The day got off to a grammar geeky start when I encountered (about 10 min. apart) examples of the correct and the wrong!wrong!wrong! way to use the word comprise. Not too surprisingly, the correct usage was in an article from the Guardian (y'know... England: where the grammar comes from). I'm not gonna throw the blog that got it wrong under the bus. Not really what I'm here for. And, anyway, there's way too many places where you can find someone writing that something was "comprised of" some-other-thing.
Fought it out with the bamboo for a while until I was gassed and it started raining. Spun some world music over at XDU in the afternoon. We were planning to cook but the late afternoon wandered away from us so we ended up going out. Last minute dining can be a crap-shoot on a Saturday night even in the depths of summer when local population density is at its lowest. We wound up at Sandwhich in Chapel Hill. And it was awesome. We don't get to CH as much as we used to and had never, in fact, ever made it to Sandwhich's original location (we tried to go one time but it was mobbed and too cold to eat outside and we were too hungry to get takeout and bring it all the way home). They're now in the old Patio Loco space on Franklin and it's virtually unrecognizably stylish. Sarah had the risotto and I had the mussels special. So good. Served with a Thai curry style broth.
After dinner, we went down the street to Sugarland for cupcakes. Yes, they've been on Food Network (for serving gelato martinis). Yes, the overall look of the shop is tending towards the precious (cupcake bakeries in general tend to fall into this trap, I've noticed). Yes, cupcakes are horribly trendy. And, yes, Sugarland's cupcakes are more expensive than Daisy Cakes. But. while I still slightly prefer Daisy Cakes, they're not open at 9pm. And Sugarland, based on the four flavors (pumpkin chocolate chip, red velvet, Boston cream pie, and dulce de leche) I've tried, makes a damn fine cupcake.

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 25 jul 10)

Ayobaness! the Sound of South African House :: various
Seu Jorge & Almaz :: Seu Jorge & Almaz
Dunya :: Bibi Tanga & the Selenites
Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel :: Cibelle
Unheard Ofs and Forgotten Abouts :: various
African Pearls: Senegal, Echo Musical :: various
King Khan: Songs from the Films of Shahrukh Khan :: various
Dara Puspita 1966-1968 :: Dara Puspita
African Pearls 5: Cote d'Ivoire, West African Crossroads :: various
Trans-Continental Hustle :: Gogol Bordello

this week's video feature: Seu Jorge

From the "didn't expect THAT" dept (#1): heard an ad for tonight's premiere of Project Runway on sports radio this AM. I mean, I'm sure that the audiences for each are more diverse than the stereotypes would have you believe. Hell, I'm in the audience for each. I guess I'm surprised that there's enough overlap to make it worth Lifetime spending some of its ad budget on ESPN radio.
From the "didn't expect THAT" dept (#2): Had to go to DMV this morning. Well, technically I could have gone anytime for almost the last six months but I had to get my license renewed by next week and this was the day I was able to get time off. I figured it would take hours and scheduled myself for an 11am start time. Got to DMV at 7.50, ten minutes before the office opened. I was the 8th person in line. Even brought a book so I'd have something to read while I was waiting. They opened the doors, I got my number, got called, took the vision and road sign recognition tests, paid my money, got my picture taken and headed on my way with temporary authorization in hand. Walked out the door at 8.25. As they say, holy flurking shnit. Arriving early is clearly the way to go.
The other thing I learned today was that, in one small way, the DMV office is like a casino. No clocks to be seen anywhere. My guess is they don't want to make it easy for you to realize just how long you've been waiting. Seeing how packed the waiting area was when I left, if you get there any time past 8am, there's a pretty good chance you'll be waiting.

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

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

Excellent article by Jay Rayner on his following a cow from farm to slaughterhouse to butcher shop to table. Will probably not convert any vegetarians. Nor was it intended to. Nor should it. But I found it thoughtful and well written. I also agree with his point that people shouldn't be forced to directly confront the "realities of meat eating." For one, I don't think people should be forced to do things, in general. Also, I think it's completely possible to understand that implications of one's carnivorous choices without having to see it in person. Animals are killed so we can eat meat. Meat does not come from plastic packages or vats or wherever. I do think it's valid to take someone's opinions about meat consumpltion less seriously if they shy away from acknowledging the basic realities. I'm not sure if that's a reasonable position but I'm still sifting through what I think.

What better way to wrap up the week than with an inspirational message from one of my culinary role models.

bort bort bort

XDU wrrld music top 10 (week ending 4 jul 10)

Dara Puspita 1966-1968 :: Dara Puspita
Assume Crash Position :: Konono No. 1
Trans-Continental Hustle :: Gogol Bordello
African Pearls 5: Cote d'Ivoire, West African Crossroads :: various
Ouled Bambara: Portraits of Gnawa :: various
Bonjour :: Rachid Taha
New Brazilian Music, vol. 1 :: various
Romancero :: La Bien Querida
Secret Agent :: Tony Allen
Blue Eyed Black Boy :: Balkan Beat Box

this week's video feature: Tony Allen

for saying it's a lovely day

that's all

Found this via Sullivan and it's a pithy little rant and also, I think, gets at an uncomfortable truth about some of the wingnuttier sections of the wingnut-o-sphere. Quote which sums it up: "no one is going to vote against Barack Obama for re-election because he doesn't have the experience to be president." I think he's onto something there. It's one of the things that's got the volume level cranked up so high. There's this subgroup of people that, on a certain level, just cannot process the fact that Barack Obama ran for office, won the nomination, beat McCain/Palin and is now the President. I guess it's not surprising, what with huge media empires built on repeating the lie that this is a center-right nation, permanent Republican majority (blah blah whatever). Depressing, but not surprising.

In political comedy news that doesn't have anything to do with Michael Steele, go check out Sharron Angle's Underground Bunker. Apparently the Nevada Democratic Party noticed that Angle, who is running against Harry Reid, had taken down the website she had up during the Republican primary and replaced it w/ a more "moderate" version for the general election. So they reposted the whole thing. Angle is claiming copyright infringement and has sent out C&D notices. More details from TPM here. And, here's Angle's original website which Nevada Dems have also put back online, after stripping out some contact info. But, really, go check out the Underground Bunker. It's not as good as Colbert's Doom Bunker rip on Glenn Beck but it's pretty damn good for a bunch of Democratic party weasels. And who knows how long it'll actually be online.

Was reminded again today that it's much easier to stake up tomato plants if you do it when they're small. As opposed to waiting until they're big and sprawling all over the garden. Still I think I did an okay job with most of them. And I gotta say for as much as we've neglected them the last month, there are a ton of tomatoes out there. Now the race is on to see if we get to eat them or if the squirrel or rabbit or whatever the hell it is out there will get 'em first. While I was staking them up this afternoon I saw an almost ripe tomato on the ground about 5 feet from the raised bed. I suppose it might have fallen off while I was messing with the stakes or with the soaker hose. But there were obvious teeth marks on it so even if the varmint didn't pull it off the vine, it was definitely trying to eat it. I tried to impress on our dog Jane that she needs to do a better job of running off critters that are trying to mess with my tomato plants. But I don't think she was really grasping the concept.

Hope all of y'all had an enjoyable 4th. We did not engage in the main American pastime of blowin' shit up (or the closely related "watching other people blow shit up") instead opting for the less explosive grilling of cheeseburgers on ye olde Weber. After some misadventures caused by poor planning that involved two separate trips to two separate grocery stores by two separate people to secure all the necessary components. But in the end burgers were grilled and enjoyed. I kicked off the evening with an oh-so-veddy-British gin & tonic and then declared my freedom from colonial rule by switching to local microbrews. Now we're watching 1776. Which I seem never to have mentioned is a favorite of mine. Not so much cos it's a great movie but because it was the first musical I ever saw on Broadway. One of the advantages of having grown up in NYC is that I got to take school trips to see Broadway shows. Well, only twice (probably would've been more if I'd ended up being a theater geek instead of a band/orchestra geek) but still not too shabby. I had the Playbill from that show kicking around my folks' house for a long time but I'm pretty sure it got tossed in some mad frenzy of cleaning at some point over the decades.
One thing which I first noticed last year when TCM showed 1776 with the restored footage of "Cool Considerate Men" (apparently cut from the movie at the request of Nixon) is that the number (which I'd forgotten about after multiple viewings of the movie had gotten in the way of my memories of the play) is anachronistically using the right/left political spectrum. Dickinson and his boys sing that they're "to the right, ever to the right, never to the left." But the idea of left and right as we understand it today is generally thought to have come from the French Revolution. Or about 13 years after the movie takes place. Oh well. The number is rather obviously more about the political realities of the 1960s than the 1770s. But if it's not a great song, it is a pretty good number with all the minuet-ing and then everyone driving off in horse drawn carriages waving walking sticks in the air.

As we get ready to roll into 4th of July weekend, let me pause to salute one of the great American cuisines, barbecue. Here's a nice slideshow from Serious Eats done at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party earlier this year of pitmasters giving their definition of 'cue. Including Ed Mitchell from the Pit in Raleigh.
Might try to do some smoking sometime over the weekend. Tonight I just grilled some lamb burgers. Turned out okay. I think I overworked the meat a bit so the burgers weren't as fall apart as I prefer in a lamb burger. But they were still pretty juicy. Added a bit of mint, oregano and sumac to the mix but probably could've used a bit more. My goal for a lamb burger is always to try and get close to the Burger Bar in Vegas (last time we were there, sadly, they'd taken it off the menu). Not there yet so the quest continues.