The Thalia and Popeye

One of the great blessings of attending college in New York City was, well, being a college student in New York City. College can be overwhelming and college students are not especially well equipped with perspective, so it's nice to be somewhere that encourages you to see your problems in their proper scale. Living in a city of 8 million gets the job done (especially when so many of those 8 million clearly have problems bigger than a late term paper).

New York in the early 1980s offered innumerable escapes from the college grind. My favorite was a dumpy movie theater called The Thalia, located on 95th Street just west of Broadway. The Thalia was a repertory revival house, meaning that it showed a different double feature of old movies almost every night of the week (occasionally a popular feature would run for two days). It was an extraordinarily poorly constructed space. The front half of the auditorium sloped away from the screen, meaning that someone sitting in this section had to be significantly taller than the person in front of him to have an unobstructed view. The seating sloped along a more conventional trajectory in the back half of the auditorium, which was also the smoking section. This is where I always sat. The whole place couldn't have seated more than 150. Ancient, decrepit, wired at the turn of the century, and with only one narrow exit, it was the sort of place you'd see illustrated in the dictionary next to the word 'firetrap.'

The Thalia is where I received my extracurricular education. I became something of a movie nut (I probably would have called myself a cinefile then, between puffs off a clove cigarette—ugh!), with a special affinity for pretentious foreign films, American film noir, silent comedies, and cartoons. In this last category I was especially lucky, as The Thalia regularly ran three-hour cartoon programs, all programmed by Greg Ford, a film historian who obviously knew his stuff. Programs were organized by main character, film studio, or theme (e.g. "Cartoonal Knowledge" for racy cartoons; there were also nights of appallingly racist cartoons, e.g. "Inky and the Mynah Bird"). A copy of Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic provided all the historical background necessary to achieve total cartoon geekdom.

It was during one of Ford's programs that I first realized the genius of Popeye. Like most folks my age, I'd grown up watching Popeye cartoons on television, but what I'd seen was a hodgepodge of 70 years of Popeye, most of them bland, unimaginative made-for-television cartoons. Ford showed only the cartoons created by the Fleischer Brothers Studio, the ones that begin with the title credits shown between slamming doors on a ship's deck. They are some of the best cartoons ever made, crammed to bursting with surreal gags, mumbled profanities, and a truly wonderful cast of lowlife characters: a one-eyed sailor, his weird beanpole girlfriend whom everyone inexplicably finds attractive, a big fat sociopath whom the beanpole inexplicably finds attractive, a hamburger-devouring mooch… it's a truly dysfunctional society, but one that makes complete sense, and is completely engaging, when taken on its own terms.

These cartoons made such an impression on me that, a decade after last seeing them regularly at The Thalia, I wrote a song about them:

If my life was a cartoon
I'd want to be Popeye the Sailor
I'd have a damsel in distress
And I would never fail her

I'd mutter something clever
Then I'd knock Bluto cold
I'd be a one-eyed mumbling crazy thug
With a heart of gold

And all my problems would be solved
Because I eat my greens
My life it would be measured out
In well-constructed scenes

I'd have drama without tragedy
Anger without pain
Love without loneliness
Hey, I would not complain

But I am what I am
And that's all I am
That's all I can stand
'Cause I can't stand no more

As a result of a rights dispute between various owners of different Popeye licenses, these cartoons existed in copyright limbo, with only a few that had crept into the public domain receiving DVD releases. The warring parties finally settled their differences last year, and today their truce bore its first fruit:Popeye the Sailor: 1933-1938, vol. 1, a four-disc collection of the first 60 Fleischer Brothers Popeye cartoons, in chronological order. It's a beautiful set with lots of great extras (lots of documentaries, a good sampling of Fleischer Brothers silents, including a few of their wonderful "Out of the Inkwell" cartoons); the folks at Warner Brothers should look at this set and hang their heads in shame, as it is everything their animation collections should be but aren't. I spent a good part of today reacquainting myself with these cartoons and I'm very pleased to report that they are at least as good as I remember. Go get it, you won't be sorry. You might want to prescreen it for your kids, though, as they are incredibly violent and not infrequently racist. But hey, we saw them when we were kids and they probably didn't do us much harm.

Right?

Khatte Chana

I am not a big one for vegetarian dishes. I have nothing against them philosophically, at least not in the way that a strict vegan would against, say, a duck stuffed into a chicken stuffed into a turkey stuffed into a giraffe’s neck. It’s just that meat seems to make all dishes better. Folks in my adoptive home in the South understand this; recipes for vegetable dishes almost always include a ham hock or fat back or bacon or something else greasy and porcine. That’s what makes it “food” down here.

If I had to pick one dish upon which to subsist for the rest of my life, however, it might well be the following vegetarian delight of Indian origin. It is savory (thanks to the Indian spices and the chickpeas), sweet (thanks to the caramelized onions and ghee), and a little sour (thanks to the tamarind paste). Fresh ginger and hot pepper add some zip. It is very, very satisfying.

It’s called khatte chana, which, I suspect, means “unbelievably delicious chickpeas” in one of India’s hundred and eighty thousand languages. Here’s what you’ll need to make it:

1 large onion
1 tbsp. ghee
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 large tomato, seeded and diced fine
2 cans of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
tamarind pulp
½ tsp. turmeric
1 ½ tsp. ground cumin
1 ½ tsp. garam masala
½ tsp. cayenne pepper
2” of ginger root. grated
chapati

A note about ingredients: ghee is clarified butter and is available in jars at your local Indian specialty store, as are all the following; tamarind pulp comes in a black, sticky block about the size of a bar of Ivory soap; turmeric, cumin, cayenne and garam masala are all ground spices that will be much, much cheaper at the specialty store than at your local supermarket or, worse still, Whole Food. Chapati is a flat bread sometimes called roti. You’ll find it in the refrigerator or freezer section; it’s the perfect accompaniment to khatte chana.

All right, then, let’s cook us up a mess. Boil some water. Cut a 1 ½ inch square of tamarind pulp, put it in a bowl, and cover it with 1 ½ cups of boiling water. Let it soak for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Cut the onion in half so you can cut semicircles of onion, then slice the onion halves real thin. Heat the ghee over medium-high heat in a large skillet or a Dutch oven. When it’s hot, add the onions and cook them, stirring occasionally, until they are well cooked, mostly golden brown but with some crispy bits. This will take 15 to 20 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for another 2 minutes. Add the ground spices, stir through, and cook until the kitchen smells like a really good Indian restaurant. Add the tomato and grated ginger. Cook for five minutes.

The next step involves separating the liquid in which the tamarind pulp is soaking (good) from the tamarind pulp (bad). A fine-mesh strainer is perfect for the job. Pour the liquid into the skillet by passing it through the strainer, then give the pulp in the strainer a good squeeze to harvest the last of that good liquid. Stir the contents of the skillet, turn the heat to low, and let the dish simmer for 15 minutes. Add the chickpeas and cook for another 10 minutes. Salt to taste and garnish with a little fresh chopped cilantro if you like. You can make a bunch of khatte chana at one time and eat it over the next few days. You won't tire of it.

You can make chapati from scratch, but I never have. The store-bought stuff is pretty good and not at all labor intensive. Heat up a skillet (nonstick coated with a little cooking spray or a well-seasoned cast iron skillet) over medium high heat. When it’s hot, add a piece of chapatti and wait for it to start puffing up in places. Then flip it, cook it for another 30 seconds to a minute, and serve. The trick is getting the skillet the exact right heat so that the bread puffs but doesn’t burn. Practice makes perfect.