→ November 15, 2013
→ By

Top Chef, S11E07.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is MVP-heavy but I tried to take a fair number of prospect questions, and I posted my hypothetical MVP and Cy Young ballots for Insiders on Thursday.

This was in the preview from last week’s episode of Top Chef, but we see Nicholas talking to a doctor and learning he has strep throat (“step thrope,” as my daughter used to call it, not to be confused with “the cold”), so he has to skip the Quickfire and will have to forfeit if he can’t cook in the elimination challenge. Tough break, although there’s not much the producers can do about it.

* Quickfire: There is an actual human being named Kermit Ruffins. He lives in New Orleans in a magical tree and holds the keys to the Land of Pretend. Also, he plays trumpet, sings, and cooks barbecue at his shows every Thursday. The chefs must “improvise” for him, starting at one station but then moving around the kitchen to another station (with its partially-finished dish) whenever Kermie plays the horn. This is all very, very silly.

* I think my favorite part was watching Justin try to roast quail in a toaster oven. I’m sure it can be done; I just wouldn’t want to be the one to have to do it.

* The way it works out, every chef starts at one station, moves to at another, then goes back to his/her original station, and then moves one more time to a new one. I’m not sure what this proves about any of the chefs; it’s great that you can improvise, I guess, but it’s also, well, kind of like judging a hitter by his RBI total: It’s more about what the people before you did.

* Those pants. My God, Kermit’s pants.

* I’m skipping ahead a little because this just wasn’t that interesting – Brian ends up winning immunity with the dish that Sara started, a duck/mussels combo with “Asian flavors.” Isn’t that Beverly’s shtick? I was more interested in Louis’ rosemary okra with rendered pork, confit potato, and frog legs. He seems to be keen on getting the most out of his vegetables.

* Elimination challenge: Now we cook – the chefs split into three teams and must create a potluck meal, after which someone has to explain “potluck” to Patty. The teams: Shirley, Louis, Justin, and Sara; Patty, Brian, Travis, and Nicholas if he returns (which he does); Nina, Steph, Carlos, and Carrie. My money would be on the third team to win and probably the middle team to lose, since at the time we didn’t know if Nicholas was returning and both Patty and Travis are near the bottom of the remaining twelve.

* Louis says he’s doing a dish with charred broccolini and pickled radishes because making vegetables taste good is hard, as opposed to some of the easier items you’d normally find at a potluck dinner. He also mentions that he worked for Thomas Keller, which floored me as he doesn’t carry himself like that.

* Nicholas is cleared to cook. Modern medicine is great. Vaccinate your children.

* Stephanie mocks him for cooking while on PEDs, saying she’ll “call bullshit” on him and won’t put him on her Hall of Fame ballot in ten years. Has she seen his backne?

* Carrie’s hair is getting shorter with each episode. I do not support this trend.

* We see Patty’s team talking about finding chili threads for their watermelon salad. This, kids, is what we refer to as “foreshadowing.”

* Guest judge: Sue Zemanick, executive chef at Gautreau’s, whom I had never heard of previously but who also appears in a Chase Sapphire commercial.

* To the food … Justin serves hominy grits with brown shrimp, roasted okra, fava beans, and smoked bacon. Louis serves his grilled and pickled vegetables with cripsy sunflower seeds and a mustard vinaigrette. Shirley and Sara collaborated on a glazed beef with charred onions, melon pickles, and a pickled ginger vinaigrette on top.

* The grits are very buttery, which is good because grits on their own have all the flavor and nuance of Elmer’s Glue, but the judges seem to feel it’s lacking that certain something. Louis’ grilled vegetables are really good. Shirley and Sara’s beef wasn’t consistently cooked and many portions were dry, although one diner says he “ate it all” anyway.

* Nicholas notices that his barramundi (fish) is sliced so thinly it’s cooking too quickly. This is also known as “foreshadowing.”

* Patty forgot the chili threads. I tried to tell you this was going to happen.

* More dishes: Brian and Travis served a togarashi fried chicken with clover bee pollen, honey, and ponzu sauce, where I assume the togarashi refers to the shichimi spice blend rather than just plain chili powder; Nicholas’ barramundi came over a summer vegetable fricasee with truffle and yuzukosho, another Japanese spice blend, this time using fermented chili peppers and yuzu peel; Patty’s watermelon salad with tomatoes, goat cheese espuma, and Szechuan pepper; and Travis and Nicholas collaborated on caramel-glazed barbecued ribs with dehydrated potatoes and peanut gremolata.

* We don’t hear much on the fried chicken other than that it was very crunchy; that sounded sickly-sweet from the list of ingredients. The barramundi was bland and, shocker, a little dry and overcooked. The rib rub was overcooked, possibly burnt. And everyone kills Patty’s salad for sloppy cuts and lack of spice or heat. You can see this elimination coming a mile away.

* The final team leads with Stephanie’s crispy fried (I should hope they’d be crispy) baby artichokes with preserved lemon and anchovy aioli (which is now just marketing for “mayonnaise”); followed by Nina’s semolina gnocchetti with fresh sausage, and Carrie and Carlos’ summer “tiramisu” with nectarines but, as it turns out, no coffee in it, which is enough to cause the Italian government to collapse.

* The artichokes were nicely cooked, the gnocchetti were nicely cooked, everything was nicely cooked. Just once I want to hear Tom get fired up and say, “They fucking NAILED that dish.” Not going to happen, I guess. The tiramisu was not nicely cooked, however, and was more like an English trifle than tiramisu.

* The interlude has the chefs talking about ambrosia salad, which I have never had and will never have, ever. It doesn’t even qualify as food. Patty, who is Puerto Rican, can only say, “You Americans.”

* Judges’ table – the consensus is that the food was overall pretty good. The green team’s artichokes were beautiful, and the gnocchi was perfectly made, but the tiramisu “really brings everything else down” for Sue. They rehash most of what we already knew here.

* Padma comes into the stew room and calls … the gray team, Patty, Travis, Nicholas, and Brian. She’s flat-out solemn as she asks for them.

* In front of the judges, the chefs say the food was a collaborative effort. The fried chicken was delicious and nothing else was good, unfortunately. The watermelon comes in for the most abuse here – it wasn’t dressed enough and had no spice. Patty said there was a lot of szechuan pepper in the dish – I believe she said she “doused” the salad – but no judge tasted it, and of course, she forgot the chili threads.

* The green team was the overall winner despite the tiramisu. Food nicely seasoned, beautifully cooked. Steph everyone liked artichokes, aioli delicious, fried capers too. Tom asks Nina taught her to make gnocchi, but she seems to say she’s self-taught. I’d like it if somewhere here Nina or Tom or anyone said, “the key is (insert key here.” Don’t work the dough too much? Don’t add too much flour? Chill before rolling? Give me a clue here, folks.

* The tiramisu flop was really a trifle in disguise. Carlos made a pistachio sponge cake, which was good, Sue says the dish needed more layers. Tom says tiramisu needs coffee (and rum, Tom, rum!), and that he would have been fine with the nectarines and the coffee together. And rum. He forgot to mention the rum, but I know he meant it.

* Winner: Stephanie, for the fried artichokes. She looks like she can’t believe it and says she hasn’t won anything at all since high school. I’m more stunned that the winning dish is actually something a little innovative. I’ve never seen crispy fried artichokes, and serving them with preserved lemons and fried capers put twists on two of the most common accompaniments to our favorite thistle.

* Patty is indeed eliminated. No one in stew room seemed surprised either, although there’s a ton of emotional support, with Carlos saying, “we’re all so proud of you.” This is an uncommonly nice group of contestants this year, which might be why the season feels less dramatic. The bad apples were auf’d early, and now the remaining chefs are mostly getting along.

* LCK: An onion challenge: Break down a tub of onions, then do all your prep work before you begin cooking. Janine doesn’t sear pork enough, but her apple rolls with goat cheese, bacon, and caramelized onions carry the day over Patty’s seared pork loin with onions and fried/confit potatoes, because those potatoes were way too salty.

* Projected top three: Nicholas, Nina, and Justin, followed by Shirley, Carrie, and Stephanie. I still think Stephanie is a dark horse here because she has more vision than some of the chefs who execute better than she does, but this was only the second episode where she really nailed a dish. Bottom three: My bottom-ranked chef has been eliminated in the last two weeks, so this is getting trickier, but I’ll go with Carlos, Travis, and Sara.

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→ November 13, 2013
→ By

We.

New Insider content since my last post here – Marlon Byrd contract reaction (hint: not positive) and my NL Rookie of the Year ballot, plus the offseason buyer’s guide for relievers.

I’ve long been a fan of the subgenre of dystopian novels, stories set in an alternate reality or in the distant future in an anti-utopian state, nearly always under a totalitarian regime that has quashed all individual liberty. The two most famous novels in the dystopian oeuvre, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 sit at 74th and 58th, respectively, on my ranking of my top 102 novels of all time, while Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a novel of social commentary in a dystopian setting, is 32nd, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is 96th. It turns out that most novels in this realm owe a direct or indirect debt to the novel I just read, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 work We ($1.99 for Kindle), a response to the authoritarian Soviet regime that had just taken control of Russia that was banned by the authorities there and eventually led to Zamyatin’s exile to the West.

We is set in the bleakest dystopia I’ve encountered, a world several hundred years in the future where people have numbers but not names, where cities are enclaves separated from all forms of nature by a “Green Wall,” and where all buildings are made of glass so that there is no privacy from the state Guardians. All personal activities are prescribed by mandated calendar, including sex, which occurs at set times of day and for which a person obtains a partner by submitting a pink ticket as a formal request. All physical activities, including but not limited to work, follow Taylor’s principles of maximizing efficiency. Food is petroleum-based, and the Guardians view smoking and drinking as crimes against the state. Math is ascendant over all, rationalism taken to the edge of its extreme, as emotions are dismissed as atavistic tendencies that should already be extinct.

The narrator, D-503, is a drone in the hive but an important one as he’s the designer of a spaceship called the Integral that will take this “perfect” society out into space – until he’s targeted by the rebellious woman I-330, who openly smokes and drinks while provoking an emotional response in him, Pleasantville-style, that leads him to tentatively consider a rebellion of his own. D-503 struggles to deal with these new emotions, with this seeming infidelity to his somewhat regular lover O-90 (who is deemed too short to bear a child under the state’s eugenics rules), and with the emergence of vivid dreams that he thinks are a sign of creeping insanity. I-330 eventually introduces him to a world of drones who are plotting against the state, forcing him to choose between compliance and sedition.

We shares the terrorizing power of Huxley’s and Orwell’s works through its vision of egalitarianism gone horribly awry, Harrison Bergeron-style, under the thumb of an omniscient government apparatus that has removed all personal choice and liberty from its subjects. Zamyatin enhances that fear by putting the narration into the hands of his protagonist, pushing the reader into his mind to experience his emotional/rational struggle firsthand. The technique has its greatest effect when D-503 is confused by this inner conflict and begins to render dialogue in fragments, forcing the reader to interpolate or complete sentences, bringing the confusion off the page into the reader’s mind. Reading a dystopian novel creates an involuntary barrier between the reader and the characters in the book because the situation in the story is often unrecognizable to us; Zamyatin’s trick of mimicking the confusion in D-503’s brain allows the feeling to slip through the barrier and affect the reader the same way that Orwell sowed fear in the reader’s mind with the rats in room 101.

Zamyatin and Orwell were specifically attacking Soviet-style totalitarianism, a topic that has lost some relevance in the twenty years since nearly all of those regimes fell or adapted by embracing economic liberty without political liberty. I’m less afraid of a technocratic, rationalist dictatorship than I am of a theocracy, as we live in a country that can’t accept evolution or climate change but is still fighting to restrict access to birth control or to ban same-sex marriage (which, all moral arguments aside, is about as anti-libertarian a policy as I can imagine). I imagine there are plenty of readers out there who’d take the opposite view, that rationalist-athiest totalitarianism is a greater likelihood or threat to our personal liberty, and for them We might be a more powerful allegory.

While Zamyatin’s tactic of eschewing character names for numbers dehumanizes the characters, it also makes reading the book more difficult than it needs to be; keeping the characters straight isn’t that hard, since Zamyatin doesn’t reuse letters and he reserves vowels for females and consonants for males, but I found the lack of actual names disorienting as I read. We is otherwise a very quick read with strong narrative greed, as it’s unclear what direction D-503 will take and his confusion rapidly becomes yours as you read. Zamyatin’s ending is ambiguous as well, although I believe I-330 foreshadows his intent with some of her earlier statements about revolutions and the mathematical nature of infinity. Given that the Soviet regime didn’t fall for another 70 years, a neater, pat ending would have felt too optimistic. It’s essential reading for fans of the dystopian genre given its influence, but also a tremendous lesson in building emotion in a reader even when your story itself revolves around its absence.

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→ November 10, 2013
→ By

Elder Sign.

My buyer’s guides to catchers and DHs, corner infielders, and outfielders are all up for Insiders over at ESPN.com.

Elder Sign is a cooperative dice-manipulation game set in the Cthulu world created by the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. One to eight players act as investigators seeking to explore a mansion haunted by the minions of an “Ancient One,” the main enemy who will awaken if the players take too long to complete enough tasks to allow them to defeat him. If he awakens, the players must then battle with him against fairly significant odds or lose the game entirely.

The theme is elaborate, but the game is pretty simple: You’re playing Yahtzee! with different dice, and you can use various cards and investigator skills to alter the dice to try to get the specific rolls you need. Every room card has one or more tasks that you must complete by achieving specific rolls on the set of six green dice. You may need to use multiple dice to complete a task, but you can only complete one task per roll – if your roll completes several, you complete one, removing those dice, then roll the remainder to try to complete another task. Once you’ve completed all of the tasks on a card, you get the rewards shown on the room card, from extra item cards to the elder sign points that you use to defeat the Ancient One. If you fail to complete any task on a roll, you must give up one die to reroll and often pay a “terror” penalty as well. If you fail to complete all of the tasks on a card you’ve begun, you pay a penalty that usually costs you one or more Stamina or Sanity points – and if you run out of either, your investigator is out of the game.

The game includes a clock that advances fifteen minutes after each player’s turn. When the clock reaches midnight, something bad happens: A monster appears and is added to a room with an open slot, or a doom token is added to the Ancient One’s doom track, which, when filled, means the big guy wakes up (and he is pissed). There can be additional effects at midnight based on what room cards are on the table and what Ancient One is in play, but the bottom line is that none of these things are good.

Each investigator has a special skill, from the ability to reroll some or all dice to the ability to complete multiple tasks on one dice roll, the most useful one I’ve found in the game. Investigators can also acquire different item cards – Common Items, most of which allow the player to add a special yellow die to the green ones; Special Items, most of which give you a red die to roll; Spells, most of which allow you to store one or two of your rolled dice to retain a specific result for the next roll; Clues, which allow you to reroll any or all of your dice without having to surrender one first; and Allies, helpful assistants that might give you an extra skill or roll. Other cards may allow you to defeat a monster without a roll, regain a Stamina or Sanity point, or open up special rooms from the Other world, which tend to offer better rewards and smaller penalties.

Investigators work as a team to accumulate the number of Elder Signs required to defeat the Ancient One, but there’s very little in-game collaboration. The bulk of the teamwork involves figuring out which investigator is best equipped to tackle each room – the investigator who’s immune to Sanity and Stamina penalties within tasks is the ideal candidate to go after a room with several of those required to finish it, for example. Using Amanda Sharpe, the investigator who can complete two or more tasks on one roll, might be a waste on a card with only one task.

The other key decision is which rooms to try to solve before the next time the clock strikes midnight. Rooms that return one or more Elder Signs are always valuable, but a few room cards allow the investigator to remove a Doom token from the Doom track if they’re completed. Some rooms have negative effects at midnight, like adding more doom tokens or deducting one Sanity point from every investigator, so taking them out quickly is key to extending your time to complete the game. Other rooms and monsters “lock” dice so they’re unusuable until the room is completed or the monster is slain. (If you kill a monster but then don’t complete the room in which he was hanging out, the monster is still dead and you still get the benefits of dispatching him.)

I’ve found value in tackling rooms that open Other rooms when solved, because of the latter category’s more favorable risk/reward ratio. The game also includes the Entrance, a sort of shop where players can return Trophy points, acquired by completing rooms or defeating monsters, for additional clues, cards, or even Elder Signs, although I’ve found I only make use of the Entrance to return Trophies for healing or to buy Elder Signs.

Ultimately, however, this is a luck-based game where you are working to manage your luck by mitigating its effects. A basic understanding of probability helps, of course, but in general it’s best to throw everything you’ve got into each room’s set of tasks because of the high cost of failure and the fact that every item or trick you use for rolls reduces your dependence on random chance. It’s the kind of game that can have you muttering that the dice are loaded after ten straight dice don’t give you the one skull (“peril” … seriously, the terminology here is stupid) image you needed, so accepting that you’ll have outlier rolls that make your can’t-miss strategy miss is part of the fun. It’s a solid mid-weight game, good as a cooperative game that has more individual decision-making than Pandemic, but you have to be able to live with Elder Sign’s heavy reliance on dice to like it.

There is a modified app version of Elder Sign sold as Elder Sign: Omens for the iPad and iPhone. I played at least a dozen games without a single crash, and the graphics are very strong and clear, drawn directly from the physical game. The interface is clumsy, unfortunately, and I had a few instances where I clicked on something, expecting more information, only to find I’d made an irrevocable choice – a dialog making sure that I wanted to give up on a room before finishing would be a good addition. It’s also too many clicks to get information on rooms or what each investigator is holding, and even if you disable the videos there’s too much nonsense in between each investigator’s turn for my tastes. The app differs in a few small ways from the board game – I don’t think there are Ally cards at all, and once the big foozle wakes up the game is over. The base app costs $6.99 and includes four Ancient Ones to fight; three more are available as in-app purchases for $2.99 each, each of which also adds some investigator options. It’s worth the seven bucks to try it out before buying the physical game, although compared to other boardgame apps in the $6-10 price range you get less bang for your buck.

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→ November 7, 2013
→ By

Top Chef, S11E06.

The offseason buyer’s guides are rolling along now, with middle infielders going up this morning and starting pitchers going up yesterday. Outfielders go up on Friday. Also, the new Behind the Dish podcast is up, with interviews with Scott Boras and Buster Olney, talking free agency. The show is going on hiatus until early December, but we’ll do at least one show a month over the winter.

To New Orleans…

The waterworks are really picking up now, so you know the sleep deprivation is starting to kick in, even though we’re not even halfway home.

* Right after last episode’s elimination, we see Nina calling Michael a “dick” and a “douche.” She seems really broken up that he’s gone. I’m surprised she didn’t take his chair by the fire, too.

* John Besh comes in and the ladies swoon. Padma introduces him as the “lovely” John Besh. Steph: “Good hair, great restaurants, James Beard awards … I’m intimidated.” Huh? Great hair? He’s got that dead floppy thing over his forehead. It looks like his barber forgot to finish the job.

* The quickfire involves an overnight trip so the show can plug the Toyota RAV4. I have owned three Toyotas in the past and don’t plan to buy one again. The alternators died on all three, all earlier than they should have, and the cars are too expensive for that to be acceptable.

* They end up on this gorgeous farm that Besh says services 50 top restaurants in New Orleans, including his eight. The key ingredient here is Creole tomatoes, which only grow in that part of the country. They have a thin skin and high acidity, but are also meatier with less of the mucilaginous goop in the center that chefs often scoop or mill out. For the Quickfire, the chefs have 20 minutes to make a dish that highlights it, with the winner getting immunity.

* Brian says he has the “great beginning of a conceptualized idea.” Heavy stuff, man.

* Travis is wilting in the heat, and says he knows he’s not making the tomato the star of the dish. How does that happen? Was he thinking that in real time and went ahead with the dish anyway? Have these people never watched the show before?

* Steph says she draws a blank when trying to come up with a dish, and eventually decides to do a basic tomato/watermelon salad with feta and avocado. That’s so generic she has no shot to win, and her constant psychouts are such a huge contrast to Kristen’s Zen approach from last season. I can’t see Steph getting much farther at this rate even though she seems to be a pretty talented cook.

* Bene supremes his tomato, which I’ve never seen before. Also seems like a great way to sever your thumb, if you were looking for a more efficient method.

* Nina knows how to properly chill something: In a larger bowl full of ice. Not by dumping ice into your soup or broth. I learned that from Good Eats about ten years ago. It’s not. That. Hard.

* The bottom three: Patty’s roasted and marinated tomatoes are just a mess, which she blamed on the heat; Steph’s was too simple; and Travis’ steak dish didn’t elevate the tomato and the steak was a little underdone.

* Top three: Nina’s chilled soup had deep flavor and was actually chilled; Carlos’ poached tomato was elevated by the salad on top of red onions, cilantro, basil, jalapeño, and flowers marinated in tomato water; Louis’ tomato-seed bouillon with marinated tomato had big flavors without killing the tomato. Nina wins again, earning immunity, for what seemed like a well-executed but not very imaginative dish.

* Elimination challenge: Cook in the La Provence kitchen for the executive chefs from Besh’ eight restaurants. Each dish must incorporate … Philadelphia cream cheese? I don’t like American cream cheese to begin with, but a generic mass-market brand? How about some local farmer’s cheese? Chefs aren’t allowed any dairy but that gunk, milk, or cream, so no butter, but they will get local produce in the kitchen. They’re divided into appetizers, entrees, and desserts, with the winner getting $10 grand.

* Also, cream cheese is gross. Keep it away from my brownies and my carrot cake or I will cut you with a santoku.

* Nicholas talks about opening his own place – it opened last night here in Philly. The menu is small but looks promising, although I’m not sure if I could bring my daughter there on one of our date nights because the menu is so narrow.

* The pantry is limited to seasonal ingredients, but then we’re treated to the chefs mauling each other to try to grab the ones they want, which doesn’t have a lot to do with cooking ability.

* Nicholas wanted to do New Orleans-style beignets but can’t find yeast in the kitchen, so he has to do a “Jersey shore” funnel cake instead. I don’t think those two doughs have much in common; funnel cake is best made with choux paste.

* Sara is trying to stuff lamb loin, but can’t get the puree out of the piping bag. I have no comment on this.

* Gail says she’s excited to see what the chefs do with the local “PRAH-duss,” rhyming it with “epiglottis.” Nothing like making up your accent as you go along.

* Travis hacks up the lamb while trying to remove the fat cap, saying the knife is “too sharp” when dullness is the typical problem when the knife goes where it shouldn’t. He’s kind of got an excuse for everything, doesn’t he? He may have been right about the central Vietnamese tomato dishes, but since then it’s been a steady stream of “it’s not my fault” lines, like he’s seven.

* To the appetizers: Patty serves a snapper crudo with cream cheese vinaigrette; Brian serves a summer squash tagiatelle over poached oysters and a sauce of emulsified cream cheese; Carlos presents poached beets, pickled carrots, and a peach habanero (no “ñ,” thank you) cream cheese sauce; Nina offers crispy zucchini blossoms stuffed with eggplant-cream cheese purée. Besh loves Carlos’ depth of flavor and complexity. Patty’s is too simple and didn’t have enough sauce. Brian’s oyster was too salty. Sara’s was their least favorite, undercooked to the point of rawness. Nina’s stayed really crispy … but is that anything more than a typical Italian dish, fried squash blossoms stuffed with a flavored soft cheese like ricotta?

* The entrees: Bene serves a roasted chicken breast filled with caramelized onions and a tarragon cream cheese dressing; Carrie does a vinegar-braised chicken with cream cheese sauce and chilled cucumbers; Justin has a roasted duck breast with eggplant vinaigrette, corn cream (with the cream cheese), and chanterelles; Travis does a seared lamb with Moroccan succotash and a roasted tomato-cream cheese aioli. Travis’ looks so undercooked on camera; I know lamb should be rare to medium rare, but I’m pretty sure that same sheep will be on “Homelamb” next week. Carrie’s braise gets some praise but her cukes lost their crunch in sauce. Bene’s getting killed on the eggplant having no flavor or texture. Besh loves Travis’ dish, but the lamb was not evenly cooked plate to plate, and Tom didn’t like it. Justin’s hid the cream cheese too much but it was the best overall dish. Any dish that hides its cream cheese is going to get more points from me.

* And desserts: Louis serves a graham cracker and cream cheese bar cookie with poached berries and white peach; Nicholas’ funnel cake comes with a carrot cake-spiced cream cheese mousse; Shirley serves a steamed egg custard with olive oil- and black pepper-macerated blueberries; Steph, whose cream cheese separated when she tried to beat it into her whipped cream, serves it as a cream cheese, peach, and cherry mousse with a cream cheese short dough (I assume a shortbread cookie). Steph’s is a disaster, a broken custard, prompting Tom to say “there’s a story behind this, has to be.” Nicholas showed off the cream cheese the best. Shirley’s custard is a little overdone, needed a touch of sweetness. Louis’ bar was very soggy and chewy. I couldn’t make out what he called it – a sous brique? A soggy brick? Whatever it was, the diners did not approve.

* Judges’ table: The judges are all surprised the chefs didn’t do better with the fresh produce. Nicholas’ really stood out, far and beyond the others. Nina had immunity but hers was also awesome. Again, hers may have been the best executed, but the history of this show has been one of rewarding ambition and creativity. Gail liked Justin’s duck, and Tom agrees that it was by far the best entree. Travis didn’t cook the vegetables properly and made “raggedy cuts,” to which he says that he “wanted it that way.” Sure you did, Trav. Tom says Travis’ and Bene’s were bad family meal dishes. Sara’s lacked a balance of flavors, but more importantly, the lamb was raw. Steph’s seemed like something went wrong and she had to throw something together at last second, which is exactly what happened. I thought at this point she was gone like a broken custard.

* Top three: Nina, Nicholas, and Justin, which could easily be a final top-three preview. Nina’s eggplant cream cheese filling was “so silky smooth.” Nicholas says he saw peaches and carrots first, and had done desserts at his last restaurant because they didn’t have a dedicated pastry chef. Gail says Justin’s dish was “so composed and thoughtful.”

* And the winner is … Nina? What? Did they whack us with editing? Everything pointed to Nicholas winning, and his dish was more out of the box than Nina’s – as was Justin’s, for that matter. She keeps winning, but isn’t it always for immaculate execution rather than for her concept or vision?

* Bottom: Bene, Sara, and Travis. Steph and Louis have to be relieved at this point. Sara said she thought her concept was good, but concedes her execution was lousy start to finish, especially around time management. Bene admits he put a lid on the steaming vegetables and ended up discoloring them while also robbing them of flavor. Is that about the lid, or about steaming them too long? Serious question there as I usually lid anything I’m steaming but keep the process short and move fast when my timer goes off. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. Travis’ plate was sloppy and the judges are all over him for the vegetables. He doesn’t want to hear it. There’s a “talk to the hand, Tom” moment coming soon.

* So, Sara’s lamb was blue. Travis’ vegetables were “miserable.” Padma can’t even remember what he did and says it was a Travis-ty. I probably can’t criticize after my Renteria joke yesterday. Bene served “cafeteria” food. His chicken was kind of dried out. Tom says to Sara, “I don’t know what’s going on in your head.” I don’t know what’s going on on her head.

* Bene is eliminated. They could have sent any of these three or Steph home from what we saw after editing.

* Top three: Carrie, Nina, Nicholas, followed by Shirley and Justin. Steph can’t get out of her own way. Nicholas comes down with strep in the next episode, though, so we’ll see what that means for him. I’d had Bene at the bottom for a while now; with him finally gone, my new bottom three is Patty, Louis, and Travis.

* LCK: Frozen/canned vegetables. Janine’s scallop with corn/pea puree and crispy pancetta beats Bene’s swordfish two ways with asparagus/pea puree and browned artichoke. Tom admits he uses frozen vegetables at home, and Janine picks the two vegetables I nearly always have in my freezer. Corn freezes beautifully and fresh peas are in season such a short time that using frozen peas is nearly always the better option. (When you do get fresh English peas in their pods, though, grab them. You’ll be amazed how sweet and vibrant they taste.) The sear on Janine’s scallops looked incredible. High heat, lots of fat, wide pan, move fast. It sounds easy, but apparently it’s not.

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→ November 5, 2013
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Tuesday links.

  • This year’s ranking of the top 50 free agents is now online for Insiders. We’ve flagged players who received Qualifying Offers, and in most comments I try to give a rough idea of what I’d be willing to pay each player. There’s a full explanation in the intro.
  • I also held a Tuesday Klawchat today. There will not be a Thursday chat, but Behind the Dish will come out that day.
  • I’ll be doing some freelance game reviews for Paste magazine, and my first piece, a column on the market shift toward tablet boardgame apps, went up today.
  • I know several of you were looking for my review of Arcade Fire’s Reflektor today – it went up here on the dish yesterday.
  • Two singles that hit my playlist in October but didn’t make yesterday’s piece: “Let Go” by RAC featuring Kele (of Bloc Party) and MNDR, the best dance song I’ve heard in 2013; and “Stay Young” by Okkervil River, a fun jangle-pop track from the indie-rock stalwarts who just had their first top-ten album in the U.S.

    [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/116010883″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

    [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/106176078″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]
  • Finally, this Sesame Street parody of “Homeland” is just brilliant. It first aired on the Thursday episode that subtly paid tribute to Jerry Nelson, the original Muppeteer behind (or under) Fat Blue, Herry Monster, Sherlock Hemlock, Mumford … and Count von Count. Nelson passed away in August of 2012, and the opening tribute was sweet, but it was “Homelamb” that ended up stealing the show.
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→ November 4, 2013
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Arcade Fire’s Reflektor.

Arcade Fire’s last album, the 2010 Grammy-winning The Suburbs, remains one of the best albums I’ve ever heard, a cohesive collection of musically strong songs that offers a profound exploration of a serious theme without sacrificing the hooks and melodies that make a record commercially viable. The band took over three years to release its follow-up, the double album Reflektor, released on October 29th, working with producer James Murphy, better known as LCD Soundsystem. (No word on whether the furniture is still in the garage.) The resulting opus is ambitious and expansive, freewheeling where The Suburbs was tight, yet still carrying musical motifs across multiple tracks. It’s also frequently repetitive, often pretentious, and overall shockingly boring.

While the first disc begins with the hit disco-inflected single “Reflektor,” the best track on either half of the album, Arcade Fire immediately downshifts into slower-tempo material, as they did early on The Suburbs, but this time around they struggle to recapture any of the sense of urgency established in the opener. “Flashbulb Eyes” begins with the embarrassing couplet “What if the camera really do/take your soul?” (Is he mocking the speech of Africans who do or did once believe that about photography?), with a backing track with hints of Afro-Caribbean rhythms that move out front for “Here Comes the Night Time,” with cringeworthy steel drums that sound more like a parody of Carnival music. (Win Butler has said that the 1959 film Black Orpheus, which takes that Greek character’s myth and adapts it to a modern setting in Brazil during Carnival, was a major inspiration for this album.) By the time the album’s pace begins to pick back up with the garage-rocker “Normal Person,” over 15 minutes have passed since the opener and all of that energy has long dissipated.

Track length is a major problem here, as it was in Murphy’s solo work with LCD Soundsystem. No single track on The Suburbs ran past 5:25, yet nine of Reflektor‘s thirteen tracks exceed that length – and the two shortest tracks are throwaway interstitials rather than fully realized songs. An artist can succeed even with songs in the six to eight-minute range, but the songs have to be more complex, with different passages or movements to sustain the listener; this, for me, was always LCD Soundsystem’s major flaw, as an eight-bar drum-and-bass loop repeated for seven minutes and 27 seconds is just going to make me change the station before I even reach the halfway point. Here Arcade Fire try just that, extending ideas that would have worked well inside of four minutes into six-minute frameworks they can’t fill. “Porno” is a monstrosity, a lyrical and musical excrescence that should have been deleted from the studio’s hard drive, but “We Exist,” “Awful Sound,” and “Afterlife” all would have worked better in a shorter format, although none has the hook to rank among the album’s stronger tracks.

And there are strong tracks here, scattered throughout the album. “Normal Person” brings to mind influences from Pavement to Wire, with a cheerfully dissonant guitar riff in the chorus that comes crashing in like an early stem engine. “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” is the best of the rambling tracks on disc two, with its Savages-like guitar line and something resembling a tempo change after the midpoint. “You Already Know” is reminiscent of the highs on The Suburbs and even Funeral with a revival chorus, although the peculiar pronunciation of the “d” in “already” – in phonetics terms, taking it from voiced to voiceless – was an unnecessary distraction.

Those distractions are the other fatal flaw in Reflektor, and why the dangerous word “pretentious” applies here, even though its stain can be difficult for any artist to remove. Using film or literary references is laudable, but calling such attention to them by using subtitles (in and of itself a bit pretentious) like “(Hey Orpheus)” and “(Oh Eurydice)” is too clever by half, and risks alienating listeners who don’t get the allusions and are now aware that they didn’t get them. Singer Régine Chassagne has always been one of the band’s biggest weaknesses – while she’s a talented musician and songwriter, her voice is thin and hollow – and having her sing in her native French on an album that is almost entirely in English seems pointless. It makes the lyrics less clear to the vast majority of listeners who don’t speak French, and the French lines are often shoehorned into the existing meter, like her “Jeanne d’Arc, oh” in the rollicking “Joan of Arc,” which I imagine will have a few non-Francophones wondering who “Jean Dachau” is. French is a beautiful language, but inserting it into an English song is almost automatically pretentious*, and it only detracts from Reflektor when Arcade Fire resorts to it.

* Never more true than in Electric Light Orchestra’s “Hold On Tight,” one of the worst songs ever recorded. Not only did they use French and overpronounce their guttural rhotics, but the French verse is just a bad translation of the English verse, so they were lazy as well.

The Suburbs was such a rousing success, even earning the most unlikely Album of the Year in Grammy history, that it raised expectations for Reflektor to a level that I concede may have been unfair. This would be a strong album for many artists, but given what Arcade Fire has shown itself capable of, Reflektor sounds like it’s caught between an ambition unachieved and a band that needed an editor but instead found an enabler. A good idea over four minutes may not play as well over six, and there are ideas on Reflektor that probably should have been cut entirely. The highlights here are among Arcade Fire’s best – the title track, “Normal Person,” “Joan of Arc,” and “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” – but there’s too much filler around them, so much that the album never establishes a consistent pace or feel and it is reduced to a collection of singles that fall short of whatever lofty aspirations the band may have had for the record.

—

When The Night, the debut album from South African-born musician Jean-Philip Grobler, who performs under the name St. Lucia, came across my desk in early October. Grobler’s music yearns back for the synth-pop heyday of the 1980s, an era before his birth, but marries it to tropical beats and rhythms and that avoid turning it into an anachronistic stumble down memory lane.

Grobler appears to bear no shame for his love of sunny, accessible pop music, and he has crafted a number of indelible hooks to express that affection for a style of music that, while current when I was a preteen, borders on the twee at this point. When the Night threatens to tumble off the cliff into saccharine nonsense at many points, but that incorporation of new backing lines, like the synthesized Caribbean pipes behind the single “Elevate,” means the songs are fresh if not exactly weighty. When St. Lucia turns up the guitars, as on the opener “The Night Comes Again,” or keeps the synths down in the mix so they don’t take over a track, like in the pulsating “All Eyes on You,” we’re at least getting something new even if the songs remain a little too sweet.

The album’s standout track, however, is “September,” where Grobler pushes out the walls around the rest of the album, creating layers of sound to produce an immersive and musically darker song that repeatedly runs you toward the edge of the crevasse before pulling you back to safety. Synth-heavy music like this always runs the risk of getting a little too “Jizz in My Pants,” but the varied percussion lines and the (presumably synthesized) horns give it just enough of a contemporary note to escape the Eurotrash bin. If Grobler can extend this darker ambient feel to the rest of his songs, even a poppier gem like “Elevate,” he’ll really be on to something.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/100513059″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/60540731″ params=”auto_play=false&player_type=tiny&font=Arial&color=000000″ width=” 100%” height=”18″ iframe=”false” /]

–

If you’re into extreme metal at all – and I can hardly blame you if you’re not – September saw the return of genre pioneers Carcass. Among the earliest practicioners of grindcore, once touring with grindcore founders Napalm Death along with Bolt Thrower and the awful American act Morbid Angel, Carcass evolved into the first true melodic death metal band, peaking with the greatest extreme metal album of all time, 1994’s Heartwork. Their new disc, Surgical Steel, their first since 1996, is close to a return to a form, remarkable for a band that’s been apart for so long, so while it doesn’t bring much new to the table, it’s a welcome addition to the Carcass canon and also shows how little the subgenre has advanced during their hiatus.

While singer Jeff Walker appears to shred his vocal cords on every track, Carcass’ music is intricate and very tightly rendered, a fusion of the classic sounds of Iron Maiden or Judas Priest with the increased speed of thrash and death metal acts like Slayer, Death, or Exodus. “Cadaver Pounch Conveyor System” has the album’s strongest riff, a dual-guitar line of incredible precision, followed by machine-gun riffing under the song’s bridge. You can actually understand most of the words, too, which is a good thing, as Walker hides extremely intelligent and literate musings behind mock-gory titles that allude to the band’s earlier albums, where their lyrics were in fact anatomically accurate descriptions of mutilation and evisceration. (It’s not the only allusion to early Carcass on the album; the cover art itself is a nod to their early EP Tools of the Trade, but cleaned up this time, just as the band seems to be.)

The slowed tempo on “A Congealed Clot of Blood” – itself a condemnation of jihadist terrorism – leads to a repetition of the chorus’ lyrics but over another rapid-fire guitar line, while “Granulating Dark Satanic Mills” is just a faster New Wave of British Heavy Metal track with growled vocals and a William Blake reference. Carcass do get a little silly at times, with the insanely fast “Captive Bolt Pistol” (Anton Chigurh’s weapon of choice), or the track “Noncompliance to ASTM F 899-12 Standard,” with a title referring to the international standard for the chemical requirements for stainless steel used in surgical instruments but lyrics that mock the prosy decline of the genre, which Walker derides as “dearth metal.”

The album even closes with an eight-minute mini-suite, “Mount of Execution,” almost all at normal speeds, relying on deep bass lines and staccato picking to create that sense of heaviness. This ain’t for everyone, but if you like modern melodeth acts like Children of Bodom, Wintersun, or Amon Amarth, it’s worth checking out.

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→ November 1, 2013
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Top Chef, S11E05.

Yesterday’s Klawchat transcript is up. Top 50 free agents ranking goes up Tuesday.

Before the cooking starts, we get a little up close and personal with Travis, who is in a deep blue funk his brush with elimination on a Vietnamese food challenge because his boyfriend is Vietnamese. We find out that Travis’ mom knows he’s gay, but his dad doesn’t, and he’ll have to tell his father before the show airs. It’s 2013. If your dad can’t handle that you’re gay, that is 100% his problem. Tell him without remorse or apology and move on with your life.

* Quickfire: The stupid Reynolds wrap challenge again. This time, they wrapped the cookware and tools as well as the ingredients. I hope they recycled all that wasted aluminum since God ain’t makin’ any more of it.

* The second twist is that the chefs don’t get to shop for ingredients; they’re divided into two teams and must use all the ingredients chosen by Padma’s and Gail’s moms. Was anyone else shocked to see that Padma’s mom is little? The winning team gets ten grand. Shirley, who appears to have no filter between her brain and her mouth, says it would “suck really bad” if her mom was doing the shopping for this challenge because she’s too slow. In a related story, Shirley is awesome.

* Not factored into the thirty minutes: All the time the chefs have to waste unwrapping the ingredients and hardware. So it’s more like a 20-25 minute challenge.

* Carrie is trying to make a sabayon without a whisk. I can’t even think of a good alternative or makeshift whisk; even if you could fashion one out of foil, it would be too malleable to hold its shape. She probably woke up with enormous biceps on her right arm the next morning. (Sabayon, similar to the Italian dessert zabaglione, is made by whisking egg yolks, often over barely simmering water, until they foam up to the ribbon stage. Sabayon is a savory French sauce, while zabaglione is typically flavored with sugar and the sweet fortified wine Marsala dolce. In the technical jargon of the industry, it is good shit.)

* The results were actually kind of boring, which I think is the result of the chefs having virtually no input into their ingredients other than divvying up the spoils within their team. Team Simmons makes a lamb with a sharp cheesy fonduta, red snapper en papillote, and a compressed burrata with pickled apples, avocadoes, and a balsamic sabayon. Team Lakshmi makes clams poached in fish sauce and served with coconut cream, snapper and branzino en papillote with a mustard vinaigrette, and a kitchen-sink soup with beans, carrots, chilies, fried okra, and a cherry/strawberry chutney.

* Justin, on team Simmons, is shown saying he thinks they have it “in the bag,” so of course team Lakshmi wins. If Top Chef never does a Reynolds wrap challenge again, it would be fine with me.

* Elimination challenge: Guest judge and “superfan” Lea Michele is here. Don’t bother to dress up, Lea. The chefs must split into teams of two and cater a costume party for her. She’s a vegetarian, often vegan but loves cheese (so, not vegan, then). She’s not huge on dessert, likes pasta, pizza, and fried foods, and doesn’t like beets. Nina rolls her eyes so hard at the vegan talk she detaches a retina. “I think that God put animals on this earth to eat.” Well, if He didn’t, it was an awfully convenient coincidence for us.

* Michael says he dressed up as a pregant nun once and “got laid.” I couldn’t hate a human being more than I hated him the moment those words left his mouth. It’s like he felt like we needed to fill the show’s douchebag quote with Jason gone.

* Justin is making beet pasta, even though Lea hates beets. Two thoughts: Does she hate beets, or just bad beets? My wife claims she hates beets, but what she really hates is canned beets or overcooked beets. Fresh roasted beets with goat cheese, or with avocado slices and a citrus vinaigrette? Come on. You can’t beet that.

* We have three arancini (balls of risotto rolled in bread crumbs and fried) dishes going, so you know whoever makes the worst of the trio will be on the bottom – unless you’ve never seen the show before, which clearly some of these chefs haven’t, since risotto is one of the great Top Chef contestant killers.

* Meanwhile, Nick, who has seen the show before, changes his gnocchi to cannoli when he sees Nina also doing gnocchi. This little bit of strategy just lost Mike Matheny.

* Have they always had a wood fired oven in the kitchen? If that’s a permanent fixture, we need some two-day bread-baking challenges.

* Brian and Bene are doing “spooky spa cuisine,” making two salads, even though Lea wants luxurious, “party in your mouth” food. I don’t even understand how Bene is still here at this point. He’s been overmatched nearly every week. And what would a spooky spa entail? Zombie masseurs?

* Nina and Michael spar over who gets to use which cooler. Michael calls her sweetheart and boo-boo and if I were Nina I’d probably clock him with a cast-iron skillet Rapunzel-style.

* Hugh is Prince Charming. Tom Orville is apparently supposed to be Jay Gatsby but really looks like Orville Redenbacher. Padma is a witch doctor, I think. No one came in a food-related costume? Hugh as Julia Child would have been pretty good.

* The dishes: Carrie and Steph serve a charred chicory puree with black garlic mushrooms, and a leek ash “grave” with cauliflower and cheese fonduta. I think we heard the least about this team’s dishes of anyone and I don’t really know if it was good or just okay.

* Patty and Nick went for autumn colors but skipped the spooky bit, with Nick’s butternut squash cannoli with ricotta salata and black garlic reduction (so at least he had the right colors) and Patty’s lemon arancini with smoked mozzarella.

* Brian and Bene’s spastic spa items are a crispy quinoa salad with mushroom espuma and a tomato salad with kale something and I stopped paying attention there. It’s a tomato salad. You barely even have to turn a burner on.

* Nina and Michael serve her ricotta gnocchetti with kale pesto and his yellow arancini with saffron, the latter designed to look a little like eyeballs. His arancini get immediate negative reactions from Lea (who is quite specific with many of her comments) and Tom.

* Travis and Carlos serve Travis’ vegetable “ceviche” with frozen lime segments, creating a little fake-smoke over the dish when he crumbles them on top, and Carlos’ goat cheese fondue with fried zucchini and a lot of chipotles.

* Louis and Shirley serve his “severed thumb,” made of braised quinoa with onions wrapped in phyllo dough, and her “worm salad,” hand cut noodles with daikon radish. They at least win for putting the most thought into the Halloween aspect of the party (which, by the way, was probably filmed in August or so).

* Justin and Sara serve his “blood” pasta with beets and fire roasted green tomatoes and Sara’s “evil eye” arancini with Moroccan tomato chutney. Sara defends her arancini by pointing out that she used non-traditional flavors. Lea moderately approves of Justin’s pasta. I’m guessing they tasted as much like beets as spinach pasta tastes like spinach, which is to say not at all.

* The judging: Patti and Nick were among the best teams, particularly Nick’s dish for incorporating Halloween colors. Sara and Justin fared well for the the flavors of his pasta. Carlos and Travis went spicy and scored highly with Lea and Padma; Travis’ ceviche was good as was Carlos’ fondue, which Tom says is a tricky dish to keep smooth and avoid having it thicken up.

* Nina’s gnocchetti were great, but Michael’s arancini weren’t, a conflict that was pretty much set up from the start of the show. (And is it really a coincidence that those two were paired up, when it’s the only known conflict among two chefs still on the program?) Brian and Bene’s entire plan is called into question – why serve two salads, and why serve salads at all when Lea wanted something more rich or decadent?

* A throwaway thought: When Lea said she’s not big on dessert, that could also mean she’s not big on sweet – but dessert doesn’t have to be sweet, or it can bring a better balance of sweet-salty-sour. I’ve had salted caramel desserts, and black pepper ice cream, to name just two. I know Italian cuisine includes many desserts involving cheese, which might have hit the mark. Dessert can be about texture or flavor contrast rather than just sugar. No one was willing to take that risk.

* Top two teams are Carlos/Travis and Nick/Patty. Padma asks Patty what it’s like to “be on the other side,” a not-subtle reminder that, hey, Patty, you’ve kind of been on the bottom a lot! Carlos and Travis are the joint winners.

* The bottom, unsurprisingly, includes Michael and Nina plus Brian and Bene.

* Travis, back in the stew room, argues that the judges can’t send home someone (Nina) after she made a great dish. He seems to forget that the judges can do whatever they want, even if we don’t think it’s fair. They sent Kristen home in season 10 when no one thought it was fair. They can and will do what they choose. We can’t do much but blog about it.

* Brian and Bene did the opposite of what Lea wanted and showed no ambition, per Tom. Michael’s arancini didn’t pack a wallop in flavor, they were too dry, and the sauce was too sweet. Padma lights into Nina for not tasting his food when they were supposed to be a team. I get that… but I don’t. She can’t tell him to make it better, or differently, if he’s not listening to her (or constantly dismissing her by calling her “sweet cheeks” or whatever). So, should she taste it, try to correct him, and then let him hang himself, just so she has a clear conscience at judges’ table?

* Nina’s dish was great. Michael’s had a lot of problems. Infantile spookiness thing with the stick through the black olive eye. (Hugh) salad boys whiffed. Watery tomato salad underseasoned and overdressed, neither was wow.

* Tom, to Bene: “We’ve seen tomato salad over and over again you’re not going to win anything with that.” I can’t accurately capture the breadth of the disdain in his delivery of that line. If he could have ended it with “… dumbass” he would have.

* Michael’s out. Good riddance to chauvinistic rubbish. Plus he was never on top of any challenges.

* LCK: Make a risotto. At least they get 40 minutes instead of 30, since risotto in 30 would be impossible, I think. Janine flies through the kitchen, gets what she needs, and makes a mixed mushroom risotto with a stock made from soaking dried porcini in chicken stock to rehydrate them and add flavor to the stock. Michael shows zero urgency in the pantry, and his dilatory style bites him when he ends up furiously boiling the risotto to cook it in time, which he claims is how he learned to make it (coughbullshitcough). He also said he couldn’t find any butter in the fridge, even though Janine says there was plenty in there. He’s an excuse-maker as well as a pig, which almost makes it a shame that he’s gone because we could use a villain on the show. Or not. Janine wins in a rout.

* Top three: Carrie, Shirley, Nina, followed by Justin, Stephanie, and Sara. Bottom three is getting more interesting; Bene is still clearly the worst for me, but Patty and Louis both had good showings this week. I’ll stick with those three at the bottom, as none of the other chefs in the middle tier took a step back other than the previously-solid Brian.

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→ October 31, 2013
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The Land that Never Was.

Klawchat today at 1 pm EDT. I’ll have a Top Chef recap up late tonight or early Friday morning.

Poyais was a small, independent principality (later republic) on the Mosquito Coast of Central America, protected by mountains from invasion by neighboring Spanish territories, blessed with abundant natural resources, and, according to its Cazique Gregor Macgregor, desperate for English colonists to come populate it. Macgregor issued bonds on behalf of the Poyais government on London exchanges, and sold plots of land in Poyais to eager would-be settlers from all economic strata, desperate blue-collar workers to professional men promised positions of authority in the Poyais government. He eventually attracted 240 men, women, and children and loading them on two ships bound across the Atlantic, while he remained in England to float more debentures and recruit further colonists.

If you’ve never heard of Poyais – I hadn’t, in any context – that’s because it was Macgregor’s fabrication, all part of an elaborate fraud he used to pilfer money from investors and settlers alike. David Sinclair’s The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor Macgregor And The Most Audacious Fraud In History covers this long-forgotten scam, which claimed the lives of 180 of those 240 settlers, yet for which Macgregor only served a few months in jail, eventually dying in exile in Caracas in 1845, still a free man.

Sinclair’s retelling is fairly straightforward, taking readers back through Macgregor’s history as a soldier of fortune with ambitions beyond his abilities and a talent for lying through his teeth when it suited his purposes (such as taking credit for battles or adventures in which he hadn’t fought). He depicts Macgregor as a silver-tongued confidence man taking advantage of a time when Central and South America were all the rage among English investors and reporters, an environment that was ripe for a polished scam artist who had just enough legitimacy in his credentials to pull it off. The people Macgregor fooled weren’t all rubes or uneducated citizens – many were successful professional men who bought Macgregor’s promises of government appointments in European-style cities in Poyais that just needed experienced leaders to fill out its government.

Knowing nothing about the Poyais scheme beyond what I read in Sinclair’s book, I was more struck by another aspect of Macgregor’s temporary success: He told people what they wanted to hear. The fantasy he created put an apparent physical reality to the aspirations of the middle-class men he recruited to lead the colony, and to the desperate dreams of poorer workers in search of greater economic opportunity than they found in the heavily populated, stagnating England. A century after the disastrous Darien scheme, a failed attempt to establish a Scottish colony on the northeast coast of what is now Panama, nearly bankrupted the nation’s landowners and led to their 1707 union with England, the Scots fell for a fabrication that catered to their disillusion over their last failure but promised little risk because the colony had already been established. Macgregor wrote his pamphlets in a bombastic style, sometimes under assumed names, to improve their appeal, but the audience had to be willing to receive it. Whether he was just fortunate in his timing or truly understood that he was selling something his listeners or readers wanted to buy, it was a critical element in the success of the scam.

Macgregor was eventually found out, but paid very little penalty for it, so Sinclair’s story lacks the sort of natural climax and resolution you’d expect or want in a story of a terrible fraud that cost not just money but innocent lives, including those of children. The reactions of the survivors are shocking, far more interesting than the limited time we see of Macgregor facing legal charges in France, but robs Sinclair a little of the strength of a traditional narrative – not that there’s much he could have done to improve that. Instead, the book’s greatest strength comes in its midsection, where we follow Macgregor around as he sells his nonsense and then read about the plight of the colonists when they get to Poyais and find nothing there. That alone makes it well worth a read, even if its story arc isn’t what we typically expect (unfairly, perhaps) from narrative non-fiction.

Next up: I’m halfway through Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, which is going far better than I expected given what little I’ve previously read of James’ work.

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→ October 30, 2013
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Middlemarch.

This week’s Behind the Dish podcast reunited me with my old Baseball Today co-host Eric Karabell. And you all thought I died when I went over that waterfall with Bias Cat, didn’t you?

George Eliot’s Middlemarch appears on the Bloomsbury 100 and ranks 9th on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100, but after my intense dislike of her novel Mill on the Floss*, I expected a similarly arduous read, with slow prose and distant, even odious characters. Middlemarch feels like the work of a different author, however, less bleak and moralistic, with stronger, better-rounded characters (and a few jerks), and every bit as pointed a perspective on the restrictive nature of Victorian society, especially regarding the rights of women.

* Not to be confused with Millon de Floss, one of the great biographer-stalkers of his time.

Middlemarch weaves several related stories together, all centered in the fictional English town of the title, revolving around idealistic young characters whose desires go beyond the traditional spouse-seeking of English literature prior to the 1860s. It begins with Dorothea Brooke, destined to be the semi-tragic heroine of the novel’s first major plot, as she rejects a suitor nearer her age and emotional temperament to marry the dour, chauvinistic theologian Edward Casaubon, a blowhard who is the first of the novel’s many comic side characters. Dorothea’s other suitor, Sir James Chettam, marries Dorothea’s sister in what becomes a far happier marriage. Edward refuses to induct Dorothea into his intellectual life, perhaps because it is nearly bankrupt, leaving her bored and unhappy until his early death, at which point an absurd codicil to his will forbids her to take up with Edward’s distant cousin, Will Ladislaw, who is a far better emotional match for Dorothea.

Middlemarch is also home to the Vincy siblings, Rosamund and Fred, a financially irresponsible pair who have very different aims in romance: Fred wants to marry Mary Garth, with whom he’s been in love for years, while Rosamund sinks her claws into the young doctor Tertius Lydgate, because she sees him as a path to upward mobility. Fred’s ability to marry is hampered by his dissolution, which leads him to bankrupt himself and nearly do the same to Mary’s father, while Rosamund manipulates the idealistic Lydgate, who doesn’t plan on marrying because it would interfere with his professional endeavors, into a betrothal he didn’t desire.

Eliot takes the usual themes of marriage and inheritance as the starting point for deeper explorations of character and societal mores than contemporary novels typically explored, helping usher in an era of fiction where independent women were increasingly found as central characters and where their lower standing in a male-dominated culture was fodder for entire novels. Dorothea begins as a high-minded, emotionally immature woman who reaches for some ill-defined goal in marrying the old pedant Casaubon, only to realize she’s grasped at a cloud and lost her independence without any intellectual gain. Fred has to be shamed into a life of industry and diligence, in a career that seemed beneath him, to have any chance to marry the woman he loves. Lydgate’s match with Rosamund turns out to be disastrous, as her extravagance nearly bankrupts him, his researches grind to a halt, and he’s caught up in a scandal involving the local squire Bulstrode, who makes ill use of the doctor to try to hide his own mistakes. While some characters face consequences for their own sins, others find their lives constrained by the need to keep up appearances, or by the effects of gossip about untoward appearances. Even in the epilogue, Eliot grants most of her characters middling outcomes, where financial success and happiness are mutually exclusive; Dorothea may at least fare the best, as she can find happiness even in an imperfect situation, telling Ladislaw that “if we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for,” marking why she stands above the rest as the novel’s real protagonist and most empathetic character.

As much as Dorothea stands at Middlemarch‘s moral center, Lydgate struck me as the most fascinating character because of the small window he provides into Eliot’s own views on the rise of science and research in English society and culture. Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch intending to work as a doctor to fund his researches, bringing ideas for reform and for greater service to those unable to afford proper medical care to a small town with decidedly staid ideas on what a doctor should do and say. The obstacles he encounters from the town’s aged, established medics slow his practice significantly, even when he has some success in treating difficult cases, but it is the marriage to the dim-witted, materialistic Rosamund that destroys his intellectual curiosity, because he can no longer devote time to research or volunteer work because he has to pay the debts she has accumulated. Coming from a male author, this might read as misogynistic, but Eliot imbues all of her characters, male and female, with strengths and defects, so even the venal Rosamund is multi-dimensional, while the reader cannot exonerate Lydgate of blame in his own downfall. (It’s also hard to accuse Eliot of anti-feminism when she has Mary say, “Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.”

Middlemarch might be the most-praised novel ever written in the English language. Virginia Woolf referred to it as “the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” A.S. Byatt used that quote in her 2007 review, saying it was possible to argue – seriously, can you get more wishy-washy? – that Middlemarch is “the greatest English novel.” Daniel Burt’s top 100 only lists two English-language novels ahead of it – the abysmal Moby Dick and the abstruse Ulysses, the latter by an author who’d abandon English entirely in his next novel, Finnegan’s Wake. Eliot’s prose is far more pleasant to read than Melville’s and easier to digest than Joyce’s, with incisive wit (as in the “husbands” comment above) or profound renditions of human emotions:

When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die – and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

Writers who craft realistic characters typically exhibit this understanding of emotion and thought, whether the feelings depicted are negative (fear of mortality) or positive. Eliot can drift from compassion to disdain – Mary, the novel’s most insightful speaker, points out that “selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything in the world,” which is undeniable – over the course of a few pages, but there is always the sense that she reveres character, even if she doesn’t always revere her specific characters. I don’t share Woolf’s and Byatt’s veneration of Middlemarch, as the Lydgate/Rosamund thread tended to meander and Rosamund was the least compelling character in the book, but it is a marvelous novel, a broad study of many brilliantly rendered characters, and a lesson in integrating multiple storylines into a single narrative.

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The Wounded and the Slain.

American author David Goodis’ work has largely been out of print since his death at age 49 in 1967, but the author of pulp novels and short stories in the noir and crime-fiction genres has seen a modest resurgence in popularity in the last decade as a few of his works have been republished. The Library of America has printed five of his novels in a single collection, including Dark Passage, which may have been the inspiration for the TV series “The Fugitive.” (A lawsuit was settled out of court after Goodis’ death.) Hard Case Crime brought The Wounded and the Slain back in 2007, part of their ongoing effort to revive those once-scorned pulp novels by introducing them to a modern audience – and I, as a fan of noir in general but a reader unfamiliar with Goodis’ work, can add my recommendation to theirs.

Wounded isn’t really a crime novel, earning its noir designation from its themes and setting rather than from its plot, even though there is a crime within the story. James Bevan is the drunk at the novel’s center, on a disastrous vacation with his wife, Cora, as their marriage threatens to dissolve in a highball glass of gin. James can’t stand to be sober, yet his self-destructive tendencies increase exponentially when he’s under the influence, which leads him to wander the slums of Kingston at night, eventually putting him in a bar where a riot breaks out and he’s drawn into the melee even though he’s too drunk to comprehend what’s happening around him. Cora shows vast patience with James, blaming herself for much of his licentiousness, but ultimately drifts into a flirtation with another guest at the posh resort where they’re staying. The novel concentrates more on James’ death spiral – and his reluctance to resist it – until Cora is forced to decide between fighting for her husband or pursuing her own happiness elsewhere.

Goodis paints one grim picture after another, both in scenery and in mood. The Kingston of this novel is filthy, poverty-stricken, drug-riddled, a den of thieves waiting to pick any errant tourist clean of all but his skin should he leave the safety of his hotel. The handful of sailors on shore leave we encounter don’t come off a whole lot better. James wanders into this world in an alcoholic stupor, trapped in a mind full of catastrophic thoughts, grappling with questions of suicide until he finds himself about to die – twice – and has to choose to live, only to see that the life he’s returning to isn’t worth that much. That these experiences prove disillusive for James underscores the stark existential nature of Goodis’ writing here, a prime example of noir without a hard-boiled detective.

Where Wounded lost me a little was the denouement, where Cora’s and James’s stories intersect in somewhat unlikely fashion, although Goodis saved himself with an ambiguous resolution that avoids tying anything up too neatly, which would have de-noired the book. I didn’t like how James ended up in that specific situation, as it seemed too far-fetched for a novel that often danced at the edge of the mundane in its realism. In James, Goodis has even created a compelling character who is miserable and whose mimesis is limited to the less palatable aspects of the human character, whose treatment of his wife should repulse us yet whose Appointment in Samarra-esque hurtle towards destruction will not let us turn away.

Many of the details about Goodis come from his entry in Wikipedia, and we know Wikipedia is never wrong.

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