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 Isa's sashimi Today, Jeremy and I enjoyed omakase lunch with Isa at Ebisu. I urged Isa to hew freely from my normal sashimi requirements. He delivered several tasty, bright, and colorful plates, including this one. Clockwise from top: ikura and uni in a shiso bed, sprouts and daikon radish, scallop, crunchy and very fresh clam, umi masu (ocean trout) at 6 o’clock, ankimo (monkfish liver), and orange slices. A great collision of textures and flavors.  Tommy's sashimi I’m not a huge fan of taking pictures of food in restaurants, but it seems so appropriate when sushi is involved, and for probably good reason. The bright, shiny, colorful qualities of raw fish — it’s like photographing a fruit bowl, or studying a table-top still life from hundreds of years ago. Left foreground: shiromaguro toro topped with ginger paste; two chunks of maguro; three chunks of succulent hamachi (my favorite); umi masa, which is bright orange like sake, but so much fuller and satisfying; the white fish right foreground is snapper — light and delicious; in the middle of it all, behind the cucumber, is tai, another form of snapper that is served with its inner skin on under scallions and a mildly spicy pepper paste. The food is from Ebisu and was prepared by Tommy-san, a Jedi Master in the making. My reviews of Ebisu are here. I’m notoriously unsocial. It used to be called shy, but now it’s a disorder about which everyone seems to be an expert. If, like me, you have low tolerance for small talk, finding the experience of it like unto pain, then you know what I’m talking about. I’d like to argue that people with a skill for chit chat enjoy that skill because natural selection favors it. It’s not a terribly controversial argument, and I may be a bit unscientific in some of my conclusions. Read more > Just got back from a lovely trip to Seattle. It was my fourth visit to the gray city, but probably the first time I really had a memorable stay. The difference between this and previous visits is that I was sleep-deprived and burnt out from work — two conditions that make a very unhappy and particularly surly Andrew. Instead of feeling vibrant and thrilled to be someplace other than San Francisco, I wanted nothing more than to sleep for four days, holed up in front of a fire and a good book. Keep reading → Sometimes, I have a Spidey sense for a movie without having seen it in the theater. When it comes out on DVD or Blu-ray, I’ll just buy it, knowing that I will probably enjoy having it in my permanent library. Primer was a good example of that. So, when Where the Wild Things Are came out, I bought it on Blu-ray, even though I hadn’t seen it before. I had it — I stared at its cover — for several days before popping it into the machine. This is unlike me. Usually, I drop everything I’m doing and start playing that shiny new disc in my collection. But something felt wrong. I knew what that something was before I watched the first frame. Expectations. Maurice Sendak’s stories are shrines to being odd. Although I haven’t read one of his books in decades, my intimacy with them is like knowing how to drive stick shift or the difference between right and wrong. Waiting for this story to be told on film was never important to me because it is so specifically tied to the medium in which I first discovered it. Sendak’s artwork, his compositions and shading, his voice, his choice of words and articulation of childhood weirdness are love letters to being misunderstood. As Spike Jonze’s grim and earnest movie began, I thought, “OK, this is different, not what I expected, and I admire what he’s trying to establish.” But by the time we got to the island, when the monsters are revealed, the movie began to deflate with the force of a pinprick in an overwrought zeppelin. You could hear the hiss as each scene played out artfully, and feel the heartbreaking ordinariness of watching cinema — so limited at times — as it tried to impose a structure, an inescapably linear format, on a story that succeeds precisely because you can linger on an image and impose your own imagination on top of it. I think Where the Wild Things Are is just misguided. It would be gracious to suggest that Spike Jonze was so rapt by the subject matter that he couldn’t help but get lost in realizing the material. But there’s also a bit of arrogance in the mix. Who does Spike Jonze think he is? When Max meets the monsters for the first time, the execution of the monsters — the voice actors who suddenly cemented them in a very specific way — robs the viewer of any imaginative involvement in the project. It’s all about Spike Jonze and his monster-makers and the voice actors. Oh, look at how cool her nose is. Oh, look how cool his beak is. Oh, look at their forest and marvel at the rock music in the background as the monsters, like characters in an MTV video, try — with no whimsy or magic — to defy physics during their wild rumpus. I know this is one of the best-selling children’s books ever, and controversial in its day, but oh, how I wish that a humble filmmaker with a small budget and a true passion for the material had gotten her hands on the material. I’m not impressed. Neat little service, I guess, if your finances are simple, but if they are complex, nuh uh. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. I just love the Olympics. I can’t be bothered with the media spectacle, all that opening-ceremonies-a-guy-got-killed stuff. That’s for media whores and their pimps. I love the actual competitions. The beauty of streaming instead of watching on TV is that you get loads of raw replay without any cheerful commentator dicks ruining the fun for you. Think about it — commentators are an insult to intelligence. It’s like reading a book while Bob Costas stands behind you, “interpreting” the narrative. As if we’re clods and can’t understand what our eyes show us. NBC’s Olympics web site is impenetrable, with an information architecture that makes the Minotaur’s labyrinth seem like a straight line from entrance to exit. But once you find the raw-replay links, there is plenty to behold. Today, while writing and folding laundry, I’m watching the men’s luge singles (2 of 4) from yesterday. Pity that today’s finals aren’t immediately available. Those of us without broadcast TV are accustomed to being punished by network totalitarians when we want its content on the superior web. One thing becomes clear after watching over an hour of luge runs. The Germans and Russians rock. The Austrians are pretty good. The Americans are so-so. The Japanese and Koreans are terrible. Oh, and lugers (lugists?) have amazing thighs and asses. All that superhero lycra makes me dizzy. I know somebody died the other day, but I don’t know who and I’m not dwelling on it (that’s what blame press is for), other than to say that a Swede or Finlander (or one of those little boutique countries) banged into the side of the luge tube and fell off his sled (or whatever you call it). It was a frightening thing to watch since these chaps are moving at near sub-light speeds. He recovered by getting back onto his sled while hurtling downhill at 80 miles per hour and finishing the run unharmed. It was amazing, and instead of dick commentators ruining the purity of the moment, all you could hear was the raucous cheers of fans who, for a moment, were caught in breathless dread. Anyone with a yen for science fiction has passed through the doors of Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy. Rich with intrigue, massive in scope, rife with socio-political ideas. It is one of those trilogies, like the more sophisticated Dune series, that gets a young sci-fi reader’s mind racing. One of the beauties of Foundation is that, while a huge spacefaring adventure, it relies on a form of suspense that occurs in generational time rather than in days, weeks, or months. Despite the fact that there are innumerable spaceships and space skirmishes, these episodes are secondary to the psycho-historical intrigue. Asimov wrote an adventure tale for anthropology and sociology geeks, not for the Star Wars crowd. Another silly piece of legislation that our favorite silly Senator has up her sleeve:
My response to The Punisher:
Korokē manene is the new home for The Clog. Google-owned Blogger decided to stop supporting the 0.5% of its customers (who cares about a few hundred thousand blogs?) who use FTP to host their Blogger blogs on their own server/domains. A peculiar and disappointing turn of events, but it’s been a free service since I started 8 years ago, so I can’t complain…other than to say it’s going to take me weeks to manually transfer hundreds of Clog posts over to the superior WordPress platform I am now using. Blogger, you sort of screwed the pooch with this one. |
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Copyright © 2010 H. Andrew Lynch - All Rights Reserved |
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