→ February 4, 2010
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A few stragglers from the 2000s.

So while compiling a list of songs for an eventual post of my top 100 rock tracks of the 1990s – the pool is over 200 and still growing by one or two a day – I came across some odd tracks that I either forgot about when working on my top 40 songs of the 2000s; they probably wouldn’t have all made the list, but they were worth mentioning, and I don’t feel like writing up another post on Ulysses.

LCD Soundsystem – “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House.” Kind of an alternative novelty hit, but it is catchy enough that I’ve caught myself singing it a few days after hearing it. I’m still waiting for the sequel, “Daft Punk is Playing Settlers of Catan at My House.”

Ryan Adams – “New York, New York.” The video and the timing made it an unlikely hit, but I found this to be one of Adams/Whiskeytown’s most accessible or mainstream songs. Speaking of Whiskeytown, “Don’t Be Sad” was recorded in the 1990s but wasn’t released until 2001, so it qualifies through the back door, although it’s a little too folky for me.

Starsailor – “Good Souls.” I actually saw these guys live in 2002, so there’s no excuse for forgetting the best song from their debut album, but for some reason I mentally had them pegged in 1999. It’s just a well-constructed song – you don’t notice the great foundation from the bass guitar until it’s alone in the final few measures – reminiscent to me of the slower material on Radiohead’s The Bends.

Basement Jaxx – “Where’s Your Head At” A phenomenal video and one of the best electronica songs of the decade, but my faulty memory put it on their 1999 debut album, Remedy. And hey, isn’t that Patton Oswalt? (No – no, it’s not.)

The Beautiful South – “Closer Than Most.” Kind of a straight song from an ordinarily snarky band (“36D” and “Ol’ Red Eyes is Back” come to mind in the latter category), “Closer” features one of my favorite lyrics of any era:

You dashed pretty’s only chance of a compliment
And gave the plain the blues
Turned supermodel into last year’s pull
And got her down shinin’ your shoes
Now I don’t mean to be hod carrier
Of other folks’ bad news
But tell Miss World to fly to Mars
If she really doesn’t like to lose

Air – “Cherry Blossom Girl.” I’m not quite sure what to call Air – “Radio #1” was sort of alternative rock-ish, but “Girl” is this soft, ethereal ballad that might fit on adult contemporary radio. I give them credit for making an X-rated video that 1) wasn’t going to get any play anywhere and 2) uses pornography in a way that seems anti-pornographic. Apparently the video was directed by a porn director noted for his idiosyncratic style, making it more impressive that he would paint such an unflattering view of his own industry.

Presidents of the United States of America – “Some Postman.” Never got into their 1990s stuff, when they were one of a dozen snotty faux-punk joke bands (Tripping Daisy, Hagfish) to infect alternative radio, but this one track from their 2004 album Love Everybody hit the mark, telling a funny story instead of throwing out ridiculous lines in search of a laugh.

BT featuring Doughty – “Never Gonna Come Back Down.” Very Crystal Method-ish, with a guest vocal from one of my favorite songwriters from any decade. “I’m just gonna … say this/To the people, not so much the people in the audience as the people sitting in my mind.”

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→ February 3, 2010
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More thoughts on Ulysses.

So I suppose a book as heavily analyzed as Ulysses is worth a second post. There were some interesting responses in the comment thread on the last post, and I wanted to respond to two of those here. First, from Jay:

Also, there’s a lot more good in Bloom than you give him credit for. He’s a very good father, and a better husband in most respects than the typical Dubliner like Simon Deadalus. He’s a progressive free-thinker (which often makes him seem out of step with the other characters). He’s also financially successful despite having changed jobs so many times. To be sure, he has his strange sexual interests, but these have a bearing on his past and only add to the very interesting Molly/Bloom puzzle. To characterize him as “pathetic, a deviant, simpering ne’er-do-well” is not fair. (You can also let this rant serve as evidence that the book can inspire some intense loyalty among some readers).

This seems to be a common view, that Bloom is a better character than I saw; Blamires called him Joyce’s “Everyman” and other critics just marvel at how well fleshed-out he is. Here’s what I saw, beyond his perverted sexual tastes. He’s not, in my view, a good husband; he’s a provider, yes, and that puts him above the median in Joyce’s Dublin, but he is emotionally tone-deaf and has allowed his marriage to atrophy after the death of their 11-day-old son. At a time when his wife needed him to step up, he appears to have done nothing, and while he’s not happy with his non-conjugal marriage and frequent cuckolding, he’s not doing jack about it, and if anything seems to be ignorant of the fact that things he does and says drive Molly further away from him. Perhaps the marriage is beyond repair, but given what I could glean from Molly’s soliloquy at the end of the book, I don’t think so. I also saw little evidence either way on the quality of his parenting or relationship with his daughter; he cares about her, which, again, may put him above the median for fathers in Joyce’s Dublin, but while that’s a necessary condition for good parenting, it’s not sufficient. And even his efforts to help Stephen Dedalus are rooted in self-interest, mostly the prospect of financial gain, not in genuine interest for the boy. His progressive, free-thinking philosophy has just shifted its locus from God to money.

Another reader pointed to this story on the first Chinese translation of Ulysses, from the Atlantic Monthly. Even if you haven’t read Joyce’s book, it’s a great article, and it gives you some flavor for the wordplay in the book, which leads me to this comment from one of the many of you referring to himself as “brian:”

if you go into ulysses (even moreso finnegan’s wake) expecting plot, narrative, story, then you’re missing a large part of what the novel is trying to do. it brings language….sound, rhythm, cadence to an equal field with what we expect from an a-b-c story. there are sections of the book where it is perfecly advisable (and enjoyable!) to remove your critical mind from understanding the characters and their relationships and the plot from its movement to simply ‘hear’ the words and their sounds in a new way.

I understand, and understood from early on in Ulysses, that the play is not the thing – the language is. That’s great. It’s not what I like to read. I love getting lost in a good story – it doesn’t have to be a happy one, or a funny one, or a fast-paced one, as long as it’s a compelling one that’s well-told, with characters I can understand and with whom I can empathize. It’s analogous to the handful of you who criticized my omission of any Radiohead tracks from my list of my favorite songs from the 2000s, but Radiohead’s electronic, sparse, 2000s sound, while critically acclaimed, is just not what I like. I like guitars. I like plots. Sue me.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ February 2, 2010
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Ulysses.

James Joyce’s Ulysses, to me, is not a novel. It is a puzzle, or a set of puzzles, or even a grand intellectual adventure, but when writers discuss how Joyce subverted the novel form or changed how writers thought of the novel, they are covering for the fact that Joyce wrote an enormous work of fiction that is only characterized as a novel because our language does not have an adequate word to describe it. It’s not a short story, and it’s not quite a collection of short stories, since the eighteen sections of Ulysses share characters and occur in chronological order. It’s hardly non-fiction despite Joyce’s meticulous attention to detail in his settings and historical references. It’s epic in scope and vision, but not in story. The book really has nothing resembling a plot, as Joyce chose to focus on the minutiae of quotidian living without any overarching storyline or narrative greed to drag you through its verbal quagmires. It is its own category. It’s … ulysseian.

The reactions of contemporary writers to its publication were sharply divided, and many authors we still read and respect today though the book was awful for one reason or another. Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100 on Ulysses – in my opinion, the best of the 73 essays in that book that I’ve read so far – quotes many of the critics:

Resisters of Ulysses have some distinguished company. D.H. Lawrence found int he book “Nothing but old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.” H.G. Wells called Ulysses a “dead end,” and Virginia Woolf labeled it “an illiterate, underbred book … the book of a self-taught working man.” Wyndham Lewis could detect only a vacuum at its core, “An absence of meaning, an emptiness of philosophic content, a poverty of new and disturbing observation” … After violating all of thenovel’s assumptions and expectations, Joyce replaced what was lost with a brilliant technical virtuosity pursued so relentlessly that even a supporter like Ford Madox Ford complained that “I am inclined to think that Mr. Joyce is riding his method to death.” Joyce himself contributed to the notion that the established compact between novelist and his audience has been altered and that his reader must rise to his demanding level, identifying his ideal reader as someone suffering “from an ideal insomnia,” and gleefully proclaiming that he put into Ulysses “so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” Many have been willing to let the scholars tuck in, while looking for their novelistic sustenance elsewhere in books more seemingly designed to be enjoyed rather than studied, to be read rather than reread.

Burt ranked Ulysses as the third-greatest novel of all time, and he clearly does not agree with the various critics of the work even while acknowledging the book’s high rating for difficulty, praising “its status as one of the supreme human documents in all of literature. NO other single day has been as fully or as brilliantly captured than [sic] June 16, 1904, nor has any novelist created a greater protagonist than Leopold Bloom…” I’ll give him the first point, but as for the second, I’m not so sure.

Bloom is fully realized, but he’s pathetic, a deviant, simpering ne’er-do-well with a stunning lack of awareness of the needs or even existence of people around him. Joyce put himself into both Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, but it’s almost as if by splitting his personality in two he created two incomplete characters, as Stephen himself has a dead quality to his moods and speeches, somewhere between disinterest and disengagement, as if he was barely even there to begin with. The lack of any compelling character limited my ability to connect with the book and enjoy the reading, as opposed to the superficial studying tactic I ultimately used.

To understand Ulysses on an initial read without any help, you would have to be an expert in Shakespeare and both books of the Bible, and familiar with English literature prior to the mid-1800s (as many books as I’ve read, I have never read any of what he’s parodied so far in the Oxen of the Sun section), Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Arist…, contemporary (for Joyce) Irish politics, Irish/English history, Irish slang at the turn of the last century, and Dublin geography. And the Odyssey, of course. And you’d have to have an enormous vocabulary, including a number of words no longer in common usage. It’s a book for polymaths. Or, it’s a book for the people whom polymaths think are “really smart.” I used The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires, an English theologian and literary critic who clearly reveres Joyce’s work, and brings to the reading not just insight and clarity but his own interpretation of religious symbolism and allegory in a work that, to me, was on the whole antireligious.

Joyce shifts styles in each section of the book, often parodying some long-forgotten narrative technique or the overblown vocabulary of an earlier era of literature. That alone makes Ulysses a literary tour de force, as there seems to be little dissent against those who argue that Joyce’s parodies hit their marks, although only two of those sections – those referred to under the Homeric structure as Circe and Cyclops – remained effective and impressive for me. Circe, the longest (by pages) section of the book, is written as a play, in an alley where Bloom’s and Stephen’s paths finally intersect, and where reality and hallucination are interwoven in a way that often leaves the question of what’s real incompletely answered. It’s inventive and crazy and often quite funny, from situation or from simple wordplay:

A PAVIOR AND A FLAGGER
That’s the famous Bloom now, the world’s greatest reformer. Hats off!

(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)

A MILLIONAIRESS

(Richly.) Isn’t he simply wonderful?

A NOBLEWOMAN

(Nobly.) All that man has seen!

A FEMINIST

(Masculinely.) And done!

Joyce takes Bloom’s fears, hopes, memories, and dreams and brings them to life in the alley, putting Bloom on trial, making him a world-renowned reformer, giving voice to inanimate objects or form to intangible concepts, and he keeps it interesting by keeping everything moving, in stark contrast to most of the rest of the novel.

In the Cyclops section, meanwhile, Joyce is parodying people, notably the “one-eyed” outlook of extreme Irish nationalists, but even showing Stephen Dedalus (per Blamires) sympathetically while also exposing his inherent egotism and vanity. Joyce interrupts his own narrative with mock-epic passages to announce the arrival of a new character or a faux-newspaper bit about the transformation of a character’s dog. Even without the basis in prior literature* that might have exposed me to the works Joyce targeted, I could still derive humor from the exaggerations and the abrupt changes in tone that allowed me to alter the way I heard the narrator’s words.

The book’s concluding section is legendary for its own difficulty, even more difficult to read than the 700-odd pages that preceded it. It is the soliloquy of Molly Bloom*, eight brobdingnagian sentences that cover 45 pages and include no punctuation marks of any sort. I have to assume that Joyce did this as some sort of reaction to Marcel Proust’s own logorrheaic style (In Search of Lost Time wasn’t published in English until after Ulysses, but Joyce was fluent in French and lived on the Continent while Proust was still alive and writing), but Proust at least used apostrophes and comma and quotation marks, and his sentences, while long, run 70-80 words rather than Joyce/Molly’s 1500-2000.

*Seriously. I’ve read nearly 500 novels, a huge chunk of them English/British, but aside from Dickens Joyce didn’t seem to hit anyone I’ve really read.

There is a substantial amount of wordplay in Ulysses, much of it buried in seemingly innocuous sentences:

There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading by fits and starts a stained by coffee evening journal; another, the card with the natives choza de; another, the seaman’s discharge.

I don’t think I have a dirty mind, but there’s no way you’re convincing me that was accidental. And he’s funnier with double entendres, hidden meanings, or quiet asides than the truly raunchy parts that helped get the book banned in the U.S. for a decade, despite the fact that none of it meets a modern standard for “pornographic;” it includes brief, crude, graphic descriptions of sexual acts in ways that would probably make the typical reader want to never have sex again.

The problem with Ulysses, again, is that there’s no pleasure – for me, at least – in the reading. It was often dull, occasionally excruciating, intermittently funny, rarely quick, and never compelling. I didn’t care at all about what happened to the characters, and I was only interested in the plot during the Circe episode. I consider myself a pretty well-read person, but much of what Joyce was doing in Ulysses flew over my head, and I think the book’s foundations are set in dated materials and events that just won’t resonate with a modern reader. (Exception: Shakespeare, who gets plenty of screen time in Ulysses, but while I enjoy Slick Willie’s plays I’m not an expert on them and have only read or seen six in total.) It was worth reading for all the references and allusions in later works that I wouldn’t have otherwise caught – Berlin Alexanderplatz certainly makes more sense to me now – and for getting to check it off on my various booklists (including the Modern Library 100, where it was #1), but it’s not an experience I’m rushing to repeat.

Next up: Virginia Woolf’s response to Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, her own one-book-in-a-day novel but written in conventional prose with, to my eye so far, lower overall ambitions.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ February 1, 2010
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Alone.

I was reading Joe Posnanski’s post on the Harlem Globetrotters and the brilliant, witty quote from the man who runs the Globetrotters’ patsy opponents, who are apparently going around again under the Washington Generals banner. That reminded me, as every mention or sighting of the Globetrotters does, of the one time I saw them perform live, a day that – for no reason related to the Globetrotters or anything that happened on the court – brings back to me a tremendous feeling of sadness.

It was a small thing, really, over in a few seconds. I was with my parents and younger sister – this was between 20 and 25 years ago – and we happened to have seats on the floor, in the front row, on folding chairs. When we got there, one of the four seats was already occupied by a solitary man, probably in his 20s, a little shabbily dressed – I remember his clothes were largely gray, but not much more about them. My mother got the attention of an usher, who checked the man’s ticket and informed him that he was in the wrong section. He stood up and sort of shuffled off, with a slightly defeated look on his face – not a crushed or devastated expression, but one that seemed to say, “oh, again.” It occurred to me even at the time that he might have some sort of developmental disorder, but the expression and the way he wandered off – shoulders sagging, head down, with no hurry to get to his proper seat before the game started, perhaps with no idea where he was headed – made it seem to me that he was, more than anything else, alone. And I found that state – not just loneliness, but a pervasive, chronic loneliness, a state of being permanently, irreversibly alone – so saddening that it stayed with me through the game, the day, the ensuing days, and twenty-plus years after. I still return to that feeling of sadness for that man every time I see or hear about the Globetrotters, even though I enjoyed the show, and can still remember some of the gags. (Stopping the game when someone left her seat to head for the concourse so one of the players could walk over, wag his finger, and say “I know where you’re going” stands out the most. I’m sure they still use the same joke.) I remember the ride home, wondering about the man in grey, who took care of him – did he need taking care of – where were his parents, or whoever raised him – did he go home to an empty house – was he as sad as he looked. I know I didn’t want this sad, gray man who should have passed in and out of my life in a matter of seconds to be as sad as he looked, because it made me sad, and I couldn’t bear the thought of someone feeling like that all day, every day, for the rest of his life.

There’s one other alone person who has haunted me for nearly that long. My wife and I were shopping at the Worcester outlet mall, which means it was either 1995 or 1996. That place was always depressing, even though the building itself seemed relatively new and in good repair; the lighting was dim, and it was never busy when we were there, even on weekends. It wasn’t easy to get to or find, and once you reached it there was less there than you expected, which sort of describes the city of Worcester as well. And the food court area was particularly poorly lit; I remember being there just after lunch on this one day and finding the whole place in shadow, with just hints of sunlight taunting shoppers – “I’m out today, people, but there is no way on earth I’m coming into that place.”

As we were leaving the food court, my wife spotted an older woman, 80 if she was a day, sitting by herself at a table, sipping one of those tiny cartons of milk from a straw. And my wife asked me if I thought the woman was drinking milk because it was all she could afford. I said no, although I wondered then and still wonder now if that was my instinctive ability to come up with a positive explanation for a probably unpleasant situation, and perhaps we should have done as my wife suggested and offered to buy the woman a meal. At the time, what overwhelmed me, even as I was trying to believe that I wasn’t witnessing the sad poverty of old age, was that the woman looked inescapably alone, and that she herself was drowning in the sadness of solitude. I can still picture her face – not ragged or dirty, but worn, used, with an expression that said she was finished, that she’d had more sadness, more loneliness than one person could possibly absorb.

In the intervening years I’ve certainly seen more alone people, but none have affected me quite like these two did. Maybe I don’t notice them because on some subconscious level I’m trying not to notice them, because I know it can upset me for days. I do tend to walk around with some sort of distraction handy, usually a book but often my Blackberry, so maybe I’m spending less time surveying the surroundings. And maybe it’s because I talk to people when I’m out and about by myself, because while I don’t mind a quiet afternoon with a book or some music, I don’t really like to be alone too much either.

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→ January 29, 2010
→ By

Power Grid.

The final piece of this week’s package on prospects for 2010, players who might jump on to the 2011 list, is up. If you missed the main list, it starts with numbers 1 through 25. I’ll have one more piece on prospects next week, possibly Tuesday. As for Ulysses, I have four sentences – running twenty-odd pages – to go, so I’m hoping to write it up on Sunday or, at worst, Monday.

I got the board game Power Grid on the recommendations from several of you, and it’s currently the fourth-ranked game on Boardgamegeek. It’s a brilliant game with a few drawbacks that are easily surmounted, fairly simple to learn with some game-to-game modifications, and (as far as I can tell) no easy strategy to win.

The idea of the game is to build a power grid across a map of Germany or the U.S., including power plants and power stations in connected cities. You can have up to 3 power plants that run on coal, oil, garbage, uranium, coal/oil (hybrid plants), or green sources; except for green power, the others require players to purchase resources in each turn to fire the plants and power the cities. The first player to build a network of 17 cities, with the capacity and resources to power them, wins the game, with the magic number varying slightly depending on the number of players.

The great hitch in the game is that the power plants each take different inputs and power anywhere from one to seven cities, and they come up for auction rather than selling for fixed prices, while resource prices vary as well depending on how many players are chasing those inputs, which can change as each player upgrades his plants. It’s a complicated economic question: costs vary, and the marginal revenue from powering another city is positive but declines slightly as the number of cities in a network increases. I imagine that someone could build a model (I’m thinking Monte Carlo simulation) to figure out what these plants should be worth, or roughly what they should be worth depending on when they come up in the game, although I think that might ruin the fun.

With three or more players, two competitive dynamics come into play. One is the map – for the first part of the game, only one player can occupy a city; in “step 2,” it’s two players per city; and it’s never more than three players per city, giving multiple opportunities for a player to block others and prevent them from expanding their networks, deliberately or as part of naturally expanding their own networks. A player could have the money and power plants to expand his network but be slowed dramatically because he has to pay extra – a lot extra on the western side of the map – to go through someone else’s network, and while I’m not sure if it could happen in practice, I think I could see how a player could end up pinned in for several turns while he waits to accumulate the cash to expand out of region. The other is the competition for resources, which are refilled at fixed rates for each step of the game, so they can be depleted if too many players need them to power their plants – in fact, I can’t see how in a five- or six-player game you wouldn’t run into shortages, forcing players to change their plants and perhaps driving up purchase prices. And uranium is refilled so slowly that there’s a severe disincentive for two players to run nuclear plants simultaneously.

I did mention drawbacks. One is that it’s a mediocre two-player game, because the constraints don’t really constrain. You have room on the map, resources won’t be depleted, and the auctions don’t get too crazy – my wife and I engage in de facto collusion, so we buy plants at face value unless it’s a green one. Three works, although I’ve only played two games with three, and I imagine four would be perfect and five-plus would be a little cutthroat. With three players, each game took over an hour, so a five-player game could certainly run two.

Another is that the board is drab. I don’t care that much about artwork, but my wife really dislikes the game because she says it looks depressing – and she’s right about the cards with the power plants on them, which depict varying levels of air pollution. It wouldn’t stop me from playing the game, but it will stop some people, and for what these games cost I think it’s fair to consider the artwork.

And the third is that the mechanics of the game are complex. To keep the game in balance, the game author had to put a number of unnatural rules in place, including artificial constructs like the shift from step one to two (when any player has seven cities in his network) or two to three (when the “Step 3” card comes up in the power plant deck) and a table for how many resources to add back to the resource market at the end of each round … it’s a lot to keep track of over the course of the game, and we usually screw something up, somewhere, like forgetting to put coal back in the market one turn only to wonder three turns later why coal is so expensive. Even the order in which the players go in each round varies – you set a new player order each round, but then for some phases in the round, players go in reverse order. Yeah. I imagine the more you play, the more natural it becomes, but I don’t see it ever become as intuitive as most of the games we enjoy.

I’d recommend Power Grid because I enjoy playing it, especially the economic twist from the power plant-resource interaction, but I know from your feedback that you guys are split between folks who like the quicker-to-learn games like Ticket to Ride or Dominion and those who think I should be playing more Agricola and Puerto Rico. Power Grid, to me, is more for the second camp than the first.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , ,
→ January 27, 2010
→ By

The prospect package.

My ranking of all 30 farm systems went up this morning, and it will all be followed on Thursday morning by the master ranking of the top 100 prospects plus top tens for all 30 organizations and an article on the ten guys who just missed the main 100. ESPNDeportes.com will have my ranking of the top 40 Latin American prospects in the minors, limited to players born outside the U.S.

I’ll chat Thursday at 1 pm, and I believe we have two other prospects chatting tomorrow, including #1 overall prospect Jason Heyward.

And on Friday, I’ll have an article on at least one sleeper in each organization who could make the big leap on to the list next year; last year’s list had around 32 names in total, and I think 14 ended up on this year’s top 100.

As for the dish, I hope to resume regular blogging tomorrow night, probably with a long-overdue writeup of Power Grid. Thanks for your patience.

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→ January 17, 2010
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Yeast-raised Belgian Waffles.

I’ve mentioned before that the problem with “Belgian waffles” as currently served by most American restaurants that offer them is that they are only “Belgian” in shape – it’s a regular waffle batter poured into an iron with deeper ridges, creating a dense, greasy, cakey waffle that bears no resemblance to the lighter, crispier waffles that earn the Belgian moniker. I’ve even seen recipes in reputable cookbooks that make no allowance for the different shape of Belgian waffle irons and assume that your straight-up chemically-leavened waffle batter will do the trick. Of course, it won’t.

It’s not clear to me whether there is a single waffle style that qualifies as an authentic Belgian waffle, but everything I’ve read points to the inclusion of one of two methods of introducing lightness into the final batter: yeast or an egg white foam. This recipe, adapted from The 1997 Joy of Cooking, uses both to create a waffle with a light texture and crispy exterior and that brings the virtue of on-the-fly extensibility.

A quick note on equipment: The model I have, from Hamilton Beach, has been discontinued – I got it four or five years ago for $10 on clearance. It has a 7-inch diameter and nonstick grids; they’re not removable, which does make cleanup tricky, but for ten bucks I wasn’t going to be picky. The heat setting runs from 1 to 5, and I found somewhere between 3 and 4 was perfect for this recipe. If you decide to buy a Belgian waffle iron, look for nonstick grids and a variable temperature setting; I vote for a circular grid since it’s easier to spread batter on a circle than on adjacent squares. Always preheat your iron before the first waffle, and after removing each waffle close the lid and allow it to come back up to temperature.

3 cups milk, warmed to 105-110 degrees
3 eggs, separated
11 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled to lukewarm
1 Tbsp vegetable oil*
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour*
2 1/4 tsp instant yeast*
a pinch of cream of tartar

1. Whisk the egg yolks, butter, oil, and 1/2 cup of the milk together in a bowl.
2. Whisk in the sugar, salt, and extract.
3. In another bowl, stir the yeast into the two flours.
4. Alternate adding the flour mixture and the remaining milk (3 installments of flour, interspersed with two installments of milk), whisking thoroughly to combine each addition.
5. In yet a third bowl, beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until you achieve soft peaks. Fold the foam into the master batter. Seal with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature for about an hour, until roughly doubled, although any healthy rise will suffice.
6. Preheat your waffle iron about 45 minutes after you finished making the batter.
7. Stir the batter to deflate it, then pour enough batter to make one waffle on to the hot iron’s grid. For my 7″ iron, it took about 3/4 cup of batter; Joy says about 1/2 cup, which probably assumes a 6″ grid. Use an offset spatula or heat-proof silicone spatula to spread the batter quickly to the edges, then close the iron and cook until the steaming starts to subside and the waffle is golden brown; this took about two and a half minutes on my iron. Serve immediately; hold in a 200 degree oven; or cool on wire racks before freezing.

* Notes:

  • The vegetable oil will help keep the waffles from drying out. It’s a tiny sacrifice of flavor for greater shelf life.
  • I’m sure this recipe will work fine if you use 4 cups of AP flour, but I like whole wheat flour for both its flavor and nutritional benefit. Not that these waffles would qualify as health food. Pastry flour is lower in protein than regular whole wheat flour and is usually ground more finely.
  • Instant yeast is infinitely superior to the crap they sell in packets as “active dry” or “rapid-rise” yeast. Instant yeast lasts longer – I’ve taken instant yeast that was in the fridge for over two years and baked successfully with it. It doesn’t require you to bloom it separately in liquid. And it uses less packaging than other kinds. Whole Foods sells a brick of the stuff for $5, so if you use yeast even a dozen times a year it’ll save you money. Just dump the contents of the bag into an airtight container and stick it in your refrigerator.
  • If you decide at any point you want to add something to the batter – nuts, berries, dried coconut, chocolate chips (I’d grease the hell out of the iron before that one, though), even crumbled bacon – you can just drop it into the master bowl or even into one waffle’s worth of batter, stir quickly, and pour. Unlike a chemically-leavened batter, this one bounces back quite well from agitation and the resulting waffle won’t be heavier or denser for the intrusion.
Filed Under: Cooking, Food Tagged With: , , , ,
→ January 15, 2010
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The Brothers Bloom.

I saw bits of The Brothers Bloom on the flight back from Arizona in October – and when I say “saw,” I mean that in a literal sense, as I didn’t put on headphones – and was interested enough to add it to our Netflix queue, but promptly forgot to do so. Seeing the title on a ten-best-films-of-2009 list (CNN’s, I believe) two weeks ago reminded me, and it was right up my alley.

The Brothers Bloom had a number of things working in its favor before I even pressed play. I love movies or books about con men – it doesn’t get much better than The Sting, despite the movie’s massive musical anachronism, and many of the hard-boiled detective novels I read are built around cons of one sort or another. It alludes to a number of literary works I’ve read – including, as you might guess, the one I’m struggling through reading right now. (And that is a major reason I’m reading Ulysses; without that experience, I often feel like I’m ignorant of a secret language that later authors used in their works.) It’s filmed all over Europe. It stars Adrien Brody, who I thought very much deserved his Oscar for The Pianist. (Or, one might argue, he deserved what he took along with the award.) It’s witty. And it has heart without excessive sentimentality.

The Brothers, Stephen (older) and Bloom (younger), are passed from foster home to foster home as children, earning their tickets out of each home for one sort of mischief or another, a pattern that culminates in a con that launches them on a roughly twenty-year spree of defrauding wealthy people as a way of life. Bloom, whose first name is never revealed, is always telling Stephen he wants out of the racket, but can’t commit to such a decision. When they pull what is to be Bloom’s “final” con, on wealthy, beautiful loner Penelope Stamp, Bloom falls in love with the mark while she finds the excitement her life has always lacked. Oh, and their Japanese sidekick, known as Bang Bang, never speaks but is a wizard with explosives.

Rachel Weisz ends up stealing much of the show in her role as Penelope as she manages to produce a fairly compelling display of social awkwardness and low self-confidence. Her effusive celebration when she pulls off, against all odds, her part in their biggest con, has an endearingly nerdy quality to it – she can’t believe she did it, and her celebration lacks the self-restraint of someone more conscious of how she looks to others around her. Brody’s performance was as strong, but the weakness and passivity of his character blended him into the background more than you’d expect for an actor of his caliber. Mark Ruffalo, as Stephen, oozes with confidence in a role that calls for a little overacting. Rinko Kikuchi says three more words as Bang Bang than she did in Babel, although she looks great throughout the film.

The richness and pace of the script were what made the movie work for me, even more than the performances or the con man angle. Everything is quick, quick cuts, short scenes, and no drawn-out monologues or lingering tension until the movie’s final sequence; it’s a hard-boiled movie, right down to the bantering among the characters and the remorselessness of the head fraudster. Writer Rian Johnson must be a fan of classic literature, from the overt reference to Herman Melville’s final novel, The Confidence Man, to the names Stephen (Dedalus) and (Leopold) Bloom (the two main characters in Ulysses) to Robbie “Hagrid” Coltrane’s stint as a Belgian man who pays far too much attention to his thick mustache (a nod to M. Poirot, I presume), which I admit is a cheap and easy way to win points with me. I haven’t seen anything of Johnson’s before, but I see he made a hard-boiled detective film in 2005 called Brick; if any of you have seen it, I’d like to hear your thoughts.

The Brothers Bloom did fall short in one regard – the path to the climax, where Bloom is forced by the script to make some, in my opinion, unrealistic choices, leading to an unrealistic (but poetic) choice by Stephen. Bloom’s desire to keep Penelope out of the con game is much more easily solved by him leaving the con game than by what ultimately unfolds, but having him simply walk away would have eliminated the slam-bang finish, where only Bang Bang’s exit is truly clever or memorable. It’s a forgivable flaw given the strength of the first 90 minutes, but I am, as always, a sucker for movies with a little heart.

Filed Under: DVDs Tagged With: , , ,
→ January 13, 2010
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Who Killed Iago?

James Walton’s Who Killed Iago?: A Book of Fiendishly Challenging Literary Quizzes is, as the title implies, a book of trivia tests about literature, trending heavily towards classics and Brit lit. It’s based on a radio program in England called The Write Stuff which, in the tradition of British quiz shows, makes the typical American quiz show look like Chutes and Ladders*. I’ve read plenty of the classics and know a little bit about nearly all the classics I haven’t read, and I struggled to score around 50% for the book as a whole – which, of course, makes it fun.

*I’ve been to England once, when I was 17, and we caught a game show on British TV called Cross-Wits, on which contestants were given clues to a cryptic crossword puzzle and roughly 8 seconds to solve them, which they did with shocking frequency. This was my introduction to cryptic crosswords, now one of my favorite types of puzzles (albeit one for which I rarely have time). Even at the time, none of us could imagine a US television network airing such a program, given how much more difficult it was than any game show we’d ever seen in the U.S., and given the enduring popularity of the ultimate game show for morons, Wheel of Fortune, I feel confident that even the reach of the long tail won’t bring a cryptic crossword show to American airwaves any time soon.

The book comprises ten quizzes, each in five parts. One part revolves around a featured author, with subjects in this volume ranging from Jane Austen (I only scored 5/10, missing two easy questions on my two least favorite Austen novels) to Stephen King to Shakespeare to J.K. Rowling. One part comprises questions in the form of lists of four things – authors, titles, characters, what have you – leaving you to determine the connection between them. The other three parts of each quiz vary in theme, although literary errors pop up a few times, and he runs through some obvious ones like literary firsts and lasts and, my favorite, a set of questions on last lines of famous but long books that most people never finish (2/6, and I’ve never finished either book).

If you’re into literature across the ages, Who Killed Iago? should be up your alley, but it is understandably lighter on contemporary literature with only occasional forays into pop fiction (even Twilight appears once). It even included, in reverse, a Shakespeare question I’d seen before in an online trivia challenge a few months ago – “Which stage direction explains the disappearance of Antigonus from The Winter’s Tale?”

Oh, and if you’re wondering the answer to the question in the book’s title, highlight the line below:
Trick question: Iago is alive at the end of Othello, although he’s being dragged off stage to be tortured.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , ,
→ January 12, 2010
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Top 40 songs of the 2000s.

I had no intention of doing any sort of decade-end list, even when I saw various other “best songs of the 2000s” rankings go by, but when I heard the #2 song on this list on the radio last week I had the idea of doing a blog post about it, and after a few terrible, discarded ideas, landed upon this. This isn’t a greatest songs list – just a list of my favorite songs of the 2000s, with longevity serving as my main criterion: I had to like the song, and like it enough that I still wanted to hear it months or years later. Aside from a few hip-hop songs, it’s almost entirely alternative, with a heavy British influence, which probably just says that my listening tastes have become as narrow as my reading tastes are wide.

40. The Darkness – “I Believe In A Thing Called Love.” The first of several songs on this list to heavily reference 1970s hard rock, with the Darkness unabashedly stealing from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that brought us bands like Iron Maiden and Motorhead. Wikipedia says this song was on the soundtrack for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, which seems comparable to putting a Yanni song on the soundtrack to Hostel.

39. Jurassic 5 – “What’s Golden.” I think their best song was 1998’s “Without a Doubt” – if they’d stuck with that slightly harder sound, they might have found a more consistent audience – but this was the high point of their recordings after that debut disc.

38. The Music – “Freedom Fighters.” Another ’70s-influenced band – that huge guitar riff just fills your ears, and I think the lack of a singable chorus hurt their chances on this side of the pond. “Breakin’” gets an honorable mention, but that flopped here as well, and they have possibly the least radio-friendly band name since Pussy Galore.

37. Carbon Leaf – “The Boxer.” Done right, rock tinged with Irish folk music is among my favorite styles of music. To the ring, to the right.

36. Velvet Revolver – “Slither“. I admit it – hearing this for the first time, I went right back to ’87 and the first time I heard Appetite for Destruction. Of course, back in ’87 it blew my ears off, while in 2004 it was a little quaint.

35. Mute Math – “Typical.” Too clever by half? Mute Math seems to have a reputation as a brilliant band, and the whole playing-backwards trick was pretty cool, but “I know there’s got to be another level/Somewhere closer to the other side” might as well be a Backstreet Boys lyric. Good thing the hook in the chorus is so catchy.

34. Stereophonics – “Have A Nice Day.” Yes, I know “Dakota” was far more successful on both sides of the Atlantic, but having listened to Stereophonics’ earlier output, I felt like I’d heard “Dakota” too many times before – “The Bartender And The Thief” is a similar yet better song in the same pseudo-punk vein, and “Local Boy In The Photograph”
is better but less punk-ish, although both were released too early for this list. “Have a Nice Day” is a slower, folkier number based on the cliched provincial cab driver met by the band – this one in San Francisco, as the story goes – but I’ll give Kelly Jones credit for a more detailed picture of the driver’s attitude and for putting such a unique stamp on the song with his raspy vocals. Come to think of it, I need to reload all my Stereophonics tracks on to my iPod.

33. White Stripes – “Seven Nation Army.” Great song, but overplayed to the point where I can still only take it in limited doses. One of the top intro bass lines in rock history.

32. Morningwood – “Nth Degree.” Surprised this never caught on as a “get amped” song at sporting events. Because it … gets you amped. I still have no idea what the shrieking voice says in the chorus.

31. Silversun Pickups – “Lazy Eye.” How long before we brand these guys one-hit wonders? And am I the only one who wasn’t sure if the lead singer was male or female? Great song in the single edit, but the outro to the album track is just late-60s wanking, and I doubt there’s been a bigger letdown for me when learning the actual lyrics to any song. “That same old decent lazy-eye?” Uh, okay.

30. Keane – “Somewhere Only We Know.” And the first track on their next album, “Spiralling,” was great and much more uptempo, which deked me into buying the entire thing only to discover that it sucked. But “Somewhere” is a beautiful lament along the lines of Coldplay’s “Trouble,” but with more urgency and less dirge.

29. Matt & Kim – “Daylight.” I think this is the newest (by release date) song on the list, although that’s a function of my attempt to avoid excessive recent-ism in putting the top 40 together. It’s the best White Stripes song not written or recorded by the White Stripes.

28. Coldplay – “In My Place.” I understand that “Clocks” is The Hit for these guys, but I was burned out on that song within a year, even before the Jays used it in a video montage at the end of the 2003 season to pay tribute to Roy Halladay’s (presumed, at the time) Cy Young-winning performance. I heard this song at a Coldplay concert from their first tour, and that opening riff made it the most memorable song of the night, even though I’d never heard it before.

27. Ian Brown – “Upside Down.” I’m not sure I would have even discovered this if it wasn’t by the former lead singer of the Stone Roses, since it garnered no airplay that I know of in the U.S. and is probably the most bizarre song on the list, with no percussion and an incongruous trumpet solo. Then again, Brown’s solo stuff has all been weird and compelling, so while this isn’t as good as “Set My Baby Free,” it’s his best song of the decade.

26. Wolfmother – “Joker And The Thief.” If you’re into old-school guitar rock at all, you had to like this song, right? The opening lick was hypnotic, and the producer tweaked every bit for maximum bombast. Sort of a guy’s guy song. I would have been surprised if they’d ever cooked up anything close to this good again.

25. Gnarls Barkley – “Crazy.” Cee-Lo’s “Closet Freak,” from his 2002 solo debut, gets an honorable mention here, too. Of course, “Crazy” ended up massively overplayed, and at this point I could stand a six-month break from it.

24. Flogging Molly – “Float.” I’ve mentioned this one before – I’m something of a sucker for Irish folk songs or, as with “Float,” songs that bring that sound forward into a sort of folk-rock hybrid. Few do it well and this, to me, is the pinnacle.

23. Chemical Brothers featuring Q-Tip, “Galvanize.” And let me just state for the record that I was all over this song a year before Budweiser stuck it on their commercials. There really is no justification for using a song this good to advertise a beer that bad.

22. Interpol – “Slow Hands.” This was the first Interpol song that didn’t sound to me like a blatant Joy Division ripoff (not that that’s even a bad thing, as there are forty million worse bands to rip off than JD), and also showed their deft hand at manipulating tempo and layering to create a full, textured song with a cathartic release in the final chorus.

21. The Stills – “Still In Love Song.” I thought these guys were supposed to be the next big thing, but this turned out to be their only … I can’t quite call it a hit. But the mix of sneer and despair in the vocals and the plaintive lead guitar line before each verse gave the song a Smiths vibe without a needless Morrissey impersonation.

20. Doves – “Words.” Either that main guitar riff hooks you on the first listen, or it annoys the hell out of you and you can’t get it out of your head for weeks. Needless to say I’m in group one, and the added layering as the song goes on just builds a tension that’s only broken by the quieter counterpoint in each chorus.

19. Sambassadeur – “Kate.” If the Kings of Convenience had been right and quiet really was the new loud, the Swedish band Sambassadeur would have been huge. As it was, they had to settle for royalties from a Payless Shoes commercial and a spot on my iPod. The song would be unbearably twee if it wasn’t for the lead singer’s slightly smoky voice and faint Swedish accent.

18. The Hives – “Hate To Say I Told You So.” The skinny ties and matching outfits were stupid, but they churned out a few memorable bone-crunchers, including this song and “Walk Idiot Walk.”

17. The Soundtrack of Our Lives – “Sister Surround.” I thought their Behind the Music album would cross over, but their sound was probably 25 years late and five years early, as ’70s guitar rock seemed to make a comeback at the end of the decade with songs like Wolfmother’s entry on the list.

16. Gorillaz – “19-2000 (Soulchild Remix).” The best fake band ever? I suppose an angry Rutles fan will show up in the comments to flame me. The hip pick for decade-end lists is “Feel Good Inc.,” another great song and one boosted by De La Soul’s best output since 3 Feet High and Rising, but this remix of an otherwise unremarkable song from Gorillaz’ debut has been on my main playlist since I first entered the digital music player world five or six years ago.

15. White Stripes – “Icky Thump.” I don’t generally get excited about politically-themed lyrics, but these were spot-on, in large part because Jack White picked a topic you could actually address in three minutes of words. Oh, and the song rocks.

14. The Klaxons – “Golden Skans.” Nu-rave died fast, yet the Klaxons, one of its leading lights, lived on. Good luck getting the chorus out of your head.

13. Modest Mouse – “Dashboard.” Johnny Marr’s revenge. I also think of this as the great pop song the Pixies never made.

12. Mike Doughty – “Looking At The World From The Bottom Of A Well.” A bouncy, sing-along (and ironic) track inspired by one of my favorite novels. The whole album, Haughty Melodic (an anagram of “Michael Doughty”), was excellent, although this was clearly the best track. I still miss Soul Coughing.

11. Queens of the Stone Age – “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret.” “No One Knows” is a great song, but nothing could top this sinister groove from their first album, Rated R, the perfect marriage of a subtle melody and detuned guitars.

10. Outkast – “Hey Ya!.” The best Prince song by an artist other than Prince.

9. Crystal Method – “Name Of The Game.” Not normally my style of music, but guitar riffs from Tom Morello and a contribution from a member of underground rap group Styles of Beyond plus a driving beat make for a hell of a driving or workout song.

8. Franz Ferdinand – “Take Me Out.” Requires no explanation, I assume.

7. The Dandy Warhols – “Bohemian Like You.” A bit forgotten as the music scene changed over the course of the decade, but it’s a catchy song dripping with snark aimed at the indie music scene.

6. White Stripes – “The Denial Twist.” Not their usual straight-ahead rocker, but they manage to update a Motown-esque sound into their minimalist musical style with plenty of wordplay in the lyrics. I probably could have put another half-dozen White Stripes songs on this list without much of a stretch.

5. Roots featuring Musiq – “Break You Off.” The best hip-hop song of the decade, assuming you accept it as hip-hop instead of R&B or soul or just … great music.

4. Arctic Monkeys – “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor.” Still like this song as much now as when I first heard it, if not more. Spawned dozens of imitators, none of which produced a song this good.

3. Coldplay – “Viva La Vida.” Brilliant track from a brilliant album. I do wish these idiots hadn’t made themselves soft-rock icons with XY, because it has hurt their credibility as artists trying to expand the boundaries of pop (or pop/rock) music.

2. Kaiser Chiefs – “I Predict A Riot.” They did have another minor success with “Ruby,” but I think they’re really destined to go down as one of rock’s greatest one-hit wonders with this bizarre, relentless song that pairs despairing lyrics with an upbeat track.

1. Doves – “Caught By The River.” (video, although it’s the edited version) My favorite track by my favorite band, the soaring end to The Last Broadcast. Heavy U2 influence on the guitar interludes between verses. The fire that destroyed Sub Sub’s recording studio was probably the greatest conflagration in music history.

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