I had a fine meal in Boston’s North End tonight; gnocchi with tre formaggi sauce, as well as five kinds of ravioli in five kinds of sauce. The price of such a succulent meal is that digestion is taking quite the effort, and the rest of my body has gone on vacation until my digestive tract finishes its work. Well worth the indulgence on occasion.

On the way home, I spoke to my wife and our dining companion about an idea I’d bounced about in the past, in the days when I was younger and it was perfectly normal to have hours and hours of “wouldn’t it be cool if?” conversations. I’ve always enjoyed imagining up fantastical things.

The basic premise was to start a restaurant with five star service and atmosphere which served bad fast-food or a restaurant that served five star food in fast-food packaging; preferably both, next door to each other. The idea of eating generic boxed macaroni and cheese out of fine china while a waiter fills your crystal wineglass with orange soda or eating a soufflé out of a styrofoam box with a plastic fork while sipping a vintage white wine out of wax paper cup still brings a smile to my face.

Taken a bit more seriously, it’s a matter of packaging versus content. We are accustomed to expect certain things to be framed in certain ways; when the correspondence of scene to action doesn’t match up, there is absurdity. This is why executive vice presidents playing basketball in a suburban driveway in full three-piece suits is odd, but executive vice presidents having a staff meeting in a room with a nice mahogany table and cushy chairs isn’t.

This replacing of an item can serve a number of purposes. It can be used in a humorous way, as in the great works of Monty Python. It can be used artistically, to cause the observer of the art to view an object in a new way, as Duchamp and his readymades did.

Many things tend to have some sort of a bond with their “natural” environment. They draw strength and gather meaning from their framing. My wife has told me stories of how many older Japanese people have decried the modern kaiten sushi restaurants, which serve sushi a la carte on conveyor belts. The complaint is that it somehow removes the artistry of the food, turns it into to something lesser. Just rice and fish.

It’s hard to separate a thing from its environment and be able to make a judgment about its quality, as sometimes its the interaction of the two that makes the art. The lute, in the Renaissance, began to fall from favor in part because the halls that were being used were growing larger, and the sound of the lute was not able to carry so well. Out of the intimate chambers and halls of the court, the lute was out of place, and lost its place.

I went to an exhibit of Art and Frames in Vienna, where the curator had chose works of art that interacted with the frames. In many cases, the frames were so entwined with the art, it was impossible to disentangle the two. In some cases, the frames themselves struggled to meld themselves into the surrounding gallery space.

When I was a kid, I thought it funny to imagine Taco Bell on fine china, as it was so absurd to me that no one would ever consider it seriously. My wife, however, mentioned that there was a trend in some culinary circles that was doing something similar; serving “comfort” foods such as meatloaf or macaroni and cheese. This conjured in my mind the entertaining image of my next trip to the North end for a high-quality bowl of Spaghetti-Os.