The Summer of Suck-yeah, that’s what I’ve settled on-is an international phenomenon, particularly in Japan, where rampaging monkeys have injured dozens of people. “[I]n Mishima and Susono cities near the Japan Alps in Hakone this week, residents have been attacked, bitten and scratched by what seems to be a team of macaques. On one day alone, August 25, some 15 people in Susono were injured.”

I am very much anti-gun in real life. So it’s always disturbed me just how much I enjoy shoot-em-up gangster movies or war movies or rap songs. I’m not like a fetishist, for the weaponry itself. I don’t have posters over my desk of women in bikinis firing Uzis or whatever. But I do like some tough-guy talk at the end of a barrel-on screen or through some speakers.

I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising: Here’s this invention we made that can can take life so efficiently, bestow the ultimate power, etc. And watching my five-year-old son shoot imaginary bullets out of a cardboard paper-towel tube or a wooden flute with flowers painted on it or, when there’s nothing else available, his fingers, reminds me of when I did the same at the same age, and of the futility of my parents’ refusal to buy me toy guns, and of my refusal to buy them for him. I don’t know much about developmental psychology but it really does seem like little boys have an inclination to shoot things. (I’ll let some Freudian expound on the part anatomy plays in the phenomenon.) And I suppose there’s a similar root explanation for why I can be so entertained by something I find theoretically disgusting.

Anyway, Waka Flocka Flame pushes those very base emotional buttons with his new video, “Luv Dem Gun Sounds.” (The song came out last year, on the the Atlanta rapper’s Flockavelli mixtape.) No weapons are pictured, but you hear plenty of them-the beat itself is constructed from recorded gun blasts and a screaming snippet of metal guitar. It was put together by the producer South Side, and it’s hugely, and harrowingly, great. In the video, too, Flocka pushes rap as far towards heavy metal (in two senses of the term, I suppose) as it’s ever been, banging his head to explosive beats, flying his dreads around like Metallica’s Jason Newsted used to do with his wavier tresses. And the scenario, filmed in Memphis, apparently, with members of a local Bloods set, is, in a word, frightening.

Striking a similar tone, with a more cinematically horror-movie-styled video, is Yelawolf’s “Pop the Trunk.”

As much as this white Alabama rapper’s inflection and delivery mimic’s that of Eminem (I hate to make that comparison, but it’s unavoidable: what is it with white rapper’s pinched nasal staccato?) he has something going on here that seems vivid and real. It’s undeniably intense. Watch him performing it live, with drummer Travis Barker, earlier this summer in L.A.

With this too, but even more with “Dem Gun Sounds,” I’m reminded of how I felt the first time I heard “Iron Man,” by Black Sabbath. I was eleven or twelve, I guess, in sixth grade. The massive drums and slashing guitar, Ozzy’s distorted, demonic voice-it’s violent, and it scared me a little. Not that I would have let on to Colin Dodds and Steve Wallace, playing the tape on a box near the bike rack behind our school. But I remember thinking, that’s the “heavy metal” I’d been hearing about on TV, Phil Donohue talking to worried moms about it or whatever.

That was the first time I heard a band that lived up to the name. But riding home that day, humming the song to myself, imagining what Ozzy looked like singing like that, I realized, too, that this was exactly the sort of sound I wanted to be listening to at the time. A sound I was probably hearing in my subconscious anyway. It was echoing something deep in my head, the part of young people that want to shoot stuff and destroy the world. (Testosterone, I guess it’s called-I know I’m not inventing the wheel here-just bubbling off in a different direction than the football field, where I only ever got flattened.) Feeding that stuff, maybe, too-ut I hope and trust in a way that leads to healthy catharsis, as opposed to actually hurting anyone. I’m a pacifist.

There’s a scientific explanation for this, but come on, fire tornado! You should definitely enjoy this now while it’s still a novelty; the way things are going, it’s not going to be too long before pretty much everything is on fire all the time and we’re going to be jaded about it.

This is not actually a terrible idea: “Scandal-plagued Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is so keen for Italians to holiday close to home that he has instigated a voucher scheme to subsidise Italian holidays for Italians…. Berlusconi believes that boosting local tourism will be a key driver for economic recovery in Italy. If a holiday is the most expensive thing that most Europeans buy all year, it makes sense for Italy to keep that discretionary spending close to home.” I mean, so long as no one goes mushroom hunting. We should do this here! I would love to get the hell out of this inferno right now.

I have to say, this film project for The Arcade Fire for “The Wilderness Downtown” totally was worth downloading Google Chrome to appreciate. Warning: sit back and relax, because it’s going to open and close a lot of windows in a scary way. This is a really excellent case of musicians finding ways to work with image-makers, achieving results that really suit their style and intentions.

Attention frugal smokers: “Scores of tobacco retailers in the U.S. are taking advantage of a federal tax loophole to offer deep discounts on roll-your-own cigarettes. But the practice is attracting scrutiny from regulators and cigarette manufacturers. At Smoke Zone, a store in this Chicago suburb, customers one recent afternoon flocked to two high-speed rolling machines that produce a carton of cigarettes in eight minutes. The price: $21-less than half the cost of a carton of Marlboro cigarettes.”

The loophole, explains the Wall Street Journal, comes from the tobacco used to make the cigarettes. The stores are using what is labeled “pipe tobacco,” which is taxed at a considerably lower rate than cigarette tobacco. Other outlets are creating new blends that are barely distinguishable from cigarette tobacco. Federal authorities naturally see this as a ploy to evade taxes, and the situation raises a very important question: Are there any of these places here in New York City? Because, oh my God, I’m getting killed. One customer admits that the smokes aren’t as good as Marlboro, but if I can save 80-something bucks on a carton I will somehow put up with the lack of ammonia and other delicious chemicals that give traditional cigarettes their wonderful lung-stinging pop. We all have to make sacrifices in these difficult times.

“OK, so the Kocherlakota dispute followed K’s very clear statement that the Fed’s current policy of low rates is deflationary. That’s sheer nonsense.”
-Paul Krugman has lost his helpful parenthetical explanations-and his interest in retaining an audience of layperson readers.

It was a close thing, but in a demurely tasteful ceremony this weekend, the nation’s honor was restored. Now, however, comes the hard part: Like the other cardinal virtues, honor requires extreme vigilance, cautious oversight and constant care and feeding to sustain. How can we strengthen our collective moral fiber without succumbing to the telltale atrophy of mind, body and spirit?

As usual, the nation’s lords of finance are here to lead the way. In this moment of unique moral-cum-calisthenic peril, they are stepping forth as exemplars of the extreme adventure challenge.

As Teddy Wayne notes in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the gladiatorial weekend competitions are “growing in popularity among young professionals, particularly those in finance.”

One such signature contest is the Spartan Race-we weren’t kidding when we said “gladiatorial.” It’s currently in the midst of a nine-city road tour across the United States, Canada, and the U.K.; its lead organizer, a former Canadian Royal Marine named Brit Richard Lee, estimates that 60 percent of the more than 15,000 enrolled participants are on corporate teams.

For a mere $50 to $70 entry fee, contestants leap through fire and crawl under barbed wire-and of course intone period war cries, like “prepare for glory!” and “Remember to return with your shield-or on it!”

Yeah, I’m not sure what that last one means, either-armaments tobogganing, so far as I know, was never featured in The Iliad. But it sure sounds menacing-and that, of course, is the point. If you hie over to the competition’s website, you’ll find that it drips with scorn for the cosseted fops who shun primal urges for phony over-civilized comfort. “In a bygone era barely imaginable by present day desk jockeys and gamer warriors,” it bellows, “adventure and toughness were part of everyday life. Modernity, in its quest for ever higher standards of safety and convenience, has made our lives soft and lackluster.”

This is, in fact, a lamentation as old as modernity itself. Teddy Roosevelt famously shed his sickly childhood pallor in favor of the hardy martial virtues of the strenuous life, becoming in the process America’s poster child for a particularly rugged sort of bourgeois self-improvement. As historian T.J. Jackson Lears notes, classically minded he-men like TR negotiated a significant shift in how American culture viewed suffering and physical trials. By the outset of the 20th century, Lears writes:

suffering was often less a means of character formation than another path to intense experience. As ethical frameworks softened, vitalism replaced stoicism. Action became its own reward; to pause was to risk falling prey to paralyzing self-doubts and anxieties.

The result, Lears observes, was a new “activist version of therapeutic self-absorption-a fascination with ‘risk-taking’ and ‘winning through intimidation’ as ends in themselves.”

Hence the rudderless, hortative rhetoric of Spartan Race’s promo copy, which seems lifted in equal parts from a Tony Robbins seminar and an XM Death Metal marathon. On the one hand, the race lists its principal requirement as “a desire to live!” and notes that the top three qualify to compete in the allied world champion “Death Race” in Pittsfield, Vt. On the other hand, the race offers standard-issue tchotchkes and picnic-outing diversions: Top finishers win either an “authentic Spartan helmet” or an “authentic Spartan spear” (which, at this late date, presumably means that each item was touched at some point by someone who once visited Sparta).

Onlookers, meanwhile, can have their “picture taken dressed as a Spartan” or take part in “Spartan face painting, spray on abs and tattoos.” Somehow, I don’t think spray-on abs quite comports with the Rough Rider’s vision of the strenuous life.

Nevertheless, Spartan Race is clearly at the center of a booming market. There’s the Warrior Dash competition, which, as Wayne notes, graces participants with “a horned ‘warrior helmet’ reminiscent of Hagar the Horrible’s.” Across the pond, we have the British Tough Guy Race-and a couple of stateside mud-themed contests, Tough Mudder and Muddy Buddy, for when the classical virtues seem, I dunno, a little too chi-chi. Any theme will do, it seems, so long as it promises therapeutic self-absorption and arduous self-dramatization. “Corporate life, and life as we know it today, is very comfortable,” says Brian Duncanson’s Spartan Race’s remorselessly on-message CEO. “People may think they have it hard, but it’s nothing compared to how hard it used to be.”

But there’s hard, and you know, hard. Sure, Death Race contestants have to eat a pound of onions each way as they go up and come down a mountain. But classical notions of honor were more than simply military and, well, gross-they also involved individual responsibility and the brand of practical, contextual wisdom that Aristotle called phronesis.

So in that spirit, I’d like to propose a new kind of extreme adventure for today’s financial and executive class. Let them forsake the Vermont mountains and see if they can’t manage to attract small-business investment back to the inner city neighborhoods decimated by the adjustable rate mortgages that today’s swashbuckling financiers marketed so heedlessly at the height of the bubble. Let them lay aside their authentic Spartan and horned Viking helmets for a bullhorn and a pile of leaflets to meet the challenge of trying to unionize a Walmart. (They’d better bring some lawyers in tow, as well, for the flood of harassment suits sure to follow.) Let them manage a school bond crisis or a federal mortgage cramdown, just once, in a manner that doesn’t redound to their benefit.

Any takers? Yeah, well, I thought not. Better to just polish your helmets, as it were, and take your due place along the other wussy gamers and desk jockeys.

Chris Lehmann’s book, “Rich People Things,” which is not at all a collection of these columns, is available now for pre-order! “Social criticism at its scorching-hot best,” says Barbara Ehrenreich!

“The teeth are bared, the claws outstretched. Even his whiskers seem to bristle with animosity. If anyone still thinks grey squirrels are cuddly little critters, here’s an image to prove them wrong.”

by John Ore

The first thing that’s going to strike her is the aroma. Your place will be filled with a deep, warm, earthy, intoxicating scent, and it will be so palpable that she’ll want to hug it. This is where you’ll want to interpose yourself, and a glass of Albariño.

This is how a fourth date should begin.

As the poet once said, “the way to make a friend into a lovah is to cook them up a dinner.” And the time to make a friend into a lover is the fourth date.

Presumably, if you’ve gotten to the fourth date, you’ve already done several things well, including mastering the first kiss (and probably first base). You scored those Grizzly Bear tickets for Governor’s Island. You introduced her to your favorite bar. Now it’s time to get cookin’.

I guess what I’m saying is: this Spanish pork roast works wonders.

There are reasons not to trust me when it comes to food-such as my recent episode of “pine mouth.” Well, trust this: I’m half Puerto Rican and half Latvian. That means I’m genetically predisposed to pork.

I dig the pig, I’m fine with the swine. And whatever shortcomings I’ve got, I’ve at least been able to parlay that heritage into being able to cook. My father could too, although he never made the same recipe twice, owing to the fact that he never wrote anything down. (Curiously enough, my wife snagged me with a bottle of Gentleman Jack. But that’s another story.)

So, why waste time trying to impress someone with some snooty restaurant’s food when you can impress them with yours? Here’s a simple plan for the quintessential fourth date: the home-cooked meal.

To Begin

Jamon Serrano
Manchego cheese, 6 or 12 month is fine
Pan con tomate

• sliced baguette
• roma tomatoes
• olive oil

The whole point of the home-cooked meal is comfort: informal setting, relaxed pace, copious amounts of booze, homey atmosphere. When you are comfortable, you are confident. When you are confident, you are fascinating. (This, like all things and all recipes, it goes without saying, is equally true for women!)

But I also want you to feel confident in being able to pull this menu off. I’m a sucker for simple appetizers that can be procured, prepared, and presented easily without resorting to Totino’s® Pizza Rolls®. I generally prefer serrano ham to prosciutto, since it’s got a nuttier flavor from the pigs feeding on acorns. If you’re a Big Deal, try for jamon iberico de bellota-the black pig!-which fetches something insane like $25 for a quarter-pound. But it is amazing, rich and nutty, delicate and slightly more oily than jamon serrano.

Joining the ham should be some nice Manchego cheese and pan con tomate, which is simply sliced bread rubbed with halved tomato and drizzled with olive oil. Cut the baguette of your choosing into rounds, and halve a nice roma tomato. Rub the sliced side of the tomato on the bread, imparting a nice rosy pink color to it. Drizzle a little olive oil-Spanish, naturally, or Croatian if you can get it (and if you can, tell me where!) or of course Frankies, which you should have on-hand anyway-and top with a piece of the ham. Enjoy with a refreshing glass of Albariño.

The Main Event

Pernil, a garlicky pork roast

• one 3–4 lb. pork roast, preferably a shoulder roast
• 6 cloves garlic
• 6 peppercorns
• 1 tsp kosher salt per 1/2 lb. of roast, so usually 6 or so
• 1 1/2 tbsp dried oregano
• 1 1/2 tbsp olive oil

Tostones, fried savory plantains

• 3 green plantains, unripe
• 1 cup olive oil (or your preferred lighter frying oil)
• kosher salt to taste

Cuban Beans (should be called Puerto Rican black beans, really)

• 2 cans of black beans, drained and rinsed (or you can use dried)
• 1/2 Spanish onion
• 1/2 green pepper
• 2 tbsp ground cumin
• white vinegar
• olive oil
• 1 bay leaf

Arroz Con Gandules, rice with pigeon peas

• 1 cup white or yellow rice (I generally prefer yellow, but white is fine)
• 1 can Goya pigeon peas
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• tomato paste to taste
• 1 bay leaf

Sensing a theme? It’s a diasporic menu, “Spanish,” and not one that evokes tapas. A nod to my Puerto Rican abuela, who claims that I’m at least partially of European Spanish descent. My father claims I’m 1/16 cannibal, but I don’t really have any recipes for that.

While some of the ingredients are seemingly exotic, this is still a rustic meal. Forgo the Reidel stems and use simple Italian wine glasses like these awesome ones from Fish’s Eddy. By the fourth date, you’re craving familiarity and a lack of pretense. You probably worked pretty hard to get here. So let’s all relax

You should have the roast in the oven before she arrives. It provides an aphrodisiac room-filling aroma and ensures that you’re not focused on the kitchen (wrong room!). It takes about 90 minutes to cook, so plan accordingly.

The Pernil

I’ve recently taken to getting shoulder roasts from Bradley Farm at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket on Saturdays, but feel free to consult your favorite source. The great thing about pork is it doesn’t have to be expensive. Unless you buy organic, where I routinely blow $30 for a roast. Stupid? Genius?

Using a mortar and pestle-oy, you don’t have a mortar and pestle? Bag it and hit it with a hammer-crack the peppercorns and combine the garlic, salt and oregano. Crush the cloves of garlic: you’re going to want nice slivers and chunks, not slices. Add the olive oil once you’ve thoroughly mixed the dry ingredients. The results will be sort of a wet, sandlike paste.

Prepare the roast by patting dry, setting it fat-side down, and cutting a diamond-like pattern in the top with a sharp knife, using crisscrossing diagonal cuts. Since the roast will likely be tied with string, be mindful of the string but don’t sweat it if you cut it. While you’re wielding a knife, make some deep plunging cuts in the roast, creating 1- to 2-inch pockets in the meat.

Take your moist adobo mixture and rub the roast thoroughly. The crisscross cuts will provide some nice crevices for the mixture, so work it into the meat. Remember those deep plunge cuts? Stuff those with slivers of the garlic, or even whole cloves. It is now ready for the oven.

The oven should be at 325 degrees, or 350 if it runs cooler. The pernil will take about 90 minutes- 25–30 minutes per pound. It’s also awesome on the grill over indirect heat, but this is a fourth date, not the Fourth of July.

So, you’ve got your hovel smelling like heaven, ideally when she arrives. Set her upon the appetizers with a glass of wine.

Everything Else

While the pernil is a-roastin’, you can prepare the sides, which should take no more than 20 minutes. But if you prefer to spend more quality time together, rather than you in the kitchen and her admiring your etchings, you can certainly do the beans and rice in advance. Save the plantains to do together: it’ll be a fun, intimate joint exercise. Complete with hot oil!

Throw your beans into a good-sized saucepan and get them going over low-medium heat. You already know this, but you should be using Goya black beans. You know how we feel about substitutes! Since the onions and the peppers take the longest to soften, throw those in next. Eyeball the veggies: you want them to complement the beans, not the other way around. Ideally, a 2/3 beans to 1/3 veggies mix is what you are aiming for, but feel free to adjust to suit your proclivities.

Add the vinegar, olive oil, bay leaf and cumin, then stir the holy heck out of everything for maximum flavor integration. You may also add some Goya Adobo to taste. Lower the heat to simmer, stir occasionally and watch for the beans sticking. Once they are done, you can always remove them and re-heat quickly before serving.

The rice is even easier: make the rice however you normally make rice. I use the old-fashioned method with water and a saucepan, but if you have a rice cooker then by all means indulge. Once the rice is just this side of done, throw in the other ingredients and mix thoroughly. If you used white rice, the tomato paste should result in a nice rosy hue.

So, Mr. Rico Suave, you’ve got a divine-smelling roast in the oven, two burners worth of Spanish food simmering and you’ve been plying her with ham and white wine. You’ve made the meal look effortless so far, so relax together. Rock that vinyl collection you’ve been dying to show off, play some Scrabble. Read some poetry together! (Kidding: don’t.)

The last side requires some participation.

Tostones!
Making tostones is easier with two people, so enlist her help if she’s game. Again, be sure to use green plantains: tostones are savory and starchy, unlike their cousins, maduros, which are made from ripe plantains and are sweet. Remove the plantain skins, and cut each one into about 1–1/2 inch pieces. Pour the olive oil into a shallow skillet or frying pan: you want enough to cover each piece about halfway. Get the oil nice and hot (mm hmm!), and place the plantains into the oil so that they are cooking round side down.

The oil at once becomes a hazard, but have fun with it. (You should warn your date about this! Perhaps let her hold a splatter guard as a fan.) While one side browns in the oil, prepare a hard surface with paper towels: you can use a large butcher block, even a plate will do. Flip the plantains to brown the other side. When they are lightly browned, remove them and cover with additional paper towels. Here’s the fun part: apply pressure on each piece using a rolling pin, cutting board or the heel of your hands. Just be sure to press STRAIGHT DOWN. The result should be a uniform set of plantains about 1/2 inch thick and 2–3 inches across, preserving their rounded tops and bottoms.

Then! Throw these back into the hot oil until they are a golden brown. Drain on paper towels, season with kosher salt-or for a touch of variety add just a touch of granulated sugar as well.

In keeping with the theme, I generally like to accompany all of this awesomeness with a Spanish red wine. Go Priorat if you’re feeling indulgent (and spendy), but remember a couple of things. This is a rustic meal, so a good tempranillo or monastrell will work just fine. Second, there’s plenty going on flavor-wise with the food, so simpler, more earthy wines-Pinots, for example-are a better bet than juicy Zinfandels.

When the peril is done-I am for about 160 degrees internal temperature, and yes, a cooking thermometer costs pennies-remove to a cutting board and let it sit for about 10 minutes to finish cooking. You’ll have a lovely crust on top, and the fat on the bottom should have a nice chicharrón quality, a crispy layer that adds flavor and texture.

Using a sharp knife, slice the beast between the strings, into inch-thick portions. If you did it correctly, you may get cross-sections of the garlic you stuffed into the meat, almost like pistachios in mortadella. That’s a good sign, my friend. Serve a slice of the pernil with portions of the beans, rice, tostones and (more!) wine.

This is meant to be ethnic comfort food for a comfortable occasion. You are both eating garlic, so no one has to worry about the not-so-fresh-breath you worried about on the second date. (Yes, you can keep mints scattered about on various surfaces for later.) And salted meats encourage quenching your thirst, with plenty of Spanish wine within reach. You’re in an environment with familiar things, on your own schedule and outside of prying eyes. A couch is handy.

Also, you’ve successfully proven you can cook-and therefore provide.

As my abuela (may or may not have) said: “If you can’t close the deal with pernil, que sinverguenza!”

Yes, John Ore is Clarence Rosario. He’s 1/16th cannibal, and has a crush on Andres Iniesta.

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