→ September 7, 2014
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Royal Blood and Opeth.

Royal Blood put out one of my favorite songs of the first half of this year, but their self-titled debut album didn’t come out until the very end of August, a long wait from the hype and airplay they received from “Out of the Black” in the first few months of 2014. Royal Blood delivers on the promise of that first track with a compact half-hour of loud, hard, hook-filled tracks, nothing that breaks new ground, just heavy earworms for folks who like rock that rocks.

“Out of the Black” is one of the best songs of 2014, an huge, heavy bass-and-drum track that comes in so loud and hard that you would swear it was multiple guitars, not the work of a two-piece band that recorded everything without overdubs or multiple instruments. The synchronized drum and machine-gun bass riff that opens the song follows up with a vast, distorted sonic boom that, here, announces the entire album’s arrival – this is loud, heavy, unapologetic rock music. It’s produced in a different way, but the aural effect is familiar.

The best tracks on Royal Blood remind me a lot of one of my favorite under-the-radar albums of late last year, the self-titled debut from Drenge, another UK-based two-piece rock. The initial riff to “Come on Over,” maybe the album’s second-best track after the opener, could easily have come from Drenge. Where Drenge stayed in the post-punk lane, Royal Blood runs more with the blues-rock aesthetic of 1970s hard rock and British Heavy Metal. With huge riffs and frequent stops and starts, most of the tracks on Royal Blood would fit in on Ozzy’s Boneyard on Sirius XM in between songs from Iron Maiden and Saxon.

That bluesy feel – it’s not really “blues” in the traditional sense – comes out more when they turn the amps down slightly, as on “You Can Be So Cruel,” which sacrifices none of the heaviness of the rest of the album but drives more than it thumps. It’s also a great example of how bassist Mike Kerr manages to create a full sound just with his bass and heavy distortion, music that you would otherwise swear had come from two six-string guitars working in tandem. His technique is more apparent on “Blood Hands” because he moderates his picking slightly to make some of the individual notes clearer and less distorted.

They’re also going to get a lot of Jack White comparisons because of Kerr’s vocal style and their shared use of heavily distorted guitar lines played in isolation or just over a drum beat. The interstitial riffs on “Careless” feel ripped straight from a great Jack White or White Stripes track – and I can’t figure out how he can produce notes that high on a traditional bass guitar., while the descending staircase vocals of “Figure It Out” also bring White’s voice and songwriting to mind. But there are little allusions to other genres that White wouldn’t incorporate into his straight-up rockers – like the syncopated, funk-tinged riffs of “Ten-Tonne Skeleton” or the hints at early doom on “You Can Be So Cruel.”

Royal Blood‘s brief 32 minutes don’t allow the duo much time to introduce anything new or innovative, although I don’t think that was part of their mission statement. They had a bunch of hooks, and a new kind of sound they wanted to introduce, two counts on which they were successful. At some point, they’ll have to expand the formula; for now, a half-hour that rocks works just fine.

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I also missed the release of Opeth’s latest album, Pale Communion, their second in their new incarnation as a prog-rock outfit. It’s hard to believe this is the same band that produced the watershed progressive death-metal album Blackwater Park, which combined death-growl doom-metal vocals with classical music influences and Gothenburg-style riffing in epic tracks that could run 10-12 minutes. Pale Communion sounds more like King Crimson or Marillion than it does like At the Gates or In Flames, with clean, sometimes harmonized vocals, intricate song structures (the one real holdover from their earlier output), and influences that range as far afield as folk and jazz. Opener “Eternal Rains Will Come” is pure 1970s prog-rock with some gorgeous instrumental passages, while “Cusp of Eternity” incorporates more hard-rock elements with a huge classic-rock guitar solo before the Hammond organ – which practically defines this album – returns.

It’s still brilliant, the kind of intelligent songwriting you can easily recognize, but it’s also a challenging listen because of the unconventional structure and lack of clear hooks. I don’t agree with Pitchfork’s review, which savaged the album mostly because it’s not the old Opeth, but I do agree with the reviewer’s specific criticism that the album doesn’t feel like its musical ideas are new, only its structures and arrangements. Opeth was so groundbreaking in their death-metal phase, defying conventions of even the adventurous melodic death metal movements of Gothenburg and Finland, that it’s a little odd to hear them as a prog-rock outfit that doesn’t seem to bring many new ideas or energies. Pale Communion is still among the best albums of the year, because of its ambition and sheer intelligence; I just want a band that has historically been so full of ideas to bring that same creativity to their new sound.

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→ September 6, 2014
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Saturday five, 9/6/14.

I wrote about the potential impact of some September callups for Insider, and held a Klawchat on Friday. I’m back on Baseball Tonight in the small hours this evening, with the show airing at 2:30 am Eastern.

This week’s links, from food science to gender bias in sports fanbases:

Also, for fellow fans of melodic death metal, the upcoming In Flames album, Siren Charms, is available as a $5 pre-order through that link. I’m not that familiar with their work, but if anyone’s heard the new album, I’d love to hear your opinions.

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→ September 5, 2014
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More NYC pizza and gelato.

Today’s Klawchat went well, I think. I’ll be back on BBTN tonight at 1:30 am Eastern.

I’ve gotten to two more spots from that (somewhat dubious) Food and Wine list of the nation’s best pizzerias, both in Manhattan, home to eleven of the 43 restaurants to make their cut. I still have five left in New York City, three of which (Di Fara, Paulie Gee’s, Sottocasa) are tricky because their hours are limited.

Forcella boasts three locations in the city, with the original in Brooklyn; I went to their NoHo location, on the Bowery between 2nd and 3rd (that’s Manhattan, for those of you unfamiliar with NYC neighborhoods). Their biggest claim to fame is as one of the first pizzerias, perhaps the first, to introduce the Neapolitan style of pizza known as “pizza montanara,” where the dough is quickly deep-fried to set and slightly crisp the crust, after which it’s topped and baked in a hot oven like most authentic Neapolitan pizzas are. This was my first experience with any kind of fried pizza, so I have no means of comparison, but I can say it was spectacular – the direct contact of the hot oil with the crust produces far more caramelization of the exterior starches and sugars than you’ll get from the indirect heat of a hotter oven, and there’s a hint of the flavor of a zeppole (the Italian take on fried dough, often served in a paper bag and drowned in powdered sugar). The crushed tomatoes were bright and very sweet, but I might argue for a little more cheese so you’re not just eating a plate of (delicious) fried bread. It is a steal at $9, by the way.


Pizza montanara at Forcella.

Rubirosa is a full-fledged Italian restaurant that happens to serve very good pizza. I saw it on Mulberry Street, between Prince and Spring, a fairly unassuming storefront that hides a larger seating area in the back. Rubirosa’s pizza isn’t true Neapolitan style, as it has very little exterior “lip” and is more cracker-like underneath, as opposed to the traditional wet-centered Neapolitan style. While the toppings were a little more generous than those at Forcella, the tomatoes weren’t as bright and their acidity overpowered the rest of the pizza because the crust was so thin. I enjoy these crispier crusts, like those at the Grimaldi’s chain in Arizona (I haven’t tried their NY outposts yet), but it’s a different product than true Neapolitan pizza, where you can really taste and feel the craft of the baker behind the bread. Also, at $17 for a small pizza, it’s overpriced for what you get.

Mo’ Gelato‘s coffee gelato is some of the strongest-flavored I’ve ever tasted, although that’s not saying much considering how most coffee-flavored gelatos, even those dubbed “espresso” flavor, often taste about as much like coffee as a light-and-sweet cup of swill from Dunkin’ Donuts. Mo’ Gelato’s looks darker and tastes it, so that the sweetness has real balance from the sharp note of roasted coffee. Their chocolate sorbet was a little pale in comparison, even though its color and flavor are both very dark – the lack of any kind of additional fat created a hollow flavor that, paired with the butterfat in the coffee gelato, seemed flat.

Il Buco Alimentaria is an Italian market and sandwich/small plates shop that also serves a small selection of gelato flavors, about eight when I visited, dished up by a rather fetching Sicilian woman who looked about as Italian as I do (which is to say, not much). Their chocolate gelato was superb, very smooth with a pudding-like flavor and texture, a rich semi-sweet chocolate that wasn’t extremely dark but less cloying or sweet than milk chocolate. The caramel gelato, however, was way too mild; in an era of sea salt caramel gelato and ice cream, weak caramel flavors just won’t cut it.

The next pizza stop will probably be Via Tribunali, an import to Manhattan from Seattle that is the only one of the F&W pizzerias in Manhattan that I haven’t tried and that is open for lunch.

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→ September 2, 2014
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August music update.

Today’s Insider column covers notable September callups.

I held this back until after the holiday weekend, both to make sure more of you would see it and because I was hoping we’d get some new singles out on Tuesday, which worked out with songs from HAERTS and TV on the Radio released this morning. I’ve created another Spotify playlist with all of this month’s songs.

alt-J – “Every Other Freckle.” Their sophomore album, This is All Yours, drops on September 22nd, and the the third single released from it is the best and most alt-J-ish one yet, a precise, rapidly-shifting track that seamlessly combines genres while boasting some of the band’s trademark double-edged lyrics: “I’m gonna bed into you like a cat beds into a beanbag/Turn you inside out, and lick you like a crisp packet.” I can’t wait for the album to see how all of these songs work together, given how cohesive An Awesome Wave was. Speaking of which, the Mercury Prize shortlist announcement is just eight days away.

Faded Paper Figures – “Real Lies.” I think Spotify suggested FPF to me because I’ve listened to alt-J, but they’re not similar beyond a shared interest in electro-pop sounds. Where alt-J is surgically precise, FPF is free-flowing; where alt-J is musically understated, FPF is bold and poppy. They do both engage in a fair amount of wordplay, as the Figures do here, singing “real lies” as you’d pronounce “realize,” and opening a song about reality and illusion with a reference to “the broken I.”

The Rentals – “Thought Of Sound.” Hard to believe their novelty/cult hit “Friends of P” came out 19 years ago next month; in the interim, they released another album, broke up, reformed, released several mini-albums on their own, then signed with Polyvinyl for the album Lost in Alphaville, which just came out last week. The band’s founder, Matt Sharp, started out as the bassist for Weezer, and I think the Rentals sound more like the original Weezer than current Weezer does. “Thought of Sound” fits that rubric: it’s not overtly poppy or catchy, but comes at you more subtly, with a balance of atmospheric and slightly dark music with the more optimistic lyrics.

Interpol – “All The Rage Back Home.” This sounds like vintage Interpol. I think that’s a good thing, but then again, I really like Joy Division.

Echosmith – “Cool Kids.” My daughter’s favorite new song of the summer is actually a pretty strong track overall, not bad for a group of four siblings, three of them still teenagers. I particularly like their use of silence when it would be almost instinctive to fill all of that space with more sound; the starkness underscores the isolation of the lyrics’ speakers.

Twerps – “Heavy Hands.” This Australian act’s influences are largely from that country and less familiar to my ears, at least, bands like the Clean and the Go-Betweens who never crossed over to U.S. radio. Their new 8-song EP, Underlay, continues their exploration of mellow jangle-pop textures, with a couple of songs under two minutes as the band has one idea, gets after it, and gets out. “Heavy Hands” is my favorite track from the album, deceptively upbeat, reminiscent of the earliest output by the Cure or New Order before their sounds expanded with bigger recording budgets.

Wild Beasts – “Wanderlust.” Radiohead meets alt-J meets … I don’t even know, the Dazz Band? It doesn’t always work, often coming off as weird for weirdness’ sake, but this track is the album’s best, fluid and abstract musically, punctuated by the singer’s refrain of “Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck.” I won’t – I promise.

Bear in Heaven – “Autumn.” I’ve got their latest, Time is Over One Day Old, on the to-listen list. “Autumn,” the second single from the album, is dark, pulsing, almost menacing in its combination of intensity and the stark keyboard lines.

Royal Blood – “Figure It Out.” I’ll review their debut album later this week; nothing on it can match the standout “Out of the Black,” one of my favorite songs of the year, but the second single is solid, more classic blues-rock than the heavier sound of their first hit.

Strand of Oaks – “Goshen ’97.” A reader recommendation, and a pretty good one. The album’s uneven but this nostalgia-tinged rocker – can we already feel nostalgic about 1997? God have mercy on us all – brings back memories not just of grunge but of the Replacements and similar loose garage-rock artists of the 1980s. I didn’t need to know about the porn and menthols under his bed, though.

Phantogram – “Black Out Days.” I’ve been remiss in omitting this song from the last two lists, as the song has been all over XMU/Alt Nation since the spring. Singer Sarah Barthels elevates this song beyond the electronic-rock norm with her hypnotic Cocteau Twins-esque vocals.

The Kooks – “Bad Habit.” The British rock quartet’s fourth album, Listen, came out today in the U.K. and is due next Tuesday here; “Bad Habit” is the second single released, after April’s “Down,” and it sounds a lot like a Kooks song – catchy, riffing heavily on classic-rock influences, less Britpop and a little more Arctic Monkeys.

Ryan Adams – “Gimme Something Good.” His best song since “Cuts Like a Knife” back in ’83.

Glass Animals – “Pools.” “Gooey” was their big alternative hit this summer, but I’m not a fan of the song itself or the production that seems to melt the lyrics back into the music. “Pools” has far more energy, driven by a jungle/tropical rhythm that’s a better contrast to the breathy low-baritone vocals.

Milky Chance – “Stolen Dance.” You’ve probably heard this by now – 77 million plays on Spotify can’t be wrong, can they? (Answer: Of course they can.) I don’t rate the song quite that highly, but it doesn’t sound like anything else out there right now, and, as Rakim might say, the beat is fresh.

HAERTS – “Giving Up.” Their debut album is due by year-end, after a slew of promising singles, including this one, released today, a bright slice of indie-pop driven by singer Nini Fabi’s strong, sultry vocals. If you liked Haim, this is a million times better than anything they released.

TV on the Radio – “Happy Idiot.” Also released today, “Happy Idiot” previews the band’s upcoming album Seeds, due November 18th. (It won’t include last year’s amazing “Mercy,” however, which was my #4 song of 2013.) Shifting into serious new wave territory with the drum machine and staccato guitar line, “Happy Idiot” has a subtler hook than “Mercy” but builds tension through layering of guitars as the song crescendoes toward the end of its three minutes. Stereogum called it TV on the Radio’s best song since Pure Science; I disagree, since “Mercy” was one of their best two or three tracks ever. Instead, I’ll just say that “Happy Idiot” is a hopeful preview of their upcoming album.

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→ September 1, 2014
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The Silkworm.

J.K. Rowling’s second detective novel starring Cormoran Strike, The Silkworm, continues to establish the detective character as the star of the series – a critical trait in any variation on the hard-boiled theme – while dropping Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott, into the world of publishing and avant-garde literature. While the crime and its resolution are just as compelling as that of the first novel in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling, it’s Strike and Robin who keep the story moving, as Rowling develops each character and explores their professional and personal relationship.

Strike is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who lost one of his lower legs to an IED, born out of wedlock to a groupie of the rock star Jonny Rokeby, with whom Strike has next to no relationship at all, although I get the sense we’ll meet Rokeby in a future book. His foundering private investigation business has received a huge boost after he solved the murder in The Cuckoo’s Calling, which brings Leonora Quine, the wife of the eccentric and would-be transgressive novelist Owen Quine, to his office to track down her missing husband. Of course, Owen’s been murdered, in a grisly fashion that mirrors the concluding scene of his new, unpublished book Bombyx Mori (Latin for “silkworm”). Solving the murder requires Strike and Robin to navigate the huge egos of Quine’s corner of the publishing world while also engaging in the kind of textual analysis you might expect to find in a college literature class. (I would have loved more passages from the fake book, but I’m generally a sucker for metafiction – and it would be fun to see Rowling mock transgressive literature.)

Rowling seems to have had a lot of fun sending up her targets in the worlds of literature and publishing, not least in the character of Quine – a philandering artiste of questionable talent, still living off the reviews of his first novel, published decades earlier, and financial support from his longtime agent, Liz Tassel. Quine’s ability and commercial success both pale compared to those of his rival, Michael Fancourt, who appears to be his own biggest fan and who has some very curious thoughts on literature, art, and love. I don’t recognize any specific targets of these parodies, if that is indeed what they are, and while they’re all entertaining and more than just two-dimensional side characters, they only come to life at all because of how Strike and Robin work them over during their investigation.

In the first novel in the series, Robin came on board as a temp and served primarily as Strike’s admistrative assistant and chief organizer, but we knew then that she had aspirations of joining Cormoran in detective work. She gets more such opportunities in the Quine case, and the result might be The Silkworm‘s greatest strength: Rowling crafts her into a strong, compelling, three-dimensional female co-lead, so while Strike is still front and center, it’ll be hard to imagine him working without her, both because she can do things he can’t (particularly where a more sensitive touch is needed with a witness or suspect) and because he’s coming to depend on her professionally and even emotionally.

That development means that The Silkworm does suffer from some second-novel blues, as Rowling spends time on her two characters on plot threads that aren’t related to the crime (something you’d never find in a classic hard-boiled detective novel) and that don’t lead to any specific resolution or catharsis at the end of the novel. Strike’s relationship with the beautiful but damaged Charlotte, which ended at the start of the first book, takes a few more turns for the worse, while Robin’s relationship with her fiancé Matt hits the skids over her commitment to a job he didn’t want her to keep. Those diversions are still critical to the evolution of Robin’s relationship with Strike, and I can imagine further development in all three relationships (or, in the case of Strike/Charlotte, a relationship that won’t quite end) in future books in the series, but they came across as too tangential to The Silkworm‘s story.

Rowling’s greatest gift as a writer – and I believe she has several – is storycraft, and while The Silkworm isn’t as involved as any of the Harry Potter novels or even The Casual Vacancy, it is tight and gripping and, in hindsight, gives the reader sufficient clues to sniff out the killer, although I was never really sure and ultimately fell for Rowling’s final feint. The investigation is convoluted and nonlinear, with Strike and Robin pursuing multiple leads at once, and Rowling eventually telling us what they’re doing without telling us what they find so she can obscure the killer’s identity until the very end of the book. The emphasis on the process, such as Strike’s advice to Robin before her first attempt to interrogate a witness, added a realistic element to the novel.

The New York Times review of The Silkworm ended with an ambiguous opinion on the novel, that “the most compelling characters are not the killer or the victim, but the detectives charged with solving the crime.” To me, however, that is an unequivocal statement of praise – a great detective novel starts and ends with the detective him- or herself. The story’s the thing in a mystery, although the detective can become part of the appeal in that genre as well, but I enjoy detective novels when I like the detective, whether he’s hard-boiled or sunnyside-up. I’ve always enjoyed Rowling’s voice and ability to craft a story I can’t put down, and now that she’s attached those to a great if unusual detective character, I’m all in.

Next up: Christine Sismondo’s America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops.

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→ August 29, 2014
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Brill Bruisers.

Today’s Klawchat transcript includes a lot of Kyle Schwarber talk and other baseball stuff.

The New Pornographers get the “supergroup” label a little too easily – I think of a supergroup as a group that includes a couple of artists who are well-known for their solo work, but among the half-dozen members of the New Pornographers the only solo artist who might qualify for that term is Neko Case. The characterization of the group as a collection of solo artists seems to me to diminish the work they do together, which has often been critically acclaimed but hasn’t broken out of the indie/alternative category on the commercial side. Their latest album, Brill Bruisers, is garnering more positive reviews, but it’s also their most overtly pop work yet – a power-pop showcase that bursts with energy beneath the band’s obscure lyrics.

The album opens with the title track and first single, which refers to the Brill Building era and style of songwriting, also apparent in the melody and backing harmoanies to the song. It’s a bouncy, exuberant track that sends a strong opening signal that we’re going to hear big pop sounds that reach back as far as the 1950s for musical inspiration. Bandleader A.C. Newman wrote about 3/4 of the tracks – Dan Bejar (of Destroyer) wrote the rest – pairing his stark lyrics with these huge major-chord hooks. “Fantasy Fools,” which is not actually about Eric Karabell and Nate Ravitz, is an even higher-energy ride with the explosions into the crescendoing harmony – one of the strongest uses on the album of the group’s mixed-gender vocals. The second track, “Champions of Red Wine,” has a space-age bachelor bad feel mixed with a Fleetwood Mac guitar line and vocals from both Case and Katherine Calder, while the album’s soft middle section leads into a rousing finish with three of the four final tracks, including the stomping closer “You Tell Me Where.”

Bejar’s best contribution brings the electricity too, but in a more frenzied fashion, particularly on the album’s second single, “War on the East Coast,” which opens with a staccato guitar riff that careens into the big chorus, only for Bejar to take a strange detour into a drunken harmonica solo. He falls short with “Spidyr,” a slower and more precious number that takes far too long to get to the huge drum incursion that powers the song’s final minute – a whole track like that might have been overkill, but it would have been preferable to Bejar’s too-close vocal style without much of any music behind him. Amber Webber of Black Mountain and Lightning Dust adds her vocals to Bejar’s other addition to the album, “Born With a Sound,” a song that would have fit in beautifully on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs musically and with Bejar and Webber’s back-and-forth.

The band gets too mired in some of its past references, like “Backstairs” quaffing too deeply on the ’70s, and the lyrics are often inscrutable and/or pretentious, like the raucous “Dancehall Domine,” detracting from the album’s most glorious song with a weird, obsolete word in the title. Most of Newman’s songs have few lyrics and don’t tell a story or even paint a still image, so while they include some clever wordplay there isn’t much substance there. Brill Bruisers is foremost a record of great music, clipped and concise pop gems with strong support on keyboards from Calder and Blaine Thurier, with influences from about four decades of music yet without ever sounding derivative of any of them.

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→ August 26, 2014
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The Magic Mountain.

I have a new post for Insiders up on ten breakout players from 2014 whose performances look sustainable to me.

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was, until this month, one of the only novels to ever defeat me – after reading the first few pages on a vacation (bad idea) in 2008, I set the book aside and couldn’t fathom tackling its heavy, leaden prose again. Its presence on both the Novel 100 and the Bloomsbury 100 Must-Read Classic Novels lists was enough encouragement to get me to try the novel again, and while I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, I did at least finish the book thanks to a lot of time logged on trains in New York City last weekend. (I read the original translation, because I’ve had the copy for ages, but the link above goes to the newer translation by John Woods that earned high marks from people who actually look into such things.)

The Magic Mountain is a “novel of ideas,” which is a euphemism for a book without a plot. Hans Castorp, the everyman protagonist, heads to a mountaintop sanatorium for tuberculosis patients around 1907, ostensibly to visit his cousin Joachim for a few weeks before embarking on a career as an engineer. A chest cold convinces Hans to extend his stay, which turns into seven years – mirroring the seven years of tribulation in Revelations – that see Castorp exposed to all manner of philosophies of life, death, religion, politics, and meaning, not to mention the rather frequent expirations of his various comrades-in-phthisis. He spends much of his time listening to arguments between the patient Hans Settembrini and Settembrini’s friend Naphta, a dialectic that becomes increasingly rancorous as the book progresses, with Settembrini the humanist speaking in circles around Naphta the Catholic extremist’s outdated, reductive arguments. Neither man has any monopoly on truth, or even a fractional share of it, and their debate ends in the only realistic fashion, speaking to the futility of arguing over such philosophical questions to such an extent that one never does anything concrete about them.

Hans is a truly enigmatic central character, bland like Nick Jenkins of A Dance to the Music of Time, but more involved than Jenkins’ largely neutral observer-narrator, essentially committing himself to the sanatorium on the flimsiest of grounds – the whole institution is more a money-making enterprise than an institution boosting convalescence – partly because he develops a crush on the Central Asian-looking Frau Chauchat. (The Chauchat was a machine gun used by the French Army during World War I, which had just ended as Mann was writing his book but takes place after the novel’s conclusion.) Hans’ participation in the various philosophical debates he encounters, mostly between Settembrini and Naphta but occasionally involving Joachim or other consumptives, is abortive and often uncomfortable. He is a metaphorical man-child, but while his naivete allows his elders to engage in lengthy exhortations on their beliefs, his childishness becomes absurd when he abases himself in front of Frau Chauchat.

Mann intended his novel both as a grand book of ideas and as a subtle satire of other works of the time, much of which is lost on the modern reader because the targets of his parody haven’t held up as well as his own work has. There are passages where he shifts gears into comedy-of-manners territory, and dreamlike sequences – including the long, gripping passage where Castorp takes a walk on his own but is caught in a snowstorm that nearly kills him – that show tremendous imagination and Mann’s ability to create narrative greed that quickens the novel’s pace. But I’ve read most of the major philosophical novels of that era, and while they consistently rank highly on every list of the greatest novels ever written, they always fall short in the aspect of fiction I enjoy most: the story. Castorp grows, sort of, although at the end he’s more educated without being much wiser, and there’s no central plot that gets or even requires some sort of resolution at the end. He marches off to war, with a ten-page epilogue that shows him on the battlefield (and in the trenches), but is he any better off? Perhaps shaking off the illusions of childhood and of a life still permanent arm him better for what would be four years of a very ugly war, assuming he were even to survive it, but the experiences he had on that mountain seemed far from magic to me.

This leaves me with just one title left on the Bloomsbury list, War and Peace, and twelve left on the Novel 100, although I don’t intend to finish that list because some of those books look like they’ll cause me too much pain.

Next up: J.K. Rowling’s The Silkworm, the second Cormoran Strike novel, published under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

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→ August 25, 2014
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New York City eats, 2014 edition.

The highlight meal of the trip, and the one big splurge, was a recommendation by Sother Teague at Amor y Amargo, whose establishment I’ll discuss in a moment. Sother directed me to the tasting menu at Hearth, which is only* $86 for a seven-course meal that showed incredible skill and breadth within the farm-to-table genre.

* I say “only” because this kind of meal can easily cost you north of $100, and I think the only thing Hearth’s tasting menu lacked was flash.

The meal started with an amuse-bouche, a chilled carrot soup with blackberry-balsamic drizzle on top, served in a tall narrow glass to allow you to drink the soup in one or two shots. The first proper course was also a chilled soup, this one a zucchini soup with pistachios, sun gold tomato, basil, and chunks of Parmiggiano-Reggiano. The zucchini was pureed and slightly aerated; I assume there was cream added given the soup’s tremendous body, but that much fat would have muted the flavor, and in this case there was no dampening of the taste of the squash itself at all. The nuts and small chunks of cheese are sprinkled throughout the soup, emphasizing the textural contrast – and I can’t say I ever realized what a great combination pistachios and zucchini would make until I had this soup. I was hoping I could get a gallon of this to go as a parting gift, but no such luck.

Second course was my favorite of all seven savory courses: a warm summer vegetable salad with a red wine vinegar/shallot dressing that reminded me in flavor of a buerre blanc, but in fact was made by simmering potatoes and then using some of them to thicken the dressing and coat the remaining vegetables, which included green beans, more zucchini, and cauliflower. People who think they don’t like vegetables should go eat this dish. I’ve never had a vegetable dish with this much flavor that didn’t involve cooking the vegetables to the point where they brown.

The next three courses involved proteins, and each was very good to great. The swordfish dish with eggplant, tomatoes, shelling beans, and black bean puree had two issues for me, although the fish itself was perfectly cooked – by far the most important part. I personally like swordfish served very simply: grilled, topped with sea salt, fresh black pepper, a little olive oil, and citrus juice. The way steak lovers want a fine steak is how I want my swordfish – don’t get in the way of the star ingredient. The other issue was that the eggplant was very soft, too much so, and I ended up setting it aside. The restaurant was dark enough that when the dish arrived, one strip of eggplant with a little of the skin and cap still on the end … well, I’ll just say it didn’t look very appetizing, because this isn’t Top Chef.

The lamb dish involved two different cuts, including a small piece of lamb rib meat that had been rubbed with Middle Eastern spices, smoked off the bone, and seared on both sides, giving it the look and texture of Texas BBQ but with the flavor profile of Turkish or Arabic cuisine. The remaining lamb pieces were slices of loin, served very rare, with roasted carrots and a smear of labneh (Lebanese strained yogurt) underneath. I wouldn’t have ordered this because lamb is my least favorite protein, but as it turned out the dish was fantastic and my only complaint is that I wanted more of the smoked rib (even if it meant less of the loin meat). The carrots were coated in some amaranth kernels, giving the dish a little more crunch – kind of like quinoa but without the bitterness.

Their “iconic” (that was my server’s word for it) meatball dish was very good, but I’m a tough critic on meatballs and I think I’ve had better, including Coppa in Boston … and in my own kitchen. The meatball comprises veal and ricotta, served in a traditional southern Italian tomato sauce (don’t call it “gravy,” please) with cannelloni filled with “market greens.” I prefer meatballs that have been browned more, to max out that Maillard reaction, and like a mixture of meats that isn’t so veal-heavy because veal is so lean that the proteins in it can tighten up when cooked through, as a meatball has to be, and there’s always a slightly dry mouthfeel because of that lack of fat.

The first dessert course was more like a palate cleanser, a watermelon granita with a tiny quenelle of creme fraiche and some toasted pine nuts. It looks like pink rock salt, so the fact that it’s subtle and sweet and cold is a big surprise – and, as with the pistachios and zucchinis, the pine nuts and watermelon worked shockingly well together.

The second dessert was the memorable one, as in I’ll remember eating this for the next twenty years. It was a chocolate-peanut butter sundae, without ice cream: Chocolate sorbet on soft whipped cream on a peanut-butter sauce, surrounded by a crumbled peanut butter cookie. Sure, you could make the whipped cream and cookie at home, and the sauce is probably doable (it was smooth like caramel), but that sorbet – I don’t know how you get something that dark and cocoa-intense without dairy or eggs. Grom in the west Village does a chocolate sorbet with egg yolks, but I think Hearth’s is just sorbet, based on what two staff members told me. Speaking of which, everyone I spoke to there was wonderful – I ended up chatting with a few of them up front before leaving and they’ve clearly done a good job assembling a team full of good people.

I visited two cocktail bars while in the city, one of which was the aforementioned Amor y Amargo, Sother Teague’s 240 square foot place in the East Village where he stocks no juices or other mixers. It’s all spirits and bitters – liquors, liqueurs, potable bitters (like Campari or Aperol), and the little flavoring agents you probably think of when you hear “bitters” (like Angostura or Peychaud’s). Sother’s good people, so if you go and you see him behind the bar, mention I sent you. I tried two of his drinks, one his own suggestion – a mixture of three varieties of whiskeys, finished with a habanero bitters, so the result was like standing over a grill on which you’re smoking a pork shoulder over hickory. It’s a really cool space too, and most of the bitters are out on display – I’d never heard of more than half of the brands, and Sother told me he’s got a dozen or so bottles of stuff that’s no longer made or otherwise very difficult to procure. If you’re also a fan of Amor y Amargo, you can vote for Sother in Edible Manhattan’s Cocktail Contest, which runs through August 31st. The winner gets a $5000 prize.

After recommending Hearth, Sother also recommended Pouring Ribbons, a hidden bar on Avenue B just off 14th, in Alphabet City, so well disguised it might as well be a speakeasy. (The password is to be very nice to the guy at the door.) I got one drink, because when I’d finished that I couldn’t feel the tip of my nose, generally a sign that the libation has done its job. The Trouble in Paradise cocktail starts with Appleton V/X rum, probably my favorite rum for mixing, and adds a charred pineapple-infused rum, sweet vermouth, and campari – a small upgrade on a Kingston Negroni. For a drink that was all alcohol, it was surprisingly subtle, even understated – the booze doesn’t overpower the rest of the drink. It’s rich, well-rounded, a little smoky, a little sweet (I find rum in general is a little sweet, as if it has memories of whence it came), better than any true Negroni I’ve ever had – and I do like true Negronis, which are made with gin rather than rum.

While in the neighborhood one of those nights, I stopped into the renowned Big Gay Ice Cream shop to see what the fuss was about … and I was underwhelmed. It’s decent soft serve ice cream, served with lots of crappy toppings. You can’t make premium ice cream and then coat it in stale grocery-store marshmallows – but that’s just what I ended up with when I ordered the Rocky Roadhouse cone. You can build your own cone or sundae, but the use of subpar ingredients is a big negative for me.

Whenever I’m at Citi Field and can sneak away long enough for lunch, I take the 7 train one more stop to its end in Flushing’s Chinatown, which seems to get bigger and busier every time I go there. I usually go for a dish of steamed dumplings (xiao long baozi), which is a popular item in that neighborhood and the kind of thing that can serve as a meal in itself. The serious eats blog had a few posts extolling the virtues of a small basement food stall called Tianjin Dumpling House in the Golden Mall, located down Main Street towards 41st Ave, which serves an absolute bargain of a dozen dumplings for $3-6 total. The pork, shrimp, and chive version didn’t seem to have much shrimp, but the pork and chives were well seasoned and juicy without any grease. The dough wrappers were just thick enough to retain a little tooth and didn’t tear or leak, but not so much so that they came out gummy or undercooked.

Their dumplings were much better than those at the very popular table-service restaurant Nan Xiang Dumpling House on Prince Street, which took much longer to get (even for take-out). Theirs are soup dumplings, so inside the wrapper is a tablespoon or so of broth that bursts (or slops) out when you bite into it – on to your shirt if you’re not careful. The tradeoff is you get less filling, and since their servings are only a half-dozen to an order, I added an order of vegetable dumplings, which were filled mostly with spinach. Unfortunately, I found a hair in the container of the latter – not actually in the dumplings, but still a hit to the confidence even though the place has an A rating from the board of health.

I almost never go into NYC without hitting up at least one pizzeria, and tried two from that old Food and Wine list of the country’s best pizzerias … neither of which was all that special. Don Antonio by Starita, which is partly owned by the co-owner of my favorite pizzeria in the city, Keste, is VPN certified for authenticity, but I thought the crust was too thick in the center for that. The dough was otherwise the strength of the pizza, though, with good texture and just a little charring around the outside. I went with one of their signature combinations, a pistachio pesto and sausage pizza with mozzarella but no tomatoes or sauce; the pesto itself was kind of heavy and gave the pizza a nut butter-like flavor that just didn’t seem to belong on a pizza. I’d like to try this place again with a more traditional set of toppings to see if the dough holds up better under a lighter load.

Nicoletta, also in the east village area, was a big disappointment – their pizza is a hybrid of New York-style and Italian-style but doesn’t grab the best traits of either of them. The crust was crispier and held its shape when pulled off the plate, with very little lift at the edges. The tomato sauce tasted overcooked and acidic, and there was grease on the top like you’d expect at a mediocre pizza shop. I can’t imagine why it was on Food and Wine‘s list.

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→ August 23, 2014
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Anxious child.

This is a continuation of a piece I wrote for Stigma Fighters in July about my struggle with anxiety. The response to that column was so positive that I wrote some more about what my life as someone with anxiety has been like. Thank you all for your kind words and support.

I was a nervous kid. That gets chalked up to all kinds of things – someone being shy, nerdy, socially awkward – but in my case, it was brain chemistry, exacerbated by the fact that I was a year younger than all of my classmates, a year less mature both physically and emotionally. That in turn meant that I didn’t have size or athletic ability on which to fall back – I wasn’t blessed with any kind of athletic skills anyway, although I didn’t learn the reason for that until my daughter was born with an inborn error of metabolism – and I was always a step behind everyone in my understanding of behavior and social norms. All of that, and it’s a lot, would have added up to a rough ride on the social side of the equation, made even worse by the added scrutiny that came with being a good student whom everyone knew as the kid who skipped first grade.

But no one ever seemed to grasp that my nervousness was more than just nerves, although maybe at the time, the late 1970s and eary 1980s, that wasn’t even something people would look for. They weren’t going to give a kid Valium, although Lord knows it might have helped. So instead, I was just unhappy a lot. I had friends, and I did have fun at school sometimes, but I was always much happier outside of the school calendar. My daughter can’t wait for school to start again; I dreaded the arrival of September the way I now dread the arrival of winter. School meant being put in situations over which I had little or no control, and I had absolutely no coping skills to handle that at the time.

I have memories of social anxiety going all the way back to preschool, and they become more frequent and more acute as early as second grade. Jumping into any grade from outside the school would have been easier, but moving from kindergarten, where I had made many friends (some of whom I’m still in touch with, one of many blessings of social media and the way the passing of time smooths over a lot of rough edges), straight to second grade, where I was immediately labelled as the kid who skipped a grade, was difficult. I didn’t feel academic pressure; I probably could have kept going, and there was a later discussion about skipping me another grade that my parents wisely shot down. Had that happened, I would have graduated high school a few weeks after my 16th birthday, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say I was not emotionally strong enough to survive what that would have entailed. Doogie Howser might have made for a cute plot point on television, but that would be a shitshow in real life.

Acquiring those labels, and the associated attention from teachers who knew that I’d been singled out for different treatment by the school’s administration, didn’t invoke rough or mean treatment from other kids; I don’t think I got it any worse than anyone else did, at least. But being different, and knowing that everyone else knows you are different, carries its own kind of pressure, one that I placed on myself. I wore every awkward or unpleasant social interaction as an open wound. I became increasingly hesitant to try anything new or different socially, something that lasted more or less until my junior year of high school. If I didn’t do anything different, I could stay out of the center of attention, and that was more or less my goal, because I was always convinced that everyone’s eyes were on me.

I say “more or less” because I didn’t view all types of attention as equally painful. Doing well in class was fine; it was almost expected of me, and I know I expected it of myself. I hated not knowing the answer, but because I was always a self-starter when it came to learning, reading anything I could get my hands on in my spare time, it wasn’t a frequent problem for me. (That said, I do remember my sixth-grade math teacher, a lecherous man whom I’ll call Mr. J, enjoying a laugh at my expense by because I gave the answer “subtraction” when he wanted “difference.” That was 31 years ago, and I remember it well enough to tell you where I was sitting in the room when it happened, and turning to the left to see Phil, a neighbor and sometime friend, mocking me for it. I should really have been able to let go of that memory by now, but it is mine for life.)

Instead, my anxiety – not that I understood it as such at the time – emerged outside of the classroom. I watch my daughter now, and I see so clearly how she has what I lacked, and how much better off she’ll be in life for it. She can walk into any situation and introduce herself, make a friend, and take off to play. She’s fearless like that, despite being the child of two parents who’ve fought anxiety, and when I see her do it, I’m beyond proud – I admire her for it. Even today, it is a real effort for me to go into any group of people I don’t know and do anything more than stand at the edge and listen. I can’t even tell you what I’m afraid of anymore; the behavior is so ingrained at this point that it’s no longer about fear or anxiety over some specific outcome. I am anxious, full stop.

Third grade, age 8, turned out to be the tipping point for me, although in this case I don’t remember any specific incident or even series of incidents that pushed me over the edge. For whatever reason, and there may not have been one, my anxiety began to wreak havoc on my stomach, to the point where I had to go home for lunch most days because I was getting sick for no apparent reason. I’m still not sure why it happened, but the fact that the symptoms that appeared 33 years ago went away almost immediately when I started taking an SSRI (escitalopram) in 2012 tells me that it had to be mental or emotional in origin. I have other GI issues – when a gastroenterologist tested me in 2011 for lactose intolerance, my test results were so bad he started laughing – but no treatment or medicine worked until I started taking medication for my anxiety. And suddenly my stomach became somewhat predictable again. Part of me wants to rage at every doctor I saw about my stomach troubles over the last twenty years for failing to even consider the possibility that the cause was psychological, but most of them just fall under the axiom that a man with a hammer sees everything as a nail.

I think back on that year as the place where my life forked. Had that happened today, it’s at least possible that my symptoms would have been recognized as anxiety, or at least as a mental illness rather than a physical one, and I might have received treatment – medication, therapy, both – that would have stopped it in its tracks. Instead, it developed into the condition that dictated my life, creating a vicious circle that made me into someone whose answer to anything was always “no.” I didn’t want to go to strange places, because I might be put in uncomfortable social situations – and might get sick. I didn’t want to go to a new restuarant because I might get sick – and I found that, even just having to spend more time in the bathroom, deeply embarrassing.

As hard as dealing with the emotional and physical aspects of anxiety was, I think I was most hurt by seeing the gulf between myself and close friends when it came to just being comfortable with who I was. I could watch friends be at ease in social situations – with guys, with girls, whatever – and understand exactly what they did that I didn’t, but I couldn’t emulate them. You can’t fake feeling safe in your own skin.

It did get better, eventually, although it took a lot of effort on my own part and a good bit of luck as well. I knew to some extent that I was high-strung, at least enough that it was creating a barrier between myself and many of my friends and even classmates. For reasons I’m not even sure I understand now, I decided that the way to get around that was … to be funny. Whether I succeeded in that endeavor is both another question and a story for another day, but it was nothing more than a band-aid on the suppurating wound of anxiety that ruled most of my life. It did, however, lead me to a group of friends that made my last year of high school by far the best year I had in school at any level, and I’m still close to many of those friends even today.

But the fundamental problems – the anxiety, and the way it discouraged me from being social the way most people my age were – persisted into my 30s, with some facets lingering until I finally got treatment two years ago. Habits I learned as a child – avoiding situations that might make me uncomfortable – came to dominate my life. I still don’t like to ponder the cost.

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→ August 22, 2014
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A Beautiful Blue Death.

Yesterday’s Klawchat transcript is up. I’ll be at Citi Field Saturday and part of Sunday for this year’s Metropolitan Classic tournament.

I received Charles Finch’s debut novel, A Beautiful Blue Death, as a gift for my birthday from someone who knows of my affinity for both detective novels and British literature, making it a potentially perfect fit, with reviews and pull quotes comparing its main character to Sherlock Holmes. With that leadup, you know I’m going to tell you that I hated this book for its dull-as-an-old-butterknife protagonist, formulaic plot, and obvious resolution. It’s a sappy trifle that I was sad to see has spurred six sequels in a matter of as many years.

The detective at the heart of the novel is the Victorian gentleman Charles Lenox, a man of leisure and broad knowledge and apparently some renown in London of the 1860s for solving difficult crimes, something we learn by frequent mention of these amazing feats of deduction – all seemingly non sequiturs that make no sense to the reader because they refer to events that never happened. More problematic is that Lenox is a damn bore. He’s too perfect – kind to everyone, thoughtful, sending anonymous gifts and donations to side characters who might otherwise make the reader sad – and has a strictly platonic relationship with the widow next door, Lady Jane. Lenox’s biggest flaw seems to be a habit of disappointing his travel agent, with whom he plans long international journeys only to cancel them, but he even sends the gentleman a £50 deposit just to make everything okay.

The story itself is fairly mundane, a slight twist on the formula that’s as old as Miss Marple – a murder in a closed house, with a limited number of suspects, one of whom will inevitably be killed in the middle of the book around the time that he becomes the primary suspect himself. The first murder is that of Prudence Smith, former lady’s maid to Lady Jane, later a maid in the house of George Barnard at the time of her death. Barnard had two nephews and three business or political acquaintances staying with him at the time, all of whom become suspects as well as one or two of the servants. Lenox dispatches his Jeeves-like butler on various fact-finding missions, gets assaulted by a pair of thugs who leave a cryptic message, then stumbles through a series of incorrect theories before arriving at the right one – little of which bears any resemblance to Holmes or any other “gentleman detective” of that era.

Dorothy Sayers created the archetypal gentleman detective with Lord Peter Wimsey, setting her character in interbellum London, but infusing his character with more complexity and even a few flaws, something Lenox lacks. Wimsey was wealthy with a patrician upbringing, but speaks in a lower-class vernacular. He suffers from shell shock (PTSD) after service in World War I, which redefines his relationship with his manservant, Bunter. Yet Sayers received criticism for making Wimsey too perfect, given his breadth of knowledge and talents, which grow over the course of the series. (Full disclosure: I read the first book, Whose Body?, didn’t love the ending, and haven’t picked up the second title.) Yet Wimsey is a train wreck compared to the pristine Lenox, whose character has no flaws and no exceptional strengths, making him the worst thing a fictional detective can be: Boring. Hell, even Holmes had his cocaine. Perhaps Lenox should give laudanum a try.

Next up: I’m slogging through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, only to learn yesterday that there’s a newer, better translation than the one I’ve got. I’m halfway done so there’s no point stopping now.

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