Noodles are my business. Sesame, cellophane, udon, you name it - I've chased the wild chow fun through Chinatown, stalked soba up and down Sawtelle. When I heard whispers in my local bodega that the O was missing from the "Cup O'Noodles" product name, something didn't taste right. (In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit here I carried a "Cup O’ Noodles" in my briefcase every day. I used to keep a lunch salad in there, but every time I opened my valise I’d hear, "Hey! I’m dressing!" When the oil and vinegar start talking to you, you know it’s time to switch to soup.)
I told my boss: "No worries, bub. Lots of things disappear in Los Angeles." Then I hit the Central Library. It's where I do all my research. There or the back booth of Canter’s Deli on Fairfax - but the library was closer. I went straight to the Shakespeare. King Lear. The Fool speaks to the King: "Thou art an O without a figure. I am more than thou art. I am a fool. Thou art nothing."
Perhaps they felt the O meant nothing. Plus the simple fact that "Cup Noodles" makes no sense. "Cup Noodles" isn't just grammatically offensive, it's practically anti-prepositional. A solecism. Morphological, even.
I got the heck out of the Thesaurus Room as fast as I could. This case was taking me lower than William Safire’s radar, so I next turned to the finest explanation of correlative expressions I know: Margaret Shertzer, the publisher of Strunk and White. She writes in The Elements of Grammar: "Care must be taken in the use of prepositions." But what kind of preposition is O, as defined in Shertzer’s primer? An "unnecessary" preposition, she prescribes, "should be omitted when they are not needed to make the meaning clear." So there it is, by the master’s definition, "Cup Noodles" pretty much gives you the meaning of what’s all happening inside the package.
Finally I sussed out the source, and that meant Nissin Foods in Gardena. I'd been in better fights than a drive to Gardena, but I was going to follow this case wherever it led. Maybe there were some free coupons in it. Four hours and fifteen miles out of downtown, I crawled off the 405 Freeway and into the Nissin offices.
Her name was Cindy. Cindy Franco. A Guatemalan, she was also a customer service liaison. And she was ready for me. "They dropped the O in 1996," Cindy explained. She said it had nothing to do with the word "of," nor with the Irish, nor even the Japanese. "Worldwide, it's been 'Cup Noodles' for a long time," she added. "Only in the U.S. was it ‘Cup O’Noodles.’ People still ask, though."
"What kind of people?"
"People like you," Cindy said. She stirred me, deeply.
I asked what "Nissin" meant. 14 employees later, a colleague of hers informed me that Nissin is Japanese for "Sun. Clear. Pure." Then he gave me a coupon and asked me to leave. "Much More Than a Soup," it read. More like a mystery to me, as five hours later in a downtown grocery, I spotted "Bowl Noodle Soup" by the Nong Shim Co. in Korea. Yeah, I know, no O. But for $1.59, you think I was gonna check it out? That’s Koreatown, Jake. If you want me, I'll be at Canter's....Wait. Make that Musso's.
The end.
Pulp Liqueur: The Fernet Factor
by Todd Eliassen
And then there was that morning my head hurt like I’d been wearing a cheap fedora in a rainstorm; squeezed and squeezed hard. Apparently the previous evening found me wholly depleting the scotch reserves of Los Angeles County, a feat which I all too frequently attempt. Somehow, no matter how tough the hangovers get, there’s always another one hunkered down around the corner awaiting its turn at bat. And this one’s a real slugger. The morning sun pasted my eyes shut. My brain throbbed a half-step behind my heart. My skeleton cracked when I moved. The Germans call this horrendous feeling a ‘katzenjammer.’ I call it ‘Thursday.’
In college it was perfectly acceptable, if not flat out cool, to gulp down a ‘hair-o-the-dog’ on the morning after. But sliding now headlong into my thirties, getting up in the morning and pounding a shot no longer seems appropriate. (And if my dog is the only one around to witness my taking a shot of swill at seven a.m., is there even a remote chance it’s still cool? I think not.) So when a friend told me about this mystery liquor that’s supposed to cure hangovers, I balked. I told him he was just trying to hang on to his youth and if you ask me, it’s pathetic, buster. Then he reminded me why we were having the conversation in the first place – I’m hung over on a weekday morning. Wisenheimer. He had me there. “Fernet-Branca,” he plainly stated. “Damn near a miracle cure. In fact, they used to sell it as medicine till the late seventies. And you wouldn’t believe the underground following the stuff has.” I’m still skeptical but a few calls later, I find a liquor store where they sell this ‘miracle cure.’
I’ll say it right out, it’s an acquired taste. This is akin to saying Cher’s had some work done. The aroma alone made me question my friend’s sanity for having suggested it as a morning after cure. And though the label plainly states that Fernet-Branca is a bitters product, the bitterness completely took me off guard. Luckily, I have masochistic leanings and I managed to put the glass to my mouth, pour it down my throat and, most impressively of all, hold it down. With my face as twisted as my mood, I picked up the phone with intentions of giving my friend a stern talking to. But before I could plunk out 714 – that’s right, the dummy lives in O.C. – my monstrous hangover began to abate. Within minutes the vile thing faded gently and quickly as so many snow flakes in Tijuana. My friend was still a jackass in general, but on this subject he was dead on. This stuff is brilliant. Not only was my hangover gone, I actually felt motivated, like doing something, like getting out there and taking L.A. by the privates and making it love me, I felt like getting a job.
Well, the job thing creeped me out actually, so I opted 
instead to have another shot of the stuff. Now I’m curious by nature, a real live George, and here I remembered an odd thing my friend said about this bitter beverage. “You wouldn’t believe the underground following the stuff has.” What the hell does that mean? A booze with a following? And why underground? I immediately set out to find some answers. Well, to be honest, I watched Mary Tyler Moore reruns for a couple hours, then I immediately set out to find some answers.
A search on the net quickly turned up a little history. It’s 1845, a young woman from Milan has the guts to start a business when young women in Milan, not to mention the world, weren’t exactly welcome in corporate culture. Maria Branca knew something about the medicinal properties of various herbs, roots, and spices of the area. Like a modern day alchemist, she mixed and matched till she created something we seldom partake of in America, a bitter liqueur. An early advertisement lauded the elixir as one that ‘averts cholera, slakes the thirst, stimulates the appetite, and cures fevers.’ (While I’m not exactly sure what it means, I do like the idea of having my thirst slaked. Just sounds fun.) In discovering Fernet-Branca, I began to realize I was onto something unusual. I dug deeper. I made phone calls. I read books. I had officially began my “fernetucation.”
Much like Coca Cola being originally conceived of as a tonic for health, Fernet-Branca’s initial purpose was to cure what ails ya. It was sold as a medicinal product in pharmacies until changes to U.S. law led to a temporary Fernet-Branca extinction in 1978. Along the way, however, many Americans had already begun to love this drink for less august reasons than those medicinal – especially during the prohibition era. Can’t get moonshine? Well, there’s an eighty proof bottle at the drug store that’ll do the trick even better. (Says one bartender in a recent issue of SF Weekly, “It’s like smoking a fatty.” Says this writer, “a fatty indeed, brother, a fatty indeed.”) So, as Coca Cola yanked the cocaine from its product and convinced the world it was a soft drink they couldn’t live without, Fernet-Branca gradually became the drink that makes you feel like a million bucks. Though it lost for a time its red, white, and blue steam, the liquor continued to grow in popularity among countries with a more refined palate. Then, in 1998, it was reintroduced to a United States who’s normally bucolic taste in booze was beginning to change.
Suddenly, Martini’s are back. It’s okay again to infuse a little style into social boozing. Our barroom coolness moved from loudly requesting a Bud to calmly ordering a white Russian and calling it a ‘Caucasian in a bucket.’ And the Fernet-Branca company was back in America, no longer a two mule operation but the 35th largest brand of liquor in the world. The family owned business now brews several unique brands at its Milan based facility. Five hundred barrels the size of swimming pools age their contents for one year. (They’ve even got their own brandy which ferments in the world’s largest barrel of booze – four stories high. Put me in 
that barrel with two monkeys and a blonde and Milan’ll have seen its better days.)
But what of the mysterious healthful qualities to this elixir? I know certain drinks affect me quite positively. For instance, when I drink Jagermiester, I become quite attractive, suave, and really very tough. Unfortunately, I’m the only one who recognizes this. Fernet-Branca, however, seems to have more legitimate effects. Forgive me for sounding like a man on the back of a wagon, but this snake oil has stood the test of time. For over a hundred and fifty years now, people have been swearing that this magic elixir is an incredible digestive aid (or ‘digestife’ if you’re feeling highfalutin). Sip a little after you’ve eaten and your stomach feels great. Cruise ships offer it as something to quell an upset stomach. I can personally attest to its being a hangover cure from heaven, but as for this next quality, well, I’ll do as so many of us do when we just don’t have the words, I’ll turn to Sean Penn. In Talk Magazine (February 2002), the star said of Fernet-Branca, “It’s very good. You’ll take an excellent shit tomorrow.” Well said, Sean, well said.
My inquiry soon found me talking to Aurelien de Seze, the USA President of Branca Products Corp. and a self-styled ‘preacher in the spirit business.’ He made me aware of a few more qualities which make Fernet-Branca the antithesis of our usual alcoholic drinks. One, should you choose to make it your drink for the evening instead of, say, scotch, you simply won’t have the nasty katzenjammer come morning. Though, as Mr. de Seze wisely pointed out in his strong French accent, “…one must do everything in moderation. I’ve only been married five times.” (I think he was joking. Either way, I liked the guy.) And for us men, Aurelien says Fernet-Branca won’t have that ugly ‘little’ effect on your amorous endeavors either. In fact, many laud the drink as an aphrodisiac. (I can’t confirm this, however, because my blonde girlfriend is soaking in a Milan brandy barrel with a couple of snow monkeys.)
One has to wonder what ingredients could possibly be in this stuff to make it so damn useful. Well, the company guards their recipe like my grandpa guards his Thin Mints, so the label on the bottle says nothing of ingredients. (In fact, the label is written in Italian. Not only do I not understand this language, I still pronounce ‘Italian’ with a long ‘i’ sound. So sue me.) But ever the diligent researcher, I discovered just a few of the over forty herbs, spices and fruit essences involved: Aloe vera, myrrh (what’s myrrh?), rhubarb, Echinacea, quinine, ginseng, St. John’s wort, sage, chamomile, peppermint oil, and lots and lots of saffron. In fact, Fernet-Branca gobbles up 75% of all saffron sold. Easily the most expensive of all spices, saffron is said to quicken the brain and clear up coughs; two things this writer finds quite alluring. And of course, there are those other rumored ingredients. I’m not about to put them down in ink, but if it’s true, let me just say ‘amen.’
And what of the aforementioned cult-like following? I made some calls and discovered that, while it’s only now permeating Los Angeles social circles, (Hilly Elkins, Beverly Hills manager to the stars, drinks it every day, and his buds James Coburn and Faye Dunaway keep a bottle at their pads just for him) Fernet-Branca is already tops in the Bay Area. Ask for a shot at San Francisco’s Monkey Bar or Bus Stop, and you’re suddenly part of the club. These bars go through cases of the stuff. But unlike our more refined European counterparts, Americans tend to shoot the liqueur with a ginger ale back. (They do this much to the chagrin of said Europeans who prefer it sipped neat or in cola.)
In Argentina, the stuff is huge. In New Zealand, they actually have a Fernet-Branca women’s club as well as one for men. It’s Europe’s favorite digestive aid. And here in Los Angeles, a few bartenders in the know are touting the liquor as Trendy-Town’s next big sensation. Sky Sushi actually has a Fernet-Branca bar. Ask for it at Lola’s, The Petit Chateau, Numbers, The Short Stop, The Whiskey Sky, Ghengis Cohen, and a whole host of other fine establishments and you’ll get a knowing wink from the bartender.
Back to the taste of this concoction. As Americans, we’ve ignored and even showed contempt for those taste buds which sense bitterness. I remember, as a child, thinking that coffee must be the worst tasting liquid on the planet. A gazillion years later now and I’ll opt for coffee in the morning over making love on a Tahitian beach. And I have to say, after polishing off a bottle of Fernet-Branca – all in the name of research, mind you – I’ve come to appreciate this foreign flavor. Perhaps, having already felt its amazing effects, I’m now simply experiencing a Pavlovian response to the muck, but I truly do enjoy the taste.
Drink it neat, drink it on the rocks. But no matter how you drink it, I strongly urge you to try this underground elixir. And if you’re one of those who likes your smokes mentholated and your mouthwash swallowed, give Brancamenta a try. It’s made of the same base as Fernet-Branca, but with an extra kick of mint. I tried it and not only will my breath be fresh till next fall, it also made my muscles bigger and I’m decidedly more attractive now. But that’s another investigation altogether.
LA Noir
by Nick Burns, photos by Jay Matsueda
The Noir genre spawns personality not just from characters imagined by the likes of Raymond Chandler but from the urban settings that inspire those characters. These pockets of unanswered curiosities taint their visitors with the pitch of the sordidness, invite with their dim lights and dark ambiances. The same edgy atmosphere that makes you wonder exactly why you came keeps you from leaving lest you miss something unexpected.
Maybe nothing deserving of its own detective novel will happen in the 21st century remnants of the Noir landscape, but the feeling of mystery lingers; enough vague promise of voyeur-istic excitement remains as it would take to keep more than a few sorority girls out past curfew.
A number of Los Angeles' night spots earned an entry on the itinerary of this search for contemporary Noir. Here are the suspects:
Cat & Fiddle Restaurant & Pub, 6530 W. Sunset Blvd., LA. A patio with fountain greets the guests into a British pub minus the cramped feeling.
Ye Coach and Horses, 7617 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. Another Brit-inspired take on good drinking scenery; with the hole feel to boot.
Jumbo's Clown Room, 5153 Holly-wood Blvd., LA. Would be funny enough to deserve its name if it weren't also creepy. Not the type of strip club you would take your mother to.
Daddy's,1610 N. Vine St., LA. Dark enough for you to covertly check between the couch cushions for loose change.
Formosa Café, 7158 Santa Monica Blvd., LA. Does this train car stop at Nicholson's house? Unlikely, since this is probably only a consistent celebrity-sighting spot for those who weren't looking in the first place.
So what passes for Noir these days? A mixture of class and sleaze, of course; stirred, not shaken. Another ingredient begs addition, though, like each of the remaining two fat kids on the playground begs for second-to-last selection by a team captain. This extra something is a real doozy, and perhaps has gone the way of the dodo and the fedora.
Noir finds itself uneasily positioned between the worlds of light and shadow; its heroes pulled too equally from both sides for the tension to ever resolve. The venues that sustain Noir keep that tension alive by daring to settle for an air of unanswered questions. And no place better unevenly raises a person's eyebrows in an statement of query than Jumbo's Clown Room, hybrid home of libidinal comforts and visceral qualms - or is it the other way around?
Inside the brick facade, Jumbo's unveils as straight-forward an approach to combining dames and booze as you can get without the two touching: the length of the bar faces the length of the stage, so all you have to do to turn your mouthful into an eyeful is spin around on your bar stool.
Though a sense of tension comes easily to any but the most jaded regular Jumbo's customer, it's probably an aesthetic quandary and not the tension of Noir since the scene generously favors sleaze over class. Let the search continue...
Daddy's draped entrance weighs on incoming visitors with an accurate anticipation of the sleep-induction to follow. With the couches, the ceiling, and the lights low, you feel like you've stepped into one funky crypt. That's when you realize the exaggerated atmosphere doesn't suit the clientele so much as it compensates for them. No one there is that sultry or secretive. So, upon close inspection, Daddy's Noir is merely a red herring; the requisite tension is uncoiled before it's ever strung.
Nothing enlivens a room so inexplicably as a celebrity attempting to earn our disregard. Perhaps this X-factor can increase a venue's Noir-factor. Ye Coach and Horses has earned some of this intrigue through a past peppered with celebrity drop-ins. But even the high-backed booths have proven insufficient cover from the fans and paparazzi; reputation as a star-magnet has rendered the pub less attractive to those sparkly types we all love to see at their most commonplace.
The celeb's don't monopolize intrigue, though. Just ask a Coach and Horses bartender to tell you the story of the man seen stirring his drink with his penis. Though, the emotional impetus for that behavior is less simply decipherable than the classical emotional impeti of Noir characters.
Formosa and Cat & Fiddle seem to have grown out of their potential for Noir. Both architecturally expand beyond the possibility of dangerous intimacy (in Formosa's case, due to renovation and addition). These venues' comforts free the tension Noir would have a lock on. People are as predictable as they are comfortable.
In all the above examples, Noir's necessary tension releases, springing an establishment into either the realm of class or sleaze. What has triggered this release? First consider what stretched the tension into place to begin with: the energy of creation. The first pulls of a separation between modern class and modern sleaze that would define their contemporary cultural differences drew a blurred dividing line. This unclear marker represents Noir.
Noir, the ill-defined real estate between upstandingness and its shadow, has mostly crumbled away from contemporary culture as the hammering over-definition of modernity cleaves deeper between the two worlds. However, a few fuzzy distinctions remain to remind us of some last, tenacious, and inevitable roots of Noir. Consider the following two converse examples.
Marketers' sexualization of youth pop culture plays on consumers' instinctual insistence on the purity of youth while pandering to their adult desires; the guilt of instinct immediately assuaged by the virtue of innocence-worship. This brand of sleaze trumps the more thinly veiled brand of classic Noir since it soaks into the mainstream more deeply. Organized criminals' seeming legitimization of their businesses capitalizes on the leverage of image on popular moral acceptance. White-collar crime has shed the symbolic iconoclastic fashions (Think, e.g., Mafioso) to more seamlessly incorporate itself into upright workforce.
This eradication of cartoonish counterculture elements better conceals Noir's shadowy side but, on its behalf, further blurs its definition. In its literary sense, Noir has either gone out like a streetlamp at dawn or transformed itself into a paradox of deeper contrasts and wider, more subliminal permeation into culture. This follows from our reluctance to adopt and realize the traits of Noir's heroes.
The leading characters of the genre indulge their curiosities in the shadow world without sacrificing their chivalric detachment from the dark excess surrounding them. They don't feign uncommon virtue, but neither do they revel in vice. These feignings and revellings have risen to fashion with the decline of shame over modern culture's dangerously wide spans in quality and morality.
Modern morality's nonexistent lower bound stays secret to no one. The once shadowed flip-side to reputable society has become lit, public, and often used as a form of entertainment. With such exposure, what Noir was has hidden or evaporated.
Easter Egg Decorating: Beyond PAAS
by Kendra Kozen
In celebrating the Easter holiday, most Christian Americans remember fondly waking on Easter morning to hunt for brightly colored, plastic, candy filled eggs left by the Easter Bunny. A universal symbol of fertility and new life since ancient times, Easter Egg decorating is a rich tradition in many cultures, stretching way beyond plastic eggs or even the dye kits available in the local store.
Early Christians in Mesopotamia were the first to decorate and exchange Easter Eggs. In the 19th century, hollow candy eggs with a window displaying an elaborate scene were popular gifts. Today, the best-known, decorated Easter Eggs are the Fabergé Eggs. Between 1883 and 1917, the Russian tsars commissioned artist Peter Carl Fabergé to create a collection of Imperial Easter Eggs. He produced 57 eggs fashioned out of jewels and precious metals. Each egg contains a surprise to complement and delight the Empress Alexandra and the Dowager Empress Marie who received the eggs twice a year - at Christmas and Easter.
Most Russians consider egg decorating an art. In the Ukrainian tradition, women create psanka (decorated eggs), secretly while the family sleeps. According to Johanna Luciow, Ann Kmit and Loretta Luciow authors of Eggs Beautiful: How to Make Ukrainian Easter Eggs, the women draw designs and symbols on each egg with melted beeswax. The completed egg is dipped in dye and finally the wax is melted and the egg wiped clean.
According to www.holidays.net.htm and Louise Riotte, author of Egg Decorating, other egg decorating traditions originate from across Europe. In Germany, eggs are hollowed out and the shells dyed and hung from trees. Armenians decorate hollow eggs with religious symbols. Austrians fasten ferns and small plants around their eggs and boil them, once removed the plants leave a beautiful design. The Greek exchange red eggs, honoring the blood of Christ.
To learn to create your own psanka and make these egg traditions part of your Easter celebration this year, visit www3.ns.sympatico.ca/amorash.ukregg.html and www.twingroves.district96.k12.il.us/Easter/Eggs.html.
