Last night I went with a few friends to see the Greyboy Allstars at the Nokia Theatre. It felt really good to get back in the city after being in Westchester for so long, and the concert was great. It was a pretty cool venue, a lot smaller than most, and the acoustics were great. Their usual drummer wasn't with them, but the guy they had to replace him was pretty damn good. Plus ?uestlove was spinning funk before they played and during the painfully long intermission. We set up the projector and the 360 back at my apartment, so I got to play a little Gears of War before we left for the show.
I've been making my own crackers rather than buying them at the store...it's not hard at all...another under 30 minutes baking treat. Just mix up a cup of flour with a half-teaspoon of salt and 2 tablespoons butter in the food processor...you can add rosemary and garlic at this point, I do...then add a quarter cup milk and whirr it in the processor, add more milk as it's going until it holds together but isn't sticky. Then you roll it out as thin as you can, score it with a knife, put it onto a floured baking sheet, and bake it at 400 for 12 minutes. Easy as pie...pie crust, anyway.
I downloaded Pan's Labyrinth last night while I was at the concert...I'm planning on watching it tonight, if I can figure out how to turn a .bin file into something watchable. It looks like a really incredible movie, sort of a non-animated Spirited Away--one of my favorite movies, incidentally.
I watched the (GRAPHIC) video of Saddam's execution earlier. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras has really changed the nature of reporting in the 21st century, and this is a trend I predict will only go further as the technology becomes more advanced and more accessible to the public. In retrospect, the video also made me wish I had studied Arabic instead of Persian. As much as it would have been a pain to attend an early class freshman year, I think the language gets a lot more use and certainly is spoken by a larger population. Which is not to say that Persian doesn't have its charms, and, given current regional trends, may become more useful for an American to know if we end up invading them too.
So, a merry end of 2006 to you all, and a happy new year!
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Thursday, December 28, 2006
everyday celebrity
This is perhaps the most captivating set of images I've seen in a while. In case you're wondering--all the photos were taken at a recent VH1 awards show, and Weird Al and Paris Hilton were the only two who knew who Noah is (he's famous for publishing a video montage of himself composed of a picture taken every day for six years). His expression is by far the best part.
So this Xmas I was lucky enough to get an awesome Wusthof bread knife and a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon...exactly what I wanted, even though I didn't know it. Knob Creek is one of the best bourbons out there...100 proof, so it packs a bit more of a punch than your typical hard liquor; much like Wild Turkey, the so-called Kickin' Chicken. They also manage to pack in considerably more flavor than most bourbons on the market. My dad also was nice enough to repair an awesome black cashmere coat, three-quarters length...exactly what I need for the winter season. God knows how old it is. Also a bottle of really nice balsamic vinegar, a cruet set, and a really cool Montinari book on culture and food.
Last night I saw Blood Diamond, one of the preachy Hollywood movies that gets cranked out towards the end of the year in a vain attempt to garner Oscar nominations. It was actually really good, which was astonishing to me as I haven't seen Leo since Titanic. Also my first time seeing the jaw-dropping Jennifer Connelly on the big screen. Dijmon Honsou was great for someone whose previous acting career consisted of the movie Eragon and some time on Paris catwalks.
Lo-fi pioneers Sebadoh have been filling up my playlists recently ever since I heard Death Cab's amazing live cover of their song "Brand New Love" on the John Byrd EP. There's an enormous amount of material that covers a really wide range of musical styles. It might even make me give Dinosaur Jr. yet another try. I'm also in the process of downloading a bunch of Dntel...if you like Postal Service, I suggest you give it a try, given as half of Postal Service IS Dntel.
I'll leave you with a recipe for some pretty serious cheese puffs. I call them "Gougeres" but just because I speak French. If you don't want to be snotty about it you can just call them cheese puffs. They come together really easily and, once you get the recipe down (i.e. the second time you do it), are ready within 30 minutes of your decision to start making them. Seriously.
Start by washing your hands. Always wash your hands! Then start again by preheating the oven to 435 F. Start once more with:
4 tbsp butter
2/3ds c. water
1/2 tsp salt
and put them all in a saucepan over medium heat until the butter melts. Once it's melted and the water is simmering, add
1 c. all-purpose flour
and stir until it's incorporated. Cook it over the heat for 3-5 minutes, still stirring (your arm will start to hurt), until all the little crumbs start to adhere into one doughy ball, and toss the ball into a mixing bowl. Rinse the saucepan quickly, because that mixture will crust up within seconds and you'll spend years trying to get it off. One by one, add
2 eggs
beating after each addition. The dough should be glossy. Stir in
2/3ds c. Gruyere or Swiss cheese, grated
2/3ds c. Parmesan or other hard cheese, grated.
Drop heaping teaspoonfuls onto a greased baking sheet and bake for 10-15 minutes, until they just start to brown. I adapted the recipe from an old NY Times one, in case you're wondering.
So this Xmas I was lucky enough to get an awesome Wusthof bread knife and a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon...exactly what I wanted, even though I didn't know it. Knob Creek is one of the best bourbons out there...100 proof, so it packs a bit more of a punch than your typical hard liquor; much like Wild Turkey, the so-called Kickin' Chicken. They also manage to pack in considerably more flavor than most bourbons on the market. My dad also was nice enough to repair an awesome black cashmere coat, three-quarters length...exactly what I need for the winter season. God knows how old it is. Also a bottle of really nice balsamic vinegar, a cruet set, and a really cool Montinari book on culture and food.
Last night I saw Blood Diamond, one of the preachy Hollywood movies that gets cranked out towards the end of the year in a vain attempt to garner Oscar nominations. It was actually really good, which was astonishing to me as I haven't seen Leo since Titanic. Also my first time seeing the jaw-dropping Jennifer Connelly on the big screen. Dijmon Honsou was great for someone whose previous acting career consisted of the movie Eragon and some time on Paris catwalks.
Lo-fi pioneers Sebadoh have been filling up my playlists recently ever since I heard Death Cab's amazing live cover of their song "Brand New Love" on the John Byrd EP. There's an enormous amount of material that covers a really wide range of musical styles. It might even make me give Dinosaur Jr. yet another try. I'm also in the process of downloading a bunch of Dntel...if you like Postal Service, I suggest you give it a try, given as half of Postal Service IS Dntel.
I'll leave you with a recipe for some pretty serious cheese puffs. I call them "Gougeres" but just because I speak French. If you don't want to be snotty about it you can just call them cheese puffs. They come together really easily and, once you get the recipe down (i.e. the second time you do it), are ready within 30 minutes of your decision to start making them. Seriously.
Start by washing your hands. Always wash your hands! Then start again by preheating the oven to 435 F. Start once more with:
4 tbsp butter
2/3ds c. water
1/2 tsp salt
and put them all in a saucepan over medium heat until the butter melts. Once it's melted and the water is simmering, add
1 c. all-purpose flour
and stir until it's incorporated. Cook it over the heat for 3-5 minutes, still stirring (your arm will start to hurt), until all the little crumbs start to adhere into one doughy ball, and toss the ball into a mixing bowl. Rinse the saucepan quickly, because that mixture will crust up within seconds and you'll spend years trying to get it off. One by one, add
2 eggs
beating after each addition. The dough should be glossy. Stir in
2/3ds c. Gruyere or Swiss cheese, grated
2/3ds c. Parmesan or other hard cheese, grated.
Drop heaping teaspoonfuls onto a greased baking sheet and bake for 10-15 minutes, until they just start to brown. I adapted the recipe from an old NY Times one, in case you're wondering.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
three star homeless food
So I first saw this article--or at least a version of it--over at the NY Times, but they have required registration and I have no idea if you can see it without a Times Select account. Basically, a professionally trained chef is making haute-ish cuisine for a soup kitchen --the kicker is, it's across the street from where I live. I wish I could link you the NY Times article: it's full of unintentionally hilarious lines. My personal favorite:
"He disguised some of the octopus in a soup and used the rest in a salad for the women’s shelter."
How bad can it be when the bread basket is filled with Le Bernardin's leftovers?
PS3 prices are dropping like Britney's underwear at the sight of a camera--maybe by the time school starts up again and we really need the distraction, my roommate and I can be the proud custodians of a family of next-gen consoles. Especially if I can find a goddamned Wii. I want to play Super Mario, damnit!
I had a long-ish discussion with my friend Dean today about the overlap between celebrity and academia--figures like Slavoj Zizek and Bernard Henri-Levy that seem to be a dime a dozen across the Atlantic yet strangely wanting over here. True, we have Jeffery Sachs, but is he married to a famous actress like those two? Didn't think so. Plus, I'd imagine he'd poll slightly ahead of Zbigniew Brzezinski in a national name-recognition contest. I've been trying to read Zizek for a while, but to be honest, I haven't been able to get through it without feeling like I need to read Lacan in order to not be wasting my time. Funny given how often he's cited as a scholar whose work references popular culture and flows well. This is the only article of his I've ever found that seems to fit that description well, and it's an interesting one.
Watch as the power of the Internet and its hundreds of thousands of nerds take their wrath on a local Washington town. To make a long story short, a ROTC cadet almost got his leg blown off when the cannon used to celebrate the local football team's touchdowns exploded. After the event, rather than the crush of support you'd expect from such an all-American scenario, the kid received something much different. Threats to break his other leg, proposals to ban him from town--all because apparently, people are scared that their football tradition might be taken from them. The story is pretty interesting, but what's even more interesting are the Fark and Digg threads about it. Snohomish has brought down upon its head the full fledged wrath of the Internet, and frankly, it isn't a pretty sight.
From the raging front of the war on drugs: Mexico is now prey to an unstoppable strain of la hierba de diablo that's ready for harvest after two months and can survive having its roots doused in pesticide. I shudder to think of the potential consequences for chip and pretzel stocks in the Southwest. We could be talking a serious famine here.
On the note of food, let it hereby be announced that the route to my heart lies in pho. Warm, steaming, bowls of pho. Don't say I didn't tell you.
EDIT: This almost made me shoot water out my nose. Just thought I should mention that.
"He disguised some of the octopus in a soup and used the rest in a salad for the women’s shelter."
How bad can it be when the bread basket is filled with Le Bernardin's leftovers?
PS3 prices are dropping like Britney's underwear at the sight of a camera--maybe by the time school starts up again and we really need the distraction, my roommate and I can be the proud custodians of a family of next-gen consoles. Especially if I can find a goddamned Wii. I want to play Super Mario, damnit!
I had a long-ish discussion with my friend Dean today about the overlap between celebrity and academia--figures like Slavoj Zizek and Bernard Henri-Levy that seem to be a dime a dozen across the Atlantic yet strangely wanting over here. True, we have Jeffery Sachs, but is he married to a famous actress like those two? Didn't think so. Plus, I'd imagine he'd poll slightly ahead of Zbigniew Brzezinski in a national name-recognition contest. I've been trying to read Zizek for a while, but to be honest, I haven't been able to get through it without feeling like I need to read Lacan in order to not be wasting my time. Funny given how often he's cited as a scholar whose work references popular culture and flows well. This is the only article of his I've ever found that seems to fit that description well, and it's an interesting one.
Watch as the power of the Internet and its hundreds of thousands of nerds take their wrath on a local Washington town. To make a long story short, a ROTC cadet almost got his leg blown off when the cannon used to celebrate the local football team's touchdowns exploded. After the event, rather than the crush of support you'd expect from such an all-American scenario, the kid received something much different. Threats to break his other leg, proposals to ban him from town--all because apparently, people are scared that their football tradition might be taken from them. The story is pretty interesting, but what's even more interesting are the Fark and Digg threads about it. Snohomish has brought down upon its head the full fledged wrath of the Internet, and frankly, it isn't a pretty sight.
From the raging front of the war on drugs: Mexico is now prey to an unstoppable strain of la hierba de diablo that's ready for harvest after two months and can survive having its roots doused in pesticide. I shudder to think of the potential consequences for chip and pretzel stocks in the Southwest. We could be talking a serious famine here.
On the note of food, let it hereby be announced that the route to my heart lies in pho. Warm, steaming, bowls of pho. Don't say I didn't tell you.
EDIT: This almost made me shoot water out my nose. Just thought I should mention that.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
In case you haven't seen this video yet, it's by Nickelback, for their song "Far Away." I was about to post a comment on Youtube about it, but my roommate suggested that this would be a more appropriate place to talk about it. First of all, I highly suggest that you sit down and watch the video, listen to the song, and, most importantly, read the comments. It's enormously fascinating from an aesthetic point of view: this is pure kitsch, and yet it provokes genuine emotion from literally hundreds of thousands of people. Lyrically, it's enormously vague--who can honestly say that they've never felt the pain of being separated from a love object? I think that pretty much explains the wide appeal, but the video is even more interesting, as if they're trying to pack so much emotional impact into 4 clean minutes that it starts to dribble out the sides. I haven't watched TV or seen mainstream music videos in a while, so maybe my reaction to this is someone extreme and unwarranted, but this just seems to be me to be the epitome of modern music: slick, overproduced, and designed to make proverbial low blows to our brain's systems of semiotics. It's like a commercial, almost, infiltrating your brain and replacing your own ideas about love and relationships and replacing it with pre-digested, sanitized pabulum. On that note, to leave you, from the Postal Service and the ever-eloquent Ben Gibbard,
"I was waiting on a cross-town train in the London Underground
When it struck me that I've been waiting since birth to find
A love that would look and sound like a movie..."
starting off
So to kick off my first blog entry, I might as well share what's been on my mind recently. Finals are just starting here at Columbia, so this probably isn't the best time to start a blog, but the thought occurred to me that if I didn't start now, I might never do so.
Musically, I've been dipping into Amon Tobin pretty heavily...even, in an unironic way--believe it or not--the soundtrack he did for the Tom Clancy game Chaos Theory. Also the Iron & Wine live session off the insufferable iTunes Music Store...I hate to shill, but go and spend your damn $6 to get this album. 100% worth it, and to the best of my knowledge, really hard to find illegally. With the wireless headphones on at night it's like they're giving a live performance in my room. Plus you get two new tracks, a New Order cover and an amazing, if not particularly groundbreaking new single. I&W is a great example of a group that doesn't cover a particularly wide ground, musically, but doesn't need to. It's like a neighborhood restaurant that does one thing, and does it well.
Speaking of neighborhood restaurants, props to Saigon Grill for sending us enough food to last for days, not to mention unbelievable cha gio. Something about the combination of a perfectly fried roll wrapped up in lettuce with herbs and crunchy pickled vegetables...it delivers a double punch of crunch and a great flavor contrast: oily/meaty pitted against crisp/herbaceous. I bought the new Anthony Bourdain cookbook--or maybe it's not that new--and hopefully once finals are done I'll get a chance to set into some of the nicer looking stuff inside: a lamb daube with neck meat, pork shoulder braised in beer...you know, light, healthy stuff.
Back in the real world, Hamas and Fateh seem to be close to ending the recent...er...unpleasantness that's been plaguing Gaza over the last week or two. My prediction is that we'll see new elections called early--whether as a result of the deals they're making now, or as a result of pressure from the international community. Ultimately, as corrupt and ineffective as Fateh is, they represent a more realistic chance for the realization of a peaceful Palestinian state: but it's important to remember why they lost the last elections. They may lose even forced elections unless they figure out a way to appease the anti-Israeli sentiments of their voting body, many of whom are being killed on a daily basis even after the "withdrawal" from Gaza, without becoming anathema to the eyes of the international community, as Hamas has done. We've seen the economic ramifications that has for the Palestinian people: since Hamas-related suspension of aid has taken effect, their already miserable living conditions have become even worse. It's a tightrope, and I don't envy the men who have to walk it.
So on a less serious note, I'm trying to get our Xbox 360 repaired in time for my last final, so that I can start playing Gears of War obsessively again. We started getting the infamous "three lights of death" just after I got about halfway through the campaign. I swear to God, I got genuine withdrawal symptoms. Not to brag, but the A/V setup we've got here is pretty amazing (96" DLP projector displaying upscaled 1080i HD, and a nice fat subwoofer to make our neighbors love us), and gaming on it--especially with a next-gen game like GoW--is really, well, frankly, addictive. We can still watch DVDs and TV, but it ain't the same. I picked up the DVD for Little Miss Sunshine, a movie I've been meaning to see for a while. I got suckered in by mentions of gay Proust professors and heroin-addicted grandpas. Plus they use Sufjan on the soundtrack!
One more thing before I go--if anyone wants to get me something for the "holidays" (whichever one you like, I'm not picky), something from WickedLasers would be great. I promise I won't do anything bad with it.
I'll leave you with a beautiful image--an installation I saw at the Met a couple of years back when it was still there. Click for it.
Musically, I've been dipping into Amon Tobin pretty heavily...even, in an unironic way--believe it or not--the soundtrack he did for the Tom Clancy game Chaos Theory. Also the Iron & Wine live session off the insufferable iTunes Music Store...I hate to shill, but go and spend your damn $6 to get this album. 100% worth it, and to the best of my knowledge, really hard to find illegally. With the wireless headphones on at night it's like they're giving a live performance in my room. Plus you get two new tracks, a New Order cover and an amazing, if not particularly groundbreaking new single. I&W is a great example of a group that doesn't cover a particularly wide ground, musically, but doesn't need to. It's like a neighborhood restaurant that does one thing, and does it well.
Speaking of neighborhood restaurants, props to Saigon Grill for sending us enough food to last for days, not to mention unbelievable cha gio. Something about the combination of a perfectly fried roll wrapped up in lettuce with herbs and crunchy pickled vegetables...it delivers a double punch of crunch and a great flavor contrast: oily/meaty pitted against crisp/herbaceous. I bought the new Anthony Bourdain cookbook--or maybe it's not that new--and hopefully once finals are done I'll get a chance to set into some of the nicer looking stuff inside: a lamb daube with neck meat, pork shoulder braised in beer...you know, light, healthy stuff.
Back in the real world, Hamas and Fateh seem to be close to ending the recent...er...unpleasantness that's been plaguing Gaza over the last week or two. My prediction is that we'll see new elections called early--whether as a result of the deals they're making now, or as a result of pressure from the international community. Ultimately, as corrupt and ineffective as Fateh is, they represent a more realistic chance for the realization of a peaceful Palestinian state: but it's important to remember why they lost the last elections. They may lose even forced elections unless they figure out a way to appease the anti-Israeli sentiments of their voting body, many of whom are being killed on a daily basis even after the "withdrawal" from Gaza, without becoming anathema to the eyes of the international community, as Hamas has done. We've seen the economic ramifications that has for the Palestinian people: since Hamas-related suspension of aid has taken effect, their already miserable living conditions have become even worse. It's a tightrope, and I don't envy the men who have to walk it.
So on a less serious note, I'm trying to get our Xbox 360 repaired in time for my last final, so that I can start playing Gears of War obsessively again. We started getting the infamous "three lights of death" just after I got about halfway through the campaign. I swear to God, I got genuine withdrawal symptoms. Not to brag, but the A/V setup we've got here is pretty amazing (96" DLP projector displaying upscaled 1080i HD, and a nice fat subwoofer to make our neighbors love us), and gaming on it--especially with a next-gen game like GoW--is really, well, frankly, addictive. We can still watch DVDs and TV, but it ain't the same. I picked up the DVD for Little Miss Sunshine, a movie I've been meaning to see for a while. I got suckered in by mentions of gay Proust professors and heroin-addicted grandpas. Plus they use Sufjan on the soundtrack!
One more thing before I go--if anyone wants to get me something for the "holidays" (whichever one you like, I'm not picky), something from WickedLasers would be great. I promise I won't do anything bad with it.
I'll leave you with a beautiful image--an installation I saw at the Met a couple of years back when it was still there. Click for it.
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