Chris Baer

A Mack’s Man for Life: Mack’s Pizza in Wildwood, New Jersey

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Forget everything you know, or think you know, about the Jersey Shore, despite the fact that most of it is probably true. You go to the Jersey Shore, Wildwood in particular, for a slice of boardwalk pizza, regardless of what travails you must face to eat it. And not just any boardwalk pizza, but Mack’s pizza. This slice represents all that is right and good about the Jersey Shore.

A slice of Mack's plain pizza, Wildwood, NJ

Mondo pizza blog Slice takes a look at Mack’s today. Adam Kuban provides a nice rundown on the peculiar construction of these salty, greasy pies, with a mozzarella-cheddar blend, sauced by a hose hooked up to a giant vat in the basement:

Pies are built cheese first, sauce, more cheese, then they hit the oven—a Roto-Flex whose multiple decks slowly revolve. It has sliding glass doors in the front and sides; the main pieman drops one in the front while his colleagues check and pull pizzas from the others. Toppings are added above the second layer of cheese, if you’ve ordered them. I’ve never needed anything more than a plain slice here, though.

I don’t even dress mine with parmesan or red pepper flakes; I eat my Mack’s straight. I’ve been enjoying Mack’s since the early ’70s, and the primal pleasure of the plain slice hasn’t changed a whit. Washed down with a birch beer, there’s very little finer than a slice of Mack’s plain with the sea air wafting into your booth and a parade of boardwalk denizens marching by. Well, a whole pie would be finer…

The Who Yorker?

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I fussily read The New Yorker in chronological order. New issues of the venerable magazine go to the bottom of the occasionally hefty pile, awaiting their turn behind older, as yet unread issues.

In an event almost as rare as the Transit of Venus, I recently jumped an issue to the top of the queue, ahead of some that had been waiting, patiently, for a month or more. But then, the “Science Fiction” issue demands no less, in particular a short piece by Emily Nussbaum focusing on Doctor Who (“Fantastic Voyage,” June 4 & 11, 2012).

Nussbaum looks at notions of fandom in arc-based genre television, or “cult fanhood,” as she puts it, through the lens of Doctor Who. My interest, though, is with a specific point she makes about the use of time travel as a literary device in the original and new iterations of the show:

The old “Doctor Who” dealt with time primarily as a mode of transportation: it jumped in a linear fashion, usually no more than one adventure per series. On the new “Who,” time travel is a philosophical and an emotional challenge: it braids together flashbacks, alternate realities, and so on, exploring with poetic verve some truly wrenching themes of mortality and loss.

Nussbaum’s point was timely (no pun intended), given my recent analysis of “The Space Museum,” which explores time travel as a philosophical phenomenon rather than a pneumatic tube shuttling the Doctor and his companions from place to place. I don’t seek to quibble here, as she points out that she’s not lifelong Whovian; rather, I tend to agree in broad terms that time travel, especially in the early stages of the series, remains a plot device in Doctor Who rather than an integrally woven element of the drama itself.

What time travel does, however, in the early stories, is begin to weave together a continuity, a coherent world that remains invisible to casual viewers yet imparts the very sense of fanhood that Nussbaum attributes to shows with multi-episode arcs. After a point, the fan assembles a timeline of the Doctor’s existence through asides and seemingly throw-away lines: he’s met historical figures, visited previously unmentioned planets, remembers past visits to locales in the current story, and so on. The Doctor’s ability to have been anywhere, anywhen, via time travel layers the show from its earliest days with the complex nuance that drives fandom.

The First Doctor and Susan by willhowells on flickr.com via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives License

Without continuity, there is no fandom. It’s important that the First Doctor wields his walking stick from “Marco Polo” throughout his tenure, without its being implicitly mentioned; its continued existence in the show remains necessary on the level of continuity. The characters, the world, had a past and will have a future. Continuity signals to the careful viewer that the creators of the show—the actors, writers, producers, directors, set and costume designers—care deeply about the world the show brings to life, that contemplation will be rewarded with insight. When a show promises continuity and then fails to deliver on it (see Lost), fans who have devoted time and energy to following the show feel slighted.

The use of time travel in early Doctor Who functions as an important literary element of the show, because it is used to further the creation (and maintenance) of a living world: no matter where in time the Doctor travels, no matter how convoluted the timeline gets, he still has his cane (or his scarf or, ah, celery stick).

(Image courtesy of willhowells via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives License.)

Doctor Who Project: The Space Museum

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All we have to do is wait here until we arrive!

It took fifteen stories for Doctor Who to finally tell a tale about time travelling rather than time travel. Glyn Jones’ “The Space Museum” (Story Production Code Q) begins the series’ occasional (and frequently contradictory) exploration of the intricacies and oddities of actually travelling across time lines as opposed to merely flitting between different times in search of adventures that can easily be filmed using the BBC’s props and costume warehouses.

When we first meet our travellers in this story, they all stand mesmerized before the TARDIS control console, wearing their kit from “The Crusade” along with blank stares; then, after the TARDIS materializes on a rocky world littered with spacecraft of all kinds, they stand in the same place, wearing their uniforms, their trademark cardigans and blazers and jumpers and knee socks. And the Doctor doesn’t seem to think there’s anything quite remarkable about these sartorial shenanigans, nor the fact that Vicki dropped a glass of water that promptly un-breaks itself.

Still, the Doctor’s curiosity is piqued by the collection of spacecraft from different worlds and eras outside, so a little exploration leads to the titular Space Museum, where our heroes leave no footprints and cannot interact with any of the objects on display nor any of the museum’s visitors or guards. After much wandering through the Space Museum’s labyrinthine corridors, all of which are jumbled with random assortments of gadgets, our travellers find the most interesting exhibit of all (yes, even more interesting than the Dalek shell with helpful notation: “Dalek—Planet Skaro”): they find themselves.

Doctor on Display

And how does our unflappable Doctor deal with this encounter? He becomes positively existential.

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Frosting Delivery Devices: Baltimore’s Berger Cookies

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I’m something of a sucker for local foods—not sprouts grown on a farm just down the road or chickens raised in someone’s backyard a block from where I live, but local specialties that never quite migrate from their home regions, like D.C. half-smokes or Pittsburgh’s Primanti Bros. sandwiches: the type of food that locals dream about when they leave home, the taste they just can’t shake and just can’t find anywhere else.

So when the Washington Post ran a feature article on a type of cookie native to the Baltimore region, my taste sensors went on high alert. Andrew Reiner’s article (“Baltimore’s storied Berger cookies come to Washington,” April 19, 2012) looks at the famed (in Baltimore, anyway) Berger cookie, made by one and only one bakery, Bergers.

Thanks to a dear co-worker who lives in Baltimore, I was able to get a pound of Berger cookies straight from their Lexington Market outpost.

Berger Cookies

The samples I got from Lexington Market appear to be rather more refined than the cookies Berger sells through grocery stores, with delicate curls rather than heaping glops of fudge frosting, but the effect is the same: lots of sugary frosting atop a nondescript cookie.

The cookie itself is somewhat crumbly, akin to a shortbread but without much flavor at all. It plays the role of vanilla ice cream in an overloaded sundae—just there to hold it all together and cleanse the palate for the next sugar-sweet explosion. Without the slightly greasy cookie to cut through the frosting, the fudge flavor is overwhelming; with the cookie, the balance feels closer to right. Eating that much fudge is a bit decadent, but the cookie brings it back to the realm of dessert rather than pure abandon.

And as for the proper eating technique? Reiner suggests eating them the way natives do:

The most popular way to eat Berger cookies in Baltimore is from the freezer. There’s just something so deeply gratifying—empowering even—about experiencing the fudge creme frosting in this altered state. It’s enough to enjoy a Berger at room temperature, but to have the option of frozen? Well, that’s a degree of luxury that aristocrats understand.

While I can’t imagine eating these often—even a half-cookie sates the brain’s chocolate pleasure center—I’m delighted to have had a chance to try these big bites of charm from Baltimore. Now I just need to pop the remainder of my initial pound into the freezer…

Is There a Penalty Box in the TARDIS?: Doctor Who Hockey Jerseys

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I’m always so very pleased when my keenest interests collide, and never more so than when they happen to be Doctor Who and hockey. Behold, then, the mind-blowing awesomeness that is the Doctor Who Hockey Jersey:

TARDIS Hockey Jersey from davesgeekyhockey.com via a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License

I really don’t know what to say, other than to express my disappointment that the first run has already been spoken for. A second version is apparently on tap for May, so I’ll have to keep my eye on Dave’s Geeky Hockey for that announcement. But which Doctor? I’m certainly a Tom Baker partisan, but my recent experiences with William Hartnell have put me in a First Doctor frame of mind.

(Image courtesy of davesgeekyhockey.com via a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License)

(via Geekadelphia)