_ _ GET IT! The Personal Column MICHIGAN DAILY CLASSIFILED ADS Bombay Bicycle Club: It's Final chapter of Clockwork Orange better left untold 0 0 i i -,,- f - %= , r 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 Ann Arbor Dearborn Flint Ann Arbor Dearborn Flint GET READY.0.for our spe- cial issue of Weekend Magazine featuring the Three U of M Campuses. Coming Feb. 10th Not Your Ordinary Wakeup Call. Men's Stainless Steel Bracelet. Black Dial. Crystal Glass. $110. Citizen provides you a beautiful way to tell more than just time with these easy-setting alarm watches. Sweep second hand and water-resistant, too. OCITIZEN0 No OTHERWATCH EXPRESSESTIMEAS BEAUTIFULLY'" WEEKEND/JESSICA GREENE 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- ..eAc