I never thought I'd be saying this, but the first time I went to Japan I really fell in love with Men's Fudge.

I couldn't have been more surprised. I mean, I'm an old-fashioned guy. I have pretty ordinary likes, which is why I never thought I'd be the type to fixate on Men's Fudge. But when I saw it lying there on the counter of a Tokyo 7-Eleven it was like it beckoned to me. "Come on over!" it called. "Pick me up!"

So I picked it up. And I couldn't bring myself to put it down.

I'm not sure why I'm so entranced by Men's Fudge, but it's been a monkey on my back ever since. Every time I inspect it I find something interesting inside. Some juicy little nugget, or toothy tidbit. Frequently it's so packed full of tasty gems I just can't put it down. This more than carries me through those periods when it's tasteless or thin.

My friends, on the other hand, are mystified by the role Men's Fudge plays in my life. They sniff at it, coming up empty-handed. I know the day will come when I'll go off it too, but until then I'll paraphrase Samuel Johnson and say, "When a person is tired of Men's Fudge, they are tired of life."

So if you get a chance, pick up Men's Fudge. Maybe it won't make you move into the local 7-Eleven, but you just might find yourself waiting at the opening to grab that next issue.

The floor of the gallery will be covered with over a million dollars of shredded US currency. In tiny fragments barely recognizable as money, these bills will be crushed under your feet and muffle the sound echoing in the space. In a moment where skyrocketing auction prices distract the compassionate art viewer from looking at and engaging with art, this show puts the financial side of the art market like so much waste underfoot, instead of infecting the paintings themselves.

Which are $40,000 each.

My trip to Japan was on short notice, so I desperately scoured TripAdvisor for an inexpensive yet stylish hotel room. They rated Hotel Super Kyoto/Shijo Kawaramachi in the top 20% of Kyoto hotels, even awarding it their Certificate of Excellence, so I guessed the place would be unforgettable. I wasn't too far off.

This photo of Super Hotel Kyoto Shijokawaramachi is courtesy of TripAdvisor.

The first thing you see in the lobby is a variety of pillows on offer. No need to worry about sanitation: many Japanese wear face masks, so they won't breathe germs on all the pillows they squeeze. Like buckwheat pillows? Foam block pillows? Buckwheat and foam block pillows? Then one of those dark little cubbyholes has the perfect pillow for you.

Imagine my delight when I walked into my room. There's no pandering to luxury or comfort: this is a room made for the paranoid. The window is frosted so nobody can watch you, and it doesn't open so you can't accidentally fall out. Worried about losing something between the bed and the couch? Heck, you can barely slide a threadbare towel through there. And rest assured nobody's going to steal your clothes when you're staring at them from four feet away.

At night you rest in indescribable comfort. Okay, I'll give it a shot: "cement block covered with a layer of cardboard" comes pretty close. The budget blankets are a foot or two narrower than the bed so you won't wake up in the middle of the night wondering if somebody's run off with your knees.

Everything you need is within easy reach: a cheap clock, a couple of mugs, a laminated sheet describing the $10 charge for porn. I'm still not sure why, after just ten minutes in the room, I had the urge to carve a shiv out of a bar of soap. The Super Hotel Kyoto Shijokawaramachi is absolutely nothing like a prison, because a prison has a workout room.

I'm still curious what the cardboard ad on the TV says, but I'm pretty sure the Japanese word for "LOSER" is in there. And yes, that's a happy face made out of my loose change. I always think the cleaning lady appreciates it more when you tip her with pennies made into an upbeat shape.

This photo of Super Hotel Kyoto Shijokawaramachi is courtesy of TripAdvisor.

At breakfast I finally stopped wondering if I'd been ripped off. The spread offered everything from toast to rolls to tiny pieces of bread. Looking for a napkin? Don't bother! The Japanese don't wipe their faces after shoveling down scrambled eggs and fried rice, though they need a fire hose to clean their asses after they poop.

Anyway, I just have one small suggestion for the Super Kyoto/Shijo Kawaramachi. You know how most hotels offer you a free disposable razor? This place should go the extra mile and give you an unlit stove and a noose.

I've been looking for mascara for macho men for nigh on twenty years, so when I spotted Tex Mex's Eyebrow Pencil for Men at a Japanese drug store I just couldn't pass it up. Clearly this ain't no sissy Maybelline: no, now I can tweeze and shape my unruly brows like they do on the Rio Grande.

Ordinarily I'm a little wary of foreign brands like Tex Mex, but if these are the same dudes who turned boring old chicken into fiery fajitas then I'm dying to see what they can do with my face.

Just remember: don't overpluck because that shit never grows back, pardner.

I think they're shipped in from California.

In Japan. Back at the end of the month.

I don't care that days before its official release YOU CAN DOWNLOAD EMINEM'S NEW RECORD THE MARSHALL MATHERS LP2 (DELUXE EX EDITION) FOR FREE HERE OR HERE. It's totally illegal and it keeps your hard-earned money out of the hands of the has-been homophobe. Resist!

Reviews of Restaurant Reviews: The New York Times Review of Hearth

I don't like restaurants, and I blame my dad. He used to tell me over and over what a ripoff they are. They give you pennies worth of ingredients and charge big bucks. A hamburger? Thirty cents worth of beef and two cents worth of bread. Salad? Three cents worth of lettuce and croutons. And don't get me started on pasta.

Though Dad had a point, he also had eighteen denim shirts and zero friends. Restaurants are a fact of life, and there's no way to avoid them. For years I managed to justify the rather exorbitant expense: I didn't have to wash dishes. I didn't have to grocery shop. It was almost worth it if the chef put in a lot of work.

And then came the latest food movement: quality ingredients, simply prepared. That's the motto of every restaurant in New York these days. And that's where I draw the line.

You know that story about how you kill a lobster? Put it in cold water, and slowly bring it to a boil. The temperature rises so slowly it doesn't realize it's in trouble until it's already dead. That's what the restaurant scene is like. First they charge you $50 for dinner, and then they try to get out of cooking it. It's like asking the lobster to crank up that burner himself.

See, the last thing I want is my food "simply prepared." I want the chef to show me what I'm paying for. I want the end result of dozens of cooking processes. I want my steak deep-fried and french-dipped and fricasseed. I want my fish seriously fucked with. Before my chicken hits my plate, I want that dead flesh to sit up and say, "Okay, okay -- enough al-fuckin'-ready!" I want the chef to drive my chicken to Rockefeller Center to meet Bernadette Peters before he plops it on my plate.

Needless to say, I heard Dad's voice in my head while reading Pete Wells' review of Hearth in the New York Times.

[W]hen I think of Hearth, ... I also picture the platters for two. The spatchcocked chicken with flavor in every scrap of its flesh and golden skin, the whole roasted fish stuffed with lemon and rosemary, and the côte de boeuf are all treated like the classics they are. Unlike other restaurants, where trendy platters for two are an old-fashioned opportunity for price gouging, Hearth sells the chicken and fish for about as much as two regular main courses.

"Spatchcocked"? Isn't it slightly pretentious to have an entrée that sounds like the landlord in a Dickens novel? "Chicken with flavor in every scrap"? I don't know about you, but I'd be a bit more surprised if the breast was meaty and toothsome but the wing tasted like soggy tofu. Heading to Hearth's online menu makes Dad drop his soldering iron:

Can't. Give. In. Must. Fight. Back. Pete Wells is right! If stealing a glove compartment is a misdemeanor and stealing a tire is a misdemeanor, stealing a Mercedes should be a misdemeanor too. The meatballs are $29. The pasta is $30. So $62 for a chicken isn't crazy at all! Seasoned and stuck in an oven. Served with two cents worth of lettuce and three cents of corn. Not price-gouging! Frantically searching for justification I find Hearth's philosophy.

It doesn't help. They find inspiration "in the strangest places"? Are they trying to say their beer comes from Belgium, or they bought their champagne at the Dollar Store? Dad would head back to the garage to grind the lens of his telescope, but I don't have to be stuck in a long-dead past. I'll stay and compromise. In the future, my food is also going to be "rooted in the modern traditions of the American kitchen."

I'm going to buy an $8,000 stove and then live on take-out.

Harry Potter Fans Prefer Bootleg Wizard Paraphernalia Because It's More Like What An Actual Wizard Would Have

Warner Brothers is suing Los Angeles shop Whimsic Alley for selling goods that infringe on the "Harry Potter" trademark.

While the store sells licensed merchandise like wands, books and sweater vests for those who want to re-create the boy wizard's look, much of its stock is unofficial and merely reminiscent of objects from the wizard's universe.

Customer Caity Knox, 27, said it would be a shame if the legal dispute forced the store to close, because she prefers the store's unlicensed merchandise to the real thing. "If I am going to dress up as Harry Potter, I am not going to buy something that has a logo on it," she noted. "I want to buy something that an actual wizard would have."

Today In Food Network Drama

On the debut of Guy Fieri's new Guy's Grocery Games, contestants have to make spaghetti and meatballs. They're thrown a curveball, though, when they discover the store is completely out of ground beef. How will these plucky amateurs meet the challenge using just ground turkey, ground chicken, ground veal, ground pork, and eight types of sausage meat?

Art Appreciation: Tom Of Finland Woodcut Masterfully Captures The Pathos Of The Sinking Of The Titanic

Art can serve many purposes. It can dazzle. It can entertain. It can provoke thought. Perhaps its highest purpose, though, is to communicate feelings that are otherwise impossible to convey.

Tom of Finland's woodcut of the sinking of the Titanic falls masterfully into the latter category. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this adage is never truer than when one is talking about a sailor's ass. Like Manet's Olympia, the central figure's body language shocks us with its crudity. Is this poor lad fevered and thinking that rather than clutching an oil drum he's humping his girlfriend Stella? Or did the sinking leave a void that he finds manifested in his ample buttcheeks?

Mr. Finland displays his mastery of allegory by omitting all the flotsam and jetsam of a typical maritime disaster to cause the reader's eyes to focus on the sailor's dookie maker. Where are the lifeboats? Where is the iceberg? Mr. Finland seems to be saying that all the gory details of the modern world don't amount to a hill of beans when one has a booty that could crack Brazil nuts.

Like all great artists, Mr. Finland takes us into a world we've never entered before, and the wealth of detail he includes is astonishing. The ship hasn't even finished sinking, yet the sailor is far from it, with no other passengers in sight. We're drawn deeper into his world of secrets as we wonder: Is he a fast paddler? Or did he leap off the deck before the ship sank because he saw an island and had a yearning for coconut?

Though he's floating aimlessly, the sailor isn't wet. Though ship disasters can be messy affairs, he isn't dirty. In fact, he hasn't even lost his hat. Gradually we begin to wonder: is this sailor, in fact, a victim to the ship disaster, or was he just floating by doing the Sump-Pump Shuffle when the tragedy occurred? Judging from the expression on his face, he looks like he's next in line for Go Ahead And Chute Me! at the Dorney Water Park. Is shock the reason his face struggles to convey something more than, "Man, I could sure use a Pepsi Light"?

To the artist's credit, the work still serves as an educational instrument, because without it we wouldn't have known that the Titanic sank exactly on the horizon, and that, judging by the steam pouring from the smokestack, the engines were still going full-speed ahead even though the prow was pointed down.

Hmm. So it hit it?

If you haven't gotten a chance to look at my new novel bOObs, you'll soon have the chance to hear highlights in person. I'll be reading from bOObs and my followup novel My First Five Hundred Boyfriends at the Bureau of General Services -- Queer Division this Friday at 7. It's on the Lower East Side at 83A Hester Street between Orchard and Allen.

It's a pop-up avant-garde queer space, which means no cupcakes.

If all the tattoos on Brooklyn hipsters were laid end to end, it would reach a weasel smoking a cigar.

As the old saying goes, England and America are two countries divided by a common language. Most Americans who venture "across the pond" will find it bizarre to hear our ordinary, commonplace words pushed past the limits of comprehensibility. While their obfuscation can be baffling in person, it might actually prove hazardous when one is trying to decipher real British traffic signs like these.

• You May Be Seriously Reconsidering Your Desire To Continue Forward, But You Cannot Reverse Course From This Point


• Pray Do Not Let Your Vehicle Rest Here Immobile


• The Thruway Ceases To Advance From This Place Due To The Failure Of A River-Crossing Abutment


• Blemishes in the Traffic Surface Are Being Attended To For The Next Thirteen Meters


• The Area In Which Schoolchildren Alight From Educational Vehicles Is Approaching Posthaste


• Do Not Tarry Here Unless Your Timepiece Reads Between Teatime and Supper


• Before You Know It The Zone In Which The Right-Most Cars Travel Will Cease To Exist


• I Hasten To Warn You About The Upcoming Appearance of An Annoying, Biscuit-Shaped Lump of Bother Used to Regulate the Speed of Traffic


• This Street Is Not Bi-Directional, And I'm Sorry To Say The Direction It Lacks Is Yours

I don't know if the plumbing in my apartment is bad, but the only option on the toilet seems to be "rearrange."

One thing I didn't expect in Rome was totally incompetence. I assumed that since 99% of the country's income came from tourism, navigating would be a piece of cake. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my hotel didn't have any tourist maps, and I couldn't find any in the streets. No maps in the subway, none at bus stops. Every street sign pointed to the Vatican and zero pointed anywhere else.

MAXXI, the provocative modern art museum? Good luck finding it. The controversial Renzo Piano towers? It's like they didn't exist. EUR, the suburb infamous for its colossal fascist architecture? From the total absence of information it could have been in Africa for all I knew.

I took the subway to the EUR stop anyway, with my fingers crossed. Instead I found nothing. Vast, wide open horizons with no clue where to find the interesting stuff. Where was the "square Colosseum" Mussolini built? Where was the culture museum, a ridiculously overblown piece of propaganda the fascists hadn't had time to finish? Where was the stadium encircled by marble statues of half-naked Aryan muscleman? I zigzagged for a mile or two but didn't run into anything. Finally, exhausted and mad, I hopped the subway back.

I tried to keep my spirits up. Rome still had a lot of attractions. Giorgio Armani, Salvatore Ferragamo, Donatella Versace: the place definitely had the market cornered in one department. Unfortunately arm hair doesn't have the cultural cachet that it used to.

Men in Italy are very stylish. Some have sport coats that very nearly match their pants, and a few go quite well with their tennis shoes. They wear mesh t-shirts that look like fishing nets strung between their shoulders. Sometimes if you get close you can smell the mackerel. It's easy to remember that Italy gave birth to drama when a somebody casually takes off their shirt and all of a sudden you're in "Streetcar Named Desire."

Italian women also have their own special style. This year it's bare shoulders. They're sexy, they're sassy, and they're the only body part that can't get fat.

Both sexes chain-smoke. It's part of their allure. It's illegal to smoke indoors, so now in the middle of the day Roman streets look like the moors in Wuthering Heights. Imagine the synergy when two grand Italian passions, smoking and style, collide:

As a whole, Italians are a very expressive people. Just look at the faces you see on the subway. Love, rage, frustration, peace. And that's just the folks who are picking their zits. They're also refreshingly unpretentious: In America the only place you'd find this model is on GetThatAwayFromMe.com.

Still, I was a bit startled by the sexism. Men still harangued attractive women with leers, whistles and catcalls. Even the advertisements clearly delineated the gender roles.

"Like women, catching men," the billboard says. The good news is, with all the cigarettes and jewelry, the women can't get up to six miles per hour in a week and a half.

The streets were full of American tourists clutching maps and grimacing, seemingly close to their limits frustration-wise. You don't want to get within fifty feet of them, because they're dying to share their stories. They can't wait to tell somebody about their lunch, their hotel, their flight here. After days of talking to Italians, they yearn to once again speak English without having to yell.

Mere seconds after taking a seat at Ivo, a sidewalk cafe in Trastevere, an American couple started nattering away at me. I ate my pizza and drank my wine and eventually the woman stumbled upon an intelligent thought. "I was touring the Sistine Chapel with my parish priest and he told me how the Vatican works. Any time there's evidence of something embarrassing -- a sculpture of a saint who's been discredited, a painting of a pope with eighteen mistresses -- it's hidden in a corner of some hard-to-find room and all the lightbulbs around it just happen to burn out."

That explained everything, I thought. I paid my bill and hit the road. All in all I liked Rome: the food was great, the streets were alive, and there were still some cool people around. So what if they wanted to control what people saw or didn't see? What was wrong with that? I followed the road to the top of the hill and snapped one last photo just in case I forgot.

In England, I took a train out to Maldon to visit my cousin. She picked me up at the station and drove me to her house. It was a cute little cottage with appropriately low ceilings. I eyed the beams that dropped clearance to probably close to six feet, then noticed each had a tiny red Post-It attached.

My cousin giggled. "It's so you don't hit your head and hurt yourself," she said. "I want to make sure you see them."

I smiled. She clearly thought it was sweet, but I wasn't so sure. The more I thought about these idiot stickers the more insulted I felt. Did she think I was clueless? That my eyes didn't work? That I was too stupid to see these giant dark wood things stretching the length of the room, or that I was too dumb to duck?

We chatted for a while over tea and scones, and at nightfall she drove me back to the station. I told her I'd take care of her if she ever got to New York. Pick her up at the station, give her a snack, tie a towel around her neck in case she drools. "Isn't that thoughtful?" I'll giggle. "I mean, I'm sure you'll be absolutely fine but we don't want to get the carpet wet."

Giorgio Armani, Salvatore Ferragamo, Donatella Versace: Italy still has the market cornered in one department. Unfortunately arm hair doesn't have the cultural cachet it used to.