→ November 15, 2014
→ By

Saturday five, 11/15/14.

I was on vacation through Wednesday of this week, but did post an omnibus reaction piece to the Cuddyer, V-Mart, and Gose deals. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

This week’s links …

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→ November 14, 2014
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The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

I have an omnibus post up for Insiders covering the Cuddyer signing, the Gose/Travis trade, and more, plus I held my regular Klawchat Thursday afternoon. Over at Paste I have a review of the hit Japanese game Machi Koro, a family-friendly deckbuilder that all three of us enjoyed.

We spent half of our vacation visiting The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios before moving over to Disneyworld, our first trip to the former , prompted by our trip through all seven books this year during our evening reading time. The two parts of Harry Potter World, Diagon Alley in Universal Studios and Hogsmeade in Universal’s Islands of Adventure, look exactly like you’d want them to look. The designs are spot on, especially in Diagon Alley, and you’ll feel like you’re walking around a movie set. Universal’s attention to detail around both areas was amazing, which makes it a little easier for you to fail to realize that twenty-dollar bills are flying out of your pockets the whole time.

There are four main rides in the two areas; my daughter tried one with me, I went on two alone, and we skipped the fourth (a roller-coaster that goes upside down, a dealbreaker for me). The Escape from Gringott’s ride in Diagon Alley is the newest one, and I thought the most impressive – it’s a 3-D ride where you’re in motion down a track that knocks you around a bit but isn’t terribly rough, and never goes all that fast. It’s the visuals and the illusion that sell it, which I won’t spoil here. There’s also new footage featuring most of the main actors from the films, adding to the realism of the ride (at least for kids who want to feel like they’re really in the story), which hews to the part of the seventh book where our heroes are going after the Horcrux in Bellatrix Lestrange’s vault. The waits were about 45-60 minutes while we were there, but there’s a single rider line if, like me, you can’t convince your daughter to try it.

Hogsmeade has the other three rides, including Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey as well as The Flight of the Hippogriff. The Forbidden Journey is a dark ride within Hogwarts that borrows the parabolic screen concept from Disney’s Soarin ride but puts riders in a vehicle that rotates vertically, so at one point you’re looking down at a steep drop while at other points you’re nearly prone. The story within the ride is unique and draws on several different books within the series, putting riders on a Quidditch pitch, in the Forbidden Forest, and in the Chamber of Secrets at different points, all with more new footage from actors playing the central characters. (While I’m sure they were all compensated well for their time, I imagine they wouldn’t participate if they were eager to leave the roles behind.) The Flight of the Hippogriff is a small roller-coaster, similar to Goofy’s Barnstormer ride at the Magic Kingdom but a little longer with tighter turns, running about 75 seconds in total; my daughter was iffy on it, although I think she didn’t like the fact that we rode after sunset and she couldn’t see any of what was coming.

While not technically a ride, the Hogwarts Express train that allows you to move between the two Harry Potter areas (if you have a combination ticket for both theme parks) is also fun and extremely well executed, with compartments that seat six and show a little outdoor footage on the exterior window. It’s a different film in each direction, and you even get some shadows behind the compartment door and a few familiar voices too.

Next stop: Platform 9 3/4.

A video posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

The food at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter was somewhat disappointing, unfortunately – a valiant effort that fell short on execution. The butterbeer is the main attraction, and it’s good for about half a glass. The beverage itself tastes a lot like cream soda, but is topped with a creamy foam that tastes strongly of butterscotch, and there’s definitely the impression of dairy even if there isn’t any actual milk involved. It’s just too sweet to finish, and the one time I did more or less do that, I regretted it. The frozen version is even sweeter (your taste buds are dulled by cold, so frozen desserts need more sugar), and you lose some of those buttery notes in the regular drink. I never tried the pumpkin juice because it contains artifical sweeteners.

The two main restaurants are The Three Broomsticks in Hogsmeade and the Leaky Cauldron in Diagon Alley, both quickservice restaurants that serve a decent number of options of mostly British pub fare. The Three Broomsticks was a tick better in our books, although neither was any great shakes. I liked their cornish pasties with side salad, but that plate alone (at $8.99) wouldn’t be a whole meal for an adult. The fish and chips were adequate, clearly just fried but not made from particularly good fish. The toad-in-the-hole (bangers served in a Yorkshire pudding-style dumpling) at the Leaky Cauldron was really disappointing – the sausage itself tasted fine but was overcooked, and the whole thing seemed to have been prepared the day before and half-heartedly nuked to order, although my daughter inhaled the minted peas (not mushy or grey) on the plate. The best thing I had to eat in either area was the ice cream at Florean Fortescue’s, where they have some non-traditional flavors like butterbeer, earl grey with lavender (really good, kind of subtle and not perfumy or floral at all), and sticky toffee pudding (could have used a little more toffee flavor).

And then you have the shops, basically giant vacuums that aim directly at your wallet as you walk by. My daughter saved up for months, including birthday money, and bought herself Hogwarts robes ($105), Hermione’s wand ($45 for the interactive model that activates some effects in the parks), a Head Girl pin (only $10), a stuffed Hedwig (I don’t even remember), and a bunch of things in the stationary store – a quill, a bottle of ink, a Gryffindor journal, and so on. We managed to limit the damage she could do in the candy stores (including Honeydukes), at least. But you’re primarily there to look and shop, with a few rides in between. My wife also picked up a Hedwig backpack which I mocked until I noticed how many women stopped and complimented her on it, so perhaps that’s the next best thing to walking around with a baby or a puppy.

The Diagon Alley area even includes a little dark corridor for Knockturn Alley, with one shop, Borgin and Burkes, selling slightly more sinister items for those of you on Team Voldemort. That was also the one place where we encountered a park employee who was truly in character, a young woman in darker garb who lurked in the alley and decided to tease my daughter, who was wearing a cat-ear headband and a shirt with a cat on it, by meowing and hissing at her while following us for a few minutes. She eventually asked if she could take my daughter home to be her kitten. I think my daughter was half-amused and half-worried, but my wife and I thought it was great. I wish more employees were in character – not named characters, which would be impossible, but playing typical denizens of the wizarding community to get the kids (and the grown-up kids, of which there were many) more into the feel of the setting.

The twin theme parks at Universal Studios are both massive beyond the Harry Potter sections, but there wasn’t a lot there that appealed to my daughter – a few rides in the Dr. Seuss area, a bit in Jurassic Park, but that’s about it. We probably could have done all of Harry Potter World in one full day if we’d arrived when the parks opened, and two days proved more than enough, probably just leading us to spend more money than we’d wanted to in the first place. I doubt we’ll go back until my daughter is willing to go on the two big Harry Potter rides she wouldn’t try this trip – it’s not worth spending all of that money to get into the parks just so we can spend even more at the shops, especially now that we’ve been there once and seen the scenery, which at the end of the trip was the best part of all.

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→ November 13, 2014
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Top Chef, S12E05.

The elephant in the room right now is the fact that Aaron, the villain on the show, was arrested last week for allegedly shoving his girlfriend, after which his employer tweeted that he no longer worked for them. Hating the guy in the context of the show is one thing, but if he did indeed assault his girlfriend, then this is no longer a laughing matter.

* Quickfire: Jamie Bissonnette of Coppa/Toro is in the house. I don’t know him directly, but I’m a big fan of his work – the meatballs with lardo at Coppa might be the single best thing I’ve ever eaten – and we have a few friends in common. He’s all punk rock on Twitter but it turns out he cleans up OK, wearing a suit and sporting a crisp haircut.

* It’s the Reynolds challenge, so the chefs have to cook using various Reynolds products, although at least this time they didn’t waste a few hundred pounds of foil wrapping up the entire kitchen. Bissonnette says they use foil in his kitchens to diffuse heat for hot- and cold-smoking. The chefs get paired up for head-to-head battles; the first chef picks the opponent, the opponent picks one of the available cooking methods.

* Katsuji picks Aaron; Aaron chooses smoked salmon for their battle. Doug picks Adam, who chooses steamed mussels. Keriann picks Stacy, who chooses trout en papillote. Melissa picks Katie, who chooses smoked BBQ (note: if it’s not smoked, it’s not BBQ). Mei draws Gregory by default, and he chooses steamed dumplings, saying he believes his will have much more flavor than hers even though she’s been making dumplings since she was about seven.

* Keriann talks about how cooking in parchment means praying the fish cooks in time. She doesn’t mention how cooking in parchment produces the blandest-tasting fish imaginable. I love fish, but if you’re going to cook it, you need the Maillard reactions from direct heat, or else you might as well have let it go spawn.

* Gregory serves steamed shrimp dumplings with ginger and herbs, but no dipping sauce. Mei serves pork dumplings with black vinegar, of which Padma is a big fan.

* Katie serves grilled chicken breast with pine nuts cooked in the style of baked beans, while Melissa serves a smoked and seared scallop with charred corn, smoked bacon, and grilled fennel.

* Katsuji, who wants to show Aaron how a real chef acts (if he only knew), serves a sake-infused chipotle broth with smoked jalapenos and salmon. Aaron serves a “lightly smoked” (that’s a tipoff) wild salmon with tarragon creme fraiche and pickled shallot. He says he “brined” the salmon for five minutes. Why not just show it some pictures of salt instead?

* Keriann serves trout with white wine butter sauce, fennel, serrano, bell pepper, and shallot – so, a ton of aromatics to make up for the total lack of flavor you get in the parchment. Stacy serves her trout with heirloom tomatoes, basil, onions, and spinach.

* Doug serves steamed mussels in orange/saffron butter with lemon preserve and roasted sweet red peppers. Adam serves his mussels with vadouvan (a curry-like spice mix), fresno chili broth, apples, and toasted pepitas. Adam is being a total dick to Doug in front of the judges, going past chest-thumping to flat-out insulting him. So you’re a New Yorker; that doesn’t justify being an asshole right before the two people who decide your fate and your opponent’s.

* Judging: Aaron’s salmon didn’t have enough smoke flavor (shocker), so Katsuji wins. Doug did a better job cooking his mussels, while Adam’s pepitas “really sung,” but Doug wins. Keriann’s trout had more texture and flavor, with more balance in the dish, so she beats Stacy. Katie scores the upset win over Melissa, as Jamie loved the pine nuts cooked down like beans. In the dumpling battle, Gregory wins, and Mei looks really upset. That might be your finals preview right there – or at least the one I’d choose to see at this point.

* The overall winner is … Gregory, of course, winning a $10K prize as well. He’s going Full Qui on this season. Jamie says, “If you had a New York City dumpling truck, there’d be a line around the block.” I’ll pay someone to stand in line for me, cronut-style.

* Elimination challenge: The chefs split into two teams, the winners on one team (blue) versus the losers (red) from the quickfire. The winning team will be safe from elimination. Teams offer up one chef for each challenge, but we end up with a lot of rematches because the chefs hear “strategy” and think “revenge,” at which point everything should be served cold, right?

* First battle: Adam vs Doug for a rematch. Adam bullies his way to that spot. Second: Katsuji vs Melissa. Third: Gregory vs Mei. Fourth: Keriann vs Stacy. Fifth: Aaron vs Katie. Aaron’s mad because he didn’t get to face Katsuji again and I think he feels like he was relegated to the last spot (which he was). Chefs say they don’t come on this show to make friends, but playing a little bit well with others has its advantages.

* The big twist: Each team has $1000 total to spend to serve 100 guests the next day at the Watertown Arsenal, so that’s $2 per plate. How do you economize for this? My first two thoughts were to avoid meat or fish, and to avoid pricier flavoring agents like Parmiggiano-Reggiano (which brings salt and umami but can easily run to $20/pound).

* Gregory is buying fresh turmeric (he says “toomeric,” like most people, but there’s an “r” in that first syllable). Have you ever seen fresh turmeric? It looks like giant maggots. I’ll buy mine powdered, thanks.

* Katsuji is putting charred cauliflower in the tostada. That cooks the exterior, but won’t it be raw inside? When I cook cauliflower by roasting it, it takes an hour-plus to cook through as a whole head and at least a half-hour as florets, and I have to work to prevent the exterior from burning before the interior softens.

* Melissa is having problem the texture of her gazpacho, and I believe this is what we refer to around here as “foreshadowing.”

* Gregory says Adam “just loves to talk shit.” Truer words were never spoken.

* Aaron’s pot of dashi broth ends up on the ground somehow. Mei, an actual team player, lends him “instant dashi mix” so that he’ll have some moisture in his meatball/noodle dish, but says it won’t be the same for flavor. That’s a lousy break for Aaron, but given what we know now, I couldn’t muster a lot of sympathy – I just want him off the show.

* Hugh’s back, always a win for the viewers. He was in rare form with the quips this week, asking Jamie if he brought a musket to the Watertown Arsenal, informing everyone that “you can open carry a musket in most southern states.”

* Adam says “it’s gonna be a bloodbath out there.” I get it, we do violent metaphors in sports too, but unless you’re making black pudding, that’s a bit much.

* The dishes: Doug serves beef tartare with ginger aioli, radish, chili oil, and cilantro. Tom says the “meat could be a little more seasoned,” which seems like a death knell for a raw beef dish. Adam made salt and pepper grits with cheddar cheese, a poached egg, and bacon and onion jam. Hugh, saying he’s had a lot of crappy grits on Top Chef, points out that “those are not crappy grits.” Adam wins unanimously.

* Doug says in the confessional that “I don’t know who won the battle of Lexington and Concord” but guessing it was the U.S., saying, “Go ‘Murica.” Gotta love the state of education in our country.

* Katsuji made a tostada with charred cauliflower, goat cheese, olives, dates, and a tomato and chili sauce. The judges say it was a little rich with the oil and the fat of the cheese, but it had a good texture and the cauliflower was cooked well (so I missed something in that process). Melissa’s chilled white gazpacho with cucumbers, mint, green grapes, and marcona almonds was, as expected, thin and watery. Katsuji wins 3/4, with Padma the dissenting vote.

* Katsuji said a few times there that he was having a panic attack … if he was, and I don’t mean to doubt him, I wish he’d gotten to explain more about what he was feeling.

* Tom says something very dismissive to Padma about this dish; did anyone catch it? I rewound a few times but couldn’t hear his words. His facial expression said a lot, though.

* The third battle is Gregory versus Mei again, and unsurprisingly, they both nailed their dishes. Gregory made shiitake mushrooms in a coconut milk-curry broth with turmeric and fresh dill; Jamie says it’s great Thai food for hot weather. It’s pretty weird to our palates here to have a hot dish in hot weather, but in Asia it seems like it’s quite common. Mei makes a quick kimchi with a New York strip loin and scallion salad; her beef was perfectly cooked and Tom loves the kimchi. But Gregory still wins the battle.

* Tom praises Gregory effusively, saying “he has a way of balancing a lot of different things … all of these aromatics that just … perfectly go together.” That might be some foreshadowing for the season finale.

* Keriann serves an herbed meatball with red onion jam, ginger mustard, and port reduction. Padma loves the jam, but Tom looks like he wants to reach for the ipecac. Stacy served marinated beets with pecan sage yogurt, horseradish brittle, and fresh horseradish. The judges say the beets were well cooked but the yogurt was bland, and I just don’t see going to battle (pun intended) with roasted beets – shouldn’t there be a LOT more to this dish? I feel like I’ve had more ornate beet dishes at a dozen restaurants. Stacy runs the table, though, because Keriann’s dish just sucked. The producers get what they wanted, though: A deciding fifth head-to-head.

* Tom says, “the war always comes down to the last battle.” Well, except for the War of 1812.

* Aaron serves an Asian pork meatball with scallop noodles, but he’s too clever by half as there’s no texture in the noodles – plus he did something similar in the elimination quickfire challenge against Katie. He admits the dashi disaster, but I don’t think he buys himself anything with his honesty. Katie takes a risk by making dessert, making an imperial stout chocolate cake with pomegranate molasses-macerated strawberries, smoked sour cream, and basil pink peppercorn oil. Hugh says the cake is classic and good but “not that exciting.”

* Aaron’s comments about dessert being a “copout” get him some flak from the judges, and when he says he can’t see going to war with chocolate cake, Hugh asks if he could imagine going to war with scallop noodles … Aaron can’t take it as well as he can dish it out, apparently.

* Katie wins unanimously, so the blue team takes the title, and one of the red team is going home. Mei and Adam should be safe. Stacy won her challenge, so if that’s enough to save her, it’s Aaron or Melissa. There’s no question whom I’d like to see sent home, but watery gazpacho isn’t helping anyone’s cause here. Jamie says he would have flunked Melissa’s gazpacho in a home economics class; do they actually still teach home ec in schools? I got a bad grade on one home ec test because the teacher insisted that peanuts were a “meat” (because they contained protein), but I refused to put the wrong answer and wrote they were legumes. Fight the power, folks.

* One interesting note from judges’ table: When the judges ask Adam and Mei if they ever thought to dissuade Aaron from trying a dish so ambitious he might not execute it, Gregory speaks up from the sidelines, saying “I would never have allowed that (the scallop noodles) to happen.” He didn’t deliver it in a condescending tone – although you could argue saying anything at all was out of line – but that just made it even more incisive to me. That did have the benefit of shutting Adam up for the first time all season.

* Aaron is eliminated. That’s fortunate for all concerned at this point, even though this was filmed months ago. He says a lot of the right things on the way out, with a few excuses thrown in. I might have been sympathetic, given what he’s told us about his childhood, before his recent arrest, but now I’m just glad he’s off the show. Melissa skated on a pretty bad dish, though, and Keriann might have been bounced if her team had lost.

* Rankings: Gregory, Mei, Doug, Adam, Melissa, Katie, Katsuji, Keriann, Stacy. There’s a big gap after Mei, and it’s starting to look like there’s a big gap after Katsuji, too.

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→ November 12, 2014
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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

I somehow fell out of reading the works of Philip K. Dick over the last ten years or so, partly because I abandoned sci-fi for classic literature and detective novels, but also I think because I’d gotten the sense that I’d read his main works. Dick was highly prolific, with numerous additional novels appearing after his death in 1982 (shortly before Blade Runner, the film based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was released), but his product was uneven, ranging from pulpy sci-fi works to serious novels of ideas like The Man in the High Castle, which was #95 on the first edition of the Klaw 100 and won the Hugo Award. Returning to his novels has reminded me of what I enjoy about Dick’s writing – his paranoia, his clarity of vision (despite a rather muddled personal life), and his willingness to dispense with the rules of narrative.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said fits all three criteria, a dark, dystopian novel that deals in questions of identity, privacy, and, in classic Dick form, the nature of reality. Jason Taverner is a world-famous TV star with a weekly audience of 30 million for his Tuesday night program on NBC until he wakes up one morning to find that there is no longer any evidence of his existence. In a police state where citizens can barely move a few city blocks without government-issued identity cards, this makes Taverner a criminal, robbing him of everything that he uses to define himself while also destroying his freedom. His agent, his lawyer, his on-and-off girlfriend all seem to have no idea who he is. He has to deal with a teenaged forger just to get the documents he needs to head into the city, only to find himself swept into a police apparatus reminiscent of our NSA and Homeland Security, where suspects check in but they don’t check out. The truth of Taverner’s missing identity turns out to be far more bizarre than he or we could have imagined, and solving the problem becomes more complex when a dead body shows up in his path.

The paranoia of Taverner’s situation probably seems a bit old hat now – there was a short-lived network series called Nowhere Man in the mid-90s that borrowed the premise – but for 1974 it was fairly new. Dick magnifies the disastrous effect it might have on the victim’s sense of self by having this happen to someone who is world-famous, confident in his celebrity to the point of arrogance. But Taverner is also a “six,” one of a few remaining products of a government genetic breeding program aimed at creating people of extraordinary beauty and intelligence, giving him the wherewithal to respond to his crisis with alacrity (with a bit of overconfidence mixed in). While Jason’s six-ness doesn’t play a huge role in the plot, it does at least somewhat level the playing field for him after an unknown force or entity has effectively de-created him.

Beyond his ability to terrify the reader by placing his characters in situations like Taverner’s, Dick also defied or just ignored conventions of narrative fiction so that predicting resolutions or outcomes would just be a waste of the reader’s time. He was the true Unreliable Author; he wrote entire books where characters were merely figments of someone else’s imagination (Eye in the Sky), or were constructed realities (Time Out of Joint), or seemed to play with the many-worlds theory of quantum physics (Ubik). You can’t accept anything in a Philip Dick novel as real except the dystopia itself. I won’t spoil Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said‘s particular deviation from realism, but wish it had been further explored within the novel once it was revealed – by that point, the cause has ended, and the explanation of why Taverner was the main victim was unsatisfactory. However, Dick mitigates that weakness (and the slightly tacked-on feeling of the epilogue) by continuing to probe the same issues of identity after the irregularity has ended, this time shifting his focus more to the police commissioner, Felix Buckman, who has come into contact with Taverner and ends up facing his own crisis of self as a result.

I knocked off four books on vacation, including this one, William Gibson’s Count Zero, Dawn Powell’s The Happy Island, and P.G. Wodehouse’s Young Men in Spats. I’ll write reviews if time allows it; in the meantime, I’ve started Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo Award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness.

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→ November 8, 2014
→ By

Saturday five, 11/8/14.

I’m still on vacation, enjoying Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade with the family and getting some reading time in too, but all the stuff I filed for ESPN before leaving is going up:

* My top 50 free agent rankings, with scouting reports on each.
* My offseason buyers’ guides to:
→ Starting pitchers
→ Relief pitchers
→ Outfielders
→ Corner infielders
→ Middle infielders

The guide to catchers will go up Sunday, and on Monday my NL ROY ballot column will go up after the winner is announced.

And now, the links…

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→ November 6, 2014
→ By

Top Chef, S12E04.

Just a reminder that I’m on vacation this week, so I’ll be sparse on social media and not reacting to anything that happens in MLB. I’ve filed all of the buyers’ guides already, so they’ll continue to appear for Insiders. Today’s was on outfielders.

Those of you who’ve argued that this isn’t a great group of chefs got some validation in this episode; it wasn’t a terribly inspiring collection of dishes overall, light on creativity in particular even for chefs who nailed the execution. Meanwhile, we see that Keriann misses her family (don’t they all?) and Aaron is complaining about Katsuji trying to get in everyone’s head (I think he just talks a lot, with no real aim in mind, which makes him rather well qualified to deliver hot sports takes too).

* The quickfire takes place at Cheers! Lame. Mediocre show that somehow has glommed on to the identity of Boston without anything particularly Boston about it.

* Guest judge is … George Wendt. Even more lame. He was disappointingly unfunny here and didn’t seem to offer much food knowledge. Maybe the producers really wanted Hugh Laurie but just asked for the star of House.

* Quickfire: By law in Boston all bars must serve food. So a bitters bar like Sother Teague’s Amor y Amargo in Manhattan couldn’t exist? Also lame. I love a lot of things about Boston, but the state’s puritanical attitude to alcohol ain’t one of them. (And the way local retailers can dance around the three-store limit but Trader Joes can’t is downright corrupt.) The challenge is to make a bar snack in thirty minutes, with the winner getting immunity.

* Katie wants to make pickled cheese curds. How do you “pickle” anything in 30 minutes? In thirty minutes, all you can do is marinate it. That’s all. Stop calling it a fucking pickle just because you stuck it in acid.

* The real buzzword of this season is “spin.” Every plate is a “spin” on something else. Or maybe they’re just providing “spin” to the judges.

* Aaron is making a peanut butter and mayo burger, which a friend made for him once. He admits it sounds gross but says it tastes great. It does sound gross, but I imagine the heat of the burger makes the peanut butter into a rich sauce … I still wouldn’t do it, but I can’t knock it since I haven’t eaten it.

* Rebecca didn’t put enough glaze on her chicken wings. This might have made more sense if we’d seen more of her cooking – the editing of the quickfire this week really left us without much context.

* Aaron’s burger also has caramel bacon and a fried egg. That had to be an absolute mess to eat – the juices from the burger mixing with mayo, the runny egg yolk, and the liquid peanut butter. Katie fried cheese curds (beer-battered) with lemon and lime zest and fried olives. Stacy did an arugula pesto with prosciutto chips, balsamic tomato jam, and burrata as a spin on a BLT. Rebecca’s wings with spicy ponzu glaze didn’t have enough sauce. Keriann’s beer-battered onion rings were topped with crab salad and spicy hollandaise. Once again, she’s talking about her dish too much – spinning it instead of just letting the food talk. Wendt is “a sucker for crab meat.” That’s #analysis.

* Mos Chef has his first real stumble when all of the stuff on one of his burgers falls off the plate as he walks out to serve it. Pro tip: Try a toothpick next time. Or some epoxy.

* Adam made black bean chilaquiles with fried egg and avocado; probably not Boston bar food, but actually that and a brown ale sounds pretty good to me. Mei made fried chicken wings with lime-chili vinaigrette and pickles, probably the most appetizing thing I saw in this challenge. James made pickled and grilled carrots with red bean puree. How is that bar food? It’s rabbit food. Do rabbits go to bars? Can you ferment carrot juice? Maybe that’s what the White Rabbit was really getting high on. Katsuji made a mahi mahi and tuna ceviche with roasted tomato and jalapeno salsa. Now that is bar food – eat it with a salty tortilla chip, so the salt and acid make that beer taste even better.

* Down: Mos Chef, although Wendt says “Woody’s a vegan anyway.” James, because it didn’t feel like bar food. Up: Katsuji’s was creative and “yummy” (#analysis), and Keriann’s because it had crab meat. Winner … Katsuji, who, given how he’s performed to date, might need that immunity for his next twenty-ingredient special.

* Elimination challenge: Chef Michael Schlow of Via Matta is on hand, and the chefs will cook at Via Matta for sixty diners, working in teams of three to prepare a three-course Italian menu, which Padma calls “antipasta, pasti, and secondi.” I’m pretty sure that second course is “primi,” meaning first – antipasto means before the meal, then you have the first course (pasta or another starch, typically) and the second (protein). Diners will pick from the four menus, and the team whose menu is ordered the most wins the challenge; the others are up for what will be a double elimination.

* The chefs make their own teams, which can be a little awkward for chefs who don’t get “picked.” Adam, Doug, and Mei teamed up together fast, which says a little something about the mutual respect there, especially since we know Mei is very sharp. Mos Chef ends up with Katsuji and Aaron, who’ve already fought once, which means he’ll be playing traffic cop more than he should have to.

* Katsuji says they should use “macerated” on the menu instead of “marinated” because there’s no difference, which isn’t true. You macerate a fruit; you marinate anything else. So they’re right to say “macerated” peaches, even if it means no one will understand it. (At the table, Tom jokes that it looks like “masticated.” No, Tom, I don’t think that’s the word people will see when they misread it.)

* Melissa, James, and Keriann form the Grey team. James wants to cook lamb, but one or both of the women says not to use lamb, doesn’t think it’ll sell. James is Italian and cooks Italian; he says not to go seafood-centric but is outvoted. I believe this is known as … foreshadowing.

* That is a HUGE kitchen. Given what they usually have to work with, it must feel like chef heaven.

* Aaron is arguing for space with Mei/Adam. Then he’s bickering with Katsuji. In other words, it’s a day ending in -y.

* Mei says “at work I’m actually known as the Fish Bitch.” Seems proud of this. I guess it’s okay if you want to call yourself that.

* Melissa is making fresh ravioli in two hours. Katie (on the blue team with Rebecca and Stacy) is making fresh pappardelle. Is the challenge here the rolling and cutting? It doesn’t take that long to make the dough and rest it, and it cooks in two minutes, so I can only assume the difficulty is in rolling out the sheets and cutting or shaping it.

* Stacy discusses the difference between serving whole steak pieces versus slicing it before serving. Slicing means you can pick out fatty/gristly pieces, but she doesn’t say that it cools off much faster that way.

* Schlow is expediting and has to tell Katsuji and Aaron to shut up. Mos Chef says, “I feel like a dad in the setting with my two bickering sons.” I wish we’d heard Schlow say whatever he was thinking, probably something like, “who let these two clowns in my kitchen?”

* The celebrity diner is Emmy Rossum. Blais is back too, always a good thing.

(Rossum was also recently a guest judge on Project Runway, where she seemed to have a little more insight into the content. I mention watching Runway from time to time, and usually get some troglodyte responses that the show is gay or just for women. Rossum, who is very attractive, dressed as nearly all of the starlet guest judges do, in a short skirt or dress. The host is Heidi Klum, still one of the hottest women on the planet. The models are …. you know, models. A bit tall for me, but still, models. So, hey, if you want to tell me this show isn’t for you while you sit around on Sundays and watch big sweaty men grind their bodies against each other for six hours, be my guest.)

* Blais points out that the first item on the orange team’s menu has radicchio, which is a mixed bag: “Radicchio to the general public, it’s a tough sell,” since it’s so bitter. Also, does the general public really know what it is? I don’t think I knew until I saw it on Good Eats when I was about 30. And it took me a while to figure out how to prepare it in a way I liked. (You either need to brown those bitter heads like radicchio and endive to get some sugar out, or balance it with fat and acid like a bacon vinaigrette.)

* The purple team – Mos Chef, Aaron, Katsuji – is getting a lot of early orders, Aaron credits the scallops, because it’s his dish. Cool story bro.

* Rossum is gluten-free and has been for 15 years due to celiac disease (sprue), which she explains as an “allergy” on air. It ends up a last-minute twist for the teams, each of whom had prepared a traditional primo course with pasta. Katie improvises with zucchini ribbons; Melissa does risotto, which is very traditional for a primo. Katsuji just “deconstructs” his ravioli, giving Rossum the filling and sauce but no pasta. You do have a few options if you have time – rice and corn (polenta) are obvious ones, zucchini or vegetable ribbons less obvious (although Blais has a recipe like this in Try This at Home), and if alternative flours were available you can make pastas out them. Chickpea flour works surprisingly well, and they’re quite common in southern Italian cuisine (called ceci). If they had the right pan, chefs could have prepared farinate, a crepe made with chickpea flour that is outstanding and crispy without feeling heavy. Granted, I’m thinking of this at a keyboard, not a grill station with a clock taunting me.

* Purple team is up first. Aaron serves seared scallops with macerated peaches, pickled ramps, and crispy speck. Solid reviews all around. Katsuji just does a deconstructed ravioli – without the pasta. Emmy sees it for what it is and no one is amused. The pasta dough in everyone else’s spring pea and goat cheese ravioli is very dry. Mos Chef’s secondo of peppercorn-crusted strip loin with sweet onion compote and roasted tomato, cured olives, and herbs gets raves. Don’t call it a comeback.

* Orange team (Mei, Adam, Doug) is not getting many orders. They serve the judges next.

* Blais is “anxious” for Doug now because of the radicchio. Doug’s salad comes with warm pancetta, goat cheese vinaigrette, and hazelnuts. The judges seem to like it, but “not a bad little salad” is not what you’re going for. Adam served a bay scallop with fennel linguine, and swaps out a polenta cake for Rossum (good call). The Fish Witch (can’t do it, sorry) serves a gorgeous branzino with lemon jam, salsa verde, and radish. The skin is crispy too. I want this recipe.

* Grey team is also not getting a lot of orders. “Chilled wild shrimp” is not that appetizing a description, really. James’ salad is really a chilled seafood salad with shrimp, mussels, and clams along with arugula and wild orange. Sounds boring, although I admit I’m not a big chilled seafood guy unless it’s raw fish. Melissa made a homemade spring pea ravioli with ramps and bacon-parmiggiano broth, substituting a stunning bright-green fresh pea risotto for Rossum. Keriann made a pan-seared halibut with with olive oil, potato, warm asparagus salad, and pistachios. I wonder if Melissa was dragged down by her team here, as her dish was lauded but the structure of the challenge didn’t give us much positive feedback at the end.

* Aaron is incredibly messy in the kitchen, but at least he’s pleasant to work with.

* Blue team is up. Rebecca’s scallop with “charred” fennel, orange, and arugula starter is not very creative; Blais doesn’t even like the concept, saying she didn’t understand the ingredients. Katie hand-cut pappardelle and served it with a basil-walnut pesto and confit tomatoes, swapping in those zucchini ribbons for Rossum, who loved the idea and the dish itself. I think Katie should at least get points for the most creative gluten-free solution of the four. Stacy’s ribeye with king trumpet mushrooms, asparagus, and a kalamata olive vinaigrette is kind of a disaster; the steak was sliced too thin and the vegetables were brutalized from overcooking.

* The judges’ discussion, which includes Rossum and Schlow, overall feels like they were all a little underwhelmed. Purple team: Blais liked Aaron’s scallops, and Tom did too. Padma liked everything except the pasta, which was dry. Orange: Doug’s salad was not the prettiest, but was delicious. Schlow says it would have been a “satisfying” salad if you had a large serving, but it wasn’t great. Five years ago I might have argued there was no such thing as a “satisfying” salad, but I know better now. Blais loved Adam’s pasta, which reminded him of growing up on Strong Long Island. Grey: Keriann and Melissa are safe, but James had the worst salad of anyone’s. That’s where I wanted to hear more on Melissa’s dish. Blue: Rebecca’s scallop dish was the least inspiring of all for Blais, who said it felt “totally incomplete.” Stacy’s vegetables were destroyed, although Blais liked the olive vinaigrette. That reminds me of the strangest viniagrette I’ve ever had: chicken-liver vinaigrette, at Ludivine in Oklahoma City, one of my favorite restaurants in the country. It’s a great example of something I never would have thought to make, and was even reluctant to try, but then loved once I ate. I wish I hadn’t been such a closed-minded eater for the first 25 years of my life.

* Judges’ table: Tom says he would have preferred to see teams take more risks on their menus, which was my sense just watching the dishes and descriptions, too. Italian cuisine doesn’t have to be safe or boring. The purple team wins, but Katsuji looks totally bummed, even before Tom tells him that he would have gone home if he hadn’t been safe twice over.

* Blais tells the orange team they have to work on their menu-writing skills, because they didn’t get many orders but their dishes were all good. They’re safe.

* The blue team was the judges’ least favorite – Katie, Stacy, and Rebecca. Stacy said in the kitchen she knew her vegetables were overcooked, then lies to the judges about it and says she thought they were good. Blais says “there’s a difference between standing behind a dish and being honest … the vegetables were annihilated.” Man I am I glad to see Blais call someone on that bullshit. Just tell the truth, don’t make excuses, and you won’t make them hate your dish any more than they already did.

* Rebecca’s fennel wasn’t charred and the dish reminded Blais of mediocre room service. James’ salad barely had any olive oil, but wasn’t it also just a boring salad? He talks about “team harmony,” but how does that justify a badly executed dish? Be a team player AND make a good salad.

* Rebecca and James both go home, so Stacy barely skates by. James says he should have done a “louder, more seasonally relevant dish,” so at least he’s not blaming his teammates. If you cook something great, you don’t go home, not this early.

* Power rankings: Mos Chef and the Fish Witch seem like they’re miles ahead of everyone else right now. Adam, Doug, and Melissa make up the next tier, ahead of Aaron and Keriann and Katie. Stacy and Katsuji are on the bottom, probably with Katsuji most likely to get the boot next.

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→ November 4, 2014
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Ex Hex’s Rips.

My ranking of the top 50 free agents (with capsules on each one) is now up for Insiders, along with the first of six buyers’ guides, this one on starting pitchers.

Ex Hex is the new project for longtime alt-rock guitarist Mary Timony, who first rose to prominence in the very out-there Helium in the early 1990s (where her cherubic face clashed with their love of dissonant sounds) and more recently surfaced in the one-and-done supergroup Wild Flag, which also featured Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein. (And boy do I love Sleater-Kinney’s newest song, “Bury Our Friends.” Welcome back.) Timony’s newest project, Ex Hex, is probably her poppiest one yet, a power trio writing simple, punk-tinged, mostly upbeat songs that never sniff four minutes. Their debut album, Rips (iTunes), is basic, and a little surprising from a former Helium member, but very catchy, to the point where it would have been great summer listening – there’s a definite Beach Boys vibe to the vocals – had it come out a few months earlier.

Ex Hex’s formula is pretty simple: One hook per song, with a big chorus, lots of power chords, and some high-gain guitar riffs for accents. You could split the album into two parts – the uptempo power pop tracks that hint back to early post-punk acts like the Slits, and the slower tracks that expose the lack of technical difficulty in the guitar lines. Fortunately, there are very few of the latter, because Ex Hex’s real appeal on Rips is when they just let ‘er rip like a high school garage punk act, just with better production. Opener “Don’t Wanna Lose” comes in with a bang and hits on all cylinders, banging drums and reverbed-up guitars, before the power chords arrive like a souped-up “Mama Kin,” but with a dash of riot grrl in the lyrics. “New Kid” gets in and out inside of three minutes and never lets up its pace, even when it’s just Timony over the drums and hand-claps, leading into one of the album’s best choruses, full of roll-the-windows-down-and-hit-the-gas energy from start to end. “Waterfall” has the same kind of electricity, built on a basic blues shuffle compressed into four bars, although it has some of the album’s more insipid lyrics (“You took me to a party and you/hid behind the door/then you stole my wallet and passed out/on the kitchen floor”), certainly Rips‘ biggest weakness.

When Ex Hex slows things down, it sounds like demo territory, stuff that probably should have been left on the cutting room floor. “Outro” closes the album in contrary fashion – we just rocked out for most of the last thirty minutes, so now you give us a slow-dance number to end it? “Hot and Cold,” the first single from the album, borrows its main riff from Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover” and follows the mopey chorus with huge guitar bends that seem lifted from “My Sharona.” The Knack might be a good point of comparison for Ex Hex, skinny ties aside; Ex Hex has that kind of intensity when they let it rock, but part of why “My Sharona” was a hit was that it was all hooks and no slack. Timony and company may have wanted to vary their output a bit, but simply slowing down the same three-power-chords and a chorus framework doesn’t work.

Ex Hex’s Rips doesn’t fit with the rest of Timony’s history, opting for simpler, more commercial sounds, but doing so successfully thanks to strong hooks and tight song structures. Her ex-boyfriend, Ash Bowie, got his old band Polvo back together a few years ago, releasing Siberia, an album as relentlessly complex as their pre-work, last autumn. We all get older in our own ways.

–

I’m heading out on vacation on Wednesday, which will make posting here sparse and my presence on social media sparser. I’ll still try to get a Top Chef recap up later this week, and there will be a new ESPN Insider column from me almost every day while I’m gone.

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→ November 3, 2014
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Haerts.

HAERTS – yeah, I’m not big on the deliberately-misspelled band names trend either – put out a strong EP late last year as a teaser for their full-length debut; “All the Days” made my top 100 songs of 2013, “Wings” would have made my top songs of 2012 had I heard it when it was released, and I liked their overall sound and lead singer Nini Fabi’s powerful, slightly smoky voice. Their self-titled debut album came out last Tuesday, including three of the four songs from last year’s EP along with six new tracks that follow the same general aesthetic – indie-pop, a little new wavish but never retro, all buttressed by Fabi’s tremendous vocals.

Produced by Jean-Philip Grobler, who records his own music under the moniker St. Lucia, Haerts isn’t as bright as his own work but features the same kind of lush, layered sounds that made his album When the Night (which made my top albums of 2013 list) so compelling. Haerts’ songs work best when Fabi is at the front, as on lead single “Giving Up,” where she begins singing just over a repeating keyboard line, after which her vocals are doubled before we get the remainder of the band involved. Like “Wings” and “All the Days,” there’s a relentlessness in the backing key and guitar lines, like a haertbeat beneath the voice that gives the album’s best songs their energy.

That’s lacking when the pace slows, as on “Call My Name,” the intro to which is way too similar to Chris Deburgh’s “The Lady in Red” (good luck unhearing that now); Fabi gets to belt it out during the chorus, but by that point I’d lost some interest, and the formula doesn’t work any better on “Lights Out,” which sounds a bit like a mediocre ’80s ballad and doesn’t let Fabi show off at all. Haerts sound best when they hit the gas from the first measure and leave the cruise control on for the whole four minutes – even deep tracks like “Be the One” (with the perhaps unintentional double entendre “can you show it/when you go down?” in the bridge) and opener “Heart” cast a spell with solid hooks and Fabi’s performance. I understand the desire to vary their sound and tempo across the 40 minutes of a full album, but their style doesn’t work as well at ballad speed.

Those songs from last year’s Hemiplegia EP are the strongest, though – the two I mentioned above plus the title track – with mesmerizing vocals and richly textured synth-bass-drum combinations that grow as each track progresses. “Hemiplegia” might be the unlikeliest title for a pure pop song, but it’s a remarkably crafted track that recalls the best moments from When the Night as it adds layers (like the guitar riff at 2:20) to increase its complexity without losing its hookiness. “Wings” is the only track on the album that feels driven by percussion, but the strength of the beat contrasts beautifully with the flow of Fabi’s vocals, but when everything drops out behind her at the halfway point, she hits this series of notes that mark the highest point of the entire album. There’s enough consistency on this album to make it well worth the purchase, as long as you didn’t buy the EP last year; it’s among the year’s best albums, on the strength of those three songs and one of the best new voices in alternative music.

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→ November 2, 2014
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American Gods.

She smiled at him, looking suddenly, and for the first time, vulnerable. She patted him on the arm. “You’re fucked up, Mister. But you’re cool.”
“I believe that’s what they call the human condition,” said Shadow. “Thanks for the company.”

Author Lev Grossman (The Magicians) also serves as arts critic for TIME magazine, helping assemble their list of the top 100 novels from 1923 with Richard Lacayo. In early 2011, Grossman also put together a list of the ten best novels from the first ten years of the century, of which I hadn’t read two, Lush Life (which I read in 2012 and loved) and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. This was my first encounter with Gaiman, whose reputation as a fantasy writer seriously undersells both his erudition and his ability as a crafter of plots.

Shadow is just about to get out of jail after serving three years of a sentence for nearly beating two men, who cheated him out of his share of a robbery, to death. He finds out that his wife has been killed in a car crash, and on a much-delayed flight home for the funeral, encounters a strange man who calls himself Wednesday (a nod to G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday) and knows more about Shadow than any stranger should.

Wednesday is no ordinary stranger, though; he’s a small-g god, a modern incarnation of Odin, the Norse god and “all-father” who ruled Asgard. It turns out that immigrants who came to the United States and brought their pagan beliefs and superstitions with them brought their gods with them as well – and those gods are about to go to war with the new gods of America, gods of television and computers and other things we worship today. And Wednesday wants Shadow’s help in preparing for the battle, a story that turns out to be as tangled and complex as any culture’s mythology and that involves gods from numerous pantheons, a dead woman who can’t quite stay dead, a lakeside town in Wisconsin, a tree in Virginia, and Rock City in Tennessee.

Gaiman’s assembly of all of these gods and myths into one coherent story by distilling them each into single human characters is brilliant and imaginative, to the point where the novel felt like nothing I’d read before. It’s not magical realism because it’s almost too realistic for it, aside from the whole gods walking around thing; Gaiman plays it all so straight that it’s easy to accept them as regular people, even when they shapeshift or defy the laws of physics. It’s an ensemble cast, with Shadow at its center but not the central character, as his personality matches his name; the plot revolves around him, but he’s never the most interesting man in the room.

As the plot develops, both sides are fighting for Shadow’s allegiance, which allows Gaiman to move Shadow into various orbits and introduce a widening array of his god-characters without creating multiple plot strands. American Gods is mostly linear, which helped make it a quick read, as did Gaiman’s fluid prose and frequent use of dark humor (especially from the mouth of Wednesday, who turns out to be a bit of a cad).

The denouement is just as imaginative as the rest of the book, defying convention and expectations while deftly tying up the various threads of the novel, without short-changing the novel’s themes of mortality, clashes of culture, and the importance of myth. Gaiman’s prose, imagination, and embrace of these big ideas reminded me in parts of Fforde, Vonnegut, Dick, and García Márquez. Grossman’s list turned out to be a tremendous collection of modern fiction; even the titles I didn’t love were worthwhile reads, and the best books on the list rank among my all-time favorites.

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→ November 1, 2014
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…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s IX.

I wrote about the Giants and Royals hitting on high draft picks for Insider, as well as a look at the top 30 prospects for the 2015 draft (with Chris Crawford). This week’s Klawchat will have to tide you over for two weeks, since I’m heading off on vacation on Wednesday.

My October playlist is up on Spotify now, featuring tracks from Ben Howard, Sleater-Kinney, Soundgarden, Ásgeir;, HAERTS, Belle & Sebastian, To Kill a King, and Wytches.

There’s also a new CHVRCHES track out, but it’s not on Spotify yet.

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead have one of my favorite band names ever, but despite my occasional references to them, I don’t have a lot of history with their music. I thought Source Tags & Codes, one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the last twenty years, was much less memorable than the glowing reviews indicated. It was a landmark album of the “emo” subgenre of alternative rock, a point where their earlier noise-rock inclinations found balance with more ambitious song structures and lyrics. Pitchfork even gave it a perfect 10/10 rating, which means some editor there fell down on the job by allowing such a score to be applied to a record that’s this accessible. But because I didn’t come to their subsequent work from the perspective that Source Tags was their magnum opus, I never held the view that they were a band in decline that seems to have affected views of their next four albums.

Coming to their latest release, simply titled IX, rather fresh probably helped me get into the album as quickly as I did – or maybe it’s just one of their more hook-laden records, with five or six tracks that boast strong melodies on top of their usual walls of distorted guitars. What sets this album apart in particular is the tremendous percussion work by Jason Reece and Jamie Miller; the drums drive nearly all of the album’s best tracks through tempo shifts and time signature changes, and they’re mixed towards the front the way John Bonham’s drums were on vintage Zeppelin albums. It’s a new dimension for the band as they continue to evolve within their particular niche of alternative rock.

The new emphasis on heavy, layered percussion work starts up with the first track, “The Doomsday Book,” where the rich drums and cymbal crashes set the tone for the guitars rather than the converse; it feels like a race where no one else can let up for a second because of the pace set by the drums. The track bleeds directly into “Jaded Apostles,” which I think is the album’s best shot at a successful single, starting with a hypnotic, rotating guitar line that subtly changes shape when the drums arrive with a tropical-accented rhythm that pulses through nearly the whole song. (It must be exhausting to play the drums for for these guys.) “Lie Without a Liar” is the first appearance of truly guitar-driven music, with a jangly lead line contrasting with the quicker rhythm section until the wave crashes in the chorus; it’s their best use of textural shifts anywhere on the album, moving from quiet to loud, slow to quick, appearing to peter out after the second chorus before the solo and wall of noise return before the final verse.

There’s some bloat on the disc, especially in the midsection, with two songs crossing the six-minute mark (and becoming tedious strictly due to their length) as well a pair of instrumentals that suffer from the lack of lyrics, which would have forced a more elaborate structure on to each song. The second one, “Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears,” starts out as a piano-and-strings song before the guitars kick in about halfway through, but it’s only effective as a prelude for the album’s closer, “Sound of the Silk,” which has the complexity of a ten-minute track in half that length. “Sound” starts with a two-minute mini-song that, by Trail of Dead standards, is practically a pop tune, although with an unconventional time signature, but then it ends abruptly with a drum breakdown (with a lot of bongos and Caribbean drumming patterns), which itself seems to peter out before we get a spoken-word passage over a guitar fill that crescendoes through the entire poem until reaching its apex in the last thirty seconds with a final chorus that alludes to the earliest part of the track without repeating it. That’s all in 5:13, by the way, and it’s masterful, even if it’s about as uncommercial as any track on the album.

I’m not qualified to say if IX, which is already out in Europe and comes out here on November 11th, is a “comeback” album for …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, because I’m just not familiar enough with their catalog and don’t line enough with the consensus on their earliest work. IX is better than mere “emo” – a term I always thought was pejorative anyway – with art-rock leanings, complex structures, and among the band’s best hooks ever.

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