→ April 26, 2012
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Husk, Vin Rouge, Customshop.

Today’s Klawchat transcript, and today’s Baseball Today podcast.

—

Husk, located in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, was named the best new restaurant in the country for 2011 by Bon Appetit magazine, just the best of a host of accolades earned by chef Sean Brock (formerly of McCrady’s). I had lunch at Husk, which isn’t the full experience (with a very different menu from what they serve for dinner), but loved their local-seasonal-artisanal approach to traditional southern cuisine.

Husk has a giant blackboard right by the podium showing where the restaurant obtained all of its main ingredients, from proteins to dairy to eggs, with most sources quite local, in either South or North Carolina. I overordered a little, but rational portion sizes meant I didn’t end up with a ton of food left over. The catfish, lightly dusted with cornmeal and quickly panfried, served over a broth of tomatoes, several beans (including lima beans), and pea shoots, was superb, easily the best catfish I’ve ever eaten, with none of the ‘fishy’ flavor most people would associate with that fish, instead playing up what a mild, slightly sweet-tasting fish it can be when sourced properly. The skillet of bacon cornbread was also superb, rich, crispy on the bottom from the skillet and the bacon fat, with flecks of bacon throughout; this may have been gauche, but I found it quite useful for dipping in the tomato broth underneath the fish. For dessert, Husk had a special item, a blueberry crisp with local berries, a very thin layer of buckwheat granola on top, and a quenelle of lemon ice cream; overall the dish was far less sweet than most desserts, with a tangy/sweet combination that kept the blueberries at the center of the dish.

Service overall was very attentive, if a little peculiar. When I told the server it was my first time at the restaurant and asked for her recommendations, she actually recommended the cheeseburger, saying it was “the best thing on the menu.” That may be true, but is that really what I’m here for? I’ll get a burger at a great burger place. I went to Husk for the chef’s innovations in southern food. And I hope eventually to get back there for dinner, preferably with a few months’ notice so I can actually get a reservation.

–

A few weeks back, I had a postgame meal in Durham at Vin Rouge, another discovery from Bon Appetit because the restaurant had participated in a charity dinner in Raleigh that was covered by the magazine. I tweeted at the time that their bacon confiture – a bacon, onion, brown sugar confection served with thick slices of country bread – was on the short list of the best things I have ever eaten, and I admit I haven’t stopped thinking about the dish since then. It overshadowed the meal itself, trout amandine that was slightly overcooked in the kitchen and became very overcooked on its way to me because the trout – the whole fish, or about two meals for me – was still folded in half and thus continued to steam itself until I opened it up. The mashed potatoes on the plate, however, were divine, with God-knows-how-much cream/butter and a perfectly smooth texture. As a wine bistro, Vin Rouge doesn’t have much of a beer selection, which isn’t so much a complaint (did I expect anything different) as a comment for those of you who, like me, prefer barley to grapes. I will return, just with a different choice of entree.

–

Kiley McDaniel and I went to Charlotte’s Customshop last night at the suggestion of a reader (I apologize, I don’t remember who passed it along). Their concept is great – local sourcing, in-house preparations (such as duck- and chicken-liver pate) – but the execution wasn’t there last night. The braised pork belly had great color on the exterior and the ale and cider reduction was a perfect complement, but the meat was tough and some of the edges of the belly were actually charred. The roasted half-duck special had a crispy skin dusted with Chinese five-spice powder, but again, the meat was overcooked and tough, refusing to separate from the bones. They have a solid selection of charcuterie items – we went with Speck, Manchego (with honey), and drunken goat (with quince paste) – and the bread pudding (with sliced apples and caramel sauce, albeit with some over-roasted walnuts) was generally strong. With ingredients this good, the finished product felt more disappointing for the lack of execution because it could have been phenomenal with a more deft hand.

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→ April 25, 2012
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The Tin Drum.

In case you missed it, I did a redraft of the first round of the 2002 Rule 4 draft for ESPN.com yesterday.

Günter Grass’ novel The Tin Drum stands for critics as one of the greatest novels in German literature, ranking 39th on The Novel 100, 70th on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 greatest novels ever written, and ranking fifth on this list of the best German novels of last century. Reading it for leisure doesn’t quite measure up to reading it as literature, and I believe a good number of allusions flew over my head due to my unfamiliarity with German (and Polish) history, but I hope I can recognize a novel’s greatness even if I wouldn’t say I loved reading it.

The drum of the title refers to a toy drum received by the narrator and main character, Oskar, for his third birthday. Oskar, precocious, cynical, and perhaps delusional, claims his personality was fully developed at birth, and at the age of three he stages an accident to prevent himself from growing physically, giving him an unusual vantage point for seeing and fooling the world, as he can play the innocent child to escape from mortal danger (even as he sends others, including both of the men he suspects of being his biological father, to their deaths), and uses that ruse to survive the German invasion of his hometown of Danzig/Gdansk, the assault on the Polish Post Office, Kristallnacht, World War II, and its immediate aftermath.

Oskar is mischievous, often devious, and has a strong instinct for self-preservation that he executes with one of his two great skills, using his voice to shatter glass, often to get what he wants but sometimes merely for the pleasure of destroying (although he might actually view it as creating, as a form of art). His other skill is to communicate via his drum: By playing the instrument, he can tell extensive stories and communicate his desires even before he’s able to speak – and he can pretend that he’s unable to speak for years beyond the point when he’s learned to do so.

Aside from the rampant symbolism – the drum, art, glass, aromas (Oskar has a hypersensitive sense of smell), Oskar’s obsession with his heritage despite its lack of clarity, and more – the brilliance of The Tin Drum is its use of humor and picaresque elements to lampoon Naziism, the church (and its complicity with the regime), and the willingness of so many Germans to go along with the regime. The book is sometimes crude and bawdy, but it’s in the service of dark, biting humor that tears apart Grass’s targets, such as the Nazi soldiers rotely building a wall and entombing small animals in it. You may often wish to avert your eyes (the horse’s head scene comes to mind), but these passages tend to be the book’s most powerful both on initial reading and after the book is done.

That said, it’s a tough read for two major reasons. One is simply that German syntax, even in this new, improved translation, doesn’t read that well to my English-reared mind. The other is that Oskar rambles, leading me to question whether he’s all there mentally or might even be unreliable as a narrator, producing long passages where nothing happens and I felt like I was reading in circles. The lengthy gaps between passages of action, or humor, or even dialogue, made it a tough slog, especially the final 100-150 pages – ordinarily a time of acceleration as the plot nears its conclusion. With The Tin Drum more of a history of a fictional character than a traditional linear narrative, there are no major plot points to resolve, and Oskar only undergoes one significant (albeit very significant) transformation in the book. It’s a cerebral novel where Oskar has some realizations but generally refuses to grow up, drawing not just from the picaresque tradition but from coming-of-age novels as well.

Next up: Alan Bradley’s second Flavia de Luce novel, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag.

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→ April 21, 2012
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Saturday five, 4/21/12.

My Tuesday column this week was on six relievers who should be starters, and I played the host to guest Chris Sprow on Wednesday’s Baseball Today podcast. And there’s the transcript to his week’s Klawchat. My post on Charleston and West Virginia prospects should be up this afternoon.

* Bob Woodward on investigative journalism and the Internet. I’d say I found this shocking, but the students in question were Yalies, after all. On a more serious note, though, I think this speaks, albeit in an overdramatic way, to the importance of old-school, first-person journalism, and perhaps an excessive faith in the cult of the amateur online.

* Amazon’s pricing war with publishers over e-books. Of course, I prefer dead trees, but I’m also a big amazon proponent, so some of what I read here was dismaying.

* The fight to preseve 35mm in a film industry increasingly pushing towards digital recording. Boogie Nights called this fifteen years ago.

* Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel takes the NCAA to task over transfer bans. Frankly, the idea that a player has to sit out a year when transferring bothers me more than anything else. They’re not employees bound by non-competes. They’re not employees, period, according to the NCAA.

* Animal Antibiotics: FDA Asks Drug Companies To Limit Overuse Amid Health Concerns. I’ve got a better idea: Stop buying antibiotic-fed meat. If demand drops, or if demand for antibiotic-free meat rises (supporting higher prices), we’ll see a reduction in their use – and factory farms depend on antibiotics to allow them to crowd their animals in unsanitary and inhumane conditions.

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→ April 17, 2012
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Atlanta, Macon, Greenville, & Baton Rouge eats.

The marquee meal of the trip was Top Chef All-Stars winner Richard Blais’ new “haute doggery,” HD1, located in Atlanta. I went with the Eastbound and Down dog, given its baseball theme and the presence of pulled pork as one of the toppings on the hot dog, along with sweet mustard and cole slaw, and it didn’t disappoint. As you’ve probably heard (I’ve said it enough recently), I ended a ten-year boycott of hot dogs with this meal; I gave them up because, as I told Chef Blais when he came on the podcast last month, in most cases you just don’t know what you’re eating when you get one. I’d also had too many mediocre or worse hot dogs and found that I always felt lousy after eating them, so the easy solution was to just cut them out. HD1’s hot dog was worth making the exception, bringing back a lot of (possibly constructed) memories from childhood – this is what I think a hot dog at the ballpark used to taste like, even though I know it was certainly never this good.

The pulled pork worked surprisingly well as a supporting player, bringing smoky and savory elements that made the final product more complex, so it felt more like real food as opposed to fast or junk food, while the thin layer of mustard gave the sandwich a much-needed sharpness. The waffle fries come with a sweet/spicy maple-soy dressing that defied my palate’s expectation of sweet/salty/sour (that is, ketchup); most potatoes aren’t that flavorful, so the bold sauce works really well on the blank canvas, although I ended up adding salt to mute the sweetness (I love maple syrup, but it is really sweet). The homemade pickles were actually the better of the two sides – large chunks with a subtle yet strong spicy finish. I was there just before 2 pm on a Wednesday, so the place was pretty quiet, but I like the décor and the vibe – the seating is mostly communal – and with a pretty broad menu that features various sausages (I’d like to try their Merguez, made with lamb), at least one vegetarian option, a good beer/wine selection, it seems like a good place to head with a group.

I followed several reader recommendations to hit Atlanta’s Antico Pizza, serving thin-crust, wood-fired pizzas reportedly in the tradition of Naples, itself the pizza capital of Italy (although regional variations abound). Antico’s pizzas are very good, a 55 on the 20-80 scale, a little too spongy in the crust, with high-quality toppings cut way too large for the pizza; the fennel sausage itself was fine, but balls of sausage the diameter of a half-dollar are too big for any kind of pizza, much less a thin-crust variety. That sausage is the star player on the San Gennaro pizza, along with sweet red peppers, cipolline onions, and mozzarella di bufala, a classic combination that, while tricky to eat, brought a solid balance of salty and savory flavors on a spongy dough.

They make several claims that they’re serving “authentic pizza napoletana,” and while what they offer is good, it’s not authentic. There are fairly specific guidelines on what authentic Neapolitan pizza comprises, including a thinner crust than what Antico offers (it should be 0.36-0.44 cm thick, specifically), a wetter center, smaller toppings, and usually fresh mozzarella rather than what I assume was the low-moisture mozzarella Antico used on the pizza I got. This is more a Neapolitan/New York-style hybrid, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Antico offers a very reasonable value ($21 for one pizza that was two meals’ worth of food for me) for what is at heart an artisanal product, but it’s not as good as Scottsdale’s ‘Pomo, which is actually certified as authentic (take that for what it’s worth – I may be Italian by descent, but I lack faith in any sort of Italian authority) and meets the requirements for authentic pizza napoletana. And ‘Pomo isn’t even the best pizza in the Valley.

Macon eats were generally unremarkable; the best meal was at the Bear’s Den, offering southern comfort food in a meat-and-two format, with the fried chicken at least above-average (very crispy crust, not too greasy) but the fried okra very disappointing (crust was soft, inside wasn’t evenly cooked) and the cornbread dressing somewhere in between. Breakfasts at Market Street Cafe and at Jeneane’s were both generally disappointing; Market Street Cafe did have a decent biscuit, but that’s about it. I did have a place in mind in Baxley, Georgia, where Byron Buxton plays – K&L Barbecue, where they serve the meat on a baked potato – but the game ran over three hours, by which point the restaurant was closed, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever be in Baxley again.

Moving on to Greenville, SC, one of the coolest towns I’ve come across in all of my travels – in less than 24 hours I was thinking about whether I could live there, and leaning towards ‘yes’ – after leaving the gorgeous Fluor Field and hitting Main Street at around 10:15 on a Wednesday night, I was shocked to find few parking spots open, plenty of people milling about, and a number of bars and restaurants still open or just closing up. I ended up at Stellar Wine Bar, which offers a small menu of appetizers, tapas, and entrees, and what they do offer they do very well. The server was a little thrown by my open-ended request for suggestions – I told her I eat just about everything and wanted to try two smaller plates rather than one entree – but eventually gave me her five favorites, from which I chose two.

Their veal “paté” is actually a terrine of seasoned ground veal wrapped in bacon and sliced thinly, served with crisp slices of pretzel bread (termed ciabatta on the menu, but that’s not what I got on the plate), spicy whole-grain mustard, diced white onions, and cornichons. It was a tricky dish to eat – the cornichons had no intention of cooperating with my plan to get every element into one bite – but, even as someone who prefers meat dishes hot rather than cold, I was impressed by the layering of flavors and the perfect seasoning on the meat, although the presence of cold, soft bacon on the outside didn’t do much other than hold the thing together (sort of).

The diver scallops over cauliflower puree were perfectly seared, perhaps slightly overcooked in the center but not to the point of toughness, and the cauliflower puree was light and a bit creamy, giving a richness to contrast to the lean scallops. For dessert, I took the server’s suggestion of the flourless chocolate torte (over chocolate mousse or bread pudding), which was dark, rich, had a hint of cinnamon, but was a little too dense, to the point where it was hard to cut or chew.

For breakfast, Marybeth’s promised a slightly more upscale take on basic breakfast items, with my meal somewhat hit or miss. The scrambled eggs with goat cheese and basil were made to order but so massive (it had to be at least three eggs, probably four or five) that they were overcooked on the edges while soft in the center. The hash browns, however, were superb, perfectly browned on the surface, soft and fluffy inside, and not greasy in the least. Just add salt and go.

Final stop was Baton Rouge, good for one meal and one dessert. The meal was very ordinary, Sammy’s Grill on Highland (a reader rec) – the gumbo was thin and the grilled shrimp po’ boy, while made with very fresh shrimp, desperately needed some kind of seasoning. Also, they didn’t hollow out the bread, which I thought was part of the definition of a po’ boy, although I could be wrong about that. Dessert was better, at Rue Beignet, apparently the upstart in competition with Baton Rouge landmark Coffee Call; the beignets (a photo of which I posted on Twitter) were extremely light and airy inside, crispy and brown on the outside, although without the powdered sugar they didn’t have much flavor beyond that of “fried dough” – not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that. They also served the obligatory weak cafe au lait, which I would never drink anywhere except in Louisiana. One warning – Rue Beignet isn’t open as late as Coffee Call, but they did serve me even though I arrived just a few minutes before closing.

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→ 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.

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→ 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.

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→ 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.

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→ 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.

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→ 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.

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→ April 5, 2012
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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.

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