Teaser trailer for Treme, the upcoming HBO series from, drum roll, the creators of The Wire. It is said to be about musicians in post-Katrina New Orleans, but given that David Simon is behind it, the series will likely be about the entire political-social ecosystem of that area.
My 2009 was the year of the half-formed post. I need to try to clear more of those out, like spring cleaning for my mind.
As more and more of our lives move online, the physical world occupies a smaller percentage of our daily concern. We sit in cafes and meetings and movie theaters with our heads tilted down in iPhone/Blackberry prayer mode.
So it is with art. You won't find this at MOMA in the surrealist section, but that's no fault of the Day Job Orchestra. I did, when I was at MOMA over the holidays, pull this video up and play it on my iPhone as a tiny tribute.
Jonathan Gold writes that right under our noses (mouths?), food became the new rock n' roll:
While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock 'n' roll -- individual, fierce and intensely political, communal yet congenial to aesthetic extremes: embracing veganism or learning to butcher a cow; eating tofu or head cheese, bean sprouts or pigs' ears. I could happily go the rest of my life without hearing about another celebrity potato farmer or rock-star butcher, about 15-year-old cheddar or 150-year-old Madeira. And I am not alone.
Perhaps that explains the food truck fever in LA, which has grown into an epidemic. There are so many food trucks with Twitter feeds that online aggregation sites for tracking their locations have evolved into attempts to aggregate physically in space. Whereas once the food trucks would bring your meal to you, now we're being roped into chasing our food? Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
For something unique, which Chef Roy's Korean tacos for Kogi were, a trek to seek out a food truck can be a culinary adventure. Kogi shot to fame from amidst the more workman-like pool of Mexican taco trucks which had been roaming LA for years before, but Kogi's rags-to-riches story (featured in NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and the NYTimes) and its use of Twitter to summon crowds like the PIed Piper (if you tweet it, they will come), seemed to launch a rush for curbside real estate. When I stepped out of work one afternoon to try out a grilled cheese truck that happened to stop down the street from our office, I ended up on the evening news on CBS. Construction workers who've been eating from taco trucks for years would have been appalled.
There are now trucks serving food that is both expensive and undistinguished ($9 cheesesteak?!), passing along none of the overhead savings from operating out of the back of a truck.
If a truck pulls up nearby your office and offers an alternative to the usual several lunch spots you're confined to, that's one thing, but if you hop in your car and drive out to a mobile food truck and pay premium prices to eat normal or even mediocre food out of a paper tray while standing on a street corner, you're getting robbed, both literally and figuratively.
The food truck bubble, as with others before it, will burst, taking down many a meal on wheels. If it isn't landlocked restaurants lobbying local officials to crack down on their mobile competition, it will be just plain fatigue. After all, this is a town where you can pay about $5 and get a really solid burger, fries, and drink, not to mention a table to sit at and enjoy the LA sun. Yes, In-N-Out is the Springsteen of this new rock n' roll.
Andy Borowitz joins The New Yorker with his Borowitz Report. I've never heard of it, but it seems to be a one-man Onion. First up: Full Body Scans to Double as Annual Checkups:
The President added that instituting the body scan/checkup could ward off some terrorists right from the start, “because a lot of them will balk at the $25 co-pay.
Preview the new album by Vampire Weekend, Contra, which Amazon is selling on CD for just $7.99. Back a few weeks, I forgot to set an alarm to fight the Ticketmaster mob for tickets to their show next Tuesday here in LA. The sold out instantly, and I'm still shut out, a 2009 regret I'm still paying for in 2010.
I finally uploaded some photos from Thanksgiving. Here's Karen showing off the heritage turkey that we roasted and that I wrote about before. It's the best tasting thing I prepared all year.
Cooking Thanksgiving dinner for a huge group just doesn't seem possible for one person in a home kitchen. I couldn't have done it without the help of my sister Karen, my sous-chef/commis. For our creamed corn pudding she grated about two dozen corn cobs with a box grater. That's heroic.
I'd always taken the U.S. tax code for granted when it comes to tax shields for debt. Individuals can deduct mortgage interest, and companies can write off interest on debt. These nudge players towards debt, all things being equal. When I first joined Amazon.com, we were looking for more funds post-IPO to finance all the investments we wanted to make over the next several years, and we went with what was, at the time, the largest convertible debt offering ever. The internet market hadn't crashed then, and debt was the cheapest way to fill our war coffers.
But, as James Surowiecki notes, even without these tax shields, debt would be prevalent in the U.S. (after all, most people can't pay for an entire house with cash, and most companies love the leverage of debt). Even worse, these tax shield for debt have almost no social benefits while magnifying risk, as the recent financial crisis exposed all too well.
Surowiecki notes that while abolishing these tax breaks will be politically challenging, other countries have done it.
...there are precedents, on a smaller scale, for these kinds of changes. In the U.S., people used to be able to write off the interest they paid on credit cards. That tax break was abolished in 1986, and, the same year, the mortgage-interest deduction, which used to be unlimited, was capped. Great Britain, meanwhile, abolished its mortgage tax break in 2000. Similarly, there are a number of countries, including Brazil and Belgium, that don’t give corporate debt a tax advantage over equity, while, just last year, both Germany and Denmark cut back sharply on their business-interest tax breaks, limiting how much interest companies can write off. Given the weak state of the economy and of housing prices, a wholesale rewriting of the tax code may be a bridge too far right now, but there are plenty of reforms—capping deductions, phasing them out over time, restricting their use by heavily leveraged companies—that would move in the right direction.
The stretches between my posts here are lengthening. Perhaps the best way to ease back into things is in the new year is in bits and pieces. Repetition of small victories, perhaps it's the rough sketch of a resolution?
I wasn't looking at my watch last night and so my passage into the new year slipped right by. And we're off.
If Twitter is down (as it is right now) and you can't use Twitter to complain about it, does anyone hear you?
Related meta phenomenon: the most common use of Google Wave thus far seems to be to complain about how useless Google Wave is. I tried using it as a collaboration tool for my team, but they revolted (more on what Google Wave desperately needs some other time).
Monsieur Colbert gives Alicia Keys an assist on "Empire State of Mind."
At the start line of the NY Marathon this year, as we stood at the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, waiting for them to release our wave, they had someone sing the National Anthem and God Bless America, and then they blasted Jay-Z and Alicia's majestic "Empire State of Mind" over the loudspeakers. We were all so pumped up that when the pistol shot fired to start us, all thoughts of not going out too fast were tossed aside and carried away by the stiff winds that morning. We all blasted through that first mile up the bridge in record time; I'd pay the debt for that some 17 miles later.
When I hear that song, I'll always think of that moment at the foot of the bridge, thousands of people hopping and vibrating in place, all overflowing with anticipation and nervous energy.
James Surowiecki noted in his New Yorker column this week, probably turned in sometime before this past weekend, that Tiger Woods' recent troubles directly undermined exactly the appeal that sponsors saw in him, and that is his amazing control and focus.
Scandals that aren’t out of tune with a celebrity’s image are often surprisingly easy to bounce back from: after images of Kate Moss snorting coke surfaced, her bookings fell, but, over time, they went up. Revelations that Michael Jordan had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling barely dented his appeal, since the story reinforced the image of him as a fierce competitor. But scandals that conflict with a person’s public image can wreak havoc.
And then Woods was dropped by Accenture this weekend.
The interesting question is why all of these experts, whose careers depend on their supposed ability to analyze and understand the mood of the public (and of corporations), could have so completely misdiagnosed what was happening. Some of the reaction can be explained as simply assuming that Tiger was too big to be brought down by extramarital transgressions. And some of it probably derived from marketing consultants’ benighted faith that any problem can be solved if the marketing is good enough. But I also think there was a profound misunderstanding on the part of these experts of the nature of Tiger’s appeal, which from the start has been founded on an image of complete control and focus, an image that this scandal utterly wrecked. And the fact that most sports marketing professionals seem not to have understood just how this story would play out with the public and with sponsors, even though understanding these things is their core business, does make you question whether companies should be listening to marketing consultants at all.
I'd generalize to say that 9 times out of 10, if you're relying on consultants, you didn't hire the right person for the job in the first place. That 10th time is usually for some skill it isn't cost-effective to keep in-house full-time (for example, you may need to do some interior decorating in your office once in a while, but keeping an interior decorator on staff full-time is not cost-efficient).
John Gray writes in the New Statesman about the intellectual wreckage of the past decade (a time period everyone seems to be trying to find a name for).
The reality, which is that western power is in retreat nearly everywhere, is insistently denied. Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century - neoliberalism just as much as communism - are obsolete. Belief systems in which the categories of western religion are reproduced in the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be only one of several versions of tolerable modernity.
For secular western intellectuals to accept this fact would rob their life of meaning. Huddled in the tattered blanket of historical teleology, which tells them they are the leading lights of humanity, they screen out any development that demonstrates their increasing irrelevance.
A TV theme song should set your mind in the right mood for the show to come, like candles for a romantic dinner or Drew Brees' Marine-inspired team chant before the Saints take the field.
This oldie, backing the sudden freeze frames over medium close-ups to allow for the actor credits to unfurl with a glow effect, is a great example.
Chris Messina proposes some new syntax for Twitter: slashtags, namely...
Web power users can be self-important about syntax, especially when it comes to open systems like Twitter, where the whole joy is in seeing how users take something atomic and simple and use it to build more sophisticated structures. But I think this proposed syntax is sensible.
---@---
Farhad Manjoo grabs a comment from a thread at Bruce Schneier's security blog and shares a sensible and simple process for devising online passwords that are easy to remember for you, hard to guess for others.---@---
I've long used ecto as a blogging client, but some time ago it was bought by Illuminex, and since then, bugs have slowly piled up with no updates. When it was just the work of one lone developer, updates were posted regularly.
It's clearly time for me to look for a new blogging client, but I bring this up as another example of why I always hate when a piece of software I love, developed by a passionate individual or individual(s), gets purchased by a larger entity. There are many reasons things can go south--maybe the company just wanted to purchase the developer, not the software, or maybe the software becomes neglected among the dozens of priorities in the company, or maybe the urgency to serve the customers of that software well are diluted by the broader customer set of the larger entity--but the end result is often a tragic ossification for a once relevant product.
RIP, Ecto.
I had just landed in Chicago for Thanksgiving and was strolling through the O'Hare concourse towards baggage claim when my phone rang. It was my sister Karen's fiance Kevin.
"You know how Karen was going to pick you up from the airport?" he asked. "She can't. She's been in a car accident."
He sounded calm which reassured me, especially since he'd already spoken to her. But then he told me their Prius was in bad shape. My gait quickened even though I had nowhere to go. She might be fine physically, but mentally an accident of that severity had to be a shock.
I called my other sister Joannie to fill her in on the situation, and after an hour or so of phone tag, one car was dispatched to get Karen from the place where they'd towed her car, another to get me from the airport.
When we finally all gathered back at Joannie's, the story had been reported and rereported multiple times, the truth coming together like pieces of a puzzle. Two guys in a sedan had the right rear corner of her Prius, sending her into a spin that ended at the center median of the highway. The sedan, meanwhile, somehow ended up flipped on its side on the other side of highway, on the shoulder.
As Karen got out of the car to gather herself and as various people stopped to help, the two guys somehow made it out of their vehicle. One of the two stumbled a few steps and vomited all over himself. The two of them were drunk.
The police took the two men to the hospital to draw blood, but they'd already failed the onsite sobriety test. The legal system will, I assume, deal with them. But in the meantime, I felt firsthand the anger of those hurt by the stupidity of those who get behind the wheel of three to four thousand pound machines under the influence of alcohol. There is nothing courageous or admirable about someone who manages to drive from point A to point B drunk; it's merely dumb luck.
It's also luck that helped Karen get out of the accident unharmed, save for a stiff neck and bruised knee. My flight arrived late, and so traffic on the 90/94 was light, so no cars were close behind that might have run into her during or immediately after her spinout.
The story has a happier ending as most of our family spent the rest of the week together celebrating Thanksgiving. We didn't dwell on the subject of her accident, especially the hypotheticals. To do so would seem morbid, and I sensed a need for us all to move on lest we cede the happiness of the entire holiday weekend to those two drunken idiots.
This was my first time in charge of preparing a Thanksgiving meal. I did a lot of research on how to prepare a turkey having had many a dry and unappetizing bird in Novembers past. My first big decision was to go with a heritage turkey over the breed commonly found at the grocery store, the Broad-Breasted White. Though they cost more, up to $10 a pound, heritage turkeys are known for their higher proportion of dark meat and a more guilt-free narrative: they tend to be raised on organic feed, on small farms where they're allowed to roam freely. If it lived up to the taste, then paying around $160 for a turkey that would feed the entire group on this once-a-year holiday would be worth it.
The next question was how to prepare the turkey. I consulted most every foodie I knew about their past experiences, and the number one technique mentioned was brining. I thought I could stop there, but it turns out there are different brining techniques. The one I'd heard of most often involved soaking the turkey in salt water. But then, while I waited for my take-out lunch one day, I saw a front page story in a section of the LA Times on the bar counter about dry brining.
It sounded too good to be true; just salt the turkey a few days in advance. Not only was it less messy than a wet brine, it supposedly produced meat of a superior texture.
The best laid plans were nearly derailed by a FedEx delivery person who couldn't distinguish a one from a zero. I spent all of Tuesday checking FedEx online, and mid-afternoon, I got the note that the turkey had been delivered to the front porch. I wandered outside, around the side of the house, poked in some bushes, looked out on the back deck, behind the garage...no turkey. I called FedEx, they tried to call the driver, but he was gone for the day.
Just as I was ready to call FedEx back to tell them they'd ruined Christmas for a group of orphans, a guy in a grey station wagon pulled up out front and walked out with a box. I was standing out on the front porch with such a look of consternation on my face that he must have put it together all at once.
"Are you Eugene? I found this on my porch when I got home just now."
Whoever you are, guy in grey station wagon, I salute you.
After letting the turkey thaw for a couple hours in a cold water bath (it was still vacuum sealed), I brined it inside and out with a mixture of kosher salt and minced parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, a the Simon Garfunkel of seasonings. I put it in a baking bag and we put it in Joannie's basement fridge, breast-side up. The next day I massaged it and flipped it over, the salt having sucked some of the liquid out of the turkey as I had read it would.
Wednesday we spent the afternoon prepping a few dishes in advance, a batch of creamed corn pudding, garlic mashed potatoes, and the turkey stock. Spices at the grocery store are not sold loose but in plastic containers that always contain too much for any one dish, I used the excess thyme, rosemary, sage, and parsley to make a compound butter and stashed it in the fridge to use as a rub on the turkey the next day. Compound butters are handy to have around in the kitchen and a great way to not waste all that spice.
Making stock, like ironing shirts, alternates between soothing ritual and exasperating burden from one minute to the next. I love the meditative pace of the process, the way the scent sneaks up on you as the liquid absorbs some of the character of all that's in it, the turkey giblet, heart, and neck bones, the mirepoix of onions, carrots, and celery, the sprigs of rosemary and thyme, the parsley and stray chicken parts. But with seven other dishes to worry about, I was tempted, at moments, to reach for canned stock, like a monk tempted by the sins of the material world.
Thankfully I had Karen as my faithful partner chef in crime, and we had enough time to get enough prepared that we could let the stock just simmer while we dined on some Chicago deep dish pizza.
On Thanksgiving Day, I thought about using a turkey bag for roasting, but some articles I'd read suggested that the steaming it would encourage would deprive us of trying a more traditional roasted texture and flavor. My decision was made when we couldn't find the turkey bag we'd set aside.
I contemplated two other methods of adding flavor, one being injection and the other being a rub. Since we didn't have a turkey syringe and I'd made the compound butter the night before, we went with the rub.
Heritage turkeys don't require as high a finishing temperature as regular turkeys as they're free of antibiotics. That brings with it another benefit: a shorter stay in the oven. I gave it about a half hour at 450 degrees to brown the skin, then lowered the temperature to 350 and covered the breast with aluminum foil. One of the chief problems with in preparing turkeys is the fact that the white breast meat tastes best at a lower temperature than the darker leg and thigh meat, thus the selective application of foil. Ultimately, I had to remove the legs and thighs and give them an extra ten to fifteen minutes alone after the rest of the turkey was finished, about two and a half hours later.
Fast forward to the taste test: dear readers, it was good. Damn good. The best turkey I've ever had. Was it the dry brining, or the rub, or the heritage of the turkey? I don't know, but the white meat was moist like a roast chicken, and the dark meat tasted almost like duck. But it was still undeniably a turkey.
A few years back I ordered a turducken for Thanksgiving, and while it was fine, there didn't seem to be any real synergy among the three meats. Stuffing one inside another inside another seemed to offer simply an advantage in carving efficiency, but the flavors simply added up to the sum of the parts, nothing more.
The heritage turkey, with its mix of different meat textures and flavors, seemed to fulfill the vision of what a turducken was trying to be. But whereas the turducken resorts to the culinary equivalent of plastic surgery, the heritage turkey is au naturel, a product of good genes and healthy living.
Thanksgiving day, one soon-to-be-convicted drunk driver was probably pondering a grim future at the hands of the law. Meanwhile, my little sister may have been without her new Prius, but that day she was celebrating Thanksgiving with loved ones over a great turkey she helped prepare. Sometimes the lessons of Thanksgiving come as simple as that.
The Pacquiao-Cotto fight generated 1.25 million PPV purchases and $70 million in revenue, outdoing the Mayweather-Marquez fight which did a solid 1.05 million PPV buys.
The Pacquiao and Mayweather camps are negotiating the economics on a potential blockbuster fight, and the issue of how they should split the money is sure to be the biggest barrier to what promises to be a historic payday for all involved.
A 50/50 split may ultimately be the best compromise, but in terms of entertainment value, Pacquiao is far and away superior. I can't recall a single Mayweather fight I've ever paid for that didn't leave me feeling a bit robbed. To a greater extent than Roy Jones Jr., Mayweather is a technical fighter, a cautious one who gets in a few punches, then plays amazing defense. I'm not sure I've ever even seen Mayweather with a bruise on his face, perhaps justifying his nickname "Pretty Boy." You appreciate the skill, but it doesn't get the heart racing.
Pacquiao, on the other hand, has all the qualities to justify your PPV investment:
Here's my anecdotal evidence in support of Pacquiao's superiority over Mayweather in a purse split. I had lots of people over to my place to watch both Mayweather-Marquez and Pacquiao-Cotto. After the Mayweather fight, we were all so disappointed that I felt compelled to put on DVDs of fights from various martial arts movies to appease the bloodthirsty mob, so to speak. After the Pacquiao fight, the mob was satisfied, and we all drank wine and recounted the best moments from the fight.
I'm actually concerned that Pacquiao-Mayweather won't be as entertaining as Pacquiao's last several fights. I'd foresee Mayweather would be a slight favorite among experts given his unblemished track record and size advantage. You can see Mayweather tagging Pacquiao a few times, as fighters like Cotto have done, and then having the speed and elusiveness to just back off and win on points. The fight would go the distance, Pacquiao would be the crowd favorite, but Mayweather would win on points sending the crowd into outrage given Mayweather's tactics (I'd be at home trying to tear my plasma off the wall and throw it off my balcony).
In the post-fight interview, Larry Merchant would ask Mayweather point blank if he really deserved to win given his lack of aggression, followed by Mayweather punching Merchant out, grabbing the mike, and shouting to the crowd, "You all can kiss my ass!" Sugar Shane Mosely would then appear out of nowhere to clock Mayweather with a cheap shot, starting an all-out brawl in the ring, and Derek Jeter would spring out of his front row seat to enter the ring to play peacemaker.
Maybe I'm talking myself into the entertainment value of this fight after all.
The potential miracle of the cookbook was immediately apparent: you start with a feeling of greed, find a list of rules, assemble a bunch of ingredients, and then you have something to be greedy about. You begin with the ache and end with the object, where in most of the life of appetites—courtship, marriage—you start with the object and end with the ache.
That's Adam Gopnik in this a recent New Yorker on why we keep buying, reading, and using cookbooks. Great read.
Robert Birnbaum interviews Tobias Wolff (one of my favorite writers) for The Morning News. Among the topics he covers are the difficulties of making a living on short story collections, the state of the publishing industry, and the impact of megabookstores.
I loved reading short stories in creative writing classes in college because they were so finely crafted and perfect, and it's a sentiment Wolff echoes here:
Somebody once described the novel as a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it. I can think of a few novels that seem to have nothing wrong with them at all, but I can think of a lot more short stories that seem to me to be perfect. Carver’s “Cathedral
