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Bombay Bicycle Club: It's
Final chapter of Clockwork
Orange better left untold
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Danish
School.
Bag.
Indestructible
Indispensable
Incomparable
A Clockwork Orange
(revised. American
edition)
Anthony Burgess
Ballentine Fiction
$3.95/Softcover
0 my brothers, the most seem-
ingly happily thing happened to
Your Humble Narrator as he was
going viddy viddy in the local book-
store. Lost deep in the horrorshow
abyss of L. Ron Hubbard and
Danielle Steele, I salvaged a little
treasure: Anthony Burgess' A
Clockwork Orange. A bit of the old
ultra-violence, eh? Twenty chapters
of delicious vile decadence, wrapped
around a moral cloak of philosophy
and psychology. Ooooh. Yum yum
yum.
So I open the book to relive
some beautifully warped memories
of my favorite droog, Alex, and what
do I perchance find? Not 20 chapters
(as I faintly recollect from Corrective
School) but 21.
Your Humble Narrator counts not
wrong. An extra chapter!
But brace yourselves, brothers. I
have read this chapter, and if you are
at all acquainted with our slightly
bent protagonist, it is fair to say its
contents hit you in the face like a
tall, icy glass of milk-plus; our fa-
vorite droog recognizes the errors of
his ways and yearns to go suburban
(suburban). "Perhaps I was getting
too old for the sort of jeezny I had
been leading brothers," Alex says in
Chapter twenty-one. "I kept viddying
like visions, like these cartoons in
the gazettas... Coming home from
work to a good hot plate of dinner,
and there was this ptitsa all
welcoming and greeting like lov-
ing... it was there (in these visions)
I should find what I really wanted."
Alex? Married? Raising chickovas
and ptitsas? My Bog (impossible,
impossible).
The tale behind this extra chapter
is spun in the introduction, written
by our fair author. And it's almost
worth the price of admission itself
just to hear him go boohoohoo
about how his American publisher
gave him the old in-out, in-out in
1961. "My New York publisher be-
lieved that my twenty-first chapter
was a sellout," poor Burgess cries.
"My book was Kennedyan and ac-
cepted the notion of moral progess.
What was really wanted was a Nixo-
nian book with no shred of opti-
mism in it." Since Burgess was a
young chickova in '61 with no
reputation and less money, he had to
go along with New York. So, in the
US of A, it was printed with this
last chapter hacked off. In Britain and
around the world, Burgess was left in
peace, 21 and all.
The beautiful irony of ironies,
brothers, is that when the time came
ten years hence to make the film
version of Orange, this Stanley
Kubrick fellow - a fellow Brit of
Burgess, no less - elected to make
his sinny using the American
(Nixonian) version. The final picture
we are left of Alex in Kubrick's
sinny is not Alex sipping expresso
with his ptitsa by the fireplace but
giving the old in-out, in-out to some
baboochka in the snow. "I was cured
all right," Alex says right before the
sinny fades to black. (So much for
Kennedy.)
The face of logic tells us our fair
author, being the creator and so cal,
should have had his creation left in-
tact, if not by New York, certainly
by Kubrick. Your Humble Narrator
says, spit in that face. For the prob-
lem rearing its head in the last chap-
ter - and it's a major one, my
brothers - has to do with structure.
Namely, our fair author makes an
improbable break from the novella's
See Books, Page 17
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Bombay Bicycle Club, located off of State Street near Briarwood, offers a ie variety of
American cuisine.
By Andrea Gacki
and Mark Shaiman
Rarely can you encounter a dining
ambiance that fosters as much a
sense of universality as the Bombay
Bicycle Club. Sure, it takes its name
from one particular city, and yes,
there isn't even any Indian cuisine
on the menu, but the desire to
broaden the horizons of its patrons
permeates this dining establishment.
There are large bookcases lining the
walls, filled with such mealtime
tomes as Solar Home Planning, A
Historical Dictionary of Chad, and
the ultimately appealing Diseases of
Poultry. These all come complete
with gold lettering on their spines,
giving their Dewey decimal num-
bers. (Some hefty library fines are
forthcoming, we suspect.)
Of course, you usually go to a
restaurant for food, not intellectual
consumption. And the Bombay Bi-
cycle Club has everything. That is,
if "everything" can be concealed in
cheese. (Except for the fried moz-
zatella sticks, which were concealed
in bread crumbs.) But as a friend
once remarked, "Whether dining
alone or with a friend, have it with
cheese." Which seems to be the Bi-
cycle Club's criteria for excellence.
Appetizers abound in this bar-
style eatery. There are three main
categories: nachos, soup, or your
choice of anything fried. Deep-fried
- Marianas Trench deep. If it's not
one thing, it's another, and if it's
not covered in cheese, it's floating in
breadcrumbs. The combination plate
($4.95) offers a host of fried delica-
cies - zucchini, mozzarella,
The service was prompt
and friendly - one thing
that can't be overdone,
even at the Bombay Bicy-
cle Club. This restaurant
has a reputation for great
happy hours, especially on
Thursday nights, Ladies'
Night, when the place is
packed like sardines.
chicken, and mushrooms. (Three
sauces accompany the tray:
horseradish, marinara, and sweet-and-
sour.) The mushrooms were good,
and the chicken strips, though unin-
teresting, were tasty. But the zuc-
chini lacked flavor, and the moz-
zarella sticks tasted as though they
were straight from the freezer. The
Bicycle Club doesn't promise home-
cooked mozzarella sticks, however.
The word "fresh" is conspicuously
lacking from the menu description.
The Bicycle Club features a crock
of French onion soup ($3.45). This
too is laden with cheese, but it's
supposed to be. And it was very
good cheese. But once you dig
through it to reach the broth, you'll
be disappointed for the strenuous ef-
fort. Like the chicken strips, it was
fine, but only fair. However, the
garlic bread served with it was deli-
cious. .
There are also three varieties of
potato skins: chicken and cheese,
bacon and cheese, and Mexican -
with cheese as well. Or you could
order the combo plate for $5.65 and
get all of the above.
In the mood for some more
cheese, we tried the pizza. And in the
immortal words of Gomer Pyle,
"Surprise, surprise!" - the pizza
wasn't overflowing with that afore-
mentioned bovine delight. That's not
to say that the pizza was substan-
dard; in fact, all the ingredients were
combined in the right proportions.
The fresh veggie pizza ($5.95) was
topped with canned olives and
mushrooms, but it did have fresh
onions and green pepper strips. It
also had three cheeses: mozzarella,
provolone, and cheddar. The size of
the pizza was adequate - enough for
two people as an appetizer, or one
person as a meal. It's a very good
deal, and all of the traditional top-
pings are available.
For lighter meals, the Bombay
Bicycle Club features a variety of
salads, quiches, sandwiches, ham-
burgers, and Mexican treats. But on
to the specialities. One of the main
dishes, the Cajun Fried Shrimp
($9.95), featured twelve shrimp,
cutely skewered and laid atop a bed
of rice. Accompanying them was a
medley of stir-fried vegetables. The
meal was generally palatable, but
aren't Cajun-cooked meals supposed
to be hot? The meal did come with a
salad; it was unspectacular.
One of the daily specials is enti-
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536 S. Forest Ave.
Ann Arbor, Ml 48104
(313) 761-2680
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PAGE8.WEKE..,.RUA.JD198
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WEEKEND/FEBR ARY13 198
WEEKEND/RFBRUARY 3;-1989
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