→ February 21, 2012
→ By

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I’ve been busy over at ESPN.com, including pieces on Chris Carpenter going to Boston and the A.J. Burnett trade, plus draft blog posts on Mark Appel, Kenny Diekroger, and Stephen Piscotty; and Luc Giolito and Max Fried.

—

I’d never read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas before last week primarily because I was always under the mistaken impression that it was a work of non-fiction, a magazine article or series of them expanded to book length. I’m sure most of you know that that impression was wrong, as it’s a novel, inspired by actual events and probably by actual drugs, but largely the product of Thompson’s expansive imagination and, in his own words, a “fantasy.”

The novel is often categorized as one of the earliest examples of “Gonzo journalism,” where the writer involves himself in the event or feature he’s covering. (In a related story, I’ll be throwing the sixth inning for the Rangers on Friday.) Thompson (as “Raoul Duke”) and his lawyer (“Dr. Gonzo”) scam their way through two dubious assignments in Las Vegas, one covering the Mint 400 off-road race, the other covering a conference of district attorneys to discuss the scourge of recreational drugs. They never even see the race beyond the starting pistol, spending more time running around Vegas getting into trouble, while their involvement in the Drug Conference is largely limited to scaring the crap out of a rural DA whose district hasn’t yet seen much action. Most of the novel is about these guys ingesting various substances and acting under their influence with often hilarious results.

I’m of two minds about the book. As a comic novel, a satire, or merely a piece of entertainment, it’s brilliant. The book reads like an unending con job, an Ocean’s 11 for people who are OK with having their fictional con men look like actual crooks. These two knuckleheads trash rental cars and hotel rooms, charge everything to their hotel accounts, and consume absurd quantities of drugs, taking one drug to ease the effect of coming down off another, and drinking heavily all the while. (Which makes me wonder how anyone could think this was all true. If Thompson survived ingesting all of these chemicals, would he actually remember anything that what happened afterwards?) A maid sees something she probably shouldn’t, so Thompson/Duke cooks up a scam on the spot threatening her with arrest, then turning her into an informant, which the gullible woman buys wholesale because she’s as greedy as the next American.

Where it lost me slightly was in its social commentary aspect, which probably just went past me as someone who was born two years after the book was published. The novel’s subtitle, “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” sets out up front that said journey isn’t going to be pretty, and it seems like Thompson’s intent was to put the lie to the common notion of the American Dream. In probably the funniest passage in the book, these two drug-addled idiots seek out “the American Dream” and are directing to a bar by that name, only to find that it burned down a few years earlier, the sort of symbolism that threatens to jump off the page and slap you in the face. (Your symbolism meter might break with all of the novel’s references to sharks and, eventually, to a car the characters nickname the “great white whale.”) They infiltrate the Drug Conference, already high, while privately mocking how far behind the times the attorneys and cops are, yet also realizing that the halcyon days of recreational drug use are over, losing its proponents to Vietnam, capitalism, and the effects of excessive consumption. But since the book’s publication, we’ve seen two economic booms (and busts), a growing wealth gap, massive changes in societal attitudes towards drugs, and a pretty big image overhaul for Vegas itself. The book’s humor remains, but I think the immediacy of its message has faded with time. Or perhaps I’m just sufficiently jaded that the book couldn’t have the same impact on me that it might have fifteen or twenty years ago.

Next up: I’m about two-thirds of the way through Wilkie Collins’ 1868 novel The Moonstone, regarded as the first detective novel, praised by writers from T.S. Eliot to G.K. Chesterton to Dorothy Sayers.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 17, 2012
→ By

The Baron in the Trees.

I want to thank all of you who’ve reached out via one medium or another to offer your prayers, positive thoughts, or best wishes on my upcoming thyroid surgery (one week from today). It’s supposed to be routine, but I admit I’m having a hard time thinking of it as such.

Yesterday’s chat was abbreviated, but I tried to plow through as many questions as I could in that short time.

–

I was introduced to the Italian novelist/fabulist Italo Calvino in college, in that “Comedy and the Novel” course (taught by the now-retired Prof. Donald Fanger) that also brought me to The Master & Margarita and The Charterhouse of Parma, among other titles. I’ve read other Calvino works, including Inscrutable Invisible Cities, but it wasn’t until I tackled The Baron In The Trees that I found something that lived up to the standard of the first novel of his that I’d read.

The Baron in the Trees is a fable, built on a plausible-but-not-really premise about a young man named Cosimo who, after a squabble with his sister that leaves him on the wrong side of the ledger with his parents, decides to climb one of the many trees on his family’s estate … and never comes down. He adapts to life in the trees, learning to navigate them all over their Ligurian village, ignoring property lines while, Omar Little-style, developing his own code of behavior and straddling the lines between outlaw and vigilante, and between folk hero and village idiot. He falls in love, develops da Vinci-like contraptions, crafts a philosophy (and sends it to Diderot), fights battles, meets Napoleon, and becomes a topic of discussion in the great salons of Europe.

While it’s not quite as imaginative as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, one of the best and funniest novels I’ve ever read, The Baron in the Trees contains a more straightforward narrative and doesn’t lack for humor. Cosimo (who becomes a baron after his father dies) sees the world differently, figuratively and literally, from his new vantage point, and necessities like food and hygiene force him to conceive new and unusual solutions to keep himself in the trees. He can also better understand the consequences of his actions, such as his response to the discovery of a traitor amongst his father’s retinue, and the development of his philosophy, while obviously satirizing some of the political philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century, is built on solid foundations, such as his understanding that “association renders men stronger and brings out each person’s best gifts,” while living a solitary, hermit-like existence in the trees was more likely to lead to bitter disagreements borne of a lack of trust between Cosimo and everyone else in the village. (I thought I also detected some elements here satirizing utopian movements of the 19th and even 20th centuries.)

The last third or so of the narrative starts to slow down as Calvino plunges Cosimo into more situations grounded in European history, thus reducing his interactions with members of the village and his own family, but the fact that he maintained a strong plot through a fable without having it fall apart at the end (or having to tie it up with an absurd plot twist) is a testament to his skill as a fabulist. I’d still recommend If on a winter’s night a traveler… (#20 on the Klaw 100) to a reader who has yet to read any Calvino works, but The Baron in the Trees would be an excellent second choice.

Next up: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ February 16, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S9E15.

If you’re here, you probably saw my guest post on Bravo’s site ranking the final four chefs, with the usual dose of sarcasm along with the analysis. If you’re new to the dish because of that post, welcome! I also chatted with our internal PR folks about how the Top Chef opportunity came to pass.

Top Chef: Texas goes to Vancouver … I would poke more fun at the show’s geographical confusion, but Vancouver is awesome, especially for food, so I’ll let it slide.

* No Quickfire this week, just three “events,” with the winner of each event going on to the final three (turns out we have two more episodes, not just one), and the one chef who doesn’t win any of the three events going home. I like this format – the playing field is even, and you actually have to be the best in something to move on.

* That said, some of the hoops involved in the events before the chefs could really start cooking were absurd. The first one gives the chefs 22 minutes to cook a meal on induction burners in a moving ski gondola, which poses no end of problems for the chefs. Paul mentions getting motion-sick; Lindsay points out that they’re cooking at altitude (so the air pressure is lower and water boils at a lower temperature) and that the burners aren’t perfectly level. There are a ton of ingredients, including a lot of proteins, but Bev makes it sound like there isn’t much hardware available. At the midpoint, each chef must jump out of the gondola as it makes its turn, choose another ingredient from a small and weird set available on a table at the station, jump back into the gondola, and incorporate the new ingredient into the final dish. This is slightly bonkers, yet less bonkers than what comes later.

* The guest judges here are all former Olympic athletes, nobody with any food expertise, and none of them was even half as prepared as Charlize Theron. I need to get my agent on this, stat.

* Bev chooses to go with a raw dish, a salmon tartare; cold dishes can win on Top Chef, but I think the judges look askance at raw dishes, something not helped by Bev almost apologizing for serving something raw. The judges despise weakness. Anyway, Bev does get points for her horseradish-anchovy crème fraiche and for mixing textures with the raw fish and crispy capers and panko bread crumbs.

* Paul can’t get the lamb to brown, so he calls an audible, debones it, breaks it down further, and sears again to try to cook it through. This has to be an induction-burner issue – I’ve never used them, but I imagine it’s a big shift from a gas flame to induction. I’m assuming next week’s elimination challenge will involve giving each chef a book of matches and an axe and sending them into the forest to cook. Paul’s lamb is underseasoned, although Gail liked his curried enoki mushrooms. He certainly had a ton of elements with a wasabi crème fraiche and juniper gastrique as well, but if the protein isn’t good, you don’t win, and Paul was on the bottom.

* Sarah was pretty strong start to finish in this episode, and she proved me wrong by getting out of the regional Italian cuisine box with everything she cooked. In the gondola, she cooked chorizo with caramelized onions, deglazed with prune juice (her extra ingredient), gooseberries (for acid – they are a complete pain in the ass to cook with too), pickled mushrooms, and almonds, with a pancetta crème fraiche underneath the sausage (the one element here that sounded weird to me – the dairy might cut the heat if the chorizo was spicy, but that’s another tart element on top of 2-3 others). The gondola is cold enough to freeze ingredients/elements that aren’t on the burners. The judges’ only criticism was that the prune juice didn’t come through in the final dish, although she finished third.

* Lindsay panics that she didn’t cook enough salmon, so she cuts it in half and serves smaller portions, which the judges don’t notice. She seems to be increasingly prone to these mental miscalculations, or at least the editing is making it look that way. The creamy red quinoa ‘risotto’ with chorizo (recipe here, although I think the red farro should be red quinoa) sounds amazing, definitely something I’ll make at home, and she served that under the salmon and topped it with a horseradish vinaigrette. Lindsay wins with much praise for the quinoa and the perfectly-cooked salmon, although the judges say no one really screwed up. I think the final decision for Lindsay over Bev was hot over cold. I love a good salmon tartare, but Bev skipped the biggest challenge in the gondola – working with the burners.

* Second event: Free your ingredients from ice-block prisons (Michelangelo-approved?) and thaw them before cooking. Psycho jokes abound, which is too bad as Hitchcock made at least a half-dozen better movies, as the chefs attack the blocks with ice picks. No one gets stabbed, although if Marcel was on this season he might have wanted to keep his distance from the others. Meanwhile, Paul wins the Lady Byng Trophy for helping Sarah and Bev break apart their chosen blocks. Did anyone try slamming one ice block against another just to break them down into more managable chunks? Moral of the story: Next year’s chefs should pack blowtorches.

* Sarah goes with vegetables because they’ll thaw as they cook (good thinking), but her pea and spinach soup with turmeric and cream separates as she cooks it, and it seems like she couldn’t re-emulsify it with the hand blender.

* Beverly uses ice or snow to make up for the lack of liquid ingredients available to them, which I thought was pretty clever as long as the snow she chose was, um, white. Anyway, her seared scallops with a red wine-citrus reduction over couscous earned pretty high marks; Gail thought the sauce was heavy but Padma praised her for the rare Top Chef couscous success. Is couscous really that hard to cook? Maybe I haven’t been doing it right.

* Paul gets the prime ingredient, the king crab – maybe he felt guilty about this, so he helped the ladies afterwards – and poaches it (in what? I missed that), serving it with toasted almonds, mango chutney, and sliced brown butter. He wins. I think Bev was ahead of Sarah, not that it matters.

* Third challenge has Bev versus Sarah. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

* “Oh my God, she has a gun.” Third challenge involves humiliating the two remaining chefs by forcing them to do a mini-biathlon, cross-country skiing and then shooting targets to earn their ingredients. This really had zero value other than to make them look like klutzes – and I will confess right now I would have fared no better – but in the end, they both had plenty of ingredients, and the judging really came down to who did the better job in the kitchen, not who was more successful at the nonsense parts of the challenge.

* My wife asked a pretty good question – what if either chef had hurt herself while skiing? The two chefs did collide, but I think it was because Beverly was going the wrong way. I have no idea how that happens.

* Bev chooses to slow-roast her Arctic char, while Sarah braises her rabbit leg, both big risks given the time limitations, but risks tend to win on Top Chef, especially late in the season.

* Bev is looking for coconut milk and lemongrass, but finds none in the kitchen. Are we seeing – dare I say it – a little pantry bias here? Hide the kittens!

* Sarah mentioned roasting the rabbit loin, but I think her final dish was just the braised leg with sliced rabbit heart, cherries, hazelnuts, and a “kraut puree” of cabbage. I put Sarah at the bottom of my rankings for Bravo’s site because everything she’s cooked seemed to sit in a narrow range of regional Italian cooking, but this was outside of that box – she called it German, my first thought before she said that was Austrian, but either way we’re not in Lazio any more.

* Beverly’s char had a celery root/truffle sauce, an onion/beet compote, and shaved fennel. Gail praised Bev for taking a risk by putting strong, earthy flavors (more suited to game, perhaps) with the fish, but Tom felt the char disappeared because it was underseasoned. Obviously, I didn’t taste the finished product, but thinking through all of those flavors, I’m finding it hard to see how the char would stand up to the truffles, the onions, and the pronounced anise flavor of the fennel.

* Sarah wins, and given the judges’ comments it made perfect sense. Her elements worked together better than Beverly’s did. I’m pretty sure Padma was crying when Bev did her “thanks for the opportunity” soliloquy. I think becoming a mom has made her into a softie.

* Bottom line on this episode is that no one really screwed anything up, and despite some absurd conditions, the best food seemed to win each time. We didn’t have many bad decisions, and there was virtually no drama outside of the heavily-edited scenes from the car at the top of the episode. I’d really like to see the final two episodes just focus on the cooking, given who’s left and what’s at stake. No more hoops till next season, please.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ February 14, 2012
→ By

Of Monsters and Men’s Into the Woods.

If you missed it, my top impact prospects for 2012 piece went up yesterday, as did my quick reaction to Yoennis Cespedes signing with Oakland. My first draft blog post of the year went up today, talking SoCal high school kids, including probable top ten picks Luc Giolito and Max Fried.

—

I caught Of Monsters and Men’s debut single, “Little Talks,” on XMU over the weekend and became borderline-obsessed with it after just that one listen. The band won the Músiktilraunir, an Icelandic national battle of the bands, in 2010, although a look at the winners list tells me that doesn’t typically mean much beyond the small island’s coastlines. (The 2001 winner, Andlát, was a death metal act whose name translates as – wait for it – “Death.”) Of Monsters and Men seems ready to break out internationally on the strength of that single and the forthcoming album My Head is An Animal, which earned very strong reviews when it was released in Iceland last fall. I can’t profess much experience with Icelandic folk music, so it’s easier for me to define them in terms of other genres, and their first EP release, Into the Woods, shows a pretty broad base of styles that call to mind Arcade Fire, Mumford and Sons, Doves, ska-punk, Irish folk music, and – of course – a little Sugarcubes too. (It’s on amazon and iTunes.)

“Little Talks” is the song to buy if you only want to buy one track, an upbeat horn-driven track with a riveting call-and-response vocal track from the group’s two lead singers, Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson, the former singing about losing her tether to reality while the latter, her lover, tries to comfort her while expressing his grief at watching her mind wither. The most poignant back-and-forth gives the song its title, as Hilmarsdóttir sings, “There’s an old voice in my head that’s/holding me back,” to which Þórhallsson responds, “Well tell her that I miss our little talks.” Yet this story is layered over a hybrid of Irish drinking songs and the short-lived ska-punk movement of the mid-1990s, complete with raise-your-glasses shouts punctuating the gap in the lyrics following each chorus. I couldn’t get it out of my head after the first listen.

The other three tracks on the EP are all strong, but nothing is similar to “Little Talks” in style or feel. “Love Love Love,” the next-best track, reminded me a little of Norah Jones meets Alison Krauss, with Hilmarsdóttir expressing regret to a lover whose affection she can’t quite return. The closing track, “From Finner,” is probably the most Mumford-ish, with a gloomy percussion-heavy shuffle behind mournful vocals, ending each chorus with a “we’re so ha-ppy” that I don’t think we’re really supposed to believe. “Six Weeks” is your Arcade Fire-influenced track, heavier on the drums as well with a marching, almost Bonham-esque beat that shares the front of the stage with the group vocals. All four tracks appear on the full album, due out in April, but I wasn’t going to wait that long to get “Little Talks” on my iPod. It’s the best new song I’ve heard in at least a full year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 12, 2012
→ By

Osteria Mozza.

I had dinner on Friday night at Osteria Mozza, one of the most popular and famous restaurants in Los Angeles at the moment, joined by my friend and colleague Molly Knight, a known cheese enthusiast and a veteran diner at Mozza. The restaurant is the brainchild of three luminaries in American food, including Mario Batali, who likely needs no introduction. The primary force behind the restaurant and its neighbor, Pizzeria Mozza (next visit!), is Nancy Silverton, co-founder of the legendary La Brea Bakery as well as of Campanile restaurant, where she previously served as pastry chef. The third partner, Joseph Bastianich, is a vintner, restaurateur, and son of Lidia Bastianich, the matron of Italian-American cooking. Names like these don’t always guarantee success, of course, but in this case, the restaurant lives up to its pedigree. Everything we had was outstanding; I would say some dishes were more outstanding than others, but nothing we ordered was less than plus.

The server said the menus are updated daily, so there are no off-menu specials. We went with two starters, two primi (pastas), and one secondo (main), plus a dessert and two beers. I believe it’s the most expensive meal I’ve ever paid for myself, just barely surpassing Craftsteak. The wine list looked extensive, as you’d expect given Bastianich’s involvement, but as I can’t drink red wine and couldn’t see white standing up to the duck ragù I went for the smaller beer list instead.

For starters, Molly humored me by letting me order the testina con salsa gribiche, better known in English by the unfortunate moniker “head cheese.” It’s not actually cheese, but is a terrine or aspic made by simmering the cleaned head of a pig (or sometimes cow) so the remaining the cheek and jowl meat ends up set in a gelatin from all of the connective tissue that surrounds it. The resulting terrine can be sliced and served cold, but Mozza slices it thickly, breads one side, and pan-fries it, serving it with a sauce gribiche, an emulsion of egg yolks and mustard to which one adds capers, chopped pickles, and herbs. (One might compare this dish, then, to a hot dog with mustard and relish, but I wouldn’t want to be so crass about it.) The result is very rich, with the strongly-flavored meat surrounded in luxurious gelatin that produces a fat-like mouth feel, while I left thinking I really need to use sauce gribiche a lot more often at home. The pan-frying, by the way, gets rid of the one real objection you might have to head cheese – the stuff looks like the result of some sort of processing accident.

You could build an entire meal just from Mozza’s selection of starters based around fresh mozzarella without getting bored, but we both zeroed in on the burrata (fresh mozzarella wrapped around a suspension of mozzarella bits in cream) with bacon, marinated escarole and caramelized shallots, which I think was my favorite item of the night. The saltiness and smokiness of the bacon, the acidity of the marinated escarole, and the sharp sweetness of the shallots were all beautifully balanced and gave depth to compliment the creamy texture of the cheese, which, while extremely fresh (of course), was mild in flavor.

I would have probably told you before Friday night that I wasn’t a big fan of potato gnocchi, but apparently I’d just never had a truly great rendition prior to tasting Mozza’s gnocchi with duck ragù, a dish we ordered primarily because I’ll eat just about any dish with duck in it. The ragù was strong, with deep earthly flavors and small chunks of tender breast meat, but played a clear second fiddle to those little pillows of love, lighter than any potato gnocchi I’d previously tried. It’s the kind of meat-and-potatoes dish I could stand behind.

Molly ordered one of her favorite primi, the goat cheese ravioli with five lilies sauce. The pasta was as thin as I’ve ever come across in ravioli, but with good tooth thanks to strong gluten development, wrapped around a thin layer of assertive chevre-style goat cheese; those thin wrappers produce a much better pasta/filling ratio than you typically get from filled pastas. The “five lilies” sauce refers to five members of the allium family – garlic, onion, chives, scallions, and leeks – which stands up well to the tangy goat cheese.

We went with one main, the short rib braised in Barolo wine and served over a very soft, creamy polenta. I’ve never met a short rib dish I didn’t like, and the braise was perfect, producing a rib that stands up on the plate but pulls apart with no effort. If I was to criticize anything we had all night, it might be that the exterior of the short rib was on the soft side, so it might not have been seared that much (it was definitely seared at some point) before the braise. But the criticism is a bit absurd, as the dish was still a 70.

For dessert, we went with the house-made gelato, mint chip and coffee side-by-side with a giant pizzelle with a faint anise flavor. The texture was perfectly smooth, no hint of ice crystals or of extra overrun; the coffee was a little sweeter than I like my coffee ice creams (but I admit I like coffee and chocolate ice creams to be as dark as possible), while the mint chip surprised with real mint flavor – not like an extract, but like actual mint leaves, brighter, fresher, and less harsh than your typical mint-flavored ice creams. (Plus, it wasn’t green.)

We sat at one of the two bars in Osteria Mozza and, at 7 pm on a Friday, didn’t have to wait to be seated, but there were no regular tables available before 10:30 pm at that point. (I actually love sitting at the bar in restaurants, alone or with a friend; you’re rarely forgotten by your server and you often get to see a lot of what’s going on in the kitchen, or at least what’s coming out of it.) The prices are not for the faint of heart, but as I said to Molly when we left, this wasn’t so much dinner but an experience, the kind of meal you might only have a few times in your life, but one you’ll think about for weeks afterwards.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ February 10, 2012
→ By

Travels with My Aunt.

My list of sleeper prospects to jump on to the 2013 top 100 is now up for Insiders.

Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt falls somewhere in between his two styles, serious novels and “entertainments,” by layering a spy-novel veneer on a story of a lifelong bachelor and banker who finds his staid village life interrupted by an imperious, independent aunt who drags him on several trips out of England. The spy story aspect, and the mystery about the narrator’s biological mother, are superficial and slightly silly, but they open up the narrator to the kind of ruminations that reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (reviewed here). (Greene’s book was adapted (and altered, it appears) for the screen in 1972, with Lady Vio— er, Dame Maggie Smith playing Augusta, a character a good 30-40 years Smith’s senior.)

The narrator, Henry Pulling, has just lost his stepmother, who raised him from birth with his biological father, as the novel opens, and the funeral reunites him with an aunt he hasn’t seen in half a century. Aunt Augusta, who would likely fit well between Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha on the Wooster continuum of intimidating aunts, has, unbeknownst to Henry, lived a peripatetic life of adventure, and intends to have at least one more go before she finds herself alongside her late sister. Pulling is so stuck in his narrow life that he can’t quite accept that his aunt’s servant, a Senegalese man nicknamed Wordsworth, is actually her lover.

Unlike Greene’s “entertainments” – his own term for his popular novels, typically spy stories – the intrigue of Travels isn’t all that intriguing, and not even all that important beyond its role in forcing Henry to adjust his worldview. He worked in a stodgy industry, formed no permanent attachments to friends or lovers, and in retirement has taken up growing and breeding dahlias (perhaps an allusion, along with the Augusta/Agatha similarity, to Wodehouse). Augusta is trying to shake him out of his psychological torpor through exposure to her life of adventure, or misadventure, while also gradually showing him that things he long held to be true may not actually be so.

Greene’s dry wit comes through in some of the more ridiculous events, like Pulling inadvertently smoking pot while traveling the Orient Express, but those are just brief lulls in the increasingly serious meditations in which Pulling indulges as the book and his travels progress, on lost opportunities, life and death, and of course the difference between a safe, predictable life, and a more dangerous one with some actual upside.

I’m a huge fan of Greene’s novels, having now read fourteen of them, but would place this in the middle to the back of the pack. I’m still quite partial to Our Man in Havana (#27 on the Klaw 100), another half-serious “entertainment” novel that revolves around a vacuum cleaner salesman who is mistaken for a spy by the British government, only to find himself filling their absurd demands by sending mechanical drawings of vacuum cleaners while claiming they’re future Soviet weapons.

–

I mentioned on Twitter last month that I was reading Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, receiving responses from a large number of you who absolutely love Carver’s work. I’m afraid, then, that I’ll be disappointing you to confess that the collection left me cold; I found no attachment to the work, no emotional involvement, no obstacle to reading (the prose is pretty easy to get through) but no strong motivation to keep the book in hand. Even ignoring the controversy over how much of the finished product was actually Carver’s and how much was his heavy-handed editor’s, the stories seemed to me to depict realistic situations without getting anywhere below the surface of the characters’ outer behavior. I know his work is highly regarded; it just didn’t speak to me.

–

Next up: Italo Calvino’s The Baron In The Trees.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ February 9, 2012
→ By

Top Chef, S9E14.

The top 100 is up. Here’s the first part of the list (it’s spread over four pages), the top ten prospects for each organization, and ten eleven prospects who just missed.

—

Fortunately, this week’s episode of Top Chef did not include any has-been comedians, just real cooking for some pretty elite guests.

* Last Chance Kitchen winner: It’s Bev! You knew it would be Bev. I’m sure her food was great, but forgive me my suspicion of anything that reeks of narrative. Sarah is still hepped up on bitchy pills, ripping Bev for being “off in Bevland” and saying she doesn’t want a ticket there. Apparently the food in Bevland is pretty good, Sarah. You might want to check it out if you ever get your head out of Italy.

* Quickfire: blindfolded pantry raid. Goofy, but certainly the idea that you should be able to identify ingredients by touch and smell has merit. Winner gets a choice between a new Prius or a guaranteed spot in the finals. This seems weak to me – you get to the finals by winning a quickfire?

* The footage of the chefs groping around the kitchen while blindfolded wasn’t all that entertaining, although Tom had an evil laugh going. There’s food on the floor and shellfish loose in the fridge. Cleanup on aisle artificial drama.

* Bev accidentally gets avocado, but she’s making fish, which is a pretty natural pairing. I felt like she could have won this thing if she’d cooked her fish through, but I think Tom feels about fish the way I do – if it’s not actually being served raw, it needs to be cooked to at least medium-rare. The shot of Bev running across the kitchen with the fish in one hand and her ten-inch chef’s knife in the other, tip pointed out, was terrifying. Her food may be great, but I wouldn’t want to share a kitchen with her.

* Ed gets pork casings instead of pancetta but makes lemonade, figuratively, by using the casings (pig intestinal linings, high in connective tissue) to make a broth for his soup. That’s the kind of cleverness the show should be rewarding, in my didn’t-taste-the-food opinion.

* Paul’s shrimp is also a touch undercooked. I don’t like raw shrimp, and I think undercooked shrimp has a really weird, unpleasant texture, so I could understand Tom’s immediate, negative reaction to the dish. Do you ever wonder (as I do) if the judges subconsciously hold Paul to a higher standard, because he’s so far ahead of the group?

* Lindsay makes fish with bulgur wheat at charred greens on top, putting her right in the middle of the group.

* Sarah makes corn soup with roasted mushrooms and peaches. Tom loved it, and she should get points for a non-obvious flavor combo, although nothing there was as clever as Ed’s broth. She wins, which I think is her first Quickfire win, and takes the guaranteed spot in the final four, which Ed labels a lack of confidence. I would have called it lazy, but your mileage may vary. And does anyone doubt that Sarah’s motormouth would have been in fourth gear, ready to run over any other chef who made that same choice? (Hat tip to my wife for raising that last point.)

* Elimination challenge: make a dish to impress your mentor. At least two of these mentors have been on before as judges or as Top Chef Masters. Waterworks commence immediately. Tito, give me some tissue.

* Ed can’t get fresh oysters so he chooses canned smoked oysters instead. Chefs on this show often pick ingredients they should know you can’t always get at whole foods, and never seem to remember how often a chef has been sent home for using one substandard ingredient, whether it’s canned or precooked or just not top-quality. Everyone loves his pickles and crisped pork belly skin, though.

* Lindsay makes errors of self-doubt by overloading a Mediterranean fish dish with a cream sauce and some dried herbs that she probably added too late for them to hydrate and mellow. You don’t get a lot of cream in Mediterranean fish plates because the regions where fish is central to the cuisine have typically had less cattle husbandry.

* Beverly takes a huge risk by cooking to order in the wok for eight people, making gulf shrimp and BBQ pork Singapore noodles. That’s a sensible risk given the history of the show, though – there’s substantial upside in showing you have a skill most others don’t, and can organize yourself to the point where you can pull this kind of fast, last-minute cooking off successfully.

* Paul takes a bigger risk by serving a cold sunchoke and dashi soup that’s assembled tableside with what was apparently a very delicate balance of seasonings across all of his ingredients. (Before Paul, when was the last time someone won an elimination challenge with a chilled/cold dish?) Hugh hasn’t blogged yet this week, but Gail wrote that it was the best Top Chef dish she’d ever had, and that the decision here wasn’t particularly close.

* Judges’ table: I told you who won. He and Bev move on, only to go to the stew room where Sarah gives Paul a big hug and Bev the finger. Paul showed wisdom in knowing when to stop adding ingredients or flavors. Comments like that from judges make me think Paul would succeed in any season, not just in this weak crop.

* No mentors at JT, just Tom, Padma, Hugh, and Gail. Gail loves everything but the smoked oyster sauce, and can’t explain why. Hugh points out that Ed had a great dish under there and buried it with one bad choice. Tom gets all double-u-tee-eff on Ed for using canned oysters. Hugh has the money line, of course: “you need to go to the store and see what’s great in the market and cook from there.” Everyone should cook like that.

* Ed is eliminated and says he was knocked out by Beverly. Uh, no. You were knocked out by a canned oyster. But I’ll still try your braised brisket with bourbon-peach glaze recipe from the latest issue of Bon Appetit.

* Final three: Paul and Lindsay are still standing, and I will take Bev over Sarah.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ February 8, 2012
→ By

Sherlock, season one.

My annual ranking of the 30 MLB farm systems is up for Insiders. The top 100 follows tomorrow, with chats at noon ET (Spanish) and 1 pm ET (English).

—

I admit to some reluctance to watch the BBC series Sherlock, which takes the famed detective character and reimagines him in the present day, solving crimes loosely based on some of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t expect to like a series that so dramatically alters the setting of the original, and inevitably changes the character as well, but it’s surprisingly well done and engaging despite the occasional bit of TV-friendly drama to keep the hoi polloi interested. (The first season just aired on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery last month.)

Rather than directly adapt Conan Doyle’s stories into individual episodes, series creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss chose to write new stories based on one or more of the originals, stretching them out to about 88 minutes apiece, with three episodes per season. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played a significant supporting role in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, plays the title character, a “consulting detective” who solves crimes the police can’t and keeps a blog on his exploits, infusing Holmes with substantial charisma despite his incredible aloofness and professed disinterest in human connections. Martin Freeman (of the UK version of The Office and the middling film adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide) plays Dr. John Watson, an Afghan war veteran paired up with Holmes by chance, forming an uneasy working relationship that’s more balanced than the partnership in Conan Doyle’s works, with Watson actually standing up for himself when he thinks Holmes is merely trying to humiliate him. (It doesn’t work, but at least he tried.)

The first season comprises three episodes, with the final one the tightest all around as the characters had become more developed and the crime (and its solution) was more clever and intricate. The first episode, “A Study in Pink,” has to get the two main characters together and define all manner of relationships within the show, and then has a drawn-out standoff between Sherlock and the killer because the BBC asked the producers to add another 30 minutes to the original hourlong show; the second episode was more focused on the crime, but the denouement was also over the top and involved a character who threatens to throw off the show’s equilibrium. The series does put Sherlock in danger a bit too often – while he did die in one of the original short stories, only to be resurrected by a recalcitrant Conan Doyle due to reader demand – even though we know he has to live till the next episode, making the drama from those scenes seem a little false, although I suppose it would be just as absurd to have the main character never find himself in any jeopardy at all.

Comparing Cumberbatch’s Holmes to the character from Conan Doyle’s stories is an exercise in frustration; I view the new Sherlock as inspired by the original character, rather than a mere adaptation. The series puts Sherlock in more situations that explore his lack of social skills, and Watson is more than just a foil for Holmes’ genius, providing commentary on Holmes’ bizarre behavior and personality. I did find myself regularly comparing this Sherlock Holmes to another TV character inspired by the literary one, Dr. Gregory House.

House is an unlikely protagonist for an American TV series, an antihero who aims for perfect rationality in his life and behavior, who solves cases for their puzzle aspects rather than any human elements, who abhors religion and other forms of authority, an unpleasant character you like because he’s clever, not because you love to hate him. Yet despite his claims of rational thought, he shows a malicious streak under the guise of flouting authority or establishing how much his superiors need him, whereas neither the literary Holmes nor the new BBC version exhibit any such behavior. Cumberbatch’s Holmes can be insulting – his line to Watson and a police officers, “Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring,” is brilliantly dismissive – but there’s no malice involved.

In just three episodes so far, we see subtle hints that Sherlock is aware he doesn’t quite fit in and might even be a little sad or ashamed about it, such as the time he lies to a potential client about how he knew the latter had recently traveled around the world. He’s arrogant, while House is misanthropic; Sherlock calls himself a sociopath (in response to the accusation that he’s a psychopath), but despite their shared focus on solving the puzzle for its own sake, Sherlock shows more glimmers of humanity in three episodes than House has in eight seasons. House has to rely on humor to make the show watchable, and with the show becoming less funny and its lead character more spiteful, the show’s quality has declined noticeably. Sherlock has some humor, but the stories and the two lead characters can drive the show on their own because there’s more to see and understand in the title character than there is in Dr. House.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a Klaw review of a British series without a mention of Foyle’s War, tied to Sherlock by (at least) a significant guest-starring role by Andrew Scott (who also appeared in The Hour). DCS Foyle is nothing like Holmes, of course; he has a normal range of emotions, but keeps them inside, producing a brooding, melancholy exterior that has become sharper with age. But what the two detectives do share is an attention to detail that characterizes most great literary detectives as well – crimes are solved when the investigator identifies some tiny inconsistency that exposes a wider range of evidence against the guilty party. Holmes solves his crimes through research, Foyle through interrogation, but both solve via deduction. The shows particularly differ in pacing, however – the London-based Sherlock moves quickly, not just in editing, but in dialogue and action, while Foyle’s War is almost leisurely and methodical, reflecting its bucolic setting and the illusion of peace while a war rages mere miles away. So if you’re a Sherlock fan looking for another British mystery series while you wait for season two to arrive here, give Foyle’s War a try.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ February 6, 2012
→ By

Shadow of the Wind.

I read Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s best-selling novel The Shadow of the Wind last week between vacation and the long trip to Bristol (during which I also watched the first half of season 4 of The Wire) after a reader recommended it and I discovered my wife wanted to read it as well. It’s quick-moving with some interesting subtexts, but with a lot of silly, predictable plot elements and some least-common-denominator writing that drags the book down to a pulpier level.

The novel starts promisingly enough as the narrator/protagonist, Daniel, is introduced by his bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a slightly mystical edifice in Barcelona where the keepers attempt to obtain a copy of every book ever written so that they may never be permanently forgotten. Daniel’s father tells him to find one book and become its champion, of sorts, and Daniel is drawn to a book called Shadow of the Wind, by an unknown author named Julián Carax. Daniel’s attempts to learn more about the book and Carax then drive the remainder of the novel’s plot, which has almost nothing to do with books or literature but instead revolves more around the history of Spain from its civil war forward, and around the city of Barcelona itself, which is the book’s real center and its main character.

It turns out that some madman is running around burning every copy of Carax’s books that he can find, and when that madman finds Daniel as a result of the boy’s inquiries about the book and its author, it plunges Daniel into the story he’s chasing, one that dates back to Carax’s boyhood and features a doomed romance and childhood grudges that have become deadly in time, while paralleling developments in Daniel’s own life, including a forbidden romance of his own that almost (but, fortunately, not completely) mirrors Julián’s.

Ruiz Zafón’s best passages have little to do with the plot, or with dialogue (it may be the translation, which was done by Lucia Graves, the daughter of I, Claudius author Robert Graves, but Zafón’s language comes off as stilted), but with Barcelona itself. His prose is most evocative when he’s describing street scenes from what is a very scenic, memorable city, a city that mixes architectural styles and landscapes and features the kind of old buildings required for the novel’s gothic-horror-lite elements.

Unfortunately, I could never fully buy into the story’s plot, not the madman’s actions, not the acts of the violent policeman who also stalks Daniel, not the romance between Julián and his intended, nor her father’s actions when their affair is discovered. The madman’s identity was easy to figure out, and while I didn’t see the twist with Julián and Penelope coming, it’s not remotely original and I thought it was played more for shock value than anything else, a trick Ruiz Zafón also uses when Daniel pronounces, American Beauty-style, that in seven days, he will be dead. (Spoiler, which I think anyone could guess, but you should avert your eyes if you really don’t want to know: He ends up dead for a few seconds before he’s revived. Cheap.) I kept looking for a deeper meaning in the book relating to the dark period of fascism in Spain that lasted four decades, but either I’m not familiar enough with Spanish history to find it, or it just wasn’t there.

If you want a real page-turner with gothic horror elements, go for the longer but far more enjoyable Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. If you like the idea of a novel revolving around books, I’d recommend the tremendously fun The Eyre Affair (which I recommend all the time) or the clever if not entirely plot-driven City of Dreaming Books.

–

I should also mention Dorothy Sayers’ mystery Whose Body?, which introduced the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey with a clever device involving the discovery of an unknown victim’s naked body in the tub of a working-class house in London. I like a good mystery, having read twenty-odd Agatha Christie novels, but Sayers’ writing and the resolution of the story both left me cold, particularly since the killer’s identity is revealed with about ten percent of the novel remaining, after which we get a long, drawn-out monologue (in epistolary form) from him explaining why he did what he did. Sayers also has Lord Wimsey speaking a very common vernacular that doesn’t gel with what we learn of his upbringing and seems like affect, and not the charming affect of, say, M. Poirot. The series has a devoted following but I don’t feel any need to go on to the next title.

Next up: Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ February 4, 2012
→ By

Caylus iOS app.

The complex strategy game Caylus is one of the top-rated games on Boardgamegeek, a site where voters tend to favor intricate games with pages upon pages of rules and little to no luck involved. It’s the kind of game I can’t imagine playing as a rookie against someone who’s played a few times – an experience I had with Agricola that ended up with me getting my ass handed to me by a slightly more seasoned player (who is, most likely, about to read this review). It’s also the kind of game that makes me say I’m not a “serious” boardgamer – I love smart games, but the complexity and length of games like Caylus (and Agricola, and Le Havre, for which I still owe everyone a review) keeps them off the top tier of my own list.

So I’m pleased to report that the Caylus app for iOS is very strong, with outstanding graphics, a very easy-to-use layout (no mean feat given the amount of information a player might need midgame), and, after a recent update, no issues with stability. The AIs could be better, and the rules included in the app are not sufficient, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to play and keeps you thinking the entire time – 15-20 minutes for a game against AI players. (I have yet to try this multiplayer, but that is available through GameCenter.)

Caylus is a worker-placement game: Each player has a small number of workers to place each turn on buildings that might return money, resources, or points; allow the exchange of some of those things for others; or allow him/her to construct something of value. Caylus operates around five resources, the value and supply of which fluctuate as the game progresses, and offers multiple paths to victory (although I found one the AIs just can’t seem to beat*). There’s really no luck involved, and because most buildings on the board allow just one worker per turn, each decision, from small to large, requires the player to consider not just his own future moves but those of every opponent as well.

* The strategy requires gold, the scarcest resource in the game. A human player would see that I was stockpiling gold and certain other resources and would at least try to made it harder for me to get gold from the gold mine, the one place to get gold for no cost beyond the cost of the worker. A human player would be trying to get gold for himself anyway. But the AI players don’t do either of these things, and I don’t think the AI players are that good at pursuing points via multiple, simultaneous strategies. I’ll come back to that.

The centerpiece of the game is the castle, which players build in blocks during three separate phases, after which their contributions to the castle are scored. Building certain numbers of blocks, or just building the most in any particular turn, grants the player one or more “royal favors” – money, a resource, victory points, or the ability to build a building at a discount. Failing to build at all in any of the three phases costs a player two victory points, but the opportunity cost is just as significant.

The graphics in this app are the best I’ve seen for any boardgame app so far, clear, bright, and very easy to look at for the length of a game. The layout is another strength, with critical information available in a left-hand sidebar that the player can rotate through several screens or can shrink to half its size to see more of the board. Moving workers is straightforward, and in the banner on the right from where the player drags a worker the app displays key info like money remaining (since placing a worker costs at least one unit of money).

I found the AI players all pretty easy to beat, working my way up from a two-player game against the easiest AI opponent to a five-player game against the two strongest AI players and two more from the next level of difficulty. The primary problem is that the AI players can’t detect a human player’s long-term strategy – an issue evident in other apps and one I expect to see in the upcoming implementations of Agricola and Le Havre. The simpler the game, generally the simpler it is to program a strong AI, either because it can pursue an optimal strategy that’s hard to beat or because the tree of potential human-player moves isn’t that wide.

The lack of in-game information is the other flaw here, one that creates a steeper-than-necessary learning curve for new players. The rules and tutorial show you how to use the app more than they show you how to successfully play the game. Buildings aren’t marked on the board; their icons are unique, so a player can look in the building directory in the left-hand sidebar and try to match them up, but allowing a player to tap any building and see its identity would be an easy addition. The app will also allow a player to select a favor that s/he can’t afford, with no opportunity to undo it as a player would have when playing the physical game.

For $4.99, I’ve already gotten my money’s worth from Caylus, spending close to three hours total across all games I’ve played so far. I’ll still play it occasionally, but they’ll need to offer a better AI for this to be something I continue to play regularly without GameCenter (and since I play on planes, that’s a key issue for me). The weaker AI makes the app more of a Caylus tutorial, or even an advertisement for the physical game – albeit a very slick, easy to use one, once you figure out the rules, which you might have to do outside of the app. It’s really well done, and if they can offer a stronger AI player down the line, it’ll join that top tier of boardgame apps.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,