Breakfast

I’ve been a breakfast freak since the 60s when I used to starve all day just so I could go to Helen’s Truck Stop out on the Rome, Ga., highway at midnight on Saturday and eat biscuits, red-eye gravy, ham, eggs and cheese grits until my eyes rolled back in my head. Then, I would go home and sleep until noon on Sunday. There aren’t many places like that around here, but I have found two that come close. The Cupboard Café in Dillard has a wonderful breakfast menu — the best thing being the thick slabs of bacon. I broke a dental plate there once, but it was my own fault. Bacon like that shouldn’t be attacked with unbridled passion. Chew slowly. The other place is the remarkable Spring Street brunch in Sylva (10 a.m. on Sunday mornings). I recommend the potato pancakes and shrimp with cheese grits. Picky folks like me have been known to bring their own biscuits, which can be picked up at Bojangles (where no biscuit is over 20 minutes old). Bon a petit, good buddy.

“Elephant” | Gus Van Sant

Inspired by the Columbine massacre, this film has become one of the most controversial releases this year. A flock of angry critics have banded it as “lacking in moral accountability;” however Roger Ebert says that is exactly the point. “Elephant” fails to hold anybody responsible for a massacre at an affluent high school. Although there are minor problems (irritating jocks and a pompous principal), nothing emerges as a cause for murderous rebellion. Students who are routinely harassed by others are not the perpetrators in “Elephant,” but the victims. The two killers are talented and intelligent loners. In fact, Ebert contends that events like Columbine (if they are influenced by anything), are probably “triggered” not by violent movies but by the news programs that convert such tragedies into “media events.” An unbalanced kid who sees the coverage on network news and CNN may come to feel that he can get the attention that he desperately needs and become famous if he does the same thing.

Van Sant uses a real school and actual students (from Spokane). The dialogue is realistic, too. That means it is trite and cliché-ridden, just like kids really talk.

Moonlight Serenade | Carly Simon

Some of my most sentimental memories always come with background music. I have a whole litany of corny lyrics that are associated with specific events like the Junior-Senior Prom or the graduation party at a camp in Whitesides Cove in 1953 when I was “Young and Foolish.”

I stand at your gate

and the song that I sing is of moonlight.

I stand and I wait

For the touch of your hand in the June night

The roses are sighing ....

Damn, that’s embarrassing. Why am I getting all choked up? I mean, those words are ... just silly! The roses are sighing? What does that mean?

But, of course, it doesn’t matter when Carly Simon sings it. Her voice (a lot deeper now than when she did the Noir album). All the other schmaltzy wonders are here, too. “Alone Together” and “All the Things You Are.” Carly does “Where or When” almost as good as Ray Charles and Betty Carter. Then, she sings:

And the moon growing dim

On the rim

Of the hill

In the still, still of the night.

Oh, hey, enough of this. I’m getting weepy. I’m out of here.

— Gary Carden