Up With People

I always manage to catch a movie or two over the holidays, and this year was no exception. Avatar and Up were this year's selections. I was pleasantly surprised by Avatar and very pleased that Up surpassed my already high expectations.

Avatar didn't blow me away, but it surpassed my admittedly meager expectations. Even though I don't get too excited about CGI effects, seeing it in 3D definitely made the experience more immersive and enjoyable. Avatar may have been the first movie I've ever seen in 3D. It's probable that I saw at least one 3D movie as a kid, but I can't think of any off of the top of my head. The story in Avatar isn't much to write home about, though it's not completely by-the-numbers. I was surprised to see how unsympathetically the paramilitary organization protecting the mining interests of the humans on Pandora was portrayed, given that they were a very thinly veiled stand-in for the American armed forces. This recent AV Club posting goes into more detail about the politics of the film. There's not much nuance, but it's a less conventional than I would have expected.

While I'm on the topic, did anyone else who saw Avatar find Sam Worthington's accent horrible? I'd never heard of the guy before seeing the movie, but an IMDB lookup confirms that he's from England and started his acting career in Australia. His Anglo and/or Aussie roots were very apparent, at least to me, during several of his dialogue sequences. You'd think for $250 million they could have gotten a decent accent coach for him so his character could have a believable middle American accent to go along with his working-class vocabulary.

Up is one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen in a while. I also liked Pixar's last outing, Wall-E, but I thought Up was even better. While Up is animated, it is not a kid's movie, but I'm sure that I would have loved it as a kid. I really enjoyed the period details and Carl, the main character, reminded me of my grandfather a little bit, but it's still a really good movie even if neither of those things hold true for you.

Dakar

We tried Dakar, a new Senegalese restaurant in Central Falls last Friday before going to see The SantaLand Diaries at the Gamm Theater. There aren't a lot of dining choices near the Gamm, so Dakar is a nice addition to the area. We had the place to ourselves once the couple that was dining when we arrived left, which is never a good sign for a restaurant on Friday night (or any other night), but the food and the service was good. Our waiter (who was also the host, bus boy, and possibly, the chef) greeted us by asking if we had ever been the Senegal. It was nice that he didn't assume we had never visited his home country (though we haven't), even though it's a place that most Americans have never even heard of.

As for the food, I really liked the ginger juice. It was very strong, but I love ginger and ginger-based drinks especially. I also enjoyed the Naem appetizer that we tried. They are Senegalese-style egg rolls and according to our waiter, they were brought back to Senegal by soldiers who fought for their colonial power (France) in Vietnam. Regardless of how you feel about colonialism, we can all agree that is has given us some great fusion cuisine. I had the Lamb Yassa for dinner. The lamb was a bit on the dry side, but the dish still had a lot of flavor.

I haven't eaten much African cuisine, but my meal at Dakar was one of my favorites. Hopefully the next time we eat there, we won't be the only patrons.

Bonus

I liked today's Dilbert. It reminded me of this story NPR did a few months ago.

The story looked into how people in various occupations are compensated and contrasted it with the huge bonus culture on Wall St. that has been all over the news for the past year. Most jobs don't pay out large performance-based bonuses because it would be counter-productive. I'd argue that it's also been quite counter-productive on Wall St., but that's another story. Since most people think that they are above average (I know I am), close to half the of the office would be pretty disappointed if a large percentage of their compensation was tied to individual performance. The other big problem, which this cartoon illustrates perfectly, is that if individual performance is the only thing that is considered when paying bonuses, interoffice cooperation is seriously devalued and employees start behaving like freelancers at best and competitors at worst.

Madness

This ad has been up for for several months now, but it raises an important question - is Mad Men no longer cool now that's it's being referenced in a Cardi's Furniture advertisement?

Fox News

We saw Fantastic Mr. Fox last weekend. Ever since watching it, I've been trying to decide if I actually like Wes Anderson movies. I've seen most of them (though this was my first since The Life Aquatic) and enjoyed all of them to a certain degree. It has become somewhat fashionable to dislike Wes Anderson's work as of late, just as it used to be fashionable to enjoy it, but I don't think I'm getting caught up in the backlash. Mr. Fox wasn't a bad movie, I just never really got into the story. Part of the problem was I felt that George Clooney (who provided the voice for the titular character) turned Mr. Fox into an animated vulpine charactiture of his stock character. I'm going through something of a George Clooney backlash right now because I feel like he always plays the same character. Perhaps I should study a foreign language so I can watch a dubbed version of Mr. Fox to see if I enjoy it more with someone other than George Clooney voicing the main character.

The Not-So-Great Wall

Like many a student before me, I assume, one of my social studies assignments in September of 1989 was to take a map of Europe and color all of the Soviet bloc countries in red. Unlike my predecessors, by the time the school year was over, the map that I colored at the beginning of the term was mostly obsolete. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in November, I knew enough to understand why it was important, but the whirlwind nature of my cold war education left a lot of gaps in my knowledge. When your social studies class happens to be in sync with the most important news story in a generation (if not more), it makes the material more engaging, but being a witness to history can give you a false sense of understanding. It wasn't until I visited Berlin several years later that I started to understand the events leading up to that night 20 years ago. Former Newsweek correspondent Michael Meyer has a new book called The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I haven't read the book, but I heard him discuss it on On Point a few weeks ago and it brought back a lot of memories from both my social studies class and my trip to Berlin.

Eureka

The AV Club featured a good interview with Jim O'Rourke yesterday. I've been aware of O'Rourke for a long time, but I never really gave any of his work a good listen until I picked up a copy of Eureka earlier this year (at Jive Time Records, a store that's joined Jazz Record Mart and Downtown Music Gallery as the record store that I visit whenever I'm in Seattle, Chicago, or New York, respectively) and I've really been enjoying it. Even though O'Rourke says in this interview that Eureka is "the one record I can’t fucking stand", I still think it's worth a listen or 20.

Where Men Win Glory

I received a copy of Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer's latest book, and I read the whole thing in a single day while traveling back home from the southwest. The book chronicles the life and death of Pat Tillman, the iconoclastic professional football player who enlisted in the Army shortly after 9/11 and whose death by friendly fire in 2004 was shamefully covered up by the military. The book isn't just about Tillman, it's also one of the best analyses of America's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq that I've ever read. I never paid as much attention to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as I should have, largely because I became so disillusioned by the Bush administration's mismanagement of them. Of course, the Bush administration is gone and the wars aren't over, so I don't have any excuses now. It's only been a week or so, but I have been paying much closer attention to the news from Iraq and Afghanistan than I was before reading this book. I'm not sure if Krakauer could have covered the wars in real-time as well as he did in this book, but more insightful press coverage certainly would have been nice in the earlier days of the wars.

There wasn't a lot of new information about Tillman in this book, but it did include excerpts from various journals that he kept during most of his adult life. The book focuses on Tillman's dual natures, how he was both an extroverted elite athlete turned soldier as well as an introspective intellectual war critic. When I first learned about Tillman after his death, he immediately struck me as someone who would have been vilified by many of the people who were holding him up as a war hero had they actually known him due to his unconventional and outspoken nature. After reading the book, I get the feeling that hating Pat Tillman would be nearly impossible for all but the most myopic partisans.

Natural Log

October 17 | 10:31 am | White Mountains, NH

¡hispanic!

I snapped this picture at my local Shaw's supermarket. They put these helpful exclamatory signs on each door in the freezer section. It's kind of fun to walk down the aisles reading the signs with the proper emphasis (breakfast! ice cream! kosher!), but I think they should have gone all out and included an inverted exclamation point on the hispanic foods sign.

Commuted Sentence

The bicycle commuting season has more or less drawn to a close. The morning temperature has dropped below my minimum riding threshold of 40 degrees. Even if we get a warm spell or I get some warmer gear, there's really not enough daylight left at the end of the day to ride home safely. Back in April, I stated that I wanted to replace the equivalent of 1000 driving miles with biking. I knew that goal was aggressive, but as the season unfolded, I realized that it was impossible. I still managed to have a successful biking season. I crossed the 1000 mile threshold and completed a century ride for the first time in a decade. Over the roughly six months I spent bicycle commuting, I completed 44 round trips and commuted a total of 735 miles, which was roughly equivalent to 600 miles of driving.

Exercise in Futility

I've had stock options at four of the companies I've worked for, but I've never made any money off of them... until now. Stock options are supposed to be a great tool for aligning employee interests with the bottom line, but in reality, they're more like a lottery ticket. In my case, they were more like a scratch and win lottery ticket, because I'll be lucky if my gain after taxes is $200. I'm not complaining since these options were set to expire in a couple of weeks and they had been underwater since May.

This experience was reinforced my belief that I don't have the stomach for active stock market investing. I like to make informed decisions, but even if I studied the markets all day and knew how to decipher a balance sheet, over a two-week time span, any individual stock can tank or go though the roof for reasons that no one could have anticipated. I finally decided to just pick a price that looked reasonable but was still high enough that it made me feel like I was still making some money and submitted a limit order. It executed yesterday afternoon near the intraday high and after today's 2.3% drop, the stock is now trading just barely above my strike price, so as it stands, I'm looking like something of a Wall Street genius right now. Unlike a compulsive gambler, instead of feeling a rush from all of this, I'm just glad that it's over and that I have a little bit of extra cash in my pocket.

Broken Dreams

A few months back, I raved about a newish band on the scene called Alberta Cross. I just finished listening to Broken Side of Time, their first full-length album, on lala and my enthusiasm has waned considerably. The album is thoroughly overproduced, robbing them of the hard-edged blues rock sound that drew me in to their music. Another downside of all that studio polish is that I never found their song lyrics very good, but it was pretty hard to decipher a lot of them on their debut EP. No such luck on Broken Side of Time. I still really enjoy their debut EP and I suspect that they might put on a pretty good live show.

Bad Goys

I just finished reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and I can honestly say that it has changed my life. Not because it's a great book, because I really didn't enjoy it that much. I just couldn't really get into it. For one, I'm not a huge fan of murder mysteries. I enjoyed the dialog and I didn't really find the Chabon's use of Yiddish too distracting, I just felt that the story never really developed enough momentum. The story is organized into relatively short chapters that all end with a punchy one-liner, which was amusing at first, but by the end, it started to feel like Chabon was putting more effort into his chapter endings than the overall plot.

So how did this slightly above average alternate history murder mystery change my life? For one, it's made me finally realize that there's no point in trying to read a novel if I'm not going to be able to be able to finish it in 2-3 weeks. I lose too much of the story if I try and read a novel 10 pages at a time. The other thing it has made me realize is that it's better to seek out books that I really want to read instead of reading whatever happens to fall in my lap. I've been meaning to read Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for a long time, but every time I look for it at the library, it's checked out. I don't tend to buy a lot of new books, and while you can often find gems at the used book stores that I love so much, you're unlikely to find specific titles. I picked up Yiddish Policemen's Union from the remaindered rack at Barnes & Noble, which can also occasionally yield gems, but if you take the money I've wasted on second-rate discount titles over the years, I could have bought a small library of decent books instead. Or better yet, I could just request the titles that I'm interested in from the library and read them free of charge.

One final note, according to this article from last year, the Coen brothers are working on a film adaptation of The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

Fantasy Island

On the recommendation of a friend, I started following Rainn Wilson's Twitter feed recently. Normally, I don't have any interest in celebrity self-promotion, but Wilson's Twitter is often interesting, funny, or poignant. I loved this tweet from yesterday where he solicits advice for his upcoming fantasy football draft. It seems that the staff of The Office has an "office" fantasy football league. I'm not sure if they formed the league because they enjoy fantasy football or it's some sort of method acting technique they use to get into their average office worker characters, but either way, I love it.

Double Trouble

I've seen this commercial for KFC's latest menu item a few times so I assumed that it was taking American by storm. I learned today that this new culinary creation is currently being test marketed in Providence and Omaha, so I'm one of the lucky few able to experience the deliciousness of the Double Down, which is ostensibly a bacon and cheese sandwich with a bun made out of boneless pieces of fried chicken. For the record, I have yet to try one and have no plans to do so. My lack of interest may lead directly to the Double Down not testing well enough to merit a nationwide release, but it's a chance I'm willing take.

Normally, this is where I would go into full snark mode, but after The AV Club called it "the Reichstag fire of health care reform", I don't think there's anything else that can be said. I hope that I have an opportunity to use that analogy somewhere else, though. But is the Double Down really that bad? The concept seems a little dated. The bun-less sandwich sounds like something straight out of the Atkins craze of a few years back. The bacon seems forced, and I feel like the current incarnation of the add bacon to everything craze is starting to fizzle out. Other than that, I don't see how this is much different than other items on the menus of America's fast food restaurants. Don't get me wrong, the Double Down is kind of disgusting and definitely not something you should eat on a regular basis if you care about your health, but it isn't a new low in the field of culinary arts.

Case in point, last night I dined on some deep-friend clam-infused dough balls. Clam cakes, as they're usually known in these parts, are a Southeastern New England institution and a staple of seaside seafood shacks. Clam cakes have a better name than the Double Down and a simplicity that makes the Double Down look even more thrown together by comparison, but are they really all that different? If clam cakes can be considered a classic comfort food cherished across generations, can the Double Down really be considered a harbinger of the end of the times?

Restaurants need to innovate in order to attract customers. For fast food restaurants, that means either offering more calories per dollar than their competitors or combining a limited set of ingredients in new ways. Most innovations across the food service industry will be forgotten as quickly as they appear. A select few will become part of humanity's culinary lexicon for a few years, a few generations, or, if they're really good, forever. I'm not predicting that every greasy spoon will someday serve a version of the Double Down, I'm just saying that the difference between a beloved culinary institution and an affront to good taste on a plate is smaller than we think.

City Lights

July 25 | 10:36 pm | Providence, RI

Newport News

More thoughts from the Newport Jazz Festival.

I was disappointed to see that RIPTA has discontinued their seasonal bus service from the Newport Visitors Center for Fort Adams. Even in these times of challenging state budgets, it's an embarrassment for city like Newport that relies so heavily on tourism to lack a public transport option from its downtown to one of its most popular attractions.

That being said, the water taxi that I wound up taking from Perrotti Park to Fort Adams was quite nice.

This was my first visit to Fort Adams, and I was really impressed with it. I'll definitely be going back some weekend when it's not playing host to a music festival to check it out.

There was no shortage of booths selling handicrafts at the festival, but I didn't see any selling recordings. Jazz fans are notorious record collectors so I was surprised to see that there wasn't even a tent selling recordings of the featured musicians.

My favorite show other than the V5 was the Christian McBride trio, which kind of surprised me. It wasn't anything earth-shattering, just really good and straight-ahead jazz. I was looking forward to Vijay Iyer's show, but with the exception of their last number, I couldn't really get into any of their tunes.

NPR music was at the festival and has made many of the concerts available for download (not the V5's set, unfortunately)

The ProJo mentioned the V5's set in their review today:

The Vandermark 5, a group of young Chicagoans, started the process with a mix of wailing horns, cello and bowed acoustic bass, completing the demolition on their final song as the second-stage crowd roared. “Some people probably hated it,” said cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, “and some people have told us it was their favorite thing of the festival so far.”

Ken's take on the V5's set, via twitter.

Here's a link to some pictures that I took of the V5 before their set.

New Thing at Newport

Vandermark 5
Newport Jazz Festival - Fort Adams State Park - Newport, RI
Saturday, August 8th

I've never bothered making the trip down to Newport for its iconic jazz festival because, like most big jazz festivals, it tends to feature lowest common denominator acts that play the same old tunes year after year. Newport Jazz impresario George Wein decided to do something about that this year, as this article from the Boston Globe back explains. This year's line-up is fairly impressive, but the Vandermark 5 alone was worth the price of admission for me. Alas, I was not disappointed.

One of the great things about Vandermark is he never talks down to his audience. When I saw him play with School Days at SXSW in 2001, they played a couple of old Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd songs and he dutifully announced the song titles and composers to the crowd despite the fact that most of them were there for the punk rock act that followed them and most certainly had never heard of Shepp or Rudd (or Vandermark, for that matter). The Vandermark 5, as far as I know, only plays original tunes, so there was no free jazz history lesson going on, but their song selection was in no way pandering to the audience in Newport.

Simply put, their set rocked - literally and figuratively. I don't think I've ever heard them play a set as hard-hitting as the one they played in Newport. The first number that they did started out on a rocking note with Fred Lonberg-Holm playing a great serpentine cello solo against the bass and drums before Vandermark and Rempis joined in on tenor and alto saxes, respectively. Vandermark played tenor for most of the set. He occasionally picked up the clarinet, but his bari was not on stage. His most impressive solo was during the most subdued number of the set, Early Color, but all of his solos were strong. The band sounded really tight. It probably helped that most of the songs were from their forthcoming album, but still, it's pretty amazing to watch a band playing music that is both highly improvised and very precise at a breakneck pace stick together as well as they did.

I was quite impressed with the crowd; at its peak, it was standing room only. Vandermark appeared to share my sentiments, as he spent most of his time between numbers thanking the crowd and George Wein himself, who was on hand for most of their set. The biggest crowd pleaser of the day was Cement, a cacophonous song that was let off by Tim Daisy and featured some devastating hooks in addition to a Vandermark-Rempis tenor sax tête-à-tête.

The few times I've seen Vandermark play in front of a so-called crossover audience, he's been incredibly well-received and this show was no exception. While it's never going to be considered mainstream, this is music that adventurous ears are ready for, even if they aren't particularly attuned to jazz. Hopefully, the Vandermark 5's first US jazz festival appearance won't be their last.

Mr. PC

I recently finished reading More Information Than You Require, the second volume in John Hodgman's three-volume almanac of made-up facts. Was I unwise to start with this volume instead of going back and reading the first book? I don't really think it matters, and I've read enough of The Areas of My Expertise in bookstores to know what I was getting into.

The genius of Hodgman's books is that he doesn't just make up things for the sake of being absurd. There's a kernel of truth at the center of all good jokes and while everything nearly Hodgman describes in his books is not true, much of it is rooted in the truth.

After an outstanding start that includes a listing of all US Presidents and important details about their lives (including whether or not they had a hook for a hand), More Information Than You Require starts to drag early in the second half when Hodgman gets stuck talking about how he fell ass-backwards into fame on the success of his first book and the subsequent acting roles to which it led. It's written in a fish-out-of-water tone, but he goes on and on about it for so long that I'm not sure if all of the fame has gone to his head or he's impersonating a writer who stumbled into fame and let it go to his head.

Once he gets off that digression, the book has its moments, but it never really recovers. I was looking forward to the chapter on mole-men, but it wasn't very funny or poignant. The list of 700 mole-man names was tedious reeked of the self-indulgence of the earlier chapters about Hodgman's life as a minor celebrity.

I should go back and read The Areas of My Expertise someday, since it was written before Hodgman became a minor celebrity and probably doesn't have as many digressions into his personal life, but I'm not going to rush out to pick up volume three whenever it arrives.