→ October 28, 2010
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East Valley eats.

One music note (pun intended) before I get to the food: Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs (best album I’ve heard in 2010) and their debut album Funeral are both just $5 as mp3 downloads on amazon.com, probably just through the end of the month (Sunday night). Their second album, Neon Bible, is just $5.99 as a download, but I don’t think that disc measures up – you could buy “Keep the Car Running” and call it a day.

–

Jason Grey has been trying to get me to try Rancho de Tia Rosa in Mesa for at least three years now, but it was never convenient until we moved to this part of the Valley. (When we were here for spring training, we’d stay in north Scottsdale, near Kierland, so heading out to eastern Mesa for dinner was a haul and would have screwed with my daughter’s bed time.) The restaurant absolutely lived up to expectations, especially since, like Ortega’s in San Diego, Tia Rosa makes their own old-school flour tortillas, the biggest delimiter for me between an ordinary Mexican restaurant and an above-average one. We’ve been there once so far, although we’re going again soon, and the portions are generous with very fresh ingredients. I ordered the carne asada, figuring I’d start with a classic dish (the menu has a mix of classics and modern Mexican cuisine); the flavor was outstanding, deep, smoky, not too salty, but unfortunately the meat had dried out a little, probably because it was slow-cooked all day and then held a little too warm for service. I don’t pay extra for ambiance, but my wife was impressed by the building and décor inside; I’m more about the tortillas and salsas and bright flavors, enough that I’m willing to give them a pass on the dryness of the main course.

In downtown Mesa on Main Street, there’s a small lunch place called Mangos that apparently keeps inconsistent hours for dinner, but for lunch it’s more of a nicer twist on a taco shop. Their fish taco is the best I’ve ever had, hot, crispy, non-greasy, with just enough seasoning, and their aguas frescas were outstanding – I went with the cashier’s recommendation, a mix of watermelon and pineapple. The shrimp taco wasn’t as good as the fish taco, mostly because it seemed undersalted, but all ingredients on both tacos were fresh, and the tacos plus beans and rice ran about $11 for more food than I could think about eating. Mangos has a sister restaurant in downtown Chandler called El Zocalo that is just a poor imitation of Tia Rosa, as expensive but with inferior product; you’re paying mostly for setting and atmosphere, and I’d rather pay for the food.

The Urban Grocery and Wine Bar at the Phoenix Public Market doesn’t have an extensive menu, but the market itself is worth checking out. At the grocery counter you can order a few sandwich items, including a roast beef sandwich that feels artisanal through all of its ingredients, from the baguette to the spicy mustard to the unusual pickles, and the sandwich is generously filled. My only complaint was that the roast beef was sliced thickly and incorrectly, resulting in a very tough product that detracted from the experience, but if that’s not the norm, it’s a steal at $7.

For pizza, I’d still call Grimaldi’s the tops among casual places in the area, but Florencia’s on Ray in Ahwautukee (near 40th) does a very solid rendition of New York-style pizza, with just a little too much sauce separating them from NYC slice-dom. The Italian sausage had a nice pronounced fennel note, and the sauce isn’t sweet as it too often is outside of New York. The pesto was a little oily for me but had a good balance of basil, garlic, and cheese. The garden salad, while basic, has always included very fresh ingredients, and the homemade balsamic dressing is solid if a touch thin.

We’ve tried three local dessert options, two of which are gelaterias. The winner there is Angel Sweet, on Chandler Blvd just east of Dobson, tucked in a strip mall with a Starbucks and a Basha’s. The owner of Angel Sweet – whom we’ve never seen – is reportedly Japanese, but I think he has an Italian soul given how incredibly smooth and precise his gelatos are. The super dark chocolate does not boast without cause, as it is about as black as the last banana with strong cocoa flavor, while the mint is actually a straciatella with an unusually round, full mint flavor. The panna cotta and crème caramel are similar, but I prefer the darker caramel notes in the panna cotta. The coconut, one of my two bellwether flavors along with dark chocolate, is bright and fresh and not too sweet. My wife and daughter are both big fans of the seasonal pumpkin pie flavor.

The other gelateria we’ve found is Enzo’s, on Ray Road, run by an emigrant from Italy who also pulls what looks like a legit shot of espresso. He’s extremely friendly, but unfortunately the gelato we had was slightly grainy and didn’t have the same powerful flavors as Angel Sweet’s. Che peccato.

Cake Cafe on Ray Rd in Ahwautukee is primarily a cupcake shop that also sells custom cakes, typically selling a dozen or so cupcake flavors on any given day. I’d call it fringe-average, not quite as good as Sprinkles (which to me is the definition of solid-average, useful since it’s likely some of you have tried it) because the cupcakes tend to be slightly dry, and the frosting portions are a little meager. The buttercreams are smooth and rich with solid flavors, as good as my own but made with (I assume) less swearing. At $2 apiece they’re actually a good value relative to what most cupcake shops charge.

Finally, to the burger debate. It started on Twitter when someone asked if I’d tried Smash Burger, which I did shortly afterwards, but devolved into a partisan Five Guys/In-n-Out argument, which I assume was geographically motivated. Smash Burger itself was a big disappointment; other than the fact that the burger was extremely hot when it reached the table, there was nothing good about the meal. The burger was greasy, but not with the rich, fulfilling flavor of beef fat – it tasted of the grill, of a thousand burgers and chicken breasts and other who-knows-what made before, a stale, slightly burned flavor that made me feel like I was in a rundown diner at 1 in the morning. The fries, covered in a rosemary-garlic mixture, weren’t fresh-cut and probably went from a freezer bag to the deep fryer. With In-n-Out here and Five Guys invading, I see no reason to think Smash Burger can succeed. Then again, I have no idea how Burger King still exists, so who knows.

As for Five Guys and In-n-Out, I stand by my assessment that Five Guys offers a better burger. Most of the counterarguments I’ve heard revolve around the In-n-Out burger package, not the meat itself. When you cook an extremely thin, tightly packed hamburger to well done, as In-n-Out does, you’re going to end up with a dry product. In-n-Out compensates for that by putting Thousand Island dressing, which at its heart is just jarred mayonnaise, on the bun, which adds fat back to the sandwich and keeps the bottom bun from getting soggy, but the burger itself is as dry as it gets. If you don’t believe me, try this experiment: Order a plain burger at both In-n-Out and Five Guys – no cheese, no condiments, no vegetation. Just the burger. Five Guys also cooks their burgers to well done – I wish they would stop at medium well – but the burger is thicker and loosely packed, so it retains some moisture and fat. I just don’t see any comparison.

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→ October 26, 2010
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Top Chef: Just Desserts midpoint review.

Top Chef: Just Desserts has reached its halfway point, and so far, I’m sorry to say I’m underwhelmed. I had pretty high hopes for the show, primarily because as both a cook and an eater I love desserts of all sorts – classic and modern, simple and complex, pastries and custards, you name it. Even though I understand the chemistry behind the transformations, there’s something thrilling about watching a handful of basic ingredients turn into a finished product that delivers flavors and textures unimaginable from the initial list of components, just because of a little know-how and the skill that comes from repetition.

But the emphasis of TC:JD hasn’t been the food so much, but the contestants, who seem to have been selected for their capacity to generate drama rather than their culinary know-how. As a result, the show seems to have more in common with Project Runway than with the original Top Chef, and while I watch Runway*, it’s primarily my wife’s show – our deal is I watch that with her and she watches the Top Chef series with me.

*I had to leave the room after the elimination on last week’s episode of Project Runway because I couldn’t watch the eliminated designer’s reaction, which seemed to me to reveal a lot of pain beyond the end of his time in the competition. I can’t imagine a life where something as fundamental to your identity as your sexual orientation leads to a gulf between you and your parents, and it’s clear that his parents’ treatment of him has had lasting, negative effects on his emotional state and even his self-esteem. It was brutal on its own, and to see that in light of the recent spate of news stories about suicides by gay teenagers … I couldn’t watch it. Just love your children, people.

The initial drama was high-strung (but apparently talented) chef Seth, who won the first quick-fire of the season and by the end of the second episode seemed to be suffering from some sort of mental illness or breakdown – I’ve theorized something along the lines of Asperger’s, although I am not a professional and recognize that you can’t diagnose someone through a television set. But his reactions to setbacks and inability to communicate with other contestants had to be evident to the producers during the interviewing process, and I can only conclude that they chose him for the show because they thought he’d be good television, rather than seeing him as an unstable person who, at best, would make other denizens of the house uncomfortable with his antics. His exit, after an unseen anxiety attack, was more than welcome if only because of the amount of time in each episode devoted to his weirdness and others’ (valid) complaints about it, although I find it odd that they didn’t show whatever meltdown he had right before the attack. (You put him on the show, and he does something crazy yet utterly predictable, and you don’t show it? Exactly how bad was it?)

No sooner was Seth out the door, however, than Heather H. loses her mind over some slight, real or perceived, from Morgan, although the edited version we saw made it appear that she volunteered to do the one group piece for her team by herself and then was annoyed that Morgan didn’t help her with it and won the overall challenge himself. Again, we’re seeing edited footage, but the complaint that he degrades women by calling them “darlin” doesn’t hold much water with me – it’s not an insult by itself, and he’s pretty clearly a charmer by nature, with that language just part of his overall act. Last week, there’s a pea-puree-style controversy when one of Heather H.’s items disappeared, and she’s blaming Morgan despite a total lack of evidence that he did anything, making her look like the paranoid nut job brought in to create drama after Seth left. That’s a lot of unnecessary, uninteresting drama for six episodes, and I haven’t even mentioned the apparently-depressed Heather C., the definitely-depressed Malika (with good reason – she was going through a divorce after her restaurant failed), or the angry Tania (thankfully ousted in episode 1). Was this really the optimal set of contestants, or merely the mix most likely to deliver water-cooler fodder for the show?

As for the competition itself, I thought after week 4 that three of the eight chefs remaining had separated themselves from the group – Morgan, Zac, and Yigit. I’m pulling for Yigit primarily because I’m most interested in his food; Morgan seems extremely skilled and I do like his ideas, but Yigit offers the best combination of pushing the envelope and technical ability, although I’d like to see him able to use his reported background in molecular gastronomy more, perhaps as we approach the finale. Zac appears to be very talented and might have the strongest sense of flavor of anyone on the show, although his personality is about as grating as a rusty Microplane, and the whole obsession with Gail’s shoes fell somewhere between creepy and stalker-ish.

Other thoughts…

  • I’m glad to see that Eric, the lone baker among a group of pastry chefs, is faring better in the various challenges, but if you’re going to invite a baker to compete on the show, at some point don’t you have to have a baking challenge? Some of the early competitions made him look sloppy and talentless, but the issue is that his talents are geared toward a different sphere of desserts.
  • Gail’s been a little better in her role as head judge after the first week or two, when her attempts to seem severe (a la Tom Colicchio) made her seem unlikeable, but her main issue now seems to be excessive awareness of the camera. She needs to just forget the camera’s there, because what she says is usually informative, but she’s coming off as stiff when I would wager good money that she’s nothing like that off air.
  • My wife and I both feel like Johnny Iuzzini keeps falling on the wrong side of the snark fence. There’s funny snark, and there’s vicious snark, and I think Iuzzini too often comes across as nasty, or at least cutting. If a contestant’s dish sucks, it sucks, but there’s a way to express that without conveying the sentiment that the contestant is simply incompetent and should stay out of the kitchen – especially when said contestant is standing right in front of you, already humiliated at his/her place in the bottom three (and often with the knowledge before judges’ table that his/her dish failed).
  • Erica’s soapy ice cream is a real mystery to me, and I wish they’d spent more time on that – or, in general, on why certain dishes failed. Soapy taste or texture is usually a case of too much baking soda or an otherwise basic (as opposed to acidic) product, but that wouldn’t apply here. Was there actually soap in the ice cream, perhaps from the last time the ice cream machine was cleaned? (That would be ironic, since the whole show is sponsored by a soap company. I imagine Dial executives hitting the ceiling when they saw the judges talking about “soap” like it was a dirty word.)
  • Was it just us, or were the judges awfully lenient about the “black” part of the black-and-white desserts challenge in the last episode? There was an awful lot of brown on those plates, as well as some purple. (My wife thought red should have been acceptable, since newspapers are black and white and “red” all over.)

At this point, I’d rank the remaining six contestants, best to worst, like so: Yigit, Morgan, Zac, Heather, Eric, Danielle. I think any of the first three could win, and I expect Danielle to be next out the door. The biggest gap in those rankings is between Zac and Heather, with another between Heather and Eric, but I think Yigit has the potential to blow away the field if the challenges give him more opportunity to show off his technical skills.

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→ October 24, 2010
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A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

Robert Olen Butler won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, yet another entry in the canon of literature about the Vietnam War. Butler’s conceit is a new one, revolving around Vietnamese immigrants in the greater New Orleans area, transplants from one delta to another, dealing with the culture gap as well as the weight of history, of a country left behind, a war lost, and often a family divided by death or distance. These depictions show great empathy for his subjects, but rarely veer into the sentimental, instead giving greater depth and color to a population that is marginalized here after a war that, despite hundreds of novels and stories on the subject, is still in search of its great, defining literary work. I’m not sure that this is it, though.

The strongest stories blended the experiences of their central Vietnamese characters into American settings, giving readers familiar ground underneath the unfamiliar emotions or cultural norms of their subjects. “The Trip Back” takes a common subject, the declining health and memory loss of an aged family member, and grafts it on to a Vietnamese couple struggling emotionally in their new country as they receive a visit from that family member, not realizing his mental state until after he gets off the plane. (Nice job by the Vietnamese branch of the family, failing to inform the American branch that the man was senile.)

One exception, the title story, is the best of the collection as it follows the conversation between a dying Vietnamese man and the ghost of Ho Chi Minh, whose hands are coated with sugar from his time in Escoffier’s kitchen before his own radicalization. Ho admits to his dying friend that he is not at peace in the afterlife, and the friend realizes it’s because Ho used confectioner’s sugar – which contains cornstarch or another anti-caking agent – instead of granulated sugar. Is the sugar standing in for the standard “blood on one’s hands” metaphor, with the wrong sugar the betrayal of the Marxist philosophy underlying the revolution, leading to Ho’s restlessness beyond the grave? Is that the dying man’s own conscience, questioning his onetime friend’s radicalization while he himself chose Buddhism and a life of peace? (In reality, the Communist leader probably did not work for the famous French chef, or, at least, there is no evidence that he did, but the symbolism depends on that connnection.) Meanwhile, the man overhears his family here in America admit to knowledge of and perhaps involvement in the murder of a local Vietnamese man who wrote an editorial urging the U.S. to admit that the war was over and begin normalizing relations with Vietnam, in direct contrast to his own non-violent philosophy.
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Two of the stories flopped because of fully predictable endings – “Letters from my Father,” which repeats an urban legend that most of you have probably heard before; and “Love,” told by a cuckolded husband who used to protect his wife (and manhood) in Vietnam by telling U.S. forces that Viet Cong fighters were hiding where his wife’s would-be suitors lived.

The one longer story in the book, “The American Couple,” was for me the weakest entry in the collection. Told from the perspective of a Vietnamese woman, Vinh, a sharp observer whose skills help her win a trip for two to Mexico on an unnamed game show that is obviously “Let’s Make a Deal,” and whose husband fought for South Vietnam. They strike up a slightly awkward, arm’s-length friendship at the resort with an American couple, one that gradually drifts into a childish battle between the two men, both of whom are dealing with the memories of a war in which they participated but never truly fought. Telling the story from Vinh’s perspective robs us of any insight into the behavior of the two men – the entire episode seemed juvenile to me – while she is almost robotic in her relaying of the action.

Next up: Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs, the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls, which fell at #33 on the last version of my own top 100.

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→ October 18, 2010
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Tar Baby.

I’ve filed two pieces from the AFL so far, one on Sunday and one on Thursday. Jason Grey also wrote a piece on Friday; we saw Brothers pitch again on Saturday and his stuff was down about 2 miles an hour.

—

You can’t spoil a child. Love and good food never spoiled nobody.

In his New York Times review of Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel Tar Baby, John Irving referred to it as “her most ambitious book” to that point. If true, I think Morrison missed the mark for which she was aiming, but I also think Irving’s comment sells short her previous novel, Song of Solomon, which put her on the literary map after her first two novels found little commercial success.

Morrison’s two best novels – Song of Solomon and 1987’s masterwork Beloved – deal with enormous themes of African-American history and culture, replete with symbolism that took compelling stories with magical realism and elevated them to magnum opi that explored the black experience in the United States, from the present day all the way back to our shameful history of slavery. Compared to those two novels, Tar Baby is an inchoate exposition with less structure and a jumbled storyline that crystallizes around its two central characters in the final third, only to end with one of the most ambigious conclusions I’ve ever seen.

Jadine, the closest thing Tar Baby has to a central character, is a light-skinned African-American woman who was raised by her aunt and uncle on the Caribbean island of Dominique (Dominica) on the estate of the wealthy, eccentric white man Valerian Street and his beautiful but aloof wife Margaret. Jadine, now a successful model who spends much of her time in Paris and New York, finds her world turned upside down when a fugitive deckhand, a black man named Son, is found hiding in Margaret Street’s closet, an arrival that creates battle lines not between white and black but between wealth and poverty, and between old black and new black. These battle lines, more than the characters or the torrid romance that forms between Jadine and Son, define the novel.

The most interesting division forms between Son and the various black characters in the book – Jadine, her aunt Ondine and uncle Sydney, and locals on Dominique who are almost invisible not just to the Streets but even to Sydney and Ondine. (One regular helper from outside the house is often fired, but continues to come under a new name because the Streets don’t know the difference.) Son represents something atavistic to Jadine and her aunt and uncle, a throwback to the time of overt social and economic repression; Sydney and Ondine refer to him as a “swamp n—–r,” ostensibly a comment on his initial appearance in Margaret’s closet, but more likely a reflection of their own discomfort at seeing their own racial past incarnate before their eyes. Jadine finds herself attracted to Son and drawn into an affair with him that spans from Dominique to New York, where Son finds himself alienated and disgusted by the way African-Americans live with and yet unequal to whites, to Son’s poor hometown of Eloe, a Florida backwater where Jadine is appalled and terrified by the ambition-less, self-satisfied poverty:

You stay in that medieval slave basket if you want to. You will stay there by yourself. Don’t ask me to do it with you. I won’t. There is nothing any of us can do about the past but make our own lives better, that’s all I’ve been trying to help you do. That is the only revenge, for us to get over. Way over. But no, you want to talk about white babies; you don’t know how to forget the past and do better.

Jadine and Son’s affair begins as the marriage between Valerian and Margaret frays under the revelation of a three-decades-old secret, one shocking and yet inconsequential in the book’s larger plot, as the two white characters are mostly absent from the remainder of the book. Morrison’s characterization is normally first-rate, but the Streets are rendered in two or two and a half dimensions and stand more as props for her various black characters than as fully-realized individuals of their own.

Margaret is waiting for her son, Michael, to bring salvation or exoneration when he comes for Christmas, but he never arrives and the plot strand frays and disappears, which stands in for the main problem with Tar Baby as a novel: Nothing is resolved at the end of the book, and what conclusion Morrison does offer us is ambiguous at best.

By and large, Morrison doesn’t take sides in the Jadine/Son conflict; if anything she seems to offer criticisms of both the complete rejection of the past and of the willingness to repeat it. That said, Jadine’s love of a sealskin coat read to me like a condemnation of her embrace of materialism. She’s rejecting her own skin and replacing it with something natural yet artificial and inhuman, and the manufacture of such a coat through violence against nature ties into the conflict between modernity and nature, another of the themes Morrison explores in the book.

If you haven’t read any Toni Morrison, Tar Baby, isn’t the place to start; I’d send you to Beloved (one of the ten best novels I’ve ever read), then Song of Solomon, and then either Tar Baby or Jazz. Those first two novels are must reads for anyone interested in American literature, but Tar Baby doesn’t measure up to them in scope or story.

Next up: Robert Olen Butler’s short story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

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→ October 9, 2010
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If You Follow Me.

Before I get to the book, I wanted to suggest again that you check out “Where I’m Going,” the new single from Cut Copy, available for free on their website. I may have sold it short by calling it “straight-up early Britpop;” after listening it a few more times, including once with the volume turned up (inadvertently) too high, I realized that there are layers of sound beyond that surface candy, even beyond the Who-like keyboard bridge in the middle of the track. At a cost of zero, it’s worth every penny.

–

I received a review copy of Malena Watrous’ debut novel If You Follow Me in the spring, and I think it speaks to how deep my book queue is that I just got around to it last week after finally abandoning the leaden Night Train to Lisbon after about 130 pages. Watrous’ novel takes the standard fish-out-of-water plot and layers a story of personal drama and growth on top of it while achieving the unusual feat of tying up the minor plot threads while leaving the macro issues open.

The narrator, Marina, has come to Japan as an English teacher with her girlfriend, Carolyn, whom she met in a bereavement group about a year and a half before the novel starts when her father took his own life. (Carolyn’s mother died of cancer about eight years before that.) Marina isn’t so much following Carolyn as running from her unresolved grief and anger, but Watrous never allows that darkness to choke the life out of the novel, allowing other characters to come to the fore and even slipping in some light humor.

While Watrous works the fish-out-of-water angle for humor, particularly with Marina’s struggles to understand their small town’s rules for disposing of garbage (gomi), she uses it more to introduce a cast of unusual characters, some eccentric, but most with very real problems. Marina’s supervisor, Hiro, has a strange love of karaoke, communicates with Marina primarily through letters, and is thoroughly depressed by his job. Keiko is ignored by her useless husband and struggles to manage her two sons, one suicidal and another socially maladjusted. Haruki, the only boy in the school’s “secretarial” track, has just returned to school after bullying led him to shut himself in his room for three years, and the boys who bully him have, of course, their own reasons for their behavior. The array of well-drawn characters gives the book a richness that wouldn’t normally be present in this type of story, which usually has the protagonist/narrator as the only normal person and the major focus of the book, with the locals serving as comic relief or simply foils for the main character. Marina also serves as her own sort of comic relief, from her trouble with the gomi rules to her misadventures in driving (in a car with doors that don’t open) to her use of some rather risque materials to get the tough-kids class to pay attention to her English lessons, and the self-effacing voice Watrous gave her alter ego works extremely well through those episodes.

Beyond the mature characterization, I loved Watrous’ infusion of grief and loneliness into the novel without turning it into a bleak, depressing, or hopeless work. Marina keeps her grief at arm’s length – she can’t dispose of it any more than she can dispose of her intermittently-operating refrigerator – and learns something about her grief and herself from watching her charges and neighbors in the small town of Shika … but not everything, as Watrous doesn’t tie it all up in a neat package at the book’s end. Marina makes headway, opens herself up to new adventures, and finds some closure with her father, but at the end it’s clear that she’s still a work in progress. That realistic touch elevated the book to something more than a trivial read for me.

Three disorganized thoughts on If You Follow Me:

  • The cover isn’t doing the book any favors – celery green with a healthy dose of pink. It’s not chick lit, but it sure seems like they’re marketing it that way. I don’t view a book about a female main character as de facto chick lit, and the themes Watrous explores are universal across gender and sexual orientation.
  • If you’re thinking a book starring a lesbian is going to have some hot girl-on-girl action, you’ll probably be disappointed. That said, I thought the few brief mentions of sex seemed a little extraneous to the plot – more placeholders to get from one scene to the next (start sex scene, drop curtain) than actual plot drivers. I do give Watrous credit for a delicate hand, since I think 90% of the sex scenes I come across are painful to read.
  • Watrous studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop under, among others, Marilynne Robinson, author of three novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winner Gilead and her debut novel Housekeeping, #58 on the last iteration of Klaw 100. And Watrous’ prose did remind me in many ways of Robinson’s – not quite as beautiful, as Robinson appears to have invented the English language and merely tolerates the rest of us playing with it, but gentle and sensitive in ways that Robinson’s is as well.

Next up: Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.

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→ October 6, 2010
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Music update for October.

As always, these are just songs I’ve been listening to lately, or recently heard for the first time, and may not actually be new songs.

“Boy” – Ra Ra Riot (video)

Unusual to see a pop band combining synths, heavy bass, and actual string instruments, and the approach is a little hit or miss, but works well on “Boy,” which combines an unconventional structure, an active bass line, and a vocal that sounds like Morrissey trying to go up an octave for a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts. Their second single, “Too Dramatic,” veers a little too far into Erasure territory for me, but “Boy” has just enough muscle from that bass line to avoid that fate. (Speaking of Erasure, Yeasayer’s “O.N.E.” does have a lot of Vince Clarke in it, fun for a few nostalgic listens but without great staying power.)

“Standing Next To Me” – Last Shadow Puppets (video)

There’s a pretty strong ’60s vibe to this song, from the chamber-pop arrangement in the background to the paired male vocals. I guess I really like Alex Turner’s work; I heard the song without realizing that it was the side project of the Arctic Monkeys’ lead singer. It’s impressive to hear something so clean and melodic from Turner, better known for the more aggressive (but still hook-laden) music from the Monkeys’ first two albums.

“Blue Blood Blues” – Dead Weather (video)

Speaking of side projects, here’s Jack White’s heavy, grungy blues-rock act Dead Weather, now on their second album. It’s reminiscent of early Zeppelin, or some of the album tracks from later in their career, the kind of music I think Jimmy Page always wanted to play but that was subjugated to more commercial considerations. (I mean, “Fool in the Rain” is an all-time classic, but doesn’t sound much like Led Zeppelin.) Anyway, “Blue Blood Blues” has the sort of huge guitar riffs I expect from White’s heavier work, except that I’m pretty sure he plays drums on the track. Go figure.

I feel like side projects and similar collaborations have finally come back in vogue after twenty-plus years where they were absent from the music scene, presumably for legal reasons. (If something sucks in the entertainment world, blame the lawyers. It’s probably their fault.) I’m hearing more groups like these last two and more covers of contemporary songs, both things that were fairly common in the late ’60s and early ’70s and led to a fairly fertile period in American and British rock music. I hope it doesn’t fall out of fashion again, and that the barristers don’t catch on to what’s happening.

“Islands” – the xx (video)

So I got this album right after the xx won the Mercury Prize, and even if I can get past the extremely muted production, I just don’t see this music as worthy of such a high honor. It’s minimalist, but that’s been done before, and done better. It’s despairing and even lonely, but that’s been done before, and done better. It’s not bad music, certainly better than 90% of what’s out there, but I don’t hear anything wildly new or inventive here. “Islands” is the standout track to me, the one I’d choose to listen to again, with more texture than most of the songs on the album, and it has one of the most inventive videos I’ve seen in ages.

“The Mighty Sparrow” – Ted Leo & the Pharmacists (video)

Grabs you right from the opening line – “When the cafe doors exploded” – and … well, it does sort of let go in the middle, but the song is short and punchy with a driving drum-and-bass line that keeps the energy level up. You can hear some influence from early punk stalwarts Fugazi and Minor Threat. It wouldn’t hurt ol’ Teddy to try some new clothing stores, though.

“Barricade” – Interpol (video)

A real disappointment; I liked a lot of Interpol’s earlier singles, especially “Slow Hands,” which drove them as deep into Joy Division territory as any band has gone, but “Barricade” feels choppy and discordant where their best singles have all been surprisingly melodic under the histrionic vocal style.

“Chelsea Dagger” – Fratellis (video)

Released in 2006, the year that was something of a black hole for my music awareness, this is the sort of snotty uptempo British rock song of which I can’t seem to get enough, and reminds me strongly of Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta.” Apparently “Chelsea Dagger” has become a popular song at football (i.e., soccer) matches across Europe, which makes sense since it has the feel of a modern drinking song. I’m not sure why the lead singer is trying to look like Jack White in the video, though.

“Where I’m Going” – Cut Copy

This is straight-up early Britpop, done over by a popular Australian group who must have been raised on Blur, James, and Belle & Sebastian. I didn’t stand a chance against this one. You can get the track for free if you click on the link in the song title, or just click here.

“A More Perfect Union” – Titus Andronicus (video)

The video edit runs just 3:35, but at seven minutes the album version eventually devolves into a bloated mess. The beginning has some brilliant lyrics combining references to baseball, New England geography, and popular music, mentioning the Fung Wah bus and including lines like “And when I stand tonight, ‘neath the lights of the Fenway/Will I not yell like hell for the glory of the Newark Bears?” and “And I never let the Merritt Parkway magnetize me no more.” The song leads off their newest album, The Monitor, which I found absolutely wearing for its unrelenting cynicism. Yes, I said that.

“Old Fangs” – Black Mountain (video)

I joked on Twitter that this song reminded me of when I was at Woodstock, and at least two followers asked me if I was indeed there. (The answer is no, for what I presume is an obvious reason.) It’s psychedelic rock but in the context of heavy stoner rock; any song with a Hammond organ is going to bring late ’60s/early ’70s psychedlia to mind. It also pulls the trick of sounding much longer than it is, perhaps the result of my mind being trained to think of songs in this vein lasting a good 12 to 15 minutes.

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→ October 4, 2010
→ By

San Diego eats + ESPN linkage.

My hypothetical awards ballots are up, and some of the comments are priceless – mostly whining about bias or calling me an idiot. You can also see my briefer-than-normal scouting reports on the eight playoff teams:

Minnesota Twins
New York Yankees
Tampa Bay Rays
Texas Rangers

Atlanta Braves
Cincinnati Reds
Philadelphia Phillies
San Francisco Giants

I hope to resume regular dish blogging now that those playoff previews are done. Thanks for bearing with me.

–

We didn’t make it to my old favorite, Cafe 222 (waffle heaven), but did get to The Mission, recommended by readers and by a scout as well. It pushes a hipster vibe but on Sunday morning the place was full of families with young kids, so all the talk about “revolution” seems a little silly. All of the food was fresh with bright colors, and the egg dishes come with two slices of light, airy rosemary bread that I’d probably buy by the loaf if I lived in San Diego. The blueberry-cornmeal pancakes were a disappointment, as they’re not cornmeal pancakes but regular pancakes with some coarsely-ground cornmeal thrown on the griddle – dry – with pancake batter poured over them, resulting in an unpleasant, pebble-like texture that ruined what was otherwise a soft, fluffy pancake. The meats, both bacon and chicken apple sausage, were better, while the rosemary potatoes were hit or miss, with some pieces perfect but others overcooked. I’d like to try them again while ordering differently.

Our other breakfast spot was Brian’s 24 on 6th, offering huge portions of solid-average food (eggs, pancakes, french toast) but nothing spectacular. It had the advantages of being fairly quick and walkable from our hotel, but I’d rate it behind the Mission and Cafe 222.

Ortega’s Mexican Bistro in Hillcrest was the huge dinner find, authentic homestyle Mexican cooking in a more upscale setting. The restaurant is in what looks like a converted two-story house with funky internal architectural features and lots of distressed wood, but really, who cares about that when you have someone in the back making fresh flour tortillas by hand? I might fly to San Diego once a week to grab a bag of those things – the texture and fullness was amazing, and if you told me they used lard in there I’d believe you. The roasted-tomato salsa that came with the chips before the meal was also outstanding, thick but not unwieldy and not in the least watery, and they make a very solid jamaica agua fresca. The sopecitos appetizer was rich, a little too dense for me (that’s a comment on my tastes, though, as “dense” may be authentic for all I know), and didn’t need the sour crema laced over the tops. Their carnitas were superbly done, no hint of dryness with lots of crispy edges, and with the sides of rice and charro beans it was more than either of us could finish. That whole Hillcrest neighborhood looks like the kind of place I’d love to live.

We had one dinner in the Gaslamp district – I got a lot of suggestions from readers, but many weren’t appropriate for dinner with a four-year-old – so we called an audible and went to Trattoria la Bocca, offering well-made if overpriced Italian food. My wife’s mushroom risotto was perfectly cooked, just al dente with a creamy (texture, not flavor) sauce that didn’t overwhelm the rice or mushrooms; I had a sauteed veal dish with artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and zucchini where every element was cooked properly but the dish as a whole had too many competing flavors. For what it’s worth, of those reader recommendations, the most intriguing one was a bar-restaurant called Neighborhood, which will be at the top of my list of places to hit the next time I’m in San Diego by myself.

Right near Petco is a small boutique shop called Cupcake Heaven that sells … well, you know. We tried several kinds over the 48-odd hours we were there, with the chocolate-chocolate and peanut butter ones my favorites; the peanut butter frosting had a texture somewhere between mousse and buttercream, and there were peanuts in the cupcake itself, resulting in something like the lightest peanut butter cookie you’ve ever had. The pumpkin cupcake’s frosting was very gingery, fine for me but lost on my ginger-hating wife. And the cupcakes were still fairly moist the second day.

I only tried one concession stand at Petco, Randy Jones’ BBQ, which was nothing more than standard, boring ballpark Q drowned in a sticky-sweet sauce. I hope there’s something better there for Padre fans.

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→ September 22, 2010
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Boardwalk Empire and The Constant Gardener.

Two topics in one post, just because. You probably saw my post on why the pitcher win stat must die. Klawchat on Thursday.

—

Finally got around to the first episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire last night , and I think my expectations were so high that I was bound to be a little disappointed, even though there’s a lot to like. The Prohibition Era/Roaring Twenties is my favorite period in U.S. history, in literature, film, or even non-fiction, so this series is tailor-made for me. Everything looks spectacular (outside of a couple of weak special effects), both the sets and the costumes, and Steve Buscemi really grew into the role as Atlantic City boss Nucky Thompson over the course of that one episode after a weak beginning with his speech to the Temperance League. Jimmy Darmody, (played by Michael Pitt), Nucky’s driver, has a chance to be an even more compelling character as a bright, young, ambitious kid whose moral compass has been warped or smashed by his experiences in Germany in World War I. Eddie, Nucky’s butler, was excellent as a sort of anti-Jeeves, although the role doesn’t offer much substance. And Paz de la Huerta … well, her character (Lucy) is mostly just comic relief, but if she’s naked a lot I won’t complain.

That first episode had plenty of cliches, though, starting with de la Huerta’s dim-witted showgirl/gangster moll. The other major female character, the abused, immigrant wife Margaret Schroder, comes with a back story we’ve seen a million times – beaten and subjugated by a jealous, alcoholic husband, who eventually gets his compuppance at Nucky’s hands, satisfying the viewer’s desire for vengeance but avoiding the harsh reality that domestic violence wasn’t seen the way we view it today. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of the portrayals, but did notice that they made the Italian guy (Luciano) the loose cannon with the bad temper and the Jewish guy (Rothstein) the money-obsessed guy who cheats in his business dealings, both of which felt like unfortunate stereotyping. The editing style, particularly the montage sequence at the end, involved so many jump cuts that I had a hard time following the multiple strands, and the final murder in the episode lacked any context whatsoever. The main antagonist to Johnson, other than Rothstein, is Agent Van Alden, rocking a Dick Tracy jaw line but lacking any kind of back story to explain his zeal for stamping out alcohol (there are hints at a religious objection, but religious faith alone isn’t much of an explanation for Van Alden’s determination or steely expressions).

Buscemi and Pitt alone are reasons enough to continue watching, and the series is one of the only ones I’ve ever seen where the visual appeal would make me tune in anyway, but I am hopeful that this episode is the one where they worked out the kinks, setting up some stronger storylines and better characterizations for the rest of the season.

–

If you’ve set your mind on hiding the truth, then the first thing you’ve got to do is give people a different truth to keep them quiet.

I’ve been slacking on my reading during the moving/unpacking process but did knock out John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener last week. A suspense novel involving spies that is less a spy novel than an angry novel of social criticism, it elevates a straightforward story of a widower’s quest to identify his wife’s murderers into a morally important work that is seldom preachy or strident without cause.

The superficial plot is that of the murder of Tessa Quayle and her research/activist partner Arnold Bluhm; their bodies are discovered in the first chapter, and the next hundred pages or so deal with the mundane nature of the death of the wife of a foreign service official – from the funeral to the investigation to the “handling” of the widower. It’s a slow beginning, but gradually builds enough of the case to set Justin off on the track that leads to the ultimate plot, the role in those murders of the multinational pharmaceutical corporations behind a supposed miracle TB drug called Dypraxa, whose side effects have apparently been ignored as it’s being given to poor Kenyans dying of the disease.

Le Carré still plays to his strengths as a spy novelist by sending Justin off on a run around the world, three continents and at least five countries, fleeing both his former employers and whoever killed his wife. Justin’s titular interest in gardening only plays a small role in defining his character, but le Carré does add some complexity through hints that Justin’s mind may be either going or playing tricks on him, a point of view pushed hard by the British foreign service, who appear to be operating in the pay of those same pharmaceutical companies who may have killed Kenyans through their drug trials and hushed it up. Through Justin’s investigation, which brings him into contact with all of the remaining major players in the drug’s development and early trials, le Carré offers the pharmaceutical companies’ points of view – particularly that they gave the drug to people who were likely to die of the disease anyway – but clearly has little sympathy for it; there’s a righteous anger bubbling just under the surface of The Constant Gardener that wouldn’t work if he was advocating a more controversial point of view, but given the existence of a similar incident that may have inspired this book, it’s hard to take the contrary position. The novel doesn’t have the same tension or psychological emphasis as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but the author’s obvious rage at what he views as abuses of supra-national corporations takes their place to drive the book forward towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion.

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→ September 21, 2010
→ By

Top Chef, season 7.

Sorry for the long delay between posts, but the move, which went reasonably smoothly*, has still been a colossal ass-kicking. Not only are we unpacking, but we have all our stuff in one place for the first time in … well, maybe ever, since we had a fairly full basement back in Massachusetts and a storage space with some boxes that had been there for five years. Since we started the unpacking process, we’ve donated at least six bankers’ boxes full of books, a lot of clothes and fabric, and an old laser printer to Savers, and we’re not done yet – so clearly, we had way too much stuff.

*I define “smoothly” as “the pizza stone, espresso machine, and rum collection all made it intact.” My wife may view it differently. Anyway having DirecTV come the day of the move to get us set up turned out great, since by that night we had the HD-DVR already recording shows.

I did catch the Top Chef finale last week as well as the first episode of Top Chef: Desserts. I’ve seen a fair amount of hand-wringing over Kevin’s upset win in Top Chef, and on some level I can sympathize – in effect, the team with the third-best record (of the three finalists) won the World Series. But as I argued loudly in 2006, the best team doesn’t always win the World Series, and winning the World Series does not make that team the best. Kevin may or may not have been the best chef of the final three, but he clearly finished ahead of Ed and had a good case to finish ahead of Angelo, and under the rules of the competition, that makes him Top Chef.

Ed’s final offerings were extremely disappointing. I’m unclear whether he completely farmed out dessert or had some input into what his sous (Ilan) was making, but that was as complete a whiff as you should ever see in a final challenge – he served sticky toffee pudding, an outstanding dessert that (for me) transcends ordinary cake, but there’s a recipe for the thing in the back of Baking Illustrated, and most Whole Foods sell a very solid microwavable version from the Sticky Toffee Pudding Company. I know he used fleur de sel, but salt and caramel isn’t exactly an inventive combination. I didn’t really see a chilled corn soup as the sort of cutting-edge cooking I’d want to see in a Top Chef finale, and I just have to take the judges’ word for it that his fish dish was too complicated and that he overcooked his duck. I will say that duck can move from perfectly cooked to inedible in a short period of time.

Angelo getting sick provided the drama the producers seemed desperate to inject into this season (coughpeapureecough), but also raised a question for me of whether he completed enough of the work to win the title. It was a lose/lose situation – if he’d won, there would be legitimate complaints that he skipped a day of work the other chefs put in, and if he lost, there’s the question of whether he lost because he got sick. The tart cherry “palate cleanser” was incredibly bizarre – palate cleansers usually aren’t sweet, and certainly not sweet and acidic – but the way he flubbed the first dish shocked me, since a pork belly char siu bao should be right in his wheelhouse. The meringue was also just weird; it was as if Angelo couldn’t taste how sweet some of these items were, so he wasn’t bothered by the high sugar content.

From episode one, Angelo came off poorly on camera between the steady arrogance (doesn’t bother me if the man can really cook) and the increasingly emotional, even erratic, behavior, but he was the closest thing this season had to a high-quality chef who pushed the envelope with many of his dishes. He’s no Voltaggio brother, but in a thinner pool, he stood out to me all season.

Whatever the reason for Angelo’s mediocre performance in the finale, it does seem like Kevin out-cooked him, and his quartet of dishes had its weakest link up front (the vegetable terrine … seriously? A terrine? What’s next, Kevin – a fondue pot? You can take that terrine and shove it up your aspic) and finished very strongly, with a dessert that the judges treated as revolutionary but looked to me like it was slightly clever but just well-executed. He didn’t botch anything major and left the judges with strong impressions of the dishes they had most recently from him, which doesn’t match our general impressions of what should make a Top Chef … but it’s not like we tasted the food, either, so I’m really hesitant to call them out the way I’m going to call the voters out when Felix Hernandez finishes 4th in the AL Cy Young voting.

Overall, a disappointing season, one where I felt like I didn’t learn as much about food as I did the previous year. Great cooking shows should either teach you fundamentals or get you to think about ingredients differently, and both Voltaggio brothers did that, while no one this season did. Kenny was our best hope, as he went for crazy flavor combinations, but when the judges told him repeatedly to edit his dishes and he didn’t do it, he was destined for an early exit.* I thought the judges had really fallen for Tiffany’s cooking, and she seemed to execute at a very high level until her last episode, but did she ever push the envelope with anything she produced? In hindsight, I think the answer is “no.”

*Also worth noting: The stronger teams on paper in this year’s Top Chef Restaurant Wars episode and the two-team episode of the current season of Project Runway both got smoked by the underdogs.

As for Top Chef: Desserts, as someone who likes cooking desserts even more than I like cooking savory foods, I’m glad to see the sequestering of desserts into their own show, and we already have seen some Voltaggio-like offerings from Seth, who works with a complex, full flavor palate and is pretty clearly unafraid to use it.

Gail Simmons gets her chance to look more beautiful without Padma Laskhmi next to her, and so far they haven’t sabotaged her with ridiculous clothing. Her delivery as a host didn’t work for me in the first episode, though; when she walked in to announce the twist to the quickfire, her “did you really think it would be that easy” came off as obnoxious, even taunting, when they were throwing a pretty nasty wrench into the works for the chefs. Picture Tom Colicchio delivering the same line as a throwaway – “Come on, did you think it would that easy?” – making it seem like a joke that the chefs are in on, a sort of, “Yeah, you know, it’s Top Chef, we like screwing with you” way. I don’t think Gail was trying to taunt anyone, but her delivery was that of a host who’s focused on seeming host-like instead of being charismatic.

I commented on Twitter that the preview of the rest of the season made it look like the show would be a cross between Top Chef and Project Runway, which wasn’t meant as a comment on how, er, fabulous the cast is but on how much more inter-chef drama they showed in the previews. Not to steal a line from Alton, but I’m just here for the food, and I hope they don’t edit in too much of the personality stuff at a cost of showing and talking about the dishes and the techniques at work.

Obligatory ESPN note: I’ll resume regular writing this week, with one piece scheduled for Tuesday and blog items probably five of the next six days, after which I’ll start some instructional league coverage. I will be doing playoff preview pieces for the eight teams that qualify, but they’ll be a little shorter this year so I don’t have to miss instructs while I’m living in the area. I’m also scheduled for a chat on Thursday.

As for the dish, I finished John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener last week – short review to come in a day or two, I hope – and just started Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier.

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→ August 31, 2010
→ By

Puerto Rico (game).

Hat tip to Matthew Leach, who covers the Cardinals for mlb.com, for pointing out that The Roots’ new album, How I Got Over, is just $5 as an mp3 download on amazon.com (through that link). No idea how long it will last – the Arcade Fire sale was supposed to last one day but amazon extended it at least through the end of that week.

—

I’ve been promising a writeup of the game Puerto Rico for about six months now, but up until a few days ago didn’t feel like I’d played it enough to offer an informed take. The significance of the last few days is that I discovered the site Tropic Euro (two points to anyone who gets the reason for that name), a very slick Java-based application that allows you to play Puerto Rico against bots or live opponents. With a three-person game involving two bots running about 11-12 minutes for me, it’s been a nice way to take a quick break from packing as well as a way to get more familiar with why BoardGameGeek users rate Puerto Rico as the #1 board game of all time.

The goal in Puerto Rico is to amass Victory Points* by producing and shipping goods from your “island” back the mother country and/or by constructing buildings, especially one of the five large buildings that provide bonus points at the end of the game based on what else you’ve accomplished. Your island is a board with spaces for twelve plantations and twelve buildings; the plantations, which are free, can grow one of five crop or house a quarry that reduces the cost of any building by one doubloon. Corn is the least valuable crop, with a trade value of zero, but doesn’t require a processing building; coffee is the most valuable crop for trading but you can’t produce more than two units per turn.

*One thing you have to get used to when playing German-Style board games is that even a fairly concrete game concept, the goal is nearly always the abstract victory points. Completing certain tasks, building specific buildings, or shipping goods earns you points, but the assignment of points to deeds can feel a little arbitrary. I’ve just learned to accept it for each game and move on.

Buildings come in three types: Production buildings, for processing any of the four crops beyond corn; small buildings, each of which grants you a few victory points and some special privilege on every turn; and large buildings, which offer no in-game benefits but can provide significant bonuses after the game ends. Every building and plantation must be manned by a colonist, but their supply is limited, especially early in the game.

In each round, each player chooses a role, with options including the mayor (obtaining colonists), the settler (choosing plantations), the builder (obvious), the craftsman (producing goods), the trader (each player can put one good on the trading ship, as long as another good of that type isn’t already there), the captain (shipping goods for points), and, in larger games, the prospector (take a doubloon). Every player gets to utilize the roles chosen by other players, but the player who chooses a specific role gets an extra privilege, such as producing one additional good of his choice. Roles that go unselected are worth an extra doubloon in the next round.

The complex and slightly crazy part of Puerto Rico is that shipping round. There are five goods that players can produce, but there are only three ships available to take goods to the mainland, and a ship can only hold goods of one type. When a player chooses the shipper, all players must ship all of their goods; if there’s no room, most of their goods spoil and are lost with no compensation. (There are large and small warehouses that a player can buy and man to protect some of his goods.) The ships empty at the end of a round and only when they’re full.

Every good shipped is worth a victory point, and in the later rounds a player could easily ship five goods or more in a single shipping phase, especially if he’s the shipper and can place his goods first. Since points from shipping can easily be around 40% of a winning score, possibly more, there are a host of considerations behind the set of decisions of what goods to produce, how much to produce, and when to ship them, and those decisions also include considering what your opponents plan to produce and what they have on hand. A well-timed decision to choose the shipper role can grab you six points while spoiling goods for several of your opponents.

That’s what makes Puerto Rico a great game, and I’m going to assume it’s why the geeks over at BoardGameGeek have it at the top of their rankings: The decisions each player has to make are rich and complex and depend on potential future moves from both the player and his opponents. Just choosing a role means weighing four or five variables – money, colonist supply, the shipping situation, production potential, and what your opponents will do with this role if you choose it … or what someone else will do with the role if you don’t. Given the game’s complexity, it’s surprising that it works as smoothly as it does, and I think the only truly difficult part of Puerto Rico is setting the game up and putting it away.

It is, however, the most complex game I’ve reviewed on the dish so far, so I can’t just tell you that, say, if you love Settlers of Catan or Stone Age, you should try Puerto Rico. It would be more fair to say that if you’re looking for a more involved game than those two – both among our favorites – you should try Puerto Rico, not just because I recommend it but because the consensus of the boardgaming world is that it’s the best game out there.

Back to Tropic Euro, I’ve found that the software works very well; I’ve had occasional trouble logging on, where the main window was blacked out, but closing and restarting the app solved it. It offers PR expansions, swaps the prices of the Factory and University buildings (per the original boardgame’s designer’s suggestion), and the AI moves quickly and pretty logically, enough to punish me for making rookie mistakes. The app’s author, Chris Gibbs, says on the site that there will be a “hard” AI option available in the next week or so.

I’ve previously reviewed San Juan, the card game variant of Puerto Rico; while it’s consistent with the theme, it is a massively simplified game. I enjoy San Juan in its own right, but it’s just a different experience.

–

Posting here will be sporadic over at least the next seven days as we pack and await the moving vans. I should have at least one ESPN chat either this week or next, and both ESPN and dish blogging will become more frequent by the week of September 20th. If you’ve emailed me or asked me a question in any forum without receiving a response, I apologize, and I hope you understand.

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