In Search of the Late-Capitalist Heartland: On Danny Caine’s “Flavortown”
Danny Caine | Flavortown | Harpoon Books | 2021 | 83 Pages
In Danny Caine’s Flavortown, Guy Fieri performs an impassioned pre-show ritual. He speaks into the mirror with strings of punctuated self-affirmations: “You fiery red Camaro. You hole in the wall… You’re a guy’s guy, a chef’s chef, a mogul’s mogul and a ladies’ man.” We imagine, perhaps, a circle of fog upon the glass—how it waxes and wanes to barbecue breath; how we are now sailing in the nth season of Triple D and its Gilgamesh is about to return to his kingdom from the sanctity of a private trailer. “Do it for Flavortown,” Guy tells himself, “Do it for the dead. Do it for your boy. Do it for the people who can’t stop laughing at you.”
Throughout Caine’s poetry collection, “Flavortown” is both an ethos and a physical assertion of space. It is a city apparated from the zeitgeist of Guy Fieri’s midwestern media empire, wherein passengers soar via Sausage Airlines, and every child’s first solid meal is a Nashville hot chicken sandwich. It has both a mayor and an ambassador; its people live, work, and ostensibly die.
Although Flavortown was birthed from the post-ironic internet age, it shares an ontological lineage with Dave Etter’s widely-acclaimed collection, Alliance, Illinois. Whereas Etter unpacked the 1970s heartland—its crumbling railroads and dying history—through the monologues of a fictitious rural community, Flavortown responds to the postmodern Midwest, homogenized by a cultural landscape of highways and chain restaurants. Like Caine’s other works, (Continental Breakfast, Picture Window, How to Resist Amazon and Why, etc.) Flavortown is heavily embedded in both his childhood home of Cleveland, Ohio, and in his present life in Lawrence, Kansas. As such, Flavortown locates the breadbasket of America not in the shantytown, but in the sprawling metropolis. At the center is an aberration of the boundaries between the local and the global, and a hunger-inducing, near-proximity to regional identity, presence, and authenticity.
In a poem titled, “The Flavortown Ambassador,” Caine writes:
No border wall can stop you
because there are no border walls
in Flavortown…
When you’re in a convertible this fast
with a stomach this full, you shrink
the world.
Space is both open and shut—within reach, yet fragmented by inscrutable intersections of memory, desire, and capital demand. In a similar vein, Flavortown describes a Midwestern spacetime only navigable via the brand. The local and the global have converged, becoming functionally indistinguishable. Caine knows it is almost Christmas because the “Texas Roadhouse has its trees up.” He marks the passage of years on a family VHS tape through the presence/absence of a Walgreens hat. Even topography is mapped by the relative proximities of a Jimmy John’s, a Dillons, and a Holiday Inn Express.
Flavortown—the imagined city—is the ultimate embodiment of this local/global doubling, as it reflects Caine’s multi-pronged, parasocial relationship to Guy himself. On one hand, when Caine visits Fieri’s restaurant, he describes it as a cynical operation built to “maximize profit off of people.” On the other hand, in imagined conversations with Anthony Bourdain—and more accurately, in opposition to the classist food politics of the coasts—Caine is compelled to defend Guy’s local sincerity: the “people pleaser” from Columbus, Ohio who refuses to pathologize ham cubes and cheese-wiz. Within this framework, the city of Flavortown becomes a kind of fraught retreat into global branding through which regional identity can be defended and maintained.
One example is Flavortown’s citizenship test, which creates authenticity by combining lived experience, Fieri-isms, and Midwestern idiosyncrasies into a flattened questionnaire:
What is the difference between a diner,
a drive-in, and a dive?
What does it mean when
a server calls you “sweetie”? What does it mean
when a server calls you "hon”?
Here, authenticity is disjointed from discrete locality and redefined as a virtual, or remote, knowledge. This pattern extends to Flavortown’s “joints” as well. While they may pantomime community spaces, all of them “have been on TV at least once” and come with the expectation that you order whichever item is chosen by Food Network. As such, they mainly function as spores of a vast, neoliberal organism under which nothing really exists anywhere. For this reason, when the poem, “Where exactly is Flavortown, USA?” tries to locate the city, it fails, offering instead a whimsical string of non-answers.
Evidenced by this poem’s twenty-two uses of the word “Flavortown,” Caine’s poetics often employ repetition and enjambment in order to stage greater dynamics of consumption and disorientation. The poem, “Three Views of Dillons” ends in an overwhelming listicle of iterations, as if we are flying down a highway swallowed by billboards:
Dirty Dillons Fancy Dillons Regular Dillons Dapper Dillons
Diaper Dillons Dino Dillons Druggy Dillons Silly Dillons…
In the poem, “Why Do You Want to be a Hotdogger?” each line follows from the repeated anaphora, “because”:
Because my parents’ generation destroyed
the job market.
Because I want to believe that every exit
is actually different from the next. Because
who the fuck knows what I truly want to be?
The result is that Flavortown is often searching—for connection, identity, or authenticity—but finds itself only within a strange near-proximity. In “It’s A Texas Roadhouse Christmas,” when Caine goes out for a meal, he describes the restaurant like a simulacrum, placing emphasis on the fact that Texas Roadhouse began in Indiana. Inexplicably, the stuffed ram on the wall—a semiotic indication of “country life”—has taken on a second set of horns. The waiter makes three identical visits, saying hon, “like a person who has learned to do so from a training video.” Caine laments:
This place makes me miss
a place I’m not from
that might not even exist.
Likewise, in the poem, “S14E11: Guy Fieri’s Dive & Taco Joint, Kansas City,” Caine goes looking for Guy at his new restaurant but can never truly get close. Fieri seems to have left ages ago. All that remains is a picture of his face on a sign, and a note: “Guy was here.” Caine finally sits down to eat and his nachos are lukewarm. He leaves, unbeknownst to him, in the opposite direction of his car.
When we address the etymology of franchise—“to make free”—it denotes positivity and liberation. In Flavortown, this impression is turned on its head. The franchise becomes a force of disorientation—decoupling the heartland from its own locality, and rendering it remote, cynical, and untouchable. Nevertheless, for Caine, this capitalist critique is also underscored by a celebration: one of people and their search; of their “usual orders,” and most unceremoniously, of their daily efforts to (re)localize space.
Perhaps this is why the last third of Flavortown shifts away from the imaginary to center the idiosyncrasies of being present. Caine speaks about the birth of his child—about changing shitty diapers, and “[collapsing] into stiff sheets, lumpy pillows, and each other.” He explores how people still master the space around them, building local worlds differentiated by good Walmarts and bad Walmarts. How a guitarist at a Dillons will take you “right back to that one summer,” and you’ll know exactly where to park your car. And tomorrow, you’ll find a Waffle House that makes you want to look around, spread your arms and yell:
God bless us,
every scattered,
smothered, and
covered one of us.