Creature Comforts Looks At Our Neuroses

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On the surface, Creature Comforts (premiering tonight on CBS, 8PM EST) comes across as just another summer replacement series. The premise is simple: reduce some man on the street interviews to sound bites, and reproduce them with animal cartoon faces. Fortunately, the premise must have been pitched to CBS a little better than that.

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Creature Comforts is, in fact, one of the brightest spots in a summer season dominated by wannabe “reality” pirates, wannabe filmmaker competitions and, yes, even bingo as a televised sport. Based on the British TV series of the same name, Creature Comforts is a welcome departure from the tried and true formulaic series to which we’ve grown accustomed. There is no plot here — there aren’t even vignettes, although there are some recurring characters. Instead, we get little snippets of conversations, the kind you hear every day, and barely notice. For instance, we hear a woman telling a man how he’ll never get close to her romantically, not particularly amusing until you realize these are pandas conversing. There are bees suffering from allergies, sharks talking about the power of a winning smile, various hypochondriacs and neurotics all in animal and insect guise, all forcing us to look at ourselves in a pointed, if somewhat skewed style.

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Produced by Aardman Animations, the same team that produced the theatrical films Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, Creature Comforts masterfully utilizes stop motion animation to create a world that may appear fanciful, but strikes close to the urban heart. I don’t want to run through all the skits here — words wouldn’t do them justice. Take my word for it. If you want a welcome diversion from from the tripe that is standard summer TV fare, you’d be hard pressed to find something as charming and insightful as Creature Comforts.

Rockers in the Kitchen

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You can relate to this.

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The night went by in a blur. The music was loud, the dancing pumped you, and the drinks just kept you moving. But after that last call for alcohol, and you were informed you didn’t have to go home, but you couldn’t stay there, it dawned on you that you were hungry. Any respectable restaurant had closed hours ago, but Denny’s or IHOP served breakfast 24 hours, and coffee sounded like a good idea at this point.

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For bar bands, rock journalists, and serious clubbers in general, those forays into the food stops that never close were an essential component of survival. Every once in a great while, though, you’d run into somebody who wasn’t ready to throw in the towel yet, and an impromptu dinner party of sorts would happen at someone’s apartment. The snacks would be, well, interesting, but they beat the hell out of the obligatory 4AM pancake breakfast. Of course, they were on the fly recipes, lost forever once the sun was high in the sky.

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All of this brings me to I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands, perhaps one of the most essential cookbooks ever written. Okay, that may be stretching a point just a bit, but it’s far and away the most entertaining cookbook ever written. You’re not going to find nutritional information or calorie counts here — you’re usually not going to find precise measurements for ingredients (as if anybody follows them anyway). What it may lack in precision, I Like Food more than makes up for in verve, though.

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What author (and music/food/travel journalist) Kara Zuaro has accomplished here is really quite amazing, given that her contributors are all indie-rock musicians — over 100, in fact — bound together by their common fondness for food. We’re talking base instinct fondness for food here — these guys are on the road much of the time, and there’s only so much fast food the palate can tolerate before the brain gets creative. And as this book demonstrates, hungry musicians can be dangerous when they get creative in the kitchen.

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Actually, there are some good recipes here, ranging from the purely survivalist to the surprisingly epicurean. The breakfast section, for example, admonishes the reader to first ask, ”How drunk am I?” before taking on some of the more involved menus. Matt Cherry’s southern cheese grits are a safe bet. Silkworm’s cheesy sleazy also is a good bit to forestall an impending hangover, and it doesn’t require precision, calling as it does, for “an onion, some red or green peppers ... and sausage and some other stuff to throw in there, if you’ve got it.”At the other end of the spectrum, Violent Femmes offer up a wild boar ragu, and Rahim’s drummer Phil Sutton shares a recipe for sauerbraten that he inherited from his dad. For more pedestrian tastes, Aloha shares a quick and simple fried chicken with biscuits and gravy. There’s also a section devoted to vegans, with such offerings as Vicki Pilato’s baked barbecue tofu and a very good eggplant parmesan, courtesy Houston McCoy.

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There are sections devoted to sandwiches, soups, desserts, and, of course, drinks. And while the majority of these are no-brainers, there are a few jewels. I never knew that sake and root beer complement each other, or that Tang serves as a perfect mixer for either Absolut or Jack Daniels. I seriously doubt I’ll try Death Cab for Cutie’s veggie sausage and peanut butter sandwich, though — at least not without having consumed one or two of those Tang highballs.

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In all seriousness, I Like Food, Food Tastes Good is an interesting compendium of recipes not likely to be recommended by the Food Channel or Martha Stewart. That’s not really the point of this book. It does give you an idea what humans can come up with in desperate road conditions, when money’s tight and Burger King just isn’t going to cut it. All the recipes are written by the band contributors themselves, and appear unedited. Some of them are actually quite tasty, while others I’ll leave to braver souls than myself.

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If nothing else, I Like Food, Food Tastes Good finally explains why rock and roll will never die. It may get a hangover, it may get indigestion, it may even pack on a few pounds here and there. But as long as it maintains its unruliness in the kitchen the same way it does on stage, it will outlast anything that dares challenge it. In the kitchen, as on the stage, the first rule is there are no rules.