A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Where the Wild Things Are…

Sometimes, movies fail in almost every way to meet the expectations their genius posters create; other times, they’re about as good any possible poster might’ve made me imagine.

Strictly Commercial

My frustrating 2009 Chicago Cubs won their series against the Reds last weekend in Cincinnati, three games to two, and I watched a lot of it on TV, but all I kept seeing was that eerily familiar Toyota Tundra ad on the wall behind home plate.

Sunday afternoon, it finally hit me: THE TOYOTA TRUCKS LOGO LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE FRANK ZAPPA’S MUSTACHE.

A few corners of the internet have already noticed how deeply Zappaesque the Toyota logo is, and it’s from those corners that I rip off this perfect comparison image:

Really perfect, because that mustache shot is a detail of the cover image from a 1974 Frank Zappa album, the one that’s really called ‘ but is best known (and pronounced) as Apostrophe.

And it was right at the very beginning of Apostrophe that Zappa “dreamed he was an Eskimo,” in the song “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow,” first in a four-part suite of connected story songs about stupid things going on way up in the frozen north. Second in that suite is the brilliant “Nanook Rubs It.” Listen to ‘em both right here.

The story in these songs is rather dumb, and it goes like this: Nanook the Eskimo boy is hanging around the igloo, debating about whether to go to “the show,” when a fur trapper comes up and starts beating Nanook’s favorite baby seal. Nanook, real pissed, blinds the fur trapper with snow yellowed by huskie whizz and pounces on him too. The blinded fur trapper wonders what the hell to do, then recalls an “ancient Eskimo legend” about how, if you ever get blinded in a conflict with someone named Nanook, you must go on a very specific sort of quest.

If fact, according to Zappa’s ridiculous lyrics, you have to

“…go trudgin’ across the mile after mile…”

I guess Toyota's marketing geniuses felt like they could save some Arctic trudging time for that all-important "Blinded by Nanook" sector of the American truck-buyer demographic.

–Pancake Dominion would like to thank Songza.com and Scott Robbin for access to the linked Zappa songs and for pointing us toward “Nanook Rubs It” after our shared realization about the Toyota logo.

Canadian In Vader

Japandroids

I’ve never heard the band Japandroids, and, to be real frank with you, I don’t plan to hear them, unless I happen to walk by their set at the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival. But that indie music review site’s own write-up of the act clued me in to a fact I haven’t really stopped coming back to for a few weeks:

ONE OF THE DUDES IN A BAND CALLED JAPANDROIDS IS NAMED DAVID PROWSE.

Now, for me and about 75 billion other movie nerds, the name David Prowse doesn’t exactly put us in mind of some Canadian garage rock duo who haven’t released an album yet. We’re reminded instead of things like blowing up the planet Alderaan, choking people from across the room without touching them, and saying things like “YOU ARE PART OF THE REBEL ALLIANCE AND A TRAITOR. TAKE HER AWAY!”

Because to us, David Prowse has always been the 6 foot, 7 inch bodybuilding British actor who was inside the Darth Vader costume for the first three Star Wars movies!

Normally, that alone would be enough to make mention on this blog, but…well….The story just doesn’t end there, despite the fact that Prowse of Japandroids isn’t related to Prowse of Star Wars and, in interviews, he has sighed and said that “Every time I go into a video store I get that.”

But think about the name “Japandroids.” It’s an example of what’s called “portmanteau,” wherein two distinct words are mushed together to make a new one. The two words here are pretty easy to parse:

JAPAN + ANDROIDS = JAPANDROIDS

Yeah, it’d be great if Darth Vader was himself an android, but he’s not. He’s a human being who’s been augmented with mechanical/robotic parts, perhaps more machine than man, but expressly not an android….Those are all robot.

But in a sense, Vader is Japanese. Everybody in Star Wars is sort of Japanese, in fact. Because it’s been really well documented that George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, has admitted to borrowing heavily for his “space opera” from The Hidden Fortress, directed by Akira Kurosawa, perhaps Japan’s single greatest moviemaker. Here’s Lucas himself:

Hidden Fortress was an influence on Star Wars right from the beginning….I was searching around for a story. I had some scenes—the cantina scene and the space battle scene—but I couldn’t think of a basic plot….And then I thought of Hidden Fortress….

It’s not even an “Oh, OK, I can sort of see that…” kind of linkage between the films, either. It’s pretty obvious. Darth Vader is Lucas’s extrapolation of the villainous warrior General Hyo Tadokoro. The Hidden Fortress, from plot to characters, is like watching an early version of Star Wars unfold in Kurosawa’s deft hands, in Japanese, and a long time ago, in a feudal land far, far away.

Even better, though: the two characters from The Hidden Fortress you can most easily see echoed in Star Wars are a pair of bickering peasants, Tahei and Matashichi, from whose perspective the story is told. They wander around, get split up, get tossed into a slave camp by the enemy, are miraculously reunited, and finally hitch up with a princess and a sword-fighting samurai. Starting to sound real familiar? It should. George Lucas turned Tahei and Matashichi into C-3PO and R2-D2. The Droids!

Early in Lucas’s development of Star Wars, he didn’t even turn them into robots. They were just human, “space opera” versions of Kurosawa’s original bickering Japanese peasants. Only later, in the process of outlining, scriptwriting, and mythologizing, did they become droids…or, as we may now forever think of them, “Japandroids.”

Oh, by the way, I lied. During the writing of this post, I stumbled across some Japandroids music, probably on that myspace page of theirs. Eh…not so great. What I heard sounded like Braid recorded onto cassette tape in a closet half-full of aluminum. Trust me, readers: “THESE AREN’T THE DROIDS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR.”

Alien McSplorers

Here’s an odd one. Watch this British TV spot for McDonalds real quick:

A few things:

A. I barely get the joke about “Four of your funky neons…” and then “Let’s try some of that liquid stuff in them…” Maybe there’s some alien backstory I missed. Do these aliens eat plastic cups? Is that what I’m supposed to assume?

B. What does the British voice-over say at the end? “Not of”? “Not Earth?” UK readers, help me out.

And C. Why do those aliens look so damn familiar?

Actually, I think I’ve got the answer to C locked down. I’m pretty sure McDonalds stole them from Joe Dante.

Remember Explorers (Joe Dante, 1985)?

It’s the one where Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, and that other kid put a junked Tilt-O-Whirl car inside this computer-generated force field thing dreamed by Hawke and put together by Wolfgang the scientist (Phoenix).

YouTube the whole thing if you feel like it. The computer-controlled force field allows the kids to navigate around town for a while before zooming off into space and being swallowed by a huge spaceship. Inside the spaceship, they meet this nutty alien named Wak:

Now take another look at that commercial if you need to. I really think the McDonalds commercial aliens are just dudes inside slightly remodeled, re-purposed Wak costumes from Explorers. Can’t really prove it, of course, but the evidence is striking. Same green skin. Same long, bony, suction-cup fingers. Same up-curved, creepy, insectoid tail:

The oddest thing about it is that the McDonalds TV commercial borrowed from a movie that’s so critical of TV. Wak and his sibling alien Neek turn out to have gotten really warped ideas about humanity from watching tons of TV via signals broadcast into space. They think we all just talk like talk show hosts and want to kill aliens. The McDonalds aliens, on the other hand, use their 30 seconds to try and convince us that we really need to go out, buy huge sodas, and collect all the neon plastic cups we possibly can. Pretty warped notion there, too.

It all sort of makes me wish McDonalds had ripped off a different character from Explorers: Heinlein, the mouse that Wolfgang has trained to touch sensor pads which allow him to speak.

I suppose the most McDonalds-appropriate thing Heinlein says is his meekly delivered “I WOULD LIKE…CHEESE.” But by far the best thing he says—and what we and Joe Dante should’ve probably said to McDonalds a long time ago—is “GO TO HELL.”

Vanishing on VHS

VHS tape entombs so much film content; this art gallery monument to the already-immortal 2001 only mocks the dead.

I’ve never been to Kim’s Video in New York and I’ve only popped in once or twice at Chicago video treasure troves Facets and Odd Obsession. But I love that they exist at all. We’re on the same team, you might say. Digging undigitized VHS tapes out of thrift stores and failed video stores is impossible for me not to do. I’ve even been known to digitize content myself now and then…often immortalizing movies I have next to no interest in ever seeing again. Seems like somebody has to do it. It’s the principle, you know?

All of which is why Moving Image Source’s pair of stirring articles on the tragedy of film content shipwrecked at the bottom of the VHS ocean struck such chords in me that I had to pass a few quotes along.

“I never understood how this myth that ‘everything is available on DVD’ got started,” agrees critic Dave Kehr, the DVD columnist for The New York Times. [According] to Turner Classic Movies’ database of U.S. feature films—of the 157,068 titles listed as of late February, 2009, fewer than 4 percent are available on home video.

Four lousy percent! That number blew my mind. 96% of all U.S. movies ever made aren’t even  important enough to the culture for anyone to own and distribute them. Makes me feel bad and sad about all the never-on-DVD VHS tapes I’ve found, cherished to one extent or another, and sold without acquiring myself a digital copy to have, if not to hold.

And it’s more to me than just “making a copy”—much more, in fact. I called it “immortalizing” before and so does MIS:

…having been purified down to bits, films are more or less immortal, virtually existent, having a better chance than [ever] before at being universally disseminated, immune to age, and free…from commodification. Copy-blocking programs are always circumventable….Whether a film shows up on TCM or on a DVD or in a torrent download or on a privately burned disc, it is inviolate and as impossible to “withdraw” or even regulate as a revolutionary idea or a piece of aural folklore. No one truly owns a film once it’s been digitized; it belongs to the world.

Which, as Lawrence Lessig has persuasively argued at length, is as it should be, after a reasonable period of profit accumulation by the original creator or owner or what have you.

Huge chunks of my apartment do nothing other than house my ever-morphing collection of VHS tapes, a good many of them I’ll keep specifically because they’re unlikely to ever be digitally mastered for DVD. I’ve gone through two ungodly shitty consumer VHS-to-DVD recorders in salving my need to DVD-R this sort of content for myself (and, in some small way, for others). Here’s a really select portion of my collection:

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years is cited as one of those hard-to-find titles that places like Odd Obsession specialize in having. All but one of these happen to be in the Top 700 of TCM's Not-On-Home Video Ranking.

One last quote, then I’m out:

With every new shift in media technology, from 16mm to VHS, from traditional broadcast to cable TV, from VHS to DVD, huge numbers of films are lost, says Facets Multi-Media executive director Milos Stehlik, who includes such titles as Robert Downey’s Chafed Elbows, Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, Glauber Rocha’s Antonio Das Mortes, and Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the IRT among the films he fears will disappear in a post-VHS culture.

“What irritates me is that with each technology comes all this promise—that you’re going to be able to watch whatever you want, whenever you want. But then it turns out not to be true,” he says. “Because most art films are marginal, financially, to the mainstream culture, they will always get pushed out.”

Ironically, I saw Chafed Elbows (and digitized it myself) on a bootleg VHS that could’ve come from nowhere but the Facets vaults.

And I’d go Milos one further: Most films [period, full stop] are marginal, financially, to the mainstream culture. Take a look at the titles pictured above: At most, only one of them (True West) could be considered an “art film.” On the one hand, it’s sad that America’s film interests are so narrow. I wish people cared enough that they’d pay real money to see a greater breadth of film content. On the other hand, the incontrovertible fact that they don’t means that there will always be something for people like me to scoop up off the sandy bottom of film culture and treasure.

For now, and hopefully forever, America’s thrift stores will keep giving me dirt-cheap VHS tapes I never knew I wanted…and the ones no one else knows they want either. Which, again, is as it should be.

Twin Peaks Steals “The Rye”

The Setup:

By 1996, Twin Peaks had long since packed up and headed off toward staking its claim as perhaps the greatest TV drama/mystery ever aired. That same year, Seinfeld was airing its now-iconic 7th season. The Soup Nazi had de-souped basically everybody; “sponge-worthy” had already entered the American lexicon. And “The Rye” episode was about to A) be flat-out awesome and B) have nothing whatsoever to do with J. D. Salinger.

Oddly enough, it seems now to have had everything to do with Twin Peaks. Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David or maybe casting director Brian Myers had some serious Peaks on the Brain when they put this particular installment together. Prominent former Twin Peaks cast members pop up at basically every turn. Let’s join Elaine as she stares in horror at a big chunk of The Evidence:

On top of that credit list is Grace Zabriskie, who portrayed Mrs. Ross, the mother of George Costanza “love interest” Susan Ross. Grace Zabriskie was also Laura Palmer’s mom (Sarah) on Twin Peaks.

Next up is Warren Frost, who played Mr. Ross, Susan’s dad, on Seinfeld…

…and was Dr. Will Hayward, the father of Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) on Twin Peaks. Not at all incidentally, Warren’s also the real-life father of Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost.

You can skip Jeff Yagher, though he was pretty “hot and heavy” as Seinfeld saxophonist John Germaine.

Last but in no way least is Frances Bay, who nobody who’s ever turned on a TV in America doesn’t remember as Mabel Choate, the stubborn old lady who turned down outrageous bucks for a marble rye before Jerry mugged the damn thing right out of her hands and called her an “old bag.”

Frances, bless her heart at age 101 this January, was also Mrs. Tremond—that creepy old lady with the creepy little kid who makes the creepy creamed corn disappear—in that one episode of Twin Peaks, as well as the same Mrs. Tremond in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. You remember her:

And then plus there’s Don Amendolia, credited a bit later in the credits, who kind of is the linchpin of this whole thing, really, just because he’s so easy to miss in “The Rye.” Three actors would’ve been very interesting; four is just blatant. Kramer collides with Don (as Dennis) in the hallway, and then he’s gone forever.

Amendolia was Emory Battis on Twin Peaks, the guy who hired Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) at the perfume counter and then…did…some other things:

Which brings us to some Conclusions:

I mean sure, you could just chalk all this up to coincidence or to incestuous Hollywood casting practices or whatever. But I don’t. No way. It’s a bit more interesting than that.

After all, Twin Peaks was a series motivated almost entirely by the mysterious death of Laura Palmer in the pilot episode. Laura’s mom (Zabriskie) and her doctor (Frost as Dr. Hayward) were huge characters throughout the show. And Seinfeld didn’t cast Zabriskie and Frost as just anybody. This genius show put them in the roles of mother and father to Susan Ross:

Now see it says “Ex-Fiancee” there. But Susan wasn’t any ordinary “ex-fiancee.” She was a TV executive, the one George Costanza kept yearning for long after his own “Show About Nothing” got killed by the fictional NBC of SeinfeldWorld. Also, she’s a dead ex-fiancee. Susan Ross never did get married to George Costanza. Susan Ross died mysteriously. Very mysteriously. Like Laura Palmer before her, Susan Ross was murdered.

Whodunit?

You can—and should—watch a season and a half of Twin Peaks to find out who killed Laura Palmer. As for Seinfeld and Susan Ross, I’m not going to make you wait that long:

Does Olmos Dream of Electric Sheep?

Get ready to start considering Blade Runner even more jaw-droppingly detailed and perfect than you already think it is. And believe it or not, Edward James Olmos gets all possible credit for this one.

Reportedly among the most diligent workers on director Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner set, Olmos himself came up with the Cityspeak language—a mixture of Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Hungarian, and Japanese—that is spoken primarily by Gaff, the origami-slinging, workaday blade runner who tails the older, crustier blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) throughout the story. Cityspeak intensifies and shades the Gaff character, who does much in little screen time. But Cityspeak also allows for a gorgeously complex moment, one I’ve never seen discussed elsewhere, that ends up forging an extremely sneaky bond between the film and its true father: sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick. Unless you’ve been living on Pluto for the last 20 years, I don’t have to tell you that Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the 1968 novel upon which Blade Runner was loosely based.

Early in the film, we are sitting inside the White Dragon Noodle Bar. Gaff approaches Deckard mid-noodle, to inform him that police captain Bryant needs him back on yet another blade-running case, like ASAP. Deckard’s eating but he’s not biting, telling Gaff “You got the wrong guy, pal!” Gaff’s response is sharp and extremely Hungarian: “Lófaszt, nehogy már. Te vagy a Blade … Blade Runner.” The authoritative documentary Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, included with a recent special edition of Blade Runner: The Final Cut, offers this stunning translation of Gaff’s first sentence:

That’s right. Gaff calls Deckard “horse dick.” And here’s the part where Philip K. Dick nerds start to maybe glimpse the 100%-mind-blowing place I’m going with all this.

See, in 1981, Philip K. Dick published a really great novel called VALIS. The main character in VALIS is a guy named Horselover Fat. Weird name, right? I thought so too. But let’s cautiously march ahead and quote wikipedia: “Even though the book is written in the first-person-autobiographical, for most of the book Dick treats himself and [Horselover] Fat as two separate characters; he describes conversations and arguments with Fat, and harshly if sympathetically criticizes his opinions and writings.” Over the course of the book, it becomes clear that Horselover Fat and Philip K. Dick are two versions of the same guy—or, to put it simply, Horselover Fat is an author surrogate for Philip K. Dick.

It’s right there in his name, in fact. As VALIS eventually spells out, “Horselover” is English for the Greek word philippos, meaning “lover of horses,” while “Fat” is the English translation of “dick,” the German word for “fat.” See how Horselover Fat = Philip Dick?

Was Olmos channeling P. K. Dick’s identity crisis? Did he just happen to be reading the freshly published VALIS? I really doubt both. But during principal photography in 1981, what Hungarian epithet—of all the Hungarian epithets he could’ve chosen—did Edward James Olmos just so happen to sling at Harrison Ford on the set of Blade Runner, a film based on a Philip K. Dick novel?

“Lófaszt!”…”Horse Dick!”

Folks, it’s finally official. Deckard is a replicant. But he’s a replicant of Philip K. Dick. Gaff uses Cityspeak to call him as much.

And we all understand by now that Gaff is a guy who would know, don’t we?

Plainview Country Club?

Full disclosure: I’ve seen There Will Be Blood three times and none of what you’re about to read makes me not want it to win the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2007. It is the best movie I saw in 2007. But making a movie is a complicated thing to do. Mistakes are sometimes made.

OK. The second time I saw There Will Be Blood, I had to reluctantly admit to myself that I had seen a red-orange flag in the deep background of one scene. Looked like the sort of flag you’d see sticking out of the hole on a golf course. I barely even believed, at the time, that I believed I had seen it. But on Viewing #3, I pointed it out to Becky (seeing the film herself for a 2nd time). She agreed. That did look one hell of a lot like a flag and its flagpole, both utterly out of place in the movie’s turn-of-the-century California. It might be one of those stakes they’re hammering into the land….but it’s just really not. Take a look.

Click here to get a better look.

Yeah, obviously the evidence I’m submitting above and in the larger linked image isn’t gonna scandalize anyone or prove that Paul Thomas Anderson and/or Dylan Tichenor (the editor) weren’t quite careful enough that day. But my arrow points to just about where I saw the flag; it’s not very orange-red in my screenshot but it was, emphatically, in the theatre. And on the DVD. And the setting around the actor (Kevin J. O’Connor as Henry Brands) pretty much screams “21st century golf course.” Doesn’t it?

And that’s all I’ve got for you. Are we the only ones who noticed this? I mean I’d really like to find out that it was some other red-orange flag-like object sitting there in the distance. But I don’t have any convincing theories about that. Anyone?

There Will Be Bloody Lyndon

Is this post a part of my blog’s mission or not? Is it enough that I just have thoughts that connect movies? You know what, who cares? If you do care, you may want to know that mild spoilers show up later in this post.

Among the first things I said after finally seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was “It really reminded me of Barry Lyndon.” I was sure the film would draw comparison to the work of Stanley Kubrick–I had doubts, though, about how much Barry Lyndon people would see in it. As much as I did, it now seems. For example:

From the Chicago Reader:

Is it too great a stretch to argue that what’s problematic in both films [There Will Be Blood and Barry Lyndon] comes to almost the same thing? Since both adapt generally forgotten period novels that demand a sympathetic jump: the issues of the characters aren’t exactly ours, and even when they are we talk about them differently, in terms already conditioned by the history of the discourse….It’s ground we’ve all been over a thousand times before. But of course the characters haven’t, and for them the issues have an urgency we can’t begin to match.

Pat Graham refers, in large part, to how hard it is to connect with the human beings in Barry Lyndon and with those in TWBB. With respect to TWBB, when he says “problematic” I think he’s talking about how empty its narrative turns out to be and feel, how devoid of humanity most of its major characters are. And I agree, even after seeing it twice, that this is how the movie makes us feel: empty. But it has to.

Emptying is among its main themes. It’s about emptying Earth’s deep places of lubricating oil. It’s about being empty of discernible identity: H.W. is nobody’s son; Paul and Eli might or might not be two people; Henry isn’t Henry the long-lost brother. There’s even that diary containing pictures of unidentified people in Plainview’s life. Emptiness is what TWBB has to leave you with: the greedily religious (Eli) and the religiously greedy (Daniel) meet, they mutually annihilate, and Daniel then sends his own damaged son off into the annihilation of the Great Depression. And Daniel Plainview’s already iconic catchphrase at the end–”I drink your milkshake!”–is as evocative and off-kilter an image of emptying as Hollywood has ever produced.

The Tulsa World compares the same two films, much less favorably:

But “Barry Lyndon” is a film that 32 years later is little remembered because the picture is so emotionally remote that viewers disconnect from its inert storytelling.

I’m wanting to quibble about how “little remembered” Barry Lyndon really is, but I’ll resist except to say that Time places it among the 100 All-Time Best films. My point here is that these are movies about unlikeable people. Critics use phrases like “sympathetic jump” and “emotionally remote” quite rightly in describing movies that need to leave a yawning chasm between main character and viewer. The emotional “thud” at the end is the sound of every viewer hitting rock bottom, having fallen with Lyndon and Plainview.

Barry Lyndon steals and lies and sleeps his way across Europe, only to die penniless, hobbled, and unloved. Daniel Plainview loves oil above all things, hints at coveting his adopted son’s wife, and destroys a religious charlatan who’s a mirror to Daniel’s own empty greed. He ends up “finished” in the [indoor bowling alley] gutter of his own making. That we stand and leave the theatre struggling to feel anything for these films is the mark of their burning power and chilly confidence. And even though Daniel Plainview “drinks your milkshake” in the end, somehow–thrillingly–we are the ones left cold.

I can’t believe the first real article in this blog has to do with King Diamond.

This is what I get for going to thrift stores.

I bought just one item this time around: Hard ‘n Heavy Volume 5 on VHS tape. Take a look at that cover; cost me 50¢. The back cover, though, is what made me sacrifice the pocket change. On it, I saw a tiny picture of King Diamond and the promise of an interview with he, the Danish Supreme Being of operatic black horror metal, himself an avowed Satanist. I obsessed about him as a teen and to this day I struggle to live with myself through annual bouts of dork-metal nostalgia, during which I cue up lurid cassette tapes that haven’t seen daylight in a dozen moons. Those same dark impulses forced this VHS purchase upon me.

A morning or two later, I watched the interview portion of the tape with a sickening fascination; it reminded me of how badly I had longed long ago to see video of King Diamond, concert footage, anything; I listened, later, to Abigail, his masterpiece 2nd album; on YouTube I watched subtitled Danish TV clips of King Diamond being interviewed while my frozen pizza dinner baked in the oven. And that was when King Diamond, sans ghoulish face-paint and being grilled by the host for his unseemly religious preference, informed me and a million Denmark TV viewers of the late 80s that “Satan” means “opposite.”

He’s right, you know. “Satan” does come from a Hebrew word that means “to oppose.” Fair enough. Satan does oppose a lot of stuff in general.

Now ever since I first ate it, I thought that seitan,–that suspicious, not bad-tasting, opposite-of-meat stuff you get at vegetarian places–was hilariously named. I mean it is pronounced “SAY-tan.” C’mon now: the irony! We eat SAY-tan so we can all feel nicer and kinder and gentler to cows and stuff. And I’ve always wondered where that unfortunate food name came from. Well, it turns out that the word “seitan” is a Japanese neologism meaning, loosely, “is protein.” What would you have done next? Me, I needed intensely to know the origin of the word “protein.”

The word “protein,” it seems, is from a Greek word meaning “of first importance.” But of course! Who would want to live a day without it? Not me. But I would like to add those two word origins together…add ‘em up and find out that “seitan”–or “is protein”–really means “is of first importance.” And there you have the reason I wrote this entry.

Say it with me now, preferably with a sing-song, kindergarten lilt: “SAY-tan is of first importance.”

I bet King Diamond would be so proud.