→ April 9, 2012
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Imagine: How Creativity Works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ April 5, 2012
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Drive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ March 30, 2012
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Citizen Public House + more Scottsdale eats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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→ March 11, 2012
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Fresno eats.

Hunan, located in the courtyard of a strip mall at Cedar and Herndon, boasts a chef, Zhongli Liu, who served as executive chef at a major Beijing hotel for over a decade before emigrating to the U.S.,  once representing China at the Bocuse d’Or competition. The restaurant looks like the typical Chinese restaurant you might find in any decent-sized city, but the food was something else entirely. 

I haggled with the waiter to try to get him to recommend something he really liked, but I didn’t get fair until I dropped the word ”authentic,” after which he didn’t hesitate to recommend the house special lamb. Lamb is my least favorite protein, but the man did not lie – the dish was outstanding. The lamb is sliced thinly and stir-fried with green peppers, onions, and a cumin sauce with lots of depth, including a little heat (not as much as you’d expect from all the dried Thai chilies on the plate), a little sweetness, and the right amount of salt. The hot and sour soup included in the meal was also phenomenal in texture and flavor, although I got one piece of bamboo that was too tough to chew. Apparently there’s a second menu you can request with more authentic dishes like the one I ate, although I still would have asked for a recommendation.

Cracked Pepper Bistro appears to be the clear leader for the ”best restaurant in Fresno” title, although that may not be the stiffest competition going. The food was very strong, maybe one grade below what you’d get at a good fine-dining establishment in a larger city, with larger portions and comparable service.

The server emphatically recommended the ”mala-insana” Napoleon, fried slices of eggplant with layers of goat cheese, roasted tomatoes, and pesto, covered with a drizzle of balsamic reduction (according to the server – the menu says it’s aged balsamic). I don’t really love eggplant because it tends to take on a weird, meaty-but-not-quite texture no matter how it’s cooked, but this was the best eggplant dish I’ve ever had. The slices, crusted in panko and crushed pumpkin seeds, held their shape, weren’t soggy or fibrous, and were as crunchy as a piece of fried chicken. I would have eaten them plain.

For the entree, I couldn’t pass up the short rib with German potato salad, and the ribs were tender enough to pull apart with your fingers. (I used a fork, as this appeared to be a respectable restaurant.) The potato salad wasn’t a salad at all – it’s new red potatoes, parcooked, then quickly fried to brown and crisp the exteriors, served with a dressing of minced bacon, sugar, cider vinegar, and Dijon mustard. The texture and sweetness of the caramelized sugars in the potatoes were great, but the sweet/sour dressing was too assertive and even bled into the sauce over the short ribs.

The restaurant’s main problem, at least in the two dishes I tried, was a lack of editing. The eggplant stacks were overpowered by the tartness of the goat cheese and the sweetness of the balsamic reduction. The potatoes that came with the short rib were similarly undone by the inclusion of sugar in the dressing, which, on top of the sugars created by quickly frying the potatoes and browning their exteriors, made the whole thing too sweet. I’m holding Cracked Pepper to a higher standard than I would most restaurants because they are aspiring to that higher standard (and are priced at that higher standard too); this is very good food done with a great deal of skill, but pulling back one step on each dish would have earned them the top grade.

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→ February 29, 2012
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The Wire, season four.

Daniels: What’s this kid to you?
Prez: I don’t know. He’s one of my students.

There appears to be a very strong consensus among critics and serious fans of The Wire that season four is its pinnacle, perhaps the greatest single season of any American TV series from any network. I won’t say that I disagree with that assessment, but that I find it very hard to view season four outside of the context of the three seasons that led up to it – season four stands strongly on the foundation laid by 37 prior episodes that established storylines, developed characters, built tension, and began a form of social criticism that draws on traditions that predate the medium, a kind of angry exposure of societal injustice and hypocrisy that called to mind the angry righteousness of Native Son. The Wire always had a point to make; season four is where that point got made.

The end of season three saw the demise of the Barksdale gang and the rise of a new, more ruthless drug kingpin on the west side of Baltimore, Marlo Stanfield, who lacks the charisma of Avon Barksdale or the intelligence of Stringer Bell, ruling his territory and crew like an authoritarian dictator, disappearing enemies and buying allegiances when he needs them. The investigation into him sputters due to the lack of bodies – a void undetstood by the viewers, but not by the investigating unit – and city politics, allowing a new storyline built around four new characters and one familiar one to take center stage.

Prez turned in his badge during season three, but resurfaces here as a math teacher in one of Baltimore’s failing public schools; four of his students, Namond (son of Barksdale enforcer Wee-Bey), Randy, Michael, and Duquan (“Dukie”), each of whom earns his own subplot. I would challenge any viewer to watch this season without becoming emotionally attached to these at-risk kids, each of whom started life with a negative balance and only one of whom ends the season with any real hope for improvement, thanks largely to the intervention of an adult who goes well beyond his duties to save a kid from jail or death on the corners. I always found Prez a little hapless as a detective; when he showed aptitude for the problem-solving aspects of the job, the camera always seemed to look on him as an object of pity, as if we should be proud that the slow kid finally found something he was good at. Even watching him slug his father-in-law (who had it coming) had that underdog feeling to it. In season four, Prez becomes a fully-realized character, a man who may have finally found his calling after leaving a job that never fit him, justifying (on some level) his presence as more than simply awkward comic relief. But Prez also becomes our conduit to not just another aspect of urban decay but to the missing piece to fill in the puzzle of the plight of the American urban underclass that this series documents. As it turns out, the problems with the streets and corners start inside the broken homes that line them.

–

No spin on a knuckleball. You still can’t tell how it’s gonna break.

Whether David Simon started The Wire to tell great stories, to criticize the actions and policies that were (or are) destroying inner cities in the northeast and the rust belt, or both is immaterial, because the result is clear: the series tells phenomenal stories, longer, deeper, and more intertwined than on any other American TV series I can remember, but always with a clear (if occasionally preachy) message about why. When I was younger, if a network series wanted to cover a major social topic, they would do a Very Special Episode; The Wire was, in that parlance, a Very Special Series.

The macro story here is the decline of the city, at least since the start of season two, since you might argue season one was primarily about the folly of the war on drugs. Adding the failing education system and the way city politics and bureaucracy perpetuate that failure (although the teachers’ unions come in for little to no criticism here) in season four only makes the overall picture more dismal. The police are corrupt. The schools are hopeless. City Hall is only concerned with numbers and elections. The FBI is too busy chasing terrorists to look at homegrown crime. The war on drugs only increases misery, but no one wants to consider decriminalizing them for fear of a backlash. Any attempt to start a small business to help the community and maybe create a job or two will be met with unreasonable regulations – or a need for bribes. And so on. You couldn’t paint a much bleaker picture unless you wanted to turn it into a series about zombies roaming across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The trick of The Wire is its ability appeal to your emotions without manipulating them, especially hard because we’re now talking about a season that revolves around kids who are swimming upstream against a current that is trying to drown them. The writing veered as close as it’s come to preaching with the storyline in the schools, with scenes that can’t help but leave the viewer angry – but could they have been written any differently? Stories of failing inner-city schools no longer make the front page because they’re too commonplace, and because (I presume) readers are resigned to these situations as unfixable. Pouring more money into the system hasn’t helped. Testing creates massive incentive problems, which becomes a subplot this season. But more than any other cause, lack of structure and support at home shows up in reality and in season four as a major cause, if not the major cause, of the failing schools.

(I did find the academic project, removing ten disruptive kids from classrooms and educating them holistically while avoiding the standard curriculum, a little contrived, but because it got us another season of Bunny Colvin – and the bittersweet restaurant scene – I won’t complain.)

Even watching the drug dealers of Baltimore recognize the benefits of cartel behavior – the “New Day Co-Op,” meeting in a local hotel conference room – keeps the show grounded in the drug-war theme that was established in season one and continued, often below the surface, in seasons two and three. It also had the benefit of giving me more of my favorite character, Proposition Joe, whose prank phone call to gather intelligence on Herc rivals his “nephews and cousins” line from season two for the biggest laugh I’ve gotten from the series.

–

A good churchman is always up in everybody’s shit. It’s how we do.

Where season four did set itself apart from the previous three seasons was in the depth of writing on individual characters. Earlier years weren’t superficial, but didn’t get as far into motivations as season four did, and there was too much emphasis on current actions relative to character history. Putting the four kids at the center of the show for a full season allowed the writers to focus on past and present because for junior high school kids those two things have little separation between them, and in the case of these kids, the issues from their pasts are still active during the show. Nowhere did this have the same impact (no pun intended) as it did in the storyline involving Michael and eventually Stanfield enforcer Chris Paltrow toward the end of the season. (Spoilers ahead.)

Michael’s visceral, negative reactions to any attempt by adult males to establish clear bonds with him were always odd, but about halfway through the year it became obvious that his reactions were some kind of latent response to prior abuse, likely sexual abuse, by a male authority figure earlier in his life. (It later becomes apparent who the culprit was, and why Michael makes the choices and sacrifices he makes as a result.) When Michael reverses course and asks Chris, who, for all of his coldness during murder after murder, shows peculiar flashes of empathy, even for victims (assuring them it will be quick), Chris’ emotions come to the surface with a fury that reveals a profound, unhealed emotional wound that explains not just the violence of his fulfillment of Michael’s request but the dichotomy in his own character, a murderer with a sensitive side that actually fits him, not one that was grafted on by writers to make him less repellent.

The camera has always liked Cutty Wise, as actor Chad Coleman has this mournful expression along with a deep, deliberate style of speaking that draws your attention even when he’s not in the middle of the action. Yet season three used him more as a prop in plotlines about the difficulties of reintegrating into society after incarceration and the hurdles city government puts in front of small businesses than as an individual character involved in micro stories. Here, his gym is thriving as a center of community activity, with all four boys spending time at the gym, two forging uncertain relationships with Cutty that lead, of course, to violence, but also to one of the season’s few slightly hopeful outcomes.

The one individual story that didn’t grab me was the mayoral campaign of Tommy Carcetti, who, despite getting a little more depth this season (as opposed to the raw ambition of season three), can’t command a scene like a credible fast-rising politician character should. I also never really doubted the outcome of the election – why would we be spending so much time with him, and seeing a resolution in the middle of the season, if he wasn’t going to win? What happens after he takes office is less a function of him and more of the moral hazards rampant in democratically-elected governments. Even the identical character played by an actor with stronger oratory skills would have been more effective.

–

Carver: You know what this is? This is one of those enabling relationships.
Herc: Enable me, Carv.

I think we all recommend The Wire, you to me and now me to everyone who’ll listen, because it is smart, compelling television, infused with bright and dark humor, a show that deserved a wider audience when it was alive and will get that audience , come hell or high water, now that it’s gone. But people should watch The Wire not just for its entertainment value, but because it is a social document, one that treats serious issues seriously, that handles characters like people rather than like tools of the writers, and that shows an essential understanding of the economics of behavior that drive all aspects of our lives. You do not need an econ degree to watch or enjoy this show, just as you do not need one to respond to incentives in your daily life. But you will get an education watching the show, if only in the way that a real education forces you to think critically about issues and search for answers, to ignore easy solutions and to question the pat responses you get from authority figures. It’s showing up on college syllabi, as this two-year-old Slate article attests, and not just in film studies classes. It is an American landmark, a work of protest disguised as a police procedural that, like its best characters, ignores the boundaries set out for both genres in the name of the greater good. There may be, or have been, better American series out there; I’m not well-watched enough to say more than that I haven’t seen one. But rather than elevate season four above the three that preceded it, I’d prefer to simply elevate the series, and hold that season four’s greatness is merely a testament to the vision of its creators, and to the strength of all of the material which laid the groundwork for it.

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→ February 17, 2012
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The Baron in the Trees.

I want to thank all of you who’ve reached out via one medium or another to offer your prayers, positive thoughts, or best wishes on my upcoming thyroid surgery (one week from today). It’s supposed to be routine, but I admit I’m having a hard time thinking of it as such.

Yesterday’s chat was abbreviated, but I tried to plow through as many questions as I could in that short time.

–

I was introduced to the Italian novelist/fabulist Italo Calvino in college, in that “Comedy and the Novel” course (taught by the now-retired Prof. Donald Fanger) that also brought me to The Master & Margarita and The Charterhouse of Parma, among other titles. I’ve read other Calvino works, including Inscrutable Invisible Cities, but it wasn’t until I tackled The Baron In The Trees that I found something that lived up to the standard of the first novel of his that I’d read.

The Baron in the Trees is a fable, built on a plausible-but-not-really premise about a young man named Cosimo who, after a squabble with his sister that leaves him on the wrong side of the ledger with his parents, decides to climb one of the many trees on his family’s estate … and never comes down. He adapts to life in the trees, learning to navigate them all over their Ligurian village, ignoring property lines while, Omar Little-style, developing his own code of behavior and straddling the lines between outlaw and vigilante, and between folk hero and village idiot. He falls in love, develops da Vinci-like contraptions, crafts a philosophy (and sends it to Diderot), fights battles, meets Napoleon, and becomes a topic of discussion in the great salons of Europe.

While it’s not quite as imaginative as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, one of the best and funniest novels I’ve ever read, The Baron in the Trees contains a more straightforward narrative and doesn’t lack for humor. Cosimo (who becomes a baron after his father dies) sees the world differently, figuratively and literally, from his new vantage point, and necessities like food and hygiene force him to conceive new and unusual solutions to keep himself in the trees. He can also better understand the consequences of his actions, such as his response to the discovery of a traitor amongst his father’s retinue, and the development of his philosophy, while obviously satirizing some of the political philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century, is built on solid foundations, such as his understanding that “association renders men stronger and brings out each person’s best gifts,” while living a solitary, hermit-like existence in the trees was more likely to lead to bitter disagreements borne of a lack of trust between Cosimo and everyone else in the village. (I thought I also detected some elements here satirizing utopian movements of the 19th and even 20th centuries.)

The last third or so of the narrative starts to slow down as Calvino plunges Cosimo into more situations grounded in European history, thus reducing his interactions with members of the village and his own family, but the fact that he maintained a strong plot through a fable without having it fall apart at the end (or having to tie it up with an absurd plot twist) is a testament to his skill as a fabulist. I’d still recommend If on a winter’s night a traveler… (#20 on the Klaw 100) to a reader who has yet to read any Calvino works, but The Baron in the Trees would be an excellent second choice.

Next up: Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

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→ February 14, 2012
→ By

Of Monsters and Men’s Into the Woods.

If you missed it, my top impact prospects for 2012 piece went up yesterday, as did my quick reaction to Yoennis Cespedes signing with Oakland. My first draft blog post of the year went up today, talking SoCal high school kids, including probable top ten picks Luc Giolito and Max Fried.

—

I caught Of Monsters and Men’s debut single, “Little Talks,” on XMU over the weekend and became borderline-obsessed with it after just that one listen. The band won the Músiktilraunir, an Icelandic national battle of the bands, in 2010, although a look at the winners list tells me that doesn’t typically mean much beyond the small island’s coastlines. (The 2001 winner, Andlát, was a death metal act whose name translates as – wait for it – “Death.”) Of Monsters and Men seems ready to break out internationally on the strength of that single and the forthcoming album My Head is An Animal, which earned very strong reviews when it was released in Iceland last fall. I can’t profess much experience with Icelandic folk music, so it’s easier for me to define them in terms of other genres, and their first EP release, Into the Woods, shows a pretty broad base of styles that call to mind Arcade Fire, Mumford and Sons, Doves, ska-punk, Irish folk music, and – of course – a little Sugarcubes too. (It’s on amazon and iTunes.)

“Little Talks” is the song to buy if you only want to buy one track, an upbeat horn-driven track with a riveting call-and-response vocal track from the group’s two lead singers, Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson, the former singing about losing her tether to reality while the latter, her lover, tries to comfort her while expressing his grief at watching her mind wither. The most poignant back-and-forth gives the song its title, as Hilmarsdóttir sings, “There’s an old voice in my head that’s/holding me back,” to which Þórhallsson responds, “Well tell her that I miss our little talks.” Yet this story is layered over a hybrid of Irish drinking songs and the short-lived ska-punk movement of the mid-1990s, complete with raise-your-glasses shouts punctuating the gap in the lyrics following each chorus. I couldn’t get it out of my head after the first listen.

The other three tracks on the EP are all strong, but nothing is similar to “Little Talks” in style or feel. “Love Love Love,” the next-best track, reminded me a little of Norah Jones meets Alison Krauss, with Hilmarsdóttir expressing regret to a lover whose affection she can’t quite return. The closing track, “From Finner,” is probably the most Mumford-ish, with a gloomy percussion-heavy shuffle behind mournful vocals, ending each chorus with a “we’re so ha-ppy” that I don’t think we’re really supposed to believe. “Six Weeks” is your Arcade Fire-influenced track, heavier on the drums as well with a marching, almost Bonham-esque beat that shares the front of the stage with the group vocals. All four tracks appear on the full album, due out in April, but I wasn’t going to wait that long to get “Little Talks” on my iPod. It’s the best new song I’ve heard in at least a full year.

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→ February 12, 2012
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Osteria Mozza.

I had dinner on Friday night at Osteria Mozza, one of the most popular and famous restaurants in Los Angeles at the moment, joined by my friend and colleague Molly Knight, a known cheese enthusiast and a veteran diner at Mozza. The restaurant is the brainchild of three luminaries in American food, including Mario Batali, who likely needs no introduction. The primary force behind the restaurant and its neighbor, Pizzeria Mozza (next visit!), is Nancy Silverton, co-founder of the legendary La Brea Bakery as well as of Campanile restaurant, where she previously served as pastry chef. The third partner, Joseph Bastianich, is a vintner, restaurateur, and son of Lidia Bastianich, the matron of Italian-American cooking. Names like these don’t always guarantee success, of course, but in this case, the restaurant lives up to its pedigree. Everything we had was outstanding; I would say some dishes were more outstanding than others, but nothing we ordered was less than plus.

The server said the menus are updated daily, so there are no off-menu specials. We went with two starters, two primi (pastas), and one secondo (main), plus a dessert and two beers. I believe it’s the most expensive meal I’ve ever paid for myself, just barely surpassing Craftsteak. The wine list looked extensive, as you’d expect given Bastianich’s involvement, but as I can’t drink red wine and couldn’t see white standing up to the duck ragù I went for the smaller beer list instead.

For starters, Molly humored me by letting me order the testina con salsa gribiche, better known in English by the unfortunate moniker “head cheese.” It’s not actually cheese, but is a terrine or aspic made by simmering the cleaned head of a pig (or sometimes cow) so the remaining the cheek and jowl meat ends up set in a gelatin from all of the connective tissue that surrounds it. The resulting terrine can be sliced and served cold, but Mozza slices it thickly, breads one side, and pan-fries it, serving it with a sauce gribiche, an emulsion of egg yolks and mustard to which one adds capers, chopped pickles, and herbs. (One might compare this dish, then, to a hot dog with mustard and relish, but I wouldn’t want to be so crass about it.) The result is very rich, with the strongly-flavored meat surrounded in luxurious gelatin that produces a fat-like mouth feel, while I left thinking I really need to use sauce gribiche a lot more often at home. The pan-frying, by the way, gets rid of the one real objection you might have to head cheese – the stuff looks like the result of some sort of processing accident.

You could build an entire meal just from Mozza’s selection of starters based around fresh mozzarella without getting bored, but we both zeroed in on the burrata (fresh mozzarella wrapped around a suspension of mozzarella bits in cream) with bacon, marinated escarole and caramelized shallots, which I think was my favorite item of the night. The saltiness and smokiness of the bacon, the acidity of the marinated escarole, and the sharp sweetness of the shallots were all beautifully balanced and gave depth to compliment the creamy texture of the cheese, which, while extremely fresh (of course), was mild in flavor.

I would have probably told you before Friday night that I wasn’t a big fan of potato gnocchi, but apparently I’d just never had a truly great rendition prior to tasting Mozza’s gnocchi with duck ragù, a dish we ordered primarily because I’ll eat just about any dish with duck in it. The ragù was strong, with deep earthly flavors and small chunks of tender breast meat, but played a clear second fiddle to those little pillows of love, lighter than any potato gnocchi I’d previously tried. It’s the kind of meat-and-potatoes dish I could stand behind.

Molly ordered one of her favorite primi, the goat cheese ravioli with five lilies sauce. The pasta was as thin as I’ve ever come across in ravioli, but with good tooth thanks to strong gluten development, wrapped around a thin layer of assertive chevre-style goat cheese; those thin wrappers produce a much better pasta/filling ratio than you typically get from filled pastas. The “five lilies” sauce refers to five members of the allium family – garlic, onion, chives, scallions, and leeks – which stands up well to the tangy goat cheese.

We went with one main, the short rib braised in Barolo wine and served over a very soft, creamy polenta. I’ve never met a short rib dish I didn’t like, and the braise was perfect, producing a rib that stands up on the plate but pulls apart with no effort. If I was to criticize anything we had all night, it might be that the exterior of the short rib was on the soft side, so it might not have been seared that much (it was definitely seared at some point) before the braise. But the criticism is a bit absurd, as the dish was still a 70.

For dessert, we went with the house-made gelato, mint chip and coffee side-by-side with a giant pizzelle with a faint anise flavor. The texture was perfectly smooth, no hint of ice crystals or of extra overrun; the coffee was a little sweeter than I like my coffee ice creams (but I admit I like coffee and chocolate ice creams to be as dark as possible), while the mint chip surprised with real mint flavor – not like an extract, but like actual mint leaves, brighter, fresher, and less harsh than your typical mint-flavored ice creams. (Plus, it wasn’t green.)

We sat at one of the two bars in Osteria Mozza and, at 7 pm on a Friday, didn’t have to wait to be seated, but there were no regular tables available before 10:30 pm at that point. (I actually love sitting at the bar in restaurants, alone or with a friend; you’re rarely forgotten by your server and you often get to see a lot of what’s going on in the kitchen, or at least what’s coming out of it.) The prices are not for the faint of heart, but as I said to Molly when we left, this wasn’t so much dinner but an experience, the kind of meal you might only have a few times in your life, but one you’ll think about for weeks afterwards.

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→ February 8, 2012
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Sherlock, season one.

My annual ranking of the 30 MLB farm systems is up for Insiders. The top 100 follows tomorrow, with chats at noon ET (Spanish) and 1 pm ET (English).

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I admit to some reluctance to watch the BBC series Sherlock, which takes the famed detective character and reimagines him in the present day, solving crimes loosely based on some of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t expect to like a series that so dramatically alters the setting of the original, and inevitably changes the character as well, but it’s surprisingly well done and engaging despite the occasional bit of TV-friendly drama to keep the hoi polloi interested. (The first season just aired on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery last month.)

Rather than directly adapt Conan Doyle’s stories into individual episodes, series creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss chose to write new stories based on one or more of the originals, stretching them out to about 88 minutes apiece, with three episodes per season. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played a significant supporting role in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, plays the title character, a “consulting detective” who solves crimes the police can’t and keeps a blog on his exploits, infusing Holmes with substantial charisma despite his incredible aloofness and professed disinterest in human connections. Martin Freeman (of the UK version of The Office and the middling film adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide) plays Dr. John Watson, an Afghan war veteran paired up with Holmes by chance, forming an uneasy working relationship that’s more balanced than the partnership in Conan Doyle’s works, with Watson actually standing up for himself when he thinks Holmes is merely trying to humiliate him. (It doesn’t work, but at least he tried.)

The first season comprises three episodes, with the final one the tightest all around as the characters had become more developed and the crime (and its solution) was more clever and intricate. The first episode, “A Study in Pink,” has to get the two main characters together and define all manner of relationships within the show, and then has a drawn-out standoff between Sherlock and the killer because the BBC asked the producers to add another 30 minutes to the original hourlong show; the second episode was more focused on the crime, but the denouement was also over the top and involved a character who threatens to throw off the show’s equilibrium. The series does put Sherlock in danger a bit too often – while he did die in one of the original short stories, only to be resurrected by a recalcitrant Conan Doyle due to reader demand – even though we know he has to live till the next episode, making the drama from those scenes seem a little false, although I suppose it would be just as absurd to have the main character never find himself in any jeopardy at all.

Comparing Cumberbatch’s Holmes to the character from Conan Doyle’s stories is an exercise in frustration; I view the new Sherlock as inspired by the original character, rather than a mere adaptation. The series puts Sherlock in more situations that explore his lack of social skills, and Watson is more than just a foil for Holmes’ genius, providing commentary on Holmes’ bizarre behavior and personality. I did find myself regularly comparing this Sherlock Holmes to another TV character inspired by the literary one, Dr. Gregory House.

House is an unlikely protagonist for an American TV series, an antihero who aims for perfect rationality in his life and behavior, who solves cases for their puzzle aspects rather than any human elements, who abhors religion and other forms of authority, an unpleasant character you like because he’s clever, not because you love to hate him. Yet despite his claims of rational thought, he shows a malicious streak under the guise of flouting authority or establishing how much his superiors need him, whereas neither the literary Holmes nor the new BBC version exhibit any such behavior. Cumberbatch’s Holmes can be insulting – his line to Watson and a police officers, “Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring,” is brilliantly dismissive – but there’s no malice involved.

In just three episodes so far, we see subtle hints that Sherlock is aware he doesn’t quite fit in and might even be a little sad or ashamed about it, such as the time he lies to a potential client about how he knew the latter had recently traveled around the world. He’s arrogant, while House is misanthropic; Sherlock calls himself a sociopath (in response to the accusation that he’s a psychopath), but despite their shared focus on solving the puzzle for its own sake, Sherlock shows more glimmers of humanity in three episodes than House has in eight seasons. House has to rely on humor to make the show watchable, and with the show becoming less funny and its lead character more spiteful, the show’s quality has declined noticeably. Sherlock has some humor, but the stories and the two lead characters can drive the show on their own because there’s more to see and understand in the title character than there is in Dr. House.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a Klaw review of a British series without a mention of Foyle’s War, tied to Sherlock by (at least) a significant guest-starring role by Andrew Scott (who also appeared in The Hour). DCS Foyle is nothing like Holmes, of course; he has a normal range of emotions, but keeps them inside, producing a brooding, melancholy exterior that has become sharper with age. But what the two detectives do share is an attention to detail that characterizes most great literary detectives as well – crimes are solved when the investigator identifies some tiny inconsistency that exposes a wider range of evidence against the guilty party. Holmes solves his crimes through research, Foyle through interrogation, but both solve via deduction. The shows particularly differ in pacing, however – the London-based Sherlock moves quickly, not just in editing, but in dialogue and action, while Foyle’s War is almost leisurely and methodical, reflecting its bucolic setting and the illusion of peace while a war rages mere miles away. So if you’re a Sherlock fan looking for another British mystery series while you wait for season two to arrive here, give Foyle’s War a try.

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→ January 11, 2012
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Downton Abbey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spoiler territory:

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