Los Angeles eats.

Versailles, recommended to me by Joe Sheehan, is a local mini-chain serving authentic Cuban food and I ate at their location on Venice Blvd in Culver City. The menu is extensive, so I asked the waiter for suggestions, and without hesitating, he pointed to three. Figuring that was a good sign, I went with his pick from the list of pork dishes, lechon asado, pork shoulder marinated in a citrus-based mojo and then roasted for several hours at a low temperature. The meat should pull apart easily with a fork, which it did, and it had been largely trimmed of exterior fat. The sauce was too tart for me to just eat the pork on its own, but the buttery white rice that came with the dish was a perfect complement that cut the acidity of the meat. (I admit I followed the example of the young Cuban kid sitting next to me, who was inhaling a roast chicken dish by mixing everything together on his fork. His meal didn’t stand a chance.) The maduros were insanely good – who needs dessert when you have maduros? They are dessert – and the meal also came with a small cup of black bean soup that was a little bit thin but also not as heavy as most black bean soups I’ve had. I actually went to Versailles with an hour or so to kill before heading to LAX for my redeye and ended up in and out of the restaurant inside of a half-hour. You order, and in a few minutes, the dish is in front of you. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, though.

The rain on Sunday morning meant I could have a regular lunch before going to the MLB complex in Compton. The Waffle, on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood, was hopping at noon on Sunday, and as you might imagine, they serve … waffles. They’re Belgian-style in shape, although they’re not as light as true Belgian waffles, which are made by folding beaten egg whites into a waffle batter that contains an absurd amount of butter. These were closer to traditional waffles that had been baked on a Belgian-style waffle iron, so they were on the dense side, and the plain waffle had a subtle taste of vanilla but otherwise tasted a little plain. The “house sausage” was good, not too greasy or too spicy, just solid-average.

The issue of Los Angeles magazine in my room had an article on the area’s twenty top bakeries, which was as clear a call to action as I’ve ever seen. One of the things I dislike most about living in Boston, aside from the permafrost, is the lack of decent bakeries. Aside from a very small number of good shops in Back Bay, we don’t have good ethnic bakeries or good high-end bakeries around here. I do a lot of baking, but there’s a difference between wanting a cookie and making an entire batch. I only made it to two of the twenty shops recommended, in part because one of the options, Amandine in West L.A., is still in business but apparently never open.

La Provence Patisserie, tucked into a strip mall on the south side of West Olympic in Beverly Hills, was more style than substance. Their almond croissant was very good, flaky, not dry, with real (possibly homemade?) almond paste inside, but their big seller, their macaroons, were insanely overpriced ($2 apiece for a tiny sandwich in any of a half-dozen fluorescent colors) and tasted like sugar rather than coconut. There was a clear see-and-be-seen vibe to the place, and since I have no particular need to be seen and no desire to see, that didn’t add anything to the experience.

The Vanilla Bake Shop in Santa Monica was a better bet. They do cupcakes, and despite the name, they do a lot of chocolate cupcakes. I went with the sampler, three mini-cupcakes for $5, so I could try three flavors – mint chocolate chip, black and white, and chocolate raspberry. The first two were just chocolate cupcakes with different kinds of buttercream frosting, while the third cupcake was filled with raspberry preserves and topped with chocolate ganache and a fresh raspberry. The bottom line here is the cupcakes: moist and very dark with a strong cocoa flavor, while not too sweet. You get enough sugar in the frosting, so backing off the sweetness in the cake is the right call. They do have non-chocolate flavors, and their specific varieties depend on the day, but I didn’t see any point in wasting time on something that wasn’t chocolate.

Chat today.

Usual time, 1 pm EST.

And yes, I completely forgot the Bonifacio/Willingham trade. Inexcusable error on my part – working on getting it fixed.

UPDATE: I found Angry Dan the Nats Fan and some of his little friends on this message board. None of them realized the Salmon line was a joke. Pretty sure they all owe $5 fines now.

Rabbit, Run.

I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you’re first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate.

Rabbit, Run, (#97 on the Radcliffe 100 and part of the TIME 100) has been on my to-be-read shelf for a few months, but in light of the recent death of author John Updike, I decided to move it up in the queue. I originally started this book about ten years ago, got through three or four pages, realized it was going to be depressing, and sold it at a used book store. I was more successful in a second attempt.

“Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom, a 26-year-old former high school basketball star who is now married to a twenty-year-old woman who has already born him a son and is pregnant again. Their marriage is crumbling, or has crumbled, to a point where any conversation degenerates into sniping and insults and where Janice is just withdrawn into alcohol and the television. Rabbit has a job demonstrating the MagiPeeler, a vegetable peeler for sale at the local five and dime store, a career roughly as fulfilling as his marriage. Faced with nothing rewarding in his life, Rabbit runs off, walking away from wife and job and falling into an affair with a slattern from the other side of town.

The fundamental problem with Rabbit, Run from my perspective is that Updike seems to be trying to present Rabbit as a sympathetic character: A young man suddenly realizing that he is trapped into a life of mediocrity and unhappiness, both in stark contrast to the small-world stardom he had in high school, who decides that the best option is to run, both physically and metaphorically. The truth is that Rabbit is a grade-A Asshole who mistreats his wife and then his mistress, refuses to take responsibility for his actions or to live up to the obligations of commitments he’s made (like, say, knocking up two women), or to just generally behave like an adult. Yes, his wife is a train-wreck, an alcoholic with hints of depression, but Rabbit at one point puts alcohol back in her hands when she is trying to give it up, because he can’t adjust to a reality of her sober and the commitment that that implies. But not only is his wife never depicted as “bad” enough for him to leave her, he has an innocent son, Nelson, who adores him as two-year-olds adore their parents, and on whom Rabbit runs out without any apparent pangs of remorse. I have a two-year-old, and I can’t imagine any situation in my marriage that would make me leave the house and not even try to see my daughter for over two months. Janice (Rabbit’s wife) tells her husband at one point after he has returned from his lost weekend about Nelson:

“Oh. Every day, ‘Daddy home day?’ until I could belt him, the poor saint. Don’t make me talk about it, it’s too depressing.”

It’s heartbreaking, and it makes Updike’s attempts to show some affection on Rabbit’s part towards the boy ring totally hollow. You have a clear two-way bond with your child by that age; if you can walk away from that for two months without making any attempt to see the kid, in all likelihood, you have no soul.

The craft of Rabbit, Run is strong. Updike’s prose is wonderful, as anyone familiar with his article on Ted Williams’ retirement knows. He’s also telling, or trying to tell, a larger story of the fears a person faces upon realizing that he has inextricably left his youth behind and has even made irreversible choices that dictate the path of the rest of his life. Rabbit is surrounded by people who symbolize hopes and fears and responsibilities, from the minister and his wife who represent faith and doubt, to the declining high school basketball coach who represents the past and ages and fades like memories, to the baby Janice bears, a metaphor for their marriage, briefly reborn as that, for whatever reason, is the event who finally brings Harry back home. But the fact that it’s well-written only made it an easier read, not a more compelling one, as my dislike for Rabbit only grew as the book went on and he failed to show any sign of maturity or simple recognition of the consequences his actions have on those around him.

Next up: A re-read of Catch-22. I have crab apples in my cheeks and flies in my eyes already.

The Dud Avocado.

I sat down and tried to read, but I couldn’t. After ten pages I was in a state of cold fury. Read! I didn’t want to read, it was just a substitute for living.

Funny words coming from an author (speaking through her semi-autobiographical protagonist) in the middle of her first novel, but Elaine Dundy wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers or flout convention. Her debut (and by all accounts best) novel, The Dud Avocado, was a critical success and was popular in its day, but has fallen out of print at least once since its original publication and just returned to print in mid-2007, less than a year before Dundy died. The book earned her plaudits from Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, and Groucho Marx, who wrote to Dundy:

I had to tell someone (and it might as well be you since you’re the author) how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream and guffaw (which incidentally is a great name for a law firm). If this was actually your life, I don’t know how on earth you got through it.

The novel follows American ingénue Sally Jay Gorce as she tries to make her uncertain way among the Bohemian set in Paris in the 1950s, “tries” being the operative word, as Sally Jay is hapless in just about every matter that matters, foremost among them love. She enters a tepid affair with a cartoonish and quite married Italian diplomat, falls in love with a smarmy American from her hometown, and goes on a mistake-prone jaunt with a man she’s never met but who has developed a crush on her after seeing her on stage. She has a tremendous knack for wearing the wrong thing, and is developing a habit of saying the wrong thing. Oh, and she loses her passport during a night on the town.

Dundy said in later letters and in the afterword to this most recent edition of the book that all of Sally Jay’s bad decisions mirror her own from her time in Paris, which I would imagine was a lot less funny to live through than it is to read about. The intimate connection with her scattered protagonist clearly helped Dundy infuse the character with the spirit for which she and the book are praised, but also a self-awareness that Dundy probably didn’t have as she lived through these misadventures:

Was I beginning to have standards and principles and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in the way?

There is an interesting plot beyond Sally Jay’s bad-luck-in-love escapades, and aside from the coincidence that drives the book’s final chapter or two (perhaps a comment on the inescapability of one’s destiny) the story is very tight. But it’s the humor that carries it into a class with Scoop, Lucky Jim, and your better Wodehouse novels.

Sorry to be rushing through these a bit, but I’m still two books behind what I’m reading; I’m probably a day away from finishing Rabbit, Run, after which I’m looking at a re-read of Catch-22.

The Quiet American.

Sooner or later one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

Graham Greene’s works are often divided into two categories which I believe were his own suggestions: his serious novels and his “entertainments,” the latter usually coming in the form of spy novels. My favorite Greene works seem to be the ones that blend elements of both styles; while The Heart of the Matter is probably his best-regarded work (it’s appears in the “second 100” in The Novel 100, made the TIME 100, and was #40 on the Modern Library 100), my favorite Greene work is Our Man in Havana, an entertainment that also satirizes the Cold War maneuvering of the great powers. The Quiet American (#67 on the Guardian 100) also straddles the line between the two forms, with a plot built around international intrigue during the Vietnamese war for independence that also poses two different questions around moral relativism.

Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” of the title, was, in life, anything but quiet; the title is twice ironic, both because Pyle was a talker and meddler and also because he’s quiet on a more permanent level when the book opens. The story then rolls backwards, told by English reporter Thomas Fowler, who recalls his first sighting of the American economic attaché:

I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm.

Fowler becomes caught in two nets woven by Pyle, one as Pyle attempts to steal Fowler’s mistress (Fowler is married to a woman who won’t grant him a divorce, whereas Pyle is willing to marry Fowler’s mistress), the other as it becomes clear that Pyle is up to no good in his clandestine duties for an ostensibly economic mission in Vietnam. Fowler’s moral conundrum – what to do as he realizes Pyle might be dangerous – is further complicated when Pyle saves his life during a guerrilla attack on a tower where they seek refuge after their car runs out of gas.

Greene has Fowler eventually make a decision – circumstances all but force him to choose – about Pyle, but avoids casting Fowler as any sort of hero or even protagonist by making him a serial adulterer and a user of (at least) his Vietnamese mistress while having him owe his life to Pyle along the way. Even when Fowler does act, it’s passive, almost a hands-free approach that robs him of the benefit (or satisfaction?) of making a clear, morally unclouded decision.

Layered on top of the Fowler/Pyle plot is the broader and less morally ambiguous question of what the hell France and especially the United States were doing in Vietnam in the first place. Pyle stands in for the domino theory foreign policy of the United States; he’s an idealistic innocent, full of ideas he learned in school or from books (largely from his ideological idol, York Harding, of whom Fowler says, “He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea”) and devoid of both real-world experience and any practical understanding of the people and culture of the country he’s supposed to save. Phuong, Fowler’s paramour and later the object of Pyle’s affection, represents Vietnam in a less than flattering light – naïve, opium-addicted, in need of protection (according to Pyle) or of economic assistance (according to Phuong’s sister), controlled by outside forces, inscrutable to both Fowler and Pyle.

It is nearly impossible to read the book now without seeing it as a powerful indictment of the U.S. war in Iraq, even though it was written fifty years prior to the 2003 invasion. (The 2004 edition, marking the centennial of Greene’s birth, includes a foreword by Robert stone that makes this connection explicit.) Greene inveighs against the involvement of a western nation in a part of the world it doesn’t know or understand where there is no direct relation to the western countries’ national interests, which parallels many arguments against U.S. involvement in Iraq. Greene oversimplifies or just misses one major argument for indirect engagement – forcing the Soviets to ramp up military spending on multiple engagements increased the strain on their economy, and may have led to the regime’s collapse in the 1980s – but is on stronger ground when he argues against grafting western mores on to non-western cultures, or when arguing that the assumption that our interests and those of local people in these foreign countries are aligned well enough to justify any military action we take or military support we provide.

I’m off to California this evening to see a high school showcase event at the MLB Academy in Compton (insert N.W.A. joke here) but should be free for one dinner in Los Angeles, so if anyone has a must-hit suggestion (sushi is always welcome – I could go to Koi, but it’s a bit out of my way) I’m all ears.

All the Pretty Horses.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses is an almost straight-up western novel with a slightly hackneyed romance plot layered on top of it. Other than his affinity for the polysyndeton, McCarthy writes very readable prose while still managing to craft the quotable and memorable lines.

The protagonist, John Grady Cole, decides to leave home with his friend, Lacey Rawlins, and head south into Mexico after his parents’ divorce becomes final and he realizes that the ranch on which he grew up is going to be sold. The two boys meet up with a runaway, calling himself Jimmy Blevins, who is a few years younger and both impetuous and immature, standing in as a metaphor for John Grady’s dying (or dead) innocence. Blevins loses his horse in a storm and in the process of stealing it back from the villager who took it in kills two locals and a law officer, after which he himself is killed in what one might loosely call an extralegal proceeding. The brouhaha enmeshes John Grady and Lacey, who had been working on a ranch where John Grady fell in love with the daughter of the hacendado. If this sounds convoluted, it is, with the romance subplot sitting on top of the more traditional western story of outlaws, corruption, and occasional gunplay; the way the romance ends, in predictable fashion, and is never revisited for the last fifty pages of the book gave it the feeling of a second story added after the fact to flesh out the main plot and give it a broader appeal. I doubt that’s actually how it happened – McCarthy doesn’t seem to be an author concerned with commercial success – but there’s a disconnection between the two plot lines that was never satisfactorily resolved.

The core plot line would have made for a short novel, but it’s well-written (of course) and has several amazing passages, particularly John Grady’s quixotic effort to obtain justice for Blevins at the end of the book, encountering first the corrupt captain responsible for Blevins’ death and John Grady’s incarceration, then an amusing episode in front of a judge after he’s accused of theft, and then an encounter with another man named Blevins as John Grady attempts to return Blevins’ horse to its rightful owners. John Grady’s paramour has little interesting to do or say, but her protective aunt – speaker of the quote up top – offers several insightful if slightly verbose thoughts on history, both of humanity and of individuals, and how we are shaped by it and often live in reaction to it.

I’ve got a few other books from my vacation to write up – Greene’s The Quiet American and Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado – and am now about a third of the way through Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza.

Klawchat.

Going on now (1 pm EST start) at the Four-Letter.

Pre-vacation Youtube links.

A few links and notes before I take off for warmer climes…

First off, there’s a lot of bad information out there about the arbitration process in baseball, and one error I have seen, heard, and been asked about repeatedly is how multiyear contracts factor into the process. The answer is that they don’t. Because of the disagreement over whether to consider AAV (average annual values) or actual year-by-year salaries, and the question of what sort of “security” discount the player might have taken, these contracts are usually ignored or discarded after cursory arguments in any arbitration negotiation or hearing. So the second year of Prince Fielder’s deal does not affect Ryan Howard’s hearing. (How could it? You can’t compare Howard’s “platform year” to Fielder’s, because the comparable season for Fielder – second time through the arb process – hasn’t occurred yet.)

Subway:” A vintage song from Sesame Street – or so they say, since I don’t remember it at all even though it’s from my era. It’s, um, a bit dark for the target audience: “You could lose your purse/Or you might lose something worse/On the subway.”

SlapChop: I know JoePo has been talking about the Snuggie and the ShamWow!, but this is the best of the new breed of infomercials. The line at 0:37 is just priceless. I would work it into a KlawChat, but there’s no way they’d let it stand.

Easy Reader: It’s groovy. But mostly it’s a segue to talk about the new version of the Electric Company, which I caught by accident last week while trying to get Barney off my television before my daughter noticed. It’s good – very good. Not quite the same as the original, but the original – while brilliant – looks pretty dated now. The new version is a little more frenetic, and the opening song is a little awkward, but the sketches have some of that second layer of humor that good children’s shows have, there’s a lot of music (like this song by Wyclef Jean with Canadian jazz singer Nikki Yanofsky, who is very cute and can’t dance a lick), and the language is never dumbed-down for the young target audience. The breakout star here is Chris Sullivan, who plays the character Shock; he’s an an amazing beat-boxer, enough that I would turn and watch whenever he was on the screen. (I’m trying to figure out who he reminds me of – I’m leaning towards a cross between Jamie Oliver and Daniel Radcliffe right now.) My daughter’s too young for the show, although it did hold her attention for 15-20 minutes, and I’m hopeful that it will stick around long enough for her to grow into it.

Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade.

I’m only doing a brief writeup of Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, in part because I’m a little pressed for time, but also because there’s so little to say about a book with no plot. The best description I can offer is that it’s an Algerian feminist Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and while I didn’t quite hate it as I hated the Joyce book, I was never remotely invested in Djebar’s words or characters.

The core theme is the difficulty of being a woman in an Islamic society, particularly one born into a somewhat liberal home environment within a generally conservative society. A woman could write a pretty good book about this, but Djebar tries to intertwine that thread with one about the French invasion and occupation of Algeria, and another about the narrator’s experiences as a supporter of the Algerian rebels during the war of independence; in fact that main thread about women in Islamic cultures is dropped for a good chunk of the book, so that when it’s reintroduced, you’ve lost the plot, literally.

I also have to question the quality of the translation. Djebar makes a point of saying that she’s writing in French (her second language) and abhors metaphor and florid language, but the translation is full of bizarre and at times fabricated vocabulary – perhaps she’s the Algerian Chabon, but more likely we have a literal translation rather than one that considers the usage patterns of the two languages.

Next up: I’m about 40% through Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, and I’m headed out on vacation on Wednesday, with five books in the suitcase, including Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

JoePo’s iconic songs.

My ballot:

“American Pie” – Don McLean
“Bohemian Rhapsody” – Queen
“Hey Ya” – Outkast
“London Calling” – The Clash
“Nuthin But a G Thang” – Dr. Dre & Snoop Doggy Dogg
“Respect” – Aretha Franklin
“Purple Rain” – Prince
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” – Nirvana
“Stairway to Heaven” – Led Zeppelin
“Welcome to the Jungle” – Guns N Roses

I think Prince – who had to be on the ballot in some way – should have been represented by either “Kiss” (his best song and one of the most-covered songs of the last thirty years) or “When Doves Cry” (probably more iconic than “Kiss”), both of which hit #1 in the U.S.