Displacement Via Movies
This was a tough week, as you know if you’ve been over at End O’ The World. I’ve been trying to hide from my illness and from some of the draining hard work I’m facing to resurrect my professional life in some functional fashion. Although I must admit, looking back on it now, that displacing via writing worked pretty damn well through the acutely painful darkness of the worst of the treatment. I wrote and published two articles in international-level journals, both opinion pieces on global sustainability. So I got that goin’ for me.
Anyway. This week I didn’t write (much). I watched movies late at night.
First up: Predators. This is the one released a year or so ago, about the group of earthly hard-asses kidnapped and airdropped into the Most Dangerous Game style hunting preserve on the alien planet. Where the predators (same ones as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover Predator 1 and 2 respectively, also the entertaining Aliens vs. Predators about the Antarctic predator hunting theme park, and the somewhat more strained A vs. P 2 about the small town in Colorado finding itself a battle ground between alien species). Anyway. In Predators, you got your World War 2 multiethnic infantry squad, in this case represented by a Hispanic guy from the Mexican drug cartels, an African killer for hire, a Russian special forces guy from Chechnya, a Yakuza assassin, etc. Except for the American mercenary and U.N. shock troop lady, they’re all cannon fodder. Suffice to say the plot is credible, requiring not too much suspension of disbelief, the photography is great, dialog at least marginally acceptable. Very good of its kind—Definitely Worth a Look.
Next, Battle Los Angeles. I’ve seen dismal reviews of this on the web. I’m not sure what the griping is about. Shot mostly from a first-person shooter perspective, with lots of shaky camera realism in the style of Generation Kill and Restrepo, it’s got surprisingly strong character study wrapped up in a very well paced shoot-em-up space opera. No Household Should Be Without.
Then there’s self-consciously gory B movie Bitch Slap. Really, for a low-budget cult-audience targeted late night cable rerun bound film, it’s pretty effective. Pretends to be a repository of sex, drugs, and violence. In reality, the sex is low key and clothed, the drug use is minimal, and the violence, which is fairly extreme, is sufficiently cartoonish to blunt disgust. Got a nice bit of plot twist at the end. Not for all of you. Well, really, not for most of you. Well, in fact, for a small minority of you. Hell, realistically, for Lance. But for Lance, and maybe Eric, it Holds Up Pretty Well.
Finally, and only in theaters at the moment, there’s Cowboys and Aliens. Colin, Jesse and I saw a matinee today. This one definitely delivers. Even Harrison Ford, as one of several villains-who-learn-their-lesson, does a credible job. Plot is more than adequate, visuals are great. And the sound track is absolutely killer. I gotta find a copy. This movie is Highly Recommended—No Household Should Be Without.
Fresh material up across the weblog empire. Please surf on over to http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for a cancer melodrama update, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for a festive seafood dinner, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ for a new essay on Armed Conflict and the Environment. Most of all, remember I love you all, and I’m grateful that you’re taking the time to read this stuff. Thanks!
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
All Dressed Up With No Place to Go
As Meat Loaf put it in, I think, the last cut on Bat Out of Hell. Actually, I look so awful at this point that you could dress me up all the hell you want and it wouldn’t help. I’d still look like a cross between a six-foot sun dried tomato and an undernourished Gypsy guitar slinger.
Anyway. What is your dream double feature? Hypothetically, of course. Let’s say, you’ve got the house to yourself on a Saturday night and you feel like watching an evening’s worth of movies. What titles would you choose to watch back-to-back?
Back when my folks first got cable for the TV in the cottage in Pompton Lakes New Jersey, various movie channels ran suites of mostly B-level stuff pretty much around the clock. I got hooked on one combination that used to come up pretty frequently: Rollerball (the original, with James Caan and John Houseman) followed by Death Race 2000 (the original with Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine). Awesome battle between low-budget, but well-plotted and surprisingly philosophical sci fi adventure films.
Saturday night I was exhausted and cranky (see why at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/). Knew I was gonna have trouble sleeping. So Molly and I slipped out to Best Buy on the way to the grocery store. Picked up Salt with Angelina Jolie and The King’s Speech. But the real prize was a made-to-be double header of Predators (the new one where they’re kidnapped to a big game park planet in a slight twist on Richard Connell’s short story Most Dangerous Game) and Battle Los Angeles. Jesse, Colin and I had seen Predators in the theater, and I remember it being pretty sucky. I don’t know what was wrong with me. It’s a great cheesy sci fi thriller, no questions asked. As is Battle Los Angeles. Both have a surprising depth of plot and decent character development, with Battle LA taking the character prize in the head-to-head.
But hell, you don’t watch movies like this for the subtlety of the characters, the acting, the motivation, or even the story line. You watch it for the dark battle scenes of aliens of various shapes, sizes and threat levels get gunned down by the good guys from Spaceship Earth.
And for that purpose, this double feature is right up there with the best. Move over, Stallone and Caan. New dogs are movin’ in.
Thanks for stoppin’ by. I have new material up at all 4 blog sites this week, so don’t miss http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . See y’all next week, same time, same blog stations!!!
Anyway. What is your dream double feature? Hypothetically, of course. Let’s say, you’ve got the house to yourself on a Saturday night and you feel like watching an evening’s worth of movies. What titles would you choose to watch back-to-back?
Back when my folks first got cable for the TV in the cottage in Pompton Lakes New Jersey, various movie channels ran suites of mostly B-level stuff pretty much around the clock. I got hooked on one combination that used to come up pretty frequently: Rollerball (the original, with James Caan and John Houseman) followed by Death Race 2000 (the original with Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine). Awesome battle between low-budget, but well-plotted and surprisingly philosophical sci fi adventure films.
Saturday night I was exhausted and cranky (see why at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/). Knew I was gonna have trouble sleeping. So Molly and I slipped out to Best Buy on the way to the grocery store. Picked up Salt with Angelina Jolie and The King’s Speech. But the real prize was a made-to-be double header of Predators (the new one where they’re kidnapped to a big game park planet in a slight twist on Richard Connell’s short story Most Dangerous Game) and Battle Los Angeles. Jesse, Colin and I had seen Predators in the theater, and I remember it being pretty sucky. I don’t know what was wrong with me. It’s a great cheesy sci fi thriller, no questions asked. As is Battle Los Angeles. Both have a surprising depth of plot and decent character development, with Battle LA taking the character prize in the head-to-head.
But hell, you don’t watch movies like this for the subtlety of the characters, the acting, the motivation, or even the story line. You watch it for the dark battle scenes of aliens of various shapes, sizes and threat levels get gunned down by the good guys from Spaceship Earth.
And for that purpose, this double feature is right up there with the best. Move over, Stallone and Caan. New dogs are movin’ in.
Thanks for stoppin’ by. I have new material up at all 4 blog sites this week, so don’t miss http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . See y’all next week, same time, same blog stations!!!
Sunday, July 17, 2011
The CD is Dead
Long live the CD. My kids know I’m not going to leave them much of an inheritance, but I AM going to leave them with a dynamite digital music collection. The only problem with this is that music is now truly digital and doesn’t mess around with hard copies any more. CD shops around the world are closing, consolidating to a few big centers that are desperately trying to find other items to purvey. I myself tend to purchase downloads form Amazon, particularly for stuff that is quirky. I recently bought large collections of T Rex radio appearances and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates studio output. These are sloppy, some of the tracks are poor audio quality, but the music is awesome and the download format costs half or less of what it would take to get it on CD. And the Johnny Kidd stuff isn’t even available at the moment on CD. So, I’m thinkin’ it’s time to get those last few visits to the Princeton Record Exchange in, as it may not be there much longer.
Fortunately, there is still some stuff that is worth obtaining in permanent form. When the Rolling Stones recorded in Jamaica, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, they built up a big stock of relationships with local music scenes. Recently, Keith Richards compiled a big stack of tapes from time in Jamaica, and released a very cool album of pre-reggae spirituals and folk songs, sung by what seems to be a bar full of drunken locals, half of whom stopped by after church and half of whom came straight from the soccer pitch.
Called Wingless Angels, Amazon offers the 2 disk collection at a good price. It is, in fact, priceless, and so worth buying in hard format. No family should be without!
This week, I managed to get all 4 weblogs up with new material. Goal is to keep it all going weekly for the foreseeable future. If you have time, please visit http://docviper.livejournal.com/, http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Thanks for stopping by!
Fortunately, there is still some stuff that is worth obtaining in permanent form. When the Rolling Stones recorded in Jamaica, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, they built up a big stock of relationships with local music scenes. Recently, Keith Richards compiled a big stack of tapes from time in Jamaica, and released a very cool album of pre-reggae spirituals and folk songs, sung by what seems to be a bar full of drunken locals, half of whom stopped by after church and half of whom came straight from the soccer pitch.
Called Wingless Angels, Amazon offers the 2 disk collection at a good price. It is, in fact, priceless, and so worth buying in hard format. No family should be without!
This week, I managed to get all 4 weblogs up with new material. Goal is to keep it all going weekly for the foreseeable future. If you have time, please visit http://docviper.livejournal.com/, http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Thanks for stopping by!
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Sweet but Torturous
When I was a kid, my folks had a hefty reprint copy of Prosper Montagne’s Larousse Gastronomique on the bookshelves. I’m sure, given how long it sat there, that it was the first English language edition from 1961. It was pretty wacky for a cookbook. Nominally an encyclopedia of French cuisine, it actually was a massive catalog of the terminally fussy school of cooking that can only be considered baroque. Occasionally the Larousse found itself on the hamper in front of the toilet, doing its rotation (along with Mad magazine paperbacks, field guides to various flora and fauna, and high school poetry readers) in the family bathroom library.
Larousse wasn’t much for fundamentals. Rather, it assumed you had abundant sous chefs and commis, spent full time in a commercially-equipped kitchen, and could throw down such basics as glace de viands, hollandaise sauce, fish quenelles, veal forcemeat, and puff pastry in your sleep. The recipes ran to long lists of stuffed eggs, and not yer standard devileds, either. More like “Oeufs Farci a la Charles DeGaulle”, reading along the lines of “mash 2 salted anchovies soaked and deboned, 25 grams of mushroom duxelles prepared with butter, leaks and forest fungus, 50 grams of foie gras poached in fino sherry and butter with 20 grams of finely minced black truffle, the yolks of 6 hard-cooked eggs, fleur de sel, freshly cracked Malabar black pepper, freshly prepared quatre epices, and 10 ml of 40 year old artisanal Calvados. Stuff the egg whites with this mixture, place each egg in a previously cleaned and prepared artichoke heart, coast each with freshly prepared veal gelatin, place each artichoke and egg assembly in a nest of deep fried shredded potatoes, place each potato nest on a generous spoonful of previously prepared spinach made with heavy cream and nutmeg, coat the entire piece in veal gelatin, chill. Serve with Montrachet 1929 using thousand franc notes as napkin holders.”
You get the picture. Fun stuff to daydream about, not much for day-to-day assistance in the weeknight-gotta-get-dinner-ready-by-7 kitchen.
A client and good friend in Texas sent me a 5 volume cookbook set called “Modernist Cuisine”. Comes in its own custom-made Plexiglas binder, weighs right around 25 kilos total. Fantastic. You might have heard of these guys, they’re all the rage in high end (VERY high end) cooking circles. About as far as you can get from Alice Waters’ “fresh and simple”, this one starts with routinely cooking sous vide (slow poaching at low temperatures in vacuum packed pouches) to decorative foams made from guar gum and gum Arabic, to odd protein glues that can re-assemble deboned fish, fowl, and mammals.
The hefty set of Modernist Cuisine.
Some of this stuff, entertaining as it is, is beyond the week night meal category (“Beef Short Ribs”: smoke for 7 hours, vacuum seal and cook sous vide at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for 72 hours). However, a hell of a lot of it made to whet your experimental appetite (did I mention that these guys open their flagship restaurant only 6 months a year so they can move to their “research laboratory” for the other 6 months a year to develop new wackiness?). Hay-Smoked Chicken Breast, for example. After brining (which I do NOT recommend under any circumstances for poultry, since it makes them come out wet and slimy), you “lay hay in bottom of pan, cover with more hay, light with blow torch, when hay has burned down, remove chicken skin and serve”.
It’s gonna take me years to get through playing with these babies. With a little luck, I’ll be working on one chapter or another next time you’re around to have dinner with us!
Thanks for stopping by. New material up at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , I’m still working on getting new stuff up over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com . But I’m getting there. They’ll all be updated within a couple days. Thanks again!
When I was a kid, my folks had a hefty reprint copy of Prosper Montagne’s Larousse Gastronomique on the bookshelves. I’m sure, given how long it sat there, that it was the first English language edition from 1961. It was pretty wacky for a cookbook. Nominally an encyclopedia of French cuisine, it actually was a massive catalog of the terminally fussy school of cooking that can only be considered baroque. Occasionally the Larousse found itself on the hamper in front of the toilet, doing its rotation (along with Mad magazine paperbacks, field guides to various flora and fauna, and high school poetry readers) in the family bathroom library.
Larousse wasn’t much for fundamentals. Rather, it assumed you had abundant sous chefs and commis, spent full time in a commercially-equipped kitchen, and could throw down such basics as glace de viands, hollandaise sauce, fish quenelles, veal forcemeat, and puff pastry in your sleep. The recipes ran to long lists of stuffed eggs, and not yer standard devileds, either. More like “Oeufs Farci a la Charles DeGaulle”, reading along the lines of “mash 2 salted anchovies soaked and deboned, 25 grams of mushroom duxelles prepared with butter, leaks and forest fungus, 50 grams of foie gras poached in fino sherry and butter with 20 grams of finely minced black truffle, the yolks of 6 hard-cooked eggs, fleur de sel, freshly cracked Malabar black pepper, freshly prepared quatre epices, and 10 ml of 40 year old artisanal Calvados. Stuff the egg whites with this mixture, place each egg in a previously cleaned and prepared artichoke heart, coast each with freshly prepared veal gelatin, place each artichoke and egg assembly in a nest of deep fried shredded potatoes, place each potato nest on a generous spoonful of previously prepared spinach made with heavy cream and nutmeg, coat the entire piece in veal gelatin, chill. Serve with Montrachet 1929 using thousand franc notes as napkin holders.”
You get the picture. Fun stuff to daydream about, not much for day-to-day assistance in the weeknight-gotta-get-dinner-ready-by-7 kitchen.
A client and good friend in Texas sent me a 5 volume cookbook set called “Modernist Cuisine”. Comes in its own custom-made Plexiglas binder, weighs right around 25 kilos total. Fantastic. You might have heard of these guys, they’re all the rage in high end (VERY high end) cooking circles. About as far as you can get from Alice Waters’ “fresh and simple”, this one starts with routinely cooking sous vide (slow poaching at low temperatures in vacuum packed pouches) to decorative foams made from guar gum and gum Arabic, to odd protein glues that can re-assemble deboned fish, fowl, and mammals.
The hefty set of Modernist Cuisine.
Some of this stuff, entertaining as it is, is beyond the week night meal category (“Beef Short Ribs”: smoke for 7 hours, vacuum seal and cook sous vide at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for 72 hours). However, a hell of a lot of it made to whet your experimental appetite (did I mention that these guys open their flagship restaurant only 6 months a year so they can move to their “research laboratory” for the other 6 months a year to develop new wackiness?). Hay-Smoked Chicken Breast, for example. After brining (which I do NOT recommend under any circumstances for poultry, since it makes them come out wet and slimy), you “lay hay in bottom of pan, cover with more hay, light with blow torch, when hay has burned down, remove chicken skin and serve”.
It’s gonna take me years to get through playing with these babies. With a little luck, I’ll be working on one chapter or another next time you’re around to have dinner with us!
Thanks for stopping by. New material up at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , I’m still working on getting new stuff up over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com . But I’m getting there. They’ll all be updated within a couple days. Thanks again!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
