Apizza Scholls

We finally made it to Apizza Scholls to see what all the fuss is about. We tried to go there a few times before and it has been closed or the line has been out the door. We got there around 7:30 p.m. on a Friday night, and the wait was 45 minutes. I think if we had come a little later we could have cut that in half, but I have heard of people coming at opening time and waiting for hours.

The menu is pretty simple, they have pizza, salad and a few antipasti. We started with the Winter Salad, which had greens, pears, pecans and blue cheese crumbles, which was awesome. We were torn on which pizza to order. There are several good options, plus you can build your own. We ended up getting half Pig and Pineapple and half Apizza Amore - pecorino, romano, fresh garlic, basil and hot capicollo (cured pork shoulder). The pizza was huge, and we were only able to eat half of it. Overall it was very tasty, the only problem was too much garlic on the the Amore side. So, now to the question, how did it stack up against other pizzas in Portland? At about $25 a pie, I would say it is better than Pizzicato, but not as good as the pizza at Nostrana Cafe. It is very good pizza and worth waiting for (not two hours, but 45 minutes). You can get a pitcher of Anchor Steam beer and think about the desert you will get next door at Ja Civas after the pizza.

Apizza Scholls
4741 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR 97215
(503) 233-1286

On The Road - Jack Kerouac

Now that the "100 records you should own" is over, I am starting a new series, "The 25 Books You Should Read." Hopefully there will be a few books here you have not read yet, or at least a few that you may want to read again. If you are like me, you didn't do all the required reading in high school or college, so this is your opportunity to catch up.

Published in 1957 On the Road is the quintessential work of beat poet and author Jack Kerouac. It is autobiographical, tracking Kerouac's (Sal Paradise) trips across the US as a young man, with the rest of the beats, William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) and Neil Ginsberg (Carlo Marx). Like a lot of other wanna be hipsters, I read this book during college as I was travelling around Europe on the train. Like most young people I thought I had discovered this book and that I should share it with the world. Little did I know that it was already a very popular book and that I was living out a cliche. That said, this does not diminish the greatness of this book in any way. It is the best coming of age story of all time in my opinion.

Kerouac is a great writer. I have read all his books, and some are more accessible than others. On the Road, is the Kerouac starter book. It is easy to read and has a plot which is easy to follow. Once you read this, you can move on to Pic and Maggie Cassidy which are also very readable. If you enjoy these books you can take on the more challenging books like the Book of Dreams and Dharma Bums.

Where does the money go?

Today I was walking to work and as I passed a hotel, I saw a guest hand a bellman a few bucks for getting him a cab. I started to wonder, where will that money go next? I was pretty sure he would not be reporting it on his W-2. This made me wonder, how far could those few dollars go in the unreported economy?

Let's say the bell man walks over to the strip club down the street after his shift. He stuffs a few bills in the strippers g-string and heads out. She heads back stage to meet her pimp who she owes money from the night before. He takes the money to his drug dealer and scores an eight ball. The drug dealer takes that money and hands it over to his bookie to place a bet. The bookie pays the money out to his strong man for collecting on a deadbeat. The strong man goes to get a haircut, where he passes the money over as a tip. The barber uses the money to tip his waitress at lunch.

So far this money has changed hands almost ten times and no one is going to pay any taxes on it. I am sure this could keep going, but I think you get the point.

Cereal Wars

Are you a big cereal eater? I personally love Kellogg's Raisin Bran Crunch. I like to buy a big box and keep it at work, but lately the box has been going down a little fast. Come to find out there is another RBC lover who sits by me and I suspected he was snacking from my box. He has his own box, but it is a small one. When we talked about it, he actually thought I was eating from his box as he too was experiencing shrinkage. So, we enacted a new cereal law. If you didn't buy it, don't eat it. I don't trust people so I am keeping the box in my locked office.

David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust

Here it is the last record of the "100 records you should own." This has been a lot of fun, and I am happy to finish this up with one of my favorite artists who everyone goes out and buys the Greatest Hits record. Don't do that. David Bowie has several great records you should own, but they all seem to only have one great song on them. I would say that Ziggy Stardust is his most complete record, start to finish and it also has a couple of great singles, "Ziggy Stardust" and "Suffragette City." After you have bought this record, go back and get, Low, Heroes, and Scary Monsters.

Taking a Strange Bus

Everyday I take the number 15 bus to work. If you've read this blog before you know there are a lot of interesting people on the bus. You see and hear a lot of weird and wonderful stuff and over time you look forward to seeing the bus people. Yesterday I took a new bus I had never been on before. This is always a scary venture into the unknown, but it also provides the opportunity to meet an entirely new group of bus people. I wanted to go to a class over on the east side between home and work, and I saw that the number 20 bus would actually be the fastest way to get there. It stops close to work, so I didn't have to walk very far, and it dropped me a few blocks from where I needed to be. If you don't know the bus route, the hard part is figuring out where to get off. You are always worried that you went too far or that you'll get off too early. Luckily this bus had a reader board that said where the next stop was so I did not screw it up.

So what about the bus people? The #20 bus goes through a little rougher area than my normal bus (if you don't count the methadone clinic), so I was hoping to see some color, but unfortunately it was pretty boring. The people looked pretty normal and dressed fairly nicely. I might go as far as to say that it was a better group of people.

Whatever Works

At the end of last year the NPR radio program Fresh Air repeated an interview they did earlier in the year with Woody Allen. I was glad they did as I had missed it the first time around. The main question Terry Gross kept pounding away at was, "how are you different from the characters in your movies?" I thought this was a great question and I expected Allen to talk at length about how autobiographical his movies were, but I couldn't have been more wrong. He insisted he is not an intellectual and that instead, he is the guy sitting on his recliner watching the ball game in a t-shirt.

This story becomes a little harder to swallow after watching Whatever Works on On Demand. To me, Larry David is a louder, more cringe inspiring version of Woody Allen. In this film, David plays Boris Yelnikoff, a tortured intellectual who was once a well respected professor and scientist. More recently, he has divorced his rich wife, moved into a dump of an apartment and makes money teaching kids to play chess. To call him a conceited jerk would be an understatement. He is offensive to everyone he meets, including Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) a young Southern runaway that shows up on his doorstep. After he takes her in, the movie dives into the myth that everyone from the South is repressed and if they could all move to New York, their true selves will be revealed.

While I enjoyed this movie, I think the combination of Woody Allen and Larry David creates too much angst for one movie. It is ironic that David's character chastises his young charge, Melodie, for using cliches, when this movie is really one big (well played out) cliche.

Whatever Works now out on DVD and PPV.