David pointed me to this infamous Leonard Nimoy video: http://www.alteringtime.com/features/misc/?p=baggins. Yes, it's hilarious but what I notice upon close listening is that its truth to the plot of the Hobbit far exceeds that of Jackson's films to their originals. To be fair, I should mention there is a lyric that mentions battling the trolls. His encounter with the trolls involves more trickery than battle. Nimoy's is more visually appealing at times as well. Overall, its marks in hokeyness are made up for in exceptional accuracy of the Ringlore when compared to many other popularizations of Tolkien's work.
This just in (only minutes after I posted the above): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4840278.stm I rest my case.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Monday, March 20, 2006
La Isla Bonito
Sitting at the bar in Taisho Yakitori on St. Mark's Pl. and watching the spectacle in the open kitchen is a great pleasure to me. I love the endless and repetitive shouting of the cooks and wait staff. Flamboyant cooks prepare truly flaming stir fries, or more carefully cook egg concoctions in distinctive frying pans with vertically attached handles (to best use Japan's notoriously limited space?) to a seemingly less than salmonella safe half-doneness. Next to them a couple bored looking sous-chef-ish kids tend the yakitori (skewered grilled meats and vegetables), spraying them occasionally with water bottles.
The last visit I paid to Taisho was in the expanded location actually, a few doors down from the original and new enough for the kitchen not to be entirely caked with black and ingrained with the smokiness of homestyle Japanese cooking. Still, no foofy sushi smell here. I suppose it was way un-hip of me not to wait on a long line to sit in the older room, but I was hungry.
But I am not here now to sing the praises of Taisho or even yakitori in general, though they are both most deserving of it. Today, I marvel at a more mysterious item of Japanese cuisine: the bonito flake. These curly flakes are shavings of dried fish. Think prosciutto meets a wood plane. Upon close inspection they even show a grain pattern reminiscent of wood. And they are delicious. Wide ranging in function, they serve as the basis for the most important stock in Japanese cooking and they appear as a topping on many dishes, including takoyaki (octopus balls), glued atop by streams of mayonnaise. (Someone call the cornoner!) But again, the flavor and versatility of bonito flakes is not my topic. I come to the point. It is of the indescribable motion that these take on when heated that I write. Placed on a hot dish, say a rice bowl of sorts, they become animated by the heat from below causing them to twist and dance. It's the trippiest thing to watch. It's like the heat patterns you see on the surface of a hot asphalt road, but condensed a smaller scale. A bonsai sized oasis, a delusion of bonito, kinetic, physical, Brownian almost, right there waiting to be eaten. Sigh, what a thing of beauty, the bonito flake. I decided if I ever go into computer animation, my great work will be to model the motion of a sprinkling of bonito flakes over rice. I will win awards.
The last visit I paid to Taisho was in the expanded location actually, a few doors down from the original and new enough for the kitchen not to be entirely caked with black and ingrained with the smokiness of homestyle Japanese cooking. Still, no foofy sushi smell here. I suppose it was way un-hip of me not to wait on a long line to sit in the older room, but I was hungry.
But I am not here now to sing the praises of Taisho or even yakitori in general, though they are both most deserving of it. Today, I marvel at a more mysterious item of Japanese cuisine: the bonito flake. These curly flakes are shavings of dried fish. Think prosciutto meets a wood plane. Upon close inspection they even show a grain pattern reminiscent of wood. And they are delicious. Wide ranging in function, they serve as the basis for the most important stock in Japanese cooking and they appear as a topping on many dishes, including takoyaki (octopus balls), glued atop by streams of mayonnaise. (Someone call the cornoner!) But again, the flavor and versatility of bonito flakes is not my topic. I come to the point. It is of the indescribable motion that these take on when heated that I write. Placed on a hot dish, say a rice bowl of sorts, they become animated by the heat from below causing them to twist and dance. It's the trippiest thing to watch. It's like the heat patterns you see on the surface of a hot asphalt road, but condensed a smaller scale. A bonsai sized oasis, a delusion of bonito, kinetic, physical, Brownian almost, right there waiting to be eaten. Sigh, what a thing of beauty, the bonito flake. I decided if I ever go into computer animation, my great work will be to model the motion of a sprinkling of bonito flakes over rice. I will win awards.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Code/coal
At the beginning of the bubble I met a programmer at R/GA, an agency that did various kinds of media for ads and movies and had made their name doing titles for films in the 70's, most notably for Alien. We (brother, friend and I) dubbed this programmer "the Viking" because of his nordic extraction and long hair. The Viking made the keen observation that the programmer was the modern-day coal miner. He is overworked, replaceable, a low ranking member of society, his product unrefined and ubiquitous. To him, what cinched the analogy was the way the words code and coal sounded the same. He used to demonstrate, repeating "code...coal, code...coal,...", blurring the ends of the words increasingly until they did sound the same, though neither sounded like code or coal when he was through with them.
Radiohead
My musical obsession of the past year has been Radiohead. When I was a teenager I would fix the larger part of my attention on one band at a time. In my twenties I thoguht I'd grown out of this but I found recently that I've returned to the same pattern. I need to immerse myself in one sound, one idiom, for a long time in order to understand it. The harder the music the longer it takes. By difficulty I don't mean musical complexity, but more my own personal index of accessability. My last band was King's-X who I learned a lot about when I learned to play about 20% of their output, at least one song from each album. Naturally the first thing I discovered when doing this was the personal writing and playing style of the artist but what remains with me is the disconnect between what sounds interesting or moving and how it is played. This increases my natural awe for music.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Action Park
Yesterday I shared this wikipedia entry on Action Park with my friend David, who's family had a summer home near Vernon Valley when we were growing up. I only visited the park a handful of times but I have very strong, fond, memories of those days. I didn't know it had such a reputation for being dangerous. Or perhaps I'd heard rumors but at that age perhaps it seemed that everything (or nothing) was dangerous so they made little impression on me. That the park should be liable for our safety was a concept unknown to me. Action Park provided a relatively controlled environment for carrying out the stunts we did on our own in our neighborhoods. So what's the big deal? We were used to being responsible for the preservation of our own lives.
I was morbidly pleased to read that one of the fatalities is, if inconclusively, attributed to the Tarzan ride, a favorite of ours. It is a simple rope swing that plunges you into water. Even we understood at the time that this one was dangerous, because it was not automated. The rider was responsible for letting go of the triangular bar at the end of the rope at the right time. We studied the timing carefully, both for safety purposes and for maximizing the pleasure of a ride that required 45 minutes of waiting on line. Now that climbing trees and swinging on ropes is no longer a daily activity of mine (it was then), I marvel at the park's trust that any, forget the majority or the totality, of the riders would get this right. And by right, I don't mean effecting the perfect trajectory, I mean not slamming back into the launch area or making any equally sketchy dismount. As it turns out the alleged cause of death, in the case of this one attraction, was the shocking cold temperature of the natural pool that caught the swinger. I remember it being cold.
I was morbidly pleased to read that one of the fatalities is, if inconclusively, attributed to the Tarzan ride, a favorite of ours. It is a simple rope swing that plunges you into water. Even we understood at the time that this one was dangerous, because it was not automated. The rider was responsible for letting go of the triangular bar at the end of the rope at the right time. We studied the timing carefully, both for safety purposes and for maximizing the pleasure of a ride that required 45 minutes of waiting on line. Now that climbing trees and swinging on ropes is no longer a daily activity of mine (it was then), I marvel at the park's trust that any, forget the majority or the totality, of the riders would get this right. And by right, I don't mean effecting the perfect trajectory, I mean not slamming back into the launch area or making any equally sketchy dismount. As it turns out the alleged cause of death, in the case of this one attraction, was the shocking cold temperature of the natural pool that caught the swinger. I remember it being cold.
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