House of Dioxin

Haven't wanted to write (or read) much about politics lately. That'd just make me too stabby. I have no idea how/if we'll survive August. That's usually considered "the silly season" but we're already at such a fever pitch of stupid fuckwittery that it's difficult (altho sadly not impossible) to imagine how it could get much worse. As usual, Ta-Nehisi Coates gets to the point in a manner and style I can only aspire to. The wide world of sport can be a welcome distraction. But today it was all buzz and howl about a spiked story on Le Bron James hanging out in Vegas. Here's what I don't get: I kept hearing people say that this story made James look bad, showed him in a bad light, etc. And I'm just not seeing it. He's 25 years old and he's got more money than most people will ever see in their entire lives. So he's hanging out in Vegas nightclubs and he's got an entourage and bodyguards and he's making crude remarks about naked women. No crimes were committed. No puppies were kicked. When did we start require multi-millionaire athletes to live lives of ascetic purity and have a repertoire of witty bon mots?

If you're keeping track at home, food trucks are about to be over. They showed up on the second season of Top Chef Masters, the current run of Next Food Network Star, and there's a whole food truck series coming on Food Network next month. So, yeah, over. Also over, it seems, are underground restaurants, which have shown up a couple of times on No Reservations but now have also show up on NFNS. I guess what I'm saying, basically, is that I'm not buying anything as trendy if it's showing up on TV with Bob Tuschman.
Meanwhile, the NYTimes (for reasons unknown) decided to do a brief write-up on the legendary Wo Hop. Which, admittedly, isn't much different from a bunch of other oldschool Cantonese joints in Chinatown. Except it's the only one featured in a Milk & Cheese comic.

we're paying cash!

Another season of ADF has come to an end. We didn't get to as many performances this year as last. I don't know enough about dance to say that this year's festival was less impressive but I can say that there were fewer performances that I was interested in seeing. Last year we saw Pilobolus, Paul Taylor, Shen Wei, Mark Morris and H. Art Chaos. This year we saw Shen Wei, Martha Clarke and Eiko and Koma. Eiko and Koma were pretty amazing. It wasn't exactly my favorite thing ever -- it's just not a style of dance that one's really gonna warm up to. But they're important enough that I felt like I was missing something by not having ever seen them.
The Martha Clarke performance was the big letdown of the season for me. The piece (co-written w/ Alfred Uhry, author of Driving Miss Daisy) was about the Shakers. All the music was Shaker hymns, sung by the cast w/o accompaniment (as was typical of the Shakers). Basically, I thought it was excellent dance, but pretty weak theater. I felt like Uhry and Clarke had one idea about the Shakers. It wasn't a terribly deep or profound idea -- they were uptight, sexually repressed and weird -- and the piece kinda beat the audience over the head with its point/idea. Still, I enjoyed the dance elements.
This was the third time we've seen Shen Wei Dance Arts and it was not only the best work I've seen by them, it was one of the best dance programs I've ever seen. They did "Rite of Spring" which really drew on and amplified the frenetic energy of the piano version of Stravinsky's music that they used. It had an off-kilter quality (very different from the version by H. Art Chaos from last year). Also an untitled solo piece by Shen Wei, which was brilliant, puzzling and funny. The second half of the program was "Folding" and it was mind-blowing. I overheard someone in the audience saying that they were planning to leave at intermission because they'd seen "Folding" the night before. After the show ended, I could not understand how anyone could see that piece and NOT want to see it again. Even if only for the prosaic reason that there's up to 13 dancers on stage at some points and how the hell can you pay attention to what everyone is doing? To say nothing of the fact that the piece is completely fucking brilliant. Here's some thoughts from Sarah on last night's performance

What did we learn today? Well, for one thing, the AC works much better when it's actually turned on. When it's not turned on, lowering the thermostat has surprisingly little impact on the temperature in the house. No matter how many times you do it. We did get over to the farmer's market before the stupid hot portion of the day. Items purchased included: cherry tomatoes, corn, lamb's quarters, zucchini, green beans, pea shoots, chorizo. And donut muffins. Of course.
The other thing we learned today is that it's maybe not squirrels eating my tomatoes off the plants. Or maybe not JUST squirrels. There's definitely been something digging in the raised bed and it looks like it's been digging from below (tunneling?) which makes me suspect voles. I've read that sprinkling cayenne around the bed and on the plants can deter small varmints, so I'm giving that a try.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 18 jul 10)

Seu Jorge & Almaz :: Seu Jorge & Almaz
Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel :: Cibelle
African Pearls: Senegal, Echo Musical :: various
Ayobaness! the Sound of South African House :: various
African Pearls 5: Cote d'Ivoire, West African Crossroads :: various
Assume Crash Position :: Konono No. 1
Trans-Continental Hustle :: Gogol Bordello
New Brazilian Music, vol. 1 :: various
Dara Puspita 1966-1968 :: Dara Puspita
Bonjour :: Rachid Taha

this week's video feature: Konono No. 1

I swear, I think all the stupid in the universe waits until the Daily Show goes on vacation before exploding. I was discussing this w/ a friend on fbook and realized that, when it really starts to get thick, I rely on Stewart and Co. to call "bullshit" on the poo-flinging monkeys. I mean, Grom knows no one else in the media will do it.
And of course, it's not helping any that it's about a billion degrees out there (w/ infinite humidity).
I actually think the fact I've gotten to the end of the week without becoming directly homicidal is a minor miracle.

Time for a tasty beverage!

It's hot, it's muggy, it's unpleasant. In other words, summer in NC. Actually, it did cool off a bit tonight after the rain but that's mostly "cool" in a relative sense. It's certainly cooler than it was but not what any objective observer would call actually cool.
The other night, I watched Kurosawa's Sanjuro. Excellent movie, featuring a super laid back performance by Toshiro Mifune. While I was watching, it reminded my quite a bit of Yojimbo. Turns out that it was made when Toho requested a sequel to Yojimbo and some of the similarities between the two stories were accentuated when they were making Sanjuro.

Latest adventures in vanity plates: SH@DOWFAX, NOSFERAT2

Probably y'all have seen this already, since it's been making its way 'round the internets (apparently by design -- more on that later): I Write Like. The idea is you enter a block of text and the program tells you what writer it's most like. I tried it with a bunch of blog posts and got a wide range of responses but the name most often returned was David Foster Wallace. Which, judging by comments I saw around, was what a lot of bloggers got. Makes me think there's something that's common to many blog posts -- something other than writing style, like sentence length or paragraphing -- that the algorithm is matching up with Wallace. Tried it tonight with some of my old short stories and they all returned Cory Doctorow. Who, oddly enough, I never got as a result when I was entering blog posts.
Not sure what that means. But, according to Making Light, it doesn't mean much. First Teresa Nielsen Hayden reported on (and did) some testing which seemed to indicate that the algorithm maybe wasn't all it was cracked up to be. A side note: ltho amusing, I'm pretty unimpressed by the folks who entered short phrases or gibberish and then carried on like they'd discovered something. Whatever this code is supposed to be doing, I'd expect it's result to get worse as the sample size decreased. Pointing that out does not strike as particularly clever or interesting. But I digress. Next up, Jim McDonald called bullshit on the whole thing, saying that it was really just a kind of viral marketing, trying to direct traffic to some vanity publisher.
My take is that it's an interesting bit o' code. It does less than advertised, tis true. But I think it's got more going on than those Facebook "which Simpsons character are you?" quizzes (some of which are actually random, I think, at least in the sense that I gave the same exact answers to the questions and got two different returns). The fact that it's an attempt to drive traffic to a vanity press doesn't really bother me. I barely noticed the linkage -- not that it's hidden or anything, I just have a pretty strong mental filter for intrusive ads on websites.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 11 jul 10)

African Pearls 5: Cote d'Ivoire, West African Crossroads :: various
Assume Crash Position :: Konono No. 1
Dara Puspita 1966-1968 :: Dara Puspita
New Brazilian Music, vol. 1 :: various
Trans-Continental Hustle :: Gogol Bordello
Koes Bersaudara 1967 :: Koes Bersaudara
Sikelela :: Amabutho
Ouled Bambara: Portraits of Gnawa :: various
Bonjour :: Rachid Taha
Secret Agent :: Tony Allen

this week's video feature: Gogol Bordello

I think I mentioned this already but AV Club remains my recap-of-choice for Top Chef. I love Serious Eats for most things but their recaps of TC have sucked. Yes, AV Club did get it wrong on the spilled cauliflower/broccoli replacement in Kevin's dish this week. But SE had hit a level of pointless and sustained snark in the first weeks of the season that rivaled some of AV Club's recaps of the last season of Project Runway. IOW, they pissed me off so much that I stopped reading them. Decided to give them another try this week but if the evil tone has calmed down a bit (it not longer reads like it's a sisyphean effort to watch/recap the show) but it hasn't been replaced by anything much better. And for a foodgeek site their discussion of the food is pretty lacking. Plus they seemed to Have No Idea who Patrick O'Connell was or why he and the Inn at Little Washington were important. Sure a commenter finally called them on it/corrected them. At comment 18. At least the AV Club commentariat caught the cauliflower/broccoli mistake at comment 4. So anyway, if you ask me (and you didn't but I'm telling you anyway), the SE recaps are full of fail. As they say on the internets. Which, last time I checked, is where we are.