the decemberists

colin meloy sounds like what i imagine ira glass would sing like if he
could or would sing.

He won't even let me play cards anymore

I'm generally not one to go to movies that make you think too much anymore. I mean, I enjoy well constructed films with clever narrative structures, engaging characters, fine performances, etc. But mostly I go to films for escapism. This was not the case in later high school and college. I mean, yes, I saw plenty of stupid Hollywood shlock in that time period, but I had a strong interest in watching movies that maybe were more serious, experimental, artful, or just weird because I enjoyed figuring out the puzzles of themes and characters that they splayed before me and because they often investigate some core truth about the nature of existence, and even if that investigation is just kind of blindly stabbing and guessing, it's still often reaching for a real truth and not just what we wish were true, which is what seems to be the case regarding the messages of Hollywood blockbusters.

Last night I saw the Coen Bros. latest, A Serious Man, which is as unsettling and bleak a movie as I've ever seen. The conversation afterwards was mostly directed around that issue and how much of a bummer it was that that was the movie we ended up seeing. But I have to say, after a day of removal, that A Serious Man is a fucking fantastic bit of cinema. Oh, yes, it's stomach churning  watching the main character get the shit kicked out of him by fate without putting up a fight. It makes you queasy and is inordinately frustrating. The Coen Bros. have been practicing their rug-pulling technique and the end of the film finds you flat on your back staring into a blackness of uncertainty and destruction and evil.

"When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies... "

Has anyone else seen this movie? Did it have the same affect?

to the future?

agape.

COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.

It'll make your mouth drop.

asterios polyp

it's received some pretty high praise from most critics. i recommend it. it's 100% solid comics. there are few artists working in comics who tie together the words and images together to underscore the meaning as well as david mazzuchelli does in this book. it's also pretty.

it seems likely to get enveloped into the canon of great american comic books: jimmy corrigan, blankets, black hole, asterios polyp.

in the words of batmanuel...

"You are being shagged by a rare parrot."

Adventures in New Zealand!

the health care blarg

"Republicans charged that both plans would lead to a government 'takeover' of the health-care system and ultimately force private insurers out of business."—Washington Post

The implication that the public option is insidious and will put good and honorable privately-run health care companies out of business needs to be beaten back with a giant stick with a nail in it. Regardless of whether a public option would or wouldn't put private insurers out of business—since when have private insurers been worth saving? What has a free market brought us in terms of health-care? Run-away costs, awful service, and—yes!—rationing. The wealthy can afford it and afford more of it, those who are monetarily challenged cannot. (One could maybe argue it brought us accelerated technological advancement, but I don't know enough about that either way.)

The thing that really pisses me off is that these jackasses in Congress arguing against government-run health-care all gladly accept their gov't plan.

Does anyone feel strongly one way or the other about this stuff? Government option? National private non-profit? Regional non-profit? Leave the system as is? Choices D through Z?

radiolab artifacts

parasites!:


moments!:



radiolab!

grow and change

canned some tomatoes with amie yesterday. maybe there'll be some photo documentation on her site in the not too distant future (hint, hint). brunch this morning featured a fairly incredible 3-layered peach and nectarine pavlova with sour whipped cream courtesy of zoe, a friend/co-worker of laurel and amie.

also watched synecdoche, new york and cold souls this weekend. i do not generally recommend the former unless you're into semi-incoherent david-lynch-type films. it's ambitious in terms of its thematic scope, but it really lost me in the middle when it veered away from linear narrative. i'm sure there was some meaning in it, but i could not figure out what it was exactly. it re-congealed toward the end, when the main character's grandiose macarthur-genius-award-funded theatrical work takes on a life of its own. the actor he hires to play himself begins a romance with his assistant, while the main character has a run-in with the woman playing the assistant. it becomes mind-bending in the fun way that kaufman's other stuff (eternal sunshine, adaptation, being john malkovich) is. the result of the love, loss, jealousy, and existential crises is ultimately depressing, emotionally draining, and confusing.

cold souls was easier to wrap my head around. alternately darkly humorous and completely ridiculous, it's paul giamatti at his best and probably most likable role (dude plays a lotta losers and curmudgeons). there's less to it than synecdoche, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. focusing more squarely on the question of identity and existence, it still tackles love, loss, and jealousy, but by using one frame of reference it creates a more coherent story. and you get to see paul giamatti do a pretty good impression of a bad william shatner performance in a chekhov play. the ending lacks much of a resolution though, which is pretty unsatisfying.

also: glee. watched the season opener. generally enjoyable. they seem to be blowing their sexual tension load a little early regarding the football player–nerdy singer. also, the lip synching is a little over the top and distracting. i'd rather the performances feel more live, less produced. the whole kanye west interlude was, frankly, awful—too cheesy even for a show that is steeped in a variety of dairy. the extent to which all of the characters are fairly gross stereotypes is somewhat bothersome. that said, it's only the first episode (well, second, if you include the pilot), and there's plenty of room to grow and change.

fi'ty peeps, one question

Fifty People, One Question: London from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

the rocket summer

so i was listening to this radiolab episode today, which is all about parasites, and they had an parasite expert who started talking about this parasitic wasp. the wasp uses cockroaches as a host. it stings them to stun them and then stings them in a very specific spot in their head, which basically zombifies them. they become living servants for these wasps. (please note that this summary here is probably somewhat inaccurate and for the full story you really should listen to the original discussion in what is a very entertaining episode of radiolab) the wasp then takes the cockroach and grabs onto its antennae to use as a steering mechanism (it does this with its mouth... or pincers or whatever it has in its general oral region), leads it over to a nice dirt patch lays some eggs under it and buries it alive. the eggs then hatch and burrow into the cockroach where they feast on its innards, being careful not to eat anything integral to its survival until they reach maturity at which point they burst out of the cockroach, shake off the viscera and fly away. the cockroach then dies.

now this got me thinking in my standard cynical anti-establishment mode. it seems to me that there's a parallel between these parasitic wasps—which i think, regardless of how you feel about cockroaches, may be one of the most heinous creatures on the planet—and the capitalistic/materialistic society we presently find ourselves in. granted, capitalism doesn't exactly lobotomize us, but what it does do is insidious in a way that's almost more evil than a direct stinger to the brain is. we're all trapped in this process that slowly brainwashes us. we're inundated from birth with carefully designed advertisements targeted at our exact demographic, whatever that happens to be at the time, to consume product A or use service B. we become used to consuming these products and services, cannot imagine life without them, even though in almost all cases these products and services only came to be recently—recently at least relative to the breadth of human existence. we recommend service B to friends and family—it makes life easier and it costs so little! we become fixated on these goods and services. they are a focal point in our lives. we begin to see them as not just the accoutrements that they are, but as the become increasingly important until they become our raison d'être. not only do we find ourselves buying them, but we're making them, we're selling them, advertising their existence to the newly born so that they can grow up and be enveloped by the same things.

the scary thing about consumerism is not that we consume so much, rather it's how much it consumes us.

this blog post was posted to blogger, written in gmail on a mac book pro (with intel inside!), powered by pacific power, connected to the internet via comcast, while sitting on a bed puchased via overstock.com, covered in sheets bought at fred meyer, and perched on a bedframe made from wood, screws, and nails, all summarily consumed from home depot. it will be posted on blogger in verdana, a typeface designed for microsoft. i'm sure there are dozens of other soulless, multinational corporations involved in this whole process—who made the sheets? the lightbulb lighting the room? mined the copper for the co-axial cable? we're all drowning in it.


/ / /

in other news, laurel's co-worker informed her that the space shuttle and ISS would be undocking and visible this evening. we watched for about 30 seconds, which was as long as we could see them, as the shuttle rocketed away from the space station at 18,000 mph. they were both remarkably bright objects for things that were relatively small and 220 miles away. it was cool. thanks NASA (also, thank you for my Memory foam mattress).

ad nauseum.

time really flies the older you get. i what used to seem like a week is now a month. there's probably a lot to tell since the last entry, but i can't think of much. tera is outta the office on a permanent basis and is prepping for a strict regiment of higher education by enjoying the delights of le france with the martinator. with her gone, the office dynamic is very different. her replacement is high energy and has a ridiculous amount of design experience: 20 years, plus design schooling. i've also taken on some more responsibility and at least for the past week haven't really had a shortage of things to do, which is kind of nice. but i do enjoy reading the news and there's been a lot less of that.

last weekend tom and laurel led me on an expedition up South Sister, the third highest mountain in all of vasty vastness of Oregon. there's documentation of the expedition located here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/egadman/show. it was a rewarding but a difficult, steep, and slippery, slide-y climb to the summit. it's probably the highest summit i've climbed to. even starting from halfway up, it was tough. i definitely noticed the air thinning out at about 8,000 feet. the last thousand feet or so i found myself resting every 20 feet or so. it wasn't so bad though, the exhaustion just gave me a good reason to stop and enjoy the view.

where did i leave off...

so i've been trying to get a little more reading done in the past fewweeks, but i can't seem to get a good rhythm going. i finally made myway back to DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing, but i had to skip the essayon TV due to my inability to focus. the next essay, written for Harper's about the Illinois State Fair back in '92 or '93, is a vivid account of how America's three c's—capitalism, commercialism, and consumerism—really bumps and grinds against our cultural heritage or at least what we think of as our cultural heritage. possibly the most telling detail he recounts is from the first couple of pages when he notices, while bearing witness to some kind of PR event for a charity hosted in the McDonald's tent, that the grass he's standing on is fake, and when he looks under the green plastic fibers beneath him, he finds real grass. it's amusing and disturbing.

* * *
i've noticed recently that when typing in a purposely informal mostly-lowercase-with-the-exception-of-proper-nouns-and-other-things-that-feel-like-they-should-be-capitalized house-style, i find it difficult to keep consistent. it's easy to leave everything lowercase. it's fairly easy to keep things in the proper standardized form. but if i start without capitalization and then start capitalizing words (like names or book titles, for instance), i involuntarily start capitalizing sentences and first-person singular pronouns again. does anyone else have this problem? does anyone else purposefully capitalize in this (or another) bizarre manner?

hot hot heat

more 8tracks

more of that same macro attackro.

flickr.

UPDATED!

with even more photos.




















new photos up on flickr. well, semi-new. some of them are from the road trip in april, some are from this past weekend, some from recent trips to SF. it's mixed bag of baggage.

i bought new bicycle wheels. i plan to install them next week.

planning a pizza and pastry evening in a couple weeks. details may or may not make it to this page.

the mostly manfattan (and man-fattening) neapolitan extravaganza

1. Co.
230 Ninth Avenue & 24th St
212-243-1105

Of all the recent NYC pizzerias to have opened, Co. has received the most buzz. Jim Lahey, famous Sullivan Street baker blah blah blah—you either probably know the story already or you don't care. Regardless, these are the things you really need to know: the owner knows his dough and there's a wood-burning oven.

For a place that was hyped (resulting in stupidly long waits) and hammered by the press (one star review by Frank Bruni NYTimes) simultaneously, being both praised and reproached for its 11-inch pies, but pretty much universally beaten to a pulp for its service, the place was remarkably inconspicuous. The dining space was warm with amber-stained wood tables and floors, and with only one other group present when our small, motley crew convened, there was nary a moment of waiting in line (or on line) to be seated.

After a few rounds of negotiation, our foursome settled on splitting a Boscaiola (tomato, mushroom, buffalo mozzarella, pork sausage, onion, chiles) and a Margherita (you know). I don't think it even took five minutes after our order was in for the Margherita to arrive, piping hot, puffed, charred... and small. Really, it seemed pretty tiny, even for a neapolitan-inspired pie.

Rather than a flattened disk with a puffed edge, Co.'s crust has a steady gradient from a relatively thin center that gets increasingly bubbly and airy as it gets to the circumference. Their pizzaiolos don't waste an inch of space and cover the whole pie in toppings, disregarding the idea of a bare edge. This I think is a bit of a shame as it would allow for an opportunity to spotlight the bread. Coming from a renowned baker, it seems odd that the crust isn't given a bit of a glory moment at the end of the slice. That said it is the crust that distinguishes Co.'s pizzas from the rest. It is unique in its soft, yeasty, salty, and airy stylings.

The Margherita, in short, was very tastey, but unremarkable. The sauce was unseasoned as far as I could tell and was light with a mild sweetness. The cheese was a buffalo mozzarella, and typically extra watery with a creamier, less potent flavor than your standard fior di latte. All in all, a well balanced meal.

The Boscaiola, which may have been the wettest slice of pizza I've eat, thanks mostly to the healthy sprinkle of moist and meaty mushrooms, was driven largely by the temper of the chiles and spicy sausage. It was a punchy combination and there were moments of gustatory excitement, but it was occasionally overpowering and there were times when my tongue would have preferred to duck and cover. It's a wild one.

Conclusion: Nice for a change of pace, but not someplace I would end up as a regular.

3-1/2 John Cougar's out of 5.

2. Kesté 271 Bleecker St.
(across from John's)
212-243-1500

Sallying forth from the starting line, the four of us meandered over to Bleecker, losing Eugene to the underground on the way. Kesté lay in the bowels of a street fair. Brendan waited for us at the door. The pizza menu at Kesté is extensive and they're all cooked in a beautiful, ceramic-tiled, wood-burning oven in the back of house.

Our rounds of choice were the Margherita (duh) and the controversial Pizza del Papa (butternut squash cream, smoked mozzarella, artichoke, roasted peppers). Our server seemed somewhat non-plussed at our paltry two-pie order, but we were not deterred. We held fast in the knowledge that there was more pizza to come in the very near future. It is in this kind of race more than any other that slow and steady wins.

Kesté's pizze are beautfully blistered. The Margherita looks in many ways like the platonic ideal. Sadly though, it's a bit of a gold-plated trophy. The slice that met my mouth was over-topped, which is no small feat on a slice containing only mozzarella, tomato sauce, and basil. The paper-thin crust could not hold the weight or the wetness of a heavy-handed dose of cheese. The edge crust was a cushiony pad with a smattering of char. It had a nice mix of crunch and chewiness, but was light on flavor. The Pizza del Papa sounds like the crazy uncle of pizzas—fun to hang out with for a weekend, but not for everyday consumption. Maybe it just takes a little getting used to, but I found the combination of the puréed butternut squash and mozzarella to be much too creamy and heavy. Brendan likened it to butternut squash soup on a flatbread. This is not an inaccurate description. I also found the pieces of roasted peppers to be too large, somewhat unwieldy and overpowering. The pie would have been better served without the cheese and a sparse distribution of diced peppers. Despite the drawbacks, Kesté is rounder than your average bear and if there weren't carbon-flecked competition from Pizza Mezzaluna, John's, Joe's, or No. 28 just around the corner, I would keep a pot of honey out for it. 3-1/2 victory gardens in a world short of massive monoculture farms.




3. Pizza Mezzaluna
146 West Houston Street, New York, NY 10012 (b/n MacDougal and Sullivan; map)
212-533-1242

I don't know what I was expecting when I dropped by Pizza Mezzaluna (located next to what used to be DeMarco's, the now defunct Di Fara spin off), but it was not the marble-benched, open-awninged environs that I found. It's a small, but open and friendly space.

By the time our band arrived it was around 2pm and the joint was vacant, with a low-key atmosphere. The pizzaiolo was in no rush to get things started, but even then, with their wood-burning oven, it only took a few minutes for our order—a Bufala (a Margherita with buffalo mozz rather than the standard cow variety) and a Piccante (tomato sauce, mozzarella, spicy salami)—to make it in and out of the oven and sit steaming in front of us.

Pizza Mezzaluna produces some fine eats. The buffalo cheese was delicate and velvety and the crust was well blistered (see left). The salami on the piccante was a nice combination of smokey, salty, spicy, and sweet, and though I'm generally partial to my salami slices being smaller in diameter (truly, Di Fara's pepperoni is about as close to perfect as it comes), I would be happy to order it on a regular basis, given the opportunity.

And though these pizzas were very good, they lacked a certain character, a little eccentricity. They were too round, too regular in their distribution of toppings, the edge was too consistant in size and color. Yes, this is a nitpicky thing to complain about, but when you're in a city with as many quality pizza establishments as NYC, then you have the luxury of such opinions.

4 horse-and-buggy rides around central park out of 5 horse-and-buggy rides around central park.




4. Motorino
319 Graham ave. Williamsburg
L stop to Graham Ave. Brooklyn
718-599-8899

Why did it take so long for me to get to this one? Because writing these things is actually kind of boring. Sure there's somewhat of a personal challenge in figuring out novel ways to describe the same four components, but even that wears thin after a few go-rounds.

Let me say this, after eating our way through three distinguished NYC pizzerias, those of us left standing took a much-needed respite at a nearby record store before heading out to confront hipstervilleberg. With our appetites at risk, we judiciously skipped San Marzano Brick Oven Pizzeria and headed straight to Motorino.

Go here. With an bright and airy atmosphere and friendly waitstaff to match their friendly pizzas, if there's one new place you hit up in the next few months, this should be the one. Motorino's crust is perfectly cooked and they've got a great sauce–cheese balance. The edge is soft and bready on the inside with a crispy exterior. You won't be disappointed. Motorino was the highlight of the tour.

Una Pizza Napoletana. Di Fara. Motorino. It's been said. Can't take it back. This place is a top fiver.

And their desserts ain't half bad either.

Rating: (x—>∞)/∞

before i consecutively watched five episodes of the west wing...

i survived what seemed to be a too long, but was in fact too short, east coast excursion. it seemed too long in that by about midway through i'd run out of energy. but it was, in fact, too short because if i'd been given more time to space out all the activities, i wouldn't have been so tired.

reunion was whirlwindy and now seems like much of it happened eons ago. having not slept at all on the red-eye into JFK, the weekend began with me at a disadvantage. though amie, laurel, and i still managed to make a run to di fara (as seen in the previous post) before heading up to vassar. i stole some piecemeal shut-eye while riding the Q train and on the metro-north. i further slept through the first hour of brendan's bbq extravaganza.

the reunion highlight for me was being around mr. miller, listening to him, and basking in the bittersweet glow of his retirement. look up "mensch" in the dictionary and you'll see his bespeckled owl-eyes looking right back at you.

for those of you in nyc with $5 to burn, i recommend checking out the current MoCCA exhibit featuring the work of David Mazzuchelli. The nerdy types will recall him as the penciller/inker of Batman: Year One and one of the more memorable runs on Daredevil (both with Frank Miller as writer). what a lot of people don't know is that after that he went on to do a number of more artsy and experimental comics. the man knows how to juxtapose images. (as an aside: the museum's descriptions of his work, while probably accurate, are remarkably pretentious and wanky. they're trying too hard to make comics high art. one of the great things about comics is how accessible they are, why muck that up?)

i also dropped by MoMA for their free Friday. nothing really blew me away, but i was glad to see they finally rearranged the design exhibit (which may have been done years ago at this point, and maybe it had been rearranged already last june and i just don't recall). now showcased: the aluminum soda can with the pull-tab mouth. really, it's kind of a beautiful bit of design.

furthermore: Boxed Water.