→ September 17, 2012
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The Worst Intentions.

I had two pieces go up late last week for Insiders – one on the Yankees’ dimming future and another on Josh Beckett and Lance Lynn.

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I’ve been blogging a little out of order (and often late) recently, but before I forget I wanted to throw a quick post up on Alessandro Piperno’s 2005 novel The Worst Intentions (Con le peggiori intenzioni), a huge best-seller in Italy that won several major literary prizes there and appeared in English in 2007. Piperno, an Italian writer and literary critic born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, has produced the Italian equivalent to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, equally crude and funny but without Roth’s trademark self-indulgence and with a more satirical eye turned toward the hypocrisy of the protoganist’s family members and friends.

Piperno’s narrator, Daniel Sonnino, is the sexually immature 33-year-old heir to a nonexistent family fortune, squandered by his extravagant and crooked grandfather, Bepy, who, along with Daniel’s father, believes in keeping up appearances over all else. The novel eschews the traditional narrative for a stream-of-consciousness approach to the family history of the Sonninos, chronicling their decline from his grandfather’s bankruptcy and flight from debtors, leaving his family to clean up the mess, to his father, mother (who views the Sonninos as frauds), uncle, and his grandfather’s one-time business partner, cuckolded by Bepy, and whose granddaughter, Gaia, becomes the object of Daniel’s puerile obsessions.

I’m not a fan of Roth’s writing, primarily because I find his central characters so self-absorbed despite their development being so arrested, but Piperno’s Daniel, while still immature both emotionally and sexually, is better able to observe his family from a detached perspective, and can even turn the lens on himself and recognize the impacts of his own failures and his inability to form meaningful relationships. His own worst trait is a sometimes-subtle misogyny that often bubbles over into not-subtle forms, particularly with Gaia, who enjoys having Daniel as a follower but dates the most popular boy in the school – one of the only other Jewish students and Daniel’s best friend. The entire final chapter is devoted to this triangle and its devolution, including Daniel’s own destructive action that follows him for years afterwards, which, given Gaia’s name, is fraught with metaphorical implications as well.

Piperno also separates himself from Roth by populating his book with enjoyably quirky side characters, similar to the way the TV series Arrested Development acquired such a devoted cult following – its narcissistic characters helped create a new genre of television comedy. Piperno’s characters aren’t all so awful; some are merely amusing, such as the Arab waiter who only reads Tolstoy’s War and Peace, over and over, reading nothing else over the last thirty years:

But every time, as he returned those old familly volumes [of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust], the Arab’s face displayed a slightly fastidious expression, as if to say: “Thank you for the suggestion, my friend, but, you see, once you’ve read War and Peace you are condemned to read nothing else all your life!” And who’s to say that he wasn’t right?

Piperno’s previous book was a work of nonfiction looking at anti-Semitic elements in Marcel Proust’s work, and the Proust influence is strong here both in word choice and in the meandering flow of the story, although Piperno’s sentences and paragraphs aren’t quite so endless as Proust’s. Here he’s taken Proust’s narrative style, merged it with the neurotic realism of Roth, and produced a slightly difficult but clever and incisive work that was worth the effort required to get through it. His subsequent novel, Persecution, was just released in English in July, and its sequel, Inseparabili, won this year’s Premia Strega, the Italian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so it appears that this book may just be a taste of his capabilities as a writer and satirist.

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→ September 4, 2012
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Bread and Tulips.

Bread & Tulips (Pane e tulipani) was a huge success in Italy when it was released in 2000, sweeping their version of the Academy Awards and even earning “official selection” status at Cannes and at the Toronto International Film Festival. Yet it’s actually a light, tender-hearted comedy about second chances in life and love, especially where kind souls are involved. (It’s available on Netflix Instant video as well.)

Licia Maglietta plays Rosalba, a harried, unappreciated housewife who, while touring ancient ruins in the Italian countryside with her fatheaded husband and their two sons, ends up left behind at a rest stop, for which her husband blames her even though he failed to notice she was missing for a few hours. (He’s a real peach, the lone one-dimensional character in the film, but at least one used to good purpose as the plot’s main punching bag.) On a whim, she hitchhikes to Venice, a city she’s always wanted to visit but has never seen, and through another series of misfortunes ends up settling there, taking a part-time job, and rooming with an Icelandic waiter, Fernando (played by Bruno Ganz), who has to delay his plans to hang himself due to his unexpected houseguest.

The film marries two old movie tropes, the bored housewife making her escape and the stranger in a town of lovable eccentrics, in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. The script’s beauty is that it presents these various oddballs as they are, in favorable lighting but without commentary and often without much definition. Fernando’s neighbor, the “holistic masseuse” (and perhaps lady of the evening) Grazia, ends up in an intrigue involving the hapless plumber-turned-detective Constantino, who should be the story’s main antagonist as an extension of Rosalba’s husband but ends up winning our affection because of his determination and ineptitude.

Bread and Tulips is sweet yet seldom sentimental, and if it’s a little unrealistic at times, it’s more to avoid getting bogged down in the mundane details of a woman just taking off without much cash or means of support. There’s a fair amount of slapstick humor along with some good situational gags, such as Rosalba’s husband asking his mistress to iron a shirt or two for him, while Giuseppe Battiston handles the clownish role of Constantino in a way that engenders sympathy for him as even he tries to ruin Rosalba’s fantasy.

The only false notes in the film, to me, were the dream sequences, in part because they’re not set off from the film in any clear way, and in part because they felt like a clumsy method of demonstrating Rosalba’s own inner turmoil at her abandonment of her family obligations. Awake, she seldom shows any guilt, and relishes her freedom, her independence, her ability to put herself first and revisit long-dormant dreams, including an apparent passion for music that resurfaces when she finds a disused accordion in the wardrobe of the room she rents. The dreams seemed forced, as if the writer or director felt that we needed a reminder that she’d fled her family or that she at least loved her two sons.

Roger Ebert’s review of Bread and Tulips praised the film, but contains one line in the first paragraph that I found shocking to the point that I was slightly offended by it:

Not a classic beauty, not a ”movie star,” but a 40-ish dreamer who’s just a little overweight, with the kind of sexiness that makes you think of bread baking, clean sheets and that everything is going to be all right. 

Man, I like Roger Ebert, but this is a seriously cracked view of beauty. Maglietti – who was around 45 when the film was made – looks gorgeous as soon as she gets to Venice and out of her frumpy-mummy clothes, spending most of the film in flattering sundresses that would certainly have exposed her as “a little overweight” if she had had any weight over. And I’m not even sure where to go with Ebert’s opinion on what’s sexy about an attractive 40-year-old woman (or about the type of women who bake bread?). Besides, if everything’s going to be all right, maybe you’re doing it all wrong.

What Ebert might have said was that Maglietti’s sex appeal is paired with a youthful visage that makes her seem more approachable, not just for the audience, but to lend credence to the idea that strangers in Venice would just take to this woman, offering her a place to rent, a part-time job, or help keeping her location a secret from her husband (who seems to want her back to take care of the house, not to be his wife or lover). Maglietti doesn’t look close to her age in this role, playing a woman in her late 30s with a cuteness that renders Rosalba’s personality as something even younger. She carries the film, with plenty of help from her supporting cast, in the kind of romantic comedy that would never be made by a major U.S. studio because it relies too much on tired tactics like strong writing and actors who bring their characters to life.

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→ September 3, 2012
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The Descendants.

I’ve been less motivated to watch all of the 2011 nominees for Best Picture than I was the previous year, with a few films in this year’s batch in which I have absolutely zero interest (The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and the winner, The Artist failing to meet expectations for me – to say nothing of the time I’ve spent watching rookie league games the last two months. I finally got around to watching The Descendants this weekend, and I’m struggling to find a credible reason why it wouldn’t beat out The Artist in a fair fight, one based strictly on the quality of the films rather than what I presume was a nostalgia move.

George Clooney plays the starring role as Matt King, a successful Hawaiian attorney whose wife, Elizabeth, suffers a serious boating accident at the start of the film, leaving her comatose and eventually without hope of recovery. Matt’s two daughters, the wayward Alexandra and the sassy Scottie, were already struggling before the accident, and the situation is made worse when Alexandra informs her father that Elizabeth had been having an affair. This revelation launches Matt, with Alexandra’s help, on a quixotic quest to identify and confront the man who has cuckolded him, only to find that he, too, has a family likely to be devastated if the adultery is unearthed. It’s clear as this storyline unfolds that this is not only Matt’s way of dealing with his two-headed grief, but a way that his remaining family nucleus can come back together and try to heal as a single unit, rather than three individuals drifting apart on a sea of sorrow and hurt.

None of the film’s characters, even side characters like Alexandra’s sort-of-boyfriend Sid, ends up one-dimensional, a rare trick in a movie with this many people in pivotal roles. The film could easily have demonized Elizabeth’s paramour, and while he’s hardly a good guy, he’s more than just a dark presence around the story’s periphery. Elizabeth’s father similarly appears with a purpose but with a severe underlying pain that governs his anger towards Matt and Alexandra, anger that presents Matt with a difficult decision near the end of the film. I had a little trouble with Judy Greer as the oblivious wife of Elizabeth’s lover, although that was primarily because every time she talked, I pictured Cheryl from Archer (whom Greer voices brilliantly).

The movie’s subplot, however, has all of the sentiment and overstatement that the main plot lacks. Matt is the sole executor of the trust overseeing the 25,000 acres of “pristine” land on Kauai that must be sold before the trust dissolves in seven years, and most of the various cousins involved in the trust want to sell out to a developer who’ll build a resort, golf course, and and other commercial properties, making the cousins instant millionaires. I doubt I need to explain what course Matt ends up taking, although the film offers minimal explanation for it beyond his soliloquy at the time he makes it (in which he acknowledges that he has no immediate solution to the problem caused by the rule against perpetuities); the parallel between his attempt to save the land and his newfound attention to the consequences of his actions and his similar efforts to save what remians of his family is obvious and forced, the one false note in a film that otherwise succeeds on how often it feels true.

George Clooney excels in the role of Matt, although I did find it hard to accept one of the most famous actors in the world in this sort-of-everyman role – doesn’t everyone around Matt realize he looks a lot like George Freaking Clooney? – and the attempts to frump him up a little, like tucking in his shirts, greying his hair, making him run oddly in flip-flops, and so on, only emphasized the disconnect between the character and the actor, much like Cary Grant in his final film role, Walk, Don’t Run. Clooney is at the point in his career where any performance in a serious film that isn’t worthy of an Oscar nomination is a surprise, so I was far more taken by the performance of Shailene Woodley, making her feature-film debut as Alexandra, who begins the film away at a reform school where she’s supposed to be getting help with substance-abuse issues. Her character develops far more over the course of the film, sometimes in mildly surprising ways, as she goes from spoiled, snotty, justifiably-angry daughter to her father’s main emotional supporter and partner-in-crime. Woodley had to show more range than any other actor in The Descendants, from the heartbreaking scene where she learns that her mother isn’t going to recover to the just-as-heartbreaking scenes at the end where the family says goodbye – delivering subtle grace notes like her movements as she brings her younger sister into their mother’s room – enough that I’m surprised she didn’t receive more attention come awards season. With that kind of ability and the requisite beauty (Hollywood accepts no less), Woodley looks like a star in the making.

Of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen so far, I’d put The Descendants on top, ahead of Hugo, which I loved but which didn’t have the subtlety of The Descendants and relied more on fantasy to drive its main plot forward. That’s not necessarily bad, but I think it’s harder to make a great film while trying to keep the characters and story firmly grounded in reality, and of course The Descendants couldn’t fill space with special effects or long flashback sequences. The Descendants also found significant humor in the cracks between the darker sequences in the film. Both movies make The Artist look like paper-thin in comparison.

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→ September 1, 2012
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Gun, with Occasional Music.

I did a final blog post on Arizona Rookie League prospects yesterday, including the Cubs’ big bonus baby Juan Paniagua; some other Cubs, Rangers, and Royals prospects; and notes on Tyler Skaggs and Jacob Turner.

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Back in December, reader JD recommended Jonathan Lethem’s 1994 novel Gun, with Occasional Music to me, saying:

It’s the best and funniest modern (well, futuristic) noir I’ve read — Chandler and Hammett by way of Philip K. Dick and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And it’s shorter than a playoff game, to boot.

All of which is pretty accurate – the various pull quotes from critics include two that mention the Dick/Chandler combination, but Lethem’s dystopian hard-boiled detective novel is also more wryly funny than either writer was, and occasionally a little too wrapped up in its own sci-fi stylings (although so was Dick’s Ubik). It’s one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year, and certainly one of the quickest, including a clever twist in the final third of the book that differentiates it from the standard (and slightly hackneyed) hard-boiled format.

Lethem’s detective, Conrad Metcalf, is a drug-addicted “private inquisitor” – but the drug addiction isn’t a big deal, as everyone in the novel is using “make,” a blend of drugs provided for free by the government and customized for each individual, including components like Forgettol, Acceptol, and Addictol, as an actual opiate of the masses to keep everyone in line. Citizens also carry around magnetic cards that track their “karma points,” which can be increased or, more commonly in this book, deducted by formal inquisitors from The Office, the Gestapo-like police presence that stands in Metcalf’s way as he tries to help a client who’s been set up by the Office for a murder he didn’t commit – one that pushes his karma down to zero, threatening him with this new world’s equivalent of prison, cryogenic suspension. Oh, and Metcalf is being dogged by a trigger-happy gunsel who just happens to be an evolved kangaroo.

The rich details of Lethem’s dystopian world start to overwhelm what is, at heart, a straightforward detective novel, one where Metcalf starts investigating one case and ends up enmeshed in a conspiracy to cover up one crime that eventually involves a second murder, Metcalf getting knocked unconscious*, and a web of lies and suspicions of adultery that doesn’t clear up until the penultimate chapter. Even though I felt little or no sympathy for any of the characters involved in the crime, Lethem layered enough complexity into that part of the story that the story maintained my interest level right to the end, both to see how the crime took place (I didn’t figure it out) and how Metcalf’s own side story would be resolved.

*If there were a hard-boiled detective story drinking game, the detective taking a blackjack or other blunt object to the back of the head, describing the carpet as it approaches is face, and waking up somewhere else would be worth two shots.

The dystopian aspects varied in their effectiveness. The “make” was at the top of the list, both because of its veneer of plausibility and because of its increasing relevance to our dependency on Big Pharma (and I say this as someone who depends on them myself). The evolved animals are largely props beyond the kangaroo, who could just as easily have been human. The “babyheads,” children with evolved brains but immature bodies, seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. The karma cards, once you get past the RPG experience-points feel, also feel somewhat prescient, written seven years before the Patriot Act and the start of our era of no-fly lists, monitoring of electronic communcations, and other erosions of privacy in the name of increasing security. It’s dark but feels more madcap than paranoid, even though there’s a clear paranoia underneath the surface. If you can gloss over some of the slightly siller sci-fi trappings of Gun, it’s a fast-paced detective story with enough of a serious underpinning to elevate it above the various pulp authors who’ve tried (and mostly failed) to repurpose Chandler and Hammett into different eras.

Next up: Alessandro Piperno’s The Worst Intentions, which, after reading about 40% of the book, I would call an Italian version of Portnoy’s Complaint.

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→ August 31, 2012
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Lost Cities app.

I’ve been touting the physical version of Lost Cities, Reiner Knizia’s easy-to-learn two-player gateway game, for about two years now, because of its combination of simple mechanics, modest strategy, and portability, even though it has a little more luck or randomness than I like in most games. The iOS version of Lost Cities is now out, from the same developers as the best-of-breed Carcassonne app, and as you might expect the Lost Cities app looks tremendous and plays very easily and quickly, with just a few minor glitches.

The entire game of Lost Cities revolves around a single deck of 60 cards, containing 12 cards in each of five colors: cards numbered 2 through 10 as well as three coin cards that allow a player to increase his/her bet on that color. Players build “expeditions” in each color by placing cards in increasing numerical order, so once you’ve placed the 4 card in one color, you can no longer place the 2 or the 3 (and must hold or discard it). Each player’s turn consists of playing or discarding one card, and then drawing a card from the deck or any discard pile. You receive points for an expedition equal to the sum of the card values in that expedition minus 20, so you can receive negative points if you don’t place enough cards in a column. Placing one coin card (before you place any numerical cards) doubles your gain or loss, placing two coin cards triples the result, and placing three quadruples it. There’s also a 20-point bonus for placing eight or more cards, including coins, in a single column. Since there is only one card of each number/color combination, the game’s decisions revolve around when to play a specific card – do you play it now, or hold it to see if you can get an intervening card first? Do you hold certain cards to keep them away from your opponent? Do you draw from the deck to move the game closer to the end, or draw from a discard pile to prolong it?

The app version has incredibly bright, clear graphics, enough that it plays well on the small iPod/iPhone screen, with a very sensible layout that makes it easy to see what’s been played, including coin markers next to the current score in each column. That ability to see the current score is probably the biggest advantage the app version offers over the physical version – the math in the game isn’t hard, but it’s easier to make quick decisions when the running tallies are there in front of you. (It can be a little disconcerting to see a -40 or -60 when you’ve played coin cards but no number cards in an expedition, though.) The app offers four AI players, one comparable to a box of rocks, one very challenging, and two in between. It also comes with a set of thirty in-game achievements that serve as tutorials on mechanics and on strategy, with the higher levels forcing you to handicap yourself in ways that will force you to think about the game a little differently. Online play is available, but I haven’t tested it out yet. I have played over 100 games against AI opponents, with most games taking under five minutes. It’s addictive enough that my daughter complained I was playing it too much.

The main glitch in the game is the proximity of the discard pile to your expeditions, making it far too easy to accidentally place a card in the wrong place. While your placement isn’t final until you draw another card, either from the deck or from a discard pile, if you move very quickly, which I found I was able to do after just a game or two, you’ll likely make a wrong move along the way because it’s so easy to put a card in the wrong place. Obviously there’s a user error element there – if I would just slow down, I wouldn’t make these mistakes – but I’d prefer to see more space between the two areas, perhaps by relocating the discard piles to the center of the board, which is how the game is set up if you’re playing the physical version. I’ve also caught the weaker AI players making what appeared to be extremely bad moves, such as playing coin cards late in the game when the probability of reaching the 20-point threshold in that expedition is very low, so once you’re up to speed on gameplay you will probably just want to face the most difficult AI opponent.

One of the best aspects of the migration of advanced boardgames to iOS has been the high-quality implementations, since the audience is still somewhat of a niche market, willing to pay a few bucks for every title released in this space. The Lost Cities app takes a fun if very simple game and gives it a high-class makeover for iOS, with tremendous graphics, plenty of replay value thanks to the game’s random element and one very strong AI player, and the potential for online play – another top of the line electronic version that matches or even exceeds the quality of the original.

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→ August 21, 2012
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Chicago eats.

I wrote about Bryce Harper’s struggles today for Insiders, and about Twins prospects Miguel Sano and Eddie Rosario yesterday. My post on Saturday’s Under Armour game should go up in the next 24 hours.

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my photograph of 2 Sparrows‘ maple bacon donut, which is on the short list of the best things I’ve ever eaten, not just for the bacon, but for the absolutely perfect donut at the heart of the $4 dish. The maple glaze is very sweet, like pure maple sugar, so the donut beneath it has little to no sweetness of its own, instead shining for the crispy exterior and a soft, light interior. The bacon crumbled over the top is house-cured, with the salt well balanced with the glaze’s sweetness, and some texture contrast with the soft donut. I admit the plate seemed a little gimmicky, but the execution across the board is tremendous.

The duck confit hash was less successful, however, primarily because of texture – every item in the hash, which is mostly duck and sweet potatoes, is soft, with the duck actually the least so, even slightly tough in comparison to everything else in the dish. I also find duck meat in general and confit in particular slightly sweet, at least relative to any other protein, so the combination with sweet potatoes felt unbalanced.

My dinner with Old Hoss Radbourn on Saturday night was also a huge hit, as we went to The Purple Pig, a restaurant that promises “cheese, swine, and wine.” We went heavy on the swine, going for pork liver paté, fried pig ears, and the “JLT,” with pig jowl standing in for the bacon – as well as two vegetable dishes and dessert. Dish by dish:

* The pork liver paté was unreal – as smooth as a dessert mousse, with a pronounced smoky undertone and a thin layer of high-quality olive oil on top, served with thick slices of grilled country bread. The server even brought more bread so we could finish every last bit of the paté, and even though I’m not even a huge fan of liver, I’d order this again in a heartbeat. The dish is one of a handful of “smears” they offer, including one made from lardo, cured pork fat that melts into whatever hot item is underneath it.

* I would never have guessed I was eating fried pig ears if I didn’t know going in what we had ordered. They’re slow-cooked, julienned, then quickly fried like french-fried onion rings, served with fried kale, pickled cherry peppers, and a fried egg on top. The pig ears have just a hint of tooth to them, but aren’t tough, and the frying makes the kale crispy while setting its deep green hue. It’s like the perfect bar snack for food snobs like me – and with a Belhaven stout in front of me I had no trouble finishing my half of the dish. You can find the recipe if you want to try this at home.

* The JLT was incredibly awkward to eat, but when I could get all the flavors into one bite, it was masterful, with huge flavors all in perfect balance. The jowl is the pig’s cheek meat, cured like bacon but thicker and much more tender; those of you familiar with regional Italian cooking may have had it as guanciale. The heirloom tomatoes are sliced nearly an inch thick, which contributed to the construction issues, although they were extremely bright and provided the one sweet element in the dish. The duck egg … perhaps I’m a philistine, but I doubt I could have identified this as a duck egg rather than a chicken egg, and either way, a runny egg makes every dish better. The lemon aioli tasted more like a cold bearnaise sauce, providing the one acidic element, while frisee adds a slightly bitter note. As a whole, the dish has a complex mixture of colors, textures, and flavors, and if it was a little easier to eat it would have scored an 80 for me.

* The broccoli with roasted garlic and anchovy vinaigrette was another winner, with the broccoli also roasted and the umami-filled vinaigrette coating the vegetables (florets and I believe julienned stalks) perfectly, but without the fishy taste the description might lead you to expect. The charred cauliflower with toasted breadcrumbs, cornichons, and parsley was our least favorite of the five dishes, even though it might have been the prettiest thanks to the use of green and purple florets; the flavors were all muted and compared to the strong flavors in every other dish it felt bland.

* Both desserts were excellent; the mixed berry crostada had a textbook flaky/tender crust that could have stood on its own, while the salted caramel soft-serve ice cream was very smooth and had the complexity you expect from that flavor, even if it’s become a little hackneyed at this point. I’d take the crostada over the ice cream just because it was more unusual. Good call by Hoss on this place, especially since I figured there was even money we’d end up at a brothel.

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→ July 26, 2012
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The Making of a Chef.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up. I am planning to go to tonight’s Mets/D-backs game and hope to file something off it tomorrow.

The Culinary Institute of America has become the most prestigious cooking school in the country, expanding from a small, all-male class when it opened 66 years ago in New Haven, to a large campus in Hyde Park, New York, featuring four restaurants and a rolling calendar where a new set of students matriculates every three weeks. For the CIA’s 50th anniversary in 1996, writer Michael Ruhlman went through the curriculum as a student, albeit at an accelerated rate and without the required restaurant externship, and wrote a book about this first-hand experience. The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America became a best-seller and established Ruhlman as one of the top food writers in the business, succeeding both because of its lively, energetic prose and because Ruhlman absorbed so much food knowledge while working his way through his classes.

Ruhlman refers to himself as an “undercover” student, although the faculty are aware of his presence and role, and he cooks right alongside the students, finding himself judged and graded as they are – and often defending himself when he’s not happy with the results. These classes range from basic knife skills to butchering to sauces to pastry, concluding with a 15-week run through the four on-campus restaurants run by the CIA, which range from family dining to formal and assign each student to a different station each day, forcing them to draw on all of their prior education.

Ruhlman’s great trick in this book is finding and conveying drama in what otherwise might seem the most mundane of tasks: The preparation of food. From early classes where the object is to beat the clock and achieve a good enough result for a demanding professor to later work in the restaurants, where students’ work is served to paying customers (and, occasionally, the school’s president or a visiting celebrity chef), Ruhlman manages to evoke a sense of urgency in the reader, turning dry material into compelling prose. He achieves this primarily through dialogue, letting his fellow students (and, often, himself) communicate their rising stress levels, rather than trying to explain it directly in a way that would likely sound trite to anyone who’s never spent time in a restaurant kitchen. There’s a recurring theme in the book about the need for chefs to push themselves harder and faster than they thought possible, something hard to imagine if you’re in a job that doesn’t have the same kind of time pressures.

He also uses the open question of what type of roux (a cooked combination of flour and fat, used as the base for many major sauces, as well as for gumbo) one should use to make the poorly-named “brown sauce,” which also relies on veal stock, aromatics, and tomatoes (usually as a paste) for flavor and then itself becomes a foundation for countless other sauces. There are two answers to the question, blond or brown, but the way in which each instructor answers the question reveals much about his/her philosophy of food and, perhaps more importantly to this book, philosophy of teaching about food. The lengthy discussion of the making of consomme follows a similar path – it is not sufficient to know what consomme is or how to make it; one must understand why making it so clear that the instructor can read the writing on a dime at the bottom of a gallon of this clarified meat stock matters.

Although Making of a Chef is a book about cooking, it’s not a cookbook – there are no recipes, nothing more specific than a general description of some fundamentals like brown sauce. The story is full of unusual characters, instructors and students, but none becomes a central figure and some of the students blink in and out of the story as they leave campus for their externships at high-end restaurants – a requirement for graduation at the CIA. It’s a book about an idea, that cooking, only recently seen as a highly respectable profession in the United States, can be codified and taught to the inexpert so that they can enter the world of haute cuisine and develop their own culinary concepts. It also details Ruhlman’s own intellectual evolution from someone who enjoys food to someone who understands it, appreciates it, and, fortunately for us, can write about it in an informative and eloquent way. For a book that would seem, on its face, to lack a compelling hook, it was very hard for me to put down.

I own four other books by Ruhlman, none better or more heavily used than Ruhlman’s Twenty, an absolutely essential cookbook that I reviewed in November. It goes through twenty ingredients or techniques that are key for any home cook, with numerous foolproof recipes that often include step-by-step instructions and photographs to help the less experienced reader.

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→ July 21, 2012
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Pelotero.

The stellar new documentary Pelotero shines a light on the way Major League Baseball has used the Dominican Republic as a pipeline for talent over the past forty years by following a pair of up-and-coming prospects leading up to Signing Day in 2009. The 75-minute film is screening in select cities, and is also available as a rental for $6.99 via both amazon and iTunesicon.

Pelotero started out as a simple documentary about the way MLB mines talent in the Dominican Republic, focusing on two young players, Miguel Angel Sano and Jean Carlos Batista, as they approached their 16th birthdays and the July 2nd date after which they’d be allowed to sign pro contracts. The directors appear to have gained almost unfettered access to both players, their families, and their trainers, as well as a surprising number of on-camera quotes from scouts with major league teams operating in the Dominican. That alone would have made the film worth seeing, but it probably wouldn’t have had much narrative greed to keep the attention of a larger audience.

As some of you probably remember, Sano ended up at the center of a controversy over his actual age and identity, one the directors were able to follow in real time and to expose in a way that has to have MLB and the Pittsburgh Pirates deeply unhappy. The film makes it quite clear that the family blames Pittsburgh’s top scout in the Dominican Republic, Rene Gayo, for starting the rumors about Sano’s age and then colluding with the MLB investigator (who, off camera, tells Sano to sign with the Pirates for $2 million to make the investigation go away) so he can acquire the player at a discount. The most damning evidence, obtained via a hidden camera, has Gayo strongly implying to the family that he is the reason Sano was partially cleared – and that they should sign with Pittsburgh as a result. The unfolding of this drama, as well as a similar if smaller-scale issue affecting Batista, and the associated effects on the players’ families, turns an ordinary documentary focusing on the exploitation of young Dominican players into a scathing indictment of corruption in MLB’s operations on the island. (The film concludes with a note that MLB declined an opportunity to respond on camera, and that MLB now claims that the depictions in the film are “inaccurate” and no longer reflect the league’s operations and conduct on the island. Gayo is still employed by the Pittsburgh Pirates and says, in another statement displayed before the credits, that he simply did his job. You can read some of MLB’s comments here and here, and it is fair for them to argue that their regulation in the Dominican Republic is stronger today than it was in 2009.)

Setting aside the specific questions of culpability in the Sano case, which may have cost him $1-2 million off his ultimate signing bonus, the film’s greatest contribution is its exposure of how Dominican prospects are treated like chattel in a factory system where independent trainers will develop players on contingency, taking up to 35% of their eventual signing bonuses, while MLB teams pay lower bonuses there than they do to comparable American- or Canadian-born prospects. The new CBA, which caps each team’s total international expenditures on all players in this signing season at a figure less than what the seventh overall pick in this June’s draft received by himself, only makes the varying treatment of players by their places of birth even more stark. Pelotero shows how much Dominican players’ families come to count on a large signing bonus as their lottery ticket out of poverty, with some players (including Sano) living in heartbreaking conditions before they sign – and relative opulence afterwards. The promise of a life-changing bonus leads to a clear sense of entitlement on the sides of some players, to Batista’s mother apparently viewing her son as a cash cow, and to incentives for players to try to cheat the system by lying about their ages or identities. MLB and Gayo come off as the villians of Sano’s story, but that doesn’t mean the players or their camps are heroes.

The directors of Pelotero deserve much credit for staying out of the story, with minimal narration from John Leguizamo that offers some slightly pro-player commentary early in the film but that largely drops off as the Sano controversy takes over. The flip side of their hands-off style is that once that storyline becomes the film’s center, the balance begins to shift, unavoidably, to Sano’s side – we are watching it from his house, and hearing most of the commentary from him, his family, and his agent, but other than Gayo, who comes off horribly, we don’t get MLB’s side because they declined to comment on film. There was little the directors could have done to restore the balance without participation from the Commissioner’s Office, but the film does suffer slightly in the end from their absence. It is an outstanding film even with that caveat, a must-watch for any baseball fan. After you hear a trainer casually toss out “planting seeds” and “harvesting” as a metaphor for how he develops teenaged prospects before they turn 16, you will find it hard to look at any Dominican prospect the same way.

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→ July 5, 2012
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Priceless.

Recent ESPN stuff:
* Notes on Trevor Bauer, Andrew Cashner, and Pat Corbin from Tuesday night
* notes on six top July 2nd signings
* Today’s Klawchat transcript
* Today’s Baseball Today podcast
* And my guest appearance on today’s Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast.

I apologize for how little I’ve been posting here; the draft, followed by a 16-day east coast trip with family, put a serious dent in my blogging time. I’ve still been reading as usual, with the best book I read in June a bit out of my normal interests – Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, Robert Wittman’s memoir of his time at the FBI, where he founded the bureau’s Art Crime Team.

Wittman wisely spends most of the book talking about major cases he helped solve for the FBI, including recoveries of objects as diverse as Goya’s The Swing, North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, and a flag used by an African-American army unit during the Civil War. He bookends all of those stories with the attempt to recover several paintings, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, stolen from the Isabella Gardner Stuart Museum in Boston in 1990, an attempt that (mild spoiler) was unsuccessful, something Wittman blames largely on bureacracy, infighting, and one particularly obstinate and territorial bureau chief within the FBI. He also includes a little of his own backstory, explaining how he ended up the bureau’s art crime expert, how he learned enough about art and artifacts to go undercover as a crooked art dealer/broker, and how his life was nearly ruined by a car accident that resulted in the death of one of his colleagues.

I’d be stretching to call this a collection of spy stories, but there’s a surprising amount of intrigue involved in stories that you know (other than the final one) are going to more or less work out OK, and are usually very successful. Wittman and co-author John Shiffman, a former investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, manage to work in enough of the personalities of the various thieves and shady dealers with whom Wittman had to negotiate – and was usually also trying to set up, with a SWAT team hanging out in the hotel lobby or in the room next door – to keep the vignettes from feeling paint-by-numbers: Wittman gets the tip, negotiates the deal, and then the bad guys get arrested. The details on how he managed to operate for so long in fairly small underworld circles without being compromised until right before he was due to retire also made for interesting reading, enough so that I wish they’d spent more time discussing backstopping or how he’d cover his tracks after a bust.

My only other criticism is that it’s way too short – even as someone who doesn’t know art, I was interested in the histories of the pieces he was trying to recover, and would gladly have read another dozen such stories between that and the unintentional comedy of the crooks who had the stolen goods. (Really, stealing a Vermeer … I get that the piece is valuable, but you can’t exactly put the thing on eBay and get 90 cents on the dollar here. Whatever happened to knocking over a nice jewelry store?) I also thought the back half of the Gardner Stuart story treated the FBI’s internal squabbling a little superficially – it reminded me of the way The Wire often used the FBI to throw an obstacle in the main police characters’ paths – even though in both cases the Bureau probably was a legitimate part of the problem. The idea that the most significant unsolved art theft in U.S. history remains unsolved in large part because one doofus in the Bureau’s Boston office wanted to cut the FBI’s main art crime expert out of the loop should make your blood boil, but at the same time, the allegation could use more substance.

Next up: Anita Loos’ two comic novellas, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.

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→ June 22, 2012
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Le Havre boardgame & app.

The board game Le Havre is one of the best complex strategy games I’ve tried, although the emphasis is on complex, involving a lengthy setup, more pieces than I can remember in any other game (mostly tiles representing resources that need to be sorted into piles), and a lot of long-range planning with great potential for other players to inadvertently trip you up. It’s very balanced, nearly luck-free, and rewards patience and attention. But the time to set it up and the time to play it are both major obstacles unless you’re quite hardcore about your boardgaming – and you don’t have to get up early the next morning.

All of that makes it a perfect game for adaptation into electronic form, and Le Havre, released on Wednesday night by Codito, is excellent, playing easily with plenty of instructions and offering sufficient challenges from the AI opponents to allow for many repeat plays.

In Le Havre, a game by the designer of Agricola and heavily inspired by Caylus, players compete to acquire the most total value in buildings and ships while filling growing requirements to feed workers each turn, a balancing act that is far more difficult than it sounds because of the competition for scarce resources and the limited number of ways to obtain food, a problem exacerbated in games of more than two players. On each turn, a player may choose to take resources from any of the seven available stocks; to take the available supply of money (francs); to build one of three buildings visible on the stacks of building cards; or to use a building that is already built, even if it was built by another player. A player may also buy certain buildings outright in addition to that main action.

Each player has to have enough food or francs on hand at the end of every round to feed his workers, and the rounds are short – seven moves in total, so in each round of a four-player game, one player will get only a single move. Yet to acquire points from resources, players have to first acquire the right mix of resources, sometimes converting them to other kinds of resources, sometimes acquiring energy sources as well, and then build the building or the ship in question. It takes patience, and requires a lot of quick decisions about when to move for the short term (food) and when to move for the long (points).

There are multiple ways to win Le Havre, one of the key features in a game that is this complex (and my main criticism of Puerto Rico). Shipbuilding is the best way to beat the AI players in my experience with the app, but there are several different paths to high point totals through buildings, including several buildings that stack up point bonuses depending on what else you’ve already built. There are also several different paths to ensuring a regular food supply, and ships can provide a fixed quantity of food on each turn once they’re built. When a player can’t feed his workers, he can take out a loan – annoying, but sometimes the right strategic move, and sometimes the path to digging a hole you can’t quite escape.

Game play within the app is very straightforward, and one of the benefits of an app version is the fact that you are protected from rules mistakes, which, given the complexity of Le Havre, is a significant advantage. Each card replicates the graphics from the physical game, including symbols that indicate the card’s price in resources, fee to use if it’s not yours, value in points, and resources or gains from usage. Clicking on the question mark in the upper right once the card is expanded gets the full text explaining the card and all of its costs and benefits. Learning the lay of the board took me two or three games, but all of the critical information is either visible or is a click away. The game also gives players the ability to undo a move while the turn is in progress, and confirms the ‘end turn’ request as well (an option that can be turned off). There’s a solid tutorial, although it is no substitute for playing the game a few times against easy AI opponents.

Those AIs are good enough to continue to challenge me, a relative rookie in Le Havre, because they offer multiple levels of difficulty. I do find them a little predictable, and they often race out to early points leads because they plan more for the short term than the long; the first two settings are like training wheels, but in a 4- or 5-player game against all AI opponents, the hardest AI setting is a good enough challenge to allow for repeated gameplay. The app now offers turn-based online multiplayer through GameCenter, which I haven’t tried yet.

My criticisms of the app are minor – the graphics could be brighter, and the font isn’t as clear as it could be, so some of the text is tough to read without expanding it from the background. The hint feature, suggesting the next move to make, can be a little too focused on the short term, although the point of the hints is to help you learn the game, not help you beat the AI players that are running on the same software. I ran into some very minor graphics glitches that should be addressed in the first update. Also, the music made my wife want to strangle me after about two minutes, so I muted it for my own safety.

If you like Agricola and/or Caylus, I strongly recommend Le Havre. It is as elegant an adaptation as I can imagine for a game with this many elements. I’m also impressed by how Codito’s boardgame apps improve each time out – the leap from Puerto Rico, another complex game with a lot of elements, to Le Havre is outstanding – showing an internal commitment to improving the player experience (and, I presume, increasing revenues). That said, if you aren’t a fan of boardgames with a lot of rules or a relatively steep learning curve, you might find this game frustrating, particularly the physical game given all its pieces. (It took me the better part of an hour to break apart and sort all of the little cardboard resource tiles.) It’s very fair to jump off the boardgame bandwagon before Le Havre or Agricola – but at least the app lets you try it out for $5 first.

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Recent ESPN content, if you made it this far: My quick reaction to this year’s Futures Game rosters; an early look at Mike Trout’s MVP case; this week’s Klawchat; and some fun podcasts from Thursday with Dave Schoenfield and from Wednesday with Chris Sprow.

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