Last Summer

 It's that weird time between Xmas and New Years where every day can be termed Blursday. This is a classic time for a Heckasac post, and old school readers will remember that sometimes Smiller would take the wheel because he would be so bored at his job at PacCorp. I had many years where I got this time off, paid, and didn't have to use official vacation but those days are long gone.

This last week or so has been a social whirlwind. Fun but I'm feeling a bit run down and haven't been sleeping well. But feeling oh so grateful for friends, loved ones (lots of overlap there), cool presents, etc. Things finally finally finally seem back to normal from COVID to me, or as much as they will ever be with that memory of COVID that will linger forever.

I finally got through with reading the 600 pages of Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann and I HIGHLY recommend it although I'm haunted by the thought that maybe I should have read a newer translation. 

Now I'm reading a short Cynthia Ozick book called the Puttermesser Papers and it's so Jewish. It even has a golem! Great to read for Hanukah. She also mentions Middlemarch a lot.

I noticed that Criterion has a director's picks for John Waters now, so on his recommendation I watched the newest Catherine Breillat movie, Last Summer, which I don't think ever came to Sac.  

Seeing Breillat's Fat Girl in the theater was an indelible and devastating experience in a way that only a few movies have been. Last Summer is very good. The characters are complicated and not what you think. Recommend!

Melaka, Malaysia or: Heckasac does mukbang

My last post has gotten over 900 hits, thanks to Bill Burg posting it on Reddit. How cool to feel like this ol' blog has some life in 'er yet. Plus that put a nice end on the mildly painful saga of writing a piece and having it get killed.

I just returned from a two week solo trip to Singapore and Malaysia, and if you follow me on Insta, you know I posted pretty frequently. I do that more when I'm by myself so I don't get lonely and I feel like I'm communicating with friends while I'm traveling. I enjoyed seeing everyone's Halloween costumes, although it was cool to be in a country that was way more stoked on Diwali than Halloween. (Shout out in Sac to the Majka chef being Carmie, he really looks like him)

Rather than do an epic post on a two week trip, I thought I'd capture one night in the city of Melaka, south of Kuala Lumpur (once you've been to Malaysia it's fun to call it KL instead of Kuala Lumpur, everyone calls it KL). Melaka is one of the older cities in Malaysia, and was occupied by the Portuguese in the 1500s, and then the Dutch, starting in the 1600s. Then for a bit it was occupied by the British, and finally the Japanese from 1942-1945, which sounds like a chaotic 3 years in which the Japanese canceled school and then made the teachers learn Japanese and teach in Japanese. Then it was British again for a while and then in the 60s when modern Malaysia was formed it was Malaysia. I'm not great at history so I'm sure some of this is wrong.

Which is all to say it has many folks there who descended from Portuguese and Dutch, and I found out while reading about stuff to do that there was an area on the bay/coast that's called the Portuguese settlement and has seafood restaurants. That sounded like a nice sunset/nighttime activity. I saw it was about 35 minute walk from where I was staying. Most of the trip was very hot and humid, where I would be soaked in sweat over and over again throughout the day, and then rest and cool off in air conditioned places. I smelled and looked great, needless to say! But, around sunset, that length walk seemed doable although have no doubt, constantly bathed in sweat, never ceasing. Also, the area I was staying in was so tourist-choked, that catching a Lyft there (it's called Grab in a lot of Asia), would take so long, and driving once the car arrived would take so long that walking would take an equal amount of time even though it was only a couple of kilometers.

So, a walk! The walk took me out of the tourist area for the first time in my stay in Melaka, which although not as picturesque, was also not as tourist-choked and I got to see some non-tourist restaurants and areas. I was about 20 minutes into the walk when I came to a 6 lane road that I had to cross. I guess to call it a freeway would be dramatic but it felt more like a freeway than not a freeway and I did not want to cross it even though I was now within 15 minutes of my destination. Then I had a frustrating 20 minutes while I waited for a Grab, while I watched hotel guests staying in the big hotel across the freeway, leisurely cross the freeway, pausing in the middle for the other direction of traffic. Coulda crossed oh well.

So I get in the Grab and then in about 10 minutes we get to the Portuguese settlement. Wiki tells me that in 1933, some land was purchased for the Kristang people, which are the mixed Portuguese/Malaysian folks. They have a couple of festas in June, and a few buildings, and then a bunch of seafood restaurants.

When you roll up first thing you see is this Christ the Redeemer statue. 

I had to choose a spot to eat so I randomly picked one that looked crowded, I think I was in De Costa's, but the boundary between places felt fluid (while it probably totally is not)

This was a def big group dining spot. So as usual, I was the weirdo dining alone but no one cared and they were very helpful when I ordered

It was crowded and fast-paced. It was a Friday night and everyone was getting tons of dishes on big lazy susans. The ordering looked family style so I knew if I ordered more than one dish it would be too much food but ya gotta try more than one thing. I hadn't had crab on my trip so I decided on chili crab, sweet potato leaves and then the server asked about what I think he said was "pan" like bread and did I want three pieces I said ok not knowing what was up. Nothing on the menu sounded particularly Portuguese except you could get what they termed Portuguese baked crab or squid or fish. That sounded boring so chili crab it was.

The food took a while so I just people-watched and drank beer and then the sweet potato greens came first and I was really hungry and they tasted really good. 

Then came these little breads which were so hot, I think from being grill toasted and they were so yeasty and sweet I could have def eaten more of those. There are no other restaurants outside of the Portuguese settlement that I saw with this type of bread so this may be a Portuguese influence thing although I'm definitely no expert. 

Then came the chili crab and I was so wowed by the size and nervous about how I was going to eat it that I didn't even get a damn centered picture. Steamed crab can really retain the heat for a long time, so I kept trying to eat it while the shell was still burning hot. I love to eat crab, but I don't love to get messy so this was like a nightmare of being the only lone diner plunging my entire hands into this saucy saucy dish, and also fully dropping my crab cracker in the sauce and then trying to use it and having it be too slippery. Oh also, still sweating like a pig and they barely have napkins in Malaysia, sometimes not at all, but here, they had a box of tiny thin Kleenexes on the wall that I could reach. The sauce was on my face, it was running down my arms to my elbows (did not get it on my dress!) I really felt like I was doing a middle-aged white lady mukbang, which none of these poor patrons had asked for. There was a table of teenagers near me, innocently toasting pitchers of watermelon juice and my nightmare is someone would film me and I would go viral. About halfway through a server was like, oh we have gloves and I said too late! I'm all in. Since it's crab there isn't actually as much meat as you think, there was no body meat, just legs and claws, so it was not the insane amount of food I thought at first. It was all 98 ringgit, including beer, so that's about 25 bucks, which is expensive for Malaysia.

Before I ate I took some pictures of the shoreline, pretty dystopian, with like, this semi-crumbling and almost aquatic apartment houses against the sunset.

Before I ate I had a beer at this tiny bar at the end of a pier. It was a unique setting to have  a brew

 Glad to be home and I hope you liked this trip slice!

L'Amour Shoppe: yes it is owned by a man named Steven Weiner

 I wrote a piece on L'amour Shoppe that got killed by the publication. It makes sense, it is a conservative publication and the article is frank about sex. 

My favorite part of writing this was my time interviewing the very charismatic worker, Anthony. This piece would have been different (more freewheeling, dirtier) if I hadn't been writing it for this pub, but nevertheless I feel like it should see the light of day. I feel bad about the 2 employees taking time to talk to me  and then not knowing why they never heard anything else about it.

Also, I did not include that two workers were murdered in robberies in L'Amour Shoppe in separate incidents in the 80s. Well, one was actually the friend of a worker who filled in while his friend took a break and was murdered by a robber. Very sad.

L’Amour for Sale

Forbidding on the outside, with blacked out windows on which the extensive hours (9am-1am every day) are scrawled, the interior of L’Amour Shoppe is a cheerful, well-stocked oasis of sex positivity.

On the day this reporter visits, that vibe is emanating from salesclerk Anthony Chiaramonte, who has worked for the L’Amour Shoppe for seven months, after a long career in retail working for other adult shops –but also selling everything from marijuana to solar panels. With the long, straight hair of a rocker and elegantly tapered nails, Chiaramonte explains that selling sex toys is not that different from selling anything else, except that the goal is not a new pair of sneakers, but “orgasmic pleasure”.

As for why in this era of one-day Amazon Prime deliveries, folks still come in to purchase an item that might cause some a bit of embarrassment, he enthuses, “It’s all about that old school touch and feel and to put it in my hands really familiarize myself with what I’m getting…the people who come in here for the first time, they’re walking on eggshells and ready to ask a ton of questions but don’t know where to start. I’m definitely that person to ask…this is sex it should be FUN, and it should be pleasurable, and it should bring a smile to your face so let’s talk about it and see what’s out there and let’s talk about the possibilities.”

One such couple, seemingly in their early 40s, enters while he’s being interviewed, with the female in the couple sending the man in first to scout out whether it’s safe inside. She says, “The front is so 1980s, I was like, ‘I don’t think they have anything in there honey. And he said, ‘I’m just going to go look.’ Then he comes out and he says, "It's just normal: normal people, normal stuff.” Within moments, Chiaramonte has them relaxed and laughing giddily, as he says, “I’m like a marriage counselor and a sex therapist and your best friend all in one” as they browse.

It may be the personal touch (and free batteries, for toys that require them, although most these days are USB rechargable) bringing folks in to L’Amour Shoppe, and the market for sex toys is only growing. According to a market research firm, US sex toys sales (the US accounts for 33% of all sales globally) reached 12.6 billion dollars in 2021, and are projected to grow over 7% by the year 2026. Further, this firm concluded that the association of masturbation with wellness and self-care, the lessening of stigma around male-focused sex toys, and the increasing acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community are some factors behind this increase in sales.

As he gives a tour of the merchandise, Chiaramonte’s observations back up this research. He said some of the top sellers for women are brightly-hued, silicon-coated clitoral suction toys that are a variation on the rose-shaped toy that went viral on TikTok in 2022. Sex toys have gone so mainstream that this shape of toy was reviewed on the NY Times Wirecutter product review page; a suction-type toy is also sold on Gwyneth Paltrow’s trendsetting wellness website Goop.com.

Blunt, but never vulgar, Chiaramonte says from his time working in similar shops since 2004, he has seen the most increase in one genre of toys, “Butt. Twenty years ago it was so taboo, you were part of the butt club or you were not…That’s where I’ve seen the most growth in terms of technology and interest, especially hetero couples."

Chiaramonte shares staff theories about the history of the building, including the thought that it was a Chinese restaurant at one point, but a search of newspaper archives reveals that the building was built in the 1930s and was initially Hewitt’s Grocery Store. After that it was Fancy Shirt Laundry, which became Fancy’s Adult Books and Things in 1978. The first record of L’Amour Book Shoppe is in 1986 (a year in which the city shut down their peep-show booth, as well as four others in Sacramento). 

L’Amour Shoppe is more accurately termed L’amour Shoppe #7: the owner, Steven Weiner,  owns 6 others throughout the state from Santa Clara to Modesto, and other sex shops as far-flung as Texas. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

Winona Fulgencio manages L’amour, as well as Weiner-owned Intimates and Adult Bookstore in Lodi. She left the medical field, saying she needed a “mental break”, and started working at the Lodi store early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Within 3 months she was a manager there and then became the manager at L’amour in late 2021.

She does research to find the hottest new toys and also relies on friend’s recommendations, she says the job is “rewarding…it’s a good company to work for.”  

As to the forbidding exterior, she said that COVID stalled a planned facelift, “Corporate is trying to figure out a way to revamp…make it a little nicer.”

Asked to sum up her message for new customers who may be wary, Fulgencio echoes Chiaramonte in saying that there are benefits to seeing a toy in person, “A lot of people complain that when they order a toy off of Amazon it’s not what they like. They throw it away and come see us. They can test out the toys and see what they like. Or they come for lube or lingerie, and remember that we helped them…we’re trying to instill that we’ve changed management and we can provide customer service.”

Kru

 I'm almost embarrassed to admit how long it's been since I've been to Kru. I think 2019 yikes. I mean, there was a whole ass pandemic. But also, I put it into the category of places that are hard to get into and I forget about those places. But with Sac only having a double handful or so of date night restaurants I need to go more often.

We started with one bite of a warm scallop with teeny shrimp chips and a sauce made with roe of some kind. Then I got various nigiri, including uni and ikura, two faves. I hadn't realized that their cocktail list is so extensive, with multiple pages. I had what they were billing as a Japanese negroni but I just don't like negronis. It had a shiso leaf, and Japanese gin, and I fell for it because they said it had Japanese vermouth but it was still too syrupy for me. Then I ended the eve with pluot sorbet and a classic highball. Very nice night with some little luxurious extras sent out.

Being alive

 

Went with CH to see my first live Sondheim last night. I really enjoyed it although I don't know why Broadway shows are all so loonnnnnggg. I won tickets through my work. 

I knew a lot of the songs and I wasn't sure why, except for Being Alive being sung by Adam Driver in the Scenes from a Marriage remake (which I did not like). But then I realized that the thrilling DA Pennebaker Sondheim doc is on the making of the cast album from Company.

You should watch this doc! It's on Criterion. It's less than an hour and it's a fun glimpse into the creative process. The best part is Elaine Stritch struggling with Ladies Who Lunch.

I think I kind of got the Sondheim thing last night, the lightness and depth. It's very old-fashioned feeling, though. Company came out in 1970, so it is literally old. This new productions does a gender swap, where the protagonist is a woman. That gives it a bit of modernity. It's about whether to marry or not, and in 1970 probably no woman would even think of it as a question. 

Onibaba: Demon Hag

 

Well hello. Blogspot was a total fail as a way to announce the Halloween show and let people call bands. Oh well, I was looking forward to a Heckasacassance that did not happen.

That's fine, let's just blow the dust off and hawk tuah this thing amiright?

Let's see, Zelda's went under. I had already pre-grieved as they said on Succession. Going back to five years ago when Zelda's son, who had a Trumpy vibe, talked about wanting to sell and move to Reno I thought it was not long for this world. RIP Zelda's. You ruled!

I just turned in a thing I wrote about German food and beer and culture for Comstock's. This one was a slow burner. I first pitched it in June, but the editor said it would be ok closer to Oktoberfest so I dilly dallied. I got to tour secret parts of Turn Verein and nerd out on German food and beer so that was very fun.

I also just turned in a thing I wrote on Onibaba for the Dreamland zine, I'm very excited about that. It was a joy to write something where I could let my mind roam free. As much as I appreciate the business mag work, it's very constrained. I got to do research for Onibaba too. And then I watched another Shindo movie last night, Naked Island, which was a silent movie (music, no dialogue) about a family with a very hard life and one of them dies. Grim!

What about that Halloween show huh? Still on kind of  a high from it TBH. Shoot it right into my veins. Glad we are having another one in spring. 

Gotta go to Corti Bros now, nice checking in! Leave a comment but I know blogspot makes you do some BS stuff like pick out pictures of traffic lights or answer the Sphynx's riddle or something.

It's Baaaaaaaack!!