared shitless; the only thing I’d ever had published anywhere were a few album reviews in a small zine back in Louisville. So I wandered into their offices one afternoon with an incredibly primitive, beat-up portfolio full of disorganized drawings and zines, and somehow they let me write and illustrate a guide to the top make-out spots in the Twin Cities (not online, as far as I know — I will have to scan it and post it here sometime). It was an enormously fun, amusing little project, and the first thing like it I’d ever done. In fact, it was really the first time anyone in a position to do so had taken me seriously as a writer or artist. More amazing yet, they paid me to do this. All of this doesn’t seem like much now, maybe, but at the time, going around town and seeing a really well-written, beautiful magazine with my work sitting side-by-side with the work of other, better writers and artists was incredibly exciting.
Just a little after that, The Soap Factory entrusted me with assembling their 20th anniversary retrospective show (again, with what in retrospect looks like an awfully thin resume), and Herbach, Brady, Sam and Steph with The Electric Arc Radio Show began inviting me to collaborate on their scripts and perform with them. My life as I now recognize it really all begins around that time. Most — probably all — opportunities I’ve had since have somehow directly or indirectly come out of The Soap, Electric Arc or The Rake.
I’m not sure what the story on The Rake study room is — who endowed it, where it came from, how long it’s been there. But it’s comforting knowing it is there, and it’s got a really nice view of the atrium. It’s a good place to sit and watch people go by and think about the mysterious processes through which luck, hard work, opportunity and simply being in the right place at the right time all intersect with one another.
#1. My elementary school chum Imran trying to convince me of the genius of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People, circa 1992.
“This song is about a man who will never see his daughter again!” he told me while playing it for me in his bedroom one afternoon. “These are things that happen to real people!” I wasn’t so convinced. My idea of good music at that time pretty much started at Jan & Dean and ended with the early Beach Boys, and I definitely didn’t trust a bunch of weird dudes with funny haircuts, even if they did look sort of like my cool uncles (more on whom in a moment).
(Parenthetically: What song was Imran talking about? I still can’t figure that out, twenty years later. R.E.M. songs aren’t really about things. And I don’t think any of the songs on Automatic for the People involve fathers, do they? Anyway, Imran got really into Killing Joke in high school, from what I heard. I believe he is now a criminal defense attorney.)
It’s fair to say, I think, that from the mid-1980s well into the 2000s, R.E.M. was the music of choice for precocious elementary school children. What seems odd in retrospect is that Imran’s other favorite musician at the time was Phil Collins. The kid was seriously nuts about No Jacket Required.
#2. Receiving Fables of the Reconstruction as a Christmas gift from one of my cool uncles at age 13 or so.
I liked it but didn’t love it. I realize now, with the benefit of hindsight, that Imran and my cool uncle were right: I was wrong to not love Automatic or (especially) Fables.
#3. Seeing another cool uncle around the same age in one of those then-ubiquitous Out of Time t-shirts.
I recall thinking, “This uncle is different than other uncles. This is a cool uncle.”
I don’t think it denigrates anyone to suggest that R.E.M. is the music of cool uncles and cool aunts all across the United States.
Oddly, I don’t even remember which uncle that was. I think it was one of the ones formerly married to one of my cool aunts, which I guess makes him more of an ex-uncle. Actually, come to think of it, maybe he was just the boyfriend of one of my cool aunts. Still, that would make him a cool uncle, spiritually.
#4. Watching Athens Inside/Out on VHS with one of my cool college girlfriends in a seedy apartment and talking about what it would be like to live in Athens, Georgia.
It is also fair to say, I think, that R.E.M. is the music of cool college girlfriends and cool college boyfriends.
#5. Holding onto the insane and thoroughly debunked notion that Michael Stipe was the first person ever to hang Christmas lights indoors when it wasn’t Christmas.
On this day, find a cool uncle, a cool aunt, a cool college girlfriend, a cool college boyfriend, or at least a precocious preteen boy or girl, and give them a hug or a slap on the shoulder for me. Thank them for their tireless efforts to make you seem cooler than you actually are.
vickyj asked: Raclette *is* a wonder cheese! Tell me about some of your favorite uses for raclette.
Oh, raclette. It is among my favorite cheeses. I owe it all to Vicki Potts and Matt Hoiland at my neighborhood cheese shop, the Grass Roots Gourmet, who first sold me raclette and told me what it was capable of. It’s capable of a lot.
Here’s the thing about raclette that makes it so unlike other cheeses: it has a really, really low melting point. Absurdly low. You put a little bit in your mouth, and it begins to melt almost right away. It was recommended to me because I was asking what would be good in a broccoli soup. It’s great in soup, because it melts almost instantly.
This is a very unsophisticated way to think about a cheese, but it may do the trick for you. Imagine, in your own cooking, when you come upon a situation where the lizard part of your brain that was raised in the 1970s and ’80s in the suburbs hisses, “You know what would be great here? Some Velveeta! Or some nacho cheese! Right? What’s the matter, kid, you too good for Velveeta now?” I have that voice inside me, and I’ll bet you do, too. Now you have an answer: you can use raclette instead.
Look, I couldn’t cook a real meal until I was probably 26 or so. Even now it’s a stretch to say I’m a “good cook” (at best, I am “inoffensive”). But I am a whole Kessel’s Run worth of parsecs beyond where I was at age 21, when I’d try to cook meals for girls coming over to my apartment and didn’t know the difference between butter and margarine. Disgraceful!*
But that tiny lizard part of your brain is right: melted cheese is great. You don’t need to stoop to using processed cheese to incorporate it into your cooking. I’ve done all kinds of things with raclette: put it inside Jucy Lucys, made soups out of it (mix in some pale ale for that classic Wisconsin wintertime super-treat, beer cheese soup), used it with baked potatoes. You can even use it in the traditional Swiss fashion, which is similar to a fondue: melt it and scrape it onto your plate and eat it with prosciutto.
So there you go: buy some raclette and use it today. I wish I had answered your question earlier, Vicky, because it’s such a great winter food. But depending on where you are in the world, there may be a few chill-in-the-air opportunities remaining for soups and dips in the next couple of weeks.
* Of course, most of the girls in question didn’t know anything about food, either, so I was safe. Do you remember that time before people cared about food? I do, but only barely. I guess everyone was so busy working on their zines and mixtapes they didn’t have time to think about anything else.
This may just be one of those things I dreamt, but I don’t think so. In the earlier part of this past decade, in 2003 or so, J. showed me a VHS documentary on the Athens, Georgia music scene from the late 1980s. It was a very good film and I remember quite a bit about it — there was a scene where Howard Finster was playing guitar with Dexter Romweber — but specifically, I clearly remember a scene where Michael Stipe looks at the camera and claims that he was the first person ever to use Christmas lights as everyday art-punk indoor house decoration. The first person, ever. In the late 1970s, he claimed. Before that, no one had ever strung up Christmas lights for decoration off-season. I may be misremembering this. But the reason I think I remember it so clearly is that I think J. and I watched the movie on that tiny TV-VCR I had in my bedroom on Gaulbert Avenue — a bedroom that was itself decorated with Christmas lights. I remember looking at Michael Stipe onscreen, and then looking at the Christmas lights, and then thinking, “wow, there is a direct correlation here.”
What a bold statement, Michael Stipe. If indeed he did make this statement, is it true? I had Christmas lights up in every apartment I lived in between 2000 and 2005. Around the windows, strung across the ceiling, over doors, around the perimeters of the ceiling. White ones, mostly, but I had a few blinking ones at various points, as well as the tube-style lights. I even once had purple Halloween-themed Christmas lights (I guess they would be called “Halloween lights”) that cast a ghostly purple light over the tiny one-bedroom apartment I had at Highland and Bardstown. It made everything that happened in that space seem important and cinematic and a little bit surreal.
Fifteen years after Michael Stipe first strung up Christmas lights in his Athens, Georgia art-punk house, it was still de rigeur to decorate your art-punk house Christmas lights. As far as I know, it still is, ten years after that.
I tried to confirm this with a Google Books search, but it’s not very helpful. There is no record I can find of Michael Stipe making such a claim. References to “Christmas lights” on Google Books first appear in print in the 1950s, from what I can tell. Wikipedia backs that up: “It would take until the mid 1950s for the use of such lights to be adopted by average households…Over a period of time, strings of Christmas lights found their way into use in places other than Christmas trees. Soon, strings of lights adorned mantles and doorways inside homes, and ran along the rafters, roof lines, and porch railings of homes and businesses.” It makes sense that it might take two decades for someone to figure out that they could be used to adorn mantles and doorways during the off-season. It makes sense that the person to figure that out might be Michael Stipe. Young, twenty-year-old Michael Stipe, in Athens, Georgia. Here I guess one could point out that Christmas lights create, in a room, an abstract sense of that room, not fully illuminated but filtered through a blur, in a similar way to how Stipe mumbles the lyrics to his songs, how he abstracts and blurs the words. One could point that out, but come on, let’s not get carried away.
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