→ August 25, 2007
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Don’t Look Back.

Reader Abel Wang was kind enough to first recommend and then lend me a copy of Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back, a straightforward detective novel that won the Glass Key Award for the best detective novel written by an author from any of the five Nordic countries.

Don’t Look Back is a very quick read, and I knocked it off in a few subway trips over a 24-hour period in New York City. The main character, Chief Inspector Konrad Sejer, isn’t the hard-boiled type I like most (Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade), but is more of a stoic without a strong personality trait to define him. He’s a young widower and a grandfather, and both characteristics bring some touches of humanity to his approach to this particular case, but given that he’s the central character and now has appeared in a series of detective novels that followed this one, he could use something to set his character apart.

The story is set in a small Norwegian town, where a fifteen-year-old girl is found dead near a lake, her body naked except for an anorak laid on top of her. What set this novel apart from most mass-market detective books was the gradual unfolding of the back story behind the victim and behind the various suspects and witnesses Sejer and his partner Skarre interrogate. Most pulp detective novels today unfurl the story in a small number of very large discoveries, wow moments that seem more designed for a film adaptation or just to shock the reader into feeling excited. Fossum instead brings out the details slowly, in small doses, often presenting them as facts without immediate relevance, which strikes me as a lot more realistic and is definitely a lot less contrived.

Fossum also manages to fold in small details about characters who ultimately have nothing to do with the resolution of the main mystery, but whose interactions with Sejer lead to something small further down the line – for example, when he interviews a Turkish family that has had some trouble assimilating into the community, the father offers a suggestion for Sejer’s eczema … and several chapters later, in an offhand sentence, it appears that Sejer has followed his advice, implying even that Sejer went to the family’s store to pick up the folk remedy in question.

This subtle, fine-pointed approach has an obvious downside, which is that readers used to the big wow are going to find the book dull and the climax anticlimactic. That approach felt a lot more real to me than the constant crescendos of the typical detective novel and of the typical TV crime drama, and I enjoyed the way Fossum depicted Sejer slowly gaining understanding through diligence and through dialogues with his partner. While I prefer the stylings of Hammett and Chandler, for a more contemporary and straightforward detective story, Don’t Look Back was right in line with what I like to read.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ August 23, 2007
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Possession.

A.S. Byatt has briefly been a target of mine for her criticism of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, so I thought it was a good idea to read one of Byatt’s novels to get a better idea of her views on literature. Possession made TIME‘s list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published since the magazine’s inception – another list I’m working my way through – so I made that my first stop on the Byatt train. It’s a good novel from a lot of perspectives, and a fairly deep one from a thematic viewpoint, but I saw a few major flaws in its construction and one major problem to the reader.

Possession revolves around the discovery by a milquetoast poetry researcher/grad student type of two unfinished letters by the great (fictional) English poet Randolph Henry Ash to a previously unknown correspondent, the minor (also fictional) poet Christabel Lamotte, who has become a cult hero to those who study literature from a hardcore feminist/lesbian point of view. That researcher, Roland Michell, and another researcher whom he contacts for help, the sort-of feminist Maud Bailey, begin to follow the trail of letters like a pattern of clues to unravel what exactly the relationship was between Lamotte and Ash, while their attempts at secrecy attract attention from several competing researchers who want to find the answer and/or any related documents for their own purposes. Through the correspondence of the two poets, and some further correspondence from Ash’s wife and Lamotte’s female companion (it’s not clear whether we could call them lovers in any modern sense of the word), we gain windows into discussions of the nature of love, poetry, literature, religion, and the afterlife.

And if that doesn’t sound like a thrilling plot, you’re right. Possession‘s major problem, to steal a phrase from Michell and Bailey themselves, is that it lacks “narrative greed.” The characters are driven forward by an almost primal desire to learn what happens next in the story of Ash and Lamotte, but it rang hollow for me. These characters have invested much of their adult lives in learning about one of the two poets, giving them a sense of urgency that it would be impossible for the reader, who has never heard of either poet because Byatt invented them both, to acquire. Add to this the fact that the plot’s denouement ultimately hinges on a quirk of English copyright law and there’s not enough narrative greed to keep me rolling through 555 pages without having to push myself forward at times.

Compounding the problem with the plot was the lack of a single compelling character. Michell is a dull, meek man, whose emotions all seem variations on the color gray, and who is completely tone-deaf to the feelings of the woman with whom he lives (Val) and is sort of seeing. Bailey is sort of prissy, emotionally restrained, often curt, and tinged with a sadness that is never explained. Ash, Lamotte, the various “villains” (including the American researcher Mortimer Cropper, a ridiculously two-dimensional character who almost seems inserted to provide one person against whom the reader can root), all are thin, and the various people with whom we’re expected to connect emotionally are unsympathetic. In fact, the most likable character of all is Euan, a lawyer who ends up playing roles in two plot threads and who has a sense of humor and a set of bollocks that would make him a good protagonist for his own novel.

I give Byatt credit for ingenuity, including the creation of miniature catalogues of material from Ash and Lamotte, with several entire poems, excerpts of epic poems, and a short story by the fictional writers appearing in the book. Unfortunately, those were exceedingly boring, and when I came across the occasional chapter that comprised only verse written by one of the characters, I skipped to the next batch of regular prose. Possession felt more to me like an achievement, a demonstration of cleverness and of ways of using different styles of narration (mixing poetry, omniscient narration, and the epistolary novel) to weave concurrent plot lines together into a cohesive whole. It just would have been a lot better if she’d done anything to make me give a damn about what was going on in the book.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With:
→ August 18, 2007
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Rick Hurd on the A’s.

Just wanted to point out a very well-written article on what’s behind the A’s struggles this year. Hurd does a nice job of laying out some possible drivers and examining them in turn, and he does it all in a very non-judgmental tone. It’s an insightful article without the “look at me!” tone that has really turned me off of so much of mainstream sportswriting.

Filed Under: Media
→ August 13, 2007
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San Diego eats.

First dinner was at Sadaf, a Persian restaurant in the Gaslamp area. The food was good, but it wasn’t quite the homey, downscale ethnic place I thought I was entering. Like every restaurant I saw in the area, it was upscale, with upscale prices to boot, not really justified by the food. I went with chicken barg, a marinated, grilled chicken dish served with a huge mound of rice. The chicken was moist and mostly flavorful – again with the lack of salt; I’m starting to think it’s a state law out here – and the rice was delicious. But $20 for that? I don’t see it.

Café 222 on Island Street does waffles, and it does them really well. They had several options on the menu – I remember the “basic” waffle, a cornmeal waffle, and a pumpkin waffle that was listed in ALL CAPS, so it must be good – but since I’m a waffle purist at heart, I went for the basic. It was outstanding – crispy exterior, light and airy inside, a classic Belgian-style waffle in a world that thinks that the crap they give you at make-your-own waffle stands in hotel lobbies is good. The basic waffle was $6.25; that plus a big side of sausage patties (generic) and tea ran $13 before tip.

For Friday dinner, I headed up to Pacific Beach to try the lobster tacos at World Famous. I sat at the bar, which I guess is the only way you can get the lobster tacos, and I ordered one fish taco, one shrimp taco, and one lobster taco. On the whole, they were quite good; the fish/shellfish was perfectly fried, not greasy and not overcooked, and the tortillas (flour) didn’t taste like they’d just been thawed. The shrimp taco was easily the best of the three. However, there was one huge problem: All three had cheese, probably cheddar, melted-glued to the tortillas. This is just not right. First of all, outside of a small number of Italian varieties, I despise cow’s-milk cheese. It tastes like spoiled milk, which, actually, is what cheese is. Cheddar is very high on my list of retch-inducing styles of cheese. But the bigger issue here is that even if I liked that disgusting goop, cheese should never be served with shellfish. The flavor of shellfish is far too delicate to stand up to the tangy/rancid taste of cheese. It didn’t even occur to me that they would put cheese on these tacos, so I didn’t ask them to leave it off and ended up doing the scraping trick, watching the cheese as it took some of the tortillas with it. Anyway, World Famous also gets points for serving Thomas Kemper root beer, which made up for the fact that all four beers they had on tap were pale and therefore not worth drinking.

Gelateria Frizzante is tucked away on Island Ave in the 400s; I only discovered it when I walked to a bank over that way before breakfast. I went for a small cup of chocolate gelato, which looked dark in the tray, but the flavor was very disappointing – mild and thin, like milk chocolate, failing to take advantage of the way gelato can deliver very intense flavors due to its low air content (called “overrun”) and melting speed. The texture, on the other hand, was very good, and they do make all their gelato on the premises.

I wasn’t going to give up that easily, so I tossed the last half of that gelato and walked six more blocks to Mondo Gelato on 10th, just south of Island. They actually had a flavor called “dark chocolate” that delivered – ultra-smooth, rich, cocoa flavor, like a cocoa pudding or custard, with that trademark bitterness of good cocoa. I split the cup between dark chocolate and coffee, but the texture of the coffee was grainy; I think they might have flavored it by using double-strength coffee or espresso, which introduces too much water into the mix. (The best way to make coffee ice cream or gelato is to toast a handful or two of coffee beans just until they glisten, then to simmer them in the milk and/or cream to let the liquid absorb the flavors without requiring the addition of more water. But I digress.) Mondo also had a selection of non-traditional flavors like green tea and Hilo malt (!), and about a half-dozen soy gelatos.

Saturday’s breakfast was at Richard Walker’s Pancake House, a pretty popular joint that already had a line by 8:15 am that morning. I’m still trying to figure out why. I ordered banana pancakes, which, it turns out, were make with a sourdough batter – and that’s all I tasted. “Sour” is not a desirable quality in pancakes, and drowning them in syrup isn’t really my idea of breakfast. I also ordered scrambled eggs on the side, and they were dry and clearly came from a giant pan of the stuff. It’s been a long time since I left that much food on my plate at any restaurant.

I never had lunch on Sunday so I had an early dinner en route to the airport at El Indio, a counter-service Mexican restaurant in the Mission Hills neighborhood. It was solid-average, nothing spectacular, although I give them credit for making their own tortillas (you can buy them by the bag). I had the daily special, carnitas with salsa verde, which came with Mexican rice, beans (pinto beans in a mini-tostada shell), three fresh and super-hot tortillas, and a drink for $8.25 or so. It was fine, but totally unremarkable.

So the funny part is that last year when I made this trip, I stayed in Old Town, and one night I ventured out in search of ice cream, heading first for a gelateria called Gelato Vero that has won some plaudits and at least one award for the best gelato in San Diego. I found it no problem, but couldn’t park. There are a handful of spots on the street in front of it, but nothing else close by, and the whole street was jammed because of all of the restaurants there – Saffron, a Thai/noodles shop; a “New York-style” pizzeria (no idea how authentic it was, but I liked the fake NYC subway sign over their front door); Shakespeare’s Corner Shoppe, serving afternoon tea and selling goods imported from the UK; and the aforementioned El Indio. Since I was already in the area, I wandered up the block to Gelato Vero. They had just eight flavors, and the stuff didn’t look right in the trays, but the texture was pretty good (not as good as Frizzante’s) and the flavor was nice and strong. Their espresso bean was really dark, almost like Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Coffee Buzz Buzz Buzz (still my gold standard for real coffee flavor in ice cream), and their chocolate was rich although it lacked that slight bitterness that comes from using good cocoa and lots of it. Gelato Vero sells their gelato by the ounce, which is kind of clever, given how different the “small” cups were at Frizzante (generous) and Mondo Gelato (a little skimpy) the night before.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ August 11, 2007
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Charlie Wilson’s War.

What makes George Crile’s book Charlie Wilson’s War so compelling is the two characters at its center: the Congressman of the book’s title, a war-hawk Democrat from Texas nicknamed “Good Time Charlie” for his off-field antics; and Gust Avrakotos, the no-nonsense, blue-collar CIA agent who was first Wilson’s doppelganger in the CIA and later his partner in crime.

The story itself is fascinating for its windows into the bizarre worlds of Washington politics and CIA bureaucracy, and how Wilson and Avrakotos manipulated the former and avoided the latter enough to wage the biggest covert war in history. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the mujahideen – poorly-armed Muslim men who fought the Soviets as part of a jihad, or an Islamic holy war – became a pet cause of Wilson, who believed both that the Afghans were noble warriors whose dedication should be rewarded with support, and that this was a good way to stick it to the Russians. (Wilson repeatedly says he wants to turn Afghanistan into the Soviets’ Vietnam, but given its role in hastening the collapse of the U.S.S.R., it would be more accurate to call it the Soviets’ Waterloo, or, if you enjoy morbid irony, their Leningrad.) Avrakotos came to the Afghan cause somewhat by circumstance, as he was an outlaw within the CIA whose future had been dimmed by internal politics and his suggestion that one of the top men in the CIA go f— himself, but he quickly became a true believer in the value of this conflict within the broader battle with the Soviets. The two men, with plenty of help, independently and then together engineered a large effort to arm and train the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, originally with the goal of just inflicting heavy casualties and expensive damage, then later with the goal of driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan entirely. The tale spins through global arms manufacturing, back-room deals (including the willingness of the Israelis to manufacture and sell arms to the CIA for use by Muslims in Afghanistan), the internal politics of Pakistan, and eventually, the Iran-contra scandal, which nearly killed the Afghan program by association.

But it’s the characters who drive the book. Wilson is almost a caricature of a politician, a man who makes Diamond Joe Quimby look dull and two-dimensional by comparison. In his political mode, Wilson plays the country boy, speaking with an exaggerated southern drawl and, despite his Democratic affiliation, voicing a lot of conservative views. (One notable exception is on abortion. Wilson’s sister Sharon was chairwoman of the board of Planned Parenthood, and despite the fact that his constituents overwhelmingly opposed abortion, Charlie Wilson voted according to his sister’s wishes.) Wilson was a classic political horse-trader, but a shrewd one who gathered his favors over a period of years before calling them in. He backed up John Murtha – still in Congress, I might add – when Murtha was caught up in the Abscam scandal, telling one of the undercover operatives that while he wouldn’t take the bribe just then, he’d be open to it down the road. When Wilson needed Murtha’s support for the Afghan program years down the road, he got it.

But in his personal life, Wilson was a mess. He nearly drank himself to death, got sober, and started drinking again a year and a half later. He was caught with two showgirls in a Vegas hot tub, with cocaine in the room (earning himself another nickname, “Cocaine Charlie”). He had a succession of girlfriends and insisted on bringing one along on each of his junkets to Pakistan and to the Middle East. And he nearly killed a man in a hit-and-run accident that by all rights should have ended his political career – although Ted Kennedy’s continued support from the ignorati of Masschusetts makes it clear that voters will even overlook manslaughter if they want to.

Given that history, it’s all the more amazing that Wilson is a clear second fiddle among the characters to Avrakotos. A Greek-American born in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Avrakotos speaks his mind regardless of the consequences, both to Crile and to everyone he encountered during his nearly thirty years at the CIA. Avrakotos was on assignment in the CIA’s Greek detachment when the Greek army overthrew the country’s left-leaning government, and as a result he became one of the most powerful men in Greece during the early years of the junta’s rule. Avrakotos later survived a near-firing and the above-mentioned telling-off to land in the CIA’s Near East group just at the time that the Afghan rebellion was getting under way. Avrakotos hated the communists as much as Wilson did, partly borne of his upbringing in an area of Pennsylvania heavily populated with people from all over Eastern Europe who could only agree on one thing: that they hated the Soviets. Although it’s never spelled out, it was clear to me that Avrakotos also got a significant charge out of the Afghan operation itself, such as its cloak-and-dagger aspects and the way he was subverting the higher-ups who wanted him out of the CIA.

To Crile’s tremendous credit, he avoids offering judgments on what these men were doing, and in particular avoids the facile explanation we’ve heard since 9/11 that the United States somehow created al-Qaeda or otherwise facilitated the attacks through its Afghan operations in the 1980s. The Soviet Union was headed for an economic collapse at the start of the 1980s, and the CIA’s involvement in Afghanistan hastened that collapse and produced a relatively good outcome when the communists in Russia gave up power voluntarily; since the Soviets were the clear enemy of the United States at the time, a strategy to undermine them made sense. And Crile also makes it clear that one possible reason for the anti-U.S. sentiment of the Islamic militants we supported in Afghanistan is that the CIA was so careful about disguising our involvement that the mujahideen had no idea where these arms came from. The relationship between the covert war and the eventual rises of the Taliban and al-Qaeda is far more complicated than the “it’s the CIA’s fault” side would have it, and Crile refrains from offering his opinion, letting the story tell itself, only delving into the aftermath in Afghanistan in an illuminating epilogue where even Wilson himself offers his thoughts on the matter.

I listened to the unabridged audio versionof Charlie Wilson’s War, clocking in at just over twenty hours. The narrator, Christopher Lane, does an excellent job of bringing the various characters to life with just slight variations in his voice, and apart from the occasional stumble over a foreign phrase (I can’t even reproduce his mispronunciation of “pièce de resistance”), his reading was clean and sharp.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With:
→ August 10, 2007
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The Kite Runner.

Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

I’ve touted Beloved as the best literary novel of the last 25-30 years, perhaps of the entire canon of postwar American literature. It told a story of a woman while telling the story of a people, and it touched on the emotions and events that drive and define our lives by using small and large events in one character’s life as metaphors for universal themes. No book since then had come close to this combination of great themes rolled up in a great story told in brilliant language.

Until The Kite Runner, that is.

Published in 2005 and headed for theaters in a film adaptation this fall, The Kite Runner is easily one of the best novels I’ve ever read and meets all the criteria one could ask for in a work of literature. The plot is riveting. The emotions it describes and that it elicits are genuine. The characters are fleshed-out and compelling. The prose sparkles. The story behind the story is real, and the layers of metaphor only make the surface plot more interesting and believable. And the novel relies on very little in the way of coincidence or other ridiculous plot contrivances that ruin a lot of novels, especially first ones.

The main plot itself revolves around the narrator-protagonist Amir, starting from his youth in Kabul and his childhood friendship with Hassan, the son of the family’s servant and a member of an ethnic minority known as the Hazaras. Hassan is a completely devoted friend to Amir, and Amir eventually betrays him, setting off a lifelong quest for redemption through his acts, a redemption – or, perhaps more accurately, self-forgiveness – he can’t find until he leaves America (his new home) and returns to Afghanistan. It’s a sad tale with flashes of hope and a certain streak of faith and even spirituality in the face of horrors, both personal and societal.

And much as Beloved tells the history of African-Americans and Absalom, Absalom! tells the history of the American South, The Kite Runner tells the history of Afghanistan, through actual events that the characters experience and through characters who serve as metaphors for peoples and nations in the history of that country. The rape of Hassan represents the rape of Afghanistan, with Hassan’s loss of innocence standing in for the end of the one period of stability and economic progress in Afghanistan’s history. One female character’s barrenness stands for the devastation wreaked on Afghanistan, first by the Soviets, then by the Taliban. And so on.

While these other attributes contribute to the book’s literary value, Hosseini’s storycraft is what really sets The Kite Runner apart as a reading experience. His plot twists are rarely outrageous and never gratuitous; he doesn’t provide pat resolutions or twist characters to make them act differently in key situations. Instead, he lets the story unfold in a natural if accelerated way, directing his lens in and out of the action as needed. It makes a melancholy book where a handful of scenes of frenetic action are separated by long periods of thought and descriptions of emotions into a page-turner that you can’t put down.

Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is now out in hardcover.

One other point that really hit me while I read The Kite Runner was the richness of Afghan traditions, particularly around Amir’s engagement and wedding. Although it is a typically Western view that such traditions – particularly if they’re tied to religion – are dated and restrictive and profoundly anti-intellectual, rituals and traditions are a part of our culture and they help define who we are. I often talk about my Italian heritage, but my identity is unabashedly American. I have no Italian traditions; even the simple Italian tradition of the long evening meal, still practiced at least on occasion in Italy, has never been a part of my life. Anyone I could ask about these traditions has forgotten or is already dead. I have no traditions, and as a result, I know less of who I am. If you have those traditions in your family, or still have someone who can teach them to you, do all you can to sustain them, so that you, your children, and their children will all know better who you are.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ August 10, 2007
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Long Beach eats.

Since I got to my hotel around 11 am Pacific Time, it kind of felt like I was caught in between breakfast and lunch. It seemed like a good time to try Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, recommended by at least two readers. Much to my surprise, I loved the chicken and didn’t care for the waffles. The chicken was “southern style,” although I’d dispute that since the breading was thin, but either way it was delicious, salty and spicy but not hot-spicy, and it had clearly just come out of the fryer. The white meat was still moist, which to me is always a good test of a kitchen’s frying abilities. The waffles, however, were pale and limp, clearly undercooked, with little sugar (needed for taste but also helps browning) and an overwhelming taste of ground cloves. I did order a biscuit on the side, just on a whim, and it was good even though it was no longer hot – nice flaky texture, buttery flavor, just lacked that crispy exterior I like in a good southern biscuit.

Sunday night I wanted sushi, and since my favorite place from last year (Kinokawa) isn’t open on Sundays, I tried Japengo in downtown Long Beach. It was excellent, with fresh and flavorful fish and very friendly and quick service. I ordered two nigiri, salmon and eel, and two maki, spicy tuna and avocado. A small edamame dish comes with dinner, and after I chatted up the guy making my sushi (from Mexico, but there was at least one Japanese sushi-ya behind the counter), I ended up with a freebie: a roll with salmon and avocado that had been tempura’d whole, served with two sauces, one teriyaki and one mayo-based that didn’t have much taste. I’m not usually big on semi-cooked foods like that – the salmon wasn’t cooked, but it wasn’t quite raw any more either – but I wasn’t going to insult the guy by not eating it, and other than that one objection it was excellent. I do think the salmon was farm-raised, since it was very pale, but it had a good flavor and I’m more concerned with that than I am with how it was raised. Japengo also gets points for very good green tea.

Monday breakfast was a return to the Pot Holder, which was my favorite of the two Long Beach breakfast spots I’d hit last year (the other being Egg Heaven a few blocks away). I went for the chorizo scramble, which – as you might imagine – is scrambled eggs with a healthy dose of chorizo sausage. If, as Mario Batali claims, parmiggiano-reggiano is the undisputed king of all cheeses, then chorizo is the king of all sausages, with a smoky, spicy flavor that can’t be replicated by any pretenders to its throne. The Pot Holder’s chorizo scramble was heavy on the chorizo; the eggs were a bit overcooked and so the whole dish didn’t really hold together, but let’s be honest: I was there for the chorizo. The dish also comes with some solid home fries, soft interior with a nice hard crust, and toast. Total cost for that plus tip was an even $10. I went back the next day and had one of the specials that included scrambled eggs (fine but slightly overcooked), link sausage (straight from a package), and pancakes (solid average).

Monday lunch was In-n-Out. I don’t want to hear it. I like their fries, and I’m not brooking any dissent here.

Dinner was with a friend from college at a place in LA right on the Santa Monica line called Sushi Sasabune. (This appears to be the restaurant’s home page, although it’s more focused on their Honolulu location.) I’ve never been to a sushi place like this. Sasabune bills itself not just as a restaurant that serves only traditional sushi, but as the veritable guardian of the sushi tradition. There are two signs at the front counter stating that they do not serve spicy tuna or other hand-cut rolls like California rolls. It’s not clear if there’s a menu for ordering à la carte; we ordered the omakase, which means that it’s the chef’s choice. As sushi arrived – usually two pieces at a time for each person – the waitress instructs the diners whether or not it is acceptable to use soy sauce on those pieces. The restaurant’s motto, which appears on the wrappers of the steamed hand towels served before the meal, is “Trust Me,” which one lengthy review posted on the walls outside the restrooms translates as, “Shut up and eat what I tell you to.” Such a restaurant wouldn’t likely stay in business long if the food wasn’t good – granted, it might stay in business a while because of idiots who would be drawn to the novelty of the thing – but the sushi here is amazing. The selection of nigiri included but wasn’t limited to halibut, salmon, yellowtail, two kinds of snapper, albacore, butterfish, and kampachi (a real standout, since I hadn’t liked it when I’d tried it previously but liked it here). The last item was a long uncut roll of minced crab and rice. Several of the nigiri came with a sauce already on them, and several had sliced scallions or other tiny accoutrements on top. What stood out about the fish was the amazing texture, which was softer than any sushi I’d ever had previously. The flavors were outstanding, and I can’t remember a dud in the bunch even though some of the sauce-sushi combinations were unusual (to me, at least). It’s not for the fiscally faint of heart: the total cost was over $50 per person. For that kind of money, I don’t just want good food, I want an experience, but Sasabune delivered.

Tuesday’s only new place was Kinokawa, the sushi place I’ve mentioned in chats before. I ended up eating a smaller dinner than normal; I went with soup, salad, some salmon and some unagi – very fresh – plus a cut roll that’s worth mentioning. Last year, they had some ridiculous cut roll (maki) that caught my attention; I remember it had shrimp tempura in the middle and salmon on the outside, and avocado in there somewhere. Well, this time they didn’t have it listed anywhere, so I ordered something similar in the hopes that it would be the same thing or close to it, but it wasn’t. The one I ordered, called the Frederic Roll (I’m sure that’s the traditional Japanese name, too), had shrimp tempura and avocado in the middle and spicy tuna on top. That was fine, but the whole thing was covered with ponzu sauce and a bit of a mayo sauce, and it was just gluttony – too rich, too sweet, too heavy for sushi. I usually avoid fancy rolls because they obscure the taste of the fish, but I was trying to unlock a memory, and unfortunately the teahouse was out of madeleines.

The last good new spot was another breakfast place, The Coffee Cup on 4th. I was pretty happy with the Pot Holder, but I have to say now that the Coffee Cup’s food is better – it’s just better prepared. I went with a special that included two eggs, two sausage links (better, but still generic), and two pancakes, and I ordered a side of toast. The scrambled eggs were cooked just right, barely cooked through but not runny. The pancakes were actually a little overcooked on the outside, with a slightly burned taste, but the cakes themselves were very good, with a light texture. (They came slathered in butter, which is really too bad, because there’s no way I wasn’t going to eat that part first, no matter how bad it is for me.) And unlike at the Pot Holder, the toast at the Coffee Cup wasn’t cold when it reached the table. I’d still have to try a chorizo scramble-type dish at the Coffee Cup to make the switch, but I’m just about sold.

One last note – I did try the Green Field churrascaria, just east of the park where Blair Field is located. Turns out that this is a chain, and I’ve been to one of their locations in Allston, Massachusetts. The food really isn’t that good. It’s not authentic churrasco, since the meat isn’t anywhere near seasoned enough, the feijão is bland, and there were no fried plantains (I don’t know if that’s really authentic, but I’ve had them at other churrascarias, and who cares if they’re authentic or not – they’re plantains, and they’re fried). And this particular place was very disappointing – one of the meats was beyond rare in the middle, while the lamb was well done (that’s not good), and the sides on the buffet table (bad sign) weren’t hot. Skip it.

Off to San Diego…

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ August 5, 2007
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Absurdistan.

So Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan was apparently one of the great critical successes of 2006, landing on a half-dozen or so Top Ten Books lists (including that of the New York Times) and otherwise garnering ridiculous praise. I’m mystified by this; the book certainly had its high points, but I preferred it in its first incarnation, when it was called A Confederacy of Dunces.

I’m not the only one to make this connection; Josip Novakovich’s review for the Washington Post, quoted on every online bookseller’s site, and the review in Publishers Weekly both point out the resemblance, but almost wave it off as irrelevant. But whereas the humor in Ignatius J. Reilly comes from his personality, his actions, and his words, the humor in Absurdistan comes from the situations and places that its antihero protagonist, Misha Vainberg, comes across, almost an unwitting victim of history in motion.

The plot of this book is almost irrelevant: Misha, a Russian-born secular Jew and the son of a dissident-turned oligarch, has become Americanized but is currently banned from the United States because his father killed a man from Oklahoma. Returning to New York is his sole goal, so he travels to the former Soviet republic of Absurdistan to buy a Belgian passport. While he’s there, the Absurdi government collapses and Misha ends up in the middle of a civil war while he’s “popping” the daughter of the leader of one of the factions.

Absurdistan isn’t really about Misha, though; it’s an attempt at a satire of modern foreign relations, of life in post-Soviet Russia, of the American government, and of a few other things I probably missed or just ignored because I was getting tired of figuring it out. There is humor to be found in all of these areas, but in trying satirize all of them, Shteyngart ends up creating a farce, where his portrayals of the local Absurdi (divided into Svanï and Sevo, who disagree over the direction of the footrest on Jesus’ crucifix) are superficial and companies like Halliburton (mentioned by name, oddly enough) are accepted as corrupt despite figuring heavily into the plot.

Shteyngart, whose first novel was called The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, isn’t above a bit of self-parody, as one never-seen villain in Absurdistan is the Russian émigré novelist/professor “Jerry Shteynfarb,” whose first novel was called The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job. And that’s one example of the facet of this book that bothered me the most: Its unrelenting crudeness. Shteyngart seeks to mine humor from bodily functions, from physical disfigurements and defects, from the fat and from the stupid (OK, I’ll admit I’m comfortable with that last one), and his heavy use of vulgar language – not just profanities – amounts to beating the reader over the head with the words, almost as if he was a twelve-year-old boy who has just learned a half-dozen terms for the female genitalia and wants to show them off to his friends. It gets in the way of the humor, and all that crudeness coming from the mouth of the main character made him even less sympathetic than he already was. Yes, there are some funny lines, but he beats even his better jokes to death, like the fact that Misha and his friend Alyosha-Bob enjoy American gangsta rap. (I particularly enjoyed the reference to DJ Assault, a real hip-hop artist whose song “F*ck You Hoe” remains the all-time pinnacle of unintentional comedy in rap.)

I’ve loaded this review with some criticisms of the book because most of what I’ve read about it has been praise, often without restraint, and the fact is that this book has its flaws. Shteyngart is not a humorist like Waugh or Wodehouse, and he lacks the insight into personalities that Toole displayed in that one masterwork. What Shteyngart does very well in Absurdistan is build up – and then, in his way, tear down – a ridiculous situation that almost resembles an elaborate con. Had he focused his sights more squarely on foreign relations in an age of short attention spans and a surfeit of media outlets, he could have produced a brilliant satire for our age that sums up the way wars are created more than fought, a modern take on Waugh’s Scoop that added the dimension of the economic depression that the Soviet Union is still foisting on its unfortunate progeny. But in my opinion, Shteyngart set his sights too low and lowbrow and missed his opportunity. I liked the book enough to go back and read his first novel, but from a critical perspective, this book just didn’t cut it for me.

Filed Under: Literature
→ August 1, 2007
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Suggestions needed for Cali eats.

I’ve been told California knows how to party, but what I care about is whether they know how to eat. I’ve got a trip to Long Beach and then San Diego coming up, and I’m looking for suggestions for some eats. Breakfast and dinner in Long Beach, all three meals in SD (downtown or near USD or SDSU). I’ve got some spots from last year that I’ll hit again, like Kinokawa in Long Beach (unreal sushi), and I’ll make the obligatory stop at In-n-Out, but that won’t get me through the week. Fire away…

Filed Under: Food
→ July 30, 2007
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Lance Armstrong.

So over on the blog Vandermint Auditorium there’s a snarky piece that makes the argument that because Lance Armstrong consistently beat cyclists who later admitted to or were caught doping, he must have doped as well. (The piece doesn’t make this argument directly, but instead is written in a sarcastic way that makes the writer’s intent pretty clear to me. And it comes off as snarky.)

But he doesn’t mention this interesting study done on Armstrong’s body, which found that his heart can pump an abnormally large amount of oxygen, that he increased his muscle-efficiency rate through an intensive training regimen, and that his muscles produce abnormally low amounts of lactic acid. While I suppose that that doesn’t prove that Armstrong was clean, it does put the lie to the VA argument that Armstrong couldn’t have possibly beaten cyclists who doped unless he doped himself.

Filed Under: Sports