→ April 14, 2012
→ By

Saturday five, 4/14/12.

I never tweeted this one while I was on the move, but I wrote a short blog post on some Boston & Texas prospects at Greenville and Hickory, led by Luke Jackson.

The links…

* Food’s Biggest Scam: The Great Kobe Beef Lie, first of three parts. That “American Kobe beef” you eat isn’t Kobe at all – and it can include just about any kind of beef the chef wants it to include.

* Serious Eats’ Food Lab looks at storing fresh mozzarella. The answer surprised me.

* Keep Food Legal’s Baylen Linnekin weighs in on California’s war on food trucks. Anti-food truck laws are nearly always about brick-and-mortar restaurants defending their turf.

* Fangraphs talks to pitcher Michael Schwimer about how he takes a more rational approach to refining his craft on the mound.

* Aziz Ansari appeared on Fresh Air, and while he’s always funny and interesting, his comments on bullying really stood out as the first time I ever feel like I heard Ansari break his comedic character.

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

Imperfect.

I assume Jim Abbott’s story is pretty well-known: Born with a malformed right hand, Abbott became a successful multi-sport high school athlete, pitched at the University of Michigan, and spent 10 years in the big leagues, pitching for the Angels, White Sox, Brewers, and Yankees, throwing a no-hitter for that last club that happens to be the only professional no-hitter I have ever attended in person. In his new memoir, Imperfect: An Improbable Life, written with Yahoo!’s Tim Brown, Abbott talks about his own personal struggles with creating an identity for himself independent of his disability, of the challenges of growing up with a visible difference, and of the opportunities his success gave him to reach and sometimes inspire children growing up with similar physical issues.

The book separates Abbott’s life and career into two separate tracks. The main track begins with Abbott’s parents meeting, dating, and finding themselves about to become teenaged parents, and then facing the reality of Abbott’s condition, yet, after an adjustment period, deciding not to let the disability become an excuse for him or for them. The sections dealing with Abbott’s childhood tell seemingly tangential anecdotes that turn out to be important in his professional career as he tries to deal with the sudden fame and just as sudden decline all within the first five or six years after college. The second track pulls Abbott’s no-hitter out of the main story and gives it its own narrative, one that I enjoyed reading because of my personal connection to that game but that only gave occasional glimpses into the mind of a pitcher as he’s throwing the game. (I’d love for any pitcher to sit down after a no-hitter – and after the ensuing celebration – and write down everything he remembers thinking or doing during that game. Abbott’s retelling here has some of that, but much of it reads like a man remembering a game he pitched almost twenty years ago, not the more precise in-the-moment recollections we’d get if it was something he’d written the day after the game occurred.)

Those two interesting stories are intertwined in an obvious and ultimately unsuccessful gimmick to try to create some parallels between them, which only serves to distract the reader from both of the narratives without adding anything to the overall story. Abbott’s no-hitter started slowly, picked up speed in the middle innings, and then reached a crescendo in the ninth inning. His career arc looked nothing like that, and ended first with a whimper, a brief comeback, and then a final great good-night. It’s awkward to read about a no-hitter in nine brief chapters separated by longer discursions dating back as much as twenty years – and it’s just as awkward to read about Abbott’s career and have the no-hitter omitted entirely. It reads to me as if the no-hitter was this book’s equivalent of Oakland’s twenty-game winning streak in the movie version of Moneyball: Someone decided that the film needed a Big Triumph, regardless of that event’s place in the greater narrative. Imperfect wouldn’t have been perfect with a more conventional structure, but it would have read better.

I also struggled with the book’s occasional lapses into purple prose; Abbott’s voice (which I’m assuming is what we’re getting for most of the first-person narratives) is clear and simple, so when he refers to a taxi as a “metered ride” or says he didn’t have the “temerity” to ask teammates why he’d been given a certain nickname, it’s like having someone crank up the volume in the middle of a song. (“Temerity” is a great word, but you can’t just drop it into a passage where it’s the two-dollar word in a paragraph of dimes.) Abbott also defines his performance primarily by his won-lost records, occasionally mentioning ERAs, which makes him a product of his time; if you’ve watched any baseball over the first ten days of this season, you already know how foolish using a pitcher’s won-lost record to measure his performance is, and the book would be stronger with anything more advanced in their stead.

Where the book really sings is in the passages about people who helped Abbott on his way up or the kids he helped once he’d gotten there. Tim Mead, the longtime PR man for the Angels, might want to get a lawyer and sue Abbott, because the book makes Mead out to be an absolutely wonderful human being. Abbott mentions the first scout to really believe in him (Don Welke, now with Texas), the teacher who taught him a trick that allowed him to tie his own shoes, the coaches and teammates who became his support network, and the late sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman, who comes through on the page exactly as I knew him from our two or three encounters in Toronto. Abbott’s recounting of his time on the Olympic team that won the gold medal in Seoul in 1988 is another highlight. And the section describing the kids and parents who would line up by the dozens across the country just to meet him so they could see that, yes, there’s someone else who looks like them, someone who made it all the way to the major leagues … well, it might get a little dusty in your living room when you get to that part.

Abbott’s early life and pro career didn’t fit the typical mold for Hollywood sports movies, but there’s plenty there for his story to stand on its own without structural gimmickry to make it seem more dramatic. I was always a Jim Abbott fan – if you liked baseball at the time and didn’t root for him, you probably weren’t human – and enjoyed reading about his experiences, but the story’s packaging took something away from what he had to say.

Next up: Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum.

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

Imagine: How Creativity Works.

Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works is a fantastic read that covers the subject of human creativity from two different but equally critical angles: The neurology of creativity, or how we can maximize our own individual creativity; and the sociology of creativity, or how managers can increase creativity in their groups or companies. The small miracle of the book is that Lehrer conveys all of this information – I wouldn’t call them answers, but there are enough ideas here to help you create a plan of action – in a way that’s largely entertaining by building almost the entire book around a series of real-world anecdotes, covering topics as wide-ranging as Shakespeare, Pixar, Innocentive, W.H. Auden, a programmer-turned-bartender named Don Lee, and Bob Dylan.

What Lehrer means by “creativity” is less about artistic creativity (although, as you can see, he uses many examples from the arts) and more about out-of-the-box thinking: Ideas that veer away from conventional wisdom and allow people (or groups) to solve previously unsolvable problems or to create works or products of enduring value. The book opens with the development of a new cleaning tool by Proctor and Gamble, created when that company decided to try to develop an improvement to the household mop. It took an outside agency to be willing to step out of the forest long enough to realize that improving the mop was an inferior solution to replacing the mop entirely – and P&G rejected that agency’s idea for a new product for a full year before finally relenting. (I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by revealing that the product, as you have likely guessed by now, was the Swiffer.) Creativity is stifled by groupthink, territorial behavior, and focus on short-term results, but it is also stifled by our own prefrontal cortices and by bad advice about the value of brainstorming. Lehrer tears each one of these obstacles down in turn and discusses in open-ended terms how we might surmount them.

Each of the book’s eight full chapters revolves around multiple real-world examples, often not obviously connected, that state the case before Lehrer states it himself, after which he’ll refer to studies by psychologists or neuroscientists on things like what happens to creativity when the prefrontal cortex is shut off. (Nothing in the book was more interesting to me than Lehrer’s explanation of the “fourth-grade slump,” referring to the age around which kids suddenly lose much of their creativity, no longer creating wild and abstract or unusual art because their prefrontal cortices have developed to the point where they feel more self-conscious about the quality of the work they produce.) He also explains why Phoenix lags behind much smaller cities in producing patents, a proxy he uses often as a measure of creativity, and why discussions with open and frank criticism produce substantially more ideas than traditional brainstorming sessions where criticism of others’ ideas, no matter how profoundly stupid they are, is forbidden.

The chapter that mentions Pixar discusses, among other factors, the benefit of proximity in idea generation. Pixar’s headquarters apparently includes just one set of restrooms, so employees from all areas of the company are effectively forced to run into each other en route (as well as in a large open area in the center of the building). I doubt I could prove this theory, but perhaps baseball front offices have, over their history, been less creative because so many critical employees don’t work out of the main office? The scouting director and player development director are just as likely to live elsewhere, so while the GM talks to those two executives regularly, even daily, the calls will be event- or agenda-driven, not the kind of casual conversation that occurs in an office setting (preferably an open one) that can spur unexpected ideas because no one is rushing to get off the phone.

One quibble is that Lehrer quotes Yo-Yo Ma referring to Julia Child dropping a roast chicken on the floor during a television show and brushing it off as if nothing had happened, yet doesn’t correct him; this incident, often-cited, never happened. Child did once flip a potato pancake out of a skillet on to the counter, joking about lacking “the courage of my convictions,” but the chicken/floor story is a myth. You don’t mess with Julia.

I’ve already recommended this book to a number of people who run departments because I think it can, or should, dramatically change how people manage their reports or companies. Lehrer argues that it’s not an accident that Pixar and 3M have had such extended runs of creative success, just as it’s not an accident that Shakespeare should rise from humble beginnings to become the greatest playwright in history. We can make ourselves more creative, and we can make our groups more creative, if we understand the science and the psychology behind creativity. Imagine is the first step.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, it appears that Lehrer fabricated many of the quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in this book. While that doesn’t make the book any less valuable in my eyes, I could certainly understand readers choosing not to read it for the hit its credibility has taken.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ April 7, 2012
→ By

Saturday five, 4/7/12.

Just links this time around. Hoping to get another post up Monday afternoon.

* Craftsteak’s short rib recipe is now available online; I’m surprised at how simple it is, since that’s the best short rib dish I’ve ever had. I can only assume its superiority is a function of better ingredients and better execution, because there’s nothing in there you couldn’t replicate at home.

* It figures that Boston should undergo a coffee renaissance now that I’ve left, including one shop in Arlington, around the corner from where we lived in 1999-2001 and not far from the house we sold twenty (glorious) months ago.

* Matt Swartz’s article this week about marginal wins per team from free agency versus those from homegrown players is a strong first step in analyzing questions around which front offices are the most efficient with their budgets.

* A vegetable I’ve never heard of – the crystalline iceplant, a succulent with edible leaves. Unfortunately it’s considered an invasive species in the U.S. and will release salt and nitrates into the soil that make establishing other plants, even native ones, difficult.

* And, finally, the best April Fools’ gag I saw this year was ThinkGeek’s advertisement for Hungry Hungry Hippos for the iPad.

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

A Very Private Gentleman.

The never-named narrator of A Very Private Gentleman – known to his neighbors as “Signor Farfalla” because they believe him to be a painter of butterflies – is in fact a high-end gunsmith, forging custom weapons for assassins whose targets have included world leaders and wealthy businessmen. He’s chatty, prone to long digressions on his craft, his philosophy of life, his politics, and why we shouldn’t view him as a mere accessory to murder, but when he realizes he’s been spotted and is being followed by a man with unknown intentions he’s forced to reconsider his plans to retire in this Italian village with his call girl/lover Clara.

That part of the book, covering the final quarter, is as gripping as any passage I’ve come across in fiction, very tightly written, but also accelerating the pace of the narrator’s revelations about his own character, constantly shifting the reader’s impressions of his morality and his motivations. He begins pursuing his pursuer, and employing many of the tricks of his trade he discussed earlier in the novel, and the way Booth has set up the big finish there’s no expectation of any specific outcome – any of the central characters could die, and it’s not even clear who’s pursuing the narrator or why until the very end of the book.

The suspenseful payoff made up for a pretty slow first half of the book, where the narrator is so busy trying to tell us about his philosophy – or, perhaps, to impress us with his intelligence while rationalizing his choice of professions – that we get little more than stage-setting. There’s no suspense other than the suspense you get from reading a novel that you know has some suspense in it but that you have yet to encounter within the book itself. It was slow enough that I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish the book, even though it pains me to put down a book I’ve already started; obviously now I’m glad I stuck it out, but I don’t remember another book with that much lead-up to the Big Finish.

You could, however, read the book as a character study, although that’s a genre I seem to prefer in films over books. The narrator is complex, and fully capable of deluding himself, which could make him, in turn, somewhat unreliable (although we never receive hard evidence that he is). His lengthy tangents on the nature of his job, specifically whether it’s immoral or amoral, expose all kinds of rationalizations designed, I imagine, to help him sleep at night. He’s a man without faith but strikes up a friendship with the priest in the Italian village where he’s working on his One Last Job before retiring, and that priest is the one person who learns something of the narrator’s personality and reasons for secrecy, leading to more probing questions about the narrator’s state of mind. I found the narrator’s thoughts on speaking about religion particularly interesting, since I have avoided discussing religion (and, for that matter, most political subjects) in any forum because it’s like licking the third rail:

I have respect for the religions of others; after all, I have worked for the cause of several – Islam, Christianity, Communism. I have no intention of insulting or demeaning the beliefs of my fellow man. Nothing can be gained thereby save controversy and the dubious satisfaction of insult.

I suppose the Internet would lose about half its volume if everyone followed that dictum.

The problem I had with the novel as a character study is that it’s plodding. You want something to move the story along, but looking backward from the end of the book it’s clear that nothing happened until the Big Finish; the most interesting passages were flashbacks to previous jobs, including two that went awry. But that finish was a heart-pounder, and once the hunt begins in earnest, it’s impossible to put down: Now you know something is about to happen, and therein lies the fear.

The novel was adapted for the big screen and titled The American, starring George Clooney as the narrator (whose nationality is never identified in the book), but with substantial changes to the plot. I understand the reviews were solid, but I have a strong aversion to films that drastically alter their source works without good reason (“the book sucked” being one such reason).

Next up: James Joyce’s Dubliners. Agenbite of inwit, indeed.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 5, 2012
→ By

Drive.

It didn’t take me long to find a 2011 film that I thought was better than The Artist. I admit to a strong partiality toward noir in all its forms, but even adjusting for that, I thought Drive was tighter, more interesting, better performed, and a lot less cliched than the actual Best Picture winner. (Drive wasn’t nominated.)

Based on a novel by James Sallis (just $5.18 on amazon), Drive follows its nameless stunt-driver/mechanic protagonist, played by Ryan Gosling with the bare minimum of emotion, as he moonlights as a getaway driver for hire, a role that gives the film’s car-chase scenes some actual justification. The Driver develops an attachment to a new neighbor Irene, (Carey Mulligan), and to her young son, Benicio, whose father, Standard, is in prison when the movie begins but comes home to find himself pursued by thugs to whom he owes money for protecting him while he was in prison. When the Driver sees Standard take a beating at the hands of the thugs and learns that they’ve threatened Irene and Benicio, he offers to help Standard fulfill the gangsters’ demand that he rob a pawn shop holding a substantial amount of cash, which, inevitably, leads the Driver into a conflict with the gangsters themselves that he resolves (in part) through his skills at the wheel. It’s a pretty simple plot with a small number of characters, but they’re all looped together very tightly, if a little improbably, unless we believe Los Angeles is so small that it only has two gangsters in it.

One of the hallmarks of the noir genre is understated dialogue, which is one of Drive‘s two greatest strengths. The Driver couldn’t say less if he was made of stone, and even his expressions are so slight that it’s often unclear whether he’s motivated by anger, self-preservation, or the desire to protect Irene and Benicio. He barely smiles or frowns, and is almost inhuman in his calmness under pressure. I wish that understatement had extended to the film’s depictions of violence, which are unsparing (fine) and gory (pandering?), and which added little to the film itself. I expected bodies, but the director seems to take a perverse delight in the destruction of the human head.

With scant dialogue, a movie like this lives or dies on the quality of its performances, which turns out to be the other strength of the film. Gosling is excellent as the Driver, playing him as emotionless without turning him into a hackneyed “tightly-wound hero about to explode” character. Albert Brooks is even better playing against type as a high-ranking gangster who hides an inner ruthlessness behind a somewhat erudite facade. (I’d also give points to Carey Mulligan for being cute, which the role requires since the Driver is supposed to develop feelings for her fairly quickly.)

Gosling’s character is so calm and insular that it requires a precise performance that keeps emotions you’d expect to see in scenes involving fear or rage below the surface, yet Gosling doesn’t come off as a charmless robot or a monotonous antihero. Brooks steals every scene he’s in, even those with Gosling, again by keeping his sinister nature underneath the sarcastic but not humorless exterior; when he’s not taking care of business, he has his charms, yet when he flips the switch and needs to commit some horrible act of violence, there’s no overplaying – this is just business, from a man who knows when something needs to be done. The failure of the Academy to give Brooks a nomination for Best Supporting Actor earned them much criticism in a year when they seemed to screw a lot of things up (Dujardin over Oldman for Best Actor would be one such mistake in my mind), and based just on Brooks’ performance here I can see why, although I still would have given the award to Christopher Plummer for Beginners. Gosling makes the movie, but Brooks elevates it every time he’s on screen.

The story itself doesn’t have much depth behind it, but imbuing a noir film with too much subtext would rob it of its essential noir-ness. Noir is entertaining without targeting the least common denominator: Phrasing is clipped, dialogue is sparse, explanations are few. The viewer is drawn into the film because he has to work a little harder to understand motivations or connections between characters. Drive only veers from typical noir through its depictions of violence, but not the intensity attached – there should be a coldness pervading all conflicts between protagonist and antagonists, which Drive achieves; the gore only served as a distraction to me.

(I should probably mention the plaudits given to the film’s soundtrack, but I can’t say I noticed it at all. Soundtracks and scores almost never make any impression on me unless they’re intrusive.)

The limitation of Drive is that you have to like this style of movies – it’s an action movie without a tremendous amount of action (which led to one of the more frivolous lawsuits I’ve ever heard of), and it’s a sharp movie without a ton of dialogue. I like hard-boiled detective novels for the same reasons I liked Drive, because I like seeing a plot stripped down to its essentials, with tension that’s derived from the story itself. Your mileage may vary.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 2, 2012
→ By

The Wire, season five.

If you’re new to these recaps, you should start with my notes on previous seasons – on season one; season two; season three; and the longest post, on season four.

I’ve held off a bit on writing about season five of The Wire for two reasons. The obvious one was work – the end of spring training is always a sprint between daily games, keeping up with draft stuff, and, you know, actual assignments, like columns and podcasts. But I also wanted to create some distance between myself and the material (I finished the series on the 23rd, watching the last two episodes back-to-back on a flight home from Charlotte) to see if my impressions of the season would vary in time.

They really haven’t, however: Season five just wasn’t that good. It’s a sad ending to what was otherwise such a phenomenal achievement in television.

There’s a laundry list of problems with season five, but I’ll limit myself to three. One is that the entire season feels rushed. The show adds another setting, the Baltimore Sun newsroom, and cast of characters, including old Homicide favorite Clark Johnson. Yet without shedding many characters from previous seasons, we’re left with the same sixty minutes per episode spread out over an ever-increasing number of subplots and characters, so the newsroom folks don’t get the development they need, and every one of them remains two-dimensional after the series finale – particularly the setting’s villain, Scott Templeton, whose motivations are never sufficiently explored. The increased character density means we also get less time with series stalwarts like Omar, McNulty, Marlo, and Carcetti, all of whom receive plot treatments far more superficial than what we’ve seen before. The explanations, if you could call them that, for McNulty falling off the wagon and into a ditch fell far short of the standards set as recently as season four for character development and background. Add to all of those issues the shorter season length, ten episodes instead of twelve or thirteen, and the need to tie up as many storylines as possible before signoff and you have a season that feels like a compliation rather than a coherent set of stories.

The second is co-creator David Simon’s proximity to the material. The Templeton storyline is Simon’s vengeance on a real-life coworker at the Sun, Jim Haner, whom Simon accused of fabricating quotes and events while also accusing the Sun‘s editors and management of protecting their star reporter. Templeton is a flawed character, but is more fleshed-out than the simpering managing editor Thomas Klebanow (who talks like a damned grief counselor) and executive editor James Whiting, both of whom are depicted as willfully blind to Templeton’s malfeasance because they only see the potential for awards and a Hail Mary play to save the newsroom. I have no problem with Simon wanting to use his platform to decry plagiarism and fabrications by reporters, but it watched as if no one edited him down from his pulpit.

And finally, the serial killer storyline, the one thing that ties just about everything together other than the Omar plot, was so implausible and so far out of left field that I found myself wishing I could skip through those scenes (I couldn’t, because the series is otherwise so tightly plotted that you can’t skip anything, ever, or risk becoming hopelessly lost) and get back to the routine street violence. The idea that straightlaced Lester would be so consumed with his desire to nab Marlo that he would engage in an illegal endeavor that would jeopardize not just his and McNulty’s careers but would jeopardize the case against Marlo and the careers of people like Cedric Daniels is too far gone for my suspension of disbelief to encompass it. Yeah, I caught the parallels between Templeton’s fabrications and McNulty’s, but that literary flourish doesn’t justify the departure from four seasons of severe realism.

There were literary flourishes within the season that did pay off for me as a viewer, however, especially the underlying conceit that the players may change, but the streets will remain the same until the structures that govern (or fail to govern) them fall. Avon Barksdale fell, to be replaced by Marlo, who will be replaced by someone, perhaps Slim Charles. Omar’s gone, but Michael has stepped right into the void. One addict, Bubbles, escapes the streets, only to be replaced by Dukwon, with their closure scenes airing back-to-back in the final episode just to hammer that point home. The government’s continued cycle of rewarding superficial stats over honest results, and politics over performance, was actually the funniest part of that final montage, one bit I won’t spoil in case any of you haven’t seen it; I’ll just say it took me a while to figure out who was going to fill that void because the choice was so unlikely (and, yet, so ultimately predictable). That self-referential aspect, the way loops always close and minor characters (like Lester’s girlfriend) resurface, remains one of the series’ most enduring qualities for me. Those closures also give the series as a whole that novelesque quality absent in most series – these massive story arcs and entrances and departures of characters mirror those of great Russian novels and require degrees of attention and skill absent in so much modern fiction in all media. I just wish the final season had played out differently.

* Because I know someone will ask, I’d rank season five as the worst, and four as the best – but you can’t really call season four the best without attaching it to the groundwork laid in season three, can you? Season three didn’t stand well on its own for me, but the 25 episodes in those two seasons combined, slightly longer in episodes than a standard network season (and about a season and a half in show minutes), beat any season of any other TV show I’ve ever seen, and it’s not that close. I still maintain that season two is unfairly maligned, however; it was different, but in a good way, and even seeds planted on the docks bloomed in the series’ final few episodes.

* One thing I’ve puzzled over far too much is which Wire actor was most deserving of some recognition from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which completely whiffed on the series while wasting Outstanding Drama Series nominations on the likes of Joan of Arcadia, CSI, Boston Legal, and Heroes. (The Wire received just two Emmy nominations that I can find, both writing nods, one for S3E11, “Middle Ground,” and one for the series finale, “-30-.” It appears the Golden Globes can’t even say that much.) My answer was far from certain after four seasons, but season five clinched it: Andre Royo, for his portrayal of Bubbles. It probably didn’t help his cause with award committees that his subplot was always in the background, or that the character’s required range only became evident over multiple seasons, but his performance was the most compelling in a series full of compelling performances. Only Seth Gilliam as Carver saw his character develop that much over the full five years – but we all know the award shows love a good addiction storyline.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: ,
→ March 31, 2012
→ By

Saturday five, #2.

Five books, five links to my own stuff, and five links to others’ articles.

I’ve read eight books since my last post on any of them, so I’m going to take a shortcut and catch up by highlighting the five most interesting. Now that spring training is ending, I hope to get back to regular dishblogging soon.

* Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea is the one non-fiction book in this bunch, a history-of-math tome that incorporates a fair amount of philosophy, physics, and religion all in a book that’s under 200 pages and incredibly readable for anyone who’s at least taken high school math. The subject is the number zero, long scorned by philosophers, theologians, and even some mathematicians who resisted the idea of nothing or the void, yet which turned out to be critical in a long list of major scientific advances, including calculus and quantum mechanics. I generally prefer narrative non-fiction, but Zero moves as easily as a math-oriented book can get without that central thread.

* Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town is one of three major Hammett short-story collections in print (along with The Continental Op and the uneven The Big Knockover), and my favorite for its range of subjects and characters without feeling as pulpy as some of his most commercial stories. The twenty stories are all detective stories of one sort or another starring several different Hammett detectives, including early iterations of Sam Spade and the character who eventually became the Thin Man, as well as a western crime story that might be my favorite short piece by Hammett, “The Man Who Killed Dan Odams.”

* Readers have recommended Tim O’Brien’s short story cycle The Things They Carried for several years, usually any time I mention reading another book that deals with the Vietnam War and/or its aftermath. The book, a set of interconnected stories that feels like an novel despite the lack of a central plot, is based heavily on O’Brien’s own experiences in that conflict, especially around death – of platoon mates, of Viet Cong soldiers, of Vietnamese civilians, and of a childhood crush of O’Brien’s who died at age 9 of a brain tumor. The writing is remarkable, more than the stories themselves, which seemed to cover familiar ground in the genre, as well as O’Brien’s ability to weave all of these disconnected stories into one tapestry around that central theme of death and the pointlessness of war. The final story, where he ties much of it together by revisiting one of the first deaths he discussed in the book, is incredibly affecting on two levels as a result of everything that’s come before.

* I’m a big Haruki Murakami fan – and no, I haven’t read 1Q84 yet and won’t until it’s in paperback – but Dance, Dance, Dance was mostly a disappointment despite some superficial entertainment value, enough to at least make it a quick read if not an especially deep one. A sequel of sorts to A Wild Sheep Chase, it attempts to be more expansive than that earlier novel but still feels like unformed Murakami, another look at him as he built up to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a top-ten novel for me that hit on every level. Dance is just too introspective, without enough of Murakami’s sort of magical realism (and little foundation for what magical realism it does contain) and no connection between the reader and the main character.

* I loved Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, a funny, biting satire on upper-class life in the United States just after World War I, so I looked forward to House of Mirth, present on the Modern Library and Bloomsbury 100 lists, expecting more of that sharp wit but receiving, instead, a dry, depressing look at the limitations of life for women in those same social circles prior to the war. It’s a tragedy with an ironic title that follows Lily Bart through her fall from social grace, thanks mostly to the spiteful actions of other women in their closed New York society; it’s a protest novel, and one of the earliest feminist novels I’ve read (preceded, and perhaps inspired, by Kate Chopin’s The Awakening), but I found myself feeling more pity than empathy for Lily as a victim of circumstances, not of her own missteps.

Next up: I’m reading Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman (filmed as The American) and listening to Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works. The Booth book is on sale through that link for $5.60.

–

Five things I wrote or said this week:

On Jeff Samardzija’s revival.

This week’s chat.

One batch of spring training minor league notes, including the Angels, A’s, Rangers, and Royals.

Tuesday’s “top 10 players for 2017” column, which I emphasized was just for fun and still got people far too riled up. There’s no rational way to predict who the top ten players will be in five years and I won’t pretend I got them right. But it was fun to do.

I interviewed Top Chef winner and sports nut Richard Blais on the Tuesday Baseball Today podcast, in which he talked about what it was like to “choke” (his word) in the finals on his first season and then face the same situation in his second go-round. We also talked about why I should break my ten-year boycott of hot dogs.

—

And the links…

* The best patent rejection ever, featuring Borat’s, er, swimsuit.

* A spotlight on Massachusetts’ outdated liquor laws. For a state that likes to pretend it’s all progressive, Massachusetts is about thirty years behind the times when it comes to alcohol, to say nothing of how the state’s wholesalers control the trade as tightly as the state liquor board does in Pennsylvania. The bill this editorial discusses would be a small start in breaking apart their oligopoly, but perhaps enough to start to crumble that wall.

* I admit it, I’m linking to Bleacher Report, but Dan Levy’s commentary on how Twitter has affected what a “scoop” means, especially to those of us in the business, is a must read. And there’s no slidshow involved.

* The Glendale mayor who drove the city into a nine-figure debt hole by spending government money to build facilities for private businesses – including the soon-to-be-ex-Phoenix Coyotes – won’t run for a sixth term, yet she’s receiving more accolades than criticism on the way out. Put it this way: Given its schools, safety, and public finances, we never considered Glendale for a second when looking to move out here.

* The “pink slime” controversy has led the manufacturer to suspend production at three of its four plants. That makes for a good headline, but are job losses really relevant to what should be a discussion of whether this is something people, especially schoolchildren, should be consuming? And now the controversy is moving on to carmine dye, derived from an acid extracted from cochineal beetles and used in Starbucks frappuccinos. If nothing else, I applaud the new emphasis on knowing exactly what we’re eating.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
→ March 30, 2012
→ By

Citizen Public House + more Scottsdale eats.

Citizen Public House in Scottsdale was on Phoenix magazine’s list of the 23 best new restaurants of 2011; this was my seventh so far, although two of the ones I’d visited previously have since closed. This dinner was the best meal I’ve had at any Arizona restaurant other than Pizzeria Bianco, a fine dining-meets-gastropub menu that’s heavy on bacon fat and other comfort-food staples.

We started with the pork belly pastrami ($12), probably their best-known dish, a small portion of melt-in-your-mouth pork belly with an exterior bark served over browned rye spaetzle with a Brussels sprout slaw and a whole-grain mustard vinaigrette. The meat is tender, the fat smooth and warm, and the zing of the mustard helped balance the richness of the meat. It was difficult to get all of the ingredients in one bite, but the hint of sweetness in the spice rub married well with the acidity of the vinaigrette and the faint bitterness of the cabbage. The bacon-fat popcorn ($5) is as you’d imagine – freshly-popped popcorn tossed in bacon fat with crispy pieces of bacon mixed in; there was a lot of fat at the bottom of the bowl but the popcorn itself wasn’t greasy.

The seared sea scallops ($24) over creamy grits were probably a bit past medium-rare but the sear was perfect and brought out the scallops’ inherent sweetness; they’re not my favorite kind of shellfish (that would be crab), but since this is another signature dish I felt compelled to try it, and actually liked the grits – more like the softest polenta imaginable, but made with white corn grits and whole corn rather than yellow cornmeal, creamy but not overly cheesy to the point where they might overshadow the scallops. The dish was topped with more crispy bacon bits, which are always welcome, and there was a superfluous Coca-Cola gastrique around the edges of the plate. My friend got the fair-trade short rib ($28), cut flanken-style, braised and browned (my preferred style) with a dried cherry sauce (barely necessary) and served over mashed parsnips

The chocolate pecan bars were a little sweet for me, with the texture of fudge and a salted caramel sauce on top, but if you like fudgy brownies this would likely be right up your alley, and the chicory ice cream that comes with it does give an earthy component to balance out the sticky-sweet flavor and texture of the bars. The beer selection only includes one local beer on draft (Four Peaks’ hefeweizen, which isn’t even one of their top two brews); the cocktail menu is heavy on old-school ingredients like gin and rye but in more contemporary concotions.

* Scratch Pastries on Indian School supposedly has the best macarons in town, but after one look at them – wide and flat, as if they’d spread badly in the oven – I decided to stick with a sandwich, which was on some of the best bread I’ve had out here. The smoked duck breast sandwich comes with walnuts, mixed greens, and olive oil, which sounded like it might be too simple but instead keeps the duck – smoky and tender but not fatty – at center stage. The sandwich came with a side salad for $8, an absolute steal given the quality of the ingredients, making it all the more horrifying that someone might choose one of the million fast-food options in that area to save a buck or two (if that).

* Echo Coffee is between Old Town and Papago Park (where the A’s minor league complex is, as well as the Phoenix Zoo) and rivals Cartel Coffee Lab for the best drip coffee in town. Echo grinds the beans to order, sitting them in a cone filter and pouring just-boiled water over the top, so it brews as you watch. Yes, it’s a $2 cup of coffee, but this is what real coffee tastes like, full of subtle notes that are lost when the coffee is overroasted (I’m looking at you, Peet’s) or blended to eliminate any kind of character (the very definition of Starbucks’ Pike Place blend). It’s too far from the house for me to go there just for a cup of coffee, but it’s good enough that I would reroute myself to go by there if I was otherwise headed into Phoenix or Scottsdale.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 24, 2012
→ By

Saturday five.

Sorry I’ve been somewhat absent from here – spring training is among my worst times of the year for getting time for non-work writing.

I don’t know if this will become a regular blog feature, but I’ve been saving up a bunch of random links and recommendations and finally had an hour (thanks to an early wakeup call from the child today) to sit and work them up: five mostly-new alternative songs I’ve got in heavy rotation on the iPod and five links to articles/posts I enjoyed.

Civil Twilight – “Fire Escape.” (amazon/iTunesicon) After Of Monsters and Men’s “Little Talks,” this is my favorite new song of the year – I hear a little early U2 in the song, especially the vocals, but the slightly offbeat guitar riff is the part that drew me back after the first listen.

Bombay Bicycle Club – “Shuffle.” (amazon/iTunesicon) Second choice for second-favorite new song. That off-kilter piano sample and the spacey production of the vocals both reminded me of Beta Band, but this song is much bouncier than any Beta Band track I’ve heard.

School of Seven Bells – “The Night.” (amazon/iTunes) Sleigh Bells gets all the love right now – I thought the industrial thing was kind of played out twenty years ago – but I prefer these Bells, or at least this song, an ethereal electronic track that sounded like an updated Flock of Seagulls with a female vocalist lamenting a broken heart.

Lonely Forest – “Turn Off This Song and Go Outside.” (amazon/iTunesicon) Immediate reaction was negative – it’s just too emo for me – but then I found myself singing it the next day and caved in and bought it. Think of a slowed-down Jimmy Eat World that still just wants you to know they’re singing their hearts out. The chorus is still gimmicky, though. Originally released in 2010 on an EP.

Grouplove – “Tongue Tied.” (amazon/iTunesicon) Prediction: I’m going to hate this song in about six weeks. I’d call this LCD Soundsystem meets Erasure as sung by your obnoxious friends who sound like they’re never going to grow up.

—

And a few links:
Penny Arcade interview with Days of Wonder’s CEO, talking about how the iPad Ticket to Ride app boosted sales of the physical game. Recommended by reader Patrick T.

Jonah Lehrer on how anyone can be creative, from his just-released book Imagine: How Creativity Works.

NY Times article on hyperpolyglots, including how they use the Internet to find and help each other learn more and learn faster. The main subject is extremely impressive, but I’m not sure from the article whether he’s getting to fluency or just learning basic conversation.

Otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as Hedgehogs who look like Martin Freeman.

Will Leitch’s piece on Bryce Harper, in which he points out that baseball needs some stars with personality, which Harper has in spades – and I agree. The “bad makeup” tag on him was always nonsense, and besides, it ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,