*Words of Cordelia Chase in her last appearance on Angel before her death.
It's time for my confession. I think everyone I know knows that I'm a huge Buffy fan. I'm not sure anyone realizes how much of a fan I really am. There is no other TV show that has ever come close to grabbing my attention the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (the Buffy spin-off) have. Even Battlestar Galactica, a fantastically politically relevant scifi epic, is a very distant second. Some may think that Veronica Mars or Medium or maybe Heroes might fill that supernatural and/or chick super-hero gap for me. (Supernatural doesn't even make my list, by the way...the jury is still quite a ways out from reaching a verdict on the new Bionic Woman.) While each of those shows addresses the battle between good and evil, right and wrong, none comes nearly as close to focusing on the daily struggle of sorting out all that gray in between as Buffy and maybe to a greater extent, Angel. Nor do any of them allow the same level of real, drastic change in character or setting, in my opinion. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
It wasn't a simple seduction. I was a late adopter. (Even after I was hooked on Buffy, I shrugged off Angel until I realized there were crossover episodes.) I heard the hype about Buffy dying at the end of Season 5 and moving to a new network. Few shows pull that off...actually, do any? Then FX showed two episodes a day throughout the summer of '01. My husband, much to his continued regret, was the person who suggested that I might like to check it out. I was fully addicted in time for Buffy's resurrection on UPN in the fall. I now own all the DVDs for both shows. I've been to one Buffy convention. I've met James Marsters (Spike) on three different occasions, and I collect the post-series comic books. (I should note that my participation in the Buffy 'community' was short lived. I realized fairly quickly that my Buffy obsession was actually very different than that of other fanatics. These people are more like serial monogamists with their TV obsessions.) I did have an opportunity to enable one other person's addiction. I don't know that she's bought the DVDs for herself yet, but she got some quality time with mine. (Yes, I'm talking about you Melissa. I got your text message about your teary-eyed re-watching of "Once More, With Feeling", by the way. Remember: Life isn't bliss. Life is just this. It's living.)
So why do I choose now to tell you about this, four years after the end of Buffy and three years after the end of Angel? Last night, I completed a several months-long project - re-watching both of the series in order. I skipped a few episodes, especially from the early years, but as the stories progressed, as the characters changed, as the weight of the plots increased, the fewer and fewer I skipped. I won't try to recount for you all the themes and characters and story-lines that particularly move me, but I do feel the need to provide some explanation as to why I have this bizarre attachment to such ephemera. In good, old-fashioned blogosphere meets Letterman tradition, I think I'll use the list format to highlight just ten of the reasons why I love these shows:
Number Ten: High school horror metaphor. The first and most obvious charm of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is its use of demons and supernatural occurrences as metaphors for the everyday horrors of adolescence. It allows for a lot of comedy, despite the fact that real people die, and Buffy, herself, is constantly in mortal danger. One of my favorite examples is perfectly expressed in the very second episode when Joyce, Buffy's mom, grounds her for getting in trouble at school (no doubt due to a demon-fighting episode of some sort). "I know. If you don't go out it'll be the end of the world. Everything is life or death when you're a sixteen-year-old girl." Of course, in Buffy's case, it is life or death, and the world might end if she doesn't go out.
Number Nine: Unapologetic writers. This isn't so much a theme of the show, but it's something I find particularly amusing and satisfying about these series. If the writers want to take a drastic turn in the show, they just do it. Sometimes they do it gracefully. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes there are plot holes. Sometimes the effects are incredibly cheesy. Sometimes the metaphors are a little lazy. Sometimes they make reference to their own ridiculousness. All true, but the resulting stories are worth it. It's a means to an end. Trust them. If they're doing something that makes you crazy, there's usually a good reason.
Number Eight: The Initiative. Case in point. The Initiative is a demon-hunting military organization introduced in Season Four, Buffy's freshman year in college. This was an extreme turn for the show. Apparently, most fans hated it. They just wanted the show to do what other shows do - get stuck for eternity in the Buffy/Angel romance. Please, people. This is the number one mistake most TV writers make. It results in the telling of the same story over and over again. Take Smallville for example. Clark and Lana. I've watched exactly one-third of an episode of that show in the past three years, and it happened to be about Clark and Lana for-the-last-time-almost-getting-together-but-something- getting-in-the-way-before-it-actually-happens yet again. Buffy, however, moves on, and people can't take it. Guess what? That's life, people. In the immortal words of Cordelia Chase, "Get over it." This season produced some of the best episodes of the entire run of the series, like the Emmy-nominated "Hush", in which all of the characters lose their voices while The Gentlemen rip out hearts all over town, "The Yoko Factor", in which Spike, made powerless by the Initiative when they put a chip in his head that kept him from doing harm to humans, manages to turn Buffy's gang against each other through very clever social manipulation, and "Restless", a surreal season finale in which the whole gang meets up with the First Slayer in their dreams.
Number Seven: Angel/Angelus. Angel is Angel, the vampire with a soul. Angelus is Angel's alter ego who shows up on occasion when Angel is temporarily relieved of his soul. As the story goes, Angelus was cursed with a soul by gypsies back in 1890-something after a century of murder and mayhem so that he may live out the rest of eternity in torment for the horrors he commmitted. In the early years of Buffy, the difference between the two personalities is very distinct - not terribly muddled with moral ambiguity. (By the way, per the curse, Angel loses his soul when he experiences a moment of, ahem, 'perfect happiness'. So what do you suppose happened when Buffy finally gave it up to him on her 17th birthday? Do you think he called the next day? Right. Score again for teenage girls' worst nightmares.) Once you get a good look at Angel in his own series, you realize that the darkness still exists below the surface of that soul. He's capable of some pretty surprising and disturbing things, although letting Drusilla and Darla (evil vampires from his past) massacre a roomful of evil human lawyers might fall into a disputable gray area. Even when not motivated by vengeance and despair, he's capable of making cold decisions for the sake of the greater good. A century of mass murder gave him a pretty thick skin.
Number Six: Spike. Yeah, I know. I have a thing for guys who need to be tamed. Shut up. Despite my predilection, Spike's character is worth some mention simply because he's such a wild card in the two series. He was slated to be a bad guy who gets dusted at the end of Buffy's second season, but the character was so popular that the producers decided to keep him around. And how. Spike went from bad guy to good guy. He went from kicking the Slayer's ass to getting a piece of it. He went from comic relief to dramatic lead and back again. The most interesting years for his character occurred after he was 'neutered' by the Initiative with the chip in his head and before he endured the demon trials to get his soul back. Technically, he was still evil, even with the chip, but when he found out he could still kill demons, not people, he started fighting along side the good guys. He fell in love with the Slayer. He thought he was being a good person when he was really acting out of selfishness, hoping to win points with Buffy for all his good deeds. Even this was debatable. Spike exhibited some behavior during this period that could make you wonder whether or not an evil thing was capable of change, no matter what the original motives were. In regards to his soul, yes, the writers let Spike be the second vampire with a soul, just to make Angel crazy. The two characters are still quite different, however. As Angel says to Spike after he shows up in L.A., "You asked for a soul. I didn't! It almost killed me. I spent a hundred years trying to come to terms with infinite remorse. You spent 3 weeks moaning in a basement, and then you were fine!"
Number Five: Redemption. Redemption is the core theme of Angel. Each character is guilty of some kind of sin. Cordelia Chase evolves from a self-involved rich girl to a self-sacrificing super-power. Wesley Wyndham-Price raises himself up from a bumbling buffoon of a Watcher to a self-effacing, self-reflective, and tragic figure struggling with and often failing in some incredibly painful decisions. Angel, of course, continues to seek redemption for all the horrible atrocities he committed as Angelus with a margin of hope that he might one day become human again. (Prophecy schmophecy.) In the end, redemption can never really be achieved. It's a carrot on a stick that these characters keep chasing until death.
Number Four: The chosen one. The premise of Buffy is that the Slayer is the ONE girl in all the world chosen to fight the vampires, demons, blah, blah, blah. By the second season, Buffy has broken that rule. She has a knack, actually, for finding loopholes in prophecies. At the end of season one, she dies...just for a minute, and then she's revived. Because of her death - however temporary it is - a new Slayer is called. So, for six out of seven seasons of Buffy, there are actually two Slayers. Okay. Ultimately, Buffy continues to fulfill the role of the chosen one, but it has very little to do with her mystical choseness and everything to do with who she is, her personal strength, incredible intuition, intelligence, and dedication to doing the right thing, no matter the cost. She isn't cold in her decision making, like Angel. Up until Season Six, Buffy mostly wears her heart on her sleeve. It's charming, really.
Number Three: Real human death. Joyce, Anya, Tara, Cordelia, Fred, and Wesley are all core characters to the series, and they all die. A lot of shows won't kill off important characters so flippantly. Fans can't take it. Even on Buffy and Angel, it's hard to take death seriously when characters like Buffy, Angel, and Spike all die at least once and are magically resurrected. That's what makes the other, mundane natural human deaths that much more dramatic. Joyce, Buffy's mom, dies of a brain aneurism. There's nothing mystical about it. Anya is gruesomely sliced in half during the final battle at the Hellmouth. Tara is shot with a gun. Wesley gets a knife in the gut in the last moments of Angel - a painful death, no doubt. Cordelia's death is most poignant because she was an original cast member from day one of Buffy. She dies in the very final season of Angel after spending months in a coma following a ridiculous demon possession. She has one mystical return to consciousness to help put Angel back on his path before her death. Fred's death is extremely traumatic, and not really human, now that I think of it. An ancient demon devours her body from the inside out until it is only a shell for its new inhabitant, Ilyria. Even Fred's soul is burnt away to nothing, eliminating any possibility of resurrection, despite the mystical nature of her death. Besides being painfully blunt and final, these deaths are pointless in one way or another. No greater purpose is served by any of these sacrifices. These men and women simply succumbed to forces beyond their control and their inevitable mortality, period.
Number Two: Buffy series finale. As usual, Buffy breaks some more rules at the end of the series. Most of us were irritated halfway through Season Seven as we watched Buffy's house fill up with a bunch of whiny teenage girls who were in line to be the next Slayer. Some great evil is hunting them down and killing them, in an attempt to kill off the entire line of Slayers, so Buffy brings as many as she can to Sunnydale to try to protect them and prepare them for battle. At the same time, fans wondered how the series could possibly end satisfactorily without Buffy's death. As far as we knew, there was no other way for her to escape her duty as Slayer. Oh, but our faith in the writers was low. Buffy finds a way to turn all the potential slayers into real Slayers, creating thousands of super-powered chicks all over the world. Cool. Now she isn't the only one. My favorite moment of this episode occurs in the last scene after Spike, of all people, saves the world (although the Hellmouth manages to devour the entire town of Sunnydale in the process) when Buffy looks at the road ahead of her rather than at the gaping pit behind her.
Number One: Angel series finale. The end of Angel, however, came with a little less hope. Over the course of Season Five, the characters were slowly come to the inevitable realization that the choice they made at the beginning of the season to take over the L.A. branch of Wolfram and Hart, the evil law firm run by all powerful forces of evil known as the Senior Partners (yes, it's supposed to be funny) was a devastating mistake. In the last episodes, they make a choice to turn this bad decision around and use what power they've gained to try to make a dent in the Senior Partners' armor. They know they'll die, but they realize they made that choice when they signed on to Wolfram and Hart in the beginning. The last episode ends not with the settling dust of the final battle, like Buffy, but with the first battle cry of The Apocalypse, the moments before we assume the last of the characters are slain, fighting desperately to show an eternal evil that they have a choice, that they have not been corrupted, and that they'll fight on the side of good, even when there is no hope. It gives me goose bumps.
I had expected this list to be short. Well, hopefully for your sake, I got a lot out of my system in this post, even though writing it made me think of a dozen other things I love about these shows. I didn't even touch on all the sex, torture, and violence. I barely mentioned Faith, the naughty Slayer. Maybe I should have gone back to some Buffy-related forum to get my issues worked out, but the folks there would just encourage me, I'm sure. I see what happens on Chris's Japanese toy sites. Damned enablers, they are. The silence I hear from the readers of this blog is really what I need right now. Thanks in advance for helping me out.
There is no acceptable form of birth control. My grandmother used to make a joke about how best to use the pill. "Hold it between your knees." Yeah, I tried that, and it's really hard to do while having sex. Har har.
I quit hormones after 12+ years. They started to make me crazy in both pill and ring form. My stress rose to intolerable levels. Let's not speak of the headaches. Of course, my doctor said that I simply needed to reduce stress in my life. Oh, imagine how splendid that would be, but imagine how unlikely. Instead, I decided to take control of the things I could easily control, I.E., my medication, as in, I stopped taking it. Ah, problem solved. Right. The headaches are long gone, but irony of all ironies: quitting the pill increased my sex drive. Fantastic.
So, I traded in one problem for another. (Actually, I traded in several problems for several others.) As I told a co-worker of mine who held up a particular brand of birth control pill that keeps women from having their periods as evidence of our over-medicated society, "Good diet and regular exercise are not effective forms of birth control." It makes me crazy that fertility is a condition that has to be treated, one way or another. So what's a girl to do?
(If somebody suggests condoms to me, I will get upset. Besides the obvious problems, nonoxynol-9 is not my friend.)
How's about a diaphragm? Seems like a good idea. I like a good old-fashioned mechanical solution to a problem. Oh, but wait. It really only works if you use it with spermicide, which tends to have a numbing effect on certain critical parts of the body, not the least of which, dare I say, is the tongue...not mine, of course. Oh, and it only works if you insert it correctly. That's not an easy task, I tell you what, and I wouldn't call it an effective method of foreplay, either. Chris, however, made it sound like fun. "It's like a trampoline at the end of the runway." I laughed and laughed, but I still had to ditch it.
So, what next? Surgery? No, I'm less a fan of surgery than I am of chemicals and hormones. Abstinence? Riiight. Cervical cap? If inserting a diaphragm's a pain, could you imagine getting this right? Female condom? Please. Ok, what's left?
IUD! Yes, as I mentioned in an earlier blog post, there's something else I can try, and try I have. Now, if I can manage to stop bleeding, all will be well. Luckily, the cramps went away after a couple days. I was afraid I was going to have to re-ignite my love affair with ibuprofen. None of this compares to the insertion, itself, in my opinion. I've never given birth, so I realize my scale for pain may not be adjusted properly. I've been told, however, that I have a pretty high threshold.
Keep in mind that those of us who have not had children have likely never had anything inside our uteri before. For the insertion of an IUD, they gotta stick a couple different things in there to get the job done. I suppose my tiny cervix didn't help me out in this case. This illustration of the tools and the step-by-step process plus a little imagination should make you wince a little:
Ouch. The good news is, assuming I don't decide I hate this thing, I can keep it for ten years. If my plan works, this will be the last time you hear from me on the subject. Lucky you.
As I was searching for images of the ParaGuard IUD to share with you, I came across this Peaches video on YouTube that I'd never seen before. It has little to do with birth control, but it still seems appropriate. I find the use of footage from the Andy Griffith Show confounding but oddly hilarious in a few spots.
I know I'm a little behind the times on this one. I call myself an atheist, and I let Sam Harris's The End of Faith languish on the shelf for three years? As I've mentioned on many occasions, I rarely pick up books without pictures since my tenure at Malaprop's ended many, many moons ago. Even in those days, you'd rarely catch me with a work of non-fiction. Science fiction and slipstream primarily held my interest. Then again, at the turn of the century, the world was quite different. We all fantasized about what would come in the the new millennium: Would technology bring us to the dawning of the true Age of Aquarius or would its failure return us to the Dark Ages? The future held so much potential, so much excitement. Science fiction really fueled that feeling for me.
Now we're living in the future. We did not go tumbling backwards into darkness - at least not in the manner for which we had so thoroughly prepared with our bottled water, canned goods, fuel, and ammunition. For better or worse, we got a little closer to a Neuromancer world than Mad Max. However, I know that I, for one, was not expecting to find myself in a world dominated by faith-based conflict, a world in which 44% of Americans believe that Jesus will probably return to Earth in the next 50 years, a world in which Muslim mothers rejoice when their sons blow themselves up in crowded markets. My self-absorbed, insulated, liberal world view got a bit of a beating, to say the least.
Sam Harris addresses so many of the questions I've struggled with since 9/11: Why are Muslims at the center of so many military struggles? (One word: Jihad.) Why would I feel better about the war in Iraq if I actually believed Bush wanted to liberate, say, the oppressed women of the world? (Because that would be a logical reason for a war.) Why does the U.S. support Israel so zealously? (Because our president believes that the rebuilding of Solomon's temple will bring the Second Coming of Christ and the ultimate destruction of the Jews.) How can we expect such inherently incompatible belief systems to coexist peacefully in the world? (We cannot.) Why do the liberals attempts to promote religious tolerance sound like bullshit lip service? (Because religious tolerance is impossible and illogical based on the teachings of these religions, themselves.)
Besides so concisely clearing up these nagging little issues for me, Harris covers some ground I didn't expect. His discussion of moral relativism versus realism especially made me sit up and take note. I've considered myself a moral relativist (or pragmatist), but he points out the inherent contradictions in my thinking. As I read his argument for realism, I thought about the moral issues that trouble me, the things that I thought I couldn't resolve for myself without a little relativism, and I realized that they could be resolved in reality.
Let's take abortion, for example. I've always been pro-choice, and yet I find both sides of the argument disturbing. The religious conservative rejection of a woman's right to be in control of her own body is clearly infuriating. On the other hand, the argument that a human life has value, even shortly after conception could hold some water for me. The pro-choice fight to protect abortion in any trimester feels a bit extreme, as well. However, backing down from this fight in any way is not acceptable for those who adamantly support women's rights. The argument becomes political and pragmatist at this point - not based in reality. What do I mean by that? I mean that in reality, we can't pinpoint the true beginning of human life as we know and respect it. Scientifically speaking, we don't know when that embryo truly becomes a person. This is what makes me uncomfortable. If science could tell me without a doubt when that group of cells becomes inherently human (which I believe science will be able to do one day), I won't feel quite so sick about it. For me, this has absolutely nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with ethics based on what we know about the world. If I knew for a fact when consciousness begins, the debate would be over...at least for me.
Speaking of consciousness, the last chapter, Experiments in Consciousness, was not quite what I anticipated, either. He tentatively covers topics like spirituality, self-awareness, and Buddhism, while attempting not to undo all the work he invests in having us, the readers, let go of irrational approaches to thinking about the world. I've, personally, made a very strong effort to think about consciousness as a function of the brain, not something separate or inherently spiritual, so I was skeptical about how Harris was going to navigate these subjects. Ultimately, I have little issue with his characterization of mindfulness, meditation, and the practice of seeking a selfless state of mind as being a logical and scientific approach to learning more about one's own state of consciousness. These are, of course, the reasons that Buddhist philosophy is so appealing to modern practitioners, including me at one time. I'm a little disappointed that Harris doesn't explicitly acknowledge much similarity between Buddhist religion and Western religions. While Buddhism isn't exactly causing a lot of conflict around the world, I would have liked him to at least address the concept of religion as opiate for the masses, a tool used specifically to keep people from questioning the actions of their leaders. Buddhism can be used to this end as well as any other.
All in all, this is the most relavant thing I've read in a long time. Thank you, Mr. Harris, for giving context for so many of the seemingly contradictory thoughts and theories that have been floating around in my head for a while. I feel like I have a useful framework for thinking about some intense subjects, not to mention about a hundred pages of footnotes for reference, in case I want to do any additional reading.
Before I share with you my review of the silent era classic The Birth of a Nation, I think we should step back a moment and consider how sophisticated we have become at using moving pictures (with sound!) to create gripping social commentary. Check out this gem:
Now consider D.W. Griffith's legendary epic, also known as The Clansman. Chris requested that we order this one from Netflix. I was shocked, but I didn't argue. I, too, have fallen victim to the I'll-put-this-movie-in-my-queue-because-I-should-watch-it-one-day trick when what I really want to do is just watch any two star movie that shows up on the Encore Action channel. When the Netflix movies show up, they sit on the shelf for weeks, maybe months, until we send them back or maybe occasionally watch one.
Last night, we finally decided to give this one a go. Maybe it's the kung fu or the fact that I drink a lot more water these days, but I was actually able to stay awake and attentive for the full 187 minutes. Chris gave up after about 5. Had I not mentioned that the movie was 187 minutes as I put the disc into the player, Chris might've lasted a bit longer.
I thought I might force myself to watch the film to fill in the gaps of my questionable film school education, but I quickly realized that the film was easy to watch because it was, well, good. This is actually the surprising and frightening realization about this film. The movie didn't spend 44 weeks in the theater in New York simply because it was controversial. As is often noted by modern critics, this film demonstrates incredible technique in the art of filmmaking. It's so well done that it's even accessible to a modern, skeptical, and fickle audience like me.
Why is this so frightening? Well, after being drawn into a compelling story about North versus South, friends killing friends, lovers split by war and ideology, you might not consciously realize that you've been steered in the direction of sympathy for the poor southern family who's lost so much during the war, not the least of which are two out of three sons. As the second half of the movie begins, you have even more reason to feel sympathy for these helpless white folk as they are overridden by zealous politicians from the North determined to elevate the rights and power of the uneducated black masses above all else.
At this point in the film, a modern audience might begin to question the version of history being delivered here. I mean, wow, that Reconstruction must've been tough for those poor white souls who had been nothing but good to those thankless slaves. Clearly, the negroes of the time were nothing but vengeful, lazy, drunk, and obsessed with having sex with white women. They had no right to have guns or be elected to office. Blocking the white men from the polls alone was an unforgivable offense. Something had to be done.
Enter our heroes: the Ku Klux Klan. It's a sickening experience to be watching an army of white-hooded men and horses descend on a town overrun by the heathen blacks and realize, as horrific as you know the scene to be, you are still holding on for the last scene in which Lillian Gish is saved from the corrupt mulatto by her savior in white. If even I, a San Franciscan liberal jaded by the tactics of our modern Republican marketing machine, can feel some level of sympathy for the oppressed Southern white man, what in the world might we expect of an impressionable new audience to the big screen in the early 1900s?
I'll tell you what you get: a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization all but destroyed following the Civil Rights Act of 1871, and a legacy of filmmaking techniques that manipulate our feelings and influence our opinions to an extent beyond our comprehension. Luckily, Hollywood films aren't that good anymore, so maybe we're in less danger of being led astray. Riiiiiight. Maybe it's good I didn't see The Birth of a Nation in film school. I might've lost my fascination with the moving image all together.
Do I think the meat industry is destroying the planet? Yes. Do I think America's brain-washed love affair with fast food is a major cause of our country's health crisis? Yes. Do I think the hormones, antibiotics, and carcinogens found in grilled burger meat will kill me if I don't stop living out this crazy fantasy? Yes. Do I think killing animals for food is inherently wrong? Well, no. I have no major qualm with the concept of a food chain. However, it's clear that the industrialization of meat production is cruel, disgusting, and unhealthy. If you're going to eat it, go hunt it down and kill it yourself, right?
Yeah, right. Clearly, I'm conflicted. I justify my meat-eating frenzy by saying that this is temporary. I've simply fallen off the wagon. I don't have (m)any other vices right now. I'm picking my battles. And since I no longer claim to be Buddhist, I have no lingering moral dilemma about the killing of animals...except of course the horrible way in which they are killed...(sigh)
So here are my favorite burgers in San Francisco. I record these memories here so that when, in the future, I give up meat completely, I can relive these moments in my mind. A little will power and a vivid imagination can go a long way. I just have to work on the will power part.
Burger Joint: This place makes the best burger I've ever eaten. Even the photo of it is glowing a little. (I think some grease got on my camera phone, creating a bit of a vaseline lens effect.) I can justify eating here because they use hormone-free Niman Ranch beef. The flavor is unbelievable. I order my burger medium-rare for maximum juiciness and flavor. The burger comes with fresh lettuce, tomato, red onion, pickles, and mayo on the bun. There are no fancy, gourmet options. I hate that crap. I don't even like cheese on my burger. Call me a purist, but this might still be the best burger ever, even if it were served with only a bun and a little mayo. So good. I just ate one for lunch today, and I'm drooling for another.
Mel's Diner: The key, I've realized, is to order the burger the way you want it. Duh. Often I don't even try to order my burger medium-rare because I don't think the cooks will do it. Guess what? They usually don't. Even when I ordered my medium-rare burger at Mel's, they just barely made it medium, in my humble opinion. (Keep in mind that I was raised to believe that a rare steak should be cold in the middle.) Even cooked at medium, this was still a fantastic thick and juicy burger - just what you'd hope for from your favorite diner. Speaking of which, I didn't used to be a big fan of Mel's. I had some disappointing experiences at the one on Mission across the street from the Metreon. The Mel's on Geary has never let me down. We've become regulars there...I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that they have parking and are right down the street from one of our favorite comic book stores.
Whiz Burgers: This is a different kind of burger - thin patty, iceberg lettuce, with all toppings applied before it's wrapped up and handed to you in a greasy bag. It's still better than your typical fast food. I'm generally more a fan of a classic burger, but in this case, I recommend the Whiz Burger, which has all the regular toppings plus avocado (eh) and bacon (yes!). The patty is cut in half and the burger is served on a french roll, too. Classy.
Tony's Cable Car Restaurant: This drive-in is only a couple of blocks from Mel's. We've almost stopped there a dozen times, but we were uncertain of what we'd find. Mel's was so close that we wouldn't take our chances. Finally, one Saturday we had enough foresight to leave the house with Tony's in mind as our destination. It was worth it. I'd rank the burger about equal with Whiz, but they have a pretty big menu that I simply must go back and peruse. Mmm, a tender ribeye steak sandwich sounds pretty good...
Sparky's Diner: I haven't spent much time at Sparky's since I started eating meat again. I look forward to trying their burger, assuming I get back there before I give it all up for good. I put them on this list because a) I love them, and b) they have the best soy burger I've ever had. Better than Boca, yes. When I wasn't eating meat, this is what a burger was to me. It makes me a little sad. When eating soy burgers, I had actually forgetten what real burgers tasted like. I fooled myself into thinking these burgers were just as good as the real thing. I just hope one day I can go back to enjoying their heroic attempt at a substitute. The dollar beers at happy hour will help me cope.
