I spent about five hours in my new basement studio yesterday, and it was enough time to get back in the flow and feel free within the tools. If I take too long off, I get awkward and hesitant with the paints, brushes, and attacks, and that sort of stutter-stepping is the death of a canvas. My rubric for releasing a comic, or any writing really, is that if I'm not sincerely feeling and transmitting back-of-the-house (personal term for the subconscious) energy when I create it, no amount of conscious and deliberate manipulation can make up for that lack of origin power, and it can't pass muster. The art studio approach is, naturally, no different.
I'm expecting to get a few large canvases done in the next few weeks, in time for holiday shipping. There are also a limited number of Oh No It's Today classics, and I'll have a few other mid-size pieces. The little model railroad houses are also part of a new series I'm doing in 2025. (You'll see the idea on the desk in the first photo.) I made this little set of houses in about 1999, when I was building a model railroad layout, but got way too into the houses instead.
If you're interested in acquiring anything from these release cycles, you'll get word of it here on Patreon first, or you can always DM me here for a private photo tour of what's in progress.
I am extremely happy to be back in the studio. Before this last year of wedding prep and constant home renovation, the studio was a constant part of my life, and getting to transpose a base layer of myself into this nonverbal medium again is a true relief. I'm heading back in for as much of today as today will allow.
Process panels and writing from this strip post at noon in tiers 2 & 3, as always!
When I was in sixth grade I was invited to a birthday slumber party at a friendly guttersnipe named Derek's house. His mom worked at Ed's, a low-slung building in our economically free-falling mountain town, which was equal parts crappy mini mart and dangerous dive bar. I was excited, because the gang in attendance would be a dynamic mix of cool kids and scrappy townies. (Derek liked heavy metal music, and because he was visibly poor, the cool kids could tell that his fandom was more authentic, so they sought this halo of credibility.)
Derek's house was clearly the work of parents who were (a) not around a lot, and (b) not into opening the windows when they were. The dander of large dogs — equal parts white pepper and hot orange nausea — was ground into a carpet already claimed by the Philip Morris Company; there was no savory fragrance of take-n-bake birthday pizza, or the sweet vanillin of rising cupcakes. The mother and some of her friends sat at the kitchen table smoking and drinking store-brand sodas mixed with Crown 7, which they poured from a large, weirdly crinkly plastic bottle — perhaps it was an aged decoy bottle from Ed's, which I would later learn seldom contained the name-brand liquor within. Even if the brand was just Seagram's.
His grandma worked at the 7-11, so the food angle was covered by foil-wrapped hamburgers that had timed out of the display case. Her arrival, much later in the party, was the only high point. I do not remember the arrival of a confection of any sort, though there may have been some donuts she swiped from the expiry box. I do remember that there was a "poster" of a woman in a Mickey's malt liquor bikini, which had been folded in quarters at some point, serving as the only decoration in Derek's room. I also fell on the rug so hard that a large scab came off, revealing angry red and white flesh. Fearing the coven below, I did not ask for help, and instead blew on the wound for the remainder of the evening. I am fairly certain I slept on the ground under one of the bath towels his mother distributed for this purpose.
The next morning my father, stepping over the variety of trash bags on Derek's porch, came and fetched me. As we drove away in the car, with him scowling and inhaling my unpopular new fragrance, I told him about my wound, which he said was definitely going to require the scalding foam of hydrogen peroxide at this point, if not outright amputation. He also mentioned that I was never going to Derek's house again, and at this I felt a great and wonderful peace.
Good afternoon Ray, My 4-year old won't go to bed. He doesn't seem to mind the concept, but rarely lays down without trying to negotiate his way out of it, if not mild-to-medium intensity rage. What can we do to help him go to sleep peacefully? Regards, Over this Shit
Dear ROTS,
Well, you definitely asked the main child-rearing expert of our times. Oh wait, I am widely regarded as a player with a helicopter. Whatever! Let’s fix your problem.
What you got on your hands there, ROTS, is a little king — a straight-up stone legend-in-the-making of a leader among men. It may not look like that when he’s all passed out on his face in The Mouse Who Sneezed jammies, but if he’s already takin’ you to the boardroom table, and then on the warpath when diplomacy doesn’t work, don’t fool yourself. By the time he’s in kindergarten he’ll have the other kids servin’ him egg rolls and Pepsi if he wants it. If he so demands it.
But even little kings get tired, and the best way to tire that boy out is to take him to the park a few times a day. This is better than doin’ the tablet zombie thing that most parents are into to these days, because eventually his kingly little brain will realize you were stuntin’ his progress, and when you're old he’ll stick you in some nursin’ home with mildew and a bitch.
You can’t change destiny,
-=R.A.Y.B.L.O.X. M.A.D.E. M.E. A. G.E.N.I.U.S.=-
+=+=+=+
Good afternoon Ray, People used to get my identical twin and I mixed up all the time. It was always funny. But now we live in different cities, and move in different circles. I miss confusing people. Is there a way to do that without having to move to my brother’s city? —Jared F.
Dear Jared,
I think when you say you miss confusing people, you might actually be saying you miss making sense with one person: your brother. It’s hard when twins move apart. Have you heard about how if one twin gets donked on the head with a Frisbee, the other twin, even from across the world, will suddenly laugh and light a joint?
The answer is, you both need to move back together. I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it isn’t. (Call a service.) Neither of you is probably satisfied with what you’re currently doing (how could you be?) so just make something happen. How classic would it be if you both just moved to some city in the middle and got busboy jobs at a popular old place called, like, The Sternwheeler, with one of those swinging kitchen doors, and you could use that door and your twin-ness to hella comedic advantage? Like, you back through the door holding a loaded bus tub, and the instant the door closes your brother busts out the same door in a tux, just wailin’ on sax! Your true life just started.
Inspired,
=-=R-R-R-revvin’ Ray=-=
+=+=+=+
Dear Ray, I'm about to move across the country. Is there some way to make the process less of a pain, even by a minuscule amount? —Distant Egg Song
Distant,
I think you should team up with Jared F. (previous question) and his twin brother! They are looking for a road trip that will redefine not just their friendship but their lives, and having another advice-column-writer-inner as the catalyst in the mix will make for an enriching comedy all can enjoy! DM me, I have access to Jared’s email address.
Cassowary Peckin’ at Tater Tots,
R
+=+=+=+
Confidential to Gary_V in Minneapolis: Whoah. If your backyard barbecue guests are actually saying to your face that they’re sick and tired of hearin’ about your kid’s high school football game, “full eye contact and spittle flecks” and all, they usually mean it. I wouldn’t push your luck any further than you have.
Because I was unwisely given the responsibility of planning the Rome portion of our honeymoon, its end-date did not fit accurately into the overarching calendar of our travels, and we wound up with an extra day in the city — which we discovered after we had packed to leave for Naples, but, thankfully, before we had left the keys on the table and departed for the train.
Lauren, whose patience for the cobbles, crowds, and ceaseless carbohydrates had run thin by now, opted to pass the mid-day in the low-decibel* sanctuary of our Trastevere apartment. I had the kind and husbandly thought of treating my new bride to the cozy-pants comfort of an English-language movie and vegetarian restaurant, both of which I was certain I could locate in this cosmopolitan city of three million.
A bit of sleuthing led me to the key term sottotitolo, which means “subtitled,” and by which I could infer that a film’s audio track would be in English, with its subtitles in Italian. Now freshly-sophisticated in all matters Italian cinema, I began perusing the websites of local theatres. One was showing a horror film, which led me to an article about that film’s artistic heritage, which led me to a lurid description of Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom), which led me to YouTube, wherein an expensively-shot 1970s terror-orgy of forced coprophagia flickered across my corneas.
For the remainder of my web searches, I made sure at each step that I was not purchasing tickets for Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, and eventually lucked into a small theater that was playing a sottotitolo version of Buena Vista Social Club. (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was also playing, but it was three bus transfers away: a too-delicious temptation of the fates to produce a transportation strike.)
Feeling smart, I walked a few crowded miles on the cobbles to purchase a few carbohydrates for us. Specifically, I walked to the highly-recommended Roscioli for supplì al telefono (basically, a battered, fried ball of cheese and risotto) and a miraculous sort of focaccia with a flaky exterior. As I wandered back to the apartment, I prayed that the Catholic church would invent a holiday where the consumption of fibrous vegetables was papally mandated.
After yet another fine but not remarkable upscale Roman restaurant dinner** Lauren produced a special kind of chocolate bar from her purse. We have a friend who runs a spiritual healing compound on the Washington coast, and one of the pharmaceutical adjutants used there is the hallucinogenic mushroom. (The other primary cerebral jet-pack they strap onto you there is something called bufo, which I think you get from giving a Mexican toad a particular kind of clavicle rub.) This friend works microdoses of her mushrooms into chocolate bars, whose remarkably competent tempering gives them that lovely professional snap and melt. Because mushrooms are not illegal in Italy — and by that I mean not detectable by the Italian travel authorities — we each enjoyed a few squares and walked off to our movie date.
The clean and capacious theater filled with young Italian art students, and we sunk back into upholstered lavender comfort. After a few charming animations and previews the opening strains of Cuban jazz wafted into our senses, and I happily surrendered myself to one of the rare experiences of peace on this leg of the journey.
Anyone who lived in the United States twenty years ago had Buena Vista Social Club played at them until their eyes ran red with heme, and the documentary of the album’s production was of commensurate cultural omnipresence. We had never seen it, but Lauren loves Latin music and stories of human perseverance, so I knew this would be a no-brainer, and a welcome break from ten days of the mental strain of constant Italian transposition.
At first, one of the musicians was speaking in Spanish, because he was Cuban and that is how it goes there. I relaxed further into the knowledge that the English narrator would soon appear and turn the musician’s words into something familiar and intelligible. The Italian subtitles had struck up, but I chose not to pick at them for the gems and rubies of understanding — I was on vacation, after all, and starting to feel that happy kind of buzzing numb that begins at the skin and melts inwards.
After several minutes of listening to Spanish with Italian subtitles, the English narrator still had not shown up. I was suddenly hit by the panicked realization that this film clearly did not have an English narrator at all. By the idiot application of my useless mind to a simple task, I had taken us to see a film that not only wasn’t in English, it was DOUBLE-FOREIGN. I looked like an idiot to my wife, a woman who was now stuck with me and my inability to navigate basic daily operations forever.
I peered discreetly to my side. Lauren, who is unlike me in several popular ways, was leaning back in delight and absorbing it all, gently moving to the music of the instruments, the voices, the visuals. Assured that I knew her well enough to believe she was legitimately having a good time, I, too, allowed myself to lay back and start to enjoy the movie, but the mushrooms were not so strong that I entered the space of ego evaporation which would have fully released me from my gaffe.
Eventually the movie ended, and we had a good laugh about many things, including the aforementioned journey of agony on which I had led myself. As I laid my head on the pillow that night, and the backs of my eyelids turned into inky black theater curtains of peacock tails, the premonition of the next morning’s croissant and cappuccino washed over me, and I was finally at peace for the day.
Next time: Naples, Where I Go On the Down Low, Down Low
- - -
* Excepting the frequent and random bleats from ambulances. It was quickly revealed to us that our apartment was situated directly above the dispatch center for all of Rome’s emergency vehicles, and Rome — perhaps owing to its culture of Vespa-pedestro superposition insanity and fiber-free diet — has oh-so-many emergencies.
** Rome’s vegetarian restaurant was closed that day, and probably would have been closed during any such time as we needed to eat (say, dinnertime) on any other day, because its calendar of hours looked like mid-game on a checkerboard.
I was very torn by the "Bread is afraid of the gravy" vs "blotting up coffee" choice. I like them equally, for different reasons. Which one edges out the other, for you?
(Complete outtakes from this strip post at noon in tiers 2 & 3!)
If you've ever received a startlingly generous portion of breakfast meat at a restaurant, you know how it can come to dominate your thoughts. For example:
Does somebody back there "like" me? Even though I'm with my partner they do this?! I hope I am not about to get drugged and lured into some seedy underworld that I have never seen but assume must be there.
In a world such as ours, thought patterns like Beef's are understandable. Unseen worlds of philanderers flirting through brazen gifts of salted pork, always in the shadows, but always watching. They know when you're ready. It's better to think it through than not think it at all. If you think it through, you can be done with it. Unless it gets really crazy and becomes a pattern.
What's a time you thought someone was trying to communicate with you through breakfast food? Sound off in the comments!
Dear Ray. I have always been a "dress left" guy but since turning fifty I think that dressing right is a younger look. Do you have any exercises/regimen that will help me with my transition? Asking for a friend. JHC.
JHC—
At first I thought you meant by “dress left” that your manhood hangs to the left and your tailored suits are adjusted to accommodate it. (Yes, everybody, this is a thing.) But then you say something that suggests you can alter the side to which your junk hangs, which I've never heard of, so at that point I figured maybe you meant more of a political left/right thing…but nobody thinks that "dressing right" like some Connecticut dude named Pipster “Pip” McCleek The Fourth is a “younger look.” (Unless you’re doin’ a post-yacht irony or sudu tang prep thing, both of which you can see emerging in the Bushwick instas right now.)
Then I was like, “Does he mean how buttons go on different sides of a man or lady shirt placket? And is this real subtle code language about gender-change stuff?” Finally I was like, they only pay me to read on the lines, not between them.*
JHC, I am exhausted just trying to know what you mean, so I’m gonna assume you really do want your chang-chang to do-si-do. Sears Roebuck used to sell a strap for this kind of thing, but it seems to have fallen out of popularity, so figure out how that worked and make your own. And whatever you’re doin’, good luck out there, we all deserve happiness.
=Ray=
*I do not actually get paid. I mainly do this advice column to keep my nougat scrappy.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Your rayness. man it's rough sledding sharing this, but sometimes when i'm going to work on my lady in the shower, my legs get to quivering real bad and i can't deliver the end credits, so to speak. it's been a minute since ThighMaster® was a thing, but there has got to be a way to lock that shit in. what would you recommend? —shakes 'n' bakes in the pnw
Shakes,
Man, I am glad to hear that people are still gettin’ it on in the shower. That is some old-school work that the younger folks aren’t willin’ to put in any more. Lord, the ways we used to knock boots! We would do it in or near a boat (nice, fiberglass hull, on open water or just parked in 3-car garage)…we used to sneak out into the woods with a Polaroid…we used to set an egg timer and do it in the snow. But these days, I just pray the new generation reads your message and (narrow, tremblin’ thighs aside) gets inspired to see what kind of fun grandma and grandpa had.
As far as your legs go, a lotta folks are probably thinkin’, “quads.” And a lot of the time they’d be right! But you mention how you’re also gettin’ on in years, and that lit up a big old light bulb over my head.
Shakes, you grew up seeing movies and cable TV series where old folks slip and fall in the shower and never really recover — the old “broken hip” thing. And now you subconsciously worry about this happening to you in your older body, and your legs start tremblin’ in fear!
It’s a danger to you both, and I think it’s time to allow yourself to get back to smackin’ in safer, yet still unconventional places, like near the broom closet in the hall (carpeted). And maybe your foreplay could involve some flutes of potassium water.
Be True!
-=Randy Raynday=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Ray, I am currently disguised as a phantom. I am in a cupboard of a ladies loo and have to jump out approximately once every three minutes to scream and jump-scare the punters that go past. Royalty free Halloween music plays on a loop as a strobe light flashes repeatedly. I must do this every night for six hours for the next eighteen days for sixteen pounds an hour... I have a masters in science. How did my career go so wrong? How do I fix this? —Tom PM
Dear Tom,
Man, once I had thought through that whole description, your situation hit me like a ton of bricks. I was all picturin’ you in some cheap green wig and bulbous “drunk doctor” nose, screamin’ at kids, bookshelves at home all full of diplomas and Niels Bohr: The Atom. I think you actually—stay with me here—are the perfect metaphor for life at this moment. I am not kidding: you have hit the lowest a man can go, despite aiming high in a first-world nation in the most opportunity-rich era of history.
It’s time for you to get on the podcast circuit, telling people that your condition represents all the economic and moral failings of our time, and that the people, and the governments, must all do better. Could net you some brisk crickets, and maybe an ad gig reppin’ a national tax prep service or something.
Definitely always wear the wig and nose as the elements of your mythology. You’ll be the Daft Punk of failin’ down.
-=Sisyphus Smuckles=-
-=The Old Crow Pecks at His Liver=-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Confidential to Gary_V in Minneapolis: I think you're safe to wear the c-ring up to half an hour without risking tissue damage. Or are we still talking about PEX crimp rings? You mentioned Melinda in the first part of your message so I wasn't sure.
Your lowly editor here, at the behest of "comedy mogul (?) and impresario Ray Smuckles," asking you to post your advice questions for Ray here. He'll probably stop monitoring incoming messages within twenty-four hours, and may begin answering them this very afternoon, as he just had a meeting fall through. (Pro shop called to say nobody was around to install a new grip on his putter; now he has nothing to do but get high until dinnertime.)
By the by, I put a (?) on the "comedy mogul" thing above because that's the first I've heard of it. I suspect he's trying to horn in on the growing visibility of the stand-up comedy segment of the entertainment market, and that he also wants to hang out with large drunk man Bert Kreischer.
Also, does anything mean less to the contemporary consumer of media than, "impresario"?
Ray will answer your questions in the Ray's Place column, which is available to tier 2 and 3 supporters of Achewood! (Erratum: Earlier version of this post mistakenly said "all supporters," but that was untrue, and I apologize for the mistake.)
So I told you the story, in the caption to this strip's primary release, of the strange boy from the woods, who tried to pull a really b-grade Deliverance on me one day. The rest of the story of this strip is that I suddenly wrote it Saturday night at the Nation of Language show, maybe a week after remembering that incident. Lauren had surprised me with tickets, and I love Nation of Language, so it was a great night. But when duty called — in this case, a strip started writing itself out of thin air while I was trying to enjoy some pretty excellent synth-wave stuff — I had to trot my phone out, invert the screen to black, and hunch over in my balcony seat so that my "screen time" was not a downer to the other exuberant attendees of the show. I don't know why I care so much about this kind of thing, but it does feel rude to write on your phone during a show. I justified it by telling myself inspiration for the strip comes before all else.
It was soon enough apparent to me that this kind of story makes sense for a pre-alpha like Ray, who, in his budding adolescence, would have certainly felt the instinct to dominate what he saw as his species' alpha/omega-male. Did you notice this aspect of the strip?
Now that the jet lag has concluded its solo and returned to its seat in the orchestra pit of accumulated sleep damage, I am cautiously settling back into "everyday life." For me that's a fairly routine thing of a celebratory breakfast, followed by a brief moment where I organize a few (but not all) responsibilities at the computer, and then either go to the gym or go running. (Today it's the gym, for Coop's "chest and tri's" workout.) Then I pass through a grocery store for dinner inspiration, and indulge fretfully in some afternoon dithering, before we cook and taking a walk together. The bulk of Achewood is produced well after dinner, when Lauren is downstairs relaxing. She actually works all day, for the City of Portland (hold your laughter, it is too a real city), managing their residential and commercial deconstruction programs. She's become quite the muckety-muck in that position, actually, and has a hard hat and steel-toed boots for when she has to go to sites and string a noncompliant jerk up in a festoon of policy.
Fatherly duties this week included drafting a plan for financial independence with Hayden, and going out to lunch with him twice. The woman who owns the farm that Hayden manages was thrown from a particularly incorrigible young Mustang named Happy, and she is laid-by hard with a half-rack of busted ribs, so I drove a few bags of groceries out for her family and took H to Shari's, as is our customary date. Only, Shari's restaurants seem to have all gone out of business while I was in Italy, so no more chewy hash browns for us. We went to a different place that was the same.
This weekend we're having a handful of friends over for Oktuberhonk, which is a party we invented. (It was important to me that the title not have stupid umlauts, which people of my generation tend to think are an absolute scream to place atop every vaguely goofy Germanic word.) We will dress in some manner of Teutonic harvest attire, heat slow, heavy foods, and try to get rid of the alcohol which remains from the wedding. Our friend Heather has these special drinking horns, made of actual horns, which she and Lauren like to use. Heather's big thing is that she is part Wolgadeutsche, and when she found out we both were a bit of that as well, she beamed and held out her arms like an auntie who has just learned of a favored niece's new pregnancy. Then the drinking horns made an appearance.
If you like the idea of an Oktuberhonk and want to throw your own, I strongly support this, and encourage you to use the Announcing Pig logo which I created (see photos), although I strongly discourage you from using my address. The only things you need to make it a proper Oktuberhonk are (1) heavy foods, (2) costumes, and (3) an exuberant friend with idiosyncratic drinking apparatus.
I was recently catalyzed to remember, I know not by what, a weird boy I had met when we first moved to the woods. His family lived in a bit of a cabin — as distinguished from a home by its rustic innards and outards — and the parents didn't have the common social graces to which I was accustomed. One day when we were there alone after school he attempted some manner of handsy dry-humping maneuver on me, which I found unacceptable, and I informed him of this. (I wasn't much practiced in physically pushing people, but push I did, and it must have been successful, because I am not to this day his cabin sex-slave.) Then we went to play in the creek of their holler, because I was stuck there another hour or so until my mom showed up, and he kept making himself fall in the water as a way to apologize for upsetting me with his mock-copulation.
He eventually became a hick (what we called rednecks), then a Mormon, and now is one of those people who isn't on the Internet. Everybody else like him is on the Internet, though, so it seems an odd absence. Maybe he died.
There have been a few other Prime Time Records albums unearthed here, but I don't think this one's seen the light of day since its original run date. Ray seems to have been deeply affected by the plight of someone named Terry Parker, and is also wearing what looks like a Michael Jackson-style chef's coat. No idea about the hair, but it's just like him to suddenly have hair like that.
For the curious, "wonder-panning" was the practice of a vocalist making some kind of pithy point, then squatting at the edge of the stage and holding the microphone out to the audience, slowly drawing it from left to right, with an open-mouthed, "did I just blow your mind" facial expression.
Lauren enjoys riding bicycles, and I am experienced in this modest elective*, so we thought it would be diverting to join a tourist’s riding group around Rome.
“They’re e-bikes,” she mentioned, looking at their page the night before.
“Isn’t the theme of this whole town that civilizations collapse?” I replied.
“And there’s a picnic lunch.”
“If we can’t even pedal bicycles any more, our destiny is to become marshmallow bycatch when the Russians seize our arable soil.”
“We need to be there at nine.”
“I’ll pedal the damn thing,” I thought to myself. “I don’t need any help riding a bike.”
Our fit and peppy guide, Adriano, worked two days a week as the tour’s guide, two days a week as “computer I.T. man,” and weekends as a pizzaiolo. He liked having variety in his life, he said. His unyoked annular suggested this third of his employment calendar served double-duty as a practical trawl for the type of variety that comes in spandex, and the abundant wine and limoncello at the picnic further underwrote this suspicion. “Cyclists,” I muttered to myself. “They think everything should be an orgy.”
Soaring down the roads of Rome on a bicycle was, truth be told, infinitely preferable to clop-clopping my depleted soles down miles of unevenly-laid cobblestones. Even when it came time to climb the long hill to the catacombs, and I refused on principle to engage the electric boost, I still felt a freedom — a very different, more native relationship with this host country. We’re used to seeing our built environments at speed, and they’re scaled for that; walking everywhere frustrates the unconscious awareness that we are in a vast new place, as it realizes we’re going to miss most of it. Walking a city is of course an essential tourist experience, but only walking it…imagine if, instead of sheet music, a clerk with a small, velvet-lined box brought each new note to the pianist, opened it ceremoniously, and then closed it once the note had been played. That is the experience of walking a city. To pass through it quickly is to unlock its greater rhythm.**
Adriano circled back to me, as I had fallen far behind the group, whose large lazy bottoms were nearly out of sight by this point. He looked concerned for a moment, then motioned to the “on” switch for the electric drive. Aware that I can come across like a grumpy asshole, I briefly inhabited my more glorious self, gave him a thumbs-up, and flipped a switch that made a large blue light glow. Soon I was shooting up the hill like a peasant with his leg caught in a carrot-pulling machine.
The ancient Christians excavated over 400 miles of underground tunnels in which to entomb the bodies of their deceased, despite the highly efficacious (and far less stinky) Roman system of burning them. This institutionalized maladaptation to clutter the town with liquefying meat has led us, through approximately eighty generations of pathologization, to modern-day children being forced to sit and watch Hoarders and Storage Wars in the warren of their grandparents’ homes. If you want to get annoyed at all the foolhardy things Christians have given us on the strength of one goofy claim or another, Rome is your place.
Our guide at the catacombs, a jocular Indian man — who turned combative when certain practically-minded American guests asked polite, carefully-worded clarifying questions about the nature of odor in the tombs — spoke several times of a martyred Christian woman whose faith was so strong that her body still has not decomposed, eighteen centuries later. He’d seen it, because he had the right credentials***, but it was not something just anybody could go and see. Much like Bigfoot or the Canadian girlfriend, I smelled a rat.
We had a remarkably competent cappuccino from the little cart by the catacombs gift shop, then scooted off down the Appian Way. At points, the Way has eroded into a base layer of stones the size of pillowcases, which makes for some world-class bonch-rattling. I rode at the front of the group, so I would not be haunted by the sight of all of the large bottoms flopping and flaring in agitation.
As we rattled our weary bonches slowly through the countryside, we passed the ruins of ancient aqueducts, crumbling stone farmhouses, and little parks full of exuberant preschoolers whose chatter, under that bright and purifying autumn sun, was the swirling of leaves into burbling creeks. If Dali ever painted a page-a-day calendar evaporating into the waters of Avalon, this was it. Cycling was growing on me.
Soon we parked our bicycles at a clearing with benches, where we were met by a friendly young woman, known to Adriano, who had, in her hip outfit of parachute pants and puffy white sneakers the size of cinderblocks, set out a simple table of bread spread with ricotta, tomatoes, cured meats, and olive oil. There were olives, grapes, a light lemon cake, and Adriano’s aforementioned firkins of iniquity. The other people on our tour — a goofy Australian family, a Dutch family who spoke every language under the sun and cycled at great speed one millimeter apart from each other, and an older Italian couple — ate with decidedly un-American reserve, while I, once the others had signaled their fill, happily went into seconds and thirds. An Italian, presenting this simple Italian repast, in Italy, gave me all the permission I needed to completely accept the elegance of this unadorned style of eating. I also felt it important to comfort the others by satisfying their stereotype of American dining habits.
The smallish church we saw next, which was apparently famous because Paul the Baptist had given a speech there once, also had a square of marble on the floor — protected by iron grates — with the “actual footprints of Jesus” in it. This might have sold better if the material in question had been wet clay at some point, but who am I to design Rome. Frankly, this whole sacred business was really starting to remind me, in a wearying way, of all the dumb shit I’d had to swallow during Sunday school. (I apologize for the disintegration of my language here. I’ve just been around too long to find further succor in unsubstantiated supernatural nonsense.)
After the tour, we felt obligated to go see St. Peter’s Basilica, which is an extremely large church. The biggest in the world, according to our friends at Google. You could fit the entire NFL inside, and still have room for hot air balloons and the music of Chris Stapleton. To walk up to its ostentatious plaza and colonnades — with their massive, action-stanced statuary of sainted mortals — is to be immediately reminded of Las Vegas, another place I find gross. WWJD if presented with this leviathan spectacle of the church’s self-congratulatory bloat?
It had been gradually dawning upon me that this significant accelerator of the religion that has shaped our western worldview had once just been rocks and paths and blue sky like anywhere, where dudes in tunics ate eel soup from a pot and shat through a hole in a board. They tried little schemes until one found traction, then that one got a brick building, and then a bigger one, and then who was any simple hole-shitting grain-sifter to question the thing that was so important it had a really, truly big brick building, full of guys in secret hats, devoted to it. Then the brick building just kept getting bigger and bigger, until it was St. Peter’s, at which point it had truly exceeded the scale at which the average human can comprehend and cast doubt. Traveling to Rome was one of the more valuable bits of debunking that I’ve done in my life.
At this point, weary of ancient wonders, and (as Americans) more than familiar with the icky feeling of outsized propaganda, we softly cried uncle, and agreed that a taxi back to the apartment was the only suitable salve for our souls. As we withdrew from the Basilica property and its swarm of tat-hawkers, hat-peddlers, and pushy men selling USB batteries on lanyards, I sensed the dénouement of my relationship with the Catholic wonders of Rome. A young priest, ministering pointlessly to a mumbling addict in an underpass, was my last memory of Vatican City.
Next time in Rome: Watching Buena Vista Social Club on mushrooms.
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* I will allow that cycling can be pleasurable, but I consider running to be the superior physical measure, as (a) there is no cowardly mechanical advantage, and (b) one’s bottom does not grow comically broad like that of the Hippopotamidae.
** Please enjoy the film Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Walther Ruttmann, 1927.
Careful readers will notice, hidden among the creative off-cuts, the colorized image of an ermine-clad Philippe holding a luminous trident. Who can tell everyone what it's from? (No, it's not the Transfer Station arc.)
The process/B-roll strips which post two hours after this comic are back! They're available to the Author's Tier and In-Universe Tier — upgrade for a month and see all you've been missing!
It was discussed at the house that this was a "weird one" to run directly after our honeymoon, so I promised to make it clear that this strip was premised solely on how bloated I felt after eating a bunch of the in-flight dinner buns on British Airways (both ways), and has nothing whatsoever to do with my beautiful bride.
Welcome back, me! There's still the usual Friday strip coming tomorrow; today's doodle was simply inspired by the schools of leaves which shimmer down from the trees as they enter their well-deserved season of tranquility. Growing efficiencies in the overseas manufacture of plastic skeletons has the whole town participating in a surfacey flirtation with a ghoul which has not yet come for their own personal sweetmeats. Hamburger lunches taken at the quick-counter cool too soon, hastening us to our vehicles for the indignity of our standard repast. A small hardware store goes out of business.
A cat, clinging with one paw to a tree branch, and captured in a timeless poster which has given millions the courage to conquer their fears, may well have been thinking the lines you see above.
Note: We have returned home, and I am now catching up with the last five days of the trip, which got so busy I couldn't adequately document it in real-time. Several more installments will follow.
As I sit and weep back at the room, forcing concrete grapes out of my ass, I visualize the fruit cup vendor we saw by the Circus Maximus the day before. Would he still be there? How much for a cab? How much for an airlift? If there is a crisis facing the tourist to Rome, it is a diet comprised exclusively of cheap, squishy bread products and salted meat. The only fresh vegetable I saw during our stay was a caper bush growing out the side of an ancient aqueduct, but there was no vendor there to sprinkle them on focaccia. Salads are typically sarcastic bowls of undressed mixed lettuce; carciofi alla Giudia are artichokes deep fried for so long they are essentially potato chips, and come to the tabe on a brown square of paper so greasy it looks like a MOMA piece entitled Sharting Fiat.
Later that morning we went to the ruins of the Colosseum, one of humankind’s earliest examples of large-scale social engineering through bad taste. Our current mass public entertainment may be as devoid of psychological nutrition as our foods are of corporal nutrition, but at least we’ve moved on from feeding terrified slaves to lions. The rest of the central ruins district feaures the spines and skulls of ravaged temples to human superiority, which create a vibe upon which it is difficult to place one’s finger, but the nearest I can tell is that what I’m responding to is the overwhelmingly postapocalyptic message of this once-apex culture. What none of the brochures and guided tours want to say is, “This will certainly be our fate, as well. Fish will peck for algae around the crumbled foundations of your home; the dome of your city hall will look like a shotgun blast to a melon.”
I once read about a tsunami that first drew all the water far out to sea, so that hundreds of yards of new shoreline were exposed, and the curious wandered out to explore the neat new area. Then the water returned with a fatal enormity and wiped the foolishly unconcerned people off the face of the earth. Wandering around the ruins of Rome, holding a donut and an iPhone, feels like this.
A crowd of young teenagers, overwhelmingly female, milled about on the small square near the basic tourist restaurant to which we had surrendered our decartilaginated legs. As we puzzling over whether or not it was actually okay to use the olive oil and balsamic as dip for the bread, as we do at home, the group let out a few chants and began marching purposefully down the cobbles past our outdoor table. I reached for a flyer they offered, which was in Italian, but clearly to do with women’s abortion rights. A curious waiter glanced at it and informed us about the new right wing government’s policy of situating a psychologist between the client and her appointment, a step backwards for a system that had once put a priest in the way, but in more recent times had presented no such obstacle whatsoever.
Later that night as we relaxed in our fifth-floor room, the sharp report of marching drums startled us to the window. It was the same crowd, now swelled in number, protected fore and aft by police and vans. We had seen a similarly bored escort provided for young, beer-swilling, balaclava-wearing male supporters of a soccer team whose cartoony logo was some sort of animal that winds up in braises; it seems Italian carabinieri are largely occupied with either idly chatting up restaurant hostesses, or disinterestedly guarding the harmless from one another. The only fear I felt in five days in Rome was a woman who jumped off her lover’s scooter, fired a staccato blue streak into the air, and damned him with a very spicy finger.
THE restaurant
The thing I treasure most about travel finally happened that night: a hole in the wall locals place, hot and loud and entirely disinterested in tourists, opened like brigadoon as we walked down a series of quiet and unpromising Trastevere alleys. There was no stand with a multi-language photographic menu. There was no sign. The waitress clearly wished she hadn’t seen us, but had made the mistake of eye contact, and could not ignore us. I immediately asked for a table for two, no prenotazione (no reservation). She shrugged her shoulders, muttered something as unfriendly as it was unintelligible, and wandered off. I knew this to be a sign more promising than glowing dowsing rods, and we held our ground by the doorway. Soon she seemed to yell to the other waitress that they had two No Langauge people on their hands, and the other woman brought us inside, where an older man who looked like he had juggled at the first Burning Man smiled and, in gently broken English, told us we’d be sharing a table with two strangers. In my poor Italian I said we liked to make new friends, which made him smile, and he set us at a table which might have had elbow room enough for two others, so long as they were toddlers. He then procured a couple festively-colored markes and doodled a squiggly line down the center of the paper tablecloth, and I termed our side the “zona romantica.” This gave him another glimmer of a smile, and I hoped I had sufficiently defused the insult of our presence.
When the waiter set down an entirely handwritten Italian menu, my heart leapt. There were the handmade agnolotti, the lamb scottadito, the trippa alla Romana, which had eluded us. None of it would be on the cookie cutter menus at the hundreds of generic trattorias that line all the city’s streets, and I wanted all of it. I sat beaming in the cramped room, with its thick, humid air of browning meat, its walls decorated primarily in little clippings and other newspaper bits whose Scotch tape was so old it had yellowed and crumbled. I heard bouncy music that was not there; I felt kinship which had never been offered.
Soon the next luckless English-speakers showed up, a very young couple from England, and we chatted pleasantly before the food started arriving. The meal was rustic, unfussy, hot, salty, greasy, rich, robust, and forcefully, unquestionably authentic. As we left, our foreheads steaming and our fingernails shiny, I was bouncing with elation, for my one travel goal had been fulfilled, indelibly marked upon my memory.
This comic is from an actual double-take I did recently. In reality, I had misread the shirt. I don't know what it actually said, but the idea of drinking so much coffee each day that the belly distends in the manner of a pregnancy captivated me.
For the next two weeks, while we're away on our honeymoon, I'm running three new strips a week, M-W-F. These are ultra-classic, single-row Achewood strips like you saw in 2001.
I'm posting three a week instead of the usual one-on-Friday because, frankly, posting short strips makes me feel insecure about providing enough value for you, even though I love how this set of six captures the old absurdist flavor of original Achewood. It's me, not you.
Why am I doing short strips at all? Because they show an essential element of the Achewood approach, and it's also becoming a pleasant custom for me to do these during my vacations. They make use of the scratch-and-dent part of my writing file — weird little ideas that can't carry a long-form strip.
Please enjoy the change-up, and when I return, you will probably see a comic about what it's like to honeymoon in Italy during a transportation strike. (Hint: Ray will sit in one restaurant in Minori and eat Pasta alla Garlic Butter until his systolic becomes a hum, like the electric pump of an aquarium).
For the next two weeks, while we're away on our honeymoon, I'm running three new strips a week, M-W-F. These are ultra-classic, single-row Achewood strips like you saw in 2001.
I'm posting three a week instead of the usual one-on-Friday because, frankly, posting short strips makes me feel insecure about providing enough value for you, even though I love how this set of six captures the old absurdist flavor of original Achewood. It's me, not you.
Why am I doing short strips at all? Because they show an essential element of the Achewood approach, and it's also becoming a pleasant custom for me to do these during my vacations. They make use of the scratch-and-dent part of my writing file — weird little ideas that can't carry a long-form strip.
Please enjoy the change-up, and when I return, you will probably see a comic about what it's like to honeymoon in Italy during a transportation strike. (Hint: Ray will sit in one restaurant in Minori and eat Pasta alla Garlic Butter until his systolic becomes a hum, like the electric pump of an aquarium).
Some many years ago, an Australian journalist named Tim Blair commissioned Ray Smuckles to write a series of columns for Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. Ray, true to form, didn’t really ask what Mr. Blair wanted from the partnership, and randomly submitted several pieces over the course of the next few months. Remarkably, they actually ran, but as they no longer exist on the Tele’s site, I reprint them here for your enjoyment.
(Addendum: Thanks to alert reader Jarret for pointing out that many of these Australia columns also exist in harder-to-access form in Ray's blog! I had completely forgotten that I ran these there, after they ran in the Telegraph. So, I guess these aren't super-exclusive to Patreon, but they are formatted and edited/updated here, with new illustrations. Perhaps I should just compile them as one big doc once they've all run.)
This one gets my vote for the Most OG Style Achewood of this entire 6-strip mini-run. Do you think it compares to the year one mentality?
For the next two weeks, while we're away on our honeymoon, I'm running three new strips a week, M-W-F. These are ultra-classic, single-row Achewood strips like you saw in 2001.
I'm posting three a week instead of the usual one-on-Friday because, frankly, posting short strips makes me feel insecure about providing enough value for you, even though I love how this set of six captures the old absurdist flavor of original Achewood. It's me, not you.
Why am I doing short strips at all? Because they show an essential element of the Achewood approach, and it's also becoming a pleasant custom for me to do these during my vacations. They make use of the scratch-and-dent part of my writing file — weird little ideas that can't carry a long-form strip.
Please enjoy the change-up, and when I return, you will probably see a comic about what it's like to honeymoon in Italy during a transportation strike. (Hint: Ray will sit in one restaurant in Minori and eat Pasta alla Garlic Butter until his systolic becomes a hum, like the electric pump of an aquarium).
So much happens in Rome, even when just slipping around the corner to buy the morning bus ticket, that documenting every remarkable little moment would somehow begin to take more time than the trip itself. It is a phenomenon, but in a city where the tourists outnumber the cobblestones and the cats want no pats, you salve the confusion with another cup of gelato and buy yourself a flamboyant neckerchief you swear you’ll wear back at home in front of people who already knew you.
After my incident with the $6,700 jacket, we went to something called the Villa Boff Red Dougie, which is an amusing autocorrrct (why didn’t that autocorrect?) of Villa Borghese. Villa Borghese is a large random green shape on Google Maps, and there was allegedly a modern art museum somewhere in the randomness.
As we trudged up to the museum, with its V-shaped U’s and columns and friezes, I began to fear “modern” simply meant “within the last five hundred years,” and that we were going to see more giant paintings of absurdly overblown Christian moments. And more fucking statues. This made me mad, and I was terse and factual with Lauren about my feelings.
Eventually we discovered that the building was not just another mind-numbing religious reliquary, and enjoyed several hours of looking at Picassos, de Chiricos, and Afros (a new favorite) at our own separate paces. Then, as we exited, a young woman from a Vermeer came to life and asked us some insightful questions about our experience, for her thesis. Okay, it was actually a Danish PhD student, but her head was narrow in a neat way.
The rest of the day was a blur of pasta, walking, resting, and going out for pasta. I’m starting to realize that the pasta here is not appreciably better than, say, at least two different places within a five minute walk from my home in Portland. I happen to live one block from a restaurant with a decorated Roman chef, so that’s not entirely fair, but it sure beats the 10.7 miles we clocked on our pins that day. Especially since my walk doesn’t include constantly dodging emoji-size cars as they rattle down alleyways (“roads”) that can scarcely fit a couple of square-dancing raccoons. If an affordance is big enough for water to penetrate, an Italian will attempt to fit a car there.
Owing in perhaps equal parts to my day-slaying outfit (vintage 90s Italian designer polo shirt, green neck bandana, flat cap, unusual tennis shoes, dark sunglasses) and my don’t-try-me demeanor, an older Italian woman gave me a lovely gift this morning: she stopped me in the street and asked for directions, going on and on, in Italian. I scared her off with an apologetic mi dispiace that probably sounded to an Italian ear like Frankenstein’s monster choking on hot caramel, but her gesture could not be retracted, and my day picked up immensely.
We breakfasted on cappuccinos and croissants, then remembered we needed protein for the big walking day, and had a second breakfast of prosciutto and cheese panini at another place half a block further down. Eating every fifty feet is not a bad way to see the city.
The crowd in line for the Parthenon (what I can’t help but call the Pantheon) was about the size and shape of a football field, and plus we heard it was just more boring Catholic statues, so we went shopping instead. This is a trend I hope we continue, because frankly I’m a bit over ancient weathered things at this point. And statues? Sorry, seen one.
History Chasm Is Real
It has been difficult for me to have a connecting moment with all these ancient ruins. I need some kind of humanizing detail that bridges the gap of millennia. It could be period players in accurate garb, speaking ancient dialect, with faces and gestures identical to ours. It could be VR goggles showing the streets and buildings as they looked when in original use. It could be a smelly bowl of fish soup, served by a man in a shroud who looks like Nick Tortelli.
Here’s a trick I used to try and connect in any relevant way with all the two-thousand year-old pottery shards and crusty amphorae: I imagined a dirty fragment of an Oh No It’s Today painting, sitting in one of the glass cases, being observed by a human in the year 4024. They would see the signature and the edge of Roast Beef’s mouth, and then numbly shuffle off to the next exhibit: a thermostat interface which could not be used by anyone other than the person who designed it, and whom I hope will still be choking on the greasy, telescoping boy penis of a hydraulic crane.
This trick didn’t really work, and it made me sad.
Shopping in Rome
We saw a cool jacket in a severe-looking boutique window, compelling enough to warrant a trip inside.
“This is either going to be $150, or $1,500,” I said to Lauren, sotto voce.
The severe, natty older gentleman attending the store received but did not acknowledge my understated nod. (“Now that’s some Italy shit, right there,” I thought to myself.) I walked over to the rack where the coat I wanted hung. I examined its details before looking at the price, in the manner of a man who can afford things.
Satisfied that the garment and I shared sufficient affinity, I fished the tag out from within. My eyes grew confused as the amount of numbers on the price line seemed to go on and on, maybe even around the back. After letting things settle for a moment, I realized that the jacket was €5,990, which is about $6,700, or the same price as a first-class ticket back to the chump factory I call my house.
It’s been a while since I realized I was on public display in full hillbilly mode, so I did the correct thing, and left the store with the same coldly unreceived nod I had delivered upon entry. Then I texted several friends and family back home about the crazy price, and we all agreed it was so crazy, and dumb.
There was more to the first day, but that will come subsequenly. This has gone on quite long.
For the next two weeks, while we're away on our honeymoon, I'm running three new strips a week, M-W-F. These are ultra-classic, single-row Achewood strips like you saw in 2001.
I'm posting three a week instead of the usual one-on-Friday because, frankly, posting short strips makes me feel insecure about providing enough value for you, even though I love how this set of six captures the old absurdist flavor of original Achewood. It's me, not you.
Why am I doing short strips at all? Because they show an essential element of the Achewood approach, and it's also becoming a pleasant custom for me to do these during my vacations. They make use of the scratch-and-dent part of my writing file — weird little ideas that can't carry a long-form strip.
Please enjoy the change-up, and when I return, you will probably see a comic about what it's like to honeymoon in Italy during a transportation strike. (Hint: Ray will sit in one restaurant in Minori and eat Pasta alla Garlic Butter until his systolic becomes a hum, like the electric pump of an aquarium).
I would complain about every meal for the last seven days being just cheese and bread, but all my hair is growing back! This makes me very happy.
LEAVING THE COAST
Our last day on the coast consisted of a walk along the clifftop highway between Minori and Maiori, and two hours chatting in a beachfront cafe waiting for a rainstorm to subside. We ate, then we ate gelato, then we climbed hundreds more stone steps back to our funny retreat among the citrus stands.
The highlight had actually been earlier in the day, when Salvatore toured us through his organic lemon grove and discussed his soil management, his climate woes, and his victories in negotiation with the “big guy” produce wholesalers. Pride of place went to his “secret technique” of placing glass bottles over the budding branches, which allows whole lemons to develop in the glass, which then give his limoncello that extra something which of course none of the other nine hundred limoncello producers on the hillside can figure out, because apparently none of them have heard of calvados. Or maybe he thinks Americans haven’t. But it’s a good life, and there had been mortadella at breakfast, and the eggs were less ruined this time, and the granules of salt finally adhered to them.
I’ll rewind a little more here to observe another curious thing about the Italians. I had walked into the dining cottage at breakfast that mizzly morning, to find Salvatore presiding over a full house of slightly effervescent guests — a distinct warmth had formed around them, like a song everybody knew but did not sing. He mumbled something charmingly conspiratorial to me, which I did not understand, then asked if I liked “chamomile…medicine against the rain.” I smiled and said I loved chamomile (I genuinely do, especially in a blend I make with pineapple, coconut, and chrysanthemum, which comes over like a crisp, fresh-pressed autumn harvest cider) at which the room had a good laugh. He said he was glad to give me a little medicine, and soon it was clear he had given everyone a shot of his limoncello with their trampoline egg and roll. I smiled and offered a gentle protestation, which he interpreted to mean I wanted a double. Nilde, the actual English teacher, even did not seem to believe me when I finally said I didn’t drink alcohol…so much for the protecting mother. I let it sit and gave it to Lauren, who can do that kind of thing but doesn’t prefer it.
A similar experience had occurred at a restaurant two nights before, when a cock waiter kept pushing me to order wine, bragging about his own consumption, until he could tell I wasn’t caving and wandered off to fuck up our order.
In the US a waiter typically demonstrates sensitivity around a non-drinking guest; here it was aggressively the opposite. It didn’t upset me — both because I am highly disagreeable, and functionally misanthropic — but rather just got me contemplating how much more the individual must be self-assured and self-reliant to maintain himself here: society wouldn’t coddle you, it would constantly test you. In a two-thousand year-old culture there’s undoubtedly more to it, but my wheels are still turning on the subject.
The next morning we bought six jars of lemon marmalade, accepted a split of limoncello which we’ll sample at our upcoming Oktuberhonk party, and said goodbye to Spot, who did not care.
Five hours later we were in an immaculate apartment in the Trastevere district of Rome, marveling at the pleasant chaos and acres of pizza al taglio. More on that next time…if I can sleep tonight. We seem to have traded hillsides full of inconsolate dogs for a room above the garage from which all of Rome’s ambulances are dispatched. I guess we’ll just keep the window closed.
ROME
2:30am - the fucking black turtleneck cockroach who designed the user interface for this thermostat should lie on a toast in sticky dog’s blood for the train to roll over his eyes
dear ray what are the best ingredients to keep on hand for when the party goes late and people might not be able to handle proper cooking but you as the host dont want guests to have to resort to ordering delivery — Zen Window
Dear e e cummings,
I’m going to be charitable and decide that your lack of grammar and punctuation is because you actually composed this at just such a party, and wanted to send it before the thought evaporated. I ain’t usually a big stick-ass about this stuff, but I am seein’ it more and more that young folks present badly in writing, and writing is the fashion of the mind. If you care about the way you dress, you got to care about the way you come over in words, too. Feel me?
Anyhow. So, you ain’t want your guests to burn down your house when they’re rippin’ and fadin’, all putting hot dogs still in the box directly on the burners. This is very wise, which leads me to believe that in better circumstances, you’ll re-send that email with good grammar. But for now, since this topic is so important, it’s my duty to answer immediately.
Basically, no machine is safe from friends in this state. Late after one party I once caught an incoherent Téodor putting a copper pot full of candles in the microwave and setting it to forty-five hours. Last thing I need is a vortex to some cackly witch dimension opening up in my house.
Best thing you can do is have one of those butter boards out, with lots of bread and pickles and charcuterie and stuff. You can make it ahead of time, the soft, fatty butter will satisfy the cravings, and that carby bread will stuff the gut like a sausage. I know butter boards are pretty much over, but at 3am with one eye open, everybody’ll be like, “...” [silent eating noise].
-=I_Used_To_B_A_Placenta!!!=-
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Hi Ray, Out of all the kitchen gadgets these days, is there ONE that actually ups your flavor game? ONE that a player should actually own rather than dropkick over the horizon? Sous Vide Wand? Convection Thing? Smoking Cloche? Driveway Egg? Shit man, am I better off just learning the mother sauces on the kind of stove that comes with a house? - Nick
Nick,
I recently got a thermometer, and it totally changed my dishes. I’d start there. It’s the difference between cooking and guessing, and last time I checked, nobody wanted to eat my guesses. (Although that does sound like somethin’ a demon in a Harry Potter novel would do.)
-=Raytolando, Known Italian=-
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O Ray, I'm sort of a film buff (I refuse to say "cinephile"), and whenever I see movies with my friends they always get mad at me for "nitpicking" or "contrarianism" even though I'm just talking about what I liked/didn't like about the movie. Are they being obstinate or should I shut my trap? — Isaac
Isaac!
So, what your friends don’t like is that your responses to movies are too structured, and probably contain words like “narrative” and “theme.” What they want to do is burst outta’ the theatre goin’, “Dude! DUDE! Did you see how fast John Wick drove that car!? And that thing with the snake?! AAAAWESOME!” (Friend #2: “Vrooom! VROOOOOM!”) And there you are, all, “Frenzy without cease becomes the new stillness; examination beyond that baseline yields but the crinkling cellophane of cheap mental candy; a scarecrow where Hercules through Atlas was promised.” (I had Connie write that last line.)
I let Pat choose the movie a couple weeks ago, and we ended up watchin’ this three hour thing about a young French boy who lived under a crashed ship, and a picture of a mountain lion was his only possession. At one point I though this explorer lady he saw in a dream was gonna show her boobs, but she turned into a book case draped in kelp, so I just kept discreetly readin’ my phone. Then Pat talked for longer than the movie itself about parallels in capitalist economics, and every time I tried to ask how the crashed boat was like economics, he just looked at me in disgust for a second before starting over again. I guess, in a way, my miserable experience was a lot like its own French surrealist movie.
Anyhow, don’t change who you are for dummies, is my advice. Works for Pat.
))booty.got.2.shake((
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Confidential to Gary_V in Minneapolis: Ha ha! I hear you, G. I used to go with this girl Janeane, and she was from St Paul, but her mom lived in Minneapolis, and she had to fly back all the time to take care of her. I guess that’s why things ultimately cooled off. Anyways, how’s Marla?
Alfonso’s electric golf cart whirred us down the winding mountain road from Zagara, the cool night air off the vines and stones nostalgic of those first early teenage years giddily spent out late in undefined freedom. We rolled down the narrow cobbled streets of Minori, over the seafront cliff road, then began the thirty minute winding climb into Tramonti. The invigorating air of youth soon blended into the chilly cave air of the steep canyon; little beep-beep emoji cars daringly grumbled past our pokey conveyance on straightaways no longer than a game of pickle. I was seated behind Alfonso, so he would absorb any mopeds that came through the windshield.
At the pizzeria he announced that he would sit on the other side of a large dining room column so that he would not be a presence at our special dinner (and spend his time drumming up rides in peace), and soon we were engrossed in a menu of simple pies and grilled verdure. Decades of food television have drilled into us that the pizzas we eat stateside are more akin to trashy casseroles than the ancestral, austere flatbreads of this region, from whence pizza allegedly originates, and this menu bore out that truth. We could have ventured into pies with smoked salmon or charred broccoli and pistachio cream, but ultimately felt it most beneficial to explore the archetypes. A white pie with sausage, artichoke, and lemon for me, a red with funghi, olives, and prosciutto for her.
I had slyly declined to use the past tense when mentioning my career in food journalism to our host, so when little freebies began arriving, I was happily reminded of the power of that pen.
Fried focaccia wedges with a dollop of the clearest, most forcefully honest little stewed tomato — sorry, daughter of Vesuvius — I have ever tasted rang the bell for a tour of, as Mario Batali used to put it, “perfect, deeply un-fucked-with” ingredients. Lightly-marked grilled vegetables of uniform thickness and their own nature of clarity, dusted with dried oregano, would have been unthinkably boring at home, but here at church they were to be appreciated in every minute aspect of their minerality, salinity, and bitterness.
A dispiriting couple from Toronto weighed on the table next to ours. Both wore shower shoes, despite not also wearing bath towels, and kept up a monotonous, broken line of conversation which indicated in no way that any species of carnality would visit their quarters on this trip. Their sole value was to have ordered before us, so that when we saw their pies emerge like glowing shields from the forge of Vulcan, born into and immediately transmuted by the tempering air of the dining room — like orange ingots quenched squealing in water — we sat upright like dogs when a cleaver falls. To the couple’s credit, they used utensils to eat their pies, a correct but annoying Italian custom, like how they spear French fries with long toothpicks.
From where we sat in the quiet Tuesday night dining room we caught occasional glimpses of Francesco’s head, of his peel stabbing into the flames of his oven, of his back as he arranged the antipasti. Soon he was clearly pulling our pies from the flame-licked dome, and his wife Pamela delivered them to the table, to our poorly-disguised Christmas morning faces.
Reading a laundry list of precious salivary adjectives is as trite to read as it is to write. What I hope you can do is come to this place and recalibrate your sense of how every parameter of this creation is meant to reach its zenith of expression and optimal intermarriage. When food is truly enthralling, you don’t drop the temperature with egghead declarations, you just lose yourself in chasing the flavors from bite to bite. It immediately established itself as the reference pie for the rest of my life.
In another move which spoke to the forewarning of a Food Journalist, Francesco carefully approached our table at the close of the meal, which he hadn’t done with the other tables. I offered my hand, and across our near-total language desert I managed a, “meraviglioso in tutti categoria,” given with as strong a smile as it was received. Multiple permutations of Thank You were exchanged as a form of information, and we thanked each other out of the restaurant, past the couple of carabinieri who always seem to be chatting idly with the staff at closing time.
Like a new baby, America provides two things: a lot of shit, and a lot of potential. I doubt we’ll ever stop selling each other bankrupt, adulterated flours and sugary tomato sauces, and approach the Italian level of reverence for ingredients, but in pockets in my home city of Portland I see a keen passion for it, and pizzas which approach Francesco’s. Only with lucky travel can we know to what we aim, so I’m grateful to Salvatore and Nilde for championing their culture to the breakfast table guy who asked so many questions about the way they made their lemon marmalade and “didn’t want to eat tourist food.”
For the next two weeks, while we're away on our honeymoon, I'm running three new strips a week, M-W-F. These are ultra-classic, single-row Achewood strips like you saw in 2001.
I'm posting three a week instead of the usual one-on-Friday because, frankly, posting short strips makes me feel insecure about providing enough value for you, even though I love how this set of six captures the old absurdist flavor of original Achewood. It's me, not you.
Why am I doing short strips at all? Because they show an essential element of the Achewood approach, and it's also becoming a pleasant custom for me to do these during my vacations. They make use of the scratch-and-dent part of my writing file — weird little ideas that can't carry a long-form strip.
Please enjoy the change-up, and when I return, you will probably see a comic about what it's like to honeymoon in Italy during a transportation strike. (Hint: Ray will sit in one restaurant in Minori and eat Pasta alla Garlic Butter until his systolic becomes a hum, like the electric pump of an aquarium).
Alfonso Golf Cart, who hustles tourists around the cliffside town in a spanky open-air four-seater, quoted us 50€ each way to a secluded four-table pizzeria up in Tramonti, run by a former English student of Nilde named Francesco. Alfonso looks like if a young Le Corbusier had given himself to racquetball instead of concrete.
There are reassuring Italian-language videos of Francesco forcefully but lovingly working his silken jellyfish-heads of dough — on floured marble in a low, amber-lit dining room — speaking in happy subtitles about the unique blend of flours he has developed (semolina di Campania, corn, rye…ba-babba ba-babba ba). In the videos he resembles a shiny-pated Yo La Tengo aficionado, with his dark plastic frames and anxious-to-please resting state, and wears a sporty white chef’s coat adorned with embroidered logos not unlike NASCAR livery.
I then watch a silent YouTube video of the road to Tramonti. (That this video even would exist says something.) It’s maybe four miles of switchbacks, takes half an hour, and often features Indiana Jones barreling the other direction in an out-of-control mine cart. (“Scusi! SCUUUSIIIII!”) After a brief discussion, Lauren and I agree to the price. (I had originally balked at 50€, so he lowered it to 40€, but then the next morning he said it had to be 50€ again.)
A Curiosity of Italian Negotiating
I met a young couple from Chicago at breakfast (Lauren stayed back to rest), and they seemed potentially interested in sharing a fare to Tramonti, so I texted Alfonso about the physical possibility of two more joining us. First he replied, “Yes Sir My question Is this people are skinny and fit?” (As an American, I was acutely aware of his implication.) I replied yes, and he replied that the trip for four would be 300€ instead of 100€ for two. He then confirmed it, upon my confirmation of what I was seeing.
At this point, I stopped trying to ask Alfonso about his prices. It seems the more you bother an Italian man, the higher the cost of his service rises. I would not be surprised to discover that among the nominativo and accusativo verb cases, there is also the levo case. Levo means leverage.
I then descended the hundreds of stone steps to town to buy “cough drops, gum, and plenty of chocolate.” (That is pasted from Lauren’s text.) I threw in two focaccia sandwiches, a few sfogliatelle, an n/a beer, and some time studying the swimsuits at the beach, as part of my learning. The sfogliatelle were far and away the highlight.
As we freshened our faces and sprezza’d the collars and cuffs for dinner, the light in our sea-canyon grew soft and cool. A high-grade evening calm settled in for the pre-barkophany hours; here a bird spip-spipped or birruped, there an unseen citrus farmer gently hammered (“tink…tink…tink…”) something iron into ancient concrete. Burning grapevine, familiar from one I used to have, lightly censed the terraces. Even the serenity they have here is better.
Next time: Pizzeria San Francisco in Tramonti. It deserves its own entry.
