Son of Two Cubes

Random Food Pics, Tokyo

2012-01-14T23:15:00.000-08:00

Two days before New Year's, in Ningyocho. The street seller was hand mixing shichimi. She asked me to specify how I wanted it. Since I didn't know enough Japanese to do that, I asked for omakase. Not sure if that was the appropriate word, but it worked out.

A manekineko dressed as a chef.

New Year's Day on the street near Meiji Jingu. This stand was making takoyaki, octopus balls. The big boats of mise en place caught my eye, and Rhys'.

From the grounds of Sensoji Temple complex, in Asakusa, just after the official hatsumode time was over, but still jammed with people.

That's ayu on a stick. It's not a funnel cake. It looked good, but we had just eaten.

Unagi cooking over a charcoal fire. This smelled good, too. Roughly the same neighborhood, but outside the temple complex.

Rhys got strawberries, off the menu, at an Italian cafe near Hamarikyu garden. Pretty impressive presentation for a bowl of berries.

On the street from Jimbocho to Akihabara

2012-01-14T13:01:00.000-08:00

After eating at Bistro Aligot, we walked down Yasukuni Dori, and headed towards Akihabara. The day was pleasant for January and we had a good time.

The area near the restaurant is filled with used bookstores. We liked walking past these, but we didn't go in. Books are heavy to bring back in luggage. Still, they were fun to see. We also saw the shop for Charles Tuttle, a sight that filled me with a bit of nostalgia. Tuttle made the first Japanese-English dictionary I owned, a sub-sized paperback that I used before I had a dictionary in my iPod. Unfortunately, the Tuttle shop was closed, probably for the New Year's holiday.

A bit farther along, the neighborhood transitioned to sporting goods shops. Most were selling ski and snowboard gear.

Then we found a shop selling dango. Dango are mochi-on-a-stick. Sabina got a skewer of yaki (grilled) dango. I'll let this picture serve as a review of the product.

A street side display of food caused Rhys to ask the question, "Is that soup real or plastic?" Sabina explained, "If the bowl is tilted and the soup doesn't spill out, it's plastic." Physics FTW.

The machine in the window display below is an old Juki sewing machine. Juki makes pro-grade sewing machines, as well as pick-and-place robots for surface mount PCB assembly. Every time I see their sewing equipment, I try to imagine similar high-tech machinery being made by Singer. Not how American businesses do things, usually.

I'm probably not reading the symbolism correctly. I assume the old, black sewing machine is supposed to be a nostalgic reference to an earlier era.

We liked this restaurant sign.

Just before turning N, I poked my head into Yanaka Coffee company. This place was densely packed. But they roasted the coffee in the shop, and it smelled delicious. The coffee roaster had an LCD display on the front. I tried to snap a picture of the temp profile, which was displayed as a line graph, just like on a reflow furnace. But I was too slow, and only grabbed this shot of the machine as it cooled down.

Here's the whole machine. You're not going to get one of these for your house.

They make espresso, too. It was very good. I need to find another branch of this chain in a neighborhood closer to work, or closer to Ikebukuro.
The image below gives a sense of the shop. Everything is shoehorned in.

We walked N over the Kanda River.

Just under the train tracks are some shops.

And nearby, this is where Pac Man goes to eat skewers and drink sake.

A few blocks more, and we were in Akihabara. We went to Laox's model shop and got some LBX models for Rhys. A fun day.

Bistrot Aligot, French x Yoshoku

2012-01-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

My Tokyo blog postings are easier to catch up, now that I am home in California.

Bistro Aligot is a French restaurant in Tokyo's Jimbocho neighborhood. We found it via the Pen 1st guide, and were again very happy with the recommendation. One note, though. It's a bit hard to find. It's down a side street/alley. Look at Google maps first. It's on the E side of the "block," the small unit to which the house number is assigned to in Tokyo address system.

The restaurant has a counter and kitchen on the first floor and tatami upstairs. The tatami area has some open-plan seating, and some rooms. We ate in a 4.5-mat room. Maybe they put us in our own private room because we were foreigners with a seven year old boy. Maybe they were just nice. I don't know, and either way, it worked out nicely.

The door had frosted glass instead of paper.

A view out of of our room, towards the stairway.

Bistro Aligot serves wine by the glass at reasonable prices. They also pour generously, which is not that common in Japan.

Rita had a Sauvignon Blanc, and I had a Carignane, both from Languedoc. They were JPY 500 each, about $6 at current rates. Both were quite tasty. (I don't use wine adjectives. If you do, here are a handful: minerally, unctuous, stone fruit, grip.)

Soup was served in coffee cups. It was outstanding. I don't usually go on about clear broth, but this was really, really good. I don't think you can order it by itself, though.

Food was picked off the lunch menu. I had menchikatsu croquette. The sauce, with whole mustard seed, transformed the dish. The flavors were very clear. This was not fast food menchikatsu.

Sabina had Japanese style curry over rice. It was home-made, and tasted better than most curry that I've had in Japan.

Rita had Basque-style chicken, a tomato-based stewed chicken dish. Also very nice.

All the food was fantastic. One comment, though. Only the chicken dish felt really French. The rest was French food by way of Yoshoku cooking. We didn't mind one bit. If this bothers you, though, be warned.

Also, no English menu. As my katakana reading skills are not very good, I had trouble with the menu. Our waiter helped us through the menu, basically reading it aloud in Japanese. That worked perfectly. You could also do well by picking randomly. There were no bad dishes.

Highly recommended.

New Table

2012-01-14T10:34:00.000-08:00

Recently, we've bought some new furniture.

Our first piece arrived earlier this week. It was made by Jeff O'Brien at Dogwood Design. We found Jeff after liking one of his pieces in the book 500 Cabinets.

(Pictures courtesy of Jeff, from his shop. It was pretty cool to see our table as WIP.)

This table will sit just inside our front door. It was sized down from a longer table called "the new table." We also changed the materials. The original design had a top made from fir, which is pretty but not very hard. Jeff agreed to make our tabletop from quilted maple. He also filled the slot in the tabletop with walnut. It will now be easier to put things on the table's surface. That said, looking at it, I am not sure anything will ever go on top.

The process of working with Jeff was really painless. We did all communication via email, and it couldn't have been easier. It's kind of weird to have done the entire transaction electronically, but it worked out very well.

The table looks just as nice in real life as it does in the images.

As I wrote up this blog post, I noticed professional images of our table at the Dogwood Design website, here. Nice images. But I still have a soft spot for the WIP images, above.

Tokyo Craft Museum

2012-01-06T16:44:00.000-08:00

Lest you think that all we do is eat, here is a post on a lovely museum we visited. Unlike many others, this one allowed photos.

The Crafts Gallery is part of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. It's an interesting pairing, because most of the displayed objects are decidedly not modern. They all hark back to a pre-Meiji style. That said, the two museums are about 400m apart, close by the Imperial palace.

The building itself is a cute, brickwork Meiji-era structure.

Inside, the gallery is on the second floor.

Closeup of the light fixture in the stairwell.

There are some awesome kimonos. These are hard to photograph.

This one by Matsueda Tamaki

This embroidered kimono by Fukuda Kiju. Stunning work.

A wider view, showing the display style. Gorgeous to look at, hard to photograph.

And zoom-in on the kimono on the left.

This kimono is stencil dyed. The registration is pretty tight. The work is by Moriguchi Kakou, from 1957.

The table by Matsuda Gonroku is stellar. It's made with lacquer, maki-e, and bachiru inlay. Maki-e is the artwork made of powdered metal (thank you Wikipedia), while bachiru is inlaid ivory design work, as explained here.

Closeups:
A better view of the birds on the lower level.

And the leg.

When even the nails are just so...well, I am completely impressed.

Here is more work by the same man.
A lovely box.

And some bowls. I know these look like soup bowls, but, wow. I cannot imagine serving soup in these.

Two very different boxes from Mae Fumio.

It's hard to see in the photos, but the second box has a "mist" pattern. Zoom in on the image below and you can see it.

Inagaki Toshijiro has three stencil dyed paperworks displayed. I like the gradients inside the stencil openings.

The first one is such a riot of color, but it works well.

A second one has less color. This one makes me think of the Photoshop trick where everything is B&W, except one area of interest, which maintains full color. Except he made this image in 1958.

All the way to monochrome.

The bowl by Hayakawa Shokosai V made me stop in my tracks. Literally so. That's not happened before in a museum. It was made from bamboo strips. The picture doesn't do it justice.

This kimono was not in a glass case. The pattern represents paving stones.

Serizawa has a stencil dyed wall hanging represented. The fine lines of this stencil are impressive. But I didn't notice the technique first, I noticed the pattern and color.

A little gem of a museum, if you like craft.

Konohana, Our New Favorite Bakery

2012-01-06T07:47:00.000-08:00

I've posted a lot about food places, but our favorite discovery of the trip was Konohana, a small bakery in Asakusa.

Konohana is a few blocks north of Sensoji. But it feels like a different world. While Sensoji and Nakamise Dori are overrun with tourists, and loud shops, Konohana is on a quiet street in a normal, residential neighborhood.

Konohana is another one of the finds from the Pen 1st Tokyo Guide. So far, the guide's recommendations are 100% good.

It is a really small place, and they make small batches. When things are sold out, they are gone. Go early.

This is one of the two sisters who run the bakery. She was surprised to see visitors from California.

We had a variety of breads, both sweet and not. Sorry, no pictures. We ate most of them while walking back to the train station. We had a round roll, orange bread, fig bread, a muffin-like bread with maccha and white chocolate, and a currant bun. Unusual for Japan, the breads had crust, and the texture was not just soft and squishy. The flavors were clear, and the combinations all worked. They make bagels, too, although we didn't try those.

Absolutely fantastic. Worth a trip. It's almost worth getting a hotel nearby.

And the Tokyo Sky Tree is nearby.

Great Signage & Ads

2012-01-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

As I walk around in Tokyo, I take pictures of the signage and advertising.

This place sold chicken kara-age. That's boneless fried chicken. It's called "Tenka," meaning "Under Heaven." I like the rooster's attitude. Although, given the restaurant, it's a bit deluded.

Here's a surprisingly stylish McDonald's. This was in Nihonbashi Ningyocho, near Hatsune.

Muji had a typically understated sign for their New Year's sale. I would buy it as a poster.

Hatsune: Delicious Sweets in Ningyocho

2012-01-06T07:06:00.000-08:00

Another find from the Pen 1st Tokyo Guide was Hatsune. It was listed for its traditional sweets.

We got a bit lost getting there, but after arriving, it was clearly worth the trouble.

Rita had the signature shiratame anmitsu, a mix of red bean, mochi, fruit and ice cream. The shiratame are the white balls of mochi between 4 o'clock and 6 o'clock in the dish.

I had kuzu mochi with bean syrup.

Sabina and Rhys split a chocolate sundae.

All of these were just wonderful. We sat and ate, and raved to each other about how wonderful the food was.

Then we ate some more.

I don't remember what this was called. It was delicious, though.

The business is quite old. It started at a previous location, back in the Edo period. Framed old photos are on the wall.

Another winning recommendation from the Pen guide.

Custom Made Notebooks at Kakimori

2012-01-05T17:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Rita got a custom made notebook at Kakimori. It's a shop we found through the Pen+ "Real Tokyo Guide 2012." Since the shop is in Kuramae, a bit south of Asakusa, we never would have found it without the guidebook.

The woman who helped us was super friendly, and spoke fluent English. That was a big help, because the notebook had many choices: what cover, what paper, what pattern of binding rings, what elastic band hold it shut.

They have lots of other writing things there, both local and imported. One wall is devoted to a large selection of fountain pens, and another showcases various inks.

Well worth the extra trip. We will be back.

Kappabashi Dori

2011-12-31T04:59:00.000-08:00

This trip, we visited Kappabashi Dori for our second time. Our last visit was in 2001. It's become more touristed since then, but it is still a working neighborhood of restaurant supply companies. You can buy cookware, restaurant signage, menu folders, condiment bottles, plastic bento boxes, chopsticks, and of course, plastic food. This is the neighborhood to buy plastic food. You can buy some pretty realistic looking sushi, beer, fried rice, ice cream, tonkatsu, you name it. Plastic food is not cheap, though. A glass of plastic beer is over $50. Some of the shops cater to tourists by selling magnets, keychains and keitai straps.

The kappa of the neighborhood name is a Japanese water goblin. The top of their head contains a "lake." If the water spills, they lose their strength. Kappa are expert wrestlers, so don't count on spilling the water easily. Kappa also love cucumbers.

Kappa themed artwork is everywhere.Here's Rhys standing next to a vaguely Greco-Roman kappa.

These are drawn in a Sanrio-ish style.

I like the mosaic. It looks very 8-bit.

You can see Tokyo Sky Tree in the distance.

A bit underexposed in the FG so you can see the Sky Tree better.

Some interesting things are found in the restaurant supply shops.

Specialty charcoal:

Enormous stock pots.

It's a fun place. Highly recommended, especially for foodies.

Acco (Acre) Pictures and Stories

2011-11-06T10:51:00.000-08:00

Last Friday, coworkers from our Israel team took me sightseeing in Northern Israel.

We ended the day in Acco (Acre), a mostly Arab town on the Northern coast.

Our first stop was the Golden Spoon, a low key restaurant with absolutely delicious food.

They make the best falafel. It isn't as well done as the falafel I've had in the US. As a result, softer on the outside, although still with some crunch.

As usual for eating at Israeli restos, we ordered a ton of food. Baba ghanoush, tahini, hummus, cucumber salad, labane cheese, hot sauce, a tomato-y "salsa," all served with fresh bread. These were just the appetizers. I had local sausages for the main. They were spiced a bit like Merguez, but ground fine like a hot dog.

Acco is a seaport and fishing town. We arrived in the afternoon, and the boats were back in port.

The boat on the left has a green panel with the white X logo of the local bus company. Not sure how that was procured.

Looking south, we could see Haifa. If you look on the ridgeline, you can see the tourist hotels Dan Panorama and Nof (View).

As I travel, I enjoy seeing restaurant names. This one is named after Ptolemy, the Egyptian-Greek astronomer.

Evidence that I know too much trivia: had to explain epicycles and other errors of the pre-Copernican worldview to my hosts. And they're all high-tech people.

And this one, a fancy spot with a view of the Med:

The name struck me as odd. Christians do not believe that Joseph was father of Christ.

As I read the sign, I also had one of those "aha!" moments, because "abu" means "father of" in Arabic. And the Hebrew says "avo," also meaning "father of." I was reminded that dubhe, "bear" is pronounced more like "dobe." Ah, transliteration follies. I suppose this is no worse than Peking = Beijing.

The clock tower has Arabic numerals on one face, and Western numerals on the other.

There was a church steeple, too. We didn't walk to the church, though. The air conditioners hanging out of the buildings make me wonder how hard it is to have good infrastructure in such old buildings. Old cities are picturesque, but I like modern plumbing and electrical connections.

Our last stop was the Masjid al-Jazzar, the Mosque of the Butcher. This is the view from the street.

We received a guided tour from this man. He did a great job, starting with the Five Pillars of the Faith, working through the symbolism of the decor, and last to the history of the mosque itself. He spoke quickly, but explained well.

This photo was taken outside the front door of the mosque. The pillars are granite from Caesaria.

Here is the interior. The mosque has a two story structure, with women on the 2nd level and men on the ground, as in older synagogues. This is unlike many other mosques, our guide explained, where the women worship in the back.

He also explained the use of calligraphy in Islamic decoration, given the proscription on graven images. This I already knew. But he explained the green color in Islamic symbolism as related to Paradise, "the Garden of Eden, גן עדן." This I had never heard before. Makes a lot of sense.

The clock tells when to pray, and when not to pray. He explained that Muslims are forbidden to pray within 15 minutes of sunrise, because "Satan worshipers pray to the rising sun." I think he meant Zoroastrians, but I didn't ask. Getting into a religious debate wasn't on my to-do list.

View of the dome. Lovely. But in need of a bit of upkeep.

After our guide finished with basics of Islam and mosque architecture, he gave us a capsule history of the builder. His version differed slightly from Wikipedia's, but I must say I liked his better. It follows, below.

al-Jazzar, the butcher, started life as a Christian nobleman in Bosnia. He fled his hometown after sleeping with his brother's wife. He proceeded towards the Holy Land, but ran out of funds, and sold himself into slavery. Eventually, he became a slave of the King of Egypt. There he converted to Islam, and took the name Ahmad. Since he was handy with a sword, he became the King's executioner. He chopped off a lot of heads. After his time as executioner, he was granted his freedom, and became head of the King's army in Northern Israel, winning great victories. For his service, he was rewarded with the governorship of Acco. There, he successfully fought off Napoleon, even though Napoleon's army had just won in Egypt.

Wikipedia version of al-Jazzar's life here. I notice the guide did not mention the Ottomans much. Former colonial rulers seem unpopular everywhere.

al-Jazzar built his great mosque on the site of a previous mosque. Earlier, the site had had been a mosque, then a church, then a mosque again. Our guide explained that when the Crusaders came into Acco, they leveled the first mosque and killed 30,000 civilians besides. When the Muslims again took over, they switched it back. Civilian casualties in this second transition were not mentioned, although I can't imagine it was a casual affair. The language of the description was telling, though. Such subtleties build our historical framings.

As we left, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer.

Note the use of green neon on the minaret. I like it.

On my way home from the airport, I related a slightly mangled version of the al-Jazzar story to my driver. He remarked that the story would make a great movie. I have to agree.

Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann

2011-06-30T23:21:00.000-07:00

I wanted to like this book. It had all the boxes checked: Dieselpunk, Pulp-Fiction, Proto-Superhero, Lovecraftian overtones. But it didn't ever come together, and that was just a shame.

The story in Ghosts of Manhattan reads like an alternate-universe Batman. There is a rich playboy who doubles as a crime fighting vigilante. Like Batman, he has gadgets and not super-powers. There is a cop who works with him, even though he "shouldn't."

Mann plays a cute game, narrating the Batman in the night, and Bruce Wayne in the day. It isn't until halfway through the book that the novelist tells us they are one and the same. But.That's it! It's not a surprise. I was expecting some twist, say, the superhero doesn't know that his alter-ego even exists. Nope.

The setting is superficially altered from the 1930s we know. Cars are steam-powered, and burn coal. Again, the author doesn't do much with this. It's just window dressing. Instead of a "rumbling V8," we have "twin funnels." The cars, though, behave pretty much as gas-powered cars do, with the exception of having to get out back and shovel in some coal. It would have been easy: the boiler runs out of water, and the fleeing civilian uses sea water, knowing that the salt will corrode the pipes...

There is a cold war between England and the US, but again, it is superficially imagined. In Mann's world, the two erstwhile allies are at each other's throats because there is no one else to fight. It's not that the US entered the war on the side of Germany, or stayed neutral while England bled dry.

Nothing in the story turns on these details. You could say Packard or Buick instead of steam car, and the book would be essentially unchanged. The cold war with England doesn't figure in the plot.

I kept reading the book, pushed along by a hope that it would get better. It never did.

Now off to find some Shadow radio plays on the web somewhere.

Jazz and Songs You Know

2011-06-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

Recently, a friend played me many of his favorite Jazz musicians, skipping around from Chet Baker to Clifford Brown, mostly playing Jazz versions of pop tunes and standards. As he played some of the songs, he sang along, in the original melody, even when the recording veered away. It became clear that he was hearing two songs when he listened: the song as it was being played, and the song in the original. This was most clear to me when we listened to a 1950s pop tune that I didn't know. To me, it was just the music coming out of the speakers. But Ron heard both.

This should have been obvious to me earlier.

It's like single sideband radio. It's as if the original song is the carrier, and the cover version is a modulated signal. The carrier is subtracted before the music is transmitted. And to complete the analogy, your mind is the beat frequency oscillator (no pun intended) playing the carrier and allowing you to demodulate the music. Without knowledge of the carrier (original tune), some of the information is lost.

Of course, this analogy makes me wonder: how many of my friends have an interest in both Jazz and radio?

Libertarian Nonsense with Ron Paul

2011-05-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

Recently, Sen. Ron Paul said he would have opposed the 1964 Civil Rights act if he had been there to vote on it.

Of course, he says, he's not for discrimination. He's for property rights. The problem with the 1964 act is its imposition on property owners. Presumably, in Senator Paul's alternate history, government discrimination would have been banned and private discrimination would have withered away.

Paul appealed to the free market, and argued that if a business owner were to post signs declaring segregation in his or her business, people wouldn't patronize it.

"For you to imply that a property rights person is endorsing that stuff, you don't understand that there would be zero signs up today saying something like that," he said. "And if they did they would be an idiot and out of business."

This is wrong on so many levels.

First, Paul uses a retail business example for his argument. Let's switch that to a big business, a manufacturing company, for example. Imagine that a computer company discriminated in hiring, avoiding Blacks and Hispanics, and instead hiring only Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants. Would that problem be solved by the market? Would that company's customers shun it, because it was discriminatory? This is a laughable assertion. Everex computer was accused and sanctioned for doing just such a thing, in the 1990s. It wasn't sanctioned by the marketplace. It was sanctioned by the government.

I work in a large company, and we buy product from vendors around the world. Quality, reliability, price, and product performance are high on our list of concerns. We do not evaluate vendors based on perceived discrimination. How would the "free market" punish discrimination in hiring?

Now maybe that's unfair. Many computer companies sell to businesses, not to retail. Let's examine a retail case, and not in high tech. Say, Abercrombie and Fitch, which has been reported to discriminate in hiring, favoring White people. Have they been shunned by their customer base for this? It seems not.

I presume that Senator Paul would support the property rights of A&F's owners, who would be free to discriminate in hiring and accomodation. A&F is not a government run store, after all. It is part of the free market. Likewise a high-tech company like Everex, would be free to pick and choose whom to hire, fearful only of the sanction of the marketplace.

Usually, commentary on Libertarian nonsense such as this turn into an either/or. Either Paul is

Making dog-whistle racist comments or
Is really that stupid he hasn't thought through the consequences

I'd suggest an alternative version of #2. Maybe Senator Paul is so wedded to his ideology that he refuses to examine real outcomes of his pure theories. Maybe that's a different form of stupid. Regardless, it's nonsense, and dangerous nonsense.

Plays I've Read Recently

2011-04-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

On our recent vacation, my wife and aunt saw a Lanford Wilson play. I had just heard one of Fresh Air's "Friday rerun interviews with dead people," featuring Mr. Wilson and was intrigued by his early plays, "Hot l Baltimore" and "Balm in Gilead." A few mouse clicks later, and "Balm in Gilead" was on it way. Through the cleverness of Amazon's "you may also like" database, I picked up a copy of Tracy Letts' Superior Donuts and Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone.

I read "Dead Man's Cell Phone" in two sessions: one before bed and another as I drank my morning coffee. That's part of the appeal of plays as reading. They go by quickly. And they pack a punch, at least the good ones do. This play was definitely one of the good ones. The setup is simple. A woman is in a cafe, and the man at the next table is dead. Not slumped over, or melodramatically dead. Just quietly not moving. Then his cell phone rings. She picks it up. Of course, this injects her into the man's life. How Ms. Ruhl deals with that is a pleasure. The play deals with serious subjects, but uses farce to keep it from being too tragic.

As you would expect in a play about dead people, the author has to deal with Heaven and Hell. While I don't believe in either, they are great literary concepts, and they work well here. Much like Steambath, the view is non-traditional.

A great play, and one that I will try to see.

Tracy Lett's "Superior Donuts" tells the story of an aging Polish-American boomer with a rundown donut shop, and the young African-American man who challenges him to revamp it. But it's not just about that. It's about cowardice and bravery, mostly. This doesn't sound like the subject matter that would attract me, but it did, completely and utterly. The characters felt so real, and the language was so sharp.

In fact, that's something I like in both Ruhl and Letts. Their dialogue is a joy. I know that shouldn't be a revelation. You don't pull off theater with anything except dialogue. And yet. It's great to read a passage, and say, "Damn. That was good."

Both highly recommended. I'll be reading more of their work.

Oh, and Lanford Wilson? Balm in Gilead awaits. Next.

Orris, Fusion Izakaya on Sawtelle

2011-04-21T21:43:00.000-07:00

Last night, we had dinner at Orris, a lovely fusion Izakaya on Sawtelle. It's across from Giant Robot, if you're anime inclined.

Sawtelle and the environs are a suburban Japantown to match the Little Tokyo downtown. In comparison to San Francisco, Chinatown:Clement Street::Little Tokyo:Sawtelle. Also, there are a number of Japanese-named nurseries around here, and I cannot help but think of Mas Arai, Naomi Hirahara's gardener-turned-detective.

Oh wait, I was blogging about dinner.

Orris was great. The fusion influences were well integrated, and nothing felt forced or out-of-place.

We had 7 dishes for 3 people.
First came a bruschetta with burrata & tomato.

This is what the dish looks like in the lighting at the restaurant. It's dim but not dark.

Here is is exposed so you can see detail.
My wife ate this and pronounced it perfect.

Next we got seared Ahi sashimi. It comes with avocado, scallion and a delicious "salad." This was also a hit. I don't care for Ahi very much, but I liked this a lot.

The third dish was fried asparagus with bacon and manchego cheese. The bacon is cooked until it's hard, but is cut fairly thick. A nice texture contrast to the vegetable and the cheese.

While eating the cheese, I discovered that sake goes well with Manchego. Who knew? I was drinking Suigei, a dry sake. The name means "Drunken Whale." So many poetic names for sake.

(That's Cooking Mama in the background on our daughter's iPhone.)

The most standard dish was the chicken kara-age. It's described on the menu as "free range fried chicken." It was perfectly executed, with a yuzu-chili dipping sauce. In any other restaurant this would be one of the best dishes. Here, it didn't stand out. It wasn't very fusion, to be honest.

On the other hand, curry-infused shrimp tempura was stunning. (Sorry, no picture.) It had flavored salt, as well as a delicious sauce. Usually, I find flavored salts to be a silly affectation. This one was not. This salt was glorious.

Shown here is basil black cod with basil mashed potatoes. Black cod = gindara, one of my favorite fish varieties. This dish was also outstanding. (Tired of hearing superlatives? Go read a different blog posting.)

The last dish was a plate of mushrooms. Delicious.

There weren't any leftovers. 'nuff said.

In addition to the delicious food, service was crisp, efficient, and friendly.

Highly recommended.

Mughal Dagger & Push Dagger

2011-04-20T22:54:00.000-07:00

I am sure my son would consider this a girly dagger.

It's from Mughal India. It's another LACMA piece. It's intriguing to me how flowers were perfectly acceptable on a weapon, 400 or so years ago, in India. I cannot imagine a Marine Corps sword with decorations like this. No slight intended to the Corps. Just a comment on the esthetics.

LACMA also has a push dagger in the same collection.

Sorry for the image. I was shooting handheld in a dim gallery, and you can tell. For whatever reason, LACMA doesn't have an image on their website.

Why the pic of the push dagger? It's one of the weapons for Manhunter. As I blogged about before, he was one of my favorites.

Saint Augustine

2011-04-20T22:32:00.000-07:00

This painting caught my eye

It's at LACMA. Saint Augustine is having his mind blown by Truth.*
The painting is by Philippe de Champaigne, who painted it around 1650.

*Not how the signage describes it in the museum. But I know "Veritas" is Latin for Truth. And, "Ecce homo, ergo elk," is Monty Python.

Diane Arbus at the Gogosian

2011-04-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

There is a lovely show of Diane Arbus prints at the Gogosian Gallery, in Beverly Hills. It's not the neighborhood we usually frequent in LA, but the show was there.

While a lot of her iconic work was shown, like Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents in Bronx, NY,

it was images that I hadn't seen before that made the show for me. For example,
Self Portrait, Pregnant, NYC, 1945

Muscle Men Contest with onlookers, Calif, 1962 (no image on the web)
Woman with a Beehive Hairdo, NYC, 1965
Erik Bruhn and Rudolph Nureyev, NYC, 1964
Woman at Counter Smoking, NYC, 1962

Some of the photos I knew from before were there, like
Teenage Couple on Hudson Street, NYC 1965
(press skip button to get to the image)

&

Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, 1962

I've really enjoyed Arbus' work since I was in college. Both my intro to Photography (a practical class) and History of Photography (an Art History class) featured her work. I am glad they did.

Magdalen with a Smoking Flames, detail

2011-04-20T01:47:00.000-07:00

I love the Georges de La Tour painting "Magdalen with a Smoking Flame," a c.1640 piece that hangs in LACMA.

This time, I noticed the lamp has oil floating on water. You can also see the wick, floating at the interface between the oil and the water.

I love this painting. Even though the memento mori aspect bores me.

Umami Burger Meets Scott Pilgrim

2011-04-20T01:30:00.000-07:00

Umami Burger provides butcher paper to draw on, while you wait for your meal.

Here is my daughter's artwork. She's been reading Scott Pilgrim.

Blow it up.

Art in the Streets, MOCA

2011-04-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

Sunday was opening day at MOCA's Art in the Streets show. Graffiti and Street Art. Murals, illegal signage, that sort of thing. Not what you'd expect to see in a museum. It was a great show.

I'm going to blog the show the way I viewed it. That is, with complete ignorance of most of the artists. I didn't read much of the signage. I just absorbed the work. It was a different way to see the show.

Start with this view as we walk past the Japanese American National Museum

The mural is by Blade, I think.

Up close, some interesting technique. And attention to the drip of sprayed paint. Nice detail.

The art in this show rewards the eye whether you are near or far.

Details in unexpected places. This Space Invader was outside the building, near the entrance.

This bandit/ninja was outside, as we waited to buy tickets. He had a miniature train on his head.

Inside, the ticket booth had a skate park behind it, with real, live skaters. The art was more interesting than the skateboarding. I love the eyes.

Next up, an installation that flipped views as the guests moved doors. This was a great piece. My son loved it. Art you can touch is rare in a museum. Compelling touchable pieces are rarer still.

There is a small section of anti-graffiti posters. They are presented "Reefer Madness" style.

Inside, there are cars by Keith Haring and Kenneth Scharf. I know of Haring, who has become something of a brand after his death from AIDS. Scharf was new to me.

Scharf has an interesting style, mixing hand painting with spray. The textures on the finished piece show the brush strokes very clearly. This was a surprise.

There were numerous installations, like this room in day-glo & black light.

Or this more homey tableau, complete with Olde English Malt Liquor cans.

Some of the images were from "Subway Art," a book I bought when it first came out. My favorite was this image of a car by Dondi. Dondi was also the name of a cartoon in the NY Post (or Daily News). It was the first page on the Sunday comics section when I visited my grandparents in Brooklyn. Never liked Dondi the comic. Loved Dondi the graffiti artist. This image is lousy. Go buy the book.It's been reissued.

There's a huge wall of train art, reproduced at a scale that makes a linger worthwhile.

And this gem of 8 images, next to the bathroom.

My son loved the interaction with some of the other pieces.

He also liked the Grim Reaper (aka "Death"), someone he knows from stories and cartoons.

The last part we stayed for was this Ice Cream/Candy truck. Breathtaking work.

Tangerine Kandy Flake, it seems to me.

But more than a little bit sexist.

Rhys looked at this carefully enough to notice the dog has a rhomboid collar, just like Scooby-Doo. He misread the SA and thought the dog was Scooby Doo. I think SA refers to the artist.

After this, our son had enough, and we left. I didn't see the whole show, but I loved it.

The Nickel Diner, Downtown LA

2011-04-17T22:26:00.000-07:00

The Nickel Diner has a maple-glazed bacon donut. We love bacon, and we love donuts.It was a natural place to go.

It's in LA's downtown, which you could charitably call "evolving." That's realtor speak for "blighted." Many shuttered buildings nearby.

This hotel is across the street. It was probably a nice place, once.

Scratch that. It was nice. Famous, too.

You can tell there was a wait. Why else would I have pictures of the outside of a restaurant?

A half hour later, we were inside. It's a crowded place, with glorious old-school decor. The sign over the door is precious.

This is the place
There is no place
Quite like this place
Anywhere near this place
So this must be the place

Is there a rhyme scheme A/A/A/A where the last word in every line is the same?

As you would expect from a place with no soft surfaces in sight, it is loud. Fine. I could still hear my wife, across the table.

She's reading me a passage from Brothers, Rivals, Victors, by Jonathan Jordan. No, she hasn't been taken over by a pod-person. Yes, she is reading a book about 3 generals in WWII.

But we didn't wait 30 minutes to read books in a noisy, crowded spot. We came to eat. Back to the eating. What they cook here is good diner food. I shared pulled pork hash with my wife, our son had pancakes, and our daughter had eggs.

The food was tasty but not earth-shattering. It isn't chef-y in execution. Comfort food, with a few new twists. Making hash with pulled pork instead of corned beef: smart. But this isn't the kind of place where you might find a shiitake mushroom in your hash.

And the donut? Super.

Worth the wait. Worth the drive.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

2011-04-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

Mitchell's historical novel "The Thousand Summers of Jacob de Zoet," is one of the best novels I've read recently, and that is saying something. The book is set in 1799 and 1800, in Nagasaki, where the Tokugawa shogunate allowed a small Dutch trading station, Dejima. Dejima was a small, artificial island, the only place where Westerners were allowed commerce or contact with Japan. (Dejima = 出島 = Exit Island.) The main character of the title is a twenty-something Dutch clerk, working for the Dutch East India Company, who is assigned the task of auditing the books of the outpost, the better to root out pervasive corruption. Of course, he is a straight arrow in a world of crooked men, which makes for interesting story-telling. He is also a novice in the ways of Japan, which allows a fairly easy immersion of the reader to world of the novel.

Mitchell's writing is good and his stories are compelling. There are moments where the bones of the novel show through, and yet I didn't care. Here and there are long stretches of monologue as the characters narrate their backstories. This is supposed to be a writerly no-no. But it works so well, I wished for more of it. The book is stuffed with those details of daily life in a bygone era, those reminders that Dejima in 1799 was a decidedly backward place, but the West was not anything approaching modern : chamber pots and insects, quills and inkpots, moxibustion and a mercury cure for syphillis.

There is a lot going on in the book.

Obviously, we have the interaction of Enlightenment-era Europeans with the strict Confucianism of Edo-period Japan. This is brought to life in Dr Marinus, a scholar, and Aibagawa Orito, a midwife and female student of his. They can see the obvious benefits of Western medicine. The first chapter has a graphic account of a difficult delivery. Only Dutch medical knowledge saves the day. But it isn't just the medicine that is introduced. There is also the culture of trying-only-if-you-succeed, as shown by the Japanese doctor who doesn't attend the birth for fear of failing.

As expected of a trading post, we have the Dutch, with their sense of honor and propriety running up against the Japanese, with a very different sense. The scenes of the Dutch negotiating with the Japanese are truly cringe-worthy.

Later in the book, a debate among the scholars of Dutch learning has a similar effect, in negative tone. They carefully debate how their policy of isolation from foreigners has not made them stronger, only weaker. The discussion is circumscribed by deference to authority. The isolation policy was instituted by a previous shogun, now deified, and it is nearly unthinkable to argue that the policy is wrong. Of course, we as readers know that Perry will come in fifty years and upend the Tokugawa shogunate.

Mitchell also explores slavery, which was starting to be abolished at this time, along with European attitudes of superiority to non-whites, which was much longer in leaving the scene.

There are many different characters, and it was often hard to keep them straight. There are Dutch traders, Japanese officials and students, sailors, people back home in Jacob's past, the list goes on. I should have made myself a dramatis personae, but I barreled on ahead, caught up in the story.

And it was the story, and the twisty plot, that kept me hooked through the book. At one point, as character plays go, he muses to himself, "Where is the hidden way...to reverse my reverses." The phrase is an apt description of the plotting style. Instead of cliffhangers, Mitchell doles out these reverses, places where the plot goes completely away from what I expected.

The prose was good, too, with lines like,

"We have a proverb," the interpreter pours himself a bowl of tea. "Nothing more costly than item that has no price." When Miss Aibagawa receives such a gift, she may worry, 'What is true price if I accept?'"

and

What if this engine of bones -- the seed germinates -- is a man's entirety...
... and divine love is a mere means of extracting baby engines of bones?

Some of the lines are coy comments on writing:

Storytellers are not priests who commune with an ethereal realm but artisans, like dumpling makers, if somewhat slower.

My favorite single sentence,

If guilt were copper coins, he thought, I could buy Dejima

It's the play between guilt and gilt that resonates.

A fine book. Highly recommended.

Read These Books

2011-03-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't had time for some proper postings on books, so I'll write mini-ones below.

Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht.

This book is set during "the troubles" in Northern Ireland. It's a Fantasy novel, with elements of Celtic mythology woven into a story involving the IRA and their fight against the British Army. I loved every bit of the book. Ms Leicht does an impressive job at weaving Faery into modern Ireland. The IRA characters are compromised in many ways, and more real for it.

True Grit by Charles Portis

I heard the Coen brothers interviewed on Fresh Air, and it made me want to read the book. The narrator is a 14 year old girl setting out to avenge her father, in post-Civil-War Arkansas and Oklahoma. Her character is riveting. The dialogue is so different from modern diction, and is quite absorbing. And the character of Rooster Cogburn made me think of the difficulty of demobilizing the men who have done terrible things in wartime.

Blood of Ambrose by James Enge

The first novel with Enge's anti-hero warrior-mage, Morlock Ambrosius. I read Mr Enge's Morlock story in Swords and Dark Magic, and loved the writing and the character. The novel is more of the same, which is to say, great. The plot unfolds in a very organic way, never having that "story on rails" feeling that you get from thrillers. And yet, the plot drives the story in a very satisfying way.

Three very different books. All great. Highly recommended.

Engineering Under Pressure

2011-03-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

My job involves troubleshooting. It's what I do, and I enjoy it.

I know how difficult it is to problem solve in an information-poor environment. This reading says X and that one says Y, and they can't possibly be true simultaneously. In the IC business, the difficulty is often one of scale. We work on things that require SEM or TEM to see structurally, for example. In a power plant, some item might be hot, or in the middle of a functioning reactor. It's a similar problem with different details.

That said, I am very glad I work on commercial ICs, and not on Nuclear Power Plants. My heart goes out to the engineers at TEPCO, who are fighting to make sure their plants don't melt down. I can't imagine the pressure they must be under. People don't want to screw up at any job, but I can't think of stakes much higher.

At my previous company, we worked on chips that did MPEG decode. As a good friend said, "When we screw up, some guy can't watch porn on his DVD player. The world doesn't end." That didn't stop big customers from raising a ruckus when we shipped defective ICs, but no one died. No oil wells blew out when we got a minus sign wrong, or when we decided to wing it, or when some designer didn't run all the corner case simulations.

I take my job seriously, but I sleep better knowing that it's not life support, or ABS brakes, or Nuclear Power Plant Engineering.

Expertise on Nuclear Reactors

2011-03-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

Like many people I know, I've been following the mess at the Fukushima Nuclear generating plants.

Two things struck me today, as I listened to reports on the radio.

First, almost no one on US radio had any real expertise. Here it was, five days after the earthquake, and today's Forum was the first time I heard someone with Nuclear Engineering background talking about how a reactor works. One guest was a professor at UC Berkeley, and he explained how Hydrogen was produced in the damaged reactor. It was pretty simple, really:

H20 + Zr (+Heat) --> ZrO2 + H2
(I think so; it was a verbal description)

This got me to thinking. Why was the news media not using nuclear experts? A quick Google check revealed 22 Universities with Nuclear Engineering departments. Presumably, any one of these would have someone capable of discussing a 1971-vintage GE-designed reactor.

Second, there was a lot of worry about radiation levels. General coverage on NPR had relatively little information, other than hand wringing. I got better information from the foreign correspondents I follow on Twitter. There I saw explanations of micro-Sieverts, and comparisons to chest X-ray or dental X-ray doses. Today, a figure of merit was shared, saying the morning reading of 400 milli-Sieverts per hour would cause acute radiation sickness in 45 minutes. Over and over, it seems that the US news media avoids order-of-magnitude explanations. This is frustrating.

Maccha Making in Isetan

2011-03-08T02:14:00.000-08:00

This woman made me a cup of maccha at the Isetan department store kimono department.

It was amazing to watch. In this bit, she heats the cup by pouring hot water in, and then heats the whisk by stirring the hot water. All while looking quite elegant.

Snow in Tokyo

2011-03-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, when I walked to work, it was raining. By the time I got to the office, on the 44th floor, the rain had turned to snow. I tried to capture the snow with my camera.

That's the Cocoon Tower on the right.

And some video

These aren't the best videos, sorry about that. I need to figure out how to adjust levels in video.

[Edit: Here are some levels-adjusted versions]

By noon, the snow had turned back to rain.

Ginkakuji: Temple of the Silver Pavilion

2011-03-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

Sunday, before leaving Kyoto, I visited Ginkakuji, the temple of the Silver Pavilion. Unlike the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, it isn't actually covered in silver leaf. All the better, to be honest. It's perfect just like it is.

Ginkakuji has a raked sand "garden," and it is impressive.

But first, the entry.

Pleasant and simple enough.

A substantial gate, with an angled path behind it.

Perfectly sharp hedges. On the left, fence in the belt line of the hedge. On the right, a peek into a bamboo grove.

Stark white walls offset the green and brown of the trees and mosses.

Raked sand near the entryway.

You could say these trees look like islands, but the sea looks like a math function, while the land looks more natural.

More white walls. Note the geometric gardening and paths. This is not repeated in the rest of the garden architecture.

Nature here is not natural. It is very much constructed. This tree branch is supported by a crutch.

Here's the pavilion itself. I tried to imagine it in silver, but it didn't work for me. I suppose I could make it silver in Photoshop, but why bother?

This is the real Ginkakuji experience. Everyone has a camera. There are people with video cameras and SLRs, with point-and-shoots and cell phones. Everyone is taking pictures. It's Japan, so people are scrupulously polite. It was actually hard to shoot images with people walking past. As soon as my camera went up, people waited silently for me to finish.

It's also interesting to people watch, because it is rare to see a couple with cameras. Usually it's one or the other person of a pair.

Close up on the white wall. You can't get all that close to the building.

The raked sand garden is named in English and Japanese. Other key features have signage in Japanese only.

This is one of the main attractions. It's a cone of gravel. When I say it that way, it doesn't sound like much. But it has a real pull to it. It looks good in the landscape. You can look at it from many angles, and it works. I really like it.

The "cone" isn't an isolated element. It plays off against plants and rocks. It's a Japanese garden, so everything is deliberate. I'm sure that rock was chosen specially, with great care. It pays off.

Different sand. This piece is brushed into stripes.

Here is the same sand viewed through an archway. I'm not used to seeing curved arches in Japanese architecture.

The Pavilion again, with the surrounding. It is very calming.

More raked sand, with a drainpipe. The drains are copper. I'm not sure when this happened, but I'm assuming it's a post-Meiji addition. You can see lightning rods and copper cladding on many historical buildings. It may be inauthentic, but it is better than them burning down from a lightning hit.

The trees are a pleasure to look at. They are very manipulated, too.

This man looked very elegant, among all the camera-toting tourists.

Another crutch supporting a tree limb. Note how the spacer of bark prevents the rope from distorting the limb's growth.

Everyone throws money at the rock here. The engineer in me sees a distribution of results centered on the rock.

The coins are mostly 1Y (Aluminum), 10Y (copper) with a smattering of 5Y (brass with a hole).

This plant was everywhere in the garden. Pretty, with a nice scent.

Close up.

The landscape reminds you that it rains a lot here.

The path winds up the hill to the East of the Pavilion.
Nice fence.

The Pavilion, as seen from the hill. This viewing angle is 100% intentional.

The complex as seen from the top of the hill path. Kyoto city is in the background. The urban parts of Kyoto are not that inspiring, but that's the view. It's easy to crop with the viewfinder. Here I decided not to.

Sand garden seen from above.

More of the fence. It's made of bamboo.

Every detail is enjoyable. I think that's a drain cover, made of bamboo. The construction reminded me of the mat used to roll maki sushi.

And back at the Pavilion, a purposely over-exposed picture so you can see the details of the construction.

This is one of my favorite places in Kyoto. Highly recommended if you go.

Modern & Traditional Kimonos in Kyoto

2011-03-05T02:55:00.000-08:00

After my maccha & mochi break, I wandered around Higashiyama, taking photos and sticking my nose in shops. Two shops are worth mentioning.

The first, Maruyasu, was a traditional kimono shop. I was drawn in by an obi. Once inside, I was delighted to find keitai (cellphone) straps made with obijime, the stiff fabric used to tie the obi. How cute, I thought, something in a kimono shop that I could actually buy, instead of just admire.

I looked around and was impressed by the obi, as well as one particular kimono fabric. The owner, who spoke simple Japanese that was still beyond me, showed off one piece of silk that was printed like shibori. Underneath the pattern, it was silk Jacquard. She showed me how it seemed to shimmer and wave as it moved. It was really lovely. Because the piece was printed and not hand-dyed, a kimono was a relative bargain at 18,000 JPY. (Yes, that's not bad.)

A few blocks away, I found the modern kimono store Wakon. This place was very different in feel -- it was brightly lit, versus the dimness of the traditional shop. I couldn't help think of Tanizaki. That said, I really liked Wakon, too. The staff was super friendly, and the shop had non-kimono items like sweets and furoshiki.

That's Morimura-san on the left & Chisaki-san on the right.

Morimura-san's obi has a striking graphic pattern of a rose, very angular. And her obijime was held in place with a pewter "flush." (As in the poker hand.)

I ended up getting some kind of glazed cookies, kind of like senbei but not as crisp. They had a huge number of flavors to the glaze. There was a mix of traditional ones like kinako, with non-traditional like Chocolate or Earl Grey tea.

When I explained I was from California, I was asked to explain where that was in the USA. American-centric guy that I am, I expected that everyone knows where California is. Nope. So I drew a freehand map, and placed California, Seattle, Texas, New York City, and Florida. I was asked "Where is Disneyland?" so I referred to the Orange County site as 本店, or "1st shop."

The two shops were very different, but enjoyed them both very much. Go if you are in Kyoto.

Higashiyama Tea House on a Saturday

2011-03-05T01:52:00.000-08:00

Today, after my colleague went to the airport, I went to Higashiyama again.

First stop was our favorite anmitsu & maccha place, whose name I never remember. We call it "the place with the koi" or similar sloppy names. We've gone every time we've been in Kyoto.

On the way there, I saw four maiko, or actually, four tourists dressed up as maiko.

Once at the shop, I got a seat in the tatami room, with a view of the garden and the koi pond.

The koi win lots of awards. Note the trophies in this image.

The men at this table were just leaving.

You can see the waitress delivering a green tea ice cream sundae, although it's not called that.

The sliding windows on the tatami room do not seal very well.

But the view makes up for it.

I got warabi mochi and maccha.

You can see the kinako clearly in this picture. The utensil is a wooden skewer, basically. It works well.

A short time later, the remains:

Delicious.

The front of the shop looks like this. I can't read the name.

They sell warabi mochi and green tea custard cake as omiyage.

Recommended.

Kyoto Tower Hotel

2011-03-05T01:23:00.000-08:00

Just to the North of Kyoto train station is the Kyoto Tower Hotel. I've never liked it. It looks like a cheap version of the Space Needle.

Tonight, as the sun was setting, I changed my mind.

Lit by the orange light of the late afternoon sun, Kyoto Tower looks good.

The hotel building looks dated. Heck, so does the tower. But it looks good against a darkening sky.

To be honest, I first noticed it reflected in the station building.

I wasn't the only one taking photos.. Were other people just shooting the station, or the tower's reflection?

The top reminds me of traditional bamboo basketry, crossed with a mid-century graphic of an atom.

Snow from the Train

2011-03-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

Thursday, we took the train to Takefu, north-northeast of Kyoto. The train takes a scenic path, past the shores of Lake Biwa. Of course, I didn't realize that at the time. I looked at the Google map only afterwards, as I wrote this post.

The weather in Kyoto was clearing after an overnight snow. As we headed north, it became snowier as we went.

Some of the scenes were more picturesque.

Some, less so.

Still, snow I don't have to drive in, or shovel, is good snow indeed.

Kyoto Morning Snow

2011-03-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning, there was snow in Kyoto. A light dusting only, but enough to be noticeable.

The view South, from my hotel. Proving, also, that Kyoto has urban bits to go along with the picturesque antique parts.

A piece of Kyoto station, seen from the hotel. Kyoto station is a striking, modern building. It's also something of a wind tunnel on cold days.

The view from Starbucks, at about 7:30, just as the snow finished.

Obanzai Restaurant "Wabisuke Shigure Chaya"

2011-03-04T12:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a long day. I woke up at 3 am from jet lag, and had an all day meeting at a customer. But dinner made it all worthwhile.

I didn't really have a good idea where to eat, and I did something unusual. I asked the hotel concierge to recommend a place, specifying only the cuisine. I wanted to try obanzai ryori, Kyoto home-style cooking. He picked a place called Wabisuke Shigure Chaya, in Gion. It was only after we started for the cab that I wondered how much it would cost.

The restaurant is located in the northern part of Gion, the entertainment district made famous by geisha. The restaurant is on a quiet side street called Shirakawa-minami-dori. A stream, shirakawa or "white river," runs next to the street on the other side, and restaurants there have balconies with views. It's amazing how quiet it can be, when only a few blocks away is the bustle of the Kamo river or the main drag of Shijo dori.

The restaurant is small and homey, with about 8 seats at the counter, and a table for 4. The chef cooks behind the counter, and the waitress serves. Thankfully, she spoke enough English to help us along. My Japanese includes a lot of nouns and food words, but not so many verbs or grammatically correct sentences. There is an English menu, too.

A variety of foods are sitting on the counter. The white bowl closest to right held cooked fish in vinegar, which we didn't eat. The blue and white one next to it had the pork, which we did.

The chef does an amazing job in a tiny cooking space. I should not complain about the size of my kitchen.

We ate food chosen for us

Sashimi -- hirame, toro, and kanpachi
Takenoko (bamboo shoots)
Buta kakuni (soy simmered pork shoulder)
Tori Shioyaki (salt grilled chicken) with mizuna "salad"
Takenoko Gohan (rice cooked with chopped bamboo shoots) &
Tsukemono (pickles) to finish

Everything was great. True to the cooking style, it was well-executed, homey food. There were no architectural flourishes or strange preparations. But every dish was delicious, and every one was worth having again. Small things stood out, too, like pickles made from wasabi-na, a mustard green. They were the best pickles I've had in a while.

The meal, one flask of local sake included, cost us JPY 7,000, about $85 at current exchange rates. A superb value, really.

Highly recommended.

Back in Kyoto

2011-03-04T05:41:00.000-08:00

I’m back in Kyoto, for work.

Yesterday, I woke up early and had a Kyoto train station breakfast. One maccha donut, from Mister Donut, and a “Maccha Milk” from Café du Monde. Maccha Milk is green tea and steamed milk, basically a maccha latte.

A bit later, I went with a colleague and toured Higashiyama on foot. Higashiyama is the area in Eastern Kyoto where the city runs into the hills. We started at Gion, walked through Yasaka Shrine, and went looking for Kodaiji temple. I recalled Kodaiji from a previous visit.

As we walked S out of the shrine, we saw these workers repairing the roof of a building.

I love walking through th older sections of Kyoto. Some of the traditional architectural elements are very different than those in the Western tradition. For example, this wall is made of wood textured by burning, it seems. And the grain is quite raised.

We ended up one temple off, at the next door temple with the giant Kannon. I couldn’t read the name of the place, but you couldn’t miss the Buddha image. Kannon is the Buddha of mercy, Kwan Yin in Chinese. The temple itself is an odd looking place, with mid-century poured concrete supporting the statue.

As we showed up, one the priests was chanting sutras while another played a drum.

Between the Kannon temple and Kodaiji, a pair of statues. That’s Nene on the Left and her husband Hideyoshi on the right. I love that the two of them are carved in SD or Super-Deformed style. It’s clear that these are not 500-year-old statues. Even better are the bilingual directions on how to touch the statues to get good fortune. Japan is a country where there are instructions for everything.

Kodaiji is a Zen Buddhist temple devoted to Nene, the wife of Hideyoshi. After Hideyoshi died, Nene became a Buddhist nun. The temple has a teahouse for cha-no-yu. You cannot go into the teahouse, but you can see the door in the photo below. It is very low, so that all visitors have to lower themselves to enter.

Much of the inside of the temple is off limits to photography. This dragon screen, for example, has a “no photography” sign in Japanese. I didn’t realize what the sign meant until I was in another building. And no, I didn't destroy the image once I knew what the sign said.

Kodaiji has a raked gravel garden. Theirs isn’t as affecting as Ryoanji’s, but it is nice nonetheless.

At the Eastern end of the temple, there are more realistic statues of Nene and Hideyoshi, but they are off limits to pictures. Outside that structure was this roof. I love the complexity of such apparently simple structures as roof tiles.

As we finished, it started to snow. We walked out of the temple, and had mochi at an open-air stand next door.

Did I mention I was here in Kyoto for work? Seriously, we left Higashiyama after the sweets, and spent the rest of the day doing engineering.

Twice Cooked Spare Ribs

2011-02-23T01:50:00.000-08:00

Sorry, no pictures this time.

I felt creative and decided to merge two methods of cooking spare ribs. First, I steamed the spare ribs to make them tender. Then I oven cooked them with a coating, to dry them out. The result was very tasty, and relatively quick.

1 rack of ribs, band-sawed into thirds by the butcher. (against the bone)
Soy sauce & Sake marinade
Dry coating, 1/2 recipe

Cut the ribs between each bone. You will have roughly thumb-sized pieces of rib. Toss these into a gallon ziploc with the marinade. Marinate until you are tired of waiting, about 1 hour at RT. More time means saltier.

Prepare a steamer in a soup pot. Dump the ribs and marinade into the steamer basket. This means that the marinade will be part of the steaming liquid. That's fine.

Bring to a boil, then steam, covered, for ~30 minutes on medium-low heat. The ribs will be cooked but not fully tender. Remove from heat.

Pull the ribs from the steamer and pat roughly dry. No need to be fastidious with the drying.

Heat the oven to 350F.

Coat each rib with dry coating. Shake off excess. Place on a baking tray, with room in between each rib.

Bake 30 minutes.

Eat.

Marinade:
Soy Sauce 1/3 C (80ml)
Sake 1/3 C (80ml)

Dry Coating: (Swiped from New Basics Cookbook chicken recipe)
1C Flour
1C Corn meal
1.5C Ground pecans
2 tsp cayenne
4 tsp paprika
2 tsp salt
(recipe has 2 tsp black pepper but I don't use it)

note: you can keep the unused coating in a sealed container for later use. It's kind of a homemade shake-n-bake.

Celebrate Passivity

2011-02-23T01:18:00.000-08:00

I saw a bumper sticker this weekend that made me mad.

"Relax, God is in Control," it said.

At first, I thought, what an amazingly smug, suburban approach to the world. Suburban here being the modern American usage where bourgeois would probably fit better. Of course you can relax. You have a nice car and presumably, a nice job.

Then I thought about recent events in Tunisia, and Egypt. Should those people have relaxed, because God was in control?

Backyard 花見 2011, #2

2011-02-13T20:36:00.000-08:00

The leaves are coming in, which means the blossoms will be gone soon on our trees.

This morning was foggy. Fog is the photographer's friend. Beautiful diffuse light.

and

Some of the blooms are on the smallest branches. I find it captivating, how the tree generates new growth.

and

The whole of one tree looks like this. Thank you, previous owners of our house, for planting so many flowering plum trees.

Undoing Corruption

2011-02-07T21:17:00.000-08:00

As protests wrack Egypt, lack of opportunity and rampant corruption is one of the main complaints. I started to think about this over the last week, not that I have any influence over events, but just as a thought exercise. What does de-corruption look like in practice? How do you undo decades of expected behavior, even when the behavior is now admitted as wrong?

The system is often described at the lowest level, where minor officials and police on the street require bribes to make anything happen. Seemingly, this is the kind of problem that would be hard to root out. Low level bureaucrats aren't paid well. They use bribes to supplement their income. If, all of a sudden, these bribes were cut off, how would these people live? On the other hand, the people doing the bribing are also lacking in opportunity. Don't they deserve the "tax break" of a bribery-free life? Paying the bureaucrats extra would work, it seems. It's also somewhat a Keynesian solution, so don't expect a lot of press supporting this idea.

In addition, the "stifling bureaucracy" is often mentioned.How would one go about getting rid of the bureaucracy, without throwing all these people out of work? This is the de-Baathification problem, without the guns.

My feelings were crystallized by reading this article in the NYT, Egypt’s Ire Turns to Confidant of Mubarak’s Son

Now, there's a different view. It describes high level corruption, and not the retail type. Removing this type would be much more useful. And it would inconvenience a small elite at the top, an elite unlikely to agree to go quietly. But it surely wouldn't mess up the economy of the mass of Egyptians.

Backyard 花見 2011

2011-02-07T09:03:00.000-08:00

It's February. In the rest of the US, there are snow & ice storms. In my backyard, the plum (梅) trees are blooming.

These are from Saturday.

In my neighborhood, some of the trees are spectacular.

Happy Monday, everyone.

God's War by Kameron Hurley

2011-02-04T08:39:00.000-08:00

Wow. This was a great book. It was another one of those "stop reading the blog, just go buy it" kind of books.

I bought God's War a weekend ago, when I stumbled upon Borderlands Books in San Francisco. It was there by the door. The cover looked great, and there was a blurb by Jeff VanderMeer, of Finch fame. Since I liked Finch, I bought the book. I am very happy I did.

I started reading God's War while I was home sick with a nasty cold. This I do not wish upon you. Read it in good health.

God's War is an interesting novel. It's an SF hard-boiled story, and the plot is complicated, and there are lots of characters.

I really liked the setting. Hurley has made a desert world, sometime in the far future. The world is approximately Muslim, but an Islam that has, I don't know, "mutated" is the word that comes to mind. "Evolved" maybe. And technology has similarly mutated so things that occur with chemicals or electronics today, use bugs in her world. Yes, bugs. Like roaches, ants, wasps and locusts. The author uses the word "bugpunk" on her website, which is appropriate, but makes it a bit too neat. The organic and messy nature of the tech is interesting, and clever. Leaking brake lines smell of coagulant, as they heal themselves. The people who make bug-tech work are called magicians, and they have healing powers as well.

Spacefaring exists, but is rare. The world of the story is almost 100% cut off from other worlds -- think Tokugawa-era Japan.

The central fact that underlies the story is the war of the title. For the purposes of the post, think of the Iran/Iraq war, although the Western Front 1915-1918 would do also. Senseless horror and slaughter without end. It's God's War because the two sides have different interpretations of the same religion.

I am a sucker for hard boiled stories. The main character, Nyx, is a classic hard boiled character: boxer, bounty hunter, heavy drinker, unattached & casual lover. But Nyx is a woman, and a woman in this pseudo-Muslim society. Makes it quite interesting. As well, the author doesn't just change all the Dashiell Hammett tough guys into girls, and the dames into pretty boys. It's more subtle than that.

And like all good hard boiled stories, the protagonist gets knocked around, a lot. Nyx is a tough character, and the things that knock her down are impressively tough, too.

Unlike the classic hard boiled detectives, Nyx is not a lone wolf. She travels with a team, and each member of that team has a skill, and a story. I liked that. This felt something of a cross between the Fellowship, a D&D adventurers party, and a squad of GIs in a WWII movie. Not that any of those are bad tropes, honestly. I enjoy them all.

I don't like spoiler reviews, so I'll skip the plot. It's messy, and the tangled bits make it interesting.

Highly recommended. Looking forward to more work from the same author.

In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki

2011-01-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

I don't remember exactly why I picked up Tanizaki Junichiro's "In Praise of Shadows," but I am glad I did. It is a long essay, translated and published in book form, that explores the difference between Japanese and Western aesthetics. Simply stated, Tanizaki says that Japanese like shadows, and Westerners like bright light. He develops the theme in a variety of ways, not all of them convincing. But he is an engaging author, and the whole is quite compelling. I liked the essay because it made me look at the world in a different way.

Tanizaki is best known as the author of The Makioka Sisters, one of those classics I haven't read, but mean to. Born in early Meiji Japan (1886), he wrote this piece in early Showa, in 1933.

The essay meandered, a style that the afterword said is traditional in Japanese essay writing. I can't claim any knowledge of that, but I have to say, it was enjoyable. It reminded me of a conversation, rather than a speech. I imagined Uncle Tanizaki holding forth, a cup of tea (or sake) in hand.

A longing for the past pervades the essay. But it is not a past that can be captured and frozen. This Tanizaki dislikes almost as much as the aspects of modernity. He denounces modern (1930's modern) Kabuki as a sham. The part that he likes about the old ways worked because it was pervasive, and common, and alive. This is an interesting perspective, but ultimately, a melancholy one. The past is gone, and you can't even hold on to it, unless there is a critical mass to keep it going.

In the main thrust, Tanizaki says that Westerners like bright light, and shiny things, and airy spaces. His analysis here is intriguing. When I've visited Japanese temples and shrines, I've been struck by the dimness of the interiors, even at mid-day. I take photos and alter the exposure to lighten the scenes. Tanizaki's thesis tells me I've been viewing them incorrectly. It's the dimness that I should enjoy. How refreshing.

Another thing I enjoyed was Tanizaki's directness when discussing aesthetics. Agree or disagree, you knew what he meant. Did you like your silver shiny or tarnished? He liked it tarnished and told you why. I contrast this to more modern pieces about art, especially contemporary art, where the language twisted in knots, but nothing seemed to be said. Or said plainly.

Some of the comments seem almost sad in their obviousness, such as his complaint about incandescent bulbs burning in the daytime in the summer. And yet, I wonder at the essence of the new, of the modern, in 1930s Kyoto or Tokyo. Not all that is new is progress, surely, but new has a great marketing allure.

There are false notes. The author has a long section about race, and how Japanese skin tone is apparent even through Western dress, powder and makeup. It's very dated, and reminds me that racial thinking was common in 1930's Japan, with horrible consequences.

Highly recommended.

Dynamo Donuts, Stop #5

2011-01-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

After a great meal at il Cane Rosso, we went to Dynamo Donuts for a "Gibraltar." When we went, we had no idea what a Gibraltar was, but it was in the article, so...

It turns out that a Gibraltar is a coffee drink. Two shots of espresso and two shots of steamed milk, in a "Gibraltar" glass. It's like a shrink version of a caffe latte. The milk:coffee ratio is great, much better than a latte. Of course, you may disagree. I drink espresso straight, no sugar, so you may think my tastes a bit off. Still, the shop is famous for this drink, so I'm not the only one ordering it.

That's a very nice orange juice and a "Four Barrel" drip coffee in the picture. Thumbs up on them, too.

Oh, and they make the best donuts here.

Did I mention the staff was super friendly? No. Well, they were. They patiently explained everything to us.

We had a chocolate spice donut, loved by all. The spice is not intensely hot, but you can tell it's there. The chocolate is also quite noticeable. It doesn't have that "sweet and brown" flavor of a cheaper donut. We also got a passionfruit glazed donut, loved by my wife. My daughter couldn't abide it, and I thought it so so. That was mostly a reaction to the passionfruit. The donut itself was perfectly executed.

Donuts here are not cheap, running about $2.50. But they are worth it. Come on, you pay this much for a mediocre croissant at a cafe, or nearly this much for a sickly sweet donut at Starbucks.

When we came upon it from the street, the place seemed to be a stand. But there was seating in the back. We were alone back there on a Sunday afternoon. My son had a great time. In addition to the old donut ads & donut ephemera, they have many donut picture books.

Highly recommended.

il Cane Rosso, Stop #4

2011-01-24T08:25:00.000-08:00

Continuing our SF Big Eat adventures, we went to il Cane Rosso in the Ferry Building. We arrived at 12:03 and just missed brunch. The place actually closes for 30 minutes to change over the kitchen and prepare for lunch. We were undeterred, and waited.Our son played Legos.

We ordered from the ever-changing menu: a pulled pork sandwich, broccoli sandwich, roast sweet potatoes and carrots, crispy polenta, and soup.

The pulled pork sandwich gets this simple description: "MARIN SUN FARMS SLOW-COOKED PORK orange-fennel compote, cracklins, mustard greens." The pork falls apart, and is very tasty. It is complimented well by the mustard greens, a vegetable I don't usually eat, let alone add to sandwiches.

The broccoli sandwich (DIRTY GIRL FARM BROCCOLI: crescenza cheese, meyer lemon, pickled parsley root) was surprisingly good. Both of us are wary of vegetarian sandwiches, usually. This was an eye-opener. Every flavor was clean and clear. Lemon and cheese go very well with broccoli.

Both of the sandwiches had flavors that stood out. If a normal sandwich is a smooth layering of flavors

(image from here)

then the il Cane Rosso sandwiches were spiky in their flavor, like this:

(image from here)

This is a positive description, mind you.

The soup was pork, cabbage and farro. It got very high marks from our daughter.

Roasted sweet potatoes were less popular. These were sweet potatoes, and not yams, so I think the fault was in the source ingredient. Sweet potatoes are starchier and less flavorful than yams. The carrots cooked with were quite good, though.

Last, we got crispy polenta. This was perfectly executed, homey food. It was the perfect end to the meal.

An outstanding place, worth the wait. Although you could show up at 12:30 and just be served. We'll be back.

Getting to Like a Technical Constraint

2011-01-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

We were in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco last weekend, and all around us were murals. I finally realized why I didn't like them. They have too many colors.

For example:

(It's not the one I saw, but the style is similar. Original photo at this site.)

To me, there are too many colors, and too many elements. I like my public artwork simpler, more graphic.
For example, this poster from Bauhaus.

It took me a while to recognize it, but the Bauhaus poster's simplicity comes from the 2 color design constraint. Four color press was not normal in 1923 poster art. Yes, the Bauhaus artists fetishized industrial imagery as the essence of the modern, but the color aesthetics come from limitations of the technology.

If you get a book on design, like this one, you get advice to limit the colors to highlight things well. Note the styling of the cover: purple and yellow.

Of course, now we have a near-infinity of colors available, but I am used to the stylings of constraint. It's not just me, it's part of the design curriculum.

In much the same way, I love the following foods that preceded refrigeration

Prosciutto
Bacon
Cheese
Beef Jerky

None of these are "necessary" any longer, but the constraint allowed an artistry.

San Tung, Stop #1

2011-01-19T22:41:00.000-08:00

At least one of you has noticed that I started my 7x7 posts with 'stop #2,' rather than our first stop. This post remedies that problem.

On the Sunday night before the MLK holiday, we went to San Tung restaurant for their dry fried chicken wings. San Tung is in the Sunset, a neighborhood we don't usually visit. It's a SF locals neighborhood. I don't think tourists know that the neighborhood even exists. Of course, locals do know about the Sunset, and they certainly know about San Tung. We had an hour wait.

San Tung is crowded and noisy, and the decor is barely there: a few paper dragons hang from the ceiling near the cash register. But you're not here for cloth napkins. You're here for food.

First, the wings. They're good. My wife liked them more than I did. The chicken is fried, and has a minimalist sauce of white pepper and a little black bean, with some sweet and sticky notes. I thought they were too sweet, but everyone else thought they were just fine. And I ate my share, too, so maybe I am just a bit picky.

We also got Pork Noodle Soup with Chinese Pickle. This was perfect. The noodles were great, as was the broth. I thought this was the best dish of the night. Others disagreed, but we all liked it.

We also ordered Pork Chow Mein, for our 6yo. Although he didn't eat it. We had some, and it was very good. Pork Chow Mein is one of those dishes we rarely order as "serious" Chinese food. It was a pleasant surprise to have a tasty version.

Rounding out the selection was an order of Four Season Green Beans. They were good but not great.

This was the aftermath.

Worth the wait? Yes.

Pizzaria Delfina, Stop #3

2011-01-17T22:24:00.000-08:00

After we had our dessert at Tartine, we grabbed lunch at Pizzeria Delfina. It's half a block down the street, with a convenient wait. No, really, it was good to have a wait before eating again. On a normal day, maybe not so much. But after pastries, fine.

The "list" item at Pizzeria Delfina is the Margherita Pizza. But before we got that, we had their cauliflower. Stupendous! I like cauliflower, and this blew away anything I've ever had with the vegetable. It was roasted or grilled, with capers and sliced fresh red chilis, among other things.

They make good coffee, too.

We got a Margherita pizza and a prosciutto pizza. Margherita is simple and classic, with the trio of tomato, cheese and basil. My wife liked it more than I did. The prosciutto pizza had the prosciutto added last, so the ham comes to the table still soft and raw. Those are leaves of fresh arugula on top, a great flavor combination. That said, eating prosciutto in large pieces doesn't really work well on pizza. Oh, heck. It wasn't an interview meal. Tasty, if a bit messy.

The crust is thin and non-oily. It's chewy, though, and not cracker-brittle. Would that my boyhood pizzas were made like this.

For two people, two pizzas is far too much food. We ate some and boxed the rest.

We like the regular restaurant Delfina. It's nice to know that the pizzeria is worthwhile as well.

Tartine, Stop #2

2011-01-17T21:53:00.000-08:00

Today we had lunch at Pizza Delfina on 18th, preceded by a pastry at Tartine. We're working our way through the 100 best list from 7x7, a subject I'll cover later in more detail.

We love Tartine, but it is always crowded. Also, it's in the land of no parking at Guerrero& 18th. We found parking a mere 3 blocks away, a trifle by neighborhood standards.

Once you're inside, it's interesting to watch the people in line. Or to look into the kitchen, another world from the way I make cookies. And no, I have no illusions. They bake far better than I do.

The 7x7 list had "morning bun" as the recommended item. I've had it before and could vouch for it, but my wife wanted to try it. Unfortunately, it was sold out. Instead, I had an eclair. The women sitting next to us had one, and it looked good. They were right. It was exquisite. Yes, a pastry worth a 45 minute drive. My wife got the bread pudding with fruit. It was very light and eggy. It wasn't as good as the eclair, but still quite nice.

It didn't take long to finish.

Yamaguchi Akira at the Ginza Mitsukoshi

2011-01-02T07:11:00.000-08:00

Today, January 2nd, was the first full shopping day of the New Year's holiday in Japan. We went as a family to the Ginza, mostly to people watch and take photos. While we were there, we planned to poke around some.

As we left Ginza Station, we saw numerous ads for an art exhibition on the top floor of the Ginza Mitsukoshi. The images in the ad were tweaked versions of Tokyo Tower. Instead of an all-steel, red and white copy of the Eiffel Tower, there were more traditional Japanese buildings embedded.

This was strange on a few levels. Even though I've been to Tokyo many times, I've never visited the Tokyo Tower. It's not that interesting to me, architecturally. So I thought, "Wow, did I miss the part-Castle, part-Meiji architecture in the middle of the thing? Maybe I should have gone to see it after all." In addition, the show was not in a museum, but in a department store. This is a uniquely Japanese way to see art, in my experience. I can't imagine going to Nordstrom's flagship store in Seattle to see a show, nor Macy's original shop in Manhattan. But we've seen art in depaatos before, so we went.

Along the way, our son conked out, so only I got to see the whole show. My wife saw a free gallery that showcased a set of 16 prints.

The show was superb. Yamaguchi does artwork that blends many styles, and many eras. Edo-era ukiyo-e style is used to draw street scenes with phone poles and superhighways. The pre-Western flat perspective is also used to great effect. But it's not just the style that blends old with new. He also has chronological impossibilities, like Russo-Japanese war paintings showing Imperial Russian cavalry riding motorcycle-horse hybrids, or Japanese naval artillery shells with dragon carvings on them. He has a wonderful, draftsman-like quality to his drawing, and he inks in a fine line. His pictures are full of detail, both of architecture and of people. Many of the works look like ink on paper, with watercolor for color. (Almost all signage was in Japanese, so I may have this wrong.)

The work has an amazing breadth as well.

In a section on redesigning street cars, there is an actual, metal mock-up of a street car, complete with trucks on the bottom. The sign says "Yanaka Roku-chome," which is a real neighborhood. The piece is done in the style of a 1950s streetcar, and at first, I thought it was the "before" version he was trying to replace or evoke.

Another section is called "The Art of Electric Pole Arrangement." There are drawings of electric poles, all of them fanciful. Yamaguchi has studied the patterns of the wires and insulators, seemingly only as exercises in form. The results are lovely, something power poles usually are not. He also has drawings of ceramic insulators, but they are decorated as if they were Delft-ware.

My favorite part was the section on the Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese wars. These are very much re-imagined, and look like Steampunk versions of these Meiji-period conflicts. But Steampunk is not a fair description either. There's a lot going on here.

Without reading the desriptions, I felt like I was missing much of the background. Also, since he borrows from earlier Japanese art traditions, there is a lot of text in the images themselves. Yet I didn't care. It was a great show. And I just bought the book pictured above. I figure I can read up later.

Mutekiya Ramen: Worth a One Hour Wait

2010-12-31T20:29:00.000-08:00

Our Tokyo apartment is on the west side of Ikebukuro train station. On the south side of the station, there is a pedestrian & bicycle undercrossing. Just as you come out onto Meiji Dori on the east side is Mutekiya, a ramen shop that always has a line.

Map here

After passing the place many times, we ended up there when another ramen shop was closed on New Year's Eve.

As usual, there was a line. It was about 30 people long, and it took us almost an hour to get seated. While we waited, we marveled at the line of cars waiting to park at the nearby Seibu department store. Unfortunately, the wait was almost completely in shadow, so we were quite chilled by the time we got seated. Of course, none of this was the restaurant's problem.

After 30 minutes of waiting, a waiter passed out menus, and took our orders. Between the picture menus and my rudimentary Japanese, we were set.

This is the sign showing all the components of the soup. I like how it's a painted wok. That's disinfectant soap next to it.

We were also told that there was no way that we were going to get to sit as a foursome. The place is set up as an all-counter space, and is quite small. Eventually, though, we did get to sit down at 4 contiguous seats, although we were seated separately, and 5 minutes apart.

My wife got miso-flavored ramen with a mini chasu donburi. My son shared with her. He's watching a DVD player with 'phones, a technique that allowed us to eat.

My daughter got tonkatsu ramen with an added egg. I think it was tonkatsu, anyway. Like I said, my reading is pretty marginal.

I got spicy ramen with the soup on the side. Here you see it before I started eating.

After 60 minutes in line in the cold, we ate our food in 15 minutes. It was fantastic. I didn't feel like we were rushing.

My wife loved her food, and commented that we should have it again, before returning to the US. We were disappointed to find out that Mutekiya is closed on 1/1 and stays closed until after we fly home. This prompted a brief fantasy of digesting our food for 2 hours and then standing in line for another hour, to get inside before the last order. This was not to be -- the portions were large and we were still full.

Suica Ads -- Don't Use Money, Use E-Money

2010-12-30T03:04:00.000-08:00

This morning, our train on the Yamanote line had only one kind of ad: Suica cards.

Suica, literally watermelon, is the name of the e-money card used on the JR East line in Tokyo. You can use them to pay for your subway ticket, rather than buying a new ticket for each leg of the ride. And they interoperate seamlessly with Pasmo, the card for the Tokyo Metro, so you can pay for train or subway with one pass card.

Now Suica is encouraging you to ditch regular money and use Suica for all sorts of transactions. This is interesting, because Japan is still much less credit-card friendly than the US. Frankly, they're easier to use than credit cards. They debit without PINs or other ID, making them the equivalent of cash. And they work in proximity, rather than swiping. All in all, they are more reliable than the mag stripe technology on US credit cards. Of course, being just like cash, you have to "load" them every so often.

Vending machines in the train station take the cards. Convenience chain Newdays takes them. The ads emphasize the benefits. I love the cartoon frustration shown in the ads.

The taxi passenger is trying to break a 10,000 JPY note. (~$120 USD at today's rates.)

Trying to get the vending machine bill reader to cope with your wrinkled note.

Missing the train because you were buying a drink with cash, and waiting for your change.

Zoom out of the 3rd image.

I don't know what everyone else thinks, as I take photos of ads in the subway. "Crazy Gaijin," I suppose.

New Year's Decorations

2010-12-27T04:29:00.000-08:00

In Japan, Christmas decorations are gone on 12/26. New Year's decorations take their place.

This one, outside a shopping mall, is typical. Bamboo and pine are common elements, as are ropes.

Of course, someone has to deliver the bamboo from which these things are made. While we were walking in Harajuku, we saw this collection of milk crates filled with bamboo.

At the small size, this reminds me of a British Cathedral.

Reading Kanji

2010-12-27T04:12:00.000-08:00

I liked this New Year's sign, and took a picture. I didn't bother to read it closely until I got home.

I'm self-taught in Japanese, and have learned some kanji via iPod apps. I'm slow. My vocabulary is spotty. But I am a very visual person, so I recognize place names and family names that I see over and over.

The bottom row reads (approximately)
Ikebukuro West Gate In-Front-of-the-Station Merchant Shop Association

Of that, I could read
Ikebukuro West Gate In-Front-of-the-Station X Shop X

But only when I was home, and looking at the photo. When I was walking on the street, I saw "2011" and a cool rabbit. It's Year of the Rabbit in a few days.

Two Snapshot Shows at Tokyo Metro Photography Museum

2010-12-25T05:20:00.000-08:00

Today, we visited the two shows devoted to the art of the snapshot at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. On floor 3, Snapshots Cast Their Spell showed historical masters of the form. On floor 2, The New Snapshot, was a contemporary show of Japanese artists. I liked both, although I thought the former was the stronger show.

Snapshots Cast Their Spell had a collection of iconic works by acknowledged masters. There are photos by Henri Cartier Bresson and Kimura Ihee, the subjects of an earlier show. But the show begins with a Hungarian artist Martin Munkacsi, whose work from the interwar years was just spectacular. For example, this piece,

"Having Fun at Breakfast," showing a dancer apparently walking up a wall with a coffee in hand.

I loved it.

Munkacsi had many images with motion stopped by the shutter, something that must have been novel at the time. But his photographs do not just freeze split seconds, the way Edgerton's do. They have a wonderful emotional content as well.

Ryan McGinley is represented nearby. His images are quite out of place in the chronology, but fit well in theme with these older pieces. The chosen work is "Up," from the NYT Sunday Magazine of February 2010! (Although the images don't appear when you go to the archived article. Drat!)

Richard Avedon has multiple images as well. While I loved his photo work, I was taken aback by the rail thin models in the New Look photos. That said, I liked this photo, which most everyone knows,

and this one, which I had never seen before.

Surprising to me was the title on the top image, "Homage to Munkacsi." It became clear just how seminal Munkacsi was.

Lartigue gets many photographs also, my favorite one below:

After a too-short section of Kimura, the show had some great images by Kuwabura Kineo. The photographs here are of 1930s Asakusa and other Shitamachi areas. Kuwabura published two books that were mentioned, "Tokyo in the 11th Year of Showa [1936]," and "Manchuria in the 11th year of Showa." (That's about as much as WWII interrupts the proceedings -- a mention of the Japanese colony in Manchuria.)

Sorry for the paucity of images from the Japanese photographers. Their images are not easily found on the web.

I especially liked another shitamachi image, Tsuchida's picture of a train car in Asakusa, Tokyo.

Usui Kaoru had a haunting photo called "Bathhouse Owner's Daughter," showing a clothed girl among the signage of the family business.

There were American photographers as well, like Walker Evans, Bruce Davidson, and Gary Winogrand. Winogrand's "Women are Beautiful" has many pictures in the show.

And his wonderful photo of the Apollo XI moon launch is the print you see when you enter the hall.

A floor below is a more modern, and all-Japanese show. This was more mixed. Two artists really impressed me. One, Yuki Shigeo, began photographing Tokyo after a life in advertising. His images of Tokyo are great. There is a nostalgia series, showing the older parts of the city, in all their rusty and faded glory. The nostalgia is a Showa-era longing, not particularly picturesque in a traditional sense. Yet the photographs felt so much more vital than pictures of some Geiko clopping down the street in Gion. Like the shitamachi pictures on floor 3, they showed the life of real people in a living city.

At the end of the show, I was blown away by the work of Shirai Satomi, whose work bridges Tokyo & New York. You can see more of her work here, but take a look at this

or these two

Great work, and two fine shows! Highly recommended if you are in town.

Recipes from the Essential NYT Cookbook

2010-11-21T22:42:00.000-08:00

My wife saw Amanda Hesser talk in San Francisco, and bought a copy of her new book, The Essential New York Times Cookbook. The book is massive, running to more than 900 pages. It collects recipes from the late 1800s to date. Ms. Hesser has remade some of the recipes, fitting them to modern ingredients, or fleshing out some very vague originals. She also adds short bits of interesting commentary to each. I must say that I love the commentary sections. I've read pages and pages of the cookbook and only made a handful of recipes.

So far, I've cooked:

String Beans with Ginger & Garlic (p. 260). I cheated on this one by skipping the garlic and adding soy sauce. But ginger does go very well with green beans.

Short Ribs with Coffee and Chilies (p.579). This dish is fantastic. I had a moment of trepidation when I combined coffee with the cooking broth for 3.5 lbs of seared short ribs. Is this going to be OK? I wondered. Yes. I like short ribs anyway, and this dish made me appreciate it with different flavors. Well worth repeating.

Bademiya's Justly Famous Bombay Chili & Cilantro Chicken (p.474). Another winner. I had a prejudice that the NYT was not the place to get Indian recipes. This one is good. It starts with whole spices, which are toasted before grinding. Yes, it would be nice to have an auntie around to do some of these steps. It also features a recipe for the green "coriander sauce" that often comes aside dosas. This sauce is surprisingly easy to make, assuming you have a food processor. I made this dish with chicken wings, which is not a traditional treatment. Also well worth repeating.

Stuck Pot Rice (p.351). This marked the first time I made rice with a crust on the bottom of the pan. Rice crust is one of my wife's favorite things. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen when you use a rice cooker. This recipe has a good step-by-step process for making rice with a crust on the bottom. Not hard, either.

Stir Fry Chicken with Cream Corn (p.483). This intrigued me. Cream corn with Chinese stir fry chicken? WTF? Well, I was on a roll, and there were other things to eat, so I tried it. Except, umm, we didn't have any creamed corn in the cupboard. So I made the dish with just the frozen corn that the dish calls for. It was good but not stunning that way. Need to make again with all the ingredients.

So far, so good. Everything I've tried, I've liked.

Some side comments:
First, there are a lot of recipes for entertaining. At my house, we don't really do this, so some of the recipes are not for us. Or not for us in that way. More leftovers, I guess.

Second, a fair number of the recipes come from the cooks of rich New Yorkers. You know, the people who read the real estate section in the Sunday Magazine? Yeah, them. While I don't hang out with the like, they eat well.

Third, there are almost no photographs, and no diagrams. This is a cookbook for people who know the basics.

Highly recommended.

Solving the Deficit, NYT interactive chart

2010-11-15T21:47:00.000-08:00

Based on John Scalzi's post on the topic, I tried my hand at reducing the budget deficit.

My results here.

The output should use Pareto ordering, in other words, high to low ranking of my choices
.
On the tax side, going to 2015
$73B Bank Tax
$54B Tax cut expiry for >$250k
$50B Millionaire Tax

$50B Payroll Tax to Higher Income
$32B Cap Gains Taxes to Clinton Era levels
$24B Obama Proposal for Estate Tax

On the Spending Side
$29B Cap Medicare Growth
$19B Cancel/delay Weapons
$19B Navy & Air Force Reductions
$19B Nuclear Arsenal Reductions
$17B Federal Contractors
$14B Farm Subsidies cuts
$13B Soc Security to 70
$ 8B Medicare to 68
$ 6B Social Security Reduced to High Income Earners

The largest of these, the Medicare growth reduction, is the most complex one. Or, put another way, the most "wishful thinking" one.

A few comments on framing.

First, almost all tax proposals are focused on individuals. While the "Bank Tax" is a big chunk of the increases, everything else comes from people, not corporations. There is no line item, "Reduce Tax Benefits of Offshoring," or "Close Offshore Tax Haven Loopholes." I don't know how much money those two cost, but they should be in the mix. And probably others.

Second, the emphasis on 2030 is fairly silly. Predictions of the things that will happen in the 20 years are going to be wrong. They all start from a linear growth premise: things will proceed as they are. Take a Cold War snapshot from Reagan's 1st term in 1982. Would someone have predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, and made budget predictions on it? How about 1992? Would someone have predicted a resurgent Russia, the US at war in Afghanistan, etc?

No, the 2030 piece is there to make a point. Entitlements are BAD. And Entitlements need to be reformed. Now. This is step one, right before Social Security is conflated with Medicare. You know the rest of that piece of logic.

Still, a very useful article by the Times.

Art & Max

2010-11-14T23:00:00.000-08:00

Art & Max is David Wiesner's new book. Just buy it. Really.

Wiesner is one of my favorite illustrated-book authors. He is getting more and more subversive, as far as the narrative goes. I really enjoyed his take on the Three Little Pigs, The Three Pigs. This book is similar in tone.

Art is a lizard artist, painting an oil portrait of another lizard. Max is a hyperactive "kid" lizard, who interrupts him, wanting to paint, also. When Max asks, "What should I paint," Art answers, "Paint me." By this he means, "paint a picture of me," and not, "put paint all over my body." But the subtlety is lost on Max, and he does paint Art.

As Max tries to undo the mess, Art cycles through various media, going from oil to pastel to outline. At the end, he is quite pointilistic, and he is using a cactus as a canvas for a Pollock-style painting.

I loved every page of the book.

It is no accident that the "serious artist" is named Art. It's that kind of book. Just like Wile E Coyote cartoons, this runs at two levels.

Added bonus: look for the Pink Floyd "Atom Heart Mother" LP cover.

The Bookman: Literary Steampunk

2010-11-14T08:15:00.000-08:00

I really enjoyed Lavie Tidhar's Steampunk novel The Bookman. It had the requisite elements: an alternate Victorian England with airships, computers and radio! Adventure! Conspiracy! And a young hero finding his way through this world.

But Tidhar has more than this. That's what makes the book. The author has folded in literature references to English authors of the period. How can you resist a book where the Prime Minister is Moriarty, the arch-villain from Sherlock Holmes? Where the hero's girlfriend is Lucy, after Wordsworth? I am only vaguely familiar with the authors, but the author's love is apparent. And while the references make the book more interesting, not knowing them doesn't make it incomprehensible. As an example, Moriarty is an antagonist, and very smart. Not a surprise to Holmes readers, but seamless in the novel if you don't know the character.

Interesting to have literary characters in the book. Of course, there are historical figures as well, although almost all of the critical ones are authors as well. Marx appears, as does Jules Verne.

That said, the book is not just a series of clever in-jokes. It's a fine adventure story. It's engaging. The characters are interesting, as are the situations. It doesn't suffer the wistful romanticization of Victorian times that Charlie Stross ranted about here. Far from it. The Queen and her ilk are the bad guys.

Also, there is an internal logic to the ahistorical modern elements. I don't want to drop a spoiler, but I did like the reasoning behind the early appearance of space flight, and robots.

I enjoyed the book thoroughly. I'll need to read it again, slowly, and look up the references as I go.

Also -- nice cover!

Recommended.

Mochi Cake 2 & 3

2010-11-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

In the previous post, I made a fairly straight mochi cake.

Last night, I tried a pair of modifications. One worked, one didn't.

Mochi Cake #2 modified the original recipe by
1. Changing 1/2 lb Mochiko (225g) to 180g mochiko & 70g coca powder. I also skipped the hazelnut flour that was in the previous post. It hadn't been in the original recipe.
2. Since these were pseudo-brownies, I left out the fruit.

The result was pleasantly bitter, but too dry. Also, the springiness of the mochi was not there. I am not sure why that happened. Is it the pH of the cocoa, messing with the protein in the mochiko? Or is the springiness a feature that needs a certain amount of moistness? Further experiments will tell.

I don't recommend this as it stands, so I'm not posting this as a recipe.

Mochi Cake #3 revisited the grits I used when I first tried to make the recipe. (Back when I neglected to add the evap milk, by mistake.)

1. Replace the 225g of mochiko with 175g of mochiko & 50g of quick grits.
Result: fantastic! It's like sweet cornbread, with the taffy-like pull of mochi. The grits makes a crunch crust at the pan edges and along the top surface. The middle is soft and chewy. The corn flavor is very mild. Color is soft yellow from the eggs, because I used white corn grits.

175 g mochiko
50 g Anson Mills Quick Grits, white
1 stick butter
196 g sugar ("1 cup" equivalent. I do baking by weight)
half can evaporated milk (=6 oz. Note this is not the same as a small can, which is 5 oz)
2 eggs
1 tsp baking powder

I made the recipe in much the same way as in the original link:

1. Melt the butter.
2. Mix in the sugar, off the heat.
3. Mix in the eggs and evaporated milk.
4. Add in all dry ingredients. The mochiko takes some extra effort to mix well.
5. Pour into an 8x8 pan. The batter will be smooth and easy to pour.
8. Bake 60 min at 350 F

I used Anson Mills Quick Grits on a whim. I had them in the freezer. I wondered how they would work compared to regular corn meal, or the fine corn flour I had used previously. Since I was going for a texture experience, I picked grits. They have the largest grain size of any of the corn products in my house.

The mochi "cake" is no longer cake, here. It's very much a corn bread. This would go very well at Thanksgiving. I may try it again with less sugar, so it goes well with the salty foods at that meal. Although I do have to say, a lot of traditional Thanksgiving fare has sugar in abundance; witness sweet potatoes with marshmallows!

Mochi Cake #1

2010-11-02T13:11:00.000-07:00

I've decided to branch out from brownie DOEs into other baked goods. Although I'm still making simple baked goods, this one at least has leavening.

As a start point, I used the mochiko based cake from the Food Librarian. I made an earlier version where I split the mochiko into 50/50 with Anson Mills quick grits. But, in that version, I left out the evaporated milk. The cake was tasty, but hard and over-dense. Since I was starting over, I decided to go back to the original cake recipe. Well, almost.

First, I cut everything in half. Instead of using a 13"x9" pan, I used 8"x8" pan. That makes the surface area drop in half, approximately, meaning the thickness will be close to the same. (13" x 9" = 117 sq in. 8" x 8" = 64 sq in.)

Second, I decided to replace 25g of the Mochiko with Hazelnut flour. I like the taste of nuts, and this is only 10% of the weight of the rice flour. It doesn't drastically alter the texture.

Third, I used brown sugar instead of white. That was because I had it around.

Fourth, fresh raspberries replaced the blueberries of the recipe.

200 g mochiko
25 g hazelnut flour
1 stick butter
196 g brown sugar ("1 cup" equivalent. I do baking by weight)
small can evaporated milk (5 oz size)
2 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 small box of fresh raspberries

I made the recipe in much the same way as in the original link:

1. Melt the butter.
2. Mix in the sugar, off the heat.
3. Mix in the eggs and evaporated milk.
4. Add in all dry ingredients, except the raspberries. The mochiko takes some extra effort to mix well.
5. Pour half into an 8x8 pan.
6. Stud the raspberries into the batter.
7. Pour the rest of the batter on top. Smooth as best as possible. It won't be perfect. Don't sweat it.
8. Bake 60 min at 350 F

The cake comes out tan from the brown sugar and the hazelnuts.

It's nice a chewy, with not too much sweetness.

Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi

2010-10-31T07:12:00.000-07:00

Before he wrote the Hugo & Nebula-winning Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi wrote some fine short stories. They are collected in Pump Six. A few are set in the same future history as Windup Girl, but most are not. What they do share is a fine writing style and a focus on a dystopian, post-oil society. I loved this collection for all the same reasons I loved Windup Girl.

The author has a consistent worldview, and he examines the coming ecological catastrophe in the same way as earlier SF authors examined nuclear war. There are no stories of the catastrophe itself. Instead, we have stories set years or centuries after our world has collapsed. The world has warmed, the icecaps have melted, and oil has run out. At the same time, GMO crops are sold by monopolistic American companies , who are not above unleashing GM plagues to force you to buy their product. Governments have fallen, or atrophied, and have been replaced by rich people or rich companies.

Frankly, it's more affecting than post-nuclear-war SF. In the post-nuclear future of early SF, you didn't know who pushed the button. Or you knew, and it was a Dr Strangelove in the US or the USSR. The ecological disaster that unfolds in Bacigalupi's future is caused by us. Yes, governments and large corporations have their role. But I couldn't help but think about my role as I read "The Tamarisk Hunter," with its story of California sucking the water out of the West. I live in California, and I water my lawn.

Always in these stories, the main characters are regular folk, making their own way through a difficult future world. I liked that, too. The people, even when they do heroic things, are not secret agents or superheroes. They are not rulers or generals. They are normal people in tough situations, well drawn and complex.

Now, I just wish that Paolo would write faster.

Highly recommended.

Maccha & Blue Corn Blondies

2010-10-24T23:08:00.000-07:00

This recipe started as the Dark & Stormy Brownie from Ideas in Food. However, it's been modified pretty heavily. I feel that I've gotten the hang of manipulating a simple baking recipe, in this case brownies. The conventional wisdom is,"you can't wing it. Substitutions don't work in baking." Well, yes, they do, if you think about it.

I wanted to make a maccha flavored brownie. The previous attempt had a too-muted green tea flavor. Plus, it was still a brownie, and the chocolate overpowered the green tea. I ditched the chocolate and made it a blondie.

I also eliminated the AP flour and replaced it with mochiko. Mochiko makes a crusty outside to baked goods, in my experience.

To replace the bulk of the cocoa powder, I used blue corn flour. It was available at the market, and I thought the color would be good with the green of the tea. To my surprise, blue corn flour is very pale. It's not nearly as dark as the Crayola-64 shade called "cornflower," so I'm not really sure how much of the finished color is from this ingredient.

The final result was nice. Still dense and "fudgy," which seems to be mostly a feature of the butter:starch ratio. They break apart a bit too easily. I think that's because of the flour substitutions. But the green tea flavor of the maccha comes through loud and clear. It blends well with the brown sugar, too.

Maccha/Blue Corn Blondies

makes 1 8x8" pan
140g butter
160g light brown sugar
106g dark brown sugar
85g blue corn flour (fine milled, not corn meal)
75g mochiko
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp (=13g) of maccha
2 eggs
2 Tbsp (=30ml) of rye whisky

Melt the butter
Take off heat & mix in brown sugar
Mix in corn flour, salt, maccha, whisky
Mix in eggs
Mix in mochiko

Put in 8x8" pan.
Bake in 325 oven for 40 minutes (+/-5 minutes, depending)
Toothpick should be clean, mostly. These are dense. You know the drill.
Cool and cut into 1" squares.

Note: Batter will be runny. Don't despair. It cooks up fine.
Note: maccha and mochiko are very fine powders. Be careful as you mix. They have a tendency to fly everywhere.

The Man in the High Castle: a view from 2010

2010-10-23T16:35:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, I reread PKD's The Man in the High Castle, a book I last read decades ago.

It is still awesome. Classic is a word that gets overused, but this book is one. It is of its period, though, and it is of a piece with other great books by Dick. That is, there is that focus on the real versus unreal that I saw the first time I read it. But there is also that 1962 dread of nuclear annihilation, not a misplaced fear, all things considered. Somehow, I didn't pay that much attention to that when I read it the first time. Maybe it was because I saw imminent nuclear conflict as a real possibility.

As I read the book, it was the role of the I Ching that was hard to take. I know it is central to the novel. That said, I think consulting oracles and reading horoscopes is the height of folly. To have the hexagrams play such a central, and future-foretelling, role got to me. I know this is not a fault of the novel. It is part of a weird way that suspension of disbelief works for me. In a way, it's like the Uncanny Valley in CGI representations of humans. I don't object to an alternate history where the Axis won WW2, but I do object to the ability of yarrow stalks to see into the future. Leave the magic in Fantasy, and leave capital-F Fate out of things.

When I read about the I Ching, I see comments like this one on the above-linked Wikipedia article:

It centered on the ideas of the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change.

I like that, and the idea of balance does run through the book. Dick's reading of Taoist philosophy shows. So does his emphasis on subtlety in Japanese culture, especially in interpersonal relations.

In standard PKD style, the main characters are in emotional crisis for much of the novel. Tagomi, Frank & Juliana Frink, Baynes/Wegener, Robert Childan -- all of them are in turmoil. The only thoroughly villainous character is the assassin, "Joe," is quite sure of himself.

There were bits and pieces I thought would be done differently. Maybe that's my 2010 viewpoint showing. For example, though the book is set in San Francisco, there are no Nisei characters. Juliana mentions that she learned Judo from a Japanese-American in Seattle, but that's the end of it. Where are the rest of the Japanese-Americans? How were they liberated from the internment camps, and what propaganda value would the PSA derive from that? How do they get along with the conquering Japanese?

On the other hand, I really enjoyed the novel within the novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Why? Because Grasshopper features in the plot of Man in the High Castle as an object on its own. It is a focus to the characters because it is about hope, about what might have been. It is not about writing, or the writing life, or the fate of the modern novel, in the way so many other novels within novels are. (Likewise movies within movies, or plays within plays.)

Reading a book like this, I think how close 1962 was to 1945. A mere 17 years from VE- & VJ-Day to the publication of this book. The end of the war in Vietnam, still a popular setting for fiction, was 35 years ago. Even the first Gulf War was nearly 20 years ago.

A great book. Glad I reread it.

Note: Here is the cover art for the copy I first read. What the heck does this have to do with the novel? It looks like Dr Strange meets Salvador Dali.

Sources in Man in the High Castle

2010-10-20T09:23:00.000-07:00

At the end of Chapter 3, PKD quotes this poem

As the spring rains fall,
soaking in them, on the roof,
is a child's rag ball

That's by Yosa Buson (1716-1784), as translated by Donald Keene in Anthology of Japanese Literature.

I didn't notice, but it rhymes. A coworker pointed that out. Weird to see rhyming haiku.

A Google search for the first line of the poem, in quotes, yields many pirated copies of PKD's book. Sigh. Only this one link to Google Books goes to the source poem.

In Japanese,

Harusame ni
nuretsutsu yane no
temari kana

Another translation, from Via Negativa

Spring rain:
a rag ball on the roof
is getting soaked.

Looking up the poem in Japanese, I find it also appears in David Brin's "Startide Rising." (As commented here)

Here's the poem in Japanese, although I can't really read this.

Cultures of War

2010-10-17T23:44:00.000-07:00

John W Dower, author of the stupendous Embracing Defeat, has written a very muddled history in Cultures of War. The subhead, "Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq," shows the threads that Dower ties together in the book. What makes the book all the more frustrating is that I agree with his basic thesis. It is the execution of the book that is maddening.

For starters, Dower makes the point that Pearl Harbor, like the invasion of Iraq, was tactically brilliant but strategically imbecilic. We all know that Pearl Harbor was a smashing success for the Japanese: tactical surprise, the sinking of much of Battleship Row, few losses of planes or pilots, and escape of all capital ships of the IJN. And we all know that Pearl Harbor was a disaster for the Japanese, because it woke the sleeping giant that was 1941 America. America did not sue for peace, but destroyed the Empire of Japan, and occupied the Home Islands. The invasion of Iraq was likewise an amazing success, at least initially. Saddam Hussein could do little to fight against the US & British armies, and his army was destroyed rapidly. It was a rerun of France '40, an analogy the Bush administration somehow never used. But the end of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq was not the end of the conflict. And just like the Japanese before them, the US got into something it had never expected.

Dower makes a clever twist here. Pearl Harbor is often compared to 9-11. In US media reports, it is Osama bin Laden who plays the role of Yamamoto, awakening the US with the attack on the World Trade Center. But Dower makes G. W. Bush into Yamamoto, or is it Hirohito, starting something he has no idea how to finish.

In discussing the Japanese attack on the US and the American attack on Iraq, Dower makes the point that key decision makers engaged in groupthink. There were no other alternatives really considered, except attack. This is an interesting point, and completely believable. That it is revisionist was a surprise to me.

Interestingly, Dower quotes WWII-era Americans who thought the Japanese incapable of rational decision making. From today's perspective, these writings look incredibly foolish, aside from the obvious racism involved. In another telling section, he quotes the CO of Pearl Harbor, Admiral Kimmel, who explained his lack of preparedness this way:

I'll give you your answer. I never thought those little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an attack, so far from Japan. [p43]

Dower highlights this but draws some strange parallels. He correctly points out that the Japanese had defeated the Chinese and the Tsarist Russians at the turn of the Twentieth Century. And he mentions Plan Orange, the US plan to fight the Japanese. But he misses a big point. The Tsarist foe in 1905 was part of the original "Old Europe," corrupt, overstretched, incompetent. The Japanese defeat of the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War was not unlike the American defeat of the Spanish in the Spanish-American war: a vital, modern power toppling a decrepit, old one. Of course the US Navy would not see a future conflict with Japan in these terms. They would not place themselves in the role of the Spanish.

Later, Dower mentions the IJN plan for a decisive sea battle that would smash the opposing navy. This echo of Tsushima was a strong thread through IJN planning. It goes unremarked. I was surprised at this.

The book covers a lot of topics, many of them interesting. But ultimately, the book fails to knit them together.

In fact, some of the threads of the book fight against each other.For example, Dower spends a long section discussing the B29 incendiary campaign against Japanese cities. He demonstrates that the US had pretty much run out of targets by August of '45, except for some cities held back as possible A-bomb targets. He also makes it clear that the area bombing of cities had only marginal military justification, despite claims to the contrary. However, in the section on the actual use of the A-bomb, he tries to argue that the A-bomb might have been unnecessary, as the incendiary campaign had so weakened the Japanese that they were close to surrender anyway.

The book does flit back and forth between WWII era and the modern day, between the Occupation of Japan and the Occupation of Iraq. The comparison is not apt, as Dower demonstrates ably. The most direct two differences get relatively little amplification, but probably matter the most. First, Japan is an island, and Iraq is not. It is much easier to slip across the Iran/Iraq border than to sail over from Korea. Second, Japan has no natural resources, and Iraq has a huge supply of oil. The third difference does receive quite a bit of discussion: Saddam Hussein was tried and executed, while Emperor Hirohito was kept on the throne, more useful alive than dead. Of course, there wouldn't really have been a way to have kept Hussein around. He wasn't the kind of man to be a puppet.

Another feature of the Iraqi Occupation was a tendency towards doctrinaire free markets, and an aversion to planning. The bureaucrats of the 21st Century compare unfavorably to those of the Japanese Occupation. This section was completely depressing. That said, it is not clear that the Iraqi Occupation would have progressed better with a staff of crack bureaucrats from DC. Somehow, Dower skips over the experience in Vietnam, which the Best and the Brightest made such a mess of.

A blind spot towards Vietnam made the US ill-prepared for the conflict in Iraq. But I think Dower may misread the conservatives and neocons who invaded Iraq. First, they saw the conflict as a conventional one, with armored warfare in open spaces. In this, they were correct, at least at first. But second, they did not expect an insurgency in Iraq. The lesson they drew from previous wars, I think, was that successful insurgencies were supported by countries: the USSR supporting the NVA and the Viet Cong, or the US supporting the Afghan resistance. Since no countries were going to support a Sunni insurgency, it wouldn't amount to anything. (Oops, wrong on both counts.)

The author spends quite a bit of time on Osama bin Laden, but this fits even less well. He tries to show that Muslims do have a beef with the US, and that we perfected aerial bombardment of civilians, yet...attacking the World Trade Center was wrong. It was weird. Dower makes a good case that the US government was hypocritical, that we supported nasty dictators and impoverished the country of Iraq through sanctions. And yet, he doesn't approve of attacking us. I mean, good, I don't approve of attacking the US either. But the logical setup of the book draws us to a conclusion the author refuses to make.

This book was, in the end, a frustrating mismash. Some pieces were good, some not. It didn't cohere.

Man in the High Castle on the Kindle

2010-10-17T10:27:00.000-07:00

I'm reading The Man in the High Castle on my Kindle.

There are sections of text in German:

ist die vielleicht der Ort wo man das konzentration-lager bilden kann. Das wetter ist so schon. Heiss aber doch schon

Which translates to

Perhaps this is the place where you can build a concentration camp. The weather is so beautiful. But already hot

(In the Kindle version, lager is rendered as "slager.")

Pages later, a garden in a Japanese-owner building is described as karesansui. Google translate asked if I meant "枯山水," which means "dry garden style." Yep, that's right, that's what I meant.

This makes me want to reread "The Name of the Rose," which was filled with foreign-language bits, none of which I bothered to look up.

I'm reading with Kindle for PC, which doesn't allow cut/paste operations. Nor does it translate. Above translation by typing in to Google translate, by hand. Thanks to DRM, I might as well be reading a paper book.

So close, yet so far.

On the Pleasure of a Good Review

2010-10-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

Internet friend Damien posted about great SF movies, and predictably the comments spun off in interesting ways. Since Damien picked Ridley Scott's Bladerunner as one of the two great SF movies, many people commented on the writings of Philip K Dick. One link led me here, to an Adam Roberts review of PKD's The Man in the High Castle.

The review is great. Maybe review is not the word I should use. Appreciation? Critical piece? I don't know. It's an essay best read if you've already read the book. Roberts writes well in this format, which doesn't surprise me in the least. He wrote Yellow Blue Tibia, which I loved. That novel was SF, but it was also about SF. Here Roberts was writing about SF, and doing it very well.

It's been decades since I read The Man in the High Castle. Shortly after reading the review, I bought another copy and started reading it.

I have a good memory, but books read years ago fade. I'm not alone in this. And I am a different person now than when I read the book the first time. Details pop out that I missed before: the Japanese culture of the occupiers, fancy suburbs overlooking Belmont.

All this because of a well written review.

Nasty Campaign Ad

2010-10-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

I got this mailing yesterday. Sandie Arnott is deputy treasurer of San Mateo county, where I live. During the market meltdown in 2008, the county's Lehman Brothers bonds became worthless. Personally, I think she bears a fair amount of the blame for the error. People in treasury departments make sure that money is invested wisely, and it wasn't.

Yet the ad clearly sends a different visual message. As I see it, it says, "Don't elect Sandie Arnott because she is fat." It isn't written, but then, it doesn't have to be.

Is this really how political campaigns are supposed to work?

On the one hand, I think it is important to have accountability in our elected officials. People who lose >$100M of the taxpayers money should resign in disgrace, or failing that, be voted out.

On the other hand, what kind of asshole will I be voting for?

Computers in Old SF

2010-10-10T09:08:00.000-07:00

I was reading Hal Clement's story "Cold Front," in The Essential Hal Clement vol 2. It's a delightful hard-SF story from the 1940s. Spaceships, red giant stars, alien races. All good. As you'd guess from the title, the story involves weather, in this case a weather station.

The weather station has computers, but 1940s SFnal ones. It's interesting that the computers are networked together, and they all have keyboards. Amusingly, the computers are kludged together when one bigger, better computer would be more appropriate. "Such a machine is being designed at our research centers, but it is so far much too bulky, complex and tricky for an outpost such as this." Of course the computers were big and bulky. "Cold Front" was published in 1946. Transistors and ICs had not been invented. Moore's law was decades in the future.

Also interesting, the computers are doing integration, and each computer on the network handles one variable in a multi-variable calculation. The lab is even described as an integration lab.It's probably lost on most readers, but integration is an analog computer function. Op amps can be used as integrators. Computing as a digital endeavor was also in the future.

None of this bothers me. The story is every bit as interesting with these details out of place. In fact, it's almost steampunk in the imagination of a future where FTL travel is possible, but computers are still large.

Dark & Stormy Brownies, Rev 2 & 3

2010-10-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

In the previous post on Dark and Stormy Brownies, I used Yuzu juice instead of lime oil, which "may have made a noticeable difference."

I was more right than I knew. Today, I used Bitter Orange Essence from Aftelier. Wow. What a difference! Stop now and buy some essences from Ms Aftel. They are nothing at all like the "orange extract" you buy at the Safeway. I am not one for food adjectives, and I have a cold now. Words fail me. But these scents are profound even to my cloggy nose.

While the recipe called for 1/2 tsp of lime oil, I used 1/4 tsp of bitter orange oil. That's 1.25 ml. Since the orange oil is $12 for 7 ml, that's about $2 per batch for orange scent and flavor. Yes, it is worth it. Really.

For rev 2 hazelnut flour was used instead of All Purpose (AP) flour. The texture changes and the brownies don't hold together as well. But they are richer and more delicious.

For rev 3, mochiko replaced the AP flour. Mochiko is sweet rice flour. It has a wonderful fine texture and lots of sticky gluten. Since the brownies are not very cakey, you can't notice the chewy-sticky mochi texture. But they do hang together well.

This time, I cooked them in an 8x8" pan. They cooked up well, but I have to say, the springform was easier to serve from, tradition aside.

Decoding the References I Used to Miss

2010-10-05T05:36:00.000-07:00

I just finished Adam Roberts' book Yellow Blue Tibia. His next book is New Model Army. I knew that phrase, but I couldn't place it. One Google search later, I realized it was an English Civil War reference. Off I went to Wikipedia, learning more about the English Civil War in 10 minutes than I knew previously.

This is cool.

More cool, to me, was discovering "the Levellers" in the English Civil War article. The Levellers feature prominently in Charlie Stross' Merchant Princes novels. As the name suggests, they are a revolutionary group that proposes to level the class system. That much, I got from context, when I read the novels. I didn't think that Stross was swiping a name from English history. It just seemed like clever wordplay for a pseudo-Marxist group in an alternate timeline. Guess not.

I imagine that both the New Model Army and the Levelers are part of any complete British education, in much the same way that Valley Forge and Juneteenth are part of an American education.

The End of the World as a Fantasy Plot

2010-10-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

I started looking for Fantasy fiction last night, hoping to discover a new series or a new author. Instead, I found a lot of novels which featured the end of the world, or some similarly large, cataclysmic event.

Unfortunately, the end of the world doesn't interest me, at least in Fantasy fiction. If I want the end of the word, I'll read SF of the Cold War, with its dread of Nuclear War or its aftermath. Or I'll read a more modern take, with environmental catastrophe. But even there, I am interested in smaller settings within that larger framework, like Paolo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl. It's not about the event of the environmental catastrophe, it's about the effects, and especially the effects on people. Characters, basically.

And in Fantasy, I turn to myth and saga as my guide. For example, Beowulf is about one nasty monster, and his mother, fighting with a small kingdom's worth of warriors and one hero. It doesn't suffer from being small in scale. You don't need to blow up the world to make things interesting.

As I thought through my favorite stories from myth, most were similarly local in scale. Even the Iliad describes a war between the Trojans and the Greeks around one city. The Odyssey? Its focus is one man and the crew of his ship.

Where did we get all this end of the world stuff from?

I'm not sure, but I think it comes from two places: the Lord of the Rings and Silver Age comics, especially ones like this

Of course, Galactus, devourer of worlds, is hard to separate from ICBMs and H-bombs, at least in this grown-up's mind.

Kirby went even more gonzo in the Fourth World, with Apokolips as the planet of the bad guys. Subtle name? Nah.

I do love Kirby at his world-threatening best.

And while I like Tolkien, Gollum was always more interesting to me than Mount Doom.

For my Fantasy, Beowulf scale is just fine, thank you.

Yellow Blue Tibia

2010-10-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts, is a strange but beautiful novel. It begins with a strange conceit. After WWII, Stalin gathers together a group of Soviet Science Fiction writers, and instructs them to write stories of a new enemy. Aliens will replace Nazis or Capitalists, and unite the Soviet people against an external threat. As soon as they have started, they are are told to cease, and discuss the project with no one, on pain of death. It being the Stalin-era USSR, such threats are perfectly credible. The men are happy that they are not liquidated, but merely sworn to secrecy.

Forty years later, and the narrator is an old man, his glory years far behind him. The same can be said for his homeland, which is in the final years of Communism. Both are cranky and creaking.

The rest of novel unfolds in 1986, as the secret Soviet SF of 1946 start coming true.The aliens have shot down the space shuttle Challenger, and are plotting to blow up the reactor at Chernobyl.

This is a extremely well written book. It is darkly comic, but with real heart. It would be easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of the Soviet Union in its last days. All the standard tropes are here: queueing up for scarce goods, brutal concrete architecture, uncaring bureaucrats, secret police. But we don't pity the narrator. We care about him, and with him, we care about his country and its people. It's hard to describe why this is. Roberts is a great writer, I guess.

And the comedy is woven well through the story. Like I said, it is darkly comic. The narrator, Svorecky, is an ironist, and he tells the story in first person. But this isn't the ironic detachment of Spy magazine, also from the 80s. It is, I don't know, the ironic necessity of living in the USSR.

At the same time, the narrator is routinely chided by authority figures for being an ironist, and not taking things seriously. Is the narrator a stand-in for the author? It would seem so. And that is perfectly fine.

As the novel is written in the first person, there are some hilarious bits. Hand-to-hand combat and tough guy heroics are a common feature of hard-boiled detective novels, also written in first person. Those protagonists drink like fish, smoke like chimneys, and dispatch bad guys with ease. What if you had been smoking and drinking for decades? How then would you go mano-a-mano with the bad guys? Read and find out.

There are many plot twists to the novel, and it is really hard to write about without writing spoiler after spoiler. Even understanding the title involves a spoiler. Yes, it's that kind of book.

While the plot is twisty, and the descriptions of the USSR evocative, the characters make the book. There is the narrator, the worn-down veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Another character has Asperger's and OCD. He is brought to life beautifully. His Asperger's is almost like a super-power. A pair of Americans bumble into the story early on, emphasis on the bumble.

It's funny, too, how much I liked this novel, and how much I think of it as SF. For the majority of the book, it's not really SF, but a lit fic novel about SF writers in a foreign land. And yet, it is SF. Or it's alternate history. Or ... I don't know. The author blows shit up*, so it's all good.

Also, the post-modernism doesn't intrude often. When it does, it's funny. At one point, the narrator discusses how something should have killed him, at about page 200 or 220. This quote takes place after that page. It fit.

A great book, a great read.

*Reference to the comments on Nicola Griffith's blog here

Dark & Stormy Brownies

2010-10-03T20:54:00.000-07:00

Over at Ideas in Food, this post caught my eye. Dark & Stormy brownies, with flavors of Dark Chocolate, Dark Rum, Lime and Ginger. Four thumbs up on those flavors.

I decided to bake some, because they sounded so good. They are.

I had to modify the recipe, because I didn't have an 8x8" pan. I used a 10" round springform, which has a larger surface area. (78 sq in vs 64, more than 20%) The brownies were therefore thinner, and cooked more quickly, as I didn't scale up by 20% on the ingredients. (2 eggs to 2.4 eggs doesn't make any sense.) There wasn't any King Arthur double dark cocoa in the store here, so I used Valrhona. It's a very dark powder, darker than Scharffen Berger. Last, I didn't have lime oil, so I used Yuzu juice. This last may have made a noticeable difference.

All that aside, they are delicious. Dark and dense, but not too fudgy. Ginger goes well with chocolate. Really, really well. I couldn't taste the yuzu in the finished brownie. Maybe that was the difference between lime oil and lime juice.

These brownies were easy to make. Get the ingredients and go to it.

The picture was taken with my cell phone camera and adjusted hastily online. 'Nuff said.

Masked, a Superhero Fiction Anthology

2010-09-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

Lou Anders rocks. Lou has edited Masked, an anthology of Superhero short fiction. He was also co-editor of Swords and Dark Magic, which I raved about. Well, here we go again. This collection is also fantastic. How fantastic? Well, I wanted to call in sick and read it. (I didn't. And if I had done such a thing, do you think I would post about it on my blog?)

Back to the anthology.

Superhero prose fiction is a weird beast. These are comic book stories, without the visuals. Would it work if the reader wasn't used to super-powered men in tights? I don't know. But, since Superman and Spiderman are part of the pop-culture canon, this is a don't-care.

The stories are varied in tone, just like modern comics. Every one was enjoyable. Every one. No clunkers. Just like Lou's S&S anthology, many of the stories made me say, "Who is that author? Where can I get more of his/her writing?"

The comments below are written in the same order I read the stories.

"By My Works You Shall Know Me" by Mark Chadbourn. The author does a great job, and sets the story in modern San Francisco. I like it when authors place stories in real cities, as opposed to invented ones. New York is more interesting than Gotham. This story also updates the Gordon Gekko "evil businessman" archetype by having him turn into a superhero. After an epiphany, of course. I laughed when I imagined some of my previous bosses or CEOs as superheroes.

"Call Me Savage" by Marjorie M Liu. This story is set in an alternate-history world, and features a half-Chinese, half-Native American heroine. Liu reveals the world in layers, through the story. Very well done.

"Thug" by Gail Simone. I know Simone's work from the comic "Welcome to Tranquility," which I adored. This story is written in first person, from the POV of a Hulk-ish young man, as his journal. He's huge but not too bright, so the writing is in bad-spelling "dialect." The writing took me a while to get into, but once I did, I enjoyed the heck out of it.

"Secret Identity" by Paul Cornell. Manchester Guardian is a rainbow-clad superhero who protects the gay men of his namesake city from homophobic super-villains. Excellent character development and dialogue.

"The Non-Event" by Mike Carey is told from the super-villain's POV. It takes place in England, and made me realize that American writers do not have a monopoly on writing superhero fiction. I can't speak for the details of the UK setting, but they felt believable and rich. Sorry, bad choice of words there, because the villains are on he poor side of the socio-economic spectrum, while the heroes are protecting the money of the tax-avoiding upper class. The villains reminded me of high school friends gone bad, especially the bit about planning the heist in a lead-lined basement.

"Message form the Bubblegum Factory" by Daryl Gregory is a super-powered jail-break story. I loved it. I can't say much more without sprinkling the review with spoilers.

"Avatar" by Mike Baron imagines a real-life martial-arts hero, opening a can of whoop-ass on inner-city thugs. This is realistic and nuanced. Yes, I know those two sentences don't look like they go together. Bittersweet in a way comics aren't usually.

"Vacuum Lad" by Stephen Baxter is a hard-SF superhero story. The namesake hero can survive in outer space, and this is explained without "cosmic rays" or "Chemical X." It's also set more than a century in the future, in a post-oil, globally-warmed world. Nice. Baxter's world is happier than Paolo Bacigalupi's, but still sobering.

"Where Their Worm Dieth Not" by James Maxey explores how superheroes and super-villains die, or appear to, in comics. What would it mean to live such a life? It's a great piece. Made me wonder why this has not been explored in Fantasy fiction before, given the prevalence of resurrection and healing magic in RPGs and Fantasy fiction.

"A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows" by Chris Roberson is an homage to Pulp heroes like the Shadow, or Doc Savage. It's written in a style that oscillates between over-the-top pulp and modern prose. The supernatural part of the story was very well integrated. Very enjoyable. I am a big Shadow fan, both in comics form (M. W. Kaluta rocks!) and radio drama. However, I have never read any of the books. This makes me want to.

"Head Cases" by Peter David & Kathleen David reminded me of Cheers for supers. What do super-powered people do in their down time? Great dialogue. Hilarious use of the web in the story -- one of the characters has a blog.

"Downfall" by Joseph Mallozzi is one of the longer stories in the piece. Lou raved about it in his editorial intro. Frankly, if not for that, I wouldn't have kept at it, because I thought the beginning of the story was weak.Too many details were jammed into too few pages. Then the story got going and it was great. The worldview is fantastic, too. Mallozzi imagines the collateral damage from superhero/super-villain combat, for example. What happens when a hero smashes a villain through an apartment building? The apartment building is destroyed, even if the bad guy is apprehended. That these bits are incidental to the storyline make it even richer.

"Tonight We Fly" by Ian McDonald is set in Northern Ireland, with a retired hero as the main character. I've got to admit, I don't think of Northern Ireland very much, so this was a refreshing change of locale. Like Chadbourn's use of San Francisco, McDonald's use of Belfast made the story feel more real.And since the hero is retired, his world has shrunk in a believable way. The setting in his sitting room made me think of a play.It's not Beauty Queen of Leenane, though. It's happier.

"A to Z in the Ultimate Big Company Superhero Universe (Villains Too)" by Bill Willingham is the last story in the book. Willingham writes Fables, one my very favorite comics, current or past. He is clearly a capable writer with a big cast, and he uses the skill to great effect here. The story is told through the clever device of alphabetical chapters, some of which concern heroes, with others about villains. More amazing, he has told a great story. It isn't just a static recitation of S is for Superman, K is Kryptonite. All the heroes and villains are invented, although more than a few are homages, like Underman as a stand-in for Namor, the Submariner, or St. George, as a combination of Superman and Iron Man. This story is worth the price of the book. My favorite, and that is saying something.

"Cleansed and Set in Gold" by Matthew Sturges is the first story in the collection and the last one I read. I don't know why. It was outstanding. It tells the story of a B-grade hero, with powers much like the Absorbing Man. It's more complex than that, and a rollicking good story, told with verve and subtlety both.

There you have it. A+

Point Blank

2010-09-19T01:19:00.000-07:00

After seeing Big Red One, I looked up Lee Marvin. He was an actor I recognized but couldn't place. I found Point Blank, a 1967 movie by John Boorman, he of later fame for Deliverance.

The movie is an adaptation of Richard Stark's book, "The Hunter." Recently, Darwyn Cooke made a graphic novel of the book, and I read both. "The Hunter" is top-notch. Rapid fire prose, great pacing, and a tough-guy anti-hero named Parker.

Lee Marvin would be perfect in the role of Parker. That is, the Parker of the novel. Somehow, the clean, vicious plot of the novel is messed up in the film. Parker is renamed Walker, and the action moves to San Francisco & LA. In and of itself, that would be fine. But there is a twist ending that is totally unnecessary, and new.

Boorman also has dreamy flashbacks, and some trippy effects. Maybe these looked good in '67, or seemed experimental. I didn't like them at all. They didn't fit.

Also, Walker doesn't come across as the hardened criminal that Parker was. He is a wronged man, and clearly a tough man, but the audience is left to wonder exactly where he picked up all these life skills. In the book, it was very clear he was a bad man.

The acting is good, and this matters, because Mal Reese, one of the key antagonists, is played by John Vernon. Vernon was later Dean Wormer in Animal House. He is a good enough actor where I can almost forget his other role. Almost. You can't really fault Point Blank for this, though, since it was made more than a decade earlier.

James Sikking (Hill St Blues), Carol O'Connor (All in the Family) and Lloyd Bochner (Dynasty) also appear in significant roles. Each one caused that jarring, "hey wait a minute" feeling. But each one played his role well. I really liked Carol O'Connor as a gangster.

I wish the movie had been better. It might have been easier to watch if I hadn't read the novel first.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

2010-09-18T20:29:00.000-07:00

Ted Chiang is an amazing writer. And yes, I know that isn't a particularly new observation. The guy wins SF writing awards left and right, and his new book will likely be no different. He's just that good.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects is a short book of 150 pages, issued in hardcover by Subterranean Press. I was going to tell you to buy it, but it's sold out. Blast. I've read a lot of good books this year and last, and this is one of the best. Find a copy.

In this little novel, Chiang explores the idea of artificial intelligence in a careful and philosophical way. It's another very modern robot story. Robots, going back to Asimov, were just intelligent. Their positronic brains just rendered them human-like in thinking, and acting, albeit constrained by devices like the 3 laws. Chiang takes a very deep look at AI thinking, from learning to relationships.

The novel is told from the point of view of two people involved in a software startup called Blue Gamma. Ana is a software tester who used to work as a zookeeper. Derek is an artist who is in charge of designing the avatars for the AIs, which are called "digients." Unlike 1950s robot stories, the AIs here are software only. People interact with them by going into a virtual world, a la World of Warcraft.

As the story progresses, it feels very much like the author is wrestling with many aspects of artificial intelligence, turning it over and over and seeing it from different angles. And yet, the story also coheres as a story, and the characters feel correct as people. This isn't a clever game, or it isn't merely a clever game. By the end of the novel, I cared very much about the characters and the digients.

It is the conceit of the story that the digients are trained as pets or children. This is a good platform for the questions Chiang is trying to ask.

I read the book in two days. I couldn't put it down.

Unlike most modern novels, this one features interior illustrations, by Christian Pearce. They are lovely, and appropriate, without being slavish reproductions of scenes from the book. He also did the cover. If you like the cover, you will like them. I thought they added a lot.

In addition, each chapter has a map, by Jacob McMurray. These are illustrations, too. For example, one chapter shows a subway line going from a station labeled coping skills to another one labeled empathy. The maps reminded me of those in the book Art Space Tokyo.

Absolutely the highest recommendation.

Underworld USA by Samuel Fuller

2010-09-17T23:41:00.000-07:00

Sam Fuller film #5 for me was Underworld USA, starring Cliff Robertson. There are parts of this movie that I loved, and parts that I didn't. In all, worth watching, but the sum is less than its parts.

Underworld USA tells the story of Tolly Devlin, who as a young man sees his father beaten to death by four gangsters. This is the Batman origin story, but with a very different twist. Tolly is the anti-Bruce Wayne. He is from the wrong side of the tracks, and his father was no saint. When DA's man Driscoll asks him who killed his father, he refuses to "fink" on them, spurning the help of the justice system. And unlike Batman, instead of becoming a vigilante force for justice, he becomes a man bent on revenge.

Tolly gets close to the four criminals who killed his father by becoming a criminal himself, and starts by going to jail to stalk one of them from inside prison. This process takes 20 years, and the adolescent ages to a 30-something adult. Once released from prison, he pursues the others by joining the gang of Mr. Gela, now a top man with his own organization. Tolly goes undercover, in much the same way as we saw in House of Bamboo.Unlike House of Bamboo, he's undercover for his own purposes. He's not working for the cops.

Robertson is great as Tolly, and the criminals are fine as well, especially Gus the sociopathic hit man. Driscoll, the head law man, has a bunch of terrible lines where he tells rather than shows. Some of these sound like Movietone Newsreel writing, not real speech. Even when his dialogue is more natural, his delivery isn't that great. Maybe Fuller just does better with hoods. All my favorite characters in this films are villains or flawed good guys.

I'm of two minds about the love interest, a bleached blond named Cuddles. Her role is especially dated, something you can't but expect. Within those constraints, I liked her, and the actress playing the role, Dolores Dorn.

There are a lot of great shots in the movie. It's gritty and the B&W film fits the mood. The music is of the period, and not my style, but it isn't intrusive.

The killings in the films are handled very well. It's a gangster picture, so there are plenty of deaths. Since1961 was a time when movie gunshots didn't produce blood, believable scenes here are an accomplishment.

There is one other place I noticed a cleverness in face of censorship and early-60s mores. Tolly is kissing Cuddles, then moves away from her face. He's still close to her, and we see her through an over-the shoulder shot from a POV behind him. Where his hands are, we can only guess. Her eyes close, her head rolls back, and she says, "You kiss well." Ahem. Pretty clear it's not his kissing that she likes. It's not as high-class as a Hitchcock double entendre, but no one in this film is that high class.

In general, I liked the low budget style. I don't need fancy sets or tons of extras. On the other hand, there are scenes where it is painfully obviousness that it's shot on a back lot. Somehow, in a play, I don't mind these abstractions. Here, the effect is jarring.

The plot is reasonably predictable, but I didn't mind.

Now that I'm done, is this a better scenario than the one with the young Bruce Wayne? I think so. Wayne's parents were horribly rich, and their killing expresses the fear of law abiding citizens. But Tolly is a lower-class kid, and it is more believable that his Dad would be murdered by the same thugs he associates with. Is it an unrealistic revenge tale where the hero gets a lot of lucky breaks? Of course, and that didn't concern me one bit

Good but not great, and definitely worth watching for noir/gangster fans.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

2010-09-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

Charles Yu's novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, (HTLSIASFU) is an odd little book. It was shelved as Science Fiction at the local bookstore, but it is, to me anyway, a literary fiction, and a postmodern one at that. To borrow a bit of the author's devices and cleverness, I'd say that you can figure my rating of the book by watching the graphic below.

Like the Lissajous curve above, the book seems to cover a lot of ground but stays in one place.

HTLSIASFU tells the story of one Charles Yu, a time machine repairman. He's also the author of the book. Inside the novel, there is a book, also called HTLSIASFU. It's written by the protagonist. It really is that self-referential. Separating the author Charles Yu from the protagonist Charles Yu? Not on my to-do list.

Why do I say that this isn't SF, but lit.fic? Because it is a character-driven story with no plot. Because the SF trappings are fun, but it isn't really about science, or ideas about the future, or about time machines. It's about a young man, and his relationship with his parents. At the beginning, it feels more SFnal, as when Yu explains how the time travelers of his story avoid creating paradoxes,

...no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past.
The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the course of anything, even ourselves.

At the beginning of the book, that seemed a clever conceit. Paradoxes don't happen, because, well, they don't, and because we are insignificant while the universe is vast.

I liked the approach to paradox, although it did beg the question of how, say, a Serbian shot Franz Ferdinand in August 1914, and plunged Europe into WWI. By Yu's calculation, if we're too insignificant to change time during reruns, how are we significant enough to make history in the first place? But the more you read, the more you realize that Yu is not concerned with history. He's concerned with the inner world, and the inner world alone. His characters use time machines to visit key points in their own lives, usually the saddest points. In one touching scene, a girl visits the moment of her grandmother's death, in Oakland Chinatown, the death she missed by being away at school. This felt right, for some people. What about visiting Dealey Plaza, or the Crucifixion?

Ultimately, this is why I feel the book is not SF. He's not examining the effect of functioning time machines on our society, or even on one tiny piece of society. He's examining the life of the protagonist as he performs self-analysis by time machine.

Now, lest you feel that all I do is complain, I liked this book. It propelled me along, turning pages, even without plot. How did the author do that? How did the author make me care about what happened next, even as I kvetched to myself about this or that? I mean, really. I have dozens of books in my house, with bookmarks somewhere before page 50, never to be picked up again. This book held my interest, and made me want to read more. It made me want to write this blog post the minute I finished.

Honestly, I don't know how it worked. When I unpack the book, there are just these pieces, and many of the pieces have roblems. Even the whole has problems. Despite that, I liked it, and couldn't stop. Weird. Magical.

Yu's time machine repairman is a believable mess, professionally. He has a relationship with TAMMY, the self-deprecating OS of the time machine. Phil, his boss, is another piece of software, and prone to crashing. As I read the work descriptions, I couldn't help but think, "This is what happens to second generation Chinese boys who don't make it to UC: dead-end job in a vaguely high tech field, no life, no family, disappointed parents." To reuse an analogy from my life, he's one of the people who didn't reach escape velocity after high school.

Unlike the software entities TAMMY & Phil, Yu's "non-existent but ontologically valid dog," Ed, is just a dog, as near as I could tell.

Yu's father is a frustrated inventor, struggling to make a time machine in the garage. Willing suspension of disbelief? Nah. Dad works a day job, isn't getting ahead, and dreams the big dream of striking it rich with an invention. Wait, though. Isn't the time machine a metaphor for the novel? And Yu senior seems a decidedly non-literary guy. So his time machine is real, right? Like I said, the author doesn't even pretend at willing suspension of disbelief here.

While the invention piece is nonsensical, the Dad's frustration is well done. It would have been more effective if it was channeled into somethng believable. The ridiculousness of doing cutting-edge physics in the garage undercuts the melancholy that envelops the father.

The mother is less nuanced. She is a typical Chinese mother, offering cooking as a sign of her love. When protagonist Yu visits her, she has purchased a one hour loop of time, and repeats the act of cooking dinner over and over.

I liked these characters, and I complained about these characters, but I kept reading.

End note: Go back to the book cover. Did you notice Ed, the dog, among all the blasters?

Funny Tattoo

2010-09-11T18:14:00.000-07:00

This tattoo was on the arm of a Hispanic man at the next table at the local McDonald's. He was sitting with his wife and two young children, eating lunch. As I couldn't read much*, I asked him what it said. "I like Chinese chicks." Hmm. Uncomfortable moment, as his wife was Hispanic, too. I took the photo and went back to waving at his toddler.

Later, I verified that the translation was correct, if slangy.

*My reading ability: X X Middle Kingdom [=China] Woman X. And I can tell that the character for "country/kingdom" is written in simplified Chinese or Japanese.

Pressure Brewed Coffee #2

2010-09-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I made a batch of cold pressure-brewed coffee. Today I made a second batch, with twice the coffee grounds.

This second version was much better, but had some unintended consequences.

This time, I used 30g to 250ml of water. I kept other variables the same: N2O charging, cold brewing, Peet's Ethiopian beans coarse-ground. This batch sat 10 hours in the refrigerator before releasing the pressure and filtering it. Yesterday's was 11. That last difference is likely unimportant.

Results:
1. Much better. It's strong, like a cold version of Vietnamese drip coffee. This may be too strong if you are not an espresso/cafe phin coffee drinker.
2. The taste is still noticeably different than hot brewed coffee. In a good way.
3. The extra coffee grounds result in extra holdup of liquid. I put in 250 ml of water, and got out about half a cup. I was using a Melitta style filter, not a press pot. Now I see why press pots are used. Gravity is not enough.

Side notes:
30g of coffee for 1 cup is a lot of coffee. This is an inefficient way to make coffee, even espresso-strength. Tasty, though.

Next round: fine ground coffee.

Pressure Brewed Cold Coffee

2010-09-10T09:17:00.000-07:00

Following a post in khymos.org, I found this link on brewing cold coffee under pressure.

The first experiment was a qualified success.

I followed the proportions of coffee in the recipe, 15g to 250ml of water. (The recipe says 250g of water, but that's the same thing. 250 ml of water is slightly more than 1 cup US.) I didn't have CO2 chargers for my ISI whipper, so I used N2O. For coffee I used freshly ground Ethiopian beans from Peets. I let it sit 11 hours in the refrigerator before releasing the pressure and filtering it.

Results:
1. It's delicious. The coffee has a different flavor profile. It isn't as sharp as hot brewed coffee.
2. It's not strong enough for my palate. 15g of coffee is the wrong amount for me. Next round will be doubled to 30g/250ml.
3. The nitrous oxide degasses from the coffee very quickly. It fizzes when poured into the filter. By the time it's gone through, the bubbles are imperceptible. It is not like drinking a coffee soda.

Side notes:
My ISI whipper has 0.5 liter capacity. This means I can make 2 cups of coffee at a time. This doesn't scale well.
And at 12 hours per experiment, the learning will be much slower than with press pots. But ISI whippers are not free, so I don't intend to buy 4 to let me do proper factorials.

More later.

Crimson Kimono by Samuel Fuller

2010-09-08T23:53:00.000-07:00

I'm on a Samuel Fuller tear, if you haven't noticed.

The fourth film for me was The Crimson Kimono, from 1959. I got it as part of Columbia's "The Samuel Fuller Collection," a 7-DVD set with films from 1938 to 1961.

Crimson Kimono is set in 1959 LA, and is framed as a police story, about the murder of of a stripper named Sugar Torch. Her murder happens within the first few moments of the movie. Wrapped inside the story is another one, a love triangle between two homicide detectives and a USC coed involved in the case. One of the detectives, Charlie, is Caucasian, the other, Joe, is Japanese-American, a Nisei. The interracial love is all the more interesting because the Asian character is a strong man, and not some variation on the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. He is also, as he points out late in the movie, an American, born and raised here, a decorated veteran of the Korean War. By writing the character this way, he is every bit as American as his handsome partner Charlie.

Fuller takes us on a tour of Little Tokyo, all as part of the story. We see the Nisei cemetery, where the camera lingers on the grave of a Medal of Honor winner. His father goes to a memorial service in a Buddhist temple. The story happens during Nisei Week, a Little Tokyo festival in July/August. As part of Nisei Week festivities, we see Japanese dolls (hina), dancing, a kendo tournament, and a parade through the neighborhood at the climax of the film. This cultural tour is engaging, and I found myself wondering what this must have looked like to 1959 audiences.

As in House of Bamboo, the Japanese isn't translated, even though Joe speaks it in the course of his police work in the neighborhood. Like that earlier film, our POV is that of outsider entering this strange world, even though this one is embedded inside the city of Los Angeles.

At times, the love story starts to swamp the police story, although, frankly, I didn't mind that bit of bait and switch. By the end, the murder is wrapped up, and in a convincing way.

I liked this movie. It's a full throttle film, with strong emotions and great writing. Being 50 years old, it's dated in places. That's fine. Well worth seeking out.

Healthy San Francisco Conversation

2010-09-06T07:47:00.000-07:00

Last night, my wife and I had dinner at Delfina, a lovely California-Italian place in the Mission. Like many other San Francisco restaurants, Delfina adds a surcharge to the bill to fund Healthy San Francisco, the program that provides health care to restaurant workers. The surcharge is featured at the bottom of the menu, $1.25 per person. Of course, this technique shows the disapproval of the restaurant's management. It also puts the wait staff in a tricky position. They have to defend the surcharge, which benefits them, while toeing the owners' line, which seeks to remove the benefit.

All this was obvious to me, but not to the couple at the next table.(Delfina's tables are maybe 1' apart.) They started to quiz the waitress when the bill came. She gave a quick answer, in, "just the facts," style. It was easy to tell she was uncomfortable. I added some comments of my own, and made it clear that I thought it was inappropriate for the restaurant to break out the charge. What surprised me was the comment from the other couple. They wondered aloud if the restaurant was profiting from the charge. The husband complained that they didn't have health care provided by employers, as he was self-employed.

It was a depressing conversation. In one small exchange, I saw the success of conservative politics, especially in framing the arguments.

The right had shifted the discussion, effectively, by focusing people on the surcharge. Argh. Here we were in a restaurant where a $100 dinner-for-two is commonplace. The customers were comfortable. And yet, $2.50 to provide health care to the workers of the place was out of line? As I said to the waitress, "Would the restaurant have added a 'no child labor' surcharge because the kitchen was forbidden to hire ten year olds?"

Worse, the right had moved the discussion to a selfish place. "I don't have health care, why should they?" Double argh.

More on HSF.
City website
Article in Newseeek
Michael Bauer in SF Gate

Merrill's Marauders & The Big Red One by Samuel Fuller

2010-09-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

This last week, I watched both Merrill's Marauders and The Big Red One by Samuel Fuller. I really like Samuel Fuller, and these two DVDs make it clear why.

Merrill's Marauders is a 1962 film, and depicts the actions of the 5307th Composite Unit, a 3,000-strong infantry unit that fought behind enemy lines in Japanese-occupied Burma. For more history see here. The film is gritty, and alternates battle scenes with scenes of boredom, jungle marching, homesickness and griping. In structure, it is a typical WWII infantry film, with the collection of types showing the cross section of the draftee army. The Japanese soldiers are often faceless cannon fodder. And yet, it isn't a typical war film.

As a B-movie from nearly 50 years ago, it had the advantage of being popular with stars unknown to me. The sergeant was just "the sergeant," and not "some famous star whose previous films I have to forget." (See: Saving Private Ryan.)

Fuller's direction is great. The scripting is also great.

There is little exposition, and almost everyone follows the "show, don't tell" dictum. Everyone except the unit's doctor, who is always telling the CO, and the audience, how drained, sick, and battle-fatigued the men are. I found this character the worst in the film, and the one aspect that I would have simply removed. Maybe he is needed, because the soldiers are pretty clean in every shot. Their uniforms get wet when they cross streams and rivers, but nothing gets torn or dirty. I suppose the exposition was necessary, because soldiers couldn't look realistically worn-down in a 1962 film.

My favorite action scene is a battle in a concrete maze. This echoes the holdup scene in House of Bamboo, set in a cement plant. Fuller likes his action constrained. It worked well in House of Bamboo, it works well here.

There is also a touching scene where the men treat a wounded Burmese woman, and are then fed rice by the villagers. (Below from YoutTube, just the first part with the wounded woman)

Watch the scene a second time, without the sound. If you're like me and dislike strings as a signifier for emotion in movie music, it's a huge improvement. And the visuals carry the scene quite well.

Well worth watching, despite some dated elements.

The Big Red One was Fuller's last war movie, and it celebrates the 1st infantry Division, whose shoulder patch is a red numeral one. Fuller served in the unit in WWII.

The movie was released in 1980, in a much-maligned studio cut. The DVD I watched is the "Reconstruction," made in 2004 from footage that didn't make it into the original release. I never saw the original cut, but after seeing this longer version, I will probably never bother. The Big Red One: The Reconstruction is a fantastic film.

Again, we see the draftee squad of types: a sharpshooter, an Italian-American, a writer, a farmer. They are like the types we see in other war movies, but more subtly drawn. Johnson, the farmer, is also an ex-medic. Griff, the sharpshooter, doesn't want to kill the enemy.

To constrain the characters to a manageable set, these four men ignore the replacements who come into the squad. They don't learn the names of those men, because pretty soon they will be dead.

Lee Marvin plays the Sergeant, a WWI veteran. He is brilliant as the grizzled non-com. In fact, to swipe a term from S&S fiction, he is the Eternal Sergeant. I don't remember Lee Marvin's other roles enough to have his fame intrude. Also, the acting is perfect.

Mark Hamill, on the other hand, is a letdown. He's a pretty boy, and not a great actor. He really gets in the way of the film. While I was watching him, I thought, "This is why I like books. Books don't have casting decisions forced on the author by higher-ups."

The differences to the 1962 war-movie conventions are telling. The characters, even the stars, get dirty. People look realistically exhausted. Death is everywhere, and blood flows from wounds. The US soldiers show fear, and he movie shows the troops routing at Kasserine Pass. In one scene, a soldier is wounded by a bouncing betty mine, and screams in worry that his balls have been blown off. There are also Germans with speaking roles, although none are truly sympathetic. One character, Schroeder, is the antithesis of Marvin's Sergeant: a die-hard Nazi and a truly ruthless man.

Throughout the movie, Fuller plays at the difference between killing & murder. It comes up early, in a conversation between Griff & the Sergeant. Griff says he doesn't want to murder. The Sarge says they don't murder, they kill, and that's different. By the end of the movie, the point is clear, driven home especially by a scene in Czechoslovakia.

It was odd to watch this movie after seeing Saving Private Ryan. The D-Day scene in that film is better, but some of the elements were much the same. Watching the men blow their way off the beach with a Bangalore Torpedo in Big Red One, I kept thinking back to Saving Private Ryan. But Big Red One was first.

Highly recommended.

Best Served Cold

2010-08-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

After reading the S&S anthology Swords and Dark Magic, I started reading novels by the anthology's authors. First up was Joe Abercrombie's stand-alone novel, Best Served Cold. The quote is, "Revenge is a dish best served cold," and as you would expect, this is a revenge story.

In the novel, Monza Murcatto, is the head of a company of mercenaries, the Thousand Swords. She is attacked and left for dead by the man who hired her. This much is already a bit of a spoiler, but it's on the back cover, so I feel justified. Beyond that, I don't want to describe plot details.

Abercrombie has crafted an alternate world that feels very much like late Medieval/Early Renaissance Italy. Various city-states vie with one another in constant warfare, often employing mercenaries.A bygone era of "New Empire" and an even older "Old Empire" is mentioned, but these stay mostly as backstory. There is little to no magic, so the story is written much as a historical novel, except without the "real" history. It works.

The technology of this world has just started to include gunpowder, but not for muskets. This leaves swords and edged weapons dominant on the battlefield and in the story. Crossbows, called "flatbows" in the book, are the primary missile weapons.

Interestingly, the characters of the books are a secular lot. They occasionally swear, but religion is not a dominant force in the story, or in the world of the story. It is a non-Christian pseudo-Italy, almost as if 21st Century European ideas were grafted onto 15th Century people. On occasion, it was a striking lack, but the story was complex enough without religion in the mix.

The characters in the book are a quirky lot. Each key character has a unique attribute. For example, Castor Moreveer is a master poisoner who is horribly elitist and self-important. He's always speaking down to the other characters in the book, but he's too self-absorbed to figure why this offends. Another character, the ex-con Friendly, is an obsessive counter who craves order in numbers.

Abercrombie can write a battle scene. He has a cinematic style, and the fighting is well done, marked by chaos, violence, and blood. Lots of blood. The author doesn't stint on grim descriptions.If your taste runs more to "fall down, go boom," and not, "his sword slid in between the other's ribs, spraying black blood," this isn't the book for you. And it's not just swordplay. There are scenes of torture, close up. These are appropriate to the era, but disturbing to read.

I couldn't help noticing the plot similarities to Kill Bill. I like Kill Bill, a lot. But I felt the structure was too similar. It was almost as if the author was in some pitch scene from The Player, saying, "Kill Bill meets Conan the Barbarian."

I recommend this book, but with reservations. The author has done a nice job, but the unrelenting violence got to me.

That said, I just bought a copy of "The Blade Itself," by the same author.