Funny ha ha

Bringing Up Baby is one of the greatest movies of all time.

Music and Lyrics is quite alright.

Adam's Rib is closer in quality to Music and Lyrics than Bringing Up Baby.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #22: Tricky, "Aftermath"

Talkin' World War III blues. By 1994, all the fun had gone out of the apocalypse, which is all the more reason to pole dance.

(Seriously, that's by far the best of the YouTube "Aftermath" videos.)

But there are only 117 days left

You know what September means: time to start working on end of year lists.

OK, maybe it's just me.

Anyway, unless Kanye turns out to be as good as I keep saying he is, M.I.A.'s Kala takes album of the year in a walk, though that's not a shock, as her only previous album was my favourite of 2005. I've listened to Kala more frequently than any new record in five years (every day). What's surprising is that Gogol Bordello's Super Taranta! is in clear second place (last album: #28 of 2005).

Anyway, here's their melting pot predecessor:

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #23: Cornershop, "Brimful of Asha"

Wouldn't one suffer bosom discomfort in short order?

Making old jokes offensive again

Conversation in Hollywood, 1997:

Ryan Phillippe: So I had sex with this actress Reese last night.
Friend of Ryan: Witherspoon?
Ryan Phillippe: No, with my penis, you sick fuck!

Here's my Stylus feature on the 'Spoon. If you don't need the pictures, here's a better revision I didn't send in on time.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #24: Fatboy Slim, "Praise You"

It's obvious, isn't it?

Don't worry kids, we've nearly got through all my electrodance picks.

Rush Hour 3: Forget it Jackie, it's Chinatown

Yes, I know I'm over my limit for variations of that Chinatown line.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #25: Technotronic, "Move This"

Yeah, it was first released in 1989, but it was a hit in the Nineties. I don't know of a song that better expresses the joy of teaching. So patient, so encouraging, and yet with a hint of slyness.

Canonball #901: Dames (1934)

The purpose of Ruby Keeler: a distraction from how intermittently awful everybody else is. Yes, even Joan Blondell. This is the definitive skip-to-the-production numbers musical, and what numbers: I could never hope to compete with Busby Berkeley in the obsessiveness stakes. "I Only Have Eyes for You" fractures Ms Keeler into omnipresence, while the title song posits that women are most valuable in aggregate, particularly when arranged as a snowflake. Fearfully symmetric. A MINUS

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #26: Baby D, "Let Me Be Your Fantasy"

More than a decade beofre Brad Paisley's "Alcohol", here's a song written from the POINT OF VIEW OF THE SUBSTANCE OMG! Rave fin de siècle.

Summer vegetable tasting notes

Peaches:

• Varieties with "June" in the name are the best, followed by Red Havens.
• The good peach purveyors at the BFM are Ram Das (guy with the beard), Blossom Bluff and Woodleaf.
• Current strategy: variety matters more than farmer. If the vendors named above all have the same variety, choose the cheapest.

This usually means I end buying the seconds from Woodleaf. Today I got them for $1.50 a pound at their end-of-day sale.

Tomatoes: I really like the Miyashita Farms odorikos at the Bowl, but they're not always available. Riverdog's heirlooms at the BFM are very good. Not feeling the ubiquitous Early Girls, don't have much tomato taste, if I wanted sweeter tomatoes I'd get cherries. Maybe the dry-farmed ones will be better.

Mushrooms: The Bowl almost always has #2 mushrooms available for around a dollar a pound. This is one of the best deals around.

Corn: Trying very hard to enjoy it, with mixed results. Corn on the cob really isn't doing it for me -- not like the corn of olde, just boringly sweet -- so I've resorted to more complicated preparations. Tried a Chez Panisse-style corn pudding souffle today. Plus side: it actually rose a bit. Big minus: it crumbled as soon as I took it out of the ramekin.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #27: Tricky, "Black Steel"

Actually, I get lots of letters from governments. Most of them say I'm the sucker.

The Lives of Others: Conversation piece

Sharp concept: Wiesler, proud Socialist Stasi, is assigned to snoop on Dreyman, favoured playwright of Mrs Honecker; Wiesler gets morally confused. From the brilliant opening sequence, in which Wiesler impassively plays excerpts from a marathon interrogation for the edification of his students, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is almost as efficient as his subject. The difference (besides occasional un-Wieslerian sloppiness, especially in editing of conversations) is that he doesn't lose himself in his art. The screenplay, however, does: I have no problem with the humanisation of the Stasi officer; what I object to is the extent to which the humanisation is driven by Brecht and the gloopy "Sonata for a Good Man". And it's too long, with the existence of multiple endings more damaging than the fact the some of them are happy. But the movie is outstanding for the way it piles up ironies, as each successive good deed comes ever closer to causing disaster. Ulrich Mühe, as Wiesler, effectively uses the old trick of not doing much, so that when you do just a little more it means the world. In a messy role, love interest Martina Gedeck is dignified; in a clear role, Sebastian Koch, as Dreyman, is attractive.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #28: Sleater-Kinney, "The Size of Our Love"

Carrie's death fugue. She draws out and flattens every phrase, as the dying of a lover overtakes life. Comfort doesn't stand a chance against reality -- no pink frost, just black milk.

One more for the list

Tried Three Twins' vanilla at the Berkeley Farmers' Market today ($2.75 for a "scoop"). Pretty good texture for prepackaged stuff, doesn't compare to Ici in the high butterfat category. Also at the BFM: Riverdog have the first Early Girl tomatoes of the summer. Nice simple flavour, expect they'll get better in coming weeks.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #29: Pavement, "Cut Your Hair"

Mujahideen is crazy. Songs mean a lot when songs are short. Korea Korea Korea Korea Korea Korea.

Chez Panisse Cafe: The sincerest form of flattery

So the most common complaint about Chez Panisse (besides the price of course) is that it's stuff you can make at home. To test this, I decided to try to reproduce in my kitchen a fixed lunch I recently ate in the Cafe (henceforth CPC). Trust that I'm a competent cook, who makes something out of the Chez Panisse Vegetables book five times a week.

GARDEN LETTUCE SALAD: The one at had at the Cafe was easily the best lettuce + vinaigrette I'd ever had, with arugula and curly endive providing exciting variations in flavour. Nevertheless, you might think this is one dish I could match: it's as simple as it gets to make, plus I could prepare the vinaigrette to my taste. I bought a wad of leaves from the Happy Boy stand at the Berkeley Farmers' Market, made my dressing and compared. And you know, even greens straight from the market didn't taste as fresh as what I had at the CPC. And my Berkeley Bowl brand olive oil and champagne vinegar aren't perfect substitutes for what they have. Other difference: their salad retails at $7.50; mine cost a dollar for the greens, plus maybe 25-50 cents for the other ingredients.
Ratio of quality of CPC's food to mine: 4.

WILD NETTLE PUDDING SOUFFLE: No, I wasn't going to put myself through the pain of foraging nettles just for this project. Their recipe for a green garlic pudding souffle is in the Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook; I substituted their suggested alternative of leek. Major problem: I don't have a food processor. Consequently my product was earthbound, which a texture more like a quiche than a souffle. It was still quite awesome, since I splurged for real parmigiano reggiano.
Ratio of quality of CPC's food to mine: 2.

ASPARAGUS AND MOREL MUSHROOMS: These were served with the souffle. I've made asparagus and morels to CP specifications a number of times, so I didn't try cooking them again. I actually prefer my asparagus, since I like it better unpeeled (that's the waste-not Cantonese upbringing talking). But the morels, wow. A few days before I went to the CPC, I bought morels at the Monterey Market, sauteed them, and thought, "Yes, I've finally worked out how to get my $19/pound worth out of these mushrooms". And then I had the ones at the CPC, which sent me into mouthwatering despair: they were just so much better again. Turns out I'd been overcooking mine -- see, dining at Chez Panisse is educational.
Ratio of quality of CPC's food to mine: 3.

VANILLA ICE CREAM WITH TOASTED ALMONDS AND BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE SAUCE: Don't have an ice cream maker, but I've eaten a lot of ice cream lately, and while what I had at the CPC was very close to the top, it wasn't the very top. For the price, I could go to Sketch and have almost enough left over for a bar of Valrhona.
Ratio of quality of CPC's food to a double at Sketch plus most of a bar of Valrhona: 0.5.

Conclusions: (1) I still have some way to go before I get my Michelin star; (2) even if I were a great cook, I'd never be able to match many of Chez Panisse's dishes, because they have access to better ingredients; (3) at my price point ($40 hard limit on splurges) I can get a better meal at Pizzaiolo than here. Still, I'll go back when I've saved up enough to order more interesting stuff.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #30: Billy Bragg & Wilco, "Walt Whitman's Niece" (download)

Does anyone else think Natasha Bedingfield hasn't just read Byron, Shelley and Keats? That "Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!" is defatalised into "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you"? Getting back to the song in question, which is nearly as great, gotta love how the sly, gentlemanly way Bragg/Wilco/Guthrie withhold details, thus expanding a personal encounter into singalong universals. Endlessly rocking indeed.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: Hark, the herald angel surfs

Review.

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #31: Geto Boys, "Mind Playing Tricks on Me"

The paranoia is drug-induced, sure, but it's also created by the Boys having to front all the time. It's hard to be hard, why not just take candy from babies? It's like Safe for the ghetto male: just scary, scary, scary.

Dopo: It's Italian for "after", disappointingly

Since Pizzaiolo is perennially compared to Dopo, and I'm near-worshipful towards the former, I decided I needed to take the 51 down to Piedmont and give Dopo a shot. The area seems to be rapidly yuppifying, and while Dopo is part of this, it's also very casual. I snuggled up to the counter and began salivating.

From the short menu, I picked a sand dab crostone ($12) and the tagliolini with hen and radicchio ($15) -- maybe I should've chosen dishes that contrasted more but the prevailing opinion seems to be that the pasta beats the pizza. The crostone was pretty small -- Dopo has a rep for being a little cheaper than Pizzaiolo, but the latter has bigger portions -- and pretty good, with a hint of lemon to the fish. The tagliolini, flat egg noodles a little narrower than fettucine, were made in-house with no mean skill: very uniform. The braised Hoffman Farms hen, the bitter radicchio, and some pork product made for a neat mix of flavours. The ingredient quality seemed high, though nothing was exceptional on this basis alone: the closest was, of all things, the parsley garnishing the sand dabs. I think the key ingredient was salt: they're not afraid to use it.

So: very good meal; I have no trouble believing the consensus that this is one of the top ten places in the East Bay, any style or price. I still strongly prefer Pizzaiolo at this price point, but Dopo has the non-negligible advantage of being open for lunch (on weekdays; it's open for dinner every day but Sunday). Need to come back for the pizza before I give out the fifth star.

Dopo 4293 Piedmont Ave @ John St, Oakland

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #32: Arto Lindsay, "Q Samba" (download)

Hip to the point of parody, baby. On one hand, he's admitting he'll never be as cool as any given Brazilian. On the other, he knows what's important isn't coolness: it's drums.

Coming: The First Annual Berkeley Ice Cream Crawl.

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #33: Sonic Youth, "Youth Agaunst Fascism"

I believe Anita Hill too, but all she proved was that Clarence Thomas was an asshole. What should've got him Borked was his judicial record, not to mention his obvious-even-then opposition to Roe vs Wade. What does a guy have to do to get the Dems to filibuster him -- advocate personal submachine gun ownership? Nope, that won't do it.

Surf's Up: Bird is the word

Review.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #34: David Murray, "Shakill's Warrior"

Don't have a digital copy of this out-of-print soul jazz classic, in fact I have to go to the library and check out the decaying cassette of the album of the same name (and find my decaying Walkman) every time I want to listen to it. This is a crowd-pleaser, with Don Pullen's organ sauntering and Murray only going nuts at the very end.

Ten favourite novels of the Nineties

Countless hours of reading and thinking result in this: two Franz K. namechecks and a Timberlake joke.

1. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled: Not simply a dream, nor an imitation of Kafka: for one thing, Ishiguro surpasses the master; never has impossible geography so aptly explicated the workings of memory. Or -- people will talk in this town.
2. Norman Rush, Mating: The most sophisticated treatment of a love relationship since the Second Wave. Or -- if I gave you utopia, would you page me on the regular?
3. Philip Roth, American Pastoral: Achieving the American Dream is un-American. Or -- sorry about the twentieth century, hope you'll like the next one better.
4. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower: It delights you with description as it makes you cringe at Romantic insensibility. Or -- Austen 3:16.
5. W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants: As Basil Fawlty knows, you can only not mention the war for so long. Or -- sorry about the twentieth century, hope you'll like the last one better.
6. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: Not simply a dream, nor an imitation of Kafka: I mean it's funny. Or -- oooh mysterious girl, I wanna get close to you.
7. Walter Mosley, A Red Death: Probably a little high, but this stands in for the whole Easy Rawlins series, a bunch of detective novels that give a marvellously detailed landscape of Watts from the Forties through to the Sixties. Or -- of Mouse and men.
8. Andrei Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers: Not always insightful but extraordinarily vivid. Or -- if Russia's so great why don't you go live there oh you did.
9. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace: As good as the lecherous old English prof genre, now accounting for 90% of all fiction by middle-aged men, gets. Or -- yeah, it wasn't a great century for South Africa, either.
10. Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon: OK, I haven't finished this one, but the 800 pages I read from my sister's copy were rather rollicking. Or -- nerd candy.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #35: Carlene Carter, "I Fell in Love" (download)

Prodigal daughter goes down home, stays down home, stays prodigal. Whatcha wanna do that for?

Nineties Madness: Honk if you like oinking

Yeah, I had forgotten about this until Girish got nostalgic.

Babe: Pig in the City vs Underground
Dudes thr so crazy. Underground is facile, not to mention politically dubious, as an allegory, but as a movie about the joys of getting crunk, it's unparalleled (I mean Arthur has a terrible soundtrack). But I guess the reason why there's aren't more good drinking movies is that they're iffy substitutes for actual drink. And actual drink is an iffy substitute for talking animals. The Babe movies are among the few post-Chaplin flicks that are made by their moralism, so call this a moral victory.
Winner: Babe: Pig in the City

Goodbye South, Goodbye vs Kundun
Ooh, tough one. How do compare a great film about just hanging out with one in which every action is world-historical? Answer: you pick the one that's world-historical.
Winner: Kundun

Taste of Cherry vs Backbeat
Not much of a contest. The Kiarostami entry should've been The Wind Will Carry Us; this rigorous piece of moping can't compete with HOMO LENNON~!
Winner: Backbeat

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #36: DJ Shadow, "Midnight in a Perfect World"

Those who still insist Shadow doesn't make great individual tracks should take another ten listens to this. It's a whole, and it sure tastes organic.

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #37: Bikini Kill, "Rebel Girl"

I used to be annoyed by the "people should be different like me" line of fauxternative thinking, but in recent years I've softened. Humanist homilies aside, you're always going to be different from just about everyone in some essential way, and a desire for community isn't the same as wanting to destroy diversity.

Watching this Maoist fan video makes me wonder if I was right originally.

The East Bakery Project: Final count of the collision between me and them

The awards:

Best bakery + best bread: Acme
Best sweets: Sketch (very marginally ahead of Crixa)
Best actually healthy goods: Vital Vittles

You can find details on the nine places I surveyed on my Yelp page. On that site, I've been posting a lot of notes I don't mention on this blog (as well as some depersonalised cross-posts) of little interest to those who don't live around here. Read if you wish. Trying to find an appropriate way of splitting content with low duplication, for the one or no people who might read both.

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40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #38: Pet Shop Boys, "I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing"

Come on, you know that feeling of absolute freedom you get when you fall in love. This song makes you glad you felt that, even if it's past, just because of the off chance you might feel it again. And it isn't the only Pet Shop Boys song on that subject on this list.

Colossal Youth: Big boys don't cry; and other stuff

(the title song, not the quoted one)

Movie review.

***

Part of the reason of the reason I haven't into movies lately is because DVD playback on my old Dell is unwatchable. Got a newfangled HP Pavilion 6500t in the mail today. First thing I pulled out to watch: a random disc from my puroresu collection.

***

Gave in and went to the Chez Panisse Cafe for lunch today. Quite good. Full report TK.

***

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #39: The Magnetic Fields, "Papa Was a Rodeo" (download)
Imagine some alternate universe where George Jones had the worst voice in Christendom. And where at the point where things looked bleakest, instead of twisting the knife even more, he instead segued to the most beautifully hopeful ending imaginable.

40 favourite songs of the Nineties, #40: Sonic Youth, "Karen Koltrane"

download

All the reasons I had for not making Sonic Youth my New Favourite Band seem daft now, so I'm declaring them my new New Favourite Band. (Sorry, Klezmatics.) Look, no band besides Ellington's has been non-stop brilliant for longer. Though they're an albums band, they can't help but produce the occasional standout track, and this, their sagest Karen konsideration, is a fitting farewell to their Youth. Noise as meditation.