January 2008 Archives

I found this note recently on the sidewalk on my way to the 190th Street station of the A train.

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite Thai dish is pad see ew, and the idea had been bouncing around my head that I should make my own, when I serendipitously came across a tempting recipe, so I set off for Chinatown after work today for the ingredients and implements.

First stop, the tiny but well-stocked Bangkok Center Grocery, which specializes in food from Thailand but also other parts of Asia. I purchased sesame oil from Japan, rice vinegar from Taiwan, black soy sauce and dry rice noodles from Thailand, and my favorite, hailing from Bangkok itself, Squid brand fish sauce, the large bottle illustrated with a vibrant yellow squid but actually made with anchovy extract, sugar and salt. (“Salt crystals may appear naturally in high quality fish sauce,” notes the label. “These salt crystals are harmless.”)

By coincidence, when I’d told a coworker of mine earlier today where I was headed after work, he revealed he was preparing a highfalutin buffalo wing recipe for a Super Bowl party and was having trouble finding sriracha, a popular Thai garlic-chili red sauce. So as a favor, I picked him up a bottle of Thai-authentic Sriraka Panich brand. (“I like that the word ‘panic’ appears in the name of a hot sauce,” he told me later.) If I hadn’t boned-up on sriracha at Wikipedia beforehand, I’d have mistakenly instead bought the best-selling U.S. brand, Huy Fong, which is made here, doped with preservatives and apparently considered ghetto-fabulous by Thai people. After ringing-up my purchases, the clerk individually wrapped my bottles in pages from a Thai newspaper.

A short walk up Mulberry Street and I hit the Asian food and houseware emporium New Kam Man (200 Canal St.), where I’ve shopped before for tea and quirky mugs. It’s a far less touristy and more practical version of Pearl River. Upstairs is dedicated to food, mostly packaged goods, although if you’re in the mood for whole dried shark fin, there are several large glass apothecary jars, nestled on a high shelf, filled with this cartilaginous treat.

Here I bought the recipe-recommended brand of oyster sauce I couldn’t find at Bangkok Center, Lee Kum Kee. I’d have chosen a bottle of this regardless. On its label, a smiling Chinese mother and son row a canoe across a lake, only the boat also contains a small bounty of oysters, each the size of a Radio Flyer wagon. On each side of this scene, a posse of uncaught giant oysters rears from the water, shells parted as if to shriek, “You’ll never make it to shore alive!”

I also bought a cylindrical tin of Roland brand grapeseed oil hailing from France. I thought the mention of this oil of which I’d never heard was a “foodie” pretension of my recipe until I did some research and learned that the oil has a high smoke point and little aroma which makes it a prime candidate for hot wok action.

Which brings me to my final purchase, a wok, which I selected from the wok aisle downstairs at New Kam Man in the midst of all flatware, glassware and teapots. I selected a no-brand steel model with sturdy handles, deep and measuring about 14" across, for a mere $10.50. While I was down there, I grabbed a box of five pairs of lacquered wood chopsticks in vibrant colors and cheesy geisha illustrations for $4.95.

Now that I’m prepared for pad see ew, other than buying an egg, garlic, Chinese broccoli and pork loin, which can be more easily procured uptown, you should be reading soon how the recipe unfolds. Excitement!

I rely of course on my sense of sight (and to a lesser yet still vital degree, smell) when navigating the cars of the New York City subway system, but I didn’t realize to what degree I relied on hearing until today.

My new headphones arrived from J&R, Panasonic RP-HTX7PP-C retro-style monitor headphones (cream-colored for extra retro-ness), kind of like the ones we kids of the ’80s wore back then to listen to educational filmstrips or language lab. They’re snug and sound-blocking, though not technically noise-cancelling.

Anyway, at the 168th Street stop of the A train, a woman rose to exit before the train had fully stopped, so I moved quickly to take her seat, didn’t hear the train’s lurching brake into the station, lost my balance and flopped gently into the lap of a random young lady in a red wool coat, who coincidentally also had on earmuff-style headphones.

When I talk while wearing these headphones, it sounds to me as if I’m under water, so I indicated via facial expression and hand gestures that I was extremely apologetic and wasn’t trying to cop a feel or anything. If it helps you to imagine the scene—and it certainly does for me—the song playing on my iPod when this all went down was Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever.”

This recipe, from the tragically designed recipe site Cooks.com, turned out a simple, tasty dozen of muffins, though they were a tad on the dry side: maybe next time I’ll add more oil or a “moisturizer” such as applesauce or sour cream.

Tonight I played Settlers of Catan, a German game of world domination that doesn’t involve genocide, with Andie, Katie, Eric, Megan, Vincent, Kelly and Joe. I enjoyed it. I didn’t think I would but I did. Probably because you can say things in earnest like, “Have you got wood for sheep?” And now that I know the rules, sort of, I look forward to one day kicking Andie’s ass.

I hate to vex you, because I know you love Daniel Day-Lewis, but I wasn’t a big fan of There Will Be Blood.

I wanted to like it. I mean, it wasn’t horrible: the period set design and costumes, cinematography and special effects are all top-drawer. And Day-Lewis is perfect as a paranoid monomaniac. But he stays that way, with few surprises and a foretold conclusion; in the absence of a branched storyline, he is the movie, a sputtering, mustachioed black hole for plot and character development. Most of the “pivotal scenes,” especially those between Day-Lewis and the smirking, sphere-headed young preacher Paul Dano, are so top-heavy with overacting, it was like Jack Nicholson barking “You can’t handle the truth” at me over and over again. There was much presumably unintended laughter from the audience.

Also, I remain undecided whether Jonny Greenwood’s often discordant, glissando-rich score is a good thing and this from a guy who roots for Radiohead and its associated endeavors. It didn’t fit at times, while other times it did. Sometimes I didn’t notice it and other times it was equal parts hornets and air-raid sirens in my head. I’m going to lean toward the Philip Glass end of my Musical Score Love Scale and claim that I didn’t like it, slightly.

I’m also going to let you in on a little secret: I am not a big Paul Thomas Anderson fan, as a writer or as a director. Hot air and half-baked new-age sentiment bloat his screenplays, his movies and he himself. At least There Will Be Blood has an irredeemable, vengeful, near-satanic oilman up front, which will hold my interest longer than Adam Sandler buying pudding. (And with Day-Lewis as I described, is the tale of Daniel Plainview an allegory of our president, as some reviewers have theorized? I guess with some creative leaps of interpretation it is. But leaps like those land inevitably in college-essay territory, wherein we have explicated Moby-Dick as a stand-in for slavery, Manifest Destiny or penis envy.)

I’d call the puffy enterprise a moderately good movie inflated by marketing as Oscar Bait. My post-show giddiness was nowhere near the levels of critical acclaim this thing’s been garnering. Maybe I’m missing something. Let me know what you think if you’ve seen it. I, too, may be puffed up by marketing.

S.

We were seated with another table of four at Biteclub and while they weren’t rude, they were definitely not of the same mindset or tax bracket. The thing that put me over the edge was when one of them said, “You Americans and your cupcakes.” Uh, fuck you, buddy. I love cupcakes. Suck my left one.

Jason

What does that even mean, “You Americans and your cupcakes”? What nationality were these people? Cupcakes are flour and frosting, sprinkled with the souls of saints, a portable dessert proving American ingenuity, if anything. Great balls of Thomas Edison, that’d anger me, too, to hear my country and my cake disrespected in the same sentence.

“There are two opportunities to burn yourself tonight,” Waldy Malouf said. “This is one of them.”

The Beacon Restaurant chef was referring to the miniature cast-iron skillets he’d placed before our table of six, each piping-hot pan filled with a bed of rock salt on which sat two oysters on the half-shell, accented with a delicious mignonette and shallot-herb butter sauce Malouf encouraged us to slurp (but only once it had cooled). The second opportunity for injury arrived later in the evening when we each placed rectangular slices of raw Kobe beef atop smooth stones that had been heated to the temperature of the sun. We ate 10 other courses, none of them as hot but all as delicious, as part of Beacon’s Kitchen Counter session.

Upper-crust restaurants commonly pull stunts like this now, exercising various levels of secrecy, but this was the first I’d been to. Kitchen Counter is an exclusive, reservation-only little get-together, for which six people get to sit at a long, narrow, freestanding wooden table in a special section near the back of the restaurant, directly in front of the open kitchen. Chef Malouf, who’s sharpened his knives and culinary skills at classic Manhattan hotspots like the Rainbow Room, the St. Regis and the Four Seasons, then shepherds the party through a two-hour dinner that features wine pairings with each course and a few surprises, explaining each dish and answering any questions.

Malouf seems like a cool guy. He resembles a shorter, ST:TNG-era Jonathan Frakes and he talks like Rocky, only with diction. (I swear, it’s the same tune, cadence and depth.) Unlike brethren chefs with Napoleon complexes, he joked that he compensates for his short stature only by hiring staff 6' and taller, women included.

After our group had been introduced and served near the bar with a fried lobster-tarragon amuse-bouche and a Kir Royal-like drink seeded with grains of dry ice, so that it bubbled and steamed from the flute like a magic potion, the hostess escorted us to the table in the back, where Malouf shook my hand and no one else’s; he said he appreciated me taking the empty sixth seat on short notice.

In typical New York City exclusive restaurant fashion, one must reserve a spot for the Kitchen Counter months in advance. When I called Beacon yesterday, a woman named Dalia was able to accommodate my attendance tonight because the sixth member of the other five people in my group, none of whom I knew, had to bail at the last moment. Those three gentlemen and two ladies, each three to five years younger than I, had cherubic complexions and made a lot more money than I do. They weren’t rude but I didn’t talk to them much because they had their own group dynamic, featuring discussions about their offices, their secretaries, the artwork in their offices, their homes in Connecticut and the best lodges at Stowe. Although it pleased me to hear that they’d been waiting since October 2007 for their reservation confirmation, one of the fun things about outings like this is potentially meeting new people; maybe next time for that.

In addition to the oysters, early in the meal we were each served a tiny rectangle of wild mushroom pizza, the lamest and most incongruous course on our private menu. These two dishes are the only ones that appear on Beacon’s regular menu. Everything else, said Malouf, is a rare menu special or an exclusive to the Kitchen Counter.

Among the more adventurous dishes, I ate the moistest fish I’ve ever laid lips on, wild bass cooked in a corn husk with lemon and fennel.

The gentlemen ate squab, served rare and garnished with huckleberry jam, salsify and Brussels sprouts, “to evoke the season,” said Malouf, with mock pretension. At first, the ladies didn’t realize the dish was pigeon and when they did, they had visions of the Washington Square Park variety spit-roasted by bums over a trashcan fire. They passed. I should have told them that if a purebred squab met a city pigeon, he’d probably bore it to death cooing about his sheltered upbringing, his Whole Foods diet, his home in Connecticut, the best lodges to roost upon in Stowe, etc.

We had pâté, paired with a strange and delicious combination of braised short ribs, grits and acorn squash, although I remain suspicious of pâté; it will be forever Fancy Feast to me and you cannot convince me otherwise that the French have been playing upon us a hearty prank all these years.

I ate a watermelon radish, a mutant vegetable that didn’t appear on our menu and which looked to have been plucked from the cartoon soil of Super Mario World.

I ate scallops, squash-mascarpone ravioli and marrow from the trough of a long, bisected bone. (I wasn’t a total savage; I spread it on the provided flat-leaf toast.)

We finished with a two-course dessert, comprised of a pear-grapefruit sorbet, a chocolate soufflé with smoked vanilla ice cream, and a cool Australian muscat that tasted to have been distilled from the smiles of supermodels. My soul writhed around my body in satisfaction.

Throughout the dozen dishes and a didn’t-even-notice overtime of 2.5 hours, I enjoyed watching Malouf and his staff hustle about. It was satisfying to view each of our courses prepared right before they were served, directly in front of us, and taking precedence over all other orders in the kitchen—and because it’s Restaurant Week, the place was busy. The kitchen itself at Beacon arcs directly above the Kitchen Counter table. At times, standing in the bright light at the arc’s apex, Malouf resembled a symphonic conductor, which is a kitchen cliché, but also in this case true. I heard him drop only one F-bomb, over an incorrectly prepared dish, then he moved on. He’s not one to linger. He did ten things at once, including entertaining us, and he revealed that he’d like to enact the Kitchen Counter twice a week, except that his staff would kill him, then possibly cook him in a cassoulet, which he would then critique from beyond the grave. (He didn’t actually mention a cassoulet, but I imagine it to be true.)

The Kitchen Counter at Beacon Restaurant

• 25 W. 56th St. (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues)
• (212) 332-0519
• Meal 4 of 52: 12-course dinner, including tax, drinks and 20% gratuity ($109).

Pax, the breakfast/lunch chain store off the lobby of my office building, is expensive and its morning lines long, but I’m lazy and want a muffin and a hazelnut coffee, so I frequent the place anyway. Usually it’s a busy but orderly scene. This morning, however, the woman at the front of the line was complaining about the price of her bagel with egg whites and tomato.

It was something insanely expensive, $8, I think, partly because it was an off-menu item and partly because this is one of the most costly cities in the country. She insisted on continuing her complaint (“It’s a bagel with egg whites and tomato. Eight dollars? That’s insane!”). I don’t know what she expected them to do—give her a discount because she deserved it?

No, instead, the manager strode over briskly, literally snatched the order away from her and said, “If you don’t want it, you can leave. You’re holding up the line.” She sputtered something about attitude and stormed out. The line shuffled forward as if nothing had happened. In the silence, I felt like chirping, “Ya know, in Latin, pax means...” but I didn’t want my muffin seized.

With the wind chill factored in, the temperature in Chicago today hovered around zero. I’ve been to the city often on business but never before today in the winter. Dozens of variants of signs like the one in my photo, warning pedestrians of ice falling from the skyscrapers, are scattered about on most of the sidewalk corners downtown.

I don’t recall seeing signs like these in New York. Are Gotham’s buildings better designed to prevent icy accumulation or does the city just not care?

A cabbie here in Chicago today swore to me that every year, at least one person is fatally trepanned by a falling icicle. What a way to go.

A 30-seat Williamsburg outpost of Dumont proper, Dumont Burger has an comparatively small menu, but features the two post popular Dumont dishes: the burger and the mac-and-cheese. Beth tried the former and I tried the latter and we’d proclaim each of them delicious. The mac was sadly made with radiatore pasta (the spiral-ly kind) and not the proper elbows, but happily made with cubes of bacon, and both cheddar and Gruyere cheese. To drink, I had a Czech lager that the bartender recommended and the name of which I now forget, but it was dark and delicious and served as her answer to my frequent request, when I don’t see the familiar face of Guinness, of “Give me the darkest beer you have on tap.” It was cold in that place, with the constant coming and going and the door of the curtain insufficient to prevent arctic gusts of wind from entering and eddying around.

DuMont Burger

• 314 Bedford Ave. (between South First and South Second Streets), Brooklyn
• (718) 384-6128
• Meal 3 of 52: mac & cheese ($11) and a beer.

S.

My comp is fucked. I need to re-image and back up everything this weekend, including my wave-my-MacBook-around-and-it-sounds-like-a-light-saber widget and my activate-car-alarm-with-remote-control widget. A while ago, there was some IT Guy who wanted to know what all these weird icons were in my Dock. I explained to him and he says, “Wow, you really are a geek.” I don’t know whether to take that as the ultimate compliment or the ultimate insult.

Jason

You should take it as a compliment. IT Guys appreciate young ladies conversant in the computer arts. Hold it, aren’t you the one with an “I PWN boys” T-shirt?

S.

Yep, I have that. I like it because it’s all 1337 (har har) and appreciate that not everyone will “get” it, and all the while, it’s bad-ass feminist.

Jason

Wearing that in public will get you a bunch of pizza-faced bad-asses rolling a quick d20 to determine whether they have enough hit points without armor to approach you and engage in verbal P2P.

At first, I’m all like, how come there were never girls around like Juno when I was in high school? I mean, not pregnant, because I was educated by stern Catholics, but quick-witted, fun-loving, sassily independent girls, possibly in possession of telephones shaped like hamburgers. And then I’m like, hold on, there totally were girls like her then. They dressed in weird clothes, excelled in art, music and English, and had penchants for music their college-age siblings passed down, like My Bloody Valentine or whatever, because twee had yet to be invented.

Damn you, Mr. Friel. Your health class taught me about gonorrhea and how I’d most certainly contract it should I premaritally insert my penis into a vagina, but you never mentioned the part about how a shy boy could approach these weird girls and just hang out with them, what with them being so quick-witted and fun-loving and all.

Juno’s best friend Bleeker (Michael Cera) has caught on to this whole world of odd girls, so much so that he impregnates her, while chewing orange Tic Tacs, no less. His own gawkiness and frequent cross country getup is spot on for those of us who may have been similarily gawky and participated in cross country at one time.

I’ve noticed some of the Juno backlash centers around the dialogue, specifically how no one actually talks in the calculated yet fluid way that Juno and the other characters do. Well, that’s great, because if I wanted to listen to the way people talk in real life, I’d spend my weekends on the M60 bus. Diablo Cody’s bitingly funny, slang-slinging screenplay is consistently quirky (yet more funny to me than the self-consciously quirky screenplays of, say, Wes Anderson). Also it’s touching when it needs to be and, just before crossing into schmaltz, quickly self-corrects. For instance, I like how the charmingly cliché line of Juno’s dad (J.K. Simmons) appears in the trailer (“the best thing you can do is to find a person who loves you for exactly what you are”) when in the film, it’s followed by the line, “Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person will still think that the sun shines out your ass.”

Ellen Page as Juno is outstanding and I like that she’s surrounded with sorta-familiar but definitely not played-out supporting-role character-actors from various TV series. Putting her sharp features to effective use as an overachieving yuppie who’s unable to have a baby but has dibs on Juno’s, Jennifer Garner delivers an heartfelt performance, or at least one worlds better than on that show where she ran around in bad wigs, fighting terrorists. (Although I’ve never known of any woman who’s expecting who cites What to Expect When You’re Expecting-style tidbits as much as her character does; doesn’t this woman talk to her mother or have a single child-rearing friend?)

Anyway, I dub Juno “Jason’s Feel-Good Movie of the Year.”

La Vie En Rose, a French biopic of singer Édith Piaf, scales the hill of tragedy and almost tumbles into the valley of comedy. It’s just that much of a bummer; what a life she led.

Left for dead by an indifferent mother, she’s raised by prostitutes and nearly blinded by an infection. She falls in with a pimp who threatens to make her turn tricks if she doesn’t bring in enough scratch from her street-corner singing gigs; her father, a failing circus performer who sees Édith as his way out, doesn’t treat her much better. At the start of her rise to fame, she’s mentored by a nightclub owner with mafia connections. In a moment that would make Shakespeare smile, the love of her life is killed, unintentionally, by her own behest. She can’t break through in America although she was (and perhaps remains) France’s greatest pop star. Addictions to drugs, alcohol, her own legend, questionable taste in friends and an unstoppable belief that the show must go on all exacerbate her descent to a pitifully early death. Only when she sings is she, and the movie, glorious.

As Édith, Marion Cotillard, only 32 years old, deserves an Academy nod for playing a woman that ages remarkably from a fidgety, wide-eyed ingénue who fits her stage name perfectly—piaf is French for sparrow—to a hunched, near Norma Desmond type. And the look of the film itself is sumptuous and hyperreal, staged like the melodrama it nearly is.

I didn’t know enough of Piaf to pay respects at her grave at Père Lachaise when I was in Paris in 2004. But non, je ne regrette rien; next time.

Have you heard that Fight Club may become a Broadway musical? I’ve decided to start writing some lyrics for the production. Eat it, Gilbert.

Tyler

I make soap and I sell it:
Yardstick of civilization.

Chorus

We are God’s unwanted children.
So be it! Fuck damnation!

Tyler

Did you know?
To make explosives
All you really need
Is a can of Minute Maid
Plus one of gasoline?

Chorus

We did not know that.
Is that true?
Would you tell a lie?

Tyler [sotto voce]

One could make all kinds of bombs
If one were so inclined.

Chorus [con brio]

Now we know
To make explosives
All we really need
Is a can of Minute Maid
Plus one of gasoline!

Just one can of Minute Maid
Plus one of gasoline!

Another round of karaoke at Karaoke One 7. Although I didn’t sing anything, I had fun. Here are some arty photos of Andie, Katie, Ian and I taken by Andie.

I’ve been wanting to make this cocktail, the Cherry Smash, at home for some time. In late 2006, I believe it was, I tried it at the Flatiron Lounge (Julie Rainer there developed the drink) and I loved it, but didn’t think much more of it until I dug into
David Wondrich’s book Imbibe!. There’s a recipe for the Cherry Smash in there and Wondrich’s enthusiasm for well-made drinks made me really want to give it a try. (Many single young men I know got into the cocktails thing in college, partly as a seduction technique and mostly because they were budding alcoholics. This would culminate in several Leaving Las Vegas-style trips to the state liquor store next to Kroger, purchase of a paperback copy of Playboy’s Party Drinks and clearance of a bar space, usually the top of the dorm mini-fridge. I guess I’m a late bloomer.)

Shopping in Ohio over the holidays, I couldn’t find the dark cherry liqueur used by the Flatiron, a brand made in Denmark called Cherry Heering. I was told by clerks at two liquor stores that the state had halted on imports of it. You’d think an enterprising bartender could find an alternate cherry liqueur; you’d be wrong. I found liqueurs made with every fruit but cherry, including pomegranate, and it was driving me nuts. Back in New York, Park Avenue Liquors, my favorite single-malt scotch destination, echoed what the Ohio liquor-vendors had told me, but added that I should try Wine Library. And not only does that site carry it, it was on sale when I placed my order.

From my local liquor store, I bought the drink’s more common ingredients of Courvoisier VS (as specified by Wondrich, and if it’s good enough for Busta, it’s good enough for me) and Grand Marnier (which Wondrich says is a legitimate orange curaçao). The clerk was amused by this sale because apparently a well-off hobo used to come in with an empty 1-liter plastic Coke bottle, buy a hip-flask of those two liquors and mix them in the bottle to drink; apparently it was refreshing.

It’s of course not cherry season but the frozen Dole dark red cherries I tried for one batch were a fine substitute; even better from my local grocer were the fresh, here-today-gone-tomorrow cherries from Chile at $2.50/pound this time of year, though they involve more work for pit removal. (The Cherry Smash is too snooty for maraschino cherries, I’m afraid.) I soaked the fruit in some bottom-shelf Paul Masson “Grande Amber” brandy I had laying around from a previous bender. And if it’s good enough for Orson, it’s good enough for me.

Anyway, the drink is great: not sweet but tart and powerful. It may sound and look sweet and girly, but it ain’t. Stop by some time and I’ll shake one up for you.

I told my super several times to no avail in the past two weeks that my kitchen ceiling was leaking, leaking to the degree that water was pooling between the wall and the paint, resulting in sags like those under Fred Thompson’s eyes.

Jose finally stopped by last night, checked the ceiling, convinced himself I hadn’t imagined the leak, then left. A few minutes later, I heard scuffling and banging from the apartment room directly above my kitchen. Then he stopped back and told me the leak had originated from a pipe upstairs and that he’d fixed it. He’s giving the watery mess three days to dry, after which he says he’ll stop by to repair the water damage and repaint the wall. In the meantime, I look forward to inhaling countless potentially toxic mold spores.

My brother Andrew sorted through a box of his childhood toys that had been in storage in our parents’ basement. Highlights included G.I. Joe, Transformers and random plastic dinosaurs: ah, the memories.

My dad celebrated his 60th birthday tonight with a group of relatives and friends at his favorite local wine bar. At tables set up in the back near the beer coolers, we began with two whites, then five reds, all of which were poured as a professorial type named Reed talked about the wine’s characteristics, its region, trivia about the wineries’ owners and other such hoohah.

I notice increasingly sloppy annotations on my wine “score sheet,” like how Reed started one sentence, as a lead-in to an anecdote on cask-aging: “One time, I went to an oak seminar....” I also seem to have written “Reed hoards port,” which has nice alliteration, and “I thought this guy said he wouldn’t lecture,” which was a gradeschool-style note passed to my sister. Also, here are paraphrased instructions from Reed on how to decant. (He didn’t pun his title like I did; I was feeling saucy.)

How to Turn a Decant into a Decan

1. Stand the bottle upright at least a day.
2. Train the beam of a miniature flashlight on the neck of the bottle while steadily pouring the wine into a decanter.
3. Stop pouring when you spot sediment.
4. If you have a magnum or a double-magnum, you’re fucked.

Afterwards we took what was left of the wine back to my parents’ house for the afterparty, for which my mom had baked two pies (cherry and apple) and, for my dad, apple dumplings, his favorite dessert.

I’d been trying to find a cheap cocktail shaker for a while and while out shopping today in Ohio, I didn’t like the designs or the prices of the models I found at Target. On a whim, I tried Marc’s, which is a great deep-discount chain here, and found a stainless-steel shaker with a classic silhouette for a grand total of $3.09. The metal isn’t the thickest so my hands will get frosty during a good shake, and the stainless-steel surface will attract all manner of water-spots and fingerprints, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay for tasty cocktails.

Inspired by my mom’s rectangular measuring spoons while I was cooking over Christmas vacation, I ordered my own pair and they arrived today. They’re Norpro brand, stainless steel with rubberized grips in standard 1 tablespoon and 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and 1 teaspoon sizes, and I hadn’t seen them or other squared-off spoons elsewhere (Mom bought hers at an outlet mall), so I tracked them down on Amazon.com through a third-party seller.

These appeal to me because I can fit the spoons—even the tablespoon—directly into jars of spice for easy and accurate measuring. I also like that they increase my accuracy for eyeballing nonstandard measurements—half a tablespoon, for example, for which I can’t be bothered to remember or look-up the equivalent (1.5 teaspoons, in case you were wondering).

No Country for Old Men really may be the second-coming of Fargo, in some respects almost literally, with a weary keeper-of-the-peace (Tommy Lee Jones) presiding over grisly murders in the middle of nowhere. In the ultimate hangdog role, all the Botox and Valium on the Upper East Side couldn’t lift the sag of Jones. I got the impression his character won’t so much retire as he will merge with the desert, reborn as a lone, craggy tree.

But No Country has only a fraction of Fargo’s goofiness. It’s bleak and violent, with scenes of extended dread during which the audience can cringe and await nasty things to happen. (I have experienced or heard of two separate instances where people watching this film did that frightened thing where they grab a random limb of the person sitting next to them.) Typically these moments involve the cat-and-mouse game between the sort-of protagonist Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who has helped himself to some money that isn’t his, and the stone-faced bounty hunter sent after him (Javier Bardem), a man of few words, a Prince Valiant haircut and a relentlessness that makes Ahab seem laid-back.

Although I saw the usual Carter Burwell composer credit, I can’t remember hearing a score; without (or little) music, the tension heightens and makes way for the sound design, which is great especially during the movie’s main chase scene. Recognizing I’m a Yankee and wouldn’t know Dixie if Foghorn Leghorn bit my ass, the Southern accents also sounded true, which is always a concern for me.

Great cinematography by Coen-fave Roger Deakins, focusing on the beautiful wide open spaces of the plains. I didn’t realize until later that the movie’s supposed to take place in the early ’80s; the costumes and set design are retro but I thought it was an unironic look of a backwater South from today.

The trivia page on IMDb.com, which I like to read after I’ve seen a film, notes the screenplay uses wholesale chunks of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, retains the story”s order and ends exactly the same way, all of which is unlikely and amazing. I feel I need to read the book now.

All said, a straight-shooter.

At the Pegu Club, conceived and operated by some of the same folks behind my favored Flatiron Lounge, music from the ’20s floats in the background. Comfy sofas and chairs with wraparound backs line the windows, which afford views of Houston Street and are overlaid with wooden lattice panels that resemble floor plans of symmetrical labyrinths. Black, lacquered-wood high chairs are angled at precise 45-degree angles to the bar, the top of which is a grained blonde wood with thick, randomly undulating edges all buffed to a sheen.

As I sat there, I perused the weighty, leatherbound drink menu. It lists a dozen seasonal drinks, contains a lot of gin-based concoctions and features wines by the glass and specialty champagne beverages. Regarding the bubbly, a Winston Churchill quote crisply notes, “In defeat I need it, in Victory I deserve it.”

I was happy and sad to see Tom & Jerrys on the seasonal specialty menu: happy because I’ve wanted to try one since reading the drink’s storied history in David Wondrich’s well-researched history of key American bartenders and cocktails, Imbibe! And sad because I wasn’t in the mood to drink one. Something about the raw eggs, I think. (Ironically, when I wanted one, late last month, I tried ordering it from a bar actually named Tom & Jerry’s, but they serve the drink only one day a year, during their Christmas party.)

I ordered a small plate of truffle-steamed portobello mushroom dumplings from the Asian-inspired menu of 10 snack-style items, half of which are seafood-based. And for my first drink, I knocked back a Whiskey Smash, made with rye, muddled lemons and mint, and simple syrup. It had a lactic aftertaste but I got more into it after a few sips.

Although I’m no big fan of gin¹, I also enjoyed the club’s powerful signature drink, the bracing, melon-colored Pegu Club Cocktail, made according to an early 20th-century recipe that calls for London dry gin, two types of bitters (Angostura and orange), orange curaçao and fresh lime juice, shook with vigor until ice-cold then strained into a squat and frosty cocktail glass. In perparing the drink, the bartender had locked the lid to the shaker so tightly that when he separated them, they came apart with a loud snap. Presentation is everything: the lime-wedge garnish was lanced with a fettuccine-width spear of bamboo tied at the end into an artful knot. A real kick in the head.

In short: spending any more than an hour at Pegu, I could burn through the contents of my wallet.

Pegu Club

• 77 W. Houston St. (second floor)
• (212) 473-PEGU
• Meal 2 of 52: mushroom dumplings

¹ And yet, here is a digression: according to the delightful Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, billed as “A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence,” slang for “gin” in early nineteenth century Europe included the following words and phrases (which I’ve mentioned before). We need to revive these into casual conversation, post haste!

• blue ruin (same as the nail-polish color mentioned by Kate Winslet’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
• crank (gin and water)
• diddle
• drain
• frog’s wine
• heart’s ease
• jackey
• Lady Dacre’s wine
• lightning (“a flash of lightning”)
• max
• rag water
• ribbin (“The cull lushes the blue ribbin; the silly fellow drinks common gin.”)
• sky blue
• strip me naked
• tape (“blue or white tape”)

[back]

I have two cinematic weaknesses. At least I think they’re weaknesses. For someone with as many out-of-print Pauline Kael review compilations and François Truffaut’s Hitchcock on his bookshelves, they might be classified as such.

But they are these: I really like physical comedy, not just classic stuff like Buster Keaton and the Three Stooges, but lowerbrow fare ranging from the Pink Panther series to Adam Sandler getting angry. I can’t help it. People falling down, people getting struck in the head by objects, a flailing of limbs in general: these things make me laugh. Some movies, the physical comedy is all I remember. When I think back on, say, The Weather Man, a lousy movie to be sure, what I immediately recall is Nicolas Cage getting nailed in the head, in slow-motion, by a six-piece box of Chicken McNuggets, and I love it. I snickered just now as I wrote that sentence.

My other shame is that I like light comedies with fast-paced, witty dialogue. If Oscar Wilde were alive and flaming today, he’d be writing these or at least doctoring the screenplays uncredited, the David Mamet of the romcom set. Some of these favorites of mine in this category are more storied than others: The Philadelphia Story, for one, or Sabrina; or ones I’ve written up here before, mostly oldies seen at the Film Forum: Divorce, Italian Style, Libeled Lady, Irma la Douce, A Foreign Affair and so on.

I can add to that list The Moon Is Blue, a trifle from 1953 that I saw tonight at the Film Forum as part of the Otto Preminger retrospective. Often I’ll think a movie like this was more solid upon its release and has merely mellowed over time into its marshmallow fluffiness. Ah, no. For this is one of the things my copy of The Complete New Yorker is good for: a reviewer in the July 18, 1953 issue calls it “a pleasant little comedy” that’s “quite a bit tamer than some pictures I’ve seen that concentrated on the mute grapplings of lovers and lasses.”

Yet initially controversy (in which Preminger relished and encouraged) swirled around the picture for its use of seduction and the words “virgin” and “mistress.” David Denby notes in his New Yorker review of the retrospective that The Moon Is Blue and The Man with the Golden Arm, which was on the double-bill tonight, hastened the death of the Production Code and “the liberation of movie content.” But seen now, it’s mostly playboy William Holden and his ex-girlfriend’s father (David Niven), his wit as dry as a Martini, lusting after a pretty, chirpy young woman (Brooklynite Maggie McNamara) who’s somewhat less naive and certainly smarter than they think. And that’s it: a bunch of cocktails, sharp verbal sparring and good humor. I laughed; I loved it.

I was juiced about jury duty this morning because I was hoping I’d get Walter, the “snowy-haired clerk of jury room 1121,” whom I’d read so much about in John Hodgman’s blog last year and I did get him (I think maybe he lives in 1121) and he’s just as funny and well-spoken as Mr. Hodgman had opined. Also, Your Turn, the low-budget, 18-minute “so you’ve got jury duty” video we were subjected to, is as great as I’d imagined; narrated by Ed Bradley and Diane Sawyer, it illustrates at one point trial by ordeal with the sinking of an accused witch, conjuring Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

However—and I chalk this up to never before having served on a jury—I was unaware, as Walter put it, that criminal trials take an average of a week and we were required to commit fully to that possibility. Because I didn’t want to gamble with my flight home on Thursday for my Dad’s 60th birthday party, I retreated down Centre Street to the New York County Supreme Court building and got another postponement, this one for April.

Someday, Walter. Someday.

I took advantage of the 25-percent-off everything sale at Fishs Eddy and bought a glass Anchor Hocking butter dish for under $5. Hey, not every day can be a thrill.

Fishs is expensive yet stylish and always seems to have the best sale items on dinnerware: they were selling white stoneware dinner plates for like 99 cents apiece and customers were swarming all over the display and walking off with tall stacks of them.

I met up with Megan and her friends Bonnie (celebrating a birthday), João (did I spell that right?) and Claire at Radegast Hall & Beer Garden, an Austro-Hungarian themed beer hall in Williamsburg with extremely high ceilings, crazy Czech music and long communal tables made from 150-year-old barn wood. It’s billed as “authentic” which I think refers to the fact that the servers wear dirndls. There a dozen beers on tap and I most enjoyed the Hofbräu Dunkel dark lager, a century-old favorite in Munich, that boasts a smooth and malty taste with caramel undertones and a welcome 5.5 percent alcohol by volume. We had two pitchers. We also tried the Spaten Oktoberfest, the Weihenstephaner Dunkel (both also from Germany) and the Gösser Pilsner from Austria, my appreciation for which was ranked in the order in which we drank them, which was pretty convenient.

Pitchers are pricey at $18 a pop, the menu entrees equally so, though a nice, more cost-effective substitute is to get some wurst, sauerkraut and fries from the overworked dudes in the back by the grill. The ordering system is abysmal. I put in my order and was told twice to stop back “in five minutes,” at which times my bratwurst was still sputtering on the grill. When I returned the second time, the grill area was overrun with an impatient clot of hipsters waving their hands and trying to get in their orders, so I muscled to the front and fortunately the beleaguered cook remembered me and tossed my food my way. The fries were for Megan, a vegetarian, and the sole meatless option on the menu, excepting the streusel, which I’m told doesn’t have much meat in it.

João told us of a recent trip to Suriname, which necessitated a break in the conversation as we tried to guess the location of this alleged country. South America, as it turns out; João showed us a map on his Blackberry after we expressed incredulity.

Deciding we hadn’t punished our livers enough, we took the L back into Manhattan and emerged at First Avenue where some girl was puking violently at the base of the “Manhattan Only” subway sign. A guy with a can-you-believe-this? look held back her hair and shouted at random passerby, “Welcome to New York!” At Jimmy’s No. 43 on E. 7th Street we ordered additional beer and random food (apple-horseradish couscous, bread pudding and a cheese plate that had more sliced apples, pears and Carr’s crackers on it than cheese).

Radegast Hall & Beer Garden

• 113 N 3rd St. (between Bedford Avenue and Berry Street), Brooklyn
• (718) 963-3973
• Meal 1 of 52: two links of bratwurst, sauerkraut and fries ($9)

Megan is house-sitting for Andie and Eric while they’re off for the holidays and she invited Vincent and I over tonight for some homemade curry and board games. We played a game of Big Boggle and, although I was loathe to try it because I am easily confused by the rules of games, we also played Guillotine. It’s a fast-paced and fun card game in which one gains points by beheading French nobles.

Walking back to the subway, I noticed something I hadn’t before: the United Methodist church at W. 86th and West End that I passed hundreds of times when I lived on the Upper West Side is named the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, coincidentally patron saints of myself and my brother, respectively. That’s weird.

S.

Thanks for your recommendation of Laphroaig. For Christmas, I scored a bottle of 10-year for my brother and he was stoked. He also got a kick out of the fact that it was bottled when he was 12. That just made me feel old.

Jason

You’re only as old as you feel. Wait, no: you’re only as old as the number of wrinkles that appear on your forehead when you’re surprised, times eight.

S.

If I’m rocking the surprised face, I’m 24. If I’m just medium surprised, then I’m 16. (Not so sweet.) Mind you, I’m totally doing the surprised-look-on-my-face thing at my desk and feeling my forehead, as if reading Braille, for all to see. No one is paying attention anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

Jason

As I read those last two sentences, I laughed silently so hard that I cried a little. The devil is in the details.

S.

Submitted for your amusement.

What’s maybe distressing is that I would not have freely chosen to see a based-on-a-true-story movie about a guy who can move only his left eye and some of his internal organs. But I hadn’t read the reviews or seen any trailers or commercials for The Diving Bell & The Butterfly so I went to a screening tonight at the BAM Rose Cinemas on the recommendation of a coworker and enjoyed it.¹

Diving Bell tried my patience in synch with the trying life of its protagonist, an Elle editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), who awakens unable to speak or move after a massive stroke, although his mind is clear and racing. Sentences composed in his head, he narrates the memoir on which the movie’s based by blinking: an aide recites the letters of the alphabet, ordered by their frequency in French, and he blinks when the letter he wants is spoken. It can take minutes to spell one word.

It’s corny to say but the film did “make me think,” about the economy of language, the challenge of communication, the futility of regret (carpe diem!) and the vitality of imagination. Bauby frequently imagines himself suspended in a deep-sea-diving suit (the diving bell of the movie’s title), which serves as a metaphor for his handicap. He finds he can chase away this claustrophobia with thoughts of happy times from his life. For instance, sick of not being able to eat solids, he conjures a grand meal with his wife in his mind, with oysters, no less.

Emotionally, I’m a marble pillar, at the movies and otherwise, and even I nearly got something stuck in my eye at moments during the life-scenes Bauby recalls with his feeble yet strong-minded father (Max von Sydow). It’s poignant that it’s not the stereotypical case of a son estranged from his father; before the stroke, the two expressed their love for each other deeply and the real tragedy is that despite his age and handicap, the father will outlive the son.

And thank the gods that the movie didn’t insist I Learn to Love a Little, Learn to Laugh a Little, a la most other disabled-character films I hate for their schmaltz, such as Awakenings or Rain Man.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t humor in Diving Bell. Bauby’s dour situation in leavened with internal laughter at jokes made at his expense, frustrations over his blowhard physicians, watching soccer matches on TV, and, at one point, a fly that alights on his nose that he’s powerless to shoo away. In the company of the women he loves and his attractive therapists, his randiness stirs in an otherwise rigid corpus.

Great cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, especially for Bauby’s POV shots, with the jerkiness, askew frames and smudged colors of disorientation. The soundtrack’s also great, although I may have been biased because it included two Tom Waits songs and I did mistake the Joe Strummer track that plays over the closing credits for a Pogues song, a la “Fairytale of New York,” which played over the closing credits of an earlier movie by director Julian Schnabel, Basquiat.

Go, dark-horse Academy-Award nomination, go!

¹ At home after the movie, I watched the trailer online and was amused, as I usually am, that trailers in the U.S. for foreign-language films rarely have dialogue, because, you know, we speak American here. Also, the trailer uses every inch of non-wheelchair/bedridden footage available to make it seem as if the film is 90% French orgy, 10% bummer. So I would have been more likely to have seen the film based on the trailer, but I would have felt duped. [back]

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Some random guy in a parka, waiting for his take-out at my local Chinese/Mexican restaurant, asked me this soon after I’d arrived and ordered my guacamole nachos to-go. I thought, “Good question for New Year’s Day, random guy. Strange but prescient.”

My mind scurried for an answer and when I looked at him to reply, he wasn’t making eye contact but staring just over my head, towards the restaurant’s menu board and the sun-faded photo of the Roast Pork Egg Foo Young.

“You want a big city, you want a small city, you want international?” he said, at which point I realized he was on a hands-free cell phone.

“So you want to stay near Decatur? Georgia?” he continued. After the person on the other end confirmed, he added, “Are they really tying you there?” A pause. “How much?”

I paid and picked up my order. “Well, I wonder how you’d like New York,” the random guy was saying as I walked out the door.

“I like New York just fine,” I thought, stepping into the cold and wind and realizing I needed to buy some salsa. “I can see myself here in five years. But maybe I’d like to make other changes in my life.”

Snow approaching. Change, too, I hope. Time to resolve!