King Tom & his merry band of eaters

Susanne & Anna are here! Joy. Amie and I picked them up from the airport on Sunday evening (after she fed me a delicious dinner of pasta with a morel mushroom cream sauce; cesar salad; and roasted asparagus).

Yesterday we had a Memorial Day BBQ at the SE Hipster Castle (which I feel is more of a hipster repellent than a hipster haven). Tom finally got his mesquite on. The menu was as follows:

+ bbq pork ribs
+ bbq chicken
+ bbq pineapple
+ bbq vegetable skewers
+ bbq portobello mushrooms
+ bbq jalapeño poppers (filled with cream cheese, wrapped in bacon)
+ bbq peaches (quartered, dipped in sugar)
+ bbq oranges (halved, dipped in sugar with rosemary)
+ bbq asparagus (in peach & orange juices)
+ house made bbq sauce
+ black bean, cherry tomato, and cucumber salad with cilantro and a tomato/citrus dressing
+ potato salad with asparagus
+ cucumber & onion salad (in vinegar)
+ watermelon
+ ice cream sandwhiches
+ chocolate–strawberry brownies
+ chocolate mousse
+ lemonade
+ beer
+ pepsi
+ water

I may be forgetting a couple of things. It was quite the feast though. Clearly. The champion ice cream sandwhich devourer was Zac, who ate 4.

I'm now in possession of a basil plant of the Genovese persuasion. I will cultivate it and garnish my pizzas with its leafy protrusions.

in the haze.

clown-ballerina haunting long's drugs in Venice, CA


Los Angeles is a cesspool of scantly clad beautiful people drenched in
sunlight, but we didn't really find that out until the morning. The
evening was spent at Kat's brother's beach shack a couple blocks away
from Venice Beach. It reminded me a bit of living at the community
house in New Zealand, with seemingly dozens of people flowing in and
out the door over the course of the evening, except these people were
more blond and tanned and ate more dairy products.

After the desert and all the driving, it was a bit overwhelming. All I
wanted was some dinner and good sleep. These things were had, but much
later than I would have hoped and we all know what happens to people
when they are tired and hungry, they get grumpy. So I did my best to
keep to myself. Eventually the party atmosphere subsided and I was
able to crash... on a sofa that Giselle had once laid on for a
magazine shoot.

The next morning we had a nice little stroll around the beach area
before heading off to the north and meeting up with Fahad for lunch.
There was much catching up, pizza eating, reminiscing, and one case of
a mistaken identity ('cause, I mean, who can really tell the
difference between us?). My greatest regret on this trip is that I
didn't get a photo of us together. We are twins separated by genetics.

There was then much scenery and coastal driving. I believe that the
sunset image from a couple posts ago is actually from our trek out to
the Pacific Coast Highway.

requisite vacation sunset image

OK. So, my attempt at recapping the whole road trip in moderately
lengthy and detailed posts has derailed. I'm okay with this. I realize
that these things are somewhat time sensitive sense (a) my memory
isn't great for such things and (b) the nature of the web blog
generally enourages quick dissemination of information that is
immediately relevant, kind of short term-y/short attention span-y.
Also, I'm not convinced that anyone actually wants to read these
posts, even me, who appreciates having them for the sake of posterity,
but since I lived the events not too long ago, am pretty okay just
sitting here thinking about them. That said, sometimes writing a
little bit can be a good workout for the brain contraption and I'll
see if I can at least pen the highlights.

Day 3: Joshua Tree redux.

We'll rewind bit, and briefly note that after Coachella Kyle and I
drove somewhat cluelessly around in the desert looking for the Palm
Springs airport, which we eventually found, and where Shanni had been
patiently waiting for us for an hour or so. We then got lost leaving
the airport ("just leave the same way you came in," one would think,
but i was a bit giddy and not really paying attention to the direction
we were pointed in). As is the wont of the Jews, there was further
wandering in the desert. What should have been an hour drive to a
Motel 6 (situated next to my mortal enemy, Pizza Hut), turned into a 3
hour battle with highway signage, countless U-turns, and everyone
losing their cool a bit, but just a bit.

Morning. The desert. We had no food. There was a diner and we were
saved by morning milkshakes. I had a Spanish omelet that was roughly
the size of Spain, and may have been populated with actual Spaniards
(I'm sorry, little Spaniards, you deserved a better death than one by
digestion). Then: into the heart of it. The morning was spent driving
through the park and the early afternoon on a two hour walk to a ridge
with magnificent views. Witnessed: Joshua trees, lizards, cacti, dirt,
more dirt, small bushes, &c. We'd just missed the bloom-y season, but
there was plenty of beauty to be seen.

Then! Away to Los Angeles!

Joshua Tree joy:

this is it.

day too two.

Phoenix for the most part remains a mystery. From the airplane window you could see a seemingly endless sprawl of the city's white-roofed domains. But who or what inhabited those buildings? And perhaps more mysterous: why and how is there grass here? We don't really know. Kyle and I busted outta there as soon as we finished our pies.

Driving directly at the sun for a good couple of hours, we finally arrived in the Indio/Coachella/Joshua Tree area around 10:00 pm, deciding to take our chances with a national park camp ground. The park's south entrance only led to group camp sites, in which, thanks to our national park's honor system of reservations and payment, we had no problem finding space for our two-person tent.

Kyle, having never been further west than Lexington, Kentucky woke up with the sun and frolicked in the desert while I stirred in my sleeping bag. We were on the road by 9:30, headed to conquer Coachella's Saturday lineup, killing some time before the afternoon start by scavenging a breakfast at Target (a banana, orange juice, and banana-nut muffin for me) and picking up some forgotten supplies.

Then it was off to search for parking, which despite somewhat excessive signage seemed to elude us for quite a while. There appeared to be a number of event parking lots dotting the path to festival, but none of them were populated by concert goers and most of them were mostly empty and closed off. It turns out that parking was located to the right of an intersection with an impromptu no right turn sign, which had a police officer idling next to it. This didn't seem to deter other attendees from making a right, so we followed them with crossed fingers. No trouble.

We arrived at the festival, were interviewed by a local radio station (top five favorite bands? i froze. what makes a good concert? who am i listening to right now?). Entering the grounds, security made me dump out my water bottle ("It could be Vodka for all we know!"), were accosted by a couple minors looking for beer bracelets ("I don't think drinking in this heat's a good idea. You'll end up in the medical tent dehydrated and covered in vomit." The thanks I got in reply I'm pretty sure was a mispronounced "fuck you.")

P.O.S. kicked off our Coachella experience ("It's 1:30. You're at a hip-hop show in the desert. Fuck it. Throw your hands in the air. No. Like this. Up. Like this!"). If the crowd had known what to make of it (i.e., not been full of what can only be described in this context as a bunch of honkeys), it would've been an excellent set.

P.O.S. was followed by what turned out to be hands-down the best set of the day with Ida Maria, a Scandinavian outfit with a very earnest and blond backing band that tore through straight to the core of rock's definition—dynamism, youth, sex, rebellion, and spontaneity—all made easily digestible with catchy hooks.

From there it was mostly downhill: Joss Stone played a too polished set on the main stage (that had a rigging system roughly a million stories tall and completely dwarfed every act it hosted); Henry Rollins offered a pandering rant about the evils of war, being frustrated with the Bush administration, and airport security; the tail-end of Amanda Palmer's set was a rousing ukulele cover of Radiohead's Creep, and seemed to be the only occurrence that day of an audience really singing along; Tinariwen worked the crowd with the clever use of not speaking English and looking foreign, which was completely charming and effortless on their part as they are from Mali and do not actually speak English or seem to be inclined to wear t-shirts and bermuda shorts; Fleet Foxes offered very tight harmonies in a solid set that I can only really describe as gently raucous; M.I.A.'s performance was completely seizure inducing, a clinic in pop art replete awful video collages, dancers in neon piping, and incoherent rambling ("I didn't sell out. I played the Grammy's, but I turned the Oscars down! I just had a baby.").

pop-ish rocks.

not my usual stuff.

It happened already?

Two days ago I was in San Fransisco. Two days ago I was a free man. Today I am parked under the fluorescent-lit drop ceiling that is the pestilence of modern living, a blight that causes the slow deaths of countless psyches across the developed world. Yup. There's nothing like a good road trip to remind you how dull and inane your daily life actually is.

Two Friday's ago I met Kyle at the Phoenix Airport Alamo Rental Car desk. After driving in circles trying to figure out how to get on I-10, we headed over to Pizzeria Bianco, a place often tagged as having the best pizza in these United States. We arrived on their sun baked front patio around 4pm, a good hour before they opened doors, and we weren't even the first in line—already there was a small collection of people hanging out under a canvass awning. Kyle and I did some catching up, interrupted periodically by a couple of very nice guys—fledgling pizza enthusiasts—asking me questions about pizzerias and pizza making. By the time Bianco's opened, the line to get in stretched maybe 60 people down the block.

How could Bianco's wood-charred pies live up to the hype surrounding them? Well, they couldn't. But I can't think of any pizza that could. We kicked off the meal with a couple of cokes and an antipasto (olives, cheese, soppressata and fire roasted asparagus, bell peppers, and onions) that turned out to be the star of the meal. A wild-haired Chris Bianco was manning the oven and stretching out paper-thin 12 inch rounds of dough. Our pizzas came out beautifully cooked, with the puffy edge having a slim crisp outter shell and soft, spongey innards. Between the two of us we split the Rosa (Red Onion, Parmigiano Reggiano, Rosemary, Arizona Pistachios), the Wiseguy (Wood Roasted Onion, House Smoked Mozzarella, Fennel Sausage), and a Margherita (Tomato Sauce, Fresh Mozzarella, Basil). The Margherita was excellent and the best of the lot, with a fresh-tasting sauce and a nice sauce and cheese balance. The Wiseguy was heavily loaded with thick strips of sausage and onion, both of which were delicious in their own right, but were detrimental to the pizza's pizza-ness. Their heft overpowered both the crust's structure and its flavor. I wondered why they bothered to put them on a pizza crust to begin with. The sausage and onions would have made a tastey meal by themselves. The Rosa is without a doubt the richest pizza I've ever had. The oils from the reggiano and pistachios mixing with the sweetness of the red onion were overwhelming and gave me that feeling of thickness at the base of the jaw where it meets the throat. I could only manage to down two of its six slices. Kyle seemed happy to play clean-up on that one.

The nail in the coffin for me though was crust, which while cooked to perfection, was simply bland. Maybe it was just this day's batch, but it lacked both the yeasty flavor and saltiness that combine for that satisfactory umami-ness one searches for in that last bite. The best pizza in America? No. But when it was all chewed and swallowed, it was still a damn fine dinner and certainly a pizza worthy of praise. Great service too.

pizza upskirt

margherita

wiseguy

rosa

the oven

songs about time

the rentals' first chapter of songs about time is ear-ready:

monday morning photo play

rustoleum



flora


recession


pdx loves neck beards


pdx loves bikes

pdx loves walking

pdx loves geometric shapes

pdx loves posters

more flora

more more flora

pdx loves decaying cherry blossoms



bike farm loves you.

The weather this weekend was ridiculously beautiful—sunny in the 60s on Saturday and 80 on Sunday. I managed to squeeze in a solid 5 hours of soccer.

Sunday I did some much needed maintenance on my bike at Bike Farm. Farbotron helped me overhaul my bike's bottom bracket (the section where the pedal and cranks spin around). It looks like I should purchase a new spindle and bearing cups. The trouble is that my bike frame is an 80's era Peugeot, which is French and conforms to French standardization with respect to part sizes and threading of screws and these French standards are no longer used. Fortunately Portland is a overgrown with cycle shops, so maybe it won't be so hard to track down.

And a personal PDX milestone: for the first time since moving here got invited over to hang out (read: non-party situation) with people who I did not go to school with. Low-key discussion about photography dark rooms, the correlation between astrology and Jesus, and cycling were had, followed by a viewing of choice internets entertainments.

and because it's a slow morning:

Marta is just plain better than everyone else. No one can match her quickness, speed, or creativity right now. She's arguably the best player—of any gender—in the world.

moo camera. moooooooooooooooooooooo.

the return of the all-seeing eye

my new, refurbished camera arrived in the mail the other day, fully formed with a working LCD display and everything. it fits snugly in my right pants pocket. i will try and use it to better document the comings-and-goings, ins-and-outs, hithers-and-thithers, repetitions-and-redundancies—the general hurly burly of everyday life in my little cloud of subjective reality. at some point this may mean additions to the long stagnant flickr page. its arrival is also just in time for my exploratory thrust into to the southern areas of the western continental united states. point being, if i can figure out how to the the photos off the goddamn thing, then there may be some photos of things besides pizza on this log of electric information.

image stabilization rulez.

meat plate

went to korean bbq for lunch today. work function. ate an unhealthy
amount of meat. seriously unhealthy. feel kind of ill about it. not
food poisoning ill, more clump-of-meat-sitting-in-stomach kind of ill.
pork, chicken, beef, shrimp, and either squid or octopus were consumed
(hard to tell... it was in a seafood pancake). not sure what was in
the potstickers. luckily no one seared themselves on the hibachi.
please do not try to duplicate this experience at home.

should've eaten more kimchi, less spicy pork.

other people's words

Far be it from me to want to direct people to Fox news, but one of their interns recently spent her spring break volunteering with Common Ground Relief and ended up working with (the not-so-facially-pierced) Morgan Meeting himself, aka Gorgon the Destroyer, aka Cap'n Morgan... I could go on. Point being he and CGR got a little publicity.

Morgan Elzey, a project coordinator for Common Ground Relief in New Orleans and my leader on this particularly muddy trek, specializes in working to rebuild the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta, which is disappearing by football fields everyday.

david mack is coming to town.

there isn't a better comics artist alive:

double eh.

and!:

IRS to the rescue!

the solution to the AIG executive bonus problem seems to me to send the IRS after them. audit the fuck out of those executives. you may not get all $165 million back, but you're bound to get some of it. and who knows? maybe a few of those guys will be sent to jail for tax fraud or evasion or perversion or inversion or some other thing, which would be a bonus on the revenge front and may ebb the nation's bloodlust.

i have to say, while these people clearly do not deserve another penny, $165 million in taxpayer money really only comes to about 50 cents per person, which isn't so bad... unless, of course, you add to that the hundreds of billions that were given to the company as a whole. in the end, as i'm sure we're all aware, this completely idiotic managerial move isn't really the problem. i think joel achenbach said it well:

The eruption of outrage over AIG is understandable given our innate need for a satisfying narrative—one in which bad things are caused by bad people, and the bad people get caught and punished. It offends our narrative sensibility when the problems are disproportionate to the number of villains.

on the portland front, many things are afoot. M & T bought a house, which it seems i will be moving into sometime in the next month or so. i'll be migrating from NE to SE, near a Pix Patisserie and the revered Pok Pok and their delectible fish sauce chicken wings. there's also a swell little bike shop, food co-op (repleat with neighboring year-round bit-sized farmer's market), and a new seasons grocery within walking distance.

i've also joined a couple of co-ed soccer teams and have miraculously turned into a goal-scoring machine this season. i think i slotted in one during the fall indoor session, but i've managed at least seven this session. players are only allowed two goals maximum per game and i've reached that limit thrice. honestly, i don't know what to do with myself. (no, really, once i get two goals i just wander around the field aimlessly—my defense is for shit. more goals get scored against us when i'm in the back than when i'm not. and i seem to have a propensity for getting in the way of and injuring our keeper.) the outdoor team gets rolling soon and that should be a good time too.

the inevitable (dweebish) watchmen post

Saw Watchmen yesterday. It was good. About as good as I expected. There were scenes that were incredibly campy, some that were profound. Among other things there was lots of blood; overly prettified fight choreography; a giant, naked blue man; too much CGI; and one sex scene that went on too long and in a kind of ridiculously showy manner. There seems to be somewhat universal agreement that the film adhered too closely to the comic book and failed to create its own identity. The critics loved Jackie Earle Haley's portrayal of Rorschach and hated Malin Ackerman's Silk Spectre. I thought they were both adequate. The major difference being that Rorschach's character—demented, violent, uncompromising—is just way more compelling to watch or read. It was the same in the comic book—its two best chapters are 5 and 6, which focus almost mostly on Rorschach.

My general feeling is that making Watchmen into a movie is about as silly as making Citizen Kane into a comic book. In adapting it, it lost a major component of what makes it such a great piece of work—its comic bookness. As much as it's a story about superheroes trying to save the world, it's also a story about debunking the myth of the comic book hero. And as much as it's a fine piece of pomo, non-linear storytelling, it's also really a twelve part course in how comic book stories are told—the ways to relate one comic book panel to another. And this last part, I believe, is really what made Watchmen "unfilmable" as its been called on so many occasions (probably most often by its cantankerous mastermind). It's unfilmable because one of the intrinsic values of the story is that it is a comic book.

There are certain things that comics allow for that helped develop some of the themes—symmetry and time—of Watchmen and this relationship between panels is one of them. The comic book's page-layout holds almost entirely to a grid divided evenly in 18 sections. Most pages had 9 panels, but whatever the configuration was, it held to that underlying grid. While it lent a certain rhythm and structure to the pages look and narrative pacing (the effects of which, I don't think I entirely understand), it also allowed for a vast use of symmetry in the page designs (see the page depicting Rorschach's capture). In as much as Watchmen was important to comics with respect to its mature subject matter (it being an instigator for the movement of comics' target audience from 8-to-12 year-olds to 18-to-30-somethings), it was equally important regarding how its panels tell the story.

The narrative flashes back and forth in time throughout the story. As Dr. Manhattan says later on in the book, "There is no future. There is no past... Time is simultaneous..." With the comic you can easily move forwards and backwards in the narrative just by turning some pages. By looking at an entire page at once you can see moments in the story happening simultaneously. Rorschach is a character of dichotomies. He sees everything in a prism of good/evil and right/wrong. His life is divided into two periods, when he was Walter Kovacs and when he became Rorschach. His mask is a mercurial Rorschach blotch, perpetually moving to make new symmetries. So the gimmick of using symmetry in the illustrations to underscore his character traits is an obvious enough device.

In the page depicting Rorschach's capture (and a number of other pages in book), the coloring of the panels is symmetrical. But the way in which that device functions in the comic is what makes it work so well. The physical motivation behind the color change in the panels is the flashing neon light in the background (The neon light features a symmetrical skull-and-crossbones in its design). The alternating color in conjunction with the rigidity of the grid-based layout acts as a sort of metronome, ticking off the moments until the issue's climax. And while it functions as a sort of timing device, in order to actually see the symmetry on the page the reader must look at all nine panels at once, such that what's happening in the first panel of the page is synchronous with the last panel. The symmetry is only apparent by making time stop in the story.

This is something that couldn't really be done in film. The comic book ties together these themes of symmetry and synchronicity in a very particular comic book-y way. Certainly the themes portrayed on film, but not in the same manner.

And this is one of the major strikes against the film. Outside of cutting scenes out of chronological order, there's little thematic play in its narrative technique. It cops the style of the comic without paying attention to the substance conveyed by that style. Snyder and co. didn't make much of an effort in that regard. They had an opportunity to create a very striking visual vocabulary (maybe using simultaneous imagery or montage, for instance) and they didn't. The only elements of the film they seemed to take liberties with were the credit sequence and the fight choreography and physics of battle, which were essentially a Matrix rehash with more blood.

A similar argument could be made for the murder mystery aspect of the story. Rorschach and Nite Owl's investigation into the Comedian's death and the reader's efforts to create order out of Moore and Gibbon's disjointed narrative are underscored by comics' innate qualities—the setting of illustrated panels together to create a larger picture. The comic doesn't just resemble a puzzle, it is a puzzle.

The movie, in the end, was the fireworks without the orchestra.

the art (click to enlarge) of Dave Gibbons, John Higgins, and Alan Moore:










more TK?

Al Forno Ferruzza

Of course. A few weeks before I'm slated to move to another neighborhood (details to come in a future posting), a new—but more importantly good—pizzeria has opened its doors around the corner and a couple of blocks from my memory foam mattress.

The interior of Al Forno Ferruzza is presently a rather cavernous space with high ceilings and just a couple tables and some counter space by the windows. Next to the register is a bit of a haphazard display case showing off the olives, a large can of San Marzano tomatoes, and pizzas by the slice. What the space lacks in warmth, the proprieters make up for in friendliness (one of them chatted to me a bit about his home's wood-burning oven, and even offered a free taste of their spiced olives). And though the space feels empty, it looks like the owner has some big plans with one wall boasting a large mural of a pizzaiolo attending his oven and another wall an image of Mt. Vesuvius.

Previously (and still?) a food cart in SW Portland, Al Forno Ferruzza (which translates to something about an oven—I can't find a definition of ferruzza), produces thin-crusted pizzas and in a stone-floored oven run at 800 degrees F. How do they keep the oven so hot? Propane. Apparently the standard gas used in gas ovens doesn't do the trick. I ordered a plain pie with half arugula. What they produced was a beautifully charred pizza, topped with a chunky sauce of San Marzano tomatoes; fresh mozzarella; a parmagiano-reggiano cheese made in Argentina, which they also sell hunks of; and a sprinkling of what looked like home grown arugula. Their list of toppings includes, among others, fresh oregano, caramelized onions, and house cured olives. Their crust was head and shoulders above Tastebud's in terms of flavor—smokey, yeasty, umami-y. Over all, I found the pizza's major fault, besides a glaring lack of basil, was balance—it was sauce heavy, which, I think I've mentioned maybe once before, is an uncommon complaint for me, as I find most pizzerias seem to skimp on the sauce and focus too much on the cheese and other toppings... "meat-lover's"... eugh. But I digress. Despite its faults, Al Forno Ferruzza's pizza certainly ranks highly on the Portland pizza chart, possibly unseating my own works at the highly coveted number three position.

Al Forno, sadly, is replacing what was an admittedly low-rent looking Ethiopian deli/restaurant. Outside of using their ATM a couple of times, I never took advantage of the establishment and I regret that, as it certainly added to the eclectic feel of an area that's increasingly gentrified every month. It was one of those places that reminded me that one of my favorite quotes about Portland isn't entirely true, which is good. (I quoteth: "I think I feel my temperature rise a degree every time someone says, 'Keep Portland weird,' because it's just a bunch of white people drinking pinot noir.") In its place though is potentially a Portland institution and I look forward to eating many a slice out of its piping hot oven.

there's no end in sight.

Brunettes Against Bubblegum Youth—The Brunettes
Comfortable Headphones—Georgie James
Your Ex-Lover is Dead—Stars
She Says It's Alright—The Rentals
I Just Threw Out The Love Of My Dreams—Weezer
I Want To Hear What You Have Got To Say—The Subways
All The Old Showstoppers—The New Pornographers
Help Help—Mates of State
Let Us Go—Washington Social Club
The Long Grift—Hedwig and the Angry Inch