To stream or not to stream, Trent Reznor, and a regular sandwich

A new record from Cindy Lee, an old Nine Inch Nails video, an honest sandwich, rumors & ramblings, and your music pairing

Cindy Lee recently put out a record called Diamond Jubilee. I had never heard of Cindy, the semi-mysterious drag queen side project of Canadian-born musician Patrick Flegel. It sounds like Phil Spector and Brian Wilson scored a Quentin Tarantino flick and Kill Rock Stars put it out. But what’s really interesting about it—besides the fact that it’s two hours long—is that it’s not available to stream. The album is presented on YouTube as a single piece of music. You can listen to it all the way through or drag the progress bar to any point on the video, and you’ll hear something as good as whatever was playing right before. Pitchfork gave it a very high review score and accurately described it as more of a radio station than an album—maybe in the Grand Theft Auto sense of radio. I can imagine running red light after red light in my lowrider, driving around Vice City at sunset, mowing down pedestrians to the soundtrack of these breezy garage rock movements. 

The CD’s back cover

You can download the high-quality files with a suggested donation of $30 Canadian via PayPal on Cindy’s GeoCities page. GeoCities, an early internet hosting platform, was the third-most-visited website in 1999, behind AOL and Yahoo. I remember Radiohead doing a similar thing with In Rainbows in 2007; there was a “virtual tip jar” and a free download link. Most people didn’t pay anything (my broke ass included), but many did, and some of them more than the suggested donation. I remember hearing rumor of Trent Reznor dropping $5,000 in that tip jar. I recently had the chance to chat briefly with Trent on the red carpet last week. After nervously informing him that the “March of the Pigs” music video “changed my life,” I asked him what he thought about Orange County, my hometown as well as his wife’s. He said something about its gardens being well-maintained. I posted the clip of us chatting on Instagram, where my friend Ryan replied, “Trent looks rich as fuck.” 

Still from the video - Photo by Joseph Cultice

I’m attracted to people doing the opposite of whatever seems to be working right now. That could mean releasing your album on a GeoCities page that people find through word of mouth. These moments transcend social media and are good enough to be shared as news, not gossip, like Nine Inch Nails scrapping their Nine-Inch Nails-looking video at the last minute to instead film themselves playing their song in an empty white room in one take. It could also mean selling a regular sandwich void of oddly trending ingredients (or even ingredients most people like). These risks don’t seem risky if you know that what you’re doing is good.

I downloaded Diamond Jubilee and added it to my iTunes. (I hate calling it “Music”—it’s like calling your closet “clothes.”) I can listen to it on my laptop speakers, but it’s not easy to take this music with me on the subway or on a drive to the desert. I’d have to upload it to the cloud or to Dropbox and stream the files from there. It’s beyond clunky. At first, I tried to accept that certain music should not be listened to out in the world. Maybe you’re just not supposed to be vibing to it at the gym or on your FedEx route. Maybe you should listen to it on your Bluetooth speaker in your backyard while drinking beer and eating regular food, like an Asahi and an unromantic sandwich. But then I saw this tweet and realized the music is meant to be listened to in the world—only in certain situations.

There is a little German deli near me called Continental Gourmet Sausage Co. Their walls are adorned with plaques for various sausage competitions they’ve participated in through the decades. They sell international sundries, imported Haribo, fig liqueurs, and deceptively simple sandwiches. For $7, you pick your bread, a choice between a French roll and rye, and your meat and cheese. You can ask for a little mustard, but that’s about it. For 50 cents extra, add some onions, sauerkraut, or *squints eyes* a cheeky slug of Nando’s sauce. They’ll slice your meats and cheeses to order: turkey and butter cheese (a Danish havarti), or maybe mortadella and smoked gouda. They’ll add a scoop of German potato salad, a pickle, and a mini Snickers, the size of a single letter, and cram it into a glorious Styrofoam container. You can also order a sandwich made with one of their housemade sausages, which is boiled in a Crockpot to order. Just look at this video—this sandwich used to be enough.

You can eat these sandwiches in the car, and nothing will spill. No shredduce will find its way between your center console and your seat. The meats are sliced thicker than the average cold cut, and sturdy, like a big old woman. It’s a complete and honest meal. It reminds me of what people ate in the ’50s, businessmen and construction workers alike, or what people probably eat in Pittsburgh today. On my most recent visit, I was told that they were out of mortadella, and a voice from the back emerged from the on-site sausage factory to let us know that a fresh batch of logs had just come out of their water bath. For $7, I ate a sandwich filled with hours-old mortadella, yet to feel the sting of a cold case. You can’t buy a sandwich from godforsaken Subway for seven bucks, so when you pop into Continental, grab a weird soda, some wieners for the weekend grill, and a marzipan bear claw, if they have any left.

We all have our regular food cravings: our plain potato chip or Cheerios in a sea of amplified flavor twists. Sometimes my wife talks about this BLT she’d get from a roach coach outside her parents’ workplace when she was younger, made with industrial-grade white bread, clear iceberg scraps, and thin, cheapest-you’ve-got, brittle bacon. It’s the BLT she compares all BLTs to, and it has yet to be dethroned. I sometimes think about my regular sandwich growing up. I’d pull out the plastic bag of supermarket wheat bread, something like an Oroweat 7-Grain. Mayo and French’s mustard goes down, carefully troweled to each corner like frosting on a cake, and dusted with Spike brand seasoning. Lunchmeat turkey flaps were cut in half and butted into each corner of the bread at 90 degrees. Tiles of medium cheddar were hand-sliced and laid down with the care of ceramic tile in an Aesop store. Lastly, a few of our family’s best iceberg lettuce leaves were added, the rest left for dead in the crisper. 

Rumors & Ramblings

• I just recorded a conversation with musician and friend Rostam, a former guest of How Long Gone. It’s a crash course in Persian food and our OCD eating habits, and it should be out next week on Talkhouse.

• Spring is here, and ramps are in stock at Whole Foods. Dan Frommer and I have texted each other when they come in for the past couple of years. Whole Foods employees in California don’t know what a ramp is, nor do they know that they cost $20 to $30 per pound, so they’ll typically ring them up as leeks, a steal at $3. But when it comes time to go through the self-checkout, remember that they bear a striking resemblance to green onions (nonorganic). I made a ramp pesto with pistachios, pecorino, and lemon zest, and Karolyn rolled out a ramp-green tagliatelle with anchovy and asparagus. The jury is still out for me on whether they’re delicious or merely scarce.

• After reading Naomi Fry’s Nylon piece about Chateau Marmont being “back,” a line struck me:  “Costs them nothing, means the world.” It was used in reference to the hotel appointing Fry’s room with personalized stationery and strategically placed glass ashtrays. I was discussing this, sort of, with Alison Roman over dinner at Frenchette in New York last week. I told her a story about a group dinner at The Grill a couple of years ago. Their bread basket features an assortment of items, one being pretzel bread. I asked our career server if it would be crazy to request a bit of mustard to pair with my pretzel. He returned moments later with, I believe, a trio of mustards alongside a plate of pretzel sticks, lined up like hot dogs in plastic, all tucked into a cloth napkin like a Chateau bedspread. It cost them nothing, and here I am, telling that story years later.

• In my conversation with Rostam, he mentioned how important the variation of textures and temperatures is in Persian dining. Sometimes people put ice cubes in their mast-o-khiar (cucumber yogurt dip) to keep the cucumbers crispy and the yogurt cold against the hot, soft meat. It reminded me of when Molly Baz was on How Long Gone a bit ago. She mentioned putting ice cubes in her cereal to keep her milk cold. Is that crazy? Maybe not. Just ask how Ben and Jerry feel about putting ice and dairy together. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, why not make your ice cubes out of the excess cereal milk or blended cucumber?

Music Pairing 

“Deep Saffron,” Roger Eno and Brian Eno (via YouTube)

In the spirit of Persian food, I chose a song named after the beloved spice used to make things look and taste like they’ve been peed upon. You should listen to the whole album through. Two Enos and a piano—it just works.