→ January 11, 2012
→ By

Downton Abbey.

I’m a little late to the Downton Abbey party – not as late as I was to the Wire party – but we just ripped through the first season on Netflix Instant over the last three nights as well as Sunday’s U.S. premiere of season two, so I’m up to speed. It’s soapier than I’d like, but so witty and smart with many compelling characters that I’ve been happy to get sucked in by the drama that drives the show’s core.

(Warning: There are some spoilers in the bullets below, including one pertaining to the start of season two.)

Downton Abbey is set in the 1910s on an English estate of that name and revolves around the family of Lord Grantham (the upstairs) and the multitude of servants who actually run the house (downstairs). There are short plots and multi-episode arcs; stories limited to the earl’s family, stories limited to the servants, and stories that intertwine the two; and larger themes around conventional morality and the changing political and social landscape of the time. It is ambitious in scope, yet is filmed with short edits, quick dialogue, and tremendous focus on individual characters – both in terms of writing and cinematography.

An ensemble show like this cannot succeed with a weak cast, since there is no single star or even a subset or two or three who participate in enough of the story to carry the entire series. Dame Maggie Smith, who won an Emmy for her performance in season one*, plays the Countess Dowager Lady Violet with enough haughty facial expressions to merit her own meme, providing comic relief on top of a serious role as the voice of the old English order that is under assault from all sides. (She played a similar character in Gosford Park.) The seething sibling rivalry between the elder two Grantham sisters, increasingly central to the biggest story arc on the show, is only effective through the acerbic delivery and withering looks from the actresses in those parts. But for me, the real stars are the less-known actors and actresses playing the servants, especially the two villains, Siobhan Finneran as Nurse Ratchett Mrs. O’Brien and Rob James-Collier as Thomas the sociopathic footman; Brendan Coyle as the maddeningly proper John Bates (operating under his own moral code, it seems); and Jim Carter as the imperious butler Mr. Carson.

* Downton Abbey was nominated in the Best Movie/Miniseries category, which allowed it to win six awards – but it felt as hollow as Lady Violet’s flower show wins because the deck was stacked. I think this show could easily hold its own against Mad Men in the drama series categories, and it’s a more apt description of the program, which was aired in the UK as seven individual episodes, all between 47 and 63 minutes excluding commercials. The miniseries category has lost its relevance anyway – this ain’t Shogun, which was longer, told a complete story, and was aired in its entirety during a single week – and Downton Abbey should be treated as the Emmys treated its spiritual antecedent, Upstairs, Downstairs, which won three Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series (the last PBS series to do so). Stop treating them like Boise State and let them fight the big boys. They might actually win.

The writing is more dramatic, or melodramatic, than I’m used to seeing, especially in British dramas, but still falls short of the mind-numbing sentimentality that infects so much American broadcast network programming. What bothers me more about Downton Abbey is the time-out-of-joint flashes of modern sensibilities, behavior and dialogue that would have been uncouth a century ago but that goes unremarked upon within the show (an assessment I’m basing on literature I’ve read from the period, since my wayback machine is broken, preventing me from evaluating this firsthand). It also seems like there’s a second writing voice that’s less faithful to the vernacular of the time period.

But the speed with which the script’s dramatic elements move, delaying or sacrificing some character development, is one of the show’s strengths – they’ve adapted the British period piece/costume drama to the shorter attention span of the modern audience, hooking everyone with shorter story arcs so we all stick around for the longer ones. It’s an intense, fast-moving show, often very funny, occasionally sentimental, and always smart, worth your time even if you might ordinarily turn your nose up at a show with this much drama and yet so little conventional action.

Spoiler territory:

  • Mary : Elizabeth Bennett :: Matthew : Mr. Darcy. Discuss.
  • I still don’t understand why Mary never said anything, even to her mother, about the Turkish gentleman arriving uninvited in her bedroom. It doesn’t nullify the infraction, but I would have thought this would be the first thing out of Mary’s mouth.
  • I don’t care about the age difference between Anna and Mr. Bates – and really, Joanne Froggatt can make a face to shatter your heart, so let’s get them together already – but am I the only one to think he generally speaks to her more as a father might to a daughter?
  • Elizabeth McGovern, as the American wife of Lord Grantham, is the weakest link in the cast. In trying to sound supercilious she sounds more like a mother talking to an infant, regardless of who else is in the conversation.
  • The actress who plays Daisy is 26. And I thought I looked young.
  • A tumblr called Downton Pawnee. Solid, with at least one panel from a DA episode that hasn’t aired here yet.
  • And the spoiler question on S2E2 (aired here on Sunday together with S2E1): Was Thomas the source of the razor? I say yes; my wife looked at me like I was fashioning a tin-foil hat. What say you?
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→ January 9, 2012
→ By

Margin Call.

Margin Call jumped on my radar when the late, lamented Yahoo! blog The Projector gave it a glowing review back in October, and then named it their must-see movie of the week a fortnight afterwards. Featuring an absurdly deep cast, the film follows an investment bank or hedge fund heavily exposed to CMOs during a 24-hour period right at the start of the U.S. housing market meltdown. It features no violence, no sex, no weapons drawn, no manufactured drama, and is entirely gripping from the moment a junior analyst (played by Zachary Quinto, whose production firm financed the film) discovers that his employer is, in effect, bankrupt.

Quinto plays Peter Sullivan, a former engineering student turned financial analyst whose boss, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), is fired in the opening scenes after 17 years at the company. Dale hands Sullivan a flash drive with an unfinished spreadsheet on it that he indicates is important – and it is, as Sullivan discovers, dragging his new boss Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) back into the office at 10 pm to point out that the firm’s portfolio has it on the verge of collapse. Emerson goes to his boss, the depressed, disgruntled Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who takes it to his boss, the amoral Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), who eventually calls in the head of the firm, played by Jeremy Irons (I told you the cast was strong) as if this was an updated work of Shakespeare and he is both the play’s central figure and its empty conscience.

Margin Call‘s central energy source is that one bit of knowledge – that the market is close to a panic, and such a drop in the housing market would drive this unnamed firm out of business – which it uses to power all of its characters, allowing us to sit back and watch their reactions. There’s no gotcha moment, no twist of a bit of unknown information revealed in the final scene to change the film’s direction; most of the movie takes place overnight, when U.S. markets are closed and thus can’t move. This movie is about the reactions of professionals with widely varying backgrounds, loyalties, and years of experience in the industry, and how they move in response to the news that the empire they built is crumbling, and that saving it will hurt others, and could even cause a wider financial panic. It’s not quite a character study, as we don’t stay with any one character long enough to give him/her sufficient depth, but a characters study, almost like witnessing a sociological experiment.

It felt to me far more like a great play than a typical movie – or perhaps more like a British film than an American one, with an emphasis on dialogue and interactions to move the story forward rather than exogenous events inserted by the writer(s). Irons’ arguments with Spacey, who seems to be growing a conscience or merely working harder to suppress it, Bettany’s conversation with the seemingly-principled Tucci, and Quinto’s vaguely comic-relief chatter with a younger colleague played by Penn Badgley had me hanging on their words, not just for their import to the story but to how they were structured and delivered. There is, of course, a message about greed, and the disconnect such traders felt with the owners of the mortgages they swapped and sold without regard to the effects on those ‘regular’ people; I also thought the dog symbolized the soul or conscience of its owner (saying more would spoil it). But I was far more wrapped up in the intensity of the conversations, the emotional reactions to the news coming down the wire, and the way characters rationalized their actions to themselves than I was in the larger themes the film might have wanted to express. It had slow moments, including a long ramp-up to the handoff of the flash drive that kicks off the main plot, and some less effective subplots (including Demi Moore, delivering little in an empty role other than appearing in the hackneyed “sitting sideways on window bench overlooking Manhattan” shot), but as a fan of simple, cerebral dramas, I found more than enough strengths to overcome some slight choppiness of the script.

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→ January 5, 2012
→ By

Top Chef S9E9.

Notes from one of the better episodes, hitting both ends of the culinary spectrum:

* Before we even get started, Edward’s trash-talking Heather for using his cake recipe, which he gave her, so, um, don’t give out your recipes any more, genius.

* Then, the night before the Quickfire, the chefs get a copy of Modernist Cuisine at the house. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a controversial, groundbreaking, backbreaking (weighing over 50 pounds), five-volume set, spearheaded by polymath/Microsoft billionaire Nathan Myhrvold, that rethinks cooking from the ground up, using a scientific approach. It’s not all molecular gastronomy, but that’s a major focus, which freaks out a few of the chefs.

* Quickfire: Moto Chris calls Myhrvold “Chef Nathan.” No.

* Then Moto Chris explains miracle berries to Padma and Nathan (who has to one-up the chef by mentioning in a somewhat offhand way that he grows miracle berries in his basement).

* Grayson referring to molecular gastronomy as “magic” was pretty funny, as was Beverly’s foam disaster (although I did feel bad for her when she referred to herself as socially awkward). Meanwhile, Sara ends up in the top three for ravioli with a raw egg yolk inside … which we see chefs do a few times a year on this show. That seems about as modern as harvest gold kitchen appliances, but the judges approved anyway. She didn’t win, which would have annoyed me, but when Ty got the nod (and the books) Moto Chris looked like he wanted to commit hara-kiri. (Or maybe he finally saw his own hair in a mirror. I’d feel the same way.)

* Elimination challenge: The chefs must stay up all night at Salt Lick BBQ – I think this was their original location; I’ve only been to the one in Round Rock – and prepare five dishes: chicken, pork spare ribs, brisket, and two sides of their choice. This is anti-modernist cuisine, and that’s awesome.

* Two of the three teams decide to go boring and literal. They could have sent all six of those chefs home and I wouldn’t have been upset. Grow a pair already.

* At Whole Foods, Malibu Chris (much better than “Chris C.”) reads the grocery list, with “liquid smoke” on it. Um, Chris, I’m pretty sure that’s what the barbecue pits are for.

* Edward gets more ornery as the show goes on, because apparently when Heather left, she took Edward’s self-awareness with her. So now we have a new villain. I get Edward’s point that he and Ty had developed a “system” for serving without Sara while she was on the disabled list, but isn’t there some obligation to re-integrate her when she comes back? At least Ty realized that, you know, there’s a damn camera on us, you idiot.

* Meanwhile, why can’t a team that’s down a member borrow a body from the restaurant just to help them serve? Was it fair for Ty and Edward to suffer in the judging because they had to compensate for another chef’s heat exhaustion (if that was indeed Sara’s malady)? I don’t get it. If the point is to identify the best chef, then let’s get the extraneous variables out of the way and focus on the food.

* I was surprised to see Beverly’s bourbon fire set off the smoke alarm in the RV, since I have, in fact, produced a fire quite a bit like that only to discover it barely gave off any heat and didn’t singe anything it touched (including, I believe, my eyebrows). Her inability to handle the fire was kind of a concern, though.

* Beer can chicken isn’t Q. Period. Automatic DQ in my mind.

* My wife was singing along with Grayson’s bullfrog song. She didn’t make the faces, though. Also, I refuse to believe Grayson only says mildly inappropriate things like “sex in the mouth” when she’s sleep-deprived. Speaking of which, Hugh’s recap might have been his funniest yet.

* Judges’ Table: Paul wins again, by going a little off the board. I know this was a team win, but it seemed clear this was Paul’s menu.

* Did Team Acrimony really put orange mint in their cole slaw? I did think Tom criticized them unfairly for slicing the meat ahead of time, unless he was willing to say explicitly that he thought they could have sliced to order fast enough to serve the guests.

* Nathan Myhrvold was a good judge except when he tried to be funny. But his comments were pretty specific and he’s obviously passionate about food and incredibly knowledgeable about it.

* I was less disturbed by Malibu Chris basing a BBQ sauce off a Texas beverage (albeit one I don’t drink) than by him thinking, again, he would get a mistake (oversalting) by the judges. I get why he went home, especially after two straight times in the losers’ bracket, but I still think he had more potential than Moto Chris.

* Last chance kitchen – did the on-screen description of Nyesha’s dish actually say “twill” instead of “tuile?” Twill is a type of fabric weave. Tuile is food. Don’t even get me started on toile.

* Both dishes seemed really strong, but it sounds like Nyesha won for making more of “a restaurant dish.” She’s cooking angry now, and I like it.

* Final three: Paul, and it’s looking like it matters less and less who else is there with him. Malibu Chris was in my projected final three as of E7, and I see much weaker chefs still here (Beverly, Moto Chris, and Ty). I’ll go with Paul, Edward, and Lindsay for the final three, with the caveat that we don’t know when the Last Chance Kitchen champ might re-enter the mix.

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→ December 31, 2011
→ By

The Last Good Kiss.

A reader, Michael L., recommended James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss to me about fifteen months ago, knowing my affinity for hard-boiled detective novels. (This should also give you some idea of how long my to-be-read queue is.) Michael described it as very Raymond Chandler-esque, with influences from later, more “sordid” writers. It is undoubtedly more lurid and graphic than Chandler’s novels, but shares the master’s sense of characterization and his knack for weaving complex mysteries among a very small number of flawed people by layering intrigues and peeling them back one by one for the reader.

Crumley’s detective hero/antihero is C.W. Sughrue, a war veteran and possibly unreliable narrator (so maybe he’s not a war veteran) who handles unglamorous P.I. jobs like spying on wayward spouses for divorce cases or locating deadbeats for bill collectors. While retrieving a wayward author named Trahearne for the man’s ex-wife, Sughrue starts a brawl and shooting match that ends with him earning a job to locate a woman, Betty Sue, who’s been missing for ten years. Betty Sue was in San Francisco with a boyfriend when their car became stuck in traffic, at which point she opened the car door, walked away, and was never heard from again.

The pursuit of Betty Sue is the main plot point that drives the novel forward, but it’s the layering, mostly around Trahearne, that makes the novel so rewarding. Trahearne is a war veteran who fought at Guadalcanal, published three pulpy novels and some volumes of poetry, and lives on an estate in Montana with his wife, his ex-wife, and his mother, running off on semi-regular benders, one of which puts him on Sughrue’s radar. When the two men strike up an odd friendship and Sughrue’s hired to find Betty Sue, Trahearne cajoles Sughrue into letting him tag along, which is when the layering – and the lying, because no one in this story seems to tell the truth at first or even second blush – begins.

Sughrue might be the fourth- or fifth-most interesting character in his own book, which separates this from the best of Chandler, whose novels always revolved around Philip Marlowe. Sughrue certainly mimics Marlowe’s exterior toughness, dry wit, and natural cynicism (especially around the motives of others), but I didn’t find him compelling – he often takes a backseat to the beer-swilling bulldog Fireball, whose loyalty to his owner may merely reflect a desire to protect his main enabler. Trahearne is the real star of the book, complex enough to border on the ridiculous, an emotional train wreck on the inside with a buffoonish exterior. Sughrue makes his presence felt, but more as the machine that makes the other characters go; his best scene is his assault on a house in Colorado where he’s trying to rescue a kidnapping victim, and he has to deal with the house’s defenses and the idiocy of his overbearing, heavily-armed sidekick.

It doesn’t measure up to the best Chandler – which, for me, would start with Farewell, My Lovely – but it’s a quick read that was hard to put down but never insulted my intelligence while holding my attention.

Side note: I’m shocked that this was never made into a film. It certainly has all of the elements to satisfy a major studio – sex, violence, humor, sharply-drawn characters – but has the smart dialogue and layered plotting of a good Coen Brothers movie.

Next up: Carol Shields’ novel The Stone Diaries, winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

–

I’m burying the lede here a little, but I want to thank everyone who’s offered kind words and positive thoughts after this week’s rumor regarding me. I have no comment on the rumor itself, of course, but so many of you have written via one method or another, including a number of readers who have never reached out to me before, that I want to make it clear how much I appreciate your messages and your continued readership over the last five-plus years. This job would not be half as much fun without you guys.

Have a safe and happy New Year’s celebration tonight. If you choose to drink, please give the keys to someone who hasn’t.

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→ December 28, 2011
→ By

Of Human Bondage.

Another pretty good deal on Amazon – the complete BBC series Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series is just $20 on DVD. I’m picking it up as a gift for someone who will probably see this so I’m going to stop talking about it now.

I also answered three questions for Keep Food Legal, the only organization dedicated to fighting for “culinary freedom” in the U.S. Hands off my unpasteurized cheese.

No Klawchat this week.

–

W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, #66 on the Modern Library 100, is a dense, autobiographical, highly philosophical novel that takes its protagonist, Philip Carey, from the moment he becomes an orphan at age nine through the end of his twenties, during which he tries several careers, loses his faith, and embarks on several ill-fated affairs, including one disastrous obsession that nearly ruins his life. It’s a book I’m glad I read, but will certainly never read again because the slightly awkward prose and the long internal monologues made it an arduous read.

The book opens with the death of Philip’s mother and his removal to the country home of his uncle, a vicar, and submissive aunt, who comes to love him as the son she never had but lacks any authority in her own home. Philip chafes under the restrictions of this life, finding solace by reading the books his uncle owns for show, but finds his life taking a turn for the worse when he’s shipped off to boarding school where his club foot makes him an object for derision and social isolation. After discovering he no longer believes in God (if he ever truly did), he begins a series of misadventures at university and in various careers, including a stint in accounting and an attempt to be a not-starving artist in Paris, before settling into medical school in London. At the same time, he begins an on-again, off-again affair with the unattractive, selfish, manipulative Mildred, who seems to view Philip as a personal ATM, only showing him attention or affection when she needs something from him, popping up in his life when he least needs her all-consuming distractions.

The novel relies heavily on events from Maugham’s own life. Like Philip, Maugham was orphaned before he turned ten, and was raised by a strict, religious uncle and an ineffectual aunt who expected him to take orders after school. He also drifted through several potential careers before studying medicine for five years, during which time he continued to observe people and their emotions and worked on his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published when he was 23. (By comparison, Philip doesn’t become a writer in Of Human Bondage, and doesn’t complete his medical training until he’s nearly 30.)

Maugham’s prose is choppy and his inconsistent use of cockney spellings, even outside of the dialogue, is a distraction, but he makes up for these deficiencies with strong use of symbolism throughout the novel. Philip’s club foot stands in for Maugham’s own personal shame (at least earlier in his life) at his homosexuality, a theme that pervades the entire novel even though Philip never develops anything stronger than a friendship with any other male character. Philip’s sense that his disability causes his ostracism, leads others to mock or simply underestimate him, and prevents him from living a full life seems to stand in well for the obstacles before a gay man in England in the late 1800s/early 1900s, when any sexual act between two males was illegal and punishable by a prison term. Maugham was in medical school when Oscar Wilde was tried for “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years in prison, which convinced Maugham to keep his own sexuality (he was either gay or bisexual) a secret, both in his private life and in his early writings. Rather than make his protagonist gay, Maugham gave him a physical disability that could cause similar social disadvantages by making him sufficiently different from the rest of the guys.

The “bondage” of the book’s title, taken from a phrase in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (which, along with Renan’s Vie de Jesus, was a major influence on the personal philosophy of the young Maugham), refers to the multiple societal constraints that appear to limit our ability to find happiness in a life that is, according to Philip, devoid of inherent meaning. The strict religion of the Victorian era and the accompanying moral codes, the expectations a man’s breeding and/or education placed on his career, all of which also limited whom one might choose to love (if one even has such a choice), are bonds Philip must consciously break to find any sort of personal happiness in a universe that will not deliver happiness to him in this life or anything after it. The introductory essay in the edition I read says that many readers found the book’s positive ending jarring or unrealistic, but in my reading, it made perfect sense: Philip casts off all of his bonds and chooses a life he believes will make him happy with a woman well-suited to his temperament, for whom he feels genuine affection (if not actual love). I read this as Maugham’s own private yearning for a world in which he, too, could cast off the societal bonds, and live openly as a gay man. (Maugham had at least two longstanding, not-exactly-secret relationships with men, but passed away two years before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 began the process of decriminalizing “homosexual acts” between consenting adults.)

Philip’s obsession with Mildred provides the narrative greed for most of the middle third of the novel, and I appear to be in good company in finding it inexplicable. She is presented without any redeeming qualities; she is rude, dismissive, haughty, plain, unfeminine, manipulative, and an unloving mother to the child she bore to another man she was sleeping with even as she is coaxing Philip out of some of his money. Philip’s obsession is presented in vivid, realistic terms, but there’s no logic to it at all beyond the possible desire he feels for a woman who won’t have him. He throws another relationship overboard, jeopardizes his career, and loses much of his savings for her, only to have her exact a rather severe punishment on him (albeit one that loosens yet another bond, that of a man to his property) in the end. She could have been just as awful a person, yet depicted as beautiful, and the obsession would have been more believable, yet Philip stands by her despite a lack of physical attraction and even as she openly mocks him by using his money to run off with another man. Is she merely a stand-in for the irrational, emotional impluses which bind us in our daily lives?

That same introductory essay, written by Professor Robert Calder of the University of Saskatchewan, who has written two biographies of Maugham, classifies Of Human Bondage with other autobiographical bildungsromans (coming-of-age novels) of its era, including A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which I found excruciating), Sons and Lovers, and The Way of All Flesh (both on my to-be-read shelf). It’s a highly introspective, emotional style of novel, with long digressions on the author’s own psychological and philosophical development, and attempts to explain how external forces (people and events) shaped that development. As someone who reads for plot over all other elements, it’s never going to be my favorite subgenre, and Of Human Bondage didn’t offer me great prose or highly compelling characters to balance out that weakness.

Odd fact: One of Maugham’s great-grandsons, Derek Pavancini, is a blind, autistic savant pianist.

Next up: James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss.

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→ December 27, 2011
→ By

A High Wind in Jamaica and After Dark.

Richard Hughes’ A High Wind in Jamaica, ranked 71st on the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 English-language novels of the 20th century, is an anti-adventure novel that deglamorizes the traditional pirate story and instead uses pirates as a vehicle for a serious novel about innocence and its loss.

The novel tells the story of the Bas-Thornton children, five preteens who live on a plantation with their parents in Jamaica, but who are sent back to England after a terrible hurricane convinces their parents that life on the island is unsafe. Traveling with two children from a neighboring plantation, they have barely embarked when their ship is set upon by pirates, led by the Danish sailor Captain Jonsen, who takes the children as well as all of the cargo. The cowardly captain of their original ship believes them killed and reports as such to their parents, who don’t learn the truth until the end of the book. Captain Jonsen tries to leave the children with a matriarch in a pirates’ haven on the island, but is rebuffed after an accident befalls one of the five, leading to several months at sea during which tensions rise between crew and captives and their “adventures” prove more harrowing than thrilling.

Unlike typical novels set on the high seas, A High Wind in Jamaica veers straight for the more serious themes, including rape and murder, that would be required in any realistic depiction of piracy. Forcing children who do not as yet understand mortality, and all of whom but one remain unaware of sexuality, into a situation where they will be confronted by the harsh realities of adult life allows Hughes to explore innocence and the cognitive dissonance children utilize to deal with events they can’t fully understand.

Hughes’ skill in dealing with this extends to his ability to bounce between the children when providing perspectives within the book, and aside from the one real murder of the novel, often describing occurrences in obscuring language to mirror the fog a seven-year-old might perceive when older children are discussing sex. The way Hughes jumps from child to child also seemed to me to mirror the rocking of a boat sailing somewhat aimlessly on the open seas, as Captain Jonsen wishes to rid himself of his human cargo (without harming them) but fears that he will be charged with kidnapping or worse if he tries to hand them over to another ship.

The book reads quickly as Hughes’ prose is straightforward, but lacked much narrative greed – there seemed little chance that Hughes would simply wipe out all of the children to end the book, so I read it assuming full well that there would be a reunion before the novel’s conclusion. Those final few short sections are critical, particularly to the resolution of Emily’s story, as she ends up the most central of the child characters, but I found my involvement within the plot to be rather limited.

–

I haven’t even acquired Haruki Murakami’s new book, the mammoth 1Q84, and probably won’t until it ends up in paperback next year. (When I’m reading a book, I tend to carry it all over the place, including on planes, and a three-pound book just isn’t my cup of tea.) I am still working my way through his back catalog, and read the somewhat inconsequential After Dark earlier this month. Telling the story of a few lost souls on one peculiar night in Tokyo, Murakami slips in a little magical realism, a few touches of his usual violence (off screen, for a change), and a lot of the vaguely philosophical dialogue that populates most of his novels.

The two main characters, Mari and Takahashi, meet by chance, and then are thrown together again by necessity, launching them on an all-night conversation that links their story to the parallel tale of Mari’s sister, who has been asleep – but not comatose – for what seems to be months, the result of a depression that is never explained but that has taken a toll on Mari as well. The parallel narrative trick worked more effectively for Murakami in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, another book of his I’d rate below his average (which is still above most contemporary writers’ averages). In After Dark, all edges are blurred, perhaps a nod to the darkness and the way our vision is distorted by artificial light, but that same blurriness keeps his characters at arm’s length, and the novel is so brief that we never learn enough about any of the central characters to understand what’s driving them to or away from anything.

Next up: I just finished W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage – I can think of at least one thing wrong with that title – and have moved on to James Crumley’s hard-boiled detective novel The Last Good Kiss.

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→ December 27, 2011
→ By

Pasta with mushroom sauce.

Amazon has Inception – which I know many of you loved – on sale today for just $8 on Blu-Ray. I liked it, but thought the film made too many sacrifices to the mainstream demands of Hollywood to make it truly great.

–

I’ve grown increasingly fond of using mushrooms as a major flavor in all kinds of dishes now that I’ve learned to prep and cook them properly. Mushrooms are high in compounds that trigger the umami (or savory) taste, which is intensified when the mushrooms are dried, while browning the mushrooms caramelizes the sugars but produces a flavor profile much more similar to seared meat than caramelized vegetables. This recipe takes advantage of both techniques to produce a rich, hearty sauce, thickened with pasta water and a little cream, for a filling side dish or a potential vegetarian entree if made with whole-grain pasta or served with some fresh mozzarella dressed with an herb vinaigrette.

(You will hear and read that you shouldn’t wash raw, fresh mushrooms because they are like “sponges” and will absorb the washing liquid. This is nonsense; raw mushrooms are already pretty well saturated, and when Alton Brown tested this on “The Fungal Saute” episode of Good Eats by weighing the mushrooms before and after washing, he found the mushrooms absorbed only a minimal amount of water. So wash them in a colander, then spread them on paper towels, rolling them in the towels to dry.)

I make the sauce for this dish in a stainless steel saute pan that can handle high heat, but I also run the exhaust fan and cover the smoke detector because I’m pushing the oil to its smoking point. High heat is key to browning the fresh mushrooms and I’m not giving that up just because the smoke detector is too damn close to the kitchen.

Pasta con Sugo ai Funghi (Pasta with Mushroom Sauce)

½ ounce dried porcini or other mushrooms
8 oz fresh cremini (“baby bella”) mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed*, and sliced
1 small shallot, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
¼ cup dry white wine
¼ cup heavy cream
1 tsp minced fresh thyme
1 pound tagliatelle or pappardelle
Grated Pecorino Romano and chopped chives, to taste

1. At least a half hour before you begin cooking, pour 1 cup of boiling water over the dried mushrooms in a heatproof bowl and allow the mushrooms to rehydrate. Strain through a fine-meshed strainer or through damp cheesecloth, but be sure to reserve the soaking liquid. Chop the rehydrated mushrooms, discarding any particularly tough stems.

2. Cook the pasta according to the directions on the box, making sure to heavily salt the cooking water, pulling the pasta when it’s still very al dente. Do not overcook the pasta. When draining, reserve ½ cup of the pasta water.

3. Heat 1 Tbsp olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed saute pan over high heat until shimmering. Add a handful of sliced mushrooms, taking care not to crowd the pan – you should still see plenty of the pan’s bottom through the mushrooms – as well as a pinch of salt. Leave the mushrooms until they are nut-brown on their cooked sides, then flip and brown the second sides. Push these mushrooms to the sides of the pan and repeat the process (adding oil as needed) until all mushrooms are added and browned.

(Don’t panic when the mushrooms appear at first to soak up much of the oil in the pan. They’ll release it as the cell walls break down during cooking.)

4. Add the rehydrated dried mushrooms and cook for about a minute, adding more oil if necessary. Add the shallot and garlic and cook for another 60 seconds.

5. Deglaze the pan with white wine, cooking until the pan is almost dry, and add the strained mushroom soaking liquid, cooking until reduced by half.

6. Add the cream and simmer (do not boil) until thickened. Thin as desired with the reserved pasta water (I add about 2 Tbsp at a time, heat through, and check for consistency). You want this sauce to coat the pasta, but not to pool in the bottom of the bowl.

7. Add the thyme and season with salt and pepper. Add the pasta and cook for sixty seconds or until the pasta reaches the desired texture, adding pasta water if the sauce becomes too thick or dry. Serve with the pecorino romano and top with the chives.

Variation: Before adding the heavy cream, add one small can of diced tomatoes with about half of the can liquid and allow to reduce slightly. Omit the pasta water.

* “Baby bella” is a marketing term, as is portobello; those are just oversized cremini. To remove the stems, just pinch the stem right where it meets the underside of the cap, and gently rock it back and forth to loosen it. You should be able to pull it right out. The tips of all mushroom stems become woody and tough, so you at least need to cut off the final half inch, but I find it’s faster to just remove the stems entirely, and it makes them easier to slice.

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→ December 26, 2011
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Cauliflower steaks … and I Want My Hat Back.

Before I get to the recipe, I have to talk about my favorite gift from Christmas this year – one I gave, not one I received. I’m not even sure how I first heard about Jon Klassen’s book I Want My Hat Back, which has apparently spawned its own online meme, but it is one of the most clever, sneakily macabre childen’s books I have ever seen, one that my daughter and I both loved on first read. It’s about a bear who has lost his hat, asks various forest animals if they’ve seen it, and eventually realizes where his hat is, a few pages after the reader has figured it out. It’s dry and a little twisted, but also perfectly captures how kids lie even when they’re caught red-handed. I’d put the vocabulary level at age 3 or 4, but the subject matter might make 5 a better minimum age. My five-year-old daughter wasn’t disturbed, and she asked to read it again last night, which is good, because I wanted to read it to her again anyway.

—

As for this peculiar side dish, I got the idea from the most recent issue of Bon Appetit, a magazine with which I’ve had pretty mixed results over the years. (The original recipe does include a useful photo if you can’t picture a cauliflower steak.) I’m just finishing a free subscription I received because my wife bought me one of their cookbooks as a gift, and the book included a coupon for a free year of the magazine, but I won’t be renewing because their recipes don’t work well and the magazine seems so much more focused on eating out (and expensively) than on actual cooking. Anyway, the idea of a cauliflower cut vertically into large steaks appealed to me, but I changed up the sauce to something that I thought better suited the mellow, slightly sweet flavor of well-browned cauliflower.

To cut the ‘steaks,’ start with a whole head of cauliflower and trim away all green leaves while leaving the stem intact. Standing the head on its base, make a small mark with your chef’s knife in the center of the top of the cauliflower, and then make similar marks at least ½” in either direction, enough to cut four slabs from the head. Anything less than a half inch won’t hold together when cooked; too much more than about 5/8” and you’ll only get two steaks that won’t cook through before the outside burns. You can cut the remaining florets and brown them with the steaks, or save them for another use (like soup).

This sauce is tangy, but contains no heat; you could also roast a hot pepper, like a red jalapeño, and add it to the puree, or finish the sauce with a few drops of red chile oil.

Cauliflower ‘Steaks’ with Roasted Red Pepper sauce

1 cauliflower head, cut as described into four steaks
2 red bell peppers
2 garlic cloves, peeled
1 Tbsp sherry vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
2 Tbsp olive oil

1. Roast the peppers on all sides under a broiler, about 40 minutes total (turning as needed), until well charred. Throw the garlic cloves on the same sheet pan for about ten minutes to soften and brown slightly. Set the garlic aside.
2. Place the peppers in a bowl and cover with foil for ten minutes to allow the steam to escape the peppers and separate the flesh from the skin. Remove the charred skin, the stems, and any seeds, saving the liquid from inside the peppers.
3. Place the peppers, garlic, pepper liquid, and sherry vinegar in a bowl or cup and puree with an immersion blender, or puree in a food processor. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper and set aside.
4. When the peppers are done, set the oven to bake at 400 degrees. Heat a large saute pan or skillet over medium-high heat.
5. Add 1 Tbsp olive oil to the skillet and heat until shimmering. Add two of the four cauliflower steaks and cook one and a half to two minutes until nicely browned. Flip the steaks carefully with a spatula (place your hand on the cool side to flip without splashing the hot oil on yourself) and brown the alternate sides. Remove the steaks and any stray bits of cauliflower to a rimmed sheet pan, add another tablespoon of oil to the pan, and brown the other two steaks.
6. Roast in the oven for ten minutes until you can easily pierce them through with a paring knife. Remove, season with salt and pepper, and serve on a bed of the roasted red pepper sauce. Finish with a drizzle of an assertive, peppery olive oil if desired.

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→ December 24, 2011
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011 film).

I rate John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy among the best suspense novels I have ever read, a wordy but incredibly tense spy novel from 1974 that borrows from the great detective novels of thirty to forty years prior. Hearing Gary Oldman was set to play the lead in the first adaptation for the theaters was exciting and worrying, not so much about Oldman but about how well such a dense book could be adapted to the two-hour constraints of the modern cinema. The worry was needless, as the adaptation, while dispensing with much of the detail of the book, is extremely faithful to the novel’s plot, and one of the most intense smart films I have ever seen.

(I have not seenthe six-hour BBC adaptation from 1979, starring Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, so I can’t offer a comparison – and, given the differences in duration and thus most likely in pacing, perhaps I’m also not hampered by the comparison either.)

The four words in the film’s title refer to codenames for five* senior British intelligence officers, one of whom is a Soviet double agent, referred to as “Gerald” in the book but only as “the mole” in the movie. As the movie opens, we see a botched operation in Budapest that appears to leave another British agent mortally wounded, after which the head of the unit, known only as “Control,” and senior agent George Smiley (Oldman) are sacked. Several months later, after Control’s death, Smiley is approached by Oliver Lacon, the civil servant who oversees MI6, the domestic intelligence agency known colloquially as “the Circus” (for Cambridge Circus, where Le Carré has located MI6’s offices), to lead an off-the-books investigation to identify the mole. Officially retired, Smiley recruits the young Peter Guillam, still employed by MI6, and one other retired agent to find out how Budapest truly went awry, what happened in Istanbul with rogue agent Ricky Tarr, and to ultimately set the trap into which the mole will walk.

*The fifth is Smiley, who is absolved from guilt when the investigation begins, while the name “Poorman” is used for the remaining suspect.

Oldman plays Smiley with tremendous understatement, especially in comparison to roles like Stansfield or Sirius Black, very much in keeping with Le Carré’s Smiley, who, even when beset by inner turmoil, rarely lets it reach the surface, and prefers to conduct his interrogations as the facilitator rather than the aggressor. This is a film of absent looks and tense pauses, with Smiley setting up the pins for others to knock down. Whether this is Best Actor nomination material or not depends largely on performances I haven’t seen by other actors, but its subtlety might mask its degree of difficulty to the point where voters overlook how key Oldman’s performance was to the film; his one great scene, reimagining a conversation with a briefly captured Soviet agent in Delhi several years previously, nearly explodes with Smiley’s emotional turmoil (and the symbolism of the purloined lighter), yet never quite boils over. One can only imagine the American remake, what with smashed lamps or over-the-top profanity or whatnot.

Aside from Oldman, the cast reads like the leading British actors were all fighting each other to get parts in the film, resulting in some powerful performances by big names in modest roles. Colin Firth appears as the caddish Bill Haydon; Ciarán Hinds (perhaps known best as Albus Dumbledore’s brother in the last two Harry Potter films) is underused as Roy Bland; John Hurt, as Control, is apparently morphing into Ian McKellen; Stephen Graham (of Snatch and Boardwalk Empire) has a critical cameo; and Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays Sherlock Holmes in the current BBC series starring that character) is even more critical as Peter Guillam, as tied up by internal demons as Smiley yet less able to restrain them. Even Tom Hardy, as Ricky Tarr, the one character who shows substantial emotions in the film (crossing the line into the pathetic, a deviation from the literary Tarr), manages to avoid sliding into the melodramatic.

The pacing of Tinker Tailor is outstanding, a direction set in the opening sequence, where the screenwriters have heightened the tension by putting the blown operation first. I remembered just enough of the book to follow the story without trouble – I actually remembered the codename of the mole, but not his actual identity, so I wasn’t sure of the ending until the big reveal. However, if you haven’t read the book, the film doesn’t waste much time with explanatory material, and it might take you a few scenes to figure out who’s who and what exactly is under investigation. The flashback scenes aren’t that clearly delineated from the present-day investigation, since they only go back a year or so and can’t be distinguished with hair and makeup. Karla, the fanatical KGB super-agent who never appears in the film except in flashbacks where only his torso is visible, also never receives any sort of introduction before characters begin referring to his existence. We lose some of the backstory of the four suspects, but it’s less necessary in a film that revolves around Smiley and the unraveling of the intrigue, rather than, say, the psychological motivation of the traitor.

The upside of the lack of long-winded explanatory passages is that the film drops you right in the heart of the action, grabs you by the throat, and spends two hours daring you to breathe. And yet there are no cheap, mass-market gimmicks to turn a taut, intelligent spy novel into a mainstream action flick; the furthest it panders is the occasional bit of inserted humor, or the on-screen death of a character whom I think was merely presumed killed by the Russians in the book, but nothing that changes the plot itself, which is ideal as the plot is the book’s greatest strength. (Connie Sacks’ one laugh-inducing line, while funny, is hopelessly out of tune with the rest of the movie, unfortunately.) Deviate from the details if you must, but when the plot’s the thing, leave it be, and the screenwriters – one of whom died at age 49 of cancer before the film was released – did just that.

The only real issue I had with this adaptation is the ending, where the final exposure of the mole’s identity is cut quite short, replaced with a series of wordless scenes set to a recording of “La Mer,” a great song that seemed forced here in a film so reliant on silence through its first 120 minutes. I could have done with less of that, especially the final flashback to the agency holiday party, and more with Smiley confronting the turncoat. It was an average finish to an otherwise plus film, one I’d gladly see again to watch for details I missed because I was so engrossed in the plot.

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→ December 22, 2011
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Top Chef, S9E8.

Notes from the episode where we see that Heather is indeed like a detuned radio…

* The conversations in the car were a little odd, but if Heather wants John Besh, she may have to fight Chris C. for him.

* Quickfire: I’m not a big fan of these mid-challenge twists. What are we measuring here? It feels like we’re just trying to create more drama. They could have just taken three tweets up front and said: Do a bacon hash with one ingredient added by a competing chef. Is that any less compelling to watch?

* Why not do something crazy with bacon in this challenge? I can’t get over the chefs here who looked at the bacon traditionally. You know the nine other chefs are likely to think traditionally, and you have to figure there will be some changes as the challenge goes along.

* Is sriracha an ingredient, or just a condiment? I don’t know, but this is hilarious anyway. I didn’t think this was such a dick move on the face of it – I think you could get away with using a small amount, just enough to produce some heat, without letting it overpower the dish. Maple syrup, which Lindsay gave Chris C. in return, seems much more likely to assert its presence in unwanted ways. (And I say that as someone who will, when your back is turned, drink maple syrup out of the bottle.)

* Chris J. used twitter as the verb instead of tweet. He fails the Internet.

* Quickfire results: Loved the idea of Sarah’s burrata stuffed squash blossom (and so did Hugh), but I was surprised to see it was among the worst dishes. Beverly is in the top three, so the editors show Heather’s face, of course. And Paul is so clearly ahead of the rest of the pack it’s not even funny. He’s cooking on another level. This thing has to be his to lose right now.

* So I had a brief, mostly facetious Twitter conversation with Hugh Acheson last night about whether Grayson is pretty, or just “Top Chef pretty.” One thing that I keep noticing is that she looks very different in the confessionals than she does in the cooking clips – like she’s put on weight since the show. I also noticed that Sarah looked much prettier in the older photos where she had longer hair. This stuff really doesn’t matter, but I keep noticing it.

* On Patti Labelle: I don’t care what song you sing, if you sing like that, you have my attention.

* Elimination challenge: Cook a dish inspired by the person who inspired you to cook. Granted, I’m not a professional chef, but I’d have a hard time with this because I wasn’t really inspired by someone’s cooking, but simply by the need for one of us to cook when I was in grad school, and with my wife exhausted every day from teaching preschool, shouldn’t it be me? I don’t cook the kind of food my mom cooked when I was growing up, and while my professional pastry-chef cousin has been a huge help to me when I’ve had cooking questions, I first learned to cook from outside sources like Good Eats and Joy of Cooking.

* Quick thoughts on the dishes: Chris J.’s steak looked blue (as in too rare) on my TV, and really dude, A1 sauce as an ingredient? … Heather’s spaetzle looked awesome, but the fear of the pressure cooker despite the different protein seemed out of nowhere. Loved Patti delivering the snark on her dish … I worried Sarah’s sausage-stuffed cabbage was too simple, but it did sound amazing (and obviously was), plus once you read the recipe you can see how complex it really is with sausage wrapped in kale wrapped in cabbage … Paul didn’t get in the top three but I still feel like he’s way ahead of everyone else with his skills and his vision … Beverly was surprisingly elegant here with her Korean short rib, so regardless of what Heather says, it seems clear the Bevster can make Asian work for her … Chris C. claiming he was “hoping the judges wouldn’t notice” makes me think he’s never watched the show. They always notice. Anyway, he’s starting to remind me of Kenny the “Preppin’ Weapon,” who could clearly cook but came up with these convoluted dishes where he sank a good idea under three more elements … Edward’s bibimbap without the stone bowl was genius in its presentation, in the contrarian move of going vegetarian, and in incorporating a ton of umami-packed elements on top of the crispy rice. Absolutely going to try that at home … Grayson apologized for her dish! Weak. Anyway, you can’t waste meat in front of Tom, and the dish seemed horribly dated … Ty-Lor, who also has apparently never watched Top Chef before, fried chicken tenders in duck fat. He had me at “fried in duck fat.” Anyone else notice a lot of peaches in dishes this season? Was it a bumper peach crop in Texas? … Lindsay’s trout spanakopita seemed clever, although I’m not a big roe fan; looking at the recipe now I can see why the butter sauce would have overwhelmed the dish, which wasn’t clear to me from watching the show.

* I’m sure Tom comparing Heather to Beverly at judges’ table was just a coincidence.

* Anyway, good riddance to bad rubbish with this elimination. I can’t help but think there was a racial component to Heather’s bullying of Beverly, and I think we’ll see some smartassery from Heather when Beverly shows up in Last Chance Kitchen. Speaking of LCK, great to see Nyesha start fulfilling my prediction that she’ll hold that jacket for a while, and to see her articulate her dislike for Heather and carry it out by executing a dessert for the win.

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