Rehab in San Francisco I

The next few days will consist of photographs from this weekend. I went back to San Francisco for a few nights just to spend some time with family and enjoy what’s left of my college irresponsibility. I got wild stupid yo.

Jeremy (a.k.a. Sycamore No More) drove us around San Francisco for a bit. Even though he’s only 14, he’s a much safer driver than any of us. He took his driver’s exam and scored a perfect 100. Stopping at all the lights and shit. Shit.

First thing I did when I arrived Thursday was hit up the convenience store in North Beach before stopping by Al’s Attire. Steaz energy drink got me through the debacle of arriving at JFK 30 minutes before my flight and not having my check-in luggage come with me on the plane to SFO. After Al’s Attire, we were in search of a good lunch spot.

Kiya and I had been in talks of finding of the best cheeseburger. The first stop was one of the top restaurants in the country, Town Hall. After some really watered down drinks, we hit the epic burgertinistravaganza:

What seems like ketchup on that burger is actually a tomato that was skinned and grilled with salt and pepper. The result is a natural ketchup sauce from the tomato without the overpowering vinegar flavor of regular Heinz. It was hella boomtime.

Afterwards we went to Kiya’s place and finally took a few snaps of his ridiculous yo-yo collection:

That’s like $3,000 worth of yo-yos. He’s also guilty of having about nine pyros and a shit ton of his own Anti-Yo yo-yos.

More San Francisco shit when I finish the last bits of university this week.

Williamsburg Eats

Oh hell yes. I just got linked up to Williamsburg Eats, and now I don’t have to scrounge through Yelp for new choices.

Sabrina’s Cafe

Thanks to Kyle and Mary for showing me around Philadelphia last Friday. It’s too bad we didn’t have more time to explore and eat!

An over the top breakfast at Sabrina’s Cafe: Stuffed Caramelized Challah French Toast with Farmers Cheese and Bananas topped with Vanilla Bean Maple Syrup.

W.A.Y.W.T. Flash Video

I’ve updated my photography site with the flash video that is being played at high definition at Tisch for my exhibition.

View the high resolution vimeo video here. Feel free to share the link to your friends: http://www.vimeo.com/850772

While I was gone

I ate a lot of things. I did a shit ton of things, but mostly ate and drank copious amounts of food and liquor. As evidence of this, I’ll begin to make up the 10 day hiatus where I was in constant disarray with the show opening.

I present you… bull penis.

Pickle Sickles

There’s a good possibility Pickle Sickles will be on ice cream trucks from New England to New Jersey this summer, Howard says. Outside of Texas, that is the area where Pickle Sickles have become most popular. Go figure

The Washington Post writes about some sick new ‘treat’ from Texas called Pickle Sickle—literally frozen pickle juice in an otter pop package. It kind of sounds really disgusting, though it reminds me of the LA Times article about the spicy popsicle cream paleta as the new shit on the block. If you compare the two, I think paleta wins hands down for which is more visually appetizing. At this point, you might as well nut in a bag and freeze it for the kiddies…

I will say though, the video up on The Washington Post has a handful of cute kids trying out the pickle juiced popsicles and all of them love it. It’s weird considering how I like pickles but can’t fathom downing this shit like a refreshing drink.

 If purchased through the Internet (a box of 16 is $17.95 at http://www.picklesickle.com), the two-ounce packets come unfrozen and are shelf stable for six months. You just put them in the freezer. Howard says some people drink the unfrozen juice out of the package

For some reason I think my roommate’s pudding sounds more appetizing right about now. If you don’t agree with me, then watch these random kids down an entire jar of pickle juice.

Working on Sundays (but not really)

Worked up some invitation text this morning but I’m not sure how it’ll be utilized. Otherwise, it’s been a slow grind for the start of this month. As you know, I have a B.F.A. exhibition coming up on the 27th. The toughest part about showing work so soon is not having any time to reflect on it. So instead of working, I hauled ass to see Mikey slob on a sandwich after he went to Supleme. He did not buy a Kermit tee.

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Evolution of global and mainstream McDonald’s

I was stunned at this recent New York Times article on a harmoniously constructed McDonald’s in Hacienda Heights, California:

“We wanted to make the restaurant a little bit more of a destination,” said Bryan Carmack, one of its franchisees, who runs 23 McDonald’s restaurants with other members of his family around Southern California. “It’s not so much décor as a theme, our theme being we want this to be a harmonic, peaceful place for people to be.”

Sure. That sounds legitimate… until it becomes a clash of the Western standard against some mythological ‘Orient’ that is imbellished through their zen-like utilization of Feng Shui.

Nonetheless, the traditional McDonald’s was radically altered. The walls are now curved, the ceiling and floor tiles are placed at distinctive angles, and the doors swing open and shut in opposite directions, all in the name of keeping luck within the restaurant. The number 4, considered bad luck in some Asian cultures, is absent in the street address and the phone number. The walls are painted in earth tones — close to nature and soothing to boot, Ms. Clifford said — with red accents.

It’s almost laughable how gimmicky this notion of ‘orientalization’ will lead to an increase in foot traffic or attention. I say this because McDonald’s has already, in a very convincing manner, swept most of the global economy as a fast food business. This is especially true when we are discussing McDonald’s in East Asia. What McDonald’s presence in Asia seems to permeate is the idea that cultural divide is not as relevant as the Amerocentric urge our global economy has to imitate the West.

Much of this is covered in a very interesting book, Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, where author James Watson discusses the primary differences in culture integration of McDonald’s and what aspects of Asia are conditioned differently to such an American establishment:

In the eyes of Beijing residents, McDonald’s represents Americana and the promise of modernization. McDonald’s highly efficient service and management, its spotless dining environment, and its fresh ingredients have been featured repeatedly by the Chinese media as exemplars of modernity. McDonald’s strict quality control, especially regarding potatoes, became a hot topic of discussion in many major newspapers, again with the emphasis on McDonald’s scientific management as reflected in the company’s unwavering standards. According to one commentator who published a series of articles on McDonald’s, the company’s global success can be traced to its highly standardized procedures of food production, its scientific recipes, and its modern management techniques. As the title of his article (”Seeing the World from McDonald’s”) suggests, each restaurant represents a microcosm of the transnational, so much so that, according to another article by the same author, many American youths prefer to work at McDonald’s before they leave home to seek work elsewhere. The experience of working at McDonald’s, he continues, prepares American youth for any kind of job in a modern society.

Unlike the American perception of McDonald’s as a low-end fast food joint that ranks amongst the lowest of lows for alternative places for nourishment, the unification of a single process for executing one goal strikes at the heart of the transnational movement that locals hope to attain and use to move up in social class. It is very apparent Asia’s outlook on something as corporate as McDonald’s is influenced strongly by perception and mythology of the West, as Watson explains the seemingly carefree forgiveness of McDonald’s low nutritional value in contrast to the daily diet of locals.

Only one-fourth of my informants regarded McDonald’s food as a formal meal, and most of these respondents were women students (18 out of 23). Accordingly, 24 of the 29 men students (83 percent) perceived McDonald’s food as snacks (xiaochi). Regarding the sensation of fullness, 54 informants (56 percent) did not feel they had had a “satisfying” meal at McDonald’s, and, not surprisingly, this sentiment appeared most commonly among young men–23 of the 29 male students (79 percent)–while fewer than half the women respondents found McDonald’s food unsatisfying. Those who treated McDonald’s food as a formal meal were more likely to feel full: only 3 of 23 such informants complained of chi bu bao (not feeling full). One implication of the findings is that the perception of McDonald’s as a provider of meals or of snacks is largely determined by the capacity of the food to make one feel full. It seems that women are more likely to feel full, and hence a larger proportion of women are ready to accept McDonald’s food as a formal meal.

Despite this, the emphasis can be seen in the overwhelming difference in attitude toward their rationale for patronizing McDonald’s.

For younger Beijing residents who have higher incomes and wish to be “connected” more closely to the outside world, eating at McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or Pizza Hut has become an integral part of their new lifestyle, a way for them to participate in the transnational cultural system. As one informant commented: “The Big Mac doesn’t taste great; but the experience of eating in this place makes me feel good. Sometimes I even imagine that I am sitting in a restaurant in New York City or Paris.” One late morning I talked with a young man, age 22, a graduate of the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages, while we sat in a McDonald’s restaurant. He ordered two Big Macs, one chicken sandwich, one Filet-o-Fish, one large Coke, and an ice cream sundae–all for himself. During our conversation, he told me that he was working for a Japanese company, earning a monthly salary of 3,500 yuan (more than $400), which in 1994 was ten times the average wage of an ordinary worker. When I asked how much he spent on fast food, he said he didn’t know and didn’t care: “I think I am better off than my friends who went to study abroad. Staying in my hometown, I can enjoy all such foreign goods as long as I make money. You see, today I have to attend a formal banquet for a business lunch and I will only drink when I get there. Unlike those tu [rustic] guys, I prefer eating at McDonald’s to a noisy Chinese restaurant.”

Throughout my fieldwork I talked with more than a dozen yuppies like this young man, all of whom were proud of their newly attained habit of eating foreign fast food. Although some emphasized that they just wanted to save time, none finished their meals within 20 minutes. Like other customers, these young professionals arrive in small groups or come with girl- or boyfriends and enjoy themselves in the restaurant for an hour or more. Eating foreign food, and consuming other foreign goods, has become an important way for these Chinese yuppies to define themselves as middle-class professionals.

Now this last bit strikes me the most, as there have been many discussions on the illusion of haste, made by the colors red and yellow, to induce faster turnover for customers to maximize profits.  Yet, the appeal seems to be that the locals want to stick around and hang out so they can be a part of the experience. The article finishes with a few more poignant examples, one of which mentions the self-service function of eating at McDonald’s as “regular customers… (who) had learned to clean up their tables by observing what foreigners did.”

With all the reverie for Americana, how silly does it look to have an Asian-themed McDonald’s in a country that still percieves Asia as a land of bamboo, kung fu, and kung pao? Almost in an ironic fashion, the global market seems to have flipped the standard on it’s head, as many Americans are chasing their own tails when most foreign nations are quite content with the standard they have established. Bamboo and curved walls sure won’t convince me to stick around at a McDonald’s.

You can read everything I sourced from Golden Arches East in this article at the New York Times book archive.

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