Lollipops and Crisps

Cheez-Its Jump the Shark

2012-01-25T18:09:00.003-05:00

I am well aware that patience is not my strong suit, but when it comes to my favorite things, I can usually exercise some restraint, but no more. I can no longer sit idly by as Cheez-It rolls out insipid flavor after flavor and dilutes their whole brand. I have loved Cheez-Its above all other cheese-centric snacks, but after trying their newest "Mozzarella" incarnation, I took their experiments as a cry for help, and decided to stage this intervention. After putting all varieties into my flavor algorithm, I have devised a clear/concise list of winning products, and those that should be cut entirely, salvaging the Cheez-it name and saving considerable supermarket shelf space.

KEEPERS

Original Cheez-Its - The OG Cheez-its are perfect in every way, although there can be severe shifts in quality on a bag to bag basis (trust me on this). Aerodynamic hole, crimped ends for grip, generous salt sprinkle. These are the elements of a well-thought out snack, and the reason why Cheez-It has towered over pale imitators like the apocryphal Cheese Nips.

Pepper Jack - This recent introduction to the family was a fiery breath of fresh air, and proof that the folks at Cheez-It are not completely devoid of innovation after all. Improving upon the bizarre "Tabasco" flavored Cheez-Its, this creative venture offered a more nuanced heat, with a unique, irresistible flavor profile. They gave me hope that Cheez-It may still have something left in the tank.

White Cheddar - When it comes to the "dusted" genus of Cheez-Its, I have serious apprehensions. While the powdered cheese adheres to the cracker admirably, I have a sneaking suspicion that Cheez-It uses this cheap flavor powder to eschew making a quality cracker beneath the pandemonium on the surface. It all feels a bit gimmicky, and to top it off, after eating a few of these, your fingers become completely lacquered in the dust, forcing you to excuse yourself to wash your hands, or lick them like a psychopath. White Cheddar are the exception. The cracker beneath the explosive dance party on the outside has a tang and a sharpness to it that other varieties lack, and the cheese powder they use has addictive properties rivaled only by crystal meth.

FORGET 'EM

'Hot and Spicy' AKA 'Tabasco' - These have always been the black sheep of the Cheez-It line, and with the emergence of Pepper Jack, their surfaces are no longer needed. Please exit stage left, and never come back.

Party Mix! - GTFO. Chex Mix has done it better, and will continue to do it better. Cut your losses, and stop barking up the Party Mix tree. People that eat Chex Mix are NOT your target demo. I AM YOUR TARGET DEMO.

Reduced Fat - Listen ladies. You eat far worse things than Cheez-Its on a daily basis. I've seen it. Practice moderation and you'll be fine. Do NOT buy these cardboard frauds to save 20 calories a serving. You will lose your Cheez-It privileges. I will make sure of it.

BIG Cheez-Its - The biggest head scratcher of the lot. Perhaps they were intimidated by larger snacks and this was their attempt to branch into the chip game. Whatever the inspiration, the recipe did not scale up well. Someone in their QC department needs a stern talking to.

FLAVOR BLASTED! (Baby Swiss, Cheddar Jack, Colby, Four Cheese, Parmesan, Nacho Cheese, Mozzarella) - As I alluded to earlier, this is the new trend in cheese snacks, and it has to stop. If I want to be covered in cheese particles, I'll buy some Jax. Don't come up with new flavors by extruding dried cheese matter and slathering it on a sad square of dough. These cheeses are terrible, and the reason you have resorted to "blasting" it on crackers is because they aren't good enough to carry a cracker flavor on their own. You can't cover weakness with a flavor blast. If you can't do it right Cheez-It, don't do it at all.

With all this being said, I remain hopeful that Cheez-it can get their groove back. In fact, I'm going to extend an olive branch right here and now by giving them a head start on an amazing new flavor they have forsaken all these years:

GOUDA.

Get to work.

Best Films of 2011

2012-01-08T20:31:00.002-05:00

I know this list is a bit tardy, but believe me when I say I've spent much of 2012 scrambling to see 2011 films that are just now getting a wider release. As a result, my Top 10 list has undergone some serious reshuffling in the past week, but I can finally say I've seen almost everything I intended to see, and can begin to shape them into some sort of order. First, here's a list of well-reviewed movies that I haven't had a chance to see yet, in case you feel their omission is a tragedy:

Shame
Take Shelter
The Skin I Live In
Uncle Bonmee
A Separation
Carnage
Margaret
The Guard
Attack the Block
War Horse
A Dangerous Method

Not too many, even though it looks like a lot on the page. I'm sure some of them are top-notch, but like I said, I had to play movie triage recently, and sadly, these didn't make the cut. Next, I have my most overrated film of the year. This film has been fawned over by critics much of the year, and pops up on a number "Best Of" lists, but didn't manage to stir up anything substantial for me:

With that out of the way, I'd like to move on to my honorable mentions. As I've whittled my list down to 10 movies, several fantastic films had to be snubbed, and I wanted to take a minute to give these second 10 their due. If you have a couple hours free, you could do a lot worse than choosing any of these.

Phew. So there's that. Now it's time for the Top 10. I'm going to spare you any commentary on the choices, as most of them have been analyzed to death, and I would scarcely have anything to add to the conversation. With that disclaimer, here goes:

10. Midnight In Paris

9. The Interrupters

8. X-Men: First Class

7. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

6. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

5. Drive

4. Buck

3. Margin Call

2. Warrior

1. The Tree of Life

And there you have it. My Top 10 (er, 20), of 2011. A good mix of genres represented, a good year for movies overall. It's no 2007, but I'll take it. If you haven't had a chance to see some of these, do your darndest to make time in your schedule. You'll be glad you did.

The Clock

2011-12-29T20:50:00.005-05:00

Imagine if Girl Talk's Greg Gillis, the "Maestro of the Mashup", applied his superhuman ability to films, dovetailing and rearranging clips to create a massive tribute to cinema. Now imagine that instead of making it the length of a typical LP (40 minutes or so), it was 24 hours long, and instead of a few hundred samples, it featured 10,000 (roughly) snippets meticulously threaded together. You would probably call this a staggeringly ambitious project. Now what if I told you that the entire "mashup", takes place in real time; that is, when your watch strikes 4, the clocks on the screen also strike four. When you start to get hungry around 6:37, the clips on the screen show people sitting down to dinner at precisely 6:37. That is what you can expect when you pull up a seat to watch Christian Marclay's "The Clock" at the MFA.

Perhaps I'm not explaining it well. Take a minute to view this clip to get a better idea of the incredible detail of this piece. And believe me when I say that the clip is woefully inadequate at expressing what makes the project so enthralling. Simply stitching the clips together would be a gargantuan effort, but Marclay was not satisfied with this simplistic endeavor. He constantly teases at certain scenes, just as a master DJ plays a tiny piece of a pop song minutes before he segues into it. While I watched it from 5:30 to 7 tonight, I was first confused when he showed Napoleon Dynamite in a van for no apparent reason, only to feel foolish 15 minutes later when Napoleon stood in a field looking at his watch waiting for Pedro to pull up. Certain films, like 1960's "The Time Machine" are the perfect tongue-in-cheek material, yet manage to pop up several times on their own merits, as George demonstrates the instrument to his friends over the course of a meeting.

The entire piece works on so many levels, it's a wonder no one had ever thought of it before. You can play "Name that Movie" with friends as films gallop by, you can sit back and enjoy as legend after legend flickers upon the screen (in my 90 minute session I saw nearly every movie star in film history*), or you can treat it like an actual film, as there is real drama and comedy in the film pairings and chosen scenes. People walking out of frame in one scene will be matched with people walking into a room in another. A knock at the door in one film will be answered in the next. When the clock nears the top of the hour, the loud music swells and the clips take on the gravitas that films usually do when time is running out for our hero. And of course, the complete work itself is an astute commentary on time and how we are both enslaved and liberated by it. It will inevitably mean different things to every person, but its net effect will be no less profound.

This blog post has gone on much longer than I expected, but such is my enthusiasm for this effort. If you have a chance to see it at the MFA, please do so before it leaves the city on December 31st. You won't regret it.

* Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson, Johnny Depp, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Sean Penn, Robert Deniro, Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis, Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, etc

Top 20 Songs of the Year

2011-12-19T18:44:00.001-05:00

Why Hello There. Thanks for dropping by. Grab an agreeable beverage, pull up that Snuggie, and cuddle up for my favorite songs of the year. I'll try and keep commentary to a minimum here, and just get to business. There were many wonderful songs this year, of which I have plucked twenty to share with you. I am confident there will be some familiar characters, but probably a great many unfamiliar choices, of which I implore you to give a listen and keep an open mind. I listen to a lot of music, but the more I listen to, the more I learn that a great song is a great song, regardless of any real or imagined barriers that have kept them out of your ear.

Honorable Mentions:
Das Racist - Booty In The Air
Other Lives - Tamer Animals
Wale - Chain Music
Wilco - Art of Almost
Wu Lyf - We Bros

20. Radiohead - The Daily Mail

Say what you will about "King Of Limbs", Radiohead's 8th studio album. Failed experiment? Brilliantly dense gem? No matter, as they saved their best song of the year for a December "single" release. Whether it didn't fit on King of Limbs or just wasn't ready, it's a fantastic tune that captures the dark atmosphere and flexible melodies that made Hail to the Thief such a disturbing listen.

19. Cults - You Know What I Mean

Cults have surfed their own buzz to a contract with Columbia Records and a BNM crowning by Pitchfork. Their tight, gorgeous songs serve as brief time capsules that trigger an avalanche of grainy imagery and black and white photos. Who knows if people will tire of this nostalgia, but this song will never wear out its welcome on my iPod.

18. Justice - Helix

Justice's sophomore album was full of disappointments, but what salvaged their rock experiment and gave fans hope for the future was this wonderfully energetic diddy. Using the briefest of samples and an intoxicating guitar part, "Helix" was as much fun as anything on their debut.

17. LMFAO - Party Rock Anthem

I don't need to link this song, or even say anything about it, but I will. For those of you who think it is a terrible, manufactured, obnoxious excuse for a song, I am here to tell you that you aren't THAT old, and that you can still have fun. It was the song of the summer in my humble opinion, and still elicits a few instinctive shuffles before I can get a hold of myself.

16. Childish Gambino - Freaks and Geeks

The Gambino backlash is here. Camp has sold over 100,000 copies, Pitchfork dismissed his album with withering ferocity, and Community is on the ropes. Donald has always said he thrives on criticism and has dealt with haters every step of the way. I hope he keeps that hoodie pulled tight and ignores everything else, because this song is still amazing.

15. Lykke Li - Sadness is a Blessing

Something happened to Lykke Li. She was a cute, precocious girl who danced her way into your heart three years ago, in 2011, she developed a prickly side, one that eschewed her playfulness for a heart-to-heart. Sadness is a Blessing is as powerful as it is entrancing, and the video is a perfect compliment to the sentiments contained therein.

14. The Weeknd - The Morning

The Weeknd came out of absolutely nowhere (well, Toronto) to release two of the strongest R&B records of the year (for FREE). This 23 year old went from cooing into his laptop to getting hooks on Drake's album in 6 months, and he shows no sign of letting up, with even more albums set for release in early 2012. The Morning is the first song I heard of him, and the one that made everyone sit up and take notice.

13. Jessica Lea Mayfield - Blue Skies Again

People who lament the lack of "good" country/folk music these days, need look no further than Jessica Lea Mayfield. Seeing her live cemented her remarkable talent and stage presence. She sings in a feathery twang with wisdom well beyond her years. I can't wait to hear what she does next.

12. Florence and the Machine - What the Water Gave Me

Florence snuck up on me. I heard rumblings about her, but never made an effort to connect the dots until her sophomore album started collecting accolades and became undeniable. I'm glad I gave in to her charms. While I like "Shake it Out", some of her songs dance dangerously close to Sarah McLachlain territory. "What the Water Gave Me" is the perfect amalgam of her reining in her voice and the band picking up the slack.

11. Cut Copy - Take Me Over

I loved Cut Copy's "In Ghost Colours" more than I can express in a sentence, so I approached their newest release Zonoscope with trepidation, fearing they would try to shake things up dramatically and make fans run back to their first album. Thankfully, Zonoscope did none of that, as demonstrated by the masterful spring and build of "Take Me Over".

10. Architecture in Helsinki - Contact High

Architecture in Helsinki have yet to cobble together a GREAT album, but they can always be counted on for a few fantastic singles, and 2011 was no exception. "Contact High" and its hilarious is one of their strongest songs, and hypnotizing live. The more songs that keep Kellie on the keyboard and her voice in the background, the better.

9. Glass Candy - Warm in the Winter
I know very little about Glass Candy. I listened to some of their other music after falling in love with this song, and nothing grabbed me like this song. Usually, song titles are pretty dumb. They are just a snippet from a lyric in the song that people can yell out at a concert. But "Warm in the Winter" is something else entirely. It is the perfect descriptor for this song. I can see myself listening to it driving in the snow, or by the fire, and it was my go-to running song all year whenever I was feeling droopy. It never failed to warm me up and bring a dumb smile to my face. There's a version with lyrics and a purely instrumental. I prefer the latter.

8. St. Vincent - Cruel
St. Vincent had herself a very nice year, and although I can't say that I loved all of "Strange Mercy", I could not deny the brilliance of "Cruel". She has a stellar voice, and this song is the ideal stage for it.

7. Youth Lagoon - Seventeen
I just wrote about this song a few weeks ago, but it is still as devastating and inspiring as ever.

6. The Rapture - How Deep Is Your Love?

The Rapture, like many buzzbands of yore (ahem, Strokes, ahem), spent 2011 trying to get their groove back, or at the very least a bit of that precious buzz. Well they did a pretty stellar job on their debut single, a jangling hand-clapper that was the first of MANY songs to invoke the saxophone this year. So what if the chorus sounds a little too much like "The Thong Song?".

5. Lil Wayne - 6 foot, 7 foot

As the biggest Wayne apologist I know (recently I've been seriously considering getting a YMCMB vanity plate), I was a little nervous at Wayne's prospects fresh out of the pen, so imagine my relief when I heard 6 foot, 7 foot for the first time. I can only liken it to the feeling you get when your plane lands safely. I know Wayne has been hit-or-miss the rest of the year, but at least this song proved to me that the old Wayne is still in there somewhere.

4. Adele - Turning Tables

I wrote about this song a while ago also, and while Someone Like You and Rolling In The Deep were massive hits, I still think this is her strongest song to date. Riveting and chilling, Adele is a talent unlike any other.

3. Drake - Headlines

Drake's "Take Care" improved on his debut album in every possible way. He handed off the singing to the capable The Weeknd, and focused his energy on his lyrics, evolving so fast and so completely that any prior criticism of him no longer stuck. Those who dismissed him were forced to take a second look. They found a far more calculating and intelligent rapper than they expected, all of these new found skills evident on the amazing "Headlines".

2. Bon Iver - Holocene

I am happy for Bon Iver. He has a humility that few artists have. Sometimes it gets him into trouble (See Grammy comments), but mostly it keeps him honest and earnestly trying to improve. With his second album he has shaken off his Kanye-glow and his cabin-in-the-woods mythology, and finally it seems as though he has earned himself a clean slate. Holocene is a wallop of a song, and needs no introduction if you've ventured outside your rock.

1. M83 - Midnight City

Yes. I am aware that this is the exact same #1 song as chosen by the tastemakers at Pitchfork.com, and I am perfectly ok with that. It is a song that transcends pretension and turned up noses and sneers from jaded hipsters. It is a lit firecracker that brought all the mopes and pessimists on to the dance floor. The album itself is huge and nearly collapses under its own weight, but this song is enough to set it on the right course and give it a hearty boost.

2011 in Books

2011-12-14T17:36:00.003-05:00

I'm excited to start squeezing out Year-End Lists, as it likely means I am done with finals and have the time/mental fortitude to list out some of my favorite things (No Oprah). I thought I'd start the festivities off with a list of the books I read this year, roughly categorized. Not counting textbooks, I read 15 books this year. Not a banner year, but I'm sure I missed a few and really shifted into high gear over the last couple months. After taking a while to get into the groove, picking up my Nook has developed into a satisfying habit that is in many ways better than paper and ink. Without further ado:

BEST:

The Pale King - David Foster Wallace, 560p

Classic Feynman - Richard Feynman, 528p

TBC #32 - The Corrections- Jonathan Franzen, 576p

Great:

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself - David Lipsky, 352p

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson, 672p

Steve Jobs- Walter Isaacson, 656p

TBC #27 - The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde, 178p

TBC #29 - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick, 210p

Moneyball - Michael Lewis, 317p

Awake In The Dark - Roger Ebert, 512p

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le' Carre, 400p

GOOD

TBC #33 - Mao II - Don Delillo, 256p

Life Itself - Roger Ebert, 448p

MEH

TBC #28 - King Lear - Shakespeare, 384p

Looking good, Gandalf ;)

TBC #35 - Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon, 487p

TBC #36 - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot, 400p

BAD

TBC #30 - Monster - Sanyika Shakur, 400p

DID NOT FINISH

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Sex At Dawn - Christopher Ryan
Common Ground - J. Anthony Lukas
American Prometheus - Kai Bird
The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach
Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises

I'm sure I forgot a few of them, but these are the books I could come up with after a cursory look around my room and my Nook. Some Great, Some Meh. Some I didn't finish for one reason or another. Doesn't seem like much when you cram it all into a blog post, but it shakes out to 7,336 pages all told, or 20 pages/day. Not staggering, but better than I would have expected, all things considered.

What have you read this year? Anything great? Any overlaps? Please share in the comments, I'm always itching for something new to read. Adieu!

Luck

2011-11-30T19:59:00.001-05:00

I will concede that this blog has hit a bit of a rough patch. Aside from a handful of photos one week and an ill-conceived rant the next, I've hit a bit of a wall. I have attempted to eschew music reviews, as I am keenly aware that no one reads them and I'm trying to avoid movie reviews so I can get it all out of my system at the end of the year when I come up with some sort of hierarchy. In one of my first entries, I confessed that this blog existed more as a means for me to express opinions more articulately than I otherwise may have, and should be read as a journal more than a manifesto. I still feel that way, but I wouldn't be linking the entries if it was an entirely solitary pursuit. What I'm saying is; the blogging will be probably be sporadic, and on my terms. This entry will address luck.

I've stopped reading the Oppenheimer biography 'American Prometheus' because it was excruciatingly slow and dry, and entirely too detailed. For Oppenheimer scholars, it may be fascinating to read the minutes of every meeting he ever attended, but I couldn't take any more. Instead, I moved laterally to 'Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself", a 300-page "conversation" between Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky and the late David Foster Wallace in 1996, just as Wallace was finishing his book tour for Infinite Jest and wrestling with his sudden celebrity. While I have only read 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again', 'The Pale King', and only made a small dent in Infinite Jest, I consider myself to be a big DFW fan. I hold his Commencement speech near and dear, and am saddened when I realize his output is finite, and some day I will have no new DFW material to read.

What I have been struck by most in Lipsky's book is the humility that DFW has in the wake of the fervor that Infinite Jest produced, and how he dismisses compliments and finds the accolades "scary", in that they are only raising expectations for his next book to unreachable heights. He was a brilliant man, and one who refused to view art with one iota of pretension, instead using it as a means to tease out fundamental, universal truths. He was not one to roll his eyes at cliche, so long as it was effective and not insulting, unabashedly enjoying old country music due to the very deep material it contained, regardless of the surface subject matter. I won't get into all of his intricacies, but it gave me a profound level of respect for him on a different level than I had before. Maybe it's because I see some of myself in him when he discusses his twenties, and it scares me when I consider how his life ended. One of the most devastating passages involves Wallace explaining how incredibly lucky he is, in spite of everything, to be doing what he enjoys. While not an edgy topic, I considered the same, and decided to quantify how lucky I really am to try and visualize it a bit better. So that's what I did. Below are the odds for each of the following characteristics, provided the above is true (for the most part).

These numbers are courtesy of the most recent US Census (www.census.gov)

Note: I am not saying any of these attributes are better than the alternatives.

US Citizen: 1 in 22
Male: 1 in 2
White: 1 in 1.5
Middle Class: 1 in 2
Non-Divorced Household: 1 in 2
High School Graduate: 1 in 1.2
Bachelor's Degree: 1 in 2.5
Master's Degree (knock on wood): 1 in 4
No Debt: 1 in 4
Full Time Job: 1 in 1 (Low unemployment rate for MS graduates)
Less than 20 minutes commute to work: 1 in 3
Healthy: 1 in 3 (guess factoring in obesity and all other fatal/chronic diseases)
Good Looking: 1 in 3
Full Head of Hair: 1 in 2
Winning Smile: 1 in 4
Well Read: 1 in 5
Charming: 1 in 3

Total: 1 in 41 million (in all seriousness, more like one in 115,000 if you ignore the frivolous things at the end)

Puts things in perspective a bit, doesn't it? And who knows how far off some of those estimations were.

Fall

2011-11-22T20:56:00.001-05:00

Legacy

2011-11-20T13:46:00.001-05:00

The term "Legacy" is one that carries both gravity and pretension. It's something I've been chewing on a lot lately after reading Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography and tackling a Richard Feynman collection after. Now in the throes of the J. Robert Oppenheimer bio American Prometheus, the concept of legacy and what it means has become quite fascinating. Steve Jobs created revolutionary products that delivered intuitive computers for normal consumers, but was a notorious asshole who routinely berated his coworkers, swindled his friends and was often too busy/callous to spend quality time with his family. Steve Jobs often fretted about his legacy, but at the end of the day he chose to be worshiped by millions of strangers than revered in his own family.

Feynman was a different character entirely. He possessed the same ferocious curiosity of Jobs, but his curiosity was not limited to a specific discipline like computing or design. He embraced everything with the zeal that few of us can muster for even our most interesting pursuits. He planned a trip to Brazil, so he taught himself Portuguese and became immersed in the culture, picking up the drums in his spare time and soon mastering them. When he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, he taught himself lock-picking and spent hours mastering the craft and learning new tricks. He was a kind and gentle and nurturing influence on his students at Cal-Tech and was equally patient and beloved by the scientific community at large. He became interested in hallucinations but was reticent to indulge in drugs, so he spent many hours in sensory deprivation chambers to satisfy these questions. He made landmark Biology observations and even became popular enough as an artist to warrant an exhibit under his pseudonym "Ofey". He had two children from a long marriage to his third wife (his first died of TB and second divorced him), and proved that genius need not be a ticket to a solitary life.

For the rest of us, does the word "legacy" even apply? Does it even matter? Some could effectively argue that concerning yourself over how you will be remembered is a pointless pursuit, and I would not disagree. But the fact of the matter is that life is an end sum game, and having a nice legacy is a validation of a life well-lived, even if your memory dissolves quickly. What's interesting is how these legacies can change over time, and how your life can be distilled into a sterile paragraph that scrubs away any complexity or dimension. Watching Boardwalk Empire, I was struck by a portrayal of a KKK member as a family man. When you have the KKK on your resume, it doesn't matter that you were a doting husband or a wonderful father or that "things were different back then", your legacy is sealed. Perhaps those who are fighting tooth and nail to defend marriage from a "liberal assault" will enjoy a similar fate in twenty years and they try to explain themselves to their grandchildren who simply dismiss them as an old bigot.

There is so much unhappiness in the world today, that most people can only cope with it by channeling it into frustration and impatience that only serves to propagate the problem. It is exceedingly difficult, but we would all be better served if we understood that everyone is struggling in some way, and that their actions are their response to this. This sentiment is better expressed in David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, but it's something I try to come back to when I am close to boiling. Perhaps legacy is an inappropriate motivator to get someone to treat others with respect, but if it gives you a moments pause before you beep your horn or spout profanity, maybe it's not such a bad thing.

Hip Hop Onomatopeias

2011-11-06T19:00:00.002-05:00

I'm not sure when rappers decided seeing their name in the credits wasn't satisfying anymore, but my best guess is sometime around 2009, or when the king of hip-hop onomatopeias himself, Gucci Mane arrived on the scene. His music was equally playful and bizarre, with a healthy dose of danger for good measure, but what kept his music fun were his hilarious sound effects that ended every verse and filled every gap in the beat. Never one for discretion, Gucci had no less than THREE sounds that he dispensed with ruthless precision. There was the declarative "BRR!" that announced his presence, in case the listener was unaware, the affirmative "S'gucci!" (an assumed contraction of "It's Gucci!") to confirm what you had already suspected, and finally, the concilliatory "Aye", a goofy shoulder-shrug to explain away everything that preceded it. These days, EVERYONE has a trademark sound effect that they sprinkle on everything they touch, a little rap fairy dust to make the song a hit. These effects range from endearing to obnoxious, but trust me, they are all completely unnecessary. For your reading pleasure, I've organized them into categories so you can identify these artists by their alter egos.

CLASSIC
Shaggy
Sounds: "Huh" "Yeah" Assorted near-grunts
Example: Mr. Lover

I guess if we're splitting hairs, Shaggy might be the first one to do this with these sounds you can only make by clenching your buttcheeks (try it, you'll see) but he is neither relevant nor a rapper so I'm not about to give him credit for anything.

Jay-Z
Sounds: Heavy breathing, strange gasps, generic "Ungh"
Example: Otis

Jay-Z has been around long enough to know when something is a passing fad (hello Autotune) or worthy of his attention, but even HOVA himself can't help but get in on the sound effect action. Jay-Z's delivery has always been breathless, like he just ran 12 blocks to deliver this verse, but in recent years he's sounded even more out of breath, and he's developed a strange "GASP!" that he drops randomly like he just woke up from a bad dream. Of course he still has his tried and true "ungh" to fall back in a pinch.

Lil Wayne
Sounds: Lighter spark, random laughter
Example: Entire "Sorry 4 The Wait" mixtape

Lil Wayne is deranged. In the best possible way. He has the most fun of any rapper, from skateboarding until 4AM after shows or spending absurd amount of money on a diamond encrusted grill to showcase his winning smile. It only makes sense that his sound effect share his sense of humor. Nearly every song he releases opens with the spark of a light and Mr. Carter taking a deep breath of "something", followed by a few unintelligible mumbles and his first verse. Inside the verses themselves, Wayne giggles and chuckles yet somehow manages to stay on the beat, and once his verses are complete, he unleashes a maniacal laugh of a mental patient. It would be troubling if it weren't so fun.

INTIMIDATING

Kanye West
Sound: "Eh?"
Example: Who Gon Stop Me?

Since Kanye emerged from the Taylor Swift controversy, he has had a swagger that is unmatched in hip-hop, which is saying something. He has always had an edge to him, but on Watch the Throne, he ends almost every verse with an "Eh?", sounding a lot like the meow of a confused cat, but also like something Maximus would say.

Rick Ross
Sound: The bark of an obese dog
Example: John

Rick Ross is a big guy, I don't think anyone will argue that, but he doesn't need to make it THAT easy. His trademark is a bark. The deep, hearty woof of a morbidly obese dog waiting for his dinner. Perhaps this is an apt sound for Ross, since he just spent a music video in a wheelchair and had two strokes on a flight, but to my ears it is a cry for help. That doesn't mean I'm not terrified of him.

ANNOYING

Pusha T
Sound: "Yeccghh"
Example: Any song from the past two years

Pusha T is half of Clipse. Maybe that doesn't mean anything to you, but it does to me. It mostly means he doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. Especially with something as annoying as his sound effect of choice, an obnoxious "YECCGHH" that is distracting. No one wants to visualize someone retching over a toilet in the middle of a song. He's been hanging out with Kanye lately, so maybe he put him up to it, but he needs to stay strong and stick to rapping.

Jadakiss
Sound: "He-heh!"
Example: It's Good

I had a hard time spelling out Jadakiss' phrase, not because I couldn't remember it but because it is so obnoxious I can't bring myself to listen to it and figure out exactly how to spell it phonetically. Imagine if the Wicked Witch of the West sucked on a helium balloon and then was tickled. That's pretty much what you can expect. I've never been a fan of Jadakiss, and his recent output has not endeared him any further, with his raspy cackle and moronic verses. Rappers don't retire (See Jay-Z), but Jadakiss should make an exception and hang it up.

Halloween

2011-10-31T20:46:00.000-04:00

On Repeat: Youth Lagoon - Seventeen

2011-10-29T13:27:00.000-04:00

Youth Lagoon is the moniker for 17 year-old Trevor Powers of Boise, Idaho. Nearly a year ago, I compiled a list of the best Indie artists from every state. At the time, Idaho was the dominion of the fantastic Built to Spill, but after listening to Youth Lagoon non-stop for the past month, the winds of change have come. For all the flack that Pitchfork gets for being pretentious tastemakers, without their rousing endorsement, Youth Lagoon would have likely remained in Idaho obscurity. Instead, they are on a US tour and getting the recognition they deserve in the wake of one of the strongest debut albums in recent memory.

Trevor Powers sings with a gorgeous, broken falsetto, registering barely above a whisper but somehow drawing strength from this fragility. At seventeen years old, most kids have little on their radar beyond college applications and the opposite sex, yet Trevor possesses a maturity and wisdom that is enviable to anyone. The song "Seventeen" is the best example of this powerful resonance, opening with an innocuous memories of swimming and hunting snakes, yet despairing the "nothing" that surrounds him. Before you have time to roll your eyes at this sentiment, he unleashes another epiphanic memory that brings chills and a lump in the throat, "When I was seventeen, my mother said to me, "Don't stop imagining, the day that you do is the day that you die."" After that line knocks you on your ass, the rest of the song is irrelevant as you've already decided you're going to listen to it again. Say what you will about teenagers these days, but perhaps they're a bit smarter than they let on.

Raleigh

2011-10-26T21:53:00.003-04:00

List: Halloween Candy

2011-10-18T18:00:00.003-04:00

Halloween is fast-approaching. Most of you are focusing most of your energy on finding a funny, topical, and of course whorish costume to masquerade about in this year, but I'd like to take a moment to implore you to not skimp on Halloween candy, especially if you'd like your domicile to remain TP free. To aid in this process and keep you up on the coolest candy kids are eating this year (that sounds creepy), I've compiled this handy list of acceptable and unacceptable Halloween candy for 2011. You have been warned.

ACCEPTABLE:

Reese's Peanut Butter Shapes: Every Holiday Reese's trots out a festive-shaped peanut butter cup. Bad News: they aren't fooling anyone. Good News: they are still peanut-butter cups. Although they seem to have a smaller chocolate to peanut butter ratio than normal cups (unlike the minis, whose C/PB ratio is too high), making them more susceptible to quick melting and dryness. I have suspicions that Reese's has been fiddling with the packaging/size of the cups, but until I have more conclusive evidence, I will give them a pass.

UNACCEPTABLE:

Marshmallow Circus Peanuts: I have a feeling that the same piece of work who came up with Peeps also came up with these turds, after a bad LSD trip or some Opiate-induced hallucination. Surely there was a time and a place in history where this terrible candy elicited cheers from children (the Great Depression?), but today it is a sign of disrespect.

ACCEPTABLE:

Entire Candy Bars: Listen up. Someone on your street needs to bite the bullet and be the one to give out whole candy bars. Why don't you buy yourself some goodwill with your neighbors and take it upon yourself? Consider it an investment. Who knows, maybe they have a snowblower and will be able to pay back the favor in January.

UNACCEPTABLE:

Peanut Butter Taffy, Mary Jane, Bit-O-Honey: I grouped all of these old-timey candies together, because they are equally shitty, and deserve each other. Even if they tasted good (they don't), it wouldn't matter since at least 80% of them have undergone some sort of mitosis and oozed out of their wrapper in transit. Unacceptable. If I can see the candy, I assume it has been tampered with, and I give it to my sister.

ACCEPTABLE:

Sour Patch Kids/Skittles/Swedish Fish: Non-chocolate candies are perfectly acceptable Halloween candies. They are ideal palate cleansers between the aforementioned chocolate cavalcade and what they lack in decadence, they make up for by being delightfully sour. Also, some morons even PREFER these candies, which make them fantastic bargaining chips for MORE CHOCOLATE.

UNACCEPTABLE:

Anything with Coconut: Throw me to the wolves if you want, but Coconut is a terrible food in any circumstances and is a crime in a candy. Who likes to chew on wax-covered grass that tastes like suntan lotion? People who claim to like coconut do so because they think it makes them seem exotic. If I were trapped on a deserted island, I would eat my hand before I cracked open a coconut.

ACCEPTABLE:

Lindt Truffles: Never in my life have I seen a house give out Lindt candies on Halloween, but they certainly should. One could argue that it is a waste of money buying such fancy candy on little gremlins who will eat it to fast to appreciate it, but I disagree. If I had received a Lindt truffle on Halloween, I surely would have approached it apprehensively (since it is wrapped eerily like the peanut-butter taffy), but once I popped it in my mouth and cracked the outer shell, I am convinced it would have blown my mind in such a way that it would have changed my entire life's trajectory. Do it for the children.

UNACCEPTABLE:

Black Licorice anything: When you give a child licorice, you are giving it to their parents. No one under 40 eats this candy. Perhaps something happens to one's sense of taste when they enter middle age, I don't know. They are the diversion candy you throw to your parents when they ask "How'd you do?" so they don't start snooping around and take something good.

ACCEPTABLE:

Payday: Payday are an amazing candy. I don't even care if its a mini one, they are the perfect blend of salty and sweet. Salty peanuts, satisfying caramel. Miles better than anything with 'nougat', which must be German for 'sawdust'. Why no one else seems to appreciate them, I will never comprehend.

UNACCEPTABLE

Smarties/Tootsie Rolls/Dum Dum Pops/Anything else that comes in a bag with them: Grandmothers keep these candy companies in business. Some misplaced nostalgia keeps them coming back to the "FUN PACK" of assorted candies, which sounds good on paper, but in reality is a collection of misfit candies with zero redeeming qualities. These candies should only be sold to banks and only from November-September.

DON'T BOTHER

Little goodie-bags: Anyone with the time/energy to make 100 goodie bags for strange children is one of two things: a psychopath under house arrest, or a nutritious nutcase looking for a clever way to disguise their crappy candy. When I was little, there was a nice old couple who lived up the street from us who ALWAYS made PERSONALIZED bags for every kid in the neighborhood (small town), and before my friends and I went to the good houses, my parents made me stop by. Every year I thanked them graciously, and then proceeded to groan at the apple sauce, granola bars, and foil-covered nickels they had packed for me. Not a good way to start out the night. Keep your nutrition out of my Halloween, I want candy.

Simple Pleasures

2011-10-11T22:32:00.001-04:00

Reddit had a thread about Top 3 Simple Pleasures, which got me thinking about subject myself and trying to make my own list. Narrowing it to three was inconceivable, so instead I decided to take the reins off completely and expand it into a blog post. Behold, my favorite 'Simple Pleasures'

-Finding something you thought was lost forever
-Handing in a test you just aced
-A cool fall breeze on your face while nestled under the blankets
-Spooning
-Ice cold glass of water after a run
-Passing cars stuck in traffic on my bike
-Running to the perfect song
-Laughing until you cry
-Coffee and a warm savory scone
-That 4th or 5th listen to a new song when you realize you love it
-A really good movie trailer (like this, or this)
-Morning pee
-Having a picture miraculously come out well
-Giving a present
-Opening a present
-Finishing a Sudoku
-When you get a password right on your last try
-When water stuck in your ear from swimming finally comes out
-Typing really fast without making a mistake
-Catching the bus, BARELY
-Petting an agreeable cat/dog
-Cracking my knuckles
-The brief respite in nausea after you throw up
-Saying "I Love You"
-Getting your hair washed at the barber/salon
-When that jerk on the opposing team serves the ball into the net.

What are yours?

#Occupy

2011-10-09T13:49:00.002-04:00

List: Apples

2011-10-02T18:17:00.002-04:00

This time of year, when leaves start to clump on the ground and the air has a certain bite, folks devastated by the closed beaches decide that driving out to the country to indulge a migrant-worker fantasy is the next best thing. Shoes get soaked in the dewy grass, denim knees sport muddy splotches, and sticky apple remnants cover every inch of exposed skin. I will concede that these apples are delicious. They are juicy. They are devoid of pesticides and that artificial shine you see in the produce section. There are no bruises or unsightly spots (aside from the occasional insect). But even with these things in its favor, even the most fanatical apple fan has no use for a bushel of apples. An ex-girlfriend of mine had a gorgeous orchard in her front yard and every October she invited college friends to fill baskets of apples and obliterate them in a sadistic cider press. When the carnage dissipated, everyone had a gallon of tasty cider to take home! It was a nice ritual, but inevitably these milk jugs would spill all over the backseat or ferment in the back of the fridge until an unsuspecting roommate discovered the disturbingly swollen container sometime in Mid-December. Apple picking is for the dogs I say. If you want fresh apples, go to your local Farmer's market not the orchard; but if you must go, allow me direct you towards the apples worth your time.

There are three factors that go into making a good apple: flavor, texture, and shelf-life. You will see on this list, that a sacrifice in any one of these categories can have devastating consequences for an apple.

WORST

Red Delicious - Red Delicious are the worst apples on earth, which is ironic, since they are often the apples brown-nosing children give to their teachers on the first day of school. If I was a teacher and I received a red delicious, the kid responsible would get a giant F and the apple back. Red delicious have zero redeeming qualities. Even at their freshest, they are mealy and flavorless. They have a bizarre, narrow shape that makes them exhausting to eat and tears up your gums in the process. I know they look tantalizing (come to think of it, I think they were the apple in Snow White too), but trust me, if you buy a bushel of these, you will regret it.

Granny Smith- I don't know Mrs. Smith, but she has a lot to learn about apples. They get high marks for shelf-life, but beyond that, I don't know a person on earth who prefers Granny Smith. They are grape-like in their inconsistency, tart one day and sweet the next. I have enough things to worry about. I have many a troubling childhood memory of my mom bringing my slices of them for snack before I knew any better. Now I do.

MEH

Golden Delicious- The similarities to Red Delicious end at the name. Golden Delicious have a much sweeter flavor and firmer texture than Red Delicious, but have a sensitive pear-like skin that makes them susceptible to unsightly bruises which can quickly turn to mush. Buyer Beware!

McIntosh- McIntosh apples are trendy and expensive. Sorry, but that joke was right in my sweet spot. Speaking of sweet spots, McIntosh apples are a common breed in New England orchards, and right off the tree, they are tough to beat. They are incredibly juicy and their flesh has a satisfying snap to it. Unfortunately, off the tree they rapidly lose their flavor and develop a waxy texture that makes them tough to stomach. Not bad in a pinch, but hit or miss.

Gala/Braeburn- I lump these together in the interest of time. They are both formidable apples, with good taste and a satisfying texture. They also last a long time in my refrigerator, which is a huge plus.

KING APPLES

Fuji - Fuji apples are wonderfully consistent and flavorful. They are huge and sweet and have a thick skin that protects them from bruising and keeps them fresh. They originated in Japan, but have recently been cultivated in the US enough to become the 4th most popular apple in America since their introduction in the 1980s. Wikipedia claims that they can stay fresh for up to a year under refrigeration, which blows my mind and gives them a special place in my heart.

Jazz- Jazz apples are tasty and much more fun than their namesake. Why they are called Jazz is beyond me, it doesn't exactly incite excitement or curiosity, which is unfortunate, because they rule. They are a combination of Gala and Braeburn apples developed in New Zealand and enjoys the best attributes of both. They are quite small (I usually buy the 2lb bag at TJs), but this makes them ideal for quick snacking and inexpensive to boot. Those Kiwis know apples.

BEST

Pink Lady - Pink Lady is not the dainty fruit you might expect, nor do they bear any resemblance to a popular liquor/beer/lemonade concoction. Pink Lady apples are the reason I stop in the produce section at all. They are a perfect apple, and my one and only. Always fresh and crisp, sweet but not saccharine, firm and hearty, they are a gold medal apple. They are owned by a company named "Cripps" which is named after some Australian dude who developed them in the 1970s. This copyright is said to keep the quality extremely high, which I believe wholeheartedly, as I've never had a bad one. They take an extremely long time to grow, and are only cultivated in hot climates, but good things come to those who wait. Once I see these come in stock at TJs, I can barely contain my excitement. Sadly, I haven't seen them for nearly a month, but I will keep looking because when you love something like I love Pink Lady's you never give up.

Schneider Wedding

2011-09-26T21:47:00.002-04:00

CYHSY

2011-09-22T21:38:00.002-04:00

Review: Drive

2011-09-20T18:19:00.000-04:00

As Summer ends in Late August, and movie studios hemorrhage terrible films from the bottom of their scrap heap, an interesting transition starts happening. A subtle industry shift from blockbusters to Oscar-worthy films, as if to atone for the terrible movies you've had to stomach in recent weeks. Gone are the 3D and Superheroes, dispatched in favor of stories with plot and characters. It's a beautiful thing to behold. Lately, I've had the pleasure of seeing Contagion (a gripping thriller for nerds and public alike, if a bit fluffy) and Warrior (incredible from start to finish, despite my preconceived notions to the contary). On Friday, I enjoyed one of my most anticipated Fall films: Drive, starring Ryan Gosling.

The premise of the film is simple. Ryan Gosling is a stunt-driver who moonlights as a getaway driver in LA. He knows the streets of LA the way you know your tiny hometown, the extent of which is clear from the very first sequence. He has a samurai-like quality to him that other reviewers have latched on to, a principled stoicism that is interesting to watch and impressive to pull off. As the film progressed, I started to draw other similarities, albeit tangentially to another retro-chic car-lustful film; Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

While the protagonists could not be more different; Kurt Russell as the raving, psychopathic 'Stuntman Mike' contrasts pretty vividly with Goslings reserved intensity, the two films start equally slowly, before gradually reaching a steady burn that turns to a raging boil in the final act. Both films also rely heavily on music to maintain a mood, Drive leaning heavily on synthesizers and 80's effects, while Tarantino and company stick to AM Rock and Roll playlists. Both share a penchant for shocking, brutal violence and exhilarating chase scenes that go to great lengths to put you inside the car. It is in telling the story that the two films begin to take different paths.

The first thing I noticed in Drive was the director Refn's unapologetic use of silence, not only from Gosling himself, but even in scenes he isn't a part of. Scenes between Albert Brooks and his goons, or Carey Mulligan and her young son are slow in nearly every sense of the word, utilizing slow-motion, slow camera pans and little dialogue, yet they manage to hold our attention. Apart from being just plain cool to see two characters leer at each other across a room or gaze wordlessly into each others eyes, it serves to infuse these scenes with an intensity that makes the bursts of action seem more potent (I know I almost fell out of my chair the first time a gun was fired). It is in these scenes that weaker actors and weaker directors would be tempted to fall into more traditional storytelling, with the false fear that audiences wouldn't have the patience for a more thoughtful heist/car/love story. Thankfully, Gosling and Refn are completely committed to the tone and pacing of this film, and our patience in them is rewarded in the end.

EDU: Changing Your Watch Battery

2011-09-18T15:48:00.000-04:00

As a lover of watch finery, I knew this day was inevitable. In recent months, my watch collection had slowly dwindled until only the solar-powered remained. The others had succumbed long ago to the limitations of their lithium hearts, and were collecting dust on bureau. Last week, I purchased this inexpensive watch tool kit from Amazon, with the hopes that I could avoid the hassle and expense of spending an afternoon at the jeweler. I was tired of spending half the price of my watch every other year, just to keep it ticking. I'm not sure if this was a symptom of my frugality or impatience, but enough was enough. I set aside most of the morning Saturday to tackle this project, and am happy to report that after two hours and $24, all of my watches are back in circulation.

Here is an excerpt of the watches. There were six in total, spanning 4 brands and three different cover fastening mechanisms.

Here are the tools laid out on my patio. Tweezers, pliers, screwdrivers, hammer, flat metal knife, and some strange torture devices. If I can't change their batteries, I can at least make them talk.

This tool, as I later learned, is for removing pins from a watchband, and not as a means to "get Medieval" on these watches. As I loathe watches with metal bands, I had no use for it.

Now THIS sexy number, actually has a valuable use. It's perfectly suited for removing the cases of "screw-back" watches, of which my Puma is. Simply adjusting the pins to fit the diameter of your watch, align the little pins into the indentations, and twist counterclockwise. This went quite smoothly and I was bursting with pride.

Here is the money shot. A look at the gorgeous innards and intricacies housed within a watch. I don't know what does what, but the battery was easy enough to find and remove. I tried not to touch anything else, and set it aside while I went to work on the rest.

I should have added something to use for scale here, but this battery was SMALL. I'm glad I brought out a paper towel and put everything small into a baggy immediately, or I surely would have lost something important. I did not however, keep track of which battery went to which watch, an oversight we will return to shortly.

Two of these watches had simple screw-backs, which were easy to handle with the included micro Phillips screwdriver. It took a little bit of pressure and care to make sure I didn't strip anything, but they were no match for me. Interestingly, this tiny Timex watch contained the biggest battery by far, for reasons I still don't understand. In fact, every watch I opened had a different sized battery, which made tracking them all down afterwards quite an adventure.

The final three watches (two Skagens and a Lucien Piccard), were, to put it tactfully, huge bitches. They all had pressure fit watch backs, which were firmly sealed and had only the slightest of lips for a tool to slip in and pop the cover off. This problem was compounded by the fact that the tool kit case knife wasn't nearly thin enough to fit. Perhaps I could shuck a loose Oyster with it, but there was no way it would open these watches. In an act of desperation (there was no way I was leaving these three watches behind after coming so far), I found a nifty tool in the kitchen that did the trick.

With this little bugger, I was able to get my "pry" on. If I am reincarnated as a squirrel, I think I'll be ok.

Cut to six watches left open on the operating table while I ran down to Walgreens with my baggy of batteries. They had ONE. -$5. I then walked further to the hardware store to take in their battery collection. Good selection. Four more batteries acquired. -$18.

Before I spent anymore time leaving my watches as prey for curious birds, I would run back home and install what I had found so far, and figure out the final one later. I also wanted to check that the batteries actually worked, specifically two from the hardware store that looked to be from the 90's. I asked the cashier if they were still good, and he claimed that they only started putting expiration dates on them this year. With limited options, I took my chances. Sure enough, both of these batteries were dead. I brought them back to the store for a refund. +$9. So close, yet so far. Miraculously, as I started checking convenience stores (desperate, I know), a lady pointed me in the direction of a neighborhood jeweler, who would surely sell me batteries. After getting into this whole mess to avoid the jeweler, I was tickled that I would be crawling back there, but at least I would salvage some pride by not asking them to install them for me. As luck would have it, they had each of my three remaining batteries, and only charged my $10 for the set. I should have gone here in the first place.

They looked like robot aspirin, but they worked just fine. It took a little while to size up which battery fit where, and get the backs back on (goddamn pressure backs again), but the ticking symphony was a wonderful reward for my hard work. All in all, I learned a LOT, didn't break anything, and saved $50. DO IT.

On Repeat: Das Racist - Michael Jackson

2011-09-14T19:35:00.000-04:00

Liking Das Racist is a lot like flirting with a pretty girl. On a superficial level, everything seems peachy. They are everything you like with a sharp sense of humor to boot. The more time you spend around them, the deeper drawn in you become, yet there's still a part of you with your hand trembling over the red 'ABORT' button, resisting full-blown devotion. Why? Because despite this infatuation, there remains a very real possibility that this is all a huge joke and the girl will retreat giggling to her group of friends, leaving you to feel like a complete idiot.

Das Racist grabbed my attention with the incredible "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" a couple years ago (has it been THAT long?), and I was curious to see what they would do next, knowing absolutely nothing about the group itself. They have followed up their single with two quality mixtapes, that only furthered the "are they serious?" questions. You see, Das Racist are three Middle Eastern looking gentlemen, who dress ridiculously and rap with a hyperliterate style that you would dismiss as satire if it weren't so impressive. So are Das Racist goofy clones of 'The Lonely Island', or are they a hip-hop phenomenon primed for stardom? No one wants to be the last one in on a joke, but after hearing their debut album Relax, and hearing what they do on legitimate beats, I'm ready to go all in. Das Racist are fantastic. If you have any interest in hip-hop or even artists with a sense of humor, you owe it to yourself to check them out. Amazing songs like "Girl", "Michael Jackson" and "Booty in the Air" would have any rapper salivating to get a swing at, but they are all property of Das Racist, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Must Have Android Apps

2011-09-06T21:02:00.001-04:00

Just over a month ago, I joined the smartphone club. It wasn't that I was putting it off exactly, it's just that there was something about a contract. My network carrier, Sprint, had me on the hook for two years with a phone that made RAZRs look trendy and sleek. I'm fine with simplicity, and after enduring 24 months with a Touch Pro 2 (phone-that-shall-not-be-named), I was seriously entertaining the idea of getting a bare bones phone, and leaving the other gadgetry for the birds. But there was one smartphone function I could not live without and forced my hand: GPS. I couldn't care less about cameras and gyrometers and apps (or so I thought), but having access to Google Maps at all times was too crucial to forgo. So I ran the numbers and got me a gorgeous Nexus S 4g and things are super. The Nexus S 4g runs the Android operating system, so I had access to all of those Apps and proceeded to go a little App crazy. After a few weeks, the really valuable ones tended to rise to the top and crappier ones tended to collect dust on my SD card. I'm here to share the best of the lot so that you might not waste your time and bandwidth downloading, installing and deleting worthless Apps. If you have an iPhone, these are probably available in some capacity through iTunes. If you don't have a smartphone at all, please proceed to the nearest exit.

Apps:

Amazon App Store -The Amazon App Store App is fantastic for two reasons: first, they offer a free Paid App every day, sometimes crappy, usually awesome and second, they offer many popular Apps for a much lower price than the Android store. Additionally, if you download something from them and need to reset your phone, they'll all be there waiting for you when you log in again, which is more than I can say for the Android store (they only save the Apps you purchase).

Allrecipes- Allrecipes.com is one of my favorite websites, so it's only fitting that their App is just as wonderful. In addition to having many of the sites recipes searchable in a mobile format (MUCH more intuitive and easier to read on a phone), they also offer a "Dinner Spinner" that asks you to plug in some basic information and will spit out recipes that fit your criteria. It's generally pretty good, although it couldn't find me any pork beverages :(

Audiogalaxy- Audiogalaxy is a great alternative to the "cloud". You simply download the app and download the desktop application on your home computer, link up your music library, and voila! As long as your computer is on and the app is open on it, you will be able to stream your entire music library to your phone seamlessly. Much faster than uploading everything to a 3rd party (Google, Amazon) while protecting your privacy at the same time.

BeyondPod - This is my go-to podcast App, and has saved me the needlessly complicated process of finding/downloading/syncing in iTunes I used to deal with. You simply search for Podcasts you like, subscribe, and they are automatically updated every day and can be downloaded or streamed for your listening pleasure. you can mark them as read or pause and pick back up where you left off at a later time, all within the App itself. In the free version you have to manually download/refresh the podcasts, but even this is INFINITELY easier than the iTunes mess.

Craigslist - This may not be valuable for many of ya'll, but lately this App has been a godsend. Instead of searching the Craigslist swamp for Kitchen Islands, the App allows you to specify everything within the App, whether you have a maximum price or want to avoid listings without photos. The BEST part is that once you have your list of results, the Craigslist will tell you how old the listings are (to the MINUTE) and show the picture alongside the listing title. Rather than having to open up interesting ads into tabs until your browser self-destructs, you can instantly tell if that coffee table is a piece of shit.

Dolphin HD- By far the best web browser for Android phones. Fast and simple, but with enough add-ons to make your head spin. Allows you to open links in new tabs, save bookmarks to your homepage, and even store passwords securely. As close to a real browser experience as you'll find on a phone.

Evernote - Great way to take/share notes on your phone and automatically syncs them to your online account for reviewing later. Many more features I haven't even tried yet.

Instant Heart Rate - This app is just cool. Somehow, by holding your finger up to the camera, this app calculates your heart rate with impressive accuracy. The science behind it sounds legit, so I feel comfortable sharing it, though please consult a trained professional instead of your telephone if you are experiencing heart trouble.

Google Reader - A great way to browse Google reader on the go. Nearly as functional as the site itself, albeit in a smaller package. Can share, star and like items as well as click on links to be directed to the full page. Everything it needs to be.

Google Voice - Google Voice is priceless because you never have to listen to another voicemail again. Well, you'll probably still have to listen to it again, because Google's speech to text needs some work, but still, not only does it transcribe every voicemail for you, it saves them for you, regardless of what happens to your phone. It also does the same for text messages, which is nice and also terrifying.

Mint - Mint.com is the best money management tool on earth, and the mobile able only improves it, allowing you to check account balances, set budgets and tag purchases on your phone. It is great peace of mind to have everything in one central location, and to receive emails if you go over budget or have any suspicious charges.

Movies - On the surface, movies is a standard theater locator/showtime app, but on the inside, it is closely linked with the premier movie review website, Rottentomatoes.com. Thus, whenever you view/search for a movie in Movies, you will see its tomatometer score and a list of links to reviews from top critics. By far the best way to find out if a movie is worth your time, even more so than IMDB.

Netflix - Without the streaming functionality, the Netflix app would be little more than a way to view and edit your Queue on the fly, but since streaming was activated on most Android devices, this App has become invaluable and pushed me over the edge to become a Netflix subscriber.

Old Time Radio- And now for something completely different. This app holds thousands of old radio programs, from The Green Hornet to The Lone Ranger, and all completely free. It's neat to hear the old series in their original format and most have held up well, and show you a glimpse of the power radio once had.

Plume - If you use Twitter, do yourself a favor and download Plume. I tried a few other Twitter apps, but this one blows them all away in simplicity and features. Updates frequently, makes it extremely easy to follow, retweet and mention people as well as click on tweeted links. It even saves your spot if you close the App and reopen it at a later time, something extremely useful that you don't realize you need until you have it.

Read it Later - A mobile version of the popular browser plug-in that allows you to "save" webpages (articles) to read when you have more time. I know I've tagged tons of articles using this to read when I'm on a bus or subway or just feeling like a long, satisfying read. It perfectly syncs saved pages from your browser also.

Starbucks - This app is a double-edged sword. Using it, your phone can generate a unique bar code for the barista to scan at Starbucks and instantly withdraw money from your Gold Card account. You can easily see how many rewards you have earned and set up a minimum balance, below which Starbucks will automatically initiate a withdrawal from your bank account.
Pro: Makes buying coffee easy.
Con: Makes buying coffee TOO easy.

Swype - Before Swype, I used SwiftKey, which was an admirable improvement from the stock Android keyboard, in that it viewed your texts and emails and understood your habits and vocabulary, but still relied on the old 'hunt and peck' style of texting. Swype obliterates Swiftkey. It is insanely fast, and somehow gets better the longer and more complicated words get. Sometimes it can get hung up with pronouns, etc, but after a quick addition to the dictionary, it is right back up to speed. The newest version allows you to easily select all and cut/paste from within Swype, making it all the more valuable. Give it a try and you will never go back.

Where's My Droid? - A precious App that kicks into action when you need it most, Where's My Droid? is activated by a "trigger" word, that can do anything from Ring loudly for 5 minutes when you lose your phone in the couch, to email you GPS coordinates when your phone is stolen. Don't say I didn't warn you.

WootWatcher - A great way to check all Woot and Woot-affiliated websites every day, and automatically alerts you to new listings and Wootoffs. Extremely easy to toggle between listings and buy using the App. Almost TOO easy.

Yelp - A mobile version of the de facto rating website. Better in many ways than the website in that it automatically detects your location and recommends restaurants/shops. Allows you to filter by price and proximity as well as view recommended dishes and organize reviews in a myriad of ways. A great way to discover a new town or just to try something new close to home.

Phew. This post was a lot longer than I thought it would be. Stay tuned for a second Game-centric App post in the near future.

Old Song Review: Dion - Runaround Sue

2011-09-01T17:39:00.000-04:00

I've been on a bit of a Doo-Wop kick lately. And by bit, I mean almost listening almost exclusively after being devastated by the Lil Wayne's mediocre Carter IV and having exhausted most other decade stations on my XM Radio (60's on 6, etc). I curiously turned the dial to 50's on 5, expecting to hear Buddy Holly, and was pleased to hear music that was much more varied and exciting than I anticipated. I've always associated the 60's with Rock and Roll music and the 40's with big band era sounds, and had generally assumed that the 50's were an wasteland of Americana, with Buddy Holly and Woody Guthrie the notable exceptions. As luck would have it, Doo-Wop music, the precursor to Motown and Rock and Roll as we know it, came to be in the 50's.

Doo-wop music revolved around sophisticated four-part harmonies, complete with a booming baritone to lay down the bass notes and an energetic alto to handle the higher octaves. Often with little insrument accompaniment, Doo-wop style evolved from the barbershop quartets of the 1940's and instead relied on the singers to mimic the instruments themselves. It wasn't until later in the decade that strings and drums became
regular players and the genre truly took off, gaining the name "doo-wop" after the song "In The Still of the Night" by The Five Satins used a "doo-wop doo-wah" refrain in 1956.

Dion and the Belmonts were a huge group in the late 50's and early 60's, before frontman Dion Dimucci entered rehab for heroin addiction in 1960 and embarked on a solo career. His first hit of this solo career was a little number called "Runaround Sue" that I can't get enough of and falls neatly into the second of two categories of doo-wop, which are as follows:

1. Pining/Lusting - Singer dramatically pines for girl, expresses undying love if only she acknowledged his desperate gaze. Some of these songs approach a Pepe Le Pew level of harassment.

Example: The Four Seasons - Sherry

2. Devastation/Heartbroken - Singer is dumped/discovers disturbing information about lover which causes pain and agony.

Example: Dion - Runaround Sue

Seriously, that's pretty much how they break down, with about 80% in the first category. But the second category is where the most memorable songs are found. There's only so many ways you can express your undying devotion, but any number of creative ways that you can be cheated on or otherwise disgraced.

In Dion's case, he finds out that his girlfriend is a ho. In those days, they called her a "runaround", but today we call that a ho. Pretty racy subject matter for a pop song 50 years ago, but I suppose infidelity never goes out of style.

Kanye West, Jay-Z - Watch the Throne

2011-08-25T20:09:00.002-04:00

Unlike films, listening to music is an intensely personal experience, and one whose impact varies significantly with environment and context. Listening to an album in your car is a completely different experience than enjoying it through your headphones, and to this effect, very few albums have the excitement and honesty to be played in both these places. It should come as no surprise that Watch the Throne sounds pretty good in traffic, but you might be surprised to hear that it also excels at my desk through my iPod.

In fact, I would go so far to say that in order to properly evaluate the album, you need to listen to it in both contexts. When I first got a hold of WTT, I threw on my Nano on the way out the door and listened to it five times at work, marveling at the amazing beats but feeling a little turned off by the heavy content. Too many songs laid on the religious and black power undertones way too thick, and I found myself over-analyzing all of the lyrics as a result. After a week or so, I had already cherry-picked my favorite songs and shoehorned them into my Running Mix and was perfectly content to never listen to the other songs again. It wasn't until I saw the "Otis" video that I realized I was overlooking a critical element of WTT that changed the entire album for me.

The Spike Jonze directed video for 'Otis' is genius in its simplicity, perfectly capturing the absolutely astounding luxury-filled lives that Kanye and Jay lead, but also highlighting how much darn FUN they have. Sure they are taking blowtorches and saws to a $350,000 car, and they have 4 supermodels sliding around in the backseat, but beyond that, they seem like otherwise normal guys having an incredible time. They giggle, they pose goofily for the camera, they hang off one another like brothers do when dad takes the video camera out. Sure their car spits flames and they seem to have a private track for donuts, but the whole thing isn't far removed from the best friends in Bellflower who created their own fire-breathing monster in 'Medusa' on a considerably tighter budget. The Otis video underlined the magic that sparked the album in the first place; that Kanye and Jay-Z have nothing to prove to anyone, and whatever came out of their partnership had to capture that 'fun' before all else.

I still think that there are some heavy themes on WTT, but they no longer detract from the experience as a whole, feeling instead like inevitable topics. Maybe if they had slipped in a few guest verses, they never would have mined such dark material, but there's something pretty special about a 16-song album with absolutely zero hip-hop features. That sort of thing just doesn't happen anymore, and goes to show you the creative excitement these two are able to draw out of one another. What Kanye first announced as a 5-song EP, and no fan ever took seriously, actually came out AND didn't embarrass any of the parties involved. That is an impressive feat.

Restaurant Week: Meritage

2011-08-23T20:21:00.000-04:00

For those of you from more suburban areas, Restaurant Week is an event where the fanciest of the fancy restaurants open their doors to us common folk and offer three course meals for a mere 33 dollars. Of course, with "suggested" wine pairings and "recommended" side dishes or glazes or other tomfoolery that you feel obligated to splurge on since you are nearly robbing the place blind paying only $33. Many who frequent restaurant week do so with serious reservations and research, knowing that the experience is very much a mixed bag. I know I personally check Yelp a few days into Restaurant week to see what people are saying before I make my reservation. I have had absolutely rapturous meals (Smith and Wollensky) and wholly disappointing meals (Harvest) during restaurant week, and though $33 is a small price to pay for the experience, you still want to feel like you are getting your moneys worth.

This year, I had my eyes set squarely on the creme de la creme, one of the most esteemed restaurants in Boston: Meritage. Located within the Boston Harbor Hotel, it is a gorgeous place that Zagat calls "romantic", "chic", offering "exquisite harbor views" and "beautiful taste symphonies". Seriously. With a glowing recommendation like that, I leapt at the first reservation I could find. Planning it as a surprise for my date, I tried to sneakily use Google Maps on my phone while also confidently leading the way, but when your restaurant is inside of a hotel, you can only get so far before you need to whisper to a doorman. We were seated just before 7pm, just in time to see the some of the last light drain out of the harbor (the sun set behind us, who knew?).

We were quickly presented restaurant week menus, and urged to try either of the two wine pairings our waiter assured us were fantastic deals. He was a dour man of average build, for whom restaurant week was probably at best a nuisance and at worst a sacrilege. We resisted his charms on the wine, placed our orders, and drank in the views. I shouldn't have to tell you, but Restaurant Week is MADE for Filet Mignon. In fact, if I see a restaurant that doesn't have steak on its RW menu, I promptly excommunicate it from competition. This reflex was only further ingrained after having some weird ham slab entree at Harvest two years ago. So needless to say, MT and I both enjoyed the filet...eventually.

The thing about these fancy restaurants are, is regardless of how you are dressed and present yourself, you can't help but feel that something is "giving you away". This is especially acute when you begin to feel miffed or disappointed. For example, shortly after placing our orders, we were each given three different pieces of bread. Once was a traditional dinner roll, plump and fluffy, which MT attacked with reckless abandon. Another was a meager slice of cinnamon raisin bread, cut from a loaf that was surely sat on. The final roll was a crusty, porous bread that was everything I could ever ask for. We were also given a heaping dish of whipped butter with a huge cursive M emblazoned across it, to remind us where we were. Admittedly, it was a cute touch that really brought home the fact that this place was really insanely fancy. I don't know how else to put it. Unfortunately, after we ate this bread, we waited a good 40 minutes before the first course showed up. Being unaccustomed to restaurants of this stature, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and told myself that they were surely following the advice of their resident gastroenterologist and giving our stomachs ample time to handle those complex carbohydrates. It wasn't until other tables started getting their food in a timely fashion that I started to feel hungry/grumpy. I blame MT, since she claimed to have seen our waiter, appetizers in hand, turn around and head back into the kitchen after emerging and seeing her with bread left on her plate. Why he didn't just come back in 5 minutes is beyond me, but we waited patiently.

When it comes to appetizers at these places, you are probably better off rolling a dice than trying to visualize what you are actually going to get. MT ordered a Salmon, Avocado and Creme Fraiche dish that looked a bit like a slightly more unstable leaning tower of Pisa above leafy brambles. Not what I would have expected from the description, but upon further review, it explicitly mentions the word "tower" so I suppose I should hold my tongue. I had spinach and shallot ravioli, which were pretty tasty, although the "wrapper-style" ravioli was a bit gummy. After another forty minutes, the main-course showed up and I was grateful. Not grateful enough apparently, as the waiter deemed it necessary to hover above me "waiting for his thank you" (his words) before excusing himself. Perhaps this turn of phrase simply came out incorrectly (he was French, but seemed more Spanish, and neither of us were convinced either accent was real), but I was a tad offended that he needed an expression of gratitude before we would let us enjoy our meal. Perhaps the wait staff is trained not to leave the table until everyone is satisfied with their food, but like I said, the word choice was unfortunate. With that being said, the filet was fantastic, as were the steamed carrots, whipped potatoes and potato "chip" (I use that term loosely).

MT and I decided to go our separate ways for dessert, with she opting for the chocolate tasting plate, while I chose the artisan cheeses. It felt like my duty to order the cheeses after enduring some heckling from my cheese post. I'm happy to report that all of the cheeses were delicious and unique. Maybe it's because cheeses are so often served as appetizers, but I rarely give their flavor and texture as much attention as I should. But when it's being served as dessert, and your girlfriend is eating some chocolate/caramel/pretzel cup, you get to know the cheese pretty intimately. The fontina was especially fantastic, soft and exploding with flavor, that I didn't expect. It tasted like distilled macaroni and cheese, and I mean that in the best possible way. The double-Gloucester was also great, and CM is right, it did taste a lot like cheddar, though with a bit of a sweet finish to it. The gouda was my least favorite, but MT loved it, so go figure. The chocolates were good also, but I've never been a big dessert guy, so I only tried a couple. All in all, the meal was quite good, though ranking in the middle of the road as far as Restaurant Week experiences go, mostly due to the off-putting waiter and the agonizing wait times.

Lists: Cheese

2011-08-17T19:58:00.000-04:00

A little birdie told me that music reviews and recipes don't really get the blood pumping like a rant or some old-fashioned snark, so I thought I'd jump the tracks for a little bit and get back on the "List" train I've been known to frequent in the past. I like lists because they are chock full of opinion and tend to get comments which means (though doesn't guarantee) that someone is reading this godforsaken blog. I've done lists about Cereal, Trader Joes, and Summertime refreshment, but I think it's about time I did one about one of my favorite foods: cheese. My love of cheese-flavoured snacks is the stuff of legends, and perhaps I this list will inspire a future list of my favourite cheesy snacks, but you may be surprised to know I have opinions about ACTUAL cheese as well! Well, probably not as encyclopedic as my knowledge of Cheez-its, but I'm going to give it a whirl. Behold a comprehensive list of cheeses that I enjoy and others that are a waste of bacteria. Authors Note: Wikipedia lists about 600 cheeses on their website, so in the interests of time, I'm going to narrow this list to my Top 5 and my Bottom 5. Apologies.

1. Cheddar - I don't think anything needs to be said about cheddar. If you are an American, you like cheddar (NOT American cheese, more on that later). If you are from New England, you LOVE cheddar, and if you are from New Hampshire or Vermont, well, it's part of dessert. Seriously, Apple Pie and Cheddar is an amazing dessert. There's not much better than a slice of extra sharp cheddar on a Triscuit or similar cracker. For my money, Cheddar is the cheese to beat.

2. Goat - Goat cheese is an incredible cheese, though sometimes it needs some help to realize its full potential. With a little olive oil and some herbs, it is nearly unbeatable when it comes to dipping/spreading/eating-the-whole-thing-in-one-sitting cheese. If you see anyone selling little pucks in tubs at a Farmer's market, make sure to grab yourself a couple. I don't care as much for the Goat Cheese "logs" that are available at TJs, mostly because they are so crumbly/dry that they either break the cracker or make a mess.

3. Parmesan - Parmesan is a versatile little cheese. When I grew up, we only had that green shaker of Parmesan dust that everyone put on their pasta, but nowadays it no longer has suffer the embarrassment that goes with being alongside other condiments. In my opinion, Parmesan is BETTER when it is central to a dish, especially in baked goods, as it has a tang and a sharpness that keeps it from being overpowered by other strong flavors. It's amazing in scones and breads, especially when it gets a little crispy and melts together at the bottom of the pan. Any good cheese is better a little burnt. If you see any of those green tubes of parmesan at any of your friends houses, you have my permission to throw them away and blame it on me. I'll cut them off a piece of my block.

4. Mozzarella - If you want a satisfying cheese or a cheese that will help you get away with murder, Mozzarella is your cheese. The gummy strings of mozzarella trailing off a pizza or the business end of a mozzarella stick really get the salivary glands in a frenzy, even if those delicious treats are accompanied by the most dangerous choking hazard known to man. The threat of imminent death and embarrassment is worth it to enjoy that gob of cheese in your cheek for the next 5 minutes. Mozzarella loses a few points in the flavor department, although I have had a few varieties with sufficient punch.

5. Pepper-Jack Cheese - Every time I have Pepper-Jack cheese, it tastes like the first time, and I wonder why I don't have it more often. It has a wonderful smooth and hearty cheese flavor, but also has little flecks of pepper that ignite the sort of dull burn that can only be satiated with more cheese. Great for melting and for snacking, Pepper-Jack is a dark horse cheese that should not be underestimated.

Honorable Mentions: Feta, Gorgonzola, Asiago (maybe if I ever tasted it outside of a Panera bagel), Gouda (lost points for puns), Cottage (half of it usually rots in my fridge).

BOTTOM 5 CHEESES:

5. Blue Cheese - There are times when Blue Cheese is tolerable, but most of the time it takes a great deal of discipline to stifle a gag-reflex. I am working on my aversion to "stinky" cheeses, but I'm convinced people only enjoy Blue Cheese because it is conducive to dipping. If Cheddar were a liquid at room temperature, Blue Cheese would be shown the door. Sometimes I can handle blue cheese if it is on the tamer side, but the risk of getting a ripe one is too high to justify. Interesting note: as it turns out, "Blue Cheese" is also a name for a popular strain of Cannabis, as I found out while trying to Google image search for this entry. So at least it has that to fall back on.

4. Swiss Cheese - Swiss is another cheese I don't think I will ever like, which is a shame, because I think it has ruined ham for me simply by association. It has a strange nuttiness and bitterness that does nothing for my palate except make me think, "I wish there were more holes in this". I've had it in baked goods (it nearly ruined croissants too), and its bitterness and nuttiness and umami-esque flavors are only enhanced by heating. If you're looking for something to lace with poison, Swiss cheese is the way to go; they'll probably never notice.

3. Nacho Cheese - Is this even a type of cheese? I've only seen it in dark corners of convenience stores or at baseball games, but that gelatinous stream of orange mucus is the stuff of nightmares. There is no discernable taste or texture, just a race against the clock to consume it before it coagulates. No one has ever succeeded. It probably comes in a bag with a spigot. I would never slap that bag.

2. Easy Cheese - Perhaps I have bad memories of Easy Cheese from a troubled college acquaintance, but I don't think I will ever understand the allure of the canister of spray-able cheese. In this day and age, you can get ANYTHING in individually-wrapped, convenient packages. There is no reason on God's green earth that any human being needs a cheese product to be extruded under pressure for their suckling pleasure. If a person is too obese to cut a slice of cheese, perhaps Easy Cheese is what got them in this predicament in the first place.

1. American Cheese - The WORST cheese. Why do people eat this? It has the disturbing tang of Miracle Whip, has the texture of human skin, and comes wrapped like a maxi pad. It is some amorphous solid that defies any law of motion or thermodynamics and is the cheese of choice for terrible lunch products like Lunchables that people have some misplaced Nostalgia for. If it weren't called American cheese, it would probably not exist, but because it is named after our country (USA!), people feel some sort of civic duty to eat it. If you are buying American cheese to prove your patriotism, you should have your citizenship revoked.

Maine

2011-08-15T18:36:00.000-04:00

EDU: Slow Cooker Beef Brisket

2011-08-10T18:28:00.000-04:00

If you'll recall, I recently mastered the two fundamental barbecue dishes, pulled pork and ribs, and tentatively set my sights on beef brisket as my swan song. Brisket presents a unique challenge compared two my previous endeavors, as most supermarkets I searched didn't have it available, or had paltry cuts that were far too meager for any recipe. Thankfully, the ever reliable McKinnon's meat market had exactly what I needed, despite smelling strangely of farts and rotting meat. Perhaps this is how they keep costs down. Whatever the case may be, I bought a 4.5lb brisket for $14, wrapped it generously in a plastic bag, and biked home with it in my backpack. I tossed it in the freezer for a few days while I researched recipes, before deciding on 'Busy Day Barbeque Brisket', by 'Shannon :)'. I'm going to assume ':)' is her husband's last name, because any woman responsible for a recipe this fantastic won't stay single for long. Wonderfully simple, the recipe simply required a slow cooker, an easy spice rub, and a little patience. I could handle the first two, and I found distractions for the patience part. Here's what you'll need:

1 tablespoon dried thyme leaves

1 tablespoon paprika

2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon onion powder

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

3 pounds beef brisket, trimmed of fat

1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke flavoring

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1 1/2 cups barbeque sauce

Step 1: Rub liquid smoke into both sides of the meat. I was skeptical about this curious elixir, but it really does seem to impart a natural smokey flavor you've come to expect from barbecue. Shortly after this, I mixed all the spices together in a small bowl and proceeded to rub these into every nook and cranny. Note: This recipe was for 3lbs of brisket, so I was a little more generous with the liquid smoke, but the spice rub was plenty.

Here are the spices pre-mixing.

Here is the meat pre-spicing:

Here is the brisket post-rubbing. Looks a little bit like someone dropped it on the ground, but I can assure you I did not.

After applying the rub, I set the slow cooker on low and poured the 2 Tbsp Worcestershire and 1.5 C Barbeque Sauce (I used TJ's Kansas City BBQ, it's great) into the bottom of the cooker, followed by the meat. To my surprise, the meat was MUCH too large to fit into my slow cooker, and needed to be sliced in half and nestled into place. Not knowing exactly why the BBQ/Worcestershire sauce was put on the bottom of the pan, I was concerned that this flavor would fail to reach the brisket and result in disaster. As you can see from the photo below, my fears were unfounded:

In fact, when I returned from a double featured at the beautiful Brattle Theatre (2001: A Space Odyssey and These Amazing Shadows, if you're curious) I found that the liquid level in the cooker was quite alarming. The added sauces combined with juices from the meat to form a marinade that had almost completely submerged the brisket. As it had been nearly 8.5hrs at this point (the recipe suggests 8-10), I gave it a sturdy poke with a fork and decided to take it out when it nearly disintegrated on contact. I set it out on a plate, and got to "pulling".

I'm not sure if brisket is typically "pulled" like pork, or sliced, but these brisket was too moist to be served any other way, so I went to work on it and served it on a fluffy roll with some extra BBQ sauce. And you know what? It was pretty great. The spices were quite flavorful and the meat itself was tender and satisfying. Certain portions of the meat were drier than others (I hypothesize that these parts either weren't submerged long enough or weren't submerged at all in the cooker), but after adding more BBQ sauce, they joined rank and were just as delicious as their meaty brethren.

Surprisingly, the leftovers seemed to get better and better as the week went on, with the meat absorbing more and more barbeque sauce and somehow becoming moister in the process. I'm sure this made coworkers especially envious, but they did their best to pretend they were enjoying their Lean Cuisines. This concludes my barbecue experiment. I hope I have proven to you that you do not need a "smoker", a "pit", a "grill" or any other elitist barbecue contraptions to make delicious barbecue in your own home. But you don't have to take my word for it!

Harvard

2011-08-07T18:14:00.001-04:00

On Repeat: The Rosebuds - Woods

2011-08-04T21:29:00.001-04:00

For a band opening for Bon Iver this summer, The Rosebuds sure pack a whallop. A husband and wife duo turned divorcees on their 5th studio release, lead single "Woods" contains the freewheeling energy of another North Carolina group and personal favorite, The Love Language. In fact, to the untrained ear, Ivan Howard's wail sounds uncannily like Stu McLamb's, and Missy Thangs could just as easily be the one pounding on the toy piano in place of Kelly Crisp. Maybe that's why I like them so much. So much is made these days of how "lo-fi" bands can get their sound, whether by scuzzing out the guitar or burying the vocals deep into the mix, but if the emotion isn't there to round things out, things sound hollow and forgettable. I can't seem to get into bands like No Age or Times New Viking for this reason. The Rosebuds are smart enough to strike a balance.

Lyrically, "Woods" isn't as bright and shiny as it sounds, but I guess that's to be expected from a song that rises amidst a divorce. Several lines sound like insults hurled down the stairs or across a room, Howard exclaiming "you can't burn what's already on fire" one moment, and realizing "there's nowhere to hide" the next. In these tiny glimpses, the song magnifies the steady unraveling of a relationship as astutely as tour-mate Bon Iver himself did on the devastating "Skinny Love", albeit in a more audacious package.

Great Film Review: Primer

2011-07-31T19:40:00.000-04:00

Primer, the 2004 debut of writer/director/actor/everyman Shane Carruth was made for $7,000 in Dallas, TX. The staff of the film was limited to five people, with family members, friends and random passerbys filling out the credits. It went on to win the 2004 Alfred P Sloan prize at Sundance, an award that is given to the best film that focuses on science or technology. Following this buzz, it went on to accrue a modest box office take of 424,000 before being released onto DVD and becoming the cult classic it is now. I'm not sure what it is about sci-fi/time travel films, but they tend to join the cult canon at an remarkable rate (see Donnie Darko, Moon), regardless of meager box office sales. I believe that the reason for this goes against popular thought, namely, that audiences like to be challenged by films and actually enjoy piecing together a plot themselves. In most film studios, the risk of losing an audience is too big to bear, and any remotely confusing scenes are abruptly followed by the protagonist cleverly explaining the situation to another character for our benefit. For a film like Primer, this hand-holding is thrown out the window, and it is all the better for it.

What makes Primer so thrilling is its sheer audacity to unabashedly use scientific jargon and equations, without bothering to slow down or explain themselves. Even as a scientist myself, most of the terminology was way over my head, but the fact that I could recognize anything at all gave the film an authenticity and a voyeuristic quality that made the "budget" production value seem irrelevant. This complete disregard for the audience does not begin and end with scientific jargon. There are scenes where things happen and it is not apparent until later (if at all) what is happening and its significance. There is a voiceover narration from the beginning, but it is just as ambiguous as the characters themselves. If I am making the film sound like an obscure art-house film that means whatever-you-think-it-means-man, please don't be scared away. Everything you need to know plotwise, is there in the film. In fact, ambitious people have even made Primer timelines to better answer the WHEN questions. And with the film clocking in at a brisk 77 minutes, you can easily queue it up again once its finishes and be amazed with how much more sense it makes (though admittedly, not completely). Scientist or not, sci-fi fan or not, give Primer a chance. You'll be a lot of things, but disappointed won't be one of them.

Old Song Review: Robbie Basho - Night Way

2011-07-28T19:15:00.000-04:00

Robbie Basho is widely regarded as a guitar pioneer. As an orphan in Baltimore, he taught himself acoustic guitar and fell in love with the steel string guitar, being particularly enchanted with the "fire" it conveyed that nylon strings could not. As an artist, he was massively influenced by Asian art and philosophy and counted the great Ravi Shankar as an influence and a friend. He often played a twelve string guitar with various open tunings in an attempt to capture features of the Indian music he cherished. With this preface, I anticipated his remarkable complexity and creativity. What I did not expect was his incredible voice.

"Night Way", the seventh song on his absolutely essential Visions of the Country LP from 1978, starts much in the way you would expect from a guitar virtuoso. They are some sitar-like twangs and pickings, squiggling here and there, gradually gaining in momentum and focus as the song approached a full gallop. After 90 seconds or so, a new sound enters, fluttering above the rest. It's Basho himself, singing in one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard.

His voice is riveting and pure, and within it I can hear the hundreds of artists that have sprouted from it. From the trembling soul of Antony and the Johnsons, to the more experimental (but no less captivating) David Thomas Broughton, I was flabbergasted by what I was hearing. An immense talent I had never heard of, was changing the way I looked at some of my favorite artists today. Much like seeing the film Citizen Kane upends how you view everything that came after it, Basho's art stands tall decades ago, its shadow continuing to stretch ahead in time.

"Night Way"

"Blue Crystal Fire"

EDU: Dr. Pepper Ribs

2011-07-25T18:12:00.000-04:00

Having thoroughly enjoyed the Chipotle Pulled Pork I made a few weeks ago, I decided to hit up the Homesick Texan blog again when I found myself with 4 pounds of spareribs and no grill to do them right. Surely there must be SOME way I can make enjoyable ribs without smoking and barbecuing them for 36 hours. As it turned out, Ms. Texan had just the thing - something called "Dr. Pepper Ribs". I'm not a big fan of Dr. Pepper (tastes like fancy Cherry Coke), but this blogger raved about its BBQ power, so who was I to turn up my nose. Amazingly, the kit and kaboodle only took 3 hours and I was able to do it in the oven. The oven part was a bit of a mixed blessing, as it was already hot enough in my apartment, but for convenience, you can't beat it.

For this recipe, I made both a rub and a BBQ sauce/glaze, and here's what you'll need for both.

For the rub

1/4 cup of salt
1/4 cup of black pepper
1/4 cup of brown sugar
4 teaspoons of mustard powder
1/2 teaspoon of cayenne
2 teaspoons of chipotle powder
1/2 teaspoon of allspice

I had to go and buy mustard powder, but all the rest I had kicking around from my last BBQ experiment, so it was a pretty painless process. I was a bit taken aback by all the salt and pepper, but tried not to overthink things.

Mix all this together and pat into the meat. Then wrap it in Saran wrap and place it in the fridge for at least 4 hours. I left mine overnight and didn't notice any problems. Supposedly salt starts to "cure" meat after 6 hours, which will give it a ham/bacon flavor, but mine seemed just fine. Not that I would have minded some bacon notes.

Here's the bouncing bundle of meat fresh out of the fridge.

Not terribly exciting/appetizing at this juncture, I'll concede, but just you wait. After adding 1/4 cup of Dr. Pepper to the pan and covering it with tinfoil, I slid this in the oven at 300 degrees for 90 minutes, meat side up.

While this cooked, I started on the glaze. Here's what you'll need.

2 cups of Dr Pepper
1 cup of ketchup
1/2 cup of mustard
1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons of molasses
2-4 teaspoons of chipotle powder

Those Chipotle flakes I bought a couple months ago have seen a lot of action lately, and I can't get enough of their smokey, spicy flavor. As such, I added 4 heaping teaspoons to the sauce. In a large saucepan, I brought the ingredients to a simmer and left it to reduce into a thick sauce for 30 minutes. The recipe used the adjective "syrupy" but mine just looked like a barbecue sauce. It tasted good, so I didn't sweat it.

After 90 minutes, take out the ribs and remove the foil. Spread the sauce on both sides and cook, uncovered for another 30 minutes, meat side up (still). Repeat this process one more time, leaving some sauce for the final step. The glaze cooked right into the ribs and smelled fantastic.

After the 2nd time, glaze both sides a final time, and place each side under the broiler for ~5 minutes to give them a good char and crunch. When they popped out, they looked pretty glorious and my apartment smelled like some Mississippi BBQ Shack.

All that remained was the serving and enjoyment. Make sure to have plenty of napkins and floss nearby. You may also want a little more BBQ sauce to throw on top to keep things moist, but they were quite delicious on their own. What BBQ item should I tackle next? I'm thinking brisket. I'll keep you posted.

Long (as hell) Trail

2011-07-20T19:36:00.000-04:00

Author's Note: Before you tell me to HTFU or STFU or any other precious acronym, let me first say that I hiked 54 miles in thong sandals after the boots I borrowed gave me hellacious blisters and made my big toenails look like those of a mummified corpse with nary a complaint.

Behold some unfiltered and uncensored thoughts about hiking:

Hiking is fucking terrible. I'm sure there are stand-up bits from comedians about how ridiculous it is and why white people need to stop kidding themselves playing Russian roulette with Lyme disease or West Nile virus or a bear mauling and stay in the 21st century where we belong. Whatever possessed otherwise sane and rational human beings to make their life as miserable as possible for an extended period of time should have evaporated around the time of the Oregon Trail, but day after day people stuff an unnecessary amount of items into an unnecessarily large backpack, and proudly march into the wild. The glow of adrenaline lasts maybe 15 minutes, before the harsh reality of hiking sets in: it is fucking terrible.

To clarify, day hikes and camping are wonderful-hell, even a jaunt into the woods can be therapeutic. When you are carrying more than a tent, food and beer, the fun quotient takes a nosedive. Carrying a full hiking backpack is a bit like carrying a heavily sedated 2nd grader on your back. You futilely loosen and tighten straps to alleviate painful jabs into your back and shoulders. You carry 4 pounds of water that scarcely seems worth it. Mosquitoes and deerflies dive bomb you from all angles and you have no recourse but to swing languidly at them. They have locked on a target and will follow you for miles until you stop for water or die. You have to physically restrain yourself from checking your watch every two minutes and the map every thirty seconds.

You may be able to distract yourself by the scenery, but beyond the ninety seconds a day you are above the treeline, the rest of the sights range from heaping piles of moose poop and large piles of mud. It occurs to you at some point that hiking is probably an incredible workout (my heart rate held steady around 180bpm from 8-4 every day), but who works out for eight hours a day? It is at this point when it dawns on you that hiking is no longer an act of leisure and has become your job. You wake up at daybreak on a wooden floor within a mesh cocoon to keep out the bugs, which still have the audacity to stab their tiny proboscises into anything in contact with the fabric. You eat a piece of jerky for breakfast and wash it down with a bag of fruit snacks and a granola bar. Everything tastes terrible. You want salt and fat and grease and sugar. Not protein and Xanthan gum, 200 calories you will burn off before your first water break. You no longer derive pleasure in things you used to enjoy and sympathize with that Zoloft rock. Your shoulders are sore and you have a crick in your back that you can't crack out. When you finally make it to a shelter, you roll out a sleeping bag, eat a bag of tuna fish and a handful of peanuts and go to straight to bed for 12 hours. You smell terrible and other people somehow smell worse. Sometimes it is so bad it wakes you up.

After a few days, the callouses start and you think you might survive. When you cross roads, you feel a primal urge to flag down/hijack passing cars and check into a hotel. Somehow water has become all you can be bothered to care about, but you still play "stream roulette", always looking for a cleaner, nicer one until you realize you are out of water, 3 hours from the nearest shelter and haven't seen so much as a juicy puddle in hours. SS and I did this twice. You find yourself sharing food for the selfish aim of shedding a few extra ounces from your backpack and suddenly feel a camaraderie with those Tour de France ninnies who insist on biking without their valve caps.

Hiking brings out the best and worst in a person. If you do it long enough, you will be reduced into survival instincts that are not glamorous but do what they are supposed to do: keep you alive. Alive so you can return to the real world and warn others. And also to call "bullshit" whenever anyone says how much they love hiking.

Long Trail

2011-07-17T20:43:00.000-04:00

Review: Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver

2011-07-06T19:20:00.003-04:00

To be perfectly honest, I didn't have high hopes for Mr. Vernon's sophomore album. I adored For Emma, Forever Ago when it came out of nowhere nearly three years ago, but its circumstances seemed a little too trite to be much more than lightning in a bottle for some schlubby guy. I mean, if breaking up with a steady girlfriend, contracting mono and moving to a secluded Wisconsin cabin in the dead of winter isn't enough to stir up somber feelings in a man, I don't know what is. It's the hipster perfect storm. At this point, everything he does is preceded by his 'legend', including this review. Huge industry names jumped on his bandwagon in recent months, but apart from sampling his back catalog, I didn't hear anything that convinced me he could avert a precipitous fall from grace.

Ladies and Gentlemen, might I present Exhibit 546983 in the case of Hipster Elite Backlash vs. Shut Your Goddamn Mouth For Two Seconds. Bon Iver, Bon Iver (yes that's the title), is fantastic. It is tender and gorgeous in the same way For Emma was, but considerably more adventurous, as Vernon has an entire band at his disposal this time around. The brilliant Colin Stetson lends his brusque saxophone, Sean Carey (fresh off his own album) handles the drums gracefully, making even the most jarring sounds feel natural. The most interesting wrinkle on Bon Iver, Bon Iver is what Vernon has done with his lyrics. Even with befuddling titles like Flume and Re:stacks on For Emma, the subject matter and lyrics themselves were clear and the songs themselves drew their power from it (See: skinny love). On this album, 6 of the 10 songs are geographical locales (though Wash. is a tossup), and the lyrics aren't any more helpful, leaving two possible conclusions. Either he's tired of people singing along with every song and wants to throw the legion of teens a curveball (doubtful), or he's decided to make art fit the sound rather than vice versa. That's not to say he's stringing along non sequitors, but 'ramble in the roots, had the marvel, moved the proof be kneeled fine’s/glowing storing up the clues, it had its sullen blue bruised through by showing' doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. And these aren't translations by some tone deaf fan, these are Vernon's own lyrics he shared on his website.

So why is this album such a colossal triumph? Because despite the misdirection and new hats on display, this album shares the warm core of its predecessor. Because for every nonsensical line, there's a nugget that stops you in your tracks and feels like an epiphany. 'Holocene' is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The first verse is a cypher, but from within this fog you hear Justin sing '...and at once I knew I was not magnificent' and the chills are unavoidable. Throughout this album, fleeting lines like this will snag your attention, before the song submerges into shadows again, but as you listen again and again, you find yourself speaking Vernon's language, and every line gains the gravitas of the first ones that caught your ear. It is intoxicating in the purest sense and now I sing along to every 'sound', whether I know the words or not.

EDU: Texas Pulled Pork with Chipotle Barbecue Sauce

2011-06-28T21:40:00.000-04:00

Lately, I've been trying to simplify things in the kitchen. Most people believe that you can get away with one three knives (Chef's, paring, bread), and I've been trying to extrapolate this even further, relying on my cast-iron Dutch oven and pan to do most of the grunt work, instead of trotting out pot after pot. Utensils are another area where gadgetry can make thing more complicated than they need to be. My parents have a garlic 'finger-trap' that peels the garlic and then another yo-yo-esque contraption to grind it up. While I lust over it at times, if one truly want to improve their cooking skills, the hard way is the only way to bolster the fundamentals. This recipe would certainly be described as pulled pork the 'hard way' but the results were spectacular, and the work involved made the end result all the more satisfying.

Note: This recipe is courteous of the Homesick Texan blog that has oodles of recipes of this caliber.

Step 1: Prepare the rub

Coffee-chipotle rubIngredients:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup black pepper
1/4 cup of finely ground dark coffee
1/4 cup paprika (smoked is preferred but regular is fine)
2 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon chipotle powder
2 teaspoons granulated garlic
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
2 teaspoons cumin
2 teaspoons allspice

I had made pulled pork once before, but in a slow-cooker after covering it in Root Beer. It was really good, but I wanted a recipe that would be a bit crispier and smokier, in line with more traditional recipes. This rub wasn't time consuming, but I had to hunt around for a few of the ingredients. The coffee and chipotle powder were unique additions, and while I didn't notice the coffee in the final product, I'm sure it enhanced the smokiness of the chipotle.

After preparing the rub, I put my 4lb bone-in Pork shoulder in a large freezer bag along with the rub, and shook it vigorously until it was thoroughly caked. There was a healthy amount of rub left over, but the recipe mentioned to simply save the rest rather than try to slather it all on. I then wrapped the shoulder in Saran wrap and put it in the fridge for 6 hours. This was around 2:30pm. The recipe called for 8 hours in the fridge, but I really couldn't push it that late, as I would be doing the final steps before work the next morning, and the old 'I was pulling pork' excuse raises its fair share of eyebrows.

I took it out around 8:30, and it was quite juicy. I unwrapped it, placed it in the Dutch oven fat-side up, and put the whole thing in the oven at 250.

While things got down to business in the oven, I started out on the homemade barbecue sauce. I had purchased a bottle of sauce from TJ's, but I decided if I was going to go through this whole process, taking a shortcut on the last step would be sacrilegious. So I set out to make the sauce. I'm glad I did.

Chipotle barbecue sauceIngredients:
1 teaspoon canola oil
1/2 half a medium onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, minced
2 cups ketchup
1/4 cup yellow, ball-park style mustard
1/4 cup molasses
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped
1/4 cup brewed coffee
2 canned chipotles, chopped
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup lime juice
Salt and black pepper to taste

Much like the rub, I had a lot of these ingredients, it was simply a matter of getting them all on the same team. I did have to get a few things: molasses (I usually hate molasses, but now I can see their merits), more ketchup (2 cups is a LOT of ketchup) and canned chipotles (of which I used maybe 1/4). Sauteing the onions until translucent, followed by the garlic, I added the rest of the ingredients and simmered the whole thing on low for about half an hour.

Color me stupid, but I was flabbergasted with how much this looked and smelled like real barbecue sauce! I suppose I had never sat down and considered what actually went into a BBQ sauce, but I would have scarcely guessed ketchup, molasses and mustard. I now feel silly for putting mustard AND BBQ sauce on a burger when I now realize I was double-dipping on the same condiment. Live and learn. After a little hand blender action, this sauce was pureed into the sauce-like consistency we know and love.

This is the point where I went all Ron Popeil and left things cooking overnight. I set my alarm, (recipe said 8hrs, I did closer to 9) and went to bed. When I woke up at 5:30, I thought I had died and gone to hog heaven. I took the crispy-looking pig out of the oven and let it sit for about 45 minute while I went back to bed and felt bad for my roommate having to smell it when he put on his morning pot of coffee. When I woke up at 6:15, the pork was waiting just as cute as can be.

I grabbed a pair of forks, hoisted the shoulder into a bowl and got a-shredding. The bones slipped out smoothly, and the forks were more than capable tools for the job. In about five minutes, I had four pounds of glistening, crispy pork. The darker portions are actually the caramelized brown sugar and toasted coffee from the rub, NOT evidence of burning as you might think. If I had read more closely, I would have found that this was noted in the recipe. Whoops.

After stirring in the sauce, the Chipotle Pulled Pork was complete. Of course, it was also 6:30 in the morning, so I packed some into a tupperware, grabbed a bun and brought it for lunch, hoping it wasn't a complete failure.

As things so happened, my fears were unfounded. It was delicious, and others agreed. The pork was moist and crispy, the sauce lightly sweet with the distinct smokiness of chipotle and a hearty kick. It really was fantastic, and I had it again that evening with Milwaukee's finest and again for lunch the next day (sans beer, of course). Give it a try, it's well worth the effort, and not really much effort now that I think of it, just patience and trust in your oven not to burn you alive in your sleep. That's it!

Portsmouth

2011-06-27T21:15:00.000-04:00

Devastation on Beacon Street

2011-06-26T19:56:00.001-04:00

Two weeks ago, I blogged about a small herb garden that I had started on my deck. I had low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised with the vivaciousness of my little seedlings. In fact, in the days that followed, several more green sprouts peeked out of the soil, and I began to research when I should start weeding out the smaller guys. I was even surprising myself with my diligent watering schedule and my paternal attachment to their success, but on Thursday afternoon I discovered an unsettling scene:

Complete at total destruction. Plants uprooted, soil strewn about, no sign of life. Little herblings that yesterday had been vying for space were now laying on their sides, stalks bent and twisted.

After the shock and anger subsided, I was on the case. I made sure to thoroughly document the crime scene and avoid contaminating evidence. I examined the surroundings, paying close attention to the significant amount of dirt on the railing and going downstairs to look for any plants that had been discarded off the deck onto the lawn below. I found nothing. After further investigation, I could not find any variety of plants "missing", though some certainly seemed to have been targeted specifically (Dill) and some emerged mostly unscathed (Basil). In fact, when I attempted to recreate the event, I concluded that it appeared as though the Dill section (3rd quadrant) had been dug out with a spade-like tool, leaving a deep crater behind.

With few leads, I had no choice but to make up a list of suspects and whittle things down one-by-one:

Suspect A: Birds (Black-capped Chickadee, specifically)

Evidence:
-Fucking EVERYWHERE around my house
-Love to eat seeds
-Can FLY (reach decks with ease)
-Unafraid of humans (ballsy)
-Nesting season in June (mouths to feed)

Alibi:
-Unlikely to afflict the large-scale carnage I discovered
-Not sure if they like herbs
-Birdfeeder on other side of deck

Suspect B: Eastern Gray Squirrel

Evidence:
-Enjoy seeds and nuts, sometimes even BONES if Wikipedia is to be believed.
-Extremely nimble, can scale decks easily
-Paws and snout extremely adept at digging
-Cold, dead eyes
-Also unafraid of humans

Alibi:
-More of a gatherer/hoarder than a random destroyer
-Unlikely to have thrown dirt onto railing with tiny paws
-Usually found with the pigeons and the homeless man down the street

Suspect C: Roommate

Evidence:
-On deck frequently
-Deck door open day of crime (Not a very hot day)
-Leaving apartment in August (Skipping country? Check extradition laws)
-Hands can easily scoop dirt and crush plant life

Alibi:
-Motive?
-Never acknowledged herbs
-Spends most time in room
-No garden tool at scene of crime

Other Persons of Interest:

Evidence:
Curious
Needlessly destructive
Can be assholes

Alibi:
Lazy
Prefers rodents

Evidence:
-Soil splatter pattern
-Precise

Alibi:
-No evidence of fire/charring
-Did not rain that day
-Planter was not obliterated

As of this post, the investigation is still open and I am following up on any and all leads. If you noticed suspicious activity on Thursday June 23rd, please contact me so the parties involved can be brought to justice.

Miracles of Science: The Waterless Urinal

2011-06-23T18:48:00.000-04:00

I'm not a Germophobe. I am a staunch proponent of the ten-second rule, and think Purell is thinly-veiled placebo mucous. Even with these eyebrow-raising standards, I still think public bathrooms are the vile cesspools that subscribe to the 'out of sight, out of mind' theory of cleanliness. As long as everything is whisked of down a ceramic hole in a timely fashion, everything is hunky-dory. While this may be appropriate for something like the toilet where you can flush from afar with your shoe, but at the urinal, your options are nil. The handle is too high to depress with anything but your hand, and if you try to maintain a safe distance your face gets precariously close to the bowl. Without knowing the flush velocity, you are taking some serious risks. And don't even think about 'letting it mellow'. Disgusting and only an viable in the event of a water emergency. You flush and get away as fast as possible. Time and again science has tried to solve this conundrum with infrared flushing sensors or 'reduced-water' systems, but splashing remained a very real threat. Short of a giant trough (which opens up another can of worms), something drastic needed to be done. Allow me to introduce the waterless urinal.

The future is here. A sleek, stylish engineering marvel promises to make the restroom a place of pastoral relief again. Speaking from personal experience, it is nothing less than a miracle. It uses a unique liquid displacement mechanism to remove waste without water or any flushing. It has a uniquely conical shape that guarantees an obtuse splash angle and efficient disposal. There are no urinal cakes, no detonation timers and no outhouse bouquet. It can save 40,000 gallons of water a year PER FIXTURE. If there were a Nobel Prize for plumbing, it would be a shoo-in. Every bar on the planet has an obligation to make this investment if they care about the health and comfort of their patrons. Until that blessed day, I'll keep visiting the ones at Donohue's every Sunday night.

Worth Your Time: The Weeknd - House of Balloons

2011-06-20T20:58:00.000-04:00

Today's post is the first in a series of entries made to go hand in hand with my 'Frugal Gourmet' pieces. Instead of pointing you towards cheap, fast, delicious food in the area, the 'Worth Your Time' segments will share 'free' things, that are worth your valuable time to seek out. Free usually comes with a hitch or a serious compromise in quality (see pathetic corporate excuses for frisbees/pens or "free" t-shirts banks give out on college campuses if you sign up for a credit card). There will be none of that here. I have no patience for that tomfoolery. Consider today's post Exhibit A.

The Weeknd is a mysterious 20 year-old from Toronto. His mixtape "House of Balloons" has been the Buzziest thing in the blogosphere since it dropped for free at the end of March, and while I have enjoyed it thoroughly over the past 3 months, cool summer nights have really made it shine. I've come up with a short questionnaire to gauge whether or not you will enjoy The Weeknd's music.

1) Do you like Drake's production but wish he wasn't such a mopey baby?

2) Do you like The Dream's voice but think he is a major perv?

If you answered yes to either of these questions, you will probably fall for the charms of this mixtape. Abel Tesfaye pairs The Dream's voice with Drake's industrial sound to make songs that exist in a cloud of sex and substance abuse. Somehow it's still tasteful (most of the time) and seriously catchy. He has promised more mixtapes this year and has been working with huge stars in recent months, but he'll find it hard to top the sneaky brilliance of his debut.

Get it for free here.

Super 8

2011-06-16T18:27:00.000-04:00

First thing's first, Super 8 is not a monster movie. But then again, neither was ET, and that didn't seem to hurt its receipts (it made nearly 800 million dollars worldwide, #4 all time). But still, ET didn't have to deal with the monstrosity that makes up a successful ad campaign these days. 'Exclusive' clips and teaser trailers often leak out years before a movie comes to fruition. Blogs report breaking news from the set and take contraband photos to satiate fans and maintain excitement. Through this exhausting promotional process, a crucial part of the film experience is lost; mystery. I'm sure JJ Abrams did his best to protect Super 8 from this fate, but concessions must be made, and the studio cut a trailer that made the film look more like Transformers than Close Encounters, which is a shame because it deserves better. I would be a hypocrite if I railed against the 'spoiling' of films by powerful studios and then proceeded to give away the plot of the film in this review, so I will steer clear of details, and instead explain why I think it is a great film, Spielberg homage or not.

The most affecting sci-fi gets that way by projecting the story through children. The circumstances are variable and irrelevant. Finding buried treasure, making a zombie film, retrieving a toy all inevitably lead to the discovery of something much bigger, and it becomes the kids responsibility to inform the adults and save the world. Donnie Darko, The Goonies, ET, The Iron Giant, even Home Alone follow this formula, and succeed because of it. Super 8 introduces these elements as well as any of them, and uses it effectively to balance the two converging story lines. Admittedly, adventurous kids alone doesn't make a film, but Abrams wrings some fantastic scenes out of these young actors, and once the actual 'sci-fi' starts, we'd almost prefer just to stick with the kids for another 90 minutes.

Surprisingly, even as the plot continues to expand and envelop a larger cast of characters, the kids remain front and center, and the film never becomes a string of ham-fisted dramatic scenes a la War of the Worlds. Abrams smartly keeps the family dynamics ambiguous and allows us to piece it together scene by scene. He also resists artistic flourishes or disorienting camera angles, instead using some manipulative and borderline distracting music and Spielberg's patented refracted light effects that come across more endearing than cliche. The acting across the board is fantastic, and the action scenes are well choreographed and fully realized without feeling like sensory overload. Despite the familiar material, Abrams has several tricks up his sleeve, many of which he refreshingly uses to empower the kids. There are no frustrating scenes of kids desperately trying tell their parents what they've seen and being sent to their room. Each character has a functional brain and pieces clues together, intersecting briefly to share information and then diverging again. It shouldn't be surprising when characters aren't paper-thin caricatures, but it is. The story resolves neatly and admirably, without shortcuts or contrivance, and although I can't promise you unscathed heartstrings, Abrams earns it.

On Repeat: Other Lives - Tamer Animals

2011-06-14T20:16:00.000-04:00

I used to think The National had a completely unique sound, one that was impervious to imitation. Not only does Matt Berninger's detached baritone emote adult melancholy like none other, but combined with the tumbling slap of Bryan Devendorf's drums, they produce an atmosphere that fans can recognize instantly. Well, The National, consider yourself hacked. The Oklahoma 5-piece Other Lives have cracked the code to your sounds and began producing moody tracks of their own.

'Tamer Animals', the newest single off their sophomore release of the same name, is the purest distillation of what I'm talking about. While Jesse Tabish's voice sounds more like Paul Banks of Interpol than Berninger, what surrounds him is pitch perfect. The off-balance drumbeats and reverberating piano mirror each verse beautifully, and although backing vocals are called in to give Tabish some depth, I can't say I blame them; few voices can make a listener to 'sit up and take notice' like Berninger's. When all is said and done, 'Tamer Animals' is something would have played quite nicely on High Violet, but instead finds itself nestled in the center someone else's record. National, consider yourselves flattered.

Urban Herbing

2011-06-08T21:00:00.001-04:00

(Author's note: Not my garden.)

A couple weeks ago, I got a crazy hair up my butt and decided gardening would be a gratifying and practical use of my free time. I had scant idea how to garden, or even what supplies were necessary, but I had an image in my head that I could not shake. It was of me waltzing out onto my porch and plucking fresh basil and parsley and whipping up some fantastical dish to the delight of my crowd of guests. Learning how to be a better cook or to figuring out how I to entertain more than 2 people in my kitchen was irrelevant. The herbs come first, and everything else will fall into place. I believe it was James Earl Jones who said "if you grow it, they will come", but don't quote me on that.

Anyhow, to make a long story short, I poked around my neighborhood flower shop and came home with a long plastic planter, a 16-quart bag of soil, and an 'Easy to Grow Seed Collection'. Inside this seed collection were five herbs that some Renee chick seems to think are 'kitchen essentials'. They have also been 'specially chosen' to grow well in containers and pots, which sounds like utter bullshit and will make the situation that much more tragic when they shrivel and die. These herbs were Basil, Chives, Cilantro, Dill, and Parsley. Of course, these names alone could never suffice, so Renee waxed poetically on the back of each packed about why this 'Perfuma di Genova' basil makes your grandmothers basil look like a limp weed. I bought the variety pack partly because I didn't want to put all my seeds in one basket if it failed, partly because it was cheaper to buy the variety pack than a couple packets separately, and mostly because I got a little carried away. I placed the seeds on my bookcase and the planter and soil on my deck, and there they sat for two weeks.

Fast forward to last Tuesday. I finally got up the gumption to plant, and plant I did. I read the instructions, but frankly, they were kind of silly: plant Basil approximately 2-3" apart, in Early June to the depth of 1/4". Listen Renee, I'm not trying to step on your toes here, but who goes around digging little 1/4 inch holes for Basil in the wild? No one does, so that's not going to happen in my garden. I can take it from here. Most of the herbs had the same basic instructions anyway. Space them a couple inches apart, about half an inch deep sometime in early Summer. I decided to give each herb half a row of my planter, and squeeze the last herb in between somewhere. Here is a picture of the soil just before I cut the ribbon and went to work.

Pristine, bathed in golden sunlight. I felt a bit like Columbus discovering America. So as I was saying, I had the presence of mind to give each herb a distinct area, but in retrospect, I made a few critical errors in the process. First, I have no idea which herb is in which quadrant. I suppose I will find out by seeing what sprouts (or doesn't), but still, it feels a little amateurish. Also, I was a little too stingy with the seeds at first. And by stingy, I mean, one seed per hole. I had rationalized this completely in my head, as I didn't want to overcrowd the little guys. It wasn't until later that the 'sperm' analogy hit me and I realized I should be stuffing 10 seeds in each dimple. Whatever herb I put in that first quadrant, I apologize. I hope it was dill, because I don't intend to 'pickle' anything this summer. Here is a picture of the seeds in my hand. So much potential, so much dirt.

Here is a picture of the soil after seeding. If you can squint, you might be able to see the seed shaped nodules. I pushed those down shortly after.

Finally, just one more picture of the seeds. These were good looking seeds.

So after seeding, I had to decide where to place this planter. There are a lot of trees in my backyard, so sunlight isn't necessarily guaranteed, and if these seeds are going to die, I'll be damned if it'll be due to lack of sunlight. I decided on the railing, as it gets a lot of sun, and I thought the planter was heavy enough to weather any errant wind gusts or curious birds. I also didn't water it at first, because the soil felt pretty moist and I didn't want to overwhelm the seeds on their first day.

I realized quickly that I didn't have anything that could be used to 'water' the seeds in the traditional sense, and even I knew that pouring water out of a cup would be disastrous. So I dug around in the basement and found a watering can. It's a little leaky, but it does the job. I also found some pelletized plant food that I sprinkled on top of the soil for good measure. Plants can't be overfed.

The next few days went something like this.

1. Go outside.
2. Stick finger in soil.
3. Estimate soil hydration.
4. Water (or not)
5. Reposition planter in sunlight

In my estimation, I've watered the seeds 3 times in 8 days, not counting rainstorms or other erroneous moisture. During these 8 days, I've tried to bring up gardening in casual conversation to try and pick up some pointers. Needless to say, it's hard to steer conversations towards gardening, but the more I learned, the more my expectations dwindled. It turns out that the reason they sell those dinky herb plants is because growing herbs from scratch is not as easy as one would think, and require more attention than I am interested in giving. Still, I continued to water diligently and gaze lovingly at the barren soil with positive vibes. The seed packets implied that the first signs of life appear after 10-21 days, at which point you need to start playing 'herb triage'. Well today has marks 8 days, and look what I found this afternoon:

Well I'll be darned. Looks like someone has a green thumb after all. If that isn't the cutest sprout (chives?) you ever did see. And that's not all. Look at this handsome devil:

Now I'm no horticulturalist, but that looks like the makings of a tall and handsome basil plant. I'd say enough for a 3 grams of pesto. The rest of the herbs are lagging behind, but I gave them a good water today, and laid on the sarcasm real thick in the hopes that I can shame them into germinating. I'll update this when I have more to report.

The Tree of Life

2011-06-04T12:30:00.000-04:00

With only 5 films to show for a 40 year career, it's no wonder that Terrence Malick feels it necessary to fill his films with some pretty heavy stuff. Unlike his contemporary Woody Allen, who, with nearly 50 films over the same time span, can afford to spend a film (or two) on comparatively trivial things, you get the feeling that with Malick, every frame has been meticulously crafted for maximum effect, and if something doesn't make sense or feels cliche, it's likely due to your own cynical or critical shortcomings. Despite my description to the contrary, he is about the furthest thing from David Lynch I can think of. In place of the Lynchian sense of imminent doom and ominous non sequiturs, Malick's films possess a sense of wonder and awe with the world at large, that feels culled from the mind of a child. It is fitting, I guess, that his most ambitious film to date- one that attempts to answer the boldest questions of humanity, does so via a slice of 1950's Americana through the eyes of three young boys.

The word 'review' seems hollow in this context, just as the term 'film' does to describe Malick's projection of light and sound. The Tree of Life is best experienced as uncritically as possible, simply allowing the experience to wash over you and absorb you into its undertow (as New-Agey as that sounds). The film is not exempt from criticism, but deserves to be taken as a whole, and not on a scene-by-scene, line-by-line basis.

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain play the parents of three young boys growing up in Waco in what appears to be the 1950's. Between these scenes, are episodes featuring the oldest son in a 'present-day' metropolis, wandering disoriented, and a 20 minute detour presenting the origin of life that defies explanation or synopsis. The majority of the story revolves around this small Texas family, and how they maintain a uncertain balance between 'nature' and 'grace'. Naturally, the father is the one responsible for instilling virtues of 'fierce will' while the mother speaks to love and compassion. When these scales tip, as they frequently do, the parents respond in kind to reclaim the equilibrium. It is these family scenes that are the most evocative. How Malick coaxed such amazing performances out of these children (even the toddlers and babies are remarkable) is beyond my comprehension. Desplat's triumphant score and Lubezki's masterful camera work pull you wholly into this world, chasing behind children as they amble through houses and backyards.

The heaviest thematic elements surround the unanswerable, inevitable questions directed to the heavens in the wake of tragedy. The "Why's" that persist and haunt a person the rest of their lives, and can shake faith in some while reinforcing it in others. Malick shows us that within the beauty and order in the world, there lies the potential for devastation at any moment, and at any scale. Is the loss of a loved one any more tragic than the mass extinction of the dinosaurs? How can we justify a shrug over tears? In the end, I don't think Malick wants us to be these tender souls, perpetually in mourning, nor does he want us to be callous to the world and ignore and dismiss beauty simply because it is temporary. What Malick believes, and what The Tree of Life instilled in me, is a reverence for life precisely because it is so fleeting.

Black Velvet

2011-05-31T18:10:00.001-04:00

Old Song Review: Grapefruit - Dear Delilah

2011-05-30T20:44:00.000-04:00

The UK rock outfit Grapefruit are one of the countless groups that arose and quickly disappeared in the shadow of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, but unlike most bands that existed simply to capitalize on Beatlemania, Grapefruit had the audacity to push rock into new and exciting places. Combining the innovative sound of the Stones, the harmonies of the Beach Boys and the melodic chops of the Beatles, Grapefruit released only two albums (around in '68 and Deep Water in '69) before going their separate ways, but their influence can be heard on many of the psych-rock records that followed.

Their highest-charting single, Dear Delilah reached #21 on the UK charts in 1968, and is the best distillation of their psychedelic sound. An organ intro and swelling strings sound a bit out of place at first, before cymbal clatter distorts the harmony, warping everything around it and dragging the organ underwater to induce a sort of auditory vertigo. Despite the swirling and churning orchestration, Alexander Young's voice provides a steady mast for the song to sail forward. The Beatles influences are hard to ignore, from the vocal cadence to the Ringo-esque yelp at 2:07, but I can't help but think that The Beatles would attempt to 'clean-up' this mess of a song and unraveled it all in the process. Perhaps their record sales suffered for it, but someone has to push the margins.

Frugal Gourmet - Moody's Falafel Palace

2011-05-25T19:10:00.000-04:00

I have been called lots of things, most of which I don't take to heart. The term "cheap", however, particularly chaps my hide. I prefer frugal, because I am frugal, and I'll tell you why. Cheap means not paying your share of a bill or tipping pathetically. Frugal means you buy a cheaper item, but pay appropriately. Cheap means staying home on Friday nights. Frugal means going out but drinking PBRs all night. Cheap means shopping exclusively at Goodwill and yard sales. Frugal means spending your money wisely, and refusing to pay MSRP. I am frugal. And proud of it. For those of you who would like to bask in the shade of my frugal wing, I have introduced a new "Frugal" series of blog posts. Today I will be discussing the gem of Central Square: Moody's Falafel Palace.

In the husk of an old White Castle, Moody's Falafel Palace has amazing hours (11AM-3AM!), criminally delicious food, friendly staff, all for less than $10. A steal in any location, but in the heart of Cambridge, virtually unheard of. I will spare you history and move on to what I consumed yesterday evening, if I can come up with some more forceful adjectives.

I ordered the Chicken Shawarma plate. The Shawarma rested upon a heart scoop of rice pilaf and adjacent to a Middle Eastern salad. I was also given a side of Tahini and pieces of bread wrapped in wax paper. It sounds humble, but it blew my little mind.

In most restaurants, side salad is akin to coleslaw, ie high-volume plate filler. But at Moody's the house salad is really fantastic. It had fresh, delicious chopped cucumber and tomato, some shaved lettuce, diced onions, some herbs and a delicious marinade that had a lemon-vinegar flavor. Really caught me off guard.

With the rice pilaf and the Shawarma intertwined, it's best to probably just pour on some tahini and dive in. If you aren't aware, Shawarma comes from the Turkish word for "turn" which is exactly what the meat does all day, on a spit. It is then shaved off into flaky, crispy bits that can be put into a wrap or spread upon a plate. With a fork full of rice pilaf, it has no substitute. What looked to be simple rice pilaf and chicken "bits" actually exploded with so much flavor that I thought my Diet Coke had been laced with Ecstasy. There was an amazing richness and a creaminess and the slightest tang of feta cheese that I could not find anywhere on the plate. The chicken was soft yet crispy, without the slightest hint of gristle or crunch. The pilaf was fluffy and warm and held the chicken in place when I decided to stack some onto my bread. It was a lot of food for $7.49, and I consider myself a tough customer. I have heard it's hit or miss, but as far as I'm concerned this was out-of-the-park. GO.

Rapture

2011-05-22T23:21:00.000-04:00

On Repeat: Jamie Woon - Spirits

2011-05-16T21:34:00.000-04:00

Jamie Woon doesn't exactly have an R&B pedigree. His mother was a Scottish folk singer, his father of Malaysian descent. So how does he sound like Jamiroquai by way of dubstep icon Burial? I can't answer that for you, except to tell you that if there are any other half-Scottish half-Malaysian children out there, give them a record contract post-haste. His new album, Mirrorwriting, is chock full of his saintly vocal curlicues and the telltale splashes and muddy production of dubstep. While dubstep frequently eschews vocals in favor of atmospherics, Woon's voice turns out to be the perfect compliment for it. Many of the highs on Mirrorwriting bring to mind the most arresting moments on Burial's Untrue, namely the masterful Archangel.

Spirits meanders innocuously for nearly a minute, Woon's voice softly reverberating amidst a chorus of "oohs and ahhs" and something that sounds like a busy bartender. Once the snare drums kick in, conditions improve substantially, with the drums retreating underwater to give Woon some space, before rushing back in for the chorus. The song feels simple and even forgettable upon first listen, until you find yourself humming 'Ladies and Gentlemen' 5 minutes later and can't seem to remember where it came from. Then you will play it again in hopes of rattling it out of your head like shaking a dime out of a plugged piggy bank. Good luck. It's been stuck in my brain for weeks, maybe this blog post will finally exorcise it.

Note: The video below is the official music video for Spirits, but is a bit different than the album version. Still great, though.

Yes Virginia, Women ARE Funny

2011-05-14T18:43:00.002-04:00

Approximately 5 years ago, give or take a few, I made an offhand comment that has lived in infamy ever since. Genuinely intended to placate a friend's mother after her failed joke, I casually remarked, "It's ok [Offendee's Name], I just don't find women funny." Needless to say, this statement did not comfort, and instead became an enduring story of misogyny and my general incompetence with the English language. Little did I know, the topic of women and humor is well-worn territory. Had I been more articulate, maybe I would have explained myself like Christopher Hitchens does here, but I was 20, so I mostly apologized profusely and desperately tried to change the subject.

Now that I'm 26, you would think I would have rethought my stance on this matter, but to tell you the truth, with very few exceptions (Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman (less so), sometimes Ellen), I can't say that I have. This isn't to say there aren't women with terrific senses of humor or wit (I know plenty personally), it simply means that how it manifests itself comedically, has never rung true in the way it does with male comedians. Is there a scientific basis to this? Maybe some humor node in the brain that translates almost identical jokes completely differently on a genetic basis completely out of our control? Is it all in the delivery and I am unconsciously some chauvinist pig? I like to think that we are all operating on the same playing field and equally receptive to humor, be it from Jerry Seinfeld or a 3-year-old. So imagine my satisfaction (validation? relief?) when Bridesmaids, a film written by two women (Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo) and starring 5 women, was absolutely hilarious.

People have been falling over themselves to congratulate producer Judd Apatow for another comedy home-run, but it is Wiig and her costars that deserve the credit here. While it's true that without Apatow's help the film would not exist, if this film had flopped, it would have been Wiig's career in the dumps, not Apatow's. As such, Wiig deserves to catapult to the top of every romantic comedy casting call, ahead of the humorless Jennifer Aniston and the vapid Katherine Heigl. The crown is hers for the taking, but here's to hoping that she shuns it for bigger and better things.

Bridesmaids' success is the ultimate validation of the term 'addition by subtraction'. Usually reserved for sports teams who unload a difficult player to improve team chemistry, Wiig refuses to use the rom-com paint-by-numbers blueprint that most films with female leads are beholden to if they want to break even. If there is an emotional scene or a hunky dude, you best believe that they are there to serve the story and not to satisfy a studio focus group. Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson need not apply. Additionally, because she doesn't rely on these reliable crutches, she entrusts the heavy comedic lifting to her capable costars, and they do not let her down. Not only is there Dumb and Dumber level physical comedy (Wiig makes Jim Carrey's shtick look tired) and Jackass-level gross out comedy, there is wit and heart that neither of these two films possess, and compare most favorably with Apatow's other male-centric offerings The Forty Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. The very fact that I am mentioning Bridesmaids in this pantheon be endorsement enough for you to buy a ticket, but if that's not enough for you, at the very least buy one so I'll stop talking about it and put my foot in my mouth already.

Tough Mudder

2011-05-08T22:41:00.001-04:00

I ran the Tough Mudder on Sunday. Well, RAN is a stretch. I limped and walked and slid the Tough Mudder on Sunday. I signed up for it after JK turned his harassment amplifier up to 11 and somehow managed to hook EG in. Shortly after, I learned SP had joined the mix, and team Weoooweooooweooooweeechhhhh was born (don't ask). In the months leading up to the event, my feelings about it fluctuated from sheer terror to foolish pomposity on a daily basis. I gave up any large scale training and tried to improve core strength (whatever that means) with push-ups and sit-ups, while maintaining a strict running schedule. Then I rolled my ankle like Rondo 'rolled' his elbow last night, and I didn't run for the past two weeks for fear of re-injuring it. So it was safe to say that my feelings on the morning of the TM were much closer to 'sheer terror' than I would care to admit. Weathering some serious cramps, severe mud inhalation, and mild-to-moderate cases of hypothermia, Team Weoooooweooooooweooooweeechhhh skipped across the finish line (literally) 4 hours after their 10:40 start. In those 4 hours, we endured a 10 mile course sprinkled with 28 humbling obstacles straight up the mountainside. Needless to say, it was tough and muddy. In light of any more TM philosophy, I want to run down the 28 obstacles and rank them on a 1-10 scale of 'Tough' and 'Muddy', because there were some doozies on both fronts. A link to the map of the course and pictures/descriptions of the obstacles can be found here.

1. Braveheart Run
Tough: 3
Muddy: 2

The Braveheart run was an excuse for most of the shirtless dudes to off-gas some of their testosterone in front of spectators. I used it to test my taped left ankle (Thanks Dad!). It was steep though, and turned out to a be cruel waste of energy, since the Death March was right behind.

2. Death March
Tough: 8
Muddy: 4

The Muddy scale may be relative at this early stage of the race, but this really was one of the Toughest obstacles, especially since it was one of the earliest and everyone was still running on adrenaline surges and trying to run up the ski slope. It wasn't long until even the biggest dudes realized that TM is not a race and started to walk. And walk. 1.5 miles later, calves doing that unconscious jiggle, we reached the first 'man-made' obstacle.

3. The Killa Gorilla
Tough: 6
Muddy: 6

This was our introduction into the enormous avalanche of mud we would become well-acquainted with. Arranged like those obnoxious queues at DisneyWorld that zigzag back and forth, the Killa Gorilla made you run up and down a steep and mud-caked hill ten times. Having not gotten our mud-legs, this was an adventure of trying to balance speed and functioning limbs.

4. Devil's Beard
Tough: 2
Muddy: 4

A huge cargo net laying in a pit of mud. This is where one gets the first taste of teamwork, and what could have been a muddy crawl-a-thon, became closer to the middle person in the famous evolution progression. Thanks to everyone who held up the net and spared my knees some wear and tear.

5. Boa Constrictor
Tough: 6
Muddy: 4

I am going to lump muddy and wet together for the purposes of these evaluations, because each obstacle had a heavy dose of one or the other (except you Underwater Tunnels). Boa constrictor was the first obstacle that involved water, and willingly putting yourself into it. It was also the first (of many) obstacles that you probably wouldn't have done if you weren't exhausted and had lost critical blood flow to your brain. To put it simply, Boa Constrictor required you to crawl through a narrow tube INTO a pond of water and then through another submerged tube on the other side to get out. The tubes were narrow enough that you had to crawl through them, and had lots of nice rocks to get your first lacerations out of the way. And then there was the little issue of having to swim/crawl OUT of the tube if you wanted to breathe again, since the other end of the pipe was almost completely submerged. If I had thought this through, I probably would have psyched myself out of it, but I just followed JK and didn't realize how scared I should have been until after.

6. Tired Yet?
Tough: 2
Muddy: 2

Just your standard tire run, with some mud thrown in for good measure. Not too difficult, but still annoying to be high stepping when your legs are still burning something fierce.

7. Tree Hugger
Tough: 7
Muddy: 3

More ridiculously steep terrain. This one was probably moguls or a black diamond or something else that looks pretty and serene in the winter but will give you an aneurysm from May to November. With nothing to grab onto, I considered both the zig-zag approach and the bear technique on all fours, before deciding to conserve energy and just trek up normally. That and JK wouldn't let me get on his back.

8. Ball Shrinker
Tough: 8
Muddy: 8

Not muddy, but fucking freezing. And made worse by the fact that you are stuck on two rickety ropes trying to shuffle across a pond in chest deep water. The top rope kept whipping back and forth like it was trying to buck you off, and the bottom rope was just asking you to lose your footing so it could disappear forever. Shimmying across this obstacle would be a tall-order under any conditions, but in 35 degree water, it borders on absurd. Usually the obstacle names are a little intense for my taste, but 'Ball Shrinker' should probably ratcheted up and be renamed to 'The Sex Change' after how I was feeling afterwards.

9. Mud Mile
Tough: 4
Muddy: 10

Not 'Tough', per se, but so much mud that you wonder why you thought you could ever wear these shoes again. It was also around this point where I patted myself on the back for wearing boxer briefs (crucial) and shorts with tie-strings. Around this point you start to be able to detect 'good' mud and 'bad' mud, the bad mud being the kind that is just solid enough to resist your weight squish, making you fall flat on your keister. The wet, splashy mud is much more reliable.

10. Kiss of Mud
Tough: 4
Muddy: 7

Far less scary than the pictures would have you believe. Barbed wires are reasonably high off the ground (although plenty of number tags got hooked), and the mud was pleasantly devoid of rocks and other debris. You still had to crawl on your hands and knees, but it certainly could have been worse.

11. Hold Your Wood

Tough: 8
Muddy: 5

From here on out, no obstacle will fall below 4 on the mud-o-meter. Every inch of person was caked with mud, and it's hard to pinpoint where it came from. Hold Your Wood did not explicitly feature mud as a part of the obstacle, but when you're carrying logs up a mountain and then back down, you're going to drop it/fall a couple times. The logs were hearty and awkward to carry, and I tried the "shoulder perch" and the "hip holster" before settling on the "bear hug" the rest of the way. Several other Mudders were less thoughtful in their grips and many a log was seen barreling down the slope at unsuspecting spectators. Or perhaps this was a brilliant strategy. I'll never know, but I was sufficiently wiped at this point and was INCREDULOUS to find out we had only gone four miles.

12. Hey Bales
Tough: 2
Muddy: 2

A nice respite from the mud and cardio. A simple stack of hay bales to climb. A new smell to complement the mud/B.O. perfume. Cake.

13. Evil Knevil
Tough: 5
Muddy: 1
This was not as it is on the website. It was a half-pipe ramp you were expected to run up and then belay down the other side. My shoes weighed 4lbs at this point and were worn and muddy enough to have the word 'CONCUSSION' flash in my mind. I also envisioned Jackass out-takes that were probably tamer than this. Miraculously, the slope was such that you could run full-bore and be virtually 'launched' up the pipe into the loving arms of your teammates. Climbing down on the other side resulted in some wicked rope burn, but I'll take that over brain damage any day.

14. Spider's Web
Tough: 4
Muddy: 5

As JK likes to say: Teamwork makes the dream work. In this case, it was closer to: hold the goddamn net still for me and I'll help you in a minute. Not as catchy, but same sentiment. I scaled both sides of this muddy net this faster than I thought I would. Maybe the Powerbar bites were kicking in (finally).

15. Mystery Obstacle!
Tough: 4
Muddy: 7

While not muddy, and only moderately wet, this obstacle did a number on my gloves for the rest of the race. Why, may you ask? Because this obstacle involved wading through a trough of maple syrup and vinegar and then crawling through sawdust under a net to claim your freedom. Neither of these were terribly troubling, but my gloves developed a slippery film after this that I couldn't shake. Not a stellar feature for the upcoming greased monkey bars.

16. Walk the Plank
Tough: 6
Muddy: 8

Much like the Boa Constrictor, Walk the Plank was an obstacle I would have almost certainly talked myself out of if there weren't 10 people waiting behind me and I could barely remember my name. So instead, I took the 15-foot leap into 35 degree water and swam back in like I was Michael Phelps. It was the 'holy-shit' cold that makes you evacuate all the air out of your lungs and see fond memories from your childhood. Swimming in shoes is a royal pain also, and even though people kept advising me to "Grab the rope", it was nowhere to be found, so I just doggy-paddled like I had never doggy-paddled before. We were all borderline hypothermic at this point, and enjoyed a nice round of group hugs and tin-foil blankets like arctic explorers.

17. Underwater Tunnels
Tough: 8
Muddy : 10

Even if I divided my "Muddy" category into "Dirty" and "Cold", Underwater Tunnels would still get solid 10's for both. Three giant pipes were laid across a huge pool of water and you had to plunge into the silty, freezing water under them to continue. There's nothing quite like being completely frozen and then opening your eyes on the other side to see complete and total brown. The water was so saturated with silt that we had silt beards for the next three obstacles and I found a disturbing amount of mud in my ears/eyes/nose. The shivers were now here to stay.

18. Glacier
Tough: 5
Muddy: 7

A steep wall of snow/ice, following by narrow, icy catacombs did not do much for our warmth problem. Shuffling down the ice tracks was cold and slow, but going faster involved putting your freezing hands in direct contact with the ice walls to keep your balance. Tough choice. I chose the latter and regretted it.

19. The Gauntlet
Tough: 5
Muddy: 4

Another sadistically steep hill, this one complete with a murderous TM employee with a fire hose. I tried to use SP as a human shield, but instead I let JK take most of the damage. There are times for teamwork and there are times to save yourself. This was one of those times.

20. Cliffhanger
Tough: N/A
Muddy: N/A

I must have blacked-out for this obstacle. The website description does little to jog my memory. I'm sure it was cold and muddy though.

21. Blood Bath
Tough: 6
Muddy: 8

How many permutations of "Hop into this freezing water" can TM possibly come up with? While superficially similar to the Underwater Tunnels (going under a giant board), this was both easier (the water was dyed vivid shades of red, green, yellow, respectively) and harder (there was a significant amount of ice cubes floating on the surface). I have never had a brain freeze without eating anything. This gave me one.

22. Funky Monkey
Tough: 10
Muddy: 7

Funky Monkey can go either way. If you can make it across the inclined greased monkey bars, you will be dry and warm. If your gloves are still soaked in syrup and/or you can scarcely conjure up the coordination to peel and eat a banana, you will make it two rungs and fall into the ice water and swim your way out. I think you know which category I fell under. JK of course made it all the way across like the half-gorilla mutant that he is.

23. Berlin Walls
Tough: 9
Muddy: 4

12-foot walls impossible to scale on your own (unless you're JK of course). Camaraderie is palatable in this obstacle as groups of strangers push any part of you they can reach to boost you over the wall. I got handfuls of butt cheeks and mouthfuls of mud, but we made it over all four of these. So much harder than I expected.

24. Tower Hurdle
Tough: 5
Muddy: 5

File this obstacle under O for obnoxious. Something tells me Mt. Snow said "Hey guys, we have 20 chairlift poles we're about to get rid of, why don't you make an obstacle out of them?" and TM did. Anywhere from 1-3 feet off the ground, and tantalizingly close together, SP was more daring than I, but I wasn't sure if chest impalement was covered on my health insurance, so I played this one conservatively.

25. Fire Walker
Tough: 3
Muddy: 2

Hoping this would be a nice change of pace from icy water and snow obstacles, The Gauntlet had us running "through fire" but was closer to "limping through smoke". SP took this time to tell us about the dangers of smoke inhalation and EG was massaging his cramping quad like nobodies business.

26. Turd's Nest
Tough: 6
Muddy: 2

At this point, otherwise innocuous obstacles of rope were becoming serious tests of will. I would have scampered up Turd's Nest netting like nobody's business 3 hours ago, but now it took all of my energy to calibrate my feet to not fall through the holes and castrate myself.

27. Greased Lightning
Tough: 3
Muddy: 4

A gigantic slip and slide. But not without danger, as you had to get a running start on the top of the slide to guarantee enough momentum to the end. I took this a bit too far and gave myself a healthy dose of whiplash. At least I got into the Tough Mudder Facebook album because of it. Even though all the comments are people thinking that I pooped my pants (I didn't).

28. Electroshock Therapy
Tough: 6
Muddy: 3

Not Muddy or Tough exactly, but surprisingly potent for something I dismissed as a gimmick after seeing on the website. Running through 10000V wires sounds like something they throw in just to round out the whole experience but water-down, but as Team Weoooweooooweeoooooweccchhh joined hands and skipped across the finish line, I got some serious jolts. I found out shortly thereafter that holding hands AMPLIFIES each person's voltage exposure, and some annoying dude was trying to trick people into doing it all day. Little did they know that we suckers would do it on our own accord.

All in all, a great day with some great Tough Mudder Brudders. If you ever even consider it, you should do it. It has very little to do with strength, and everything to do with endurance and fortitude. Maybe you'll even surprise yourself. I know I did.

IFF Boston 2011: Final Installment

2011-05-07T10:59:00.000-04:00

I had grand aspirations for the final days of the festival. There were several interesting movies scheduled, and I intended to see every one. Sadly, 5 successive nights up well beyond my curfew started to do me in. When the dust (and crowds) cleared Thursday morning, I had seen 11 movies, but skipped the final two on my radar, for reasons that can best be described as exhaustion. Sleep deprivation being the primary cause, but emotional exhaustion a close second. This years festival was especially documentary heavy, and after watching film after engrossing film, you approach the natural limits of your attention. Additionally, film festivals are not the place to search for levity, and 'The Trip' notwithstanding, true humor was hard to come by (though many films were certainly uplifting). My final three films were a microcosm of what one expects from a film festival. A documentary, a stylish, low-budget action flick and an offbeat, quirky coming-of-age story. After failing to find any duds in my first 8 films, my luck ran out with a couple here. Here's a quick rundown:

El B ulli - Cooking in Progress - Gereon Wetzel
El Bulli is a world-renowned Spanish restaurant regarded as the hardest reservation on Earth. Head chef Ferran Adria has been hailed as the most innovative and insane chef in the world. Under his watchful eye, El Bulli shuts down for six months every year to prepare their menu for the upcoming year. This documentary tells the story of a year at El Bulli. The preceding synopsis is more supplementary information than you will receive in the entire film. Wetzel throws you instantly into El Bulli's laboratory, where chef-scientist hybrids scratch results into lab notebooks and play with instrumentation seemingly on loan from Merck. Extracting flavors and juices from things that have no business being juiced, the chefs taste their results and distract Adria from his cellphone long enough to offer him a spoonful. Many chefs and Adria himself talk about magic of food, with an enthusiasm you would expect but strain to appreciate. I went into this film truly excited and hoping for something that would validate it, but what I got instead, was a virtually silent thirty-minute opening scene of these chefs vacuuming mushrooms. I understand this is the unsexy R&D side, but this was beyond unsexy, it was boring. Perhaps Wetzel would have been better served if he had spliced in interviews with these characters or food critics to tell us how original and amazing what we were seeing was, but I couldn't see it. As the film progressed and the dishes gained momentum and shape, the documentary picked up steam, but it is never able to dig itself out of the hole the opening scene puts it in. Opening with a brief background of the restaurant and its accolades would give the audience a better appreciation for the research phase and its necessity and maybe make the whole thing go down a little easier. Instead, Wetzel gives us moldy bread and expects us to hang around for dessert.

Bellflower - Evan Glodell
'The end of a relationship can be apocalyptic"

This was the synopsis for Bellflower in our IFFBoston program. Vague? Yes. Pretentious? Maybe. Intriguing? Very.

Today, five days removed from seeing it, I don't think I could sum it up any better. Ostensibly, its about two 30-ish guys in California, drinking and fornicating their way through life. Not in a depressing way, but in a 'you-should-really-grow-up-and-stop-building-flamethrowers' way. The two men meet a group of women at their local watering hole, and a relationship blossoms between Woodrow (director Glodell himself) and Milly. Woodrow is the quiet, brooding type, and Milly is the 'spit-and-vinegar' type, but they work for a while. And then things turn sour, and the film defies explanation. The story is interesting and engrossing, but it is the spectacular style and assured direction that really keeps the film going and completely ensnares the audience. Filmed using a camera Glodell cobbled together from vintage parts, the shots have a yellow, grimy sheen that adds to the apocalyptic mood. Snatched up by Oscilloscope records and primed for a larger release, Glodell has been taking this film and 'Mother Medusa' (his fire-breathing muscle car) from festival to festival anyway to generate buzz. While Medusa probably won't be in attendance next time Bellflower comes to Boston, the film is loud and bold enough that you won't miss it.

Terri - Azazel Jacobs
Of all these films, Terri is probably the one most primed for a wide(ish) release. It stars John C Reilly as a no-nonsense assistant principal and newcomer Jacob Wysocki as the titular Terri, an aimless high-school student. Terri lives with his sick uncle and has taken to wearing pajamas to school for reasons that are unclear. He gets in trouble in class and meets with Reilly after school for sentencing. The two bond (sort-of), Terri loosens up and makes 'friends' with other misfit students. Azazel aims for charmingly quirky, but decides to ramp up the quirk in the absence of charm and falls short. There are probably stories about misfit teenagers painted on cave walls, so if you really want to add something new to the genre, you can't subscribe to the Napoleon Dynamite school of "Random=Funny" and hope that the rest will take care of itself. John C Reilly is terrific and the only thing here to salvage it from being a total loss, but he can't save scenes he's not in, which is far too many. I haven't seen any of Jacobs' other films (Momma's Man, The Good Times Kid), but I hope Terri was simply a failed experiment and not indicative of his overall canon.

IFF Boston 2011 Round-Up Pt. 2

2011-05-04T19:04:00.000-04:00

I saw four movies on Sunday.This is where I get a little sleepy and complete sentences are challenging. It's pretty tough to gauge the quality of the movie you're about to walk into, so preemptive stimulants are are necessity. Starbucks or Diet Coke are commonplace, but having copped a Five-Hour energy (compliments of the MayFair), I was about to enter uncharted territory. I hoped it could carry me through the last two movies that evening, and it did; mostly because I thought I might die at any moment or maybe melt through my chair. How did Four-Loko get the axe but menopause in a nip is at every gas station? I will spare you further details, but anyone who takes Five-Hour energy to study probably cuts their fingernails with garden shears or makes toast with a blowtorch. The good news was that the films were solid, and I am excited to tell you about them.

Make Believe - J. Clay Tweel
Kids are cute. Magicians are weird. At what point do magicians go from precocious to insufferable? In Make Believe, there are kids on both sides of this fence, and how you will feel about the film depends on whether you consider Penn and Teller creative geniuses or ponytailed creeps. Each of kids here got into magic for some semblance of control and attention, which is refreshing when the kid is 13 and would otherwise be a bully magnet, but tends to get grating when a kid nears twenty and has the hyperactive intensity of an used car salesman, and a bravado to boot. Confidence is a crucial element to magic, but more integral is the humility that gets them hooked from the beginning and inspires them record a grainy magic special on VHS and replay it until the tape breaks. For some of the kids, the swagger they are forced to adopt for their act, becomes fused with their person and is tough to swallow. The young and international talents are naive enough to have no idea how hard magic is, yet confident enough to believe they can figure it out with perseverance. Tweel does well to focus on their enthusiasm and keep the intensity building until the final scene, but I wish he had a few more tricks up his sleeve in the editing room.

Buck - Cindy Meehl
Buck is a profile of Buck Brannaman, a man who could not look more cowboy if he had a team of costume designers. He has the thick, slow voice of a country sheriff, but is a more empathetic man than you are ever likely to meet. At a young age, Buck and his brother traveled the country performing rope tricks under the stern tutelage of their father. Never a "horse" person, he stumbled into his calling nearly 30 years ago, and now performs small miracles 9 months out of the year through his horse training workshops. Buck's philosophy is based on sensitivity and respect, treating the horse like an equal, and anticipating their movements and allowing them to anticipate yours. For centuries, horses had to be 'broken' before they could be of any use, but Buck intends to change that, one timid creature at a time. He can do things on a wild horse in 5 minutes that take Hollywood trainers months to mimic. It isn't hypnosis or ESP, he is simply sensitive to the horses fears, and gains their trust. It is miraculous to watch, and leagues beyond a trite Animal Planet special. As we learn more about Buck's troubled past, his character gains depth and as his training philosophy broadens into life lessons, the horses aren't the only ones captivated.

Project Nim - James Marsh
Nim was the center of a landmark 1973 science experiment by Columbia behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace that investigated whether chimpanzees could understand and use American Sign Language to communicate with humans. Plucked from his mother at 2-weeks old, Nim was raised as a human in every capacity by the research team, but not in the sterile scientific confines you might expect. Terrace employs a revolving door of students who raise Nim affectionately and spend hours teaching him signs and tracking his progress. Many of these female students engage in romantic relationships with Terrace before being shown the door or excusing themselves after Nim's increasingly vicious attacks. After the experiment is abandoned that Project Nim takes on a dramatic new direction, and science becomes secondary. Director James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE) does a fantastic job of reconstructing an engaging story from very little archival video footage, instead relying on gorgeous photographs, interviews, and innovative art direction. As Nim's story gains complexity and the cast of characters thickens, Marsh charges ahead, and risks losing control of his central premise. By allowing his subjects to speak candidly, even about one another, he navigates these dangerous waters nimbly, trusting us to make up our own minds and wait to hear the whole story.

Another Earth - Mike Cahill
Another Earth takes a well-trodden redemption story and filters it through a unique science fiction premise to makes a film that is more than the sum of these two parts. Part Contact, part Donnie Darko, it's hard to believe that Another Earth is Mike Cahill's first narrative feature, but that's what it says in my program, so I will take him at his word. In any case, his film impressively strikes a delicate balance between dramatic tension and eerie sci-fi chills. Leaning on story and strong performances over CGI, Cahill uses the science as a means rather than an end, keeping the story insular and avoiding sci-fi tropes one might expect. It is surprisingly how well the whole thing works, and if you can suspend disbelief until the end you'll find yourself rewarded for your patience.

IFF Boston 2011 Round-Up Pt. 1

2011-05-01T21:53:00.000-04:00

Four days in and IFF Boston has fully enveloped Davis Square. Muscle cars named Medusa breathe fire behind the Somerville Theatre, a gigantic queue of people snakes around the building and several blocks down Dover St. The theatre foyer is finely-tuned chaos, not unlike a Mumbai intersection. But oh, the films! 47 screenings thus far, and another 20 scheduled for today makes the ominous weather a little less troubling. Not that my complexion can carry a tan on normal days, but during the film-fest, I considerably more nocturnal. I've enjoyed 4 movies so far, and have another 4 scheduled today, but before I forget, I want to jot down a few thoughts on each, should any of you have the chance to see them in a larger release.

The Trip - Dir. Michael Winterbottom
I'm not sure if knowing that The Trip was already a successful BBC miniseries helped or hurt its charms. On one hand, it feels a little cheap to know that a TV series has been trimmed and stitched together to support a 2-hour running time, but on the other, Michael Winterbottom is an accomplished director and if anything, this film should be a potent distillation of the originals hilarity. As it turns out, I was right on both accounts. The film is quite funny and doesn't necessarily feel cobbled together, but at the same time, doesn't possess any semblance of an 'arc'. It is, by my accounts, a series of fancy meals and car-rides in which Coogan and Brydon riff off one another for 110 minutes. There are pitch-perfect Woody Allen impressions, an amazing spoof of 'costumed dramas' ("WE RISE AT DAYBREAK") and Brydons terrible yet endearing Al Pacino impression he cannot help himself from lapsing into. As a series of scenes, it is a riot, but as a film, its could use a bit more focus.

Green - Dir. Sophia Takal
Green opens with a scene that is does not ingratiate itself with the audience. It features Sebastian extolling the virtues of Philip Roth and flippantly dismissing his girlfriend's claims to the contrary. They are from Brooklyn, and I believe them. The couple then move to a sublet in West Virginia, where Sebastian intends to write an article on sustainable living for a blog. It plays about how you would expect, but is sufficiently frustrating due to the intentionally loose plotting, which lets Sebastian to ramble uninterestingly simply to fill a scene. Things improve when Robin (director Takal) enters the picture and a bizarre will-they/did-they? love triangle begins to take shape. Robin is more naive then dumb, but nevertheless, it takes a long time to warm up to her drawl and personality. I understand what Takal was trying to do by dropping a woman into the story who is at first the butt of inside jokes for the couple, and then a palpable threat, but it could have been better handled with a little more direction. The strong score and eerie shots of the woods add a fantastic sense of foreboding, but the story never meets it there, and eventually gets in over its head. I think Takal has talent and am interested in what she does next, but she could stand to put more trust in herself.

How To Die In Oregon - Dir. Peter Richardson
In 1994, Oregon became the first state to pass the Die with Dignity act, a law that makes it legal for terminally ill individuals to take their own lives (under supervision of their doctor) when their quality of life has diminished. In the 16 years since, 600 people have gone through with it. God did not smite them from on high, and no one was killed by their family in an inheritance grab as Republicans feared. Richardson makes it quite clear that this is not suicide, as suicide involves people with functioning bodies but whom are clinically depressed, whereas dying with dignity patients have complete mental faculties, but irreparably failing bodies. The first hour of the movie hops between several affecting stories, but these eventually coalesce into the story of 54 year-old Cody Curtis, a wife and mother of two with inoperable liver cancer. Her story arc starts with simple meditation on the principles of Death with Dignity, and shows her making preparations with her family, but takes a new shape as she exceeds her prognosis and 'Death with Dignity' becomes more of a dark cloud hanging over her family than a calm and logical way out. In less capable hands, the story could have unraveled, but Richardson strikes a wonderful balance between the celebration of life and the acceptance of death, never reveling in either too long to feel exploitative or uncomfortable. I wish the pacing of the film had allowed for the other subplots stretch to the end as well, if only for some small relief from Cody's story, but I can understand if he wanted to give the Curtis family the attention and concern they deserve. In any case, it's a powerful film.

Puppet - Dir. David Soll
When a documentary sheds light on a topic that you knew nothing of or had deeply seated misconceptions about, it is an amazing thing. What King of Kong did for videogames and Wordplay did for crossword puzzles, David Soll's Puppet does for puppetry. As it turns out, puppets haven't always been a gimmick to shut up a whiny child. Every culture on earth has revered puppetry and it wasn't until the days of television and film that they began their descent into the margins. While Jim Henson and Sesame Street have performed small miracles in reviving puppetry, they also reinforced the notion that they are not to be considered a serious art. The puppetry that Dan Hurlin and his team perform in Puppet can best be described as an amazingly intricate dance, and seeing what goes into it makes it even more astonishing. I will resist delving into the plot of Hurlin's show, if only to say that it surrounds a photographer/hermit who finds himself literally shrinking as portrait photography as an art form metaphorically does. I will confess to being someone who never gave puppetry any serious consideration alongside other forms, but now feel like a complete boob. The level of craft necessary to breathe life into an inanimate object (and not just life, but personality and humor as well), cannot be overstated. And in many ways it is even beyond acting. Many times, an actors mannerisms and body language may simply be coincidental and unconscious, but with puppets, every shrug and sigh is the complex product of three puppeteers working together as one. Puppet does exactly what a great documentary should do: introduces you to something new, and makes you fall in love.

On Repeat: Lykke Li - Sadness Is a Blessing

2011-04-28T17:16:00.000-04:00

I'm moving to Stockholm. Sweden has everything I need. The best pop music (Robyn), the best folk singer (Tallest Man on Earth), the most energetic rock outfit (The Hives) and now the best brooding, damaged femme fatale, Ms. Lykke Li. She won me over instantly with "Dance, Dance, Dance" off her 2008 release Youth Novels, but this years Wounded Rhymes has her ditching some of the cutesy, and going for the throat.

The just released music video for 'Sadness Is a Blessing' is the antithesis of the joyous "Dance Dance Dance', but no less affecting. Li has never been one for monologues, preferring to dance when the right words don't come. It's her celebration and her depression, whirling and twisting with the concentrated frenzy of a child. In Sadness is a Blessing, she seems somewhere in between, declaring her sadness both a pearl and a curse. It's something she has known well and is resigned to forever be near, like a doting boyfriend.

As she drinks heavily in a silent restaurant and begins her dance, there's still a glimmering happiness present in the song, even as she is subdued by waiters and tries to wriggle herself free. Even her most devastating songs always carry a hopeful glow, as though she is remembering these miseries with nostalgia, knowing that it made her who she is today. It's a spirit that cannot be restrained.

Bloom

2011-04-24T22:59:00.000-04:00

Insider Guide: IFF Boston 2011

2011-04-23T13:53:00.002-04:00

In 8 short years, the Independent Film Festival of Boston has grown from cultish gathering, to cinematic powerhouse, attracting acclaimed films straight out of prestigious festivals like Sundance and SXSW. It's no coincidence that this festival has grown so quickly and has been embraced by the city. They are not the first film festival to try to make it in Boston, but they have succeeded where others have failed because they are impeccably run by people who sincerely love movies. The tiny staff manages to organize the massive week-long festival while holding down day-jobs and being completely non-profit. When you care, it shows. Hundreds of volunteers offer their time to make the festival run smoothly (I am lucky enough to have taken part last year and be welcomed aboard again this year), and area venues like the Somerville and Brattle theatres hand over their keys to IFFBoston for the week, something they do not have to do and illustrates how contagious the staff enthusiasm really is.

Last year I managed to see 8 films, many of which made my Top 10 list and went on to win major awards (Winter's Bone, Cyrus, Down Terrace). Many I didn't see also went on to do big things (Marwencol, I Am Love, The Killer Inside Me, Life During Wartime, Tiny Furniture). Part of the fun (and work) of attending a film festival is figuring out what films are actually worth your valuable time. With nearly 100 films playing, it becomes imperative to do a little research, lest you find yourself stuck in an unbearable dark room for 90 minutes and your wallet $10 lighter. Mercifully, I've done the lion's share of the research for you this year, so you simply have to heed my advice and enjoy the show. The following are the shows I intend to see, or would see if I wasn't volunteering.

4/27 Wednesday (Opening Night):

7:30pm Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
The story of Kevin Clash, the man behind Elmo. Who doesn't love Elmo. I would pay $10 to see an extended Sesame Street featuring only Elmo, so this is the next best thing. Don't bring children or they will probably be scarred for life to find out Elmo is really a hand and two sticks.

4/28: Thursday

To be honest, I'm not super jazzed about any of the Thursday evening films. There's a documentary called Convento that caught my eye, mostly because it looks rife with steampunk. There's also a documentary about the seminal Minnesota rock outfit The Replacements, but I think I might save up my energy for the weekend push.

4/29 Friday

7:15pm The Trip
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play two traveling food critics and compete with each other about the level of their fame. I believe this was a miniseries in the UK and this film is the product of editing the episodes together. If the above Michael Caine-off is any indication, it looks like a lot of fun.

9:30pm Submarine
Wales' answer to Rushmore, complete with fantastic soundtrack, quirky characters, and awkward teenage love. Sign me up.

4/30 Saturday

12pm Green
Billed as a blurring of reality and paranoid fantasy, the trailer makes it look like a low-budget Antichrist, which makes me glad it's playing during the day. I hope they dropped the genital mutilation.

2pm How To Die In Oregon
A calm and even-handed look at the topic of physician-assisted suicide. Hopefully the US is beyond the Dr. Kevorkian nonsense at this point and can actually handle this conversation. Won top Documentary Prize at Sundance.

5:30pm Puppet
A documentary about a master puppeteer attempting to create a complex work and shake the stereotypes surrounding puppets. Looks fascinating.

I have to work the rest of Saturday night, but I highly recommend checking out Page One: Inside the New York Times, a documentary about the newspaper and the dying art of journalism. Playing at 7:15pm.

5/1 Sunday

12:15pm Make Believe
A documentary about six kids competing for the title of Teen World Champion at the World Magic Seminar in Las Vegas. Hopefully it does for magic what Spellbound and King of Kong did for similarly nerdy pursuits. Won Audience Award at several film festivals.

3:15pm Buck/2:45pm Bobby Fischer Against the World
My first real conundrum of the festival. Two interesting documentaries, playing at the same time. Do I chose Buck, the moving story of "horse whisperer" Buck Brannaman, determined to end the age-old practice of horse "breaking", or Bobby Fischer Against the World, that traces the life of Bobby Fischer and tries to understand his eccentricities and whether chess helped or exacerbated them. It's a toss-up, but I've heard great things about Buck, so it gets my vote. Plus, who doesn't want to be a cowboy?

5:30pm Project Nim
From the director of the fantastic Man on Wire, comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who was raised as a human and communicated through sign language and taught the world more about humanity than chimpanzees. Man on Wire was amazing, so I have high hopes.

7:30pm Another Earth/8pm Oliver Sherman
Conundrum #2. See Another Earth, the sci-fi Sundance winner about the discovery of another earth and its repercussions or Oliver Sherman, the tense drama of an army veteran seven years off the battlefield trying to pull his life together starring Donald Logue and Garret Dillahunt. Both look wonderful, but I can't resist smart, low-budget sci-fi (Moon, Primer, etc).

5/2 Monday

7pm El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
Another documentary, what do you know? This one goes behind the scenes of the world-famous restaurant and offers a glimpse into the magic of molecular gastronomy. Impossible to resist for scientists and foodies alike.

9:30pm Bellflower
The description of this SXSW hit film is ingeniously vague. I sleuthed a little more and found a video of P. Diddy giving the director of this film $1000 for some bizarre reason. Further investigation uncovered a loose plot surrounding two friends who build elaborate weapons in preparation for the apocalypse, culminating in a fire-breathing named Medusa. Apparently Medusa herself will be on hand at the Somerville Theatre. I love a good apocalyptic romp and will be there to get my eyebrows singed.

5/3 Tuesday (Both showings at the Stuart Street Playhouse in downtown Boston)

7pm Terri

John C. Reilly as a loveable fuck-up principal who teaches another loveable fuck-up the ways of the world? From the team behind Blue Valentine and Half Nelson? What God did I please?

9:30pm The Whistleblower
Billed as a political thriller, Rachel Weisz plays a police officer who risks her career to uncover a Bosnian human-trafficking scandal involving US Contractors and the UN. Monica Bellucci and David Strathairn also star. Terrible poster, but has some good buzz coming out of TIFF.

5/4 Wednesday (At the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline)

8pm Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
This documentary follows Conan along on his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television tour that occured in the wake of his NBC fallout and before his TBS resurrection. Conan's self-deprecating humor and resilience makes him impossible not to love, and even this 1 minute clip holds more wit and affability than the full sets of most comedians these days. Playing at his hometown theatre no less, I'm sure Conan's family will be there in droves, if not the wonder himself. Great way to close out the festival.

Jamestown/Spring

2011-04-20T18:21:00.000-04:00

Old Song Review: The Four Tops - Bernadette

2011-04-18T18:19:00.000-04:00

While I take great pains to be on the razors edge of indie music, that doesn't mean my radio dial is forever tuned into the trendiest. There are plenty of songs I don't like, and when this happens, I have no choice but to take my ears elsewhere. My tried and true back-up is 60's on 6, and they never let me down. There was a time when I was ashamed of enjoying Oldies, and my sister and I would roll our eyes as hard as we could and sigh heartily from the backseat whenever our parents would turn it on. But today, I don't think any decade in music can hold a candle to it. It's been too long since I've shared a great song on here.

When one considers Motown, they inevitably think of The Supremes and The Temptations, and for good reason. They put it on the map, and are responsible for a staggering number of Top 10 hits. But there were several other groups whose music continues to influence, but remain in the shadows. The Four Tops had two Billboard No. 1's I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) and Reach Out I'll Be There, and a string of other hits deep into the 80's, but in my opinion, Bernadette is their crowning achievement. Off their 1967 release Reach Out, it is the perfect evolution of Motown music, maintaining the dense efficiency while never feeling rushed or forced. Frontman Levi Stubbs sings with James Browns intensity but in a deeper register, giving his words added urgency. Gorgeous backing vocals add depth and give the song a steady rudder, while Stubbs is free to make his desperate case for her love. At around 2:30, the song reaches what seems to be a traditional ending with a brief coda and fade out, before bursting out for one more chorus. Of course false endings like this are commonplace today, but it was an edgy choice at a time when most songs followed a very rigid formula. Now its just another reason to love it.