Book Review — Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain

I finally finished Anthony Bourdain’s latest collection of essays (I bought it this summer and read it in chunks, a perfectly suitable thing to do with a book of essays), Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, but I cannot recommend it… to anyone who has not read his other books.

I don’t know how/where I first encountered Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  Saw it recommend by someone I respect on some website, probably.  But I bought it and thoroughly enjoyed the stories of his early career, his up and downs, and his personality conflicts.  In Kitchen Confidential, Borurdain painted a vivid picture of a career path which I was interested in but had no interest in getting into.

When his biography of Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical came out, I snapped it up and devoured it quickly.  A lot of people who know Bourdain’s work don’t even seem to know it exists, which is a shame.  It’s a great look into households and cooking practices from a century ago which should make people today absolutely twitch, wondering how we survived.  (On the flip side, a lot of people claim that the modern rise in allergies is a result of “too much” cleanliness and such in our food preparation, that we are bringing it on ourselves by not being exposed to things which would help build immunities.  “A little dirt never hurt anyone.”)

His third book (might be his second; Wikipedia lists it before Typhoid Mary), A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, was fascinating, combining a travelogue with an examination of exotic meals and delicacies.  (“Delicacy”: a word that means weird-ass food that not even the locals eat/enjoy very much.)  His focus on stuff like Vietnamese phở and a Portuguese farm using the entire slaughtered pig were fascinating and really encouraged me to try stuff previously outside my comfort zone, such as tendon and the like in my phở .  (But I’ll still say no to cobra heart, thanks.)

(As an aside, I do the bulk of my pleasure reading in one of three places/times: with a meal, including dining out by myself; in bed just before going to sleep; and on a plane.  Do not — I repeat, do not — read Bourdain’s essays about food in Kitchen Confidential or especially in A Cook’s Tour while you are eating a meal.  I don’t care what you are eating, the stuff he is describing will either sound so fantastic that what you are eating will become depressingly plain, or else it will sound so gross that you’ll lose your appetite.)

Which finally brings us to Medium Raw, and why I can’t recommend it as a first taste of Bourdain.

The essays in this book are mostly focused on three things:

• Specific chefs Bourdain knows, many of whom are big names in the world of high class cookery, especially in New York
   
• Specific restaurants Bourdain enjoys (or fails to enjoy), many of which are big names in the world of high class cookery, especially in New York
   
• Follow ups from or tangents off his pieces in earlier books

In other words, if you don’t know (aren’t able to recognize) the chefs and restaurants that Bourdain name drops — or at the least, if you aren’t apt to travel to New York or Europe and patronize high-end dining establishments — and if you haven’t read his earlier works (and probably haven’t read them recently, to boot), this isn’t a book for you.  Do not choose this as your entry to Bourdain; you might as well start reading Harry Potter midway through book #7 and hope to follow things.

Myself, I don’t know these names or these restaurants, and I’m not going to travel to where they are or frequent them if I should, and it’s been probably 8 years since I read Kitchen Confidential.  Having read others of his book, I knew what I was getting with Bourdain: as mentioned before, I’m getting a view into a career and a lifestyle which I am interested in but which I have no interest in getting into.  There are probably relatively few career/lifestyles where, as Bourdain describes it, people from all walks of life, given the right choices and breaks, could genuinely ascend to a high level of skill, fame, and renown; that concept makes this book, if not fascinating, at least intriguing, and forgives the relative impenetrability of this piece.

Do pick up one of Bourdain’s books.  Just not this one, not as your first taste of him.

(Perusing his Wikipedia entry, I see there are two other essay collections I've missed: The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones [2006] and No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach [2007].  Must get.)
 

Book Review — Peter & Max (Fables)

Here is the final review of the movies and books I dealt with on my trip to New Zealand this February.

First, some background on the comic book Fables:

Imagine a world where all the stories and characters we think of as “fairy tales” — Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Aladdin — existed, each in their own universe/dimension/whatever.  In this universe of fairy tale worlds, there are linkages between the worlds, and as is inevitable, someone from one world built an army and attacked another world, and another one after that, and another one, creating a vast empire.  In the wake of this empire building, many characters we know from stories (dubbed “Fables”) fled from their homeworlds to our mudane, largely magic-free world (and many others died along the way).  Here, those characters and their stories live on, nearly immortal, and a few hundred years later, there are a couple enclaves of Fables and a scattering of individuals around the world.  Leadership of the Fables has fallen to the likes of Snow White, Prince Charming, Old King Cole, Bigby Wolf (formerly known as the Big Bad Wolf, now reformed), and Beauty and the Beast.

Fables is a comic book series written by Bill Willingham, running now for almost 100 issues, about 8 years, with a host of collected volumes, spin-off series, and a TV show in the works, plus now the prose novel, Peter & Max.

Now for the novel itself.

One of the conceits of Fables — and any fiction that pulls together threads from many other sources — is that any characters which could be connected or related, are.  And thus since fairy tales contain two “piper” characters — Peter Piper, who picked a peck of pickled peppers, and the Pier Piper of Hamelin — those characters must either be the same or related.  In this case, brothers.  (The conceit also draws together noted Peters: Peter Piper is also Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater and might be the one from “Peter and the Wolf”.)

Peter & Max follows two storylines.  The first is long ago in the Homelands, with the boyhood of brothers Peter and Max Piper, the conquering of that world, the bestowal of magic flutes and their associated curses, and Max’s turn away from being a good boy.  (You’ll recall the story of the Pied Piper: he cleared the town of rats, but when the city wouldn’t pay, he led the children away as well, never to be seen again.)  Along the way, we encounter other characters familiar to Fables readers and fairy tale/nursery rhyme fans: the Big Bad Wolf, the Black Forest Witch (of gingerbread house infamy), and Little Bo Peep.  The second storyline involves the return of Max to the modern world, and Peter’s journey to meet him and hopefully stop him from killing all the other Fables and generally wreaking havoc on the world.

Half of the fun in a book like this is seeing the author pull together the threads of familiar stories, especially ones that were less obvious, and adding new stuff into the mix to create something both familiar and new at the same time.  Willingham has been doing this with Fables for years (and projects like Pantheon and Coventry/Ironwood before that), so there’s no question he knows how to do this task successfully.  The real question, then, is how accessible is this to people who have no connection to the Fables comics, and that I can’t answer since I’m way to close to the comics (having read them all as singles and again as collections).  But I can answer two reverse-side questions: this novel is largely independent from the comics storylines, so there’s little in the way of “I know this must refer to something, but what?” moments (so this isn’t a “crossover” where you have to buy all the pieces to figure out the story), and for readers of the comics, there are some new insights into the secondary characters here who are primaries in the comics (so comics readers benefit from reading the novel).

Definitely recommended for fans of the comics.  For fans of this sort of story, moderately recommended: others like Neil Gaiman have done it better, but this is just fine and serves as a gateway into some truly excellent comics, a much broader world than seen in just the book.

I would be happy to get another Fables novel like this every couple years.
 

New Zealand: Christchurch to Seattle (Monday, February 22)

Written at the international terminal at Los Angeles International Airport at 5:35 pm (Los Angeles time) on Monday, February 22; and in Seattle after returning home

Today, we went out to Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, a wildlife park on the outskirts of Christchurch.  All we really knew was that they had kiwi there.  It turned out that they are a three-part walk-through wildlife park/zoo.  One part for introduced wildlife — freshwater eels, wallabies, ostriches, lemurs, gibbons, capuchin monkeys, assorted birds.  Then a part for New Zealand farm life — chickens, cows, pigs, rabbits, and horses, many of them rare breeds only found in New Zealand.  And the third part was mostly native wildlife (although some introduced, mostly hundreds of years ago) — kiwi, tuatara, possums, ferrets, ducks, etc.

Willowbank has the most successful kiwi breeding program in New Zealand.  They have a nocturnal house, which allows the kiwi to be available for viewing during the day.  (If you can call it “viewing” when it’s very dark in there.  We were able to visually observe two kiwis in the house, though.)

While we were viewing the capuchin monkeys, Mom leaned her cane against the banister and >splash< into the water it fell.  The park staff was able to fish it out and hose it down for her, though.  To keep parity, I proceeded to drop my sunglasses into the eel pond (and recovered them).

We bought souvenirs at their gift shop — I got some paua shell stud earrings, a tocque with a Māori design on it, another Kiwi country CD (this one with older artists, I think), and a book on New Zealand foods (descriptions of foods, essays on New Zealand food producers, and some recipes, mostly for desserts).  We also had lunch there, and as beverage, we had Elderflower Sparkle sodas (one original and one with black currant); got to keep trying those local items!

We then got me to the airport for my return home.  Alas, I got to see absolutely nothing of downtown Christchurch in the process.

I bought a chocolate croissant at the airport with the rest of my New Zealand money, leaving me just a few coins.  I had also forgotten that I hadn’t finished the bottle of Southern Comfort I bought in Auckland, so it got tossed at security, as did the jar of Nutella-knockoff spread (which should have gone into the checked luggage, darn it).

Retracing the steps from 10 days ago, I flew Emirates Air back to Sydney and finished Julie & Julia.  Our plane was a Boeing 777; nothing special about the flight, but an ugly landing.  I swear the plane bounced twice.  Had a 3-hour layover in Sydney.  Pulled out my leftover Australian money and looked around for a small souvenir, something warranting the 6 hours total I spent in the Sydney airport, and bought a shot glass with kangaroo silhouettes on it.  That took just coins, so I have an AUS$10 bill left for some future conversion.

Then it was back on V Australia to Los Angeles.  finished an episode of Heroes I had brought with me (from December, we’re slowly catching up on it), and then watched The Hangover.  Sleep was difficult, and I have no idea how much I caught; probably just 3-4 hours, I think.  After waking up, I watched the recent version of Fame.

In Los Angeles, customs wasn’t too bad; in fact, the wait to get my suitcase was the longest part.  I found a table in the food court at the International Terminal and worked on the trip report, plus sent a few texts and a short phone call to my boyfriend.

I mentioned early in the trip report bringing an episode of Lost with me.  Well, I never got around to watching it until I was back in Los Angeles.  I thought about watching it on the Syndey-to-LA trip, but that would be just a bit too much tempting of fate.  (What, you forgot that the show started with a Syndey-to-Los Angeles plane crash?)

I read Bill Willingham’s Fables novel on the trip, Peter & Max.  A good light read, with a surprising and yet well preceded finale.  Completely in line with the comics, and hopefully with the upcoming television show.

I’ve also been reading the second omnibus volume of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (followers of previous trip reports know I read the previous volume on my trip to Europe last summer; I guess my next overseas trip will have to cover Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, and Michael Tolliver Lives?), having finished Babycakes and almost done with Significant Others.

When I dug the book out, I discovered a picture from when I worked at Frame Technology, over 15 years ago, which must be when I last (first) read the books.  I only recognized about half the people, it’s been so long.  I’ll have to put that pic up on Facebook.  (Which also serves to remind me that my Facebook contacts are people I currently know and those from high school.  I need to look up folks from college, grad school, and when I lived in the Bay Area.  For all that it’s great for having some form of contact with people I’m otherwise lost on the wayside, there are huge chunks of my life not yet connected there.)

I’m feeling quite ready to be home.  On Sunday, I found myself almost snapping at Mom at one point, due to one of her personal speaking quirk (explaining things way too much).  My neck is hurting, mostly because of working on the netbook in the car, bending my head down.  My $50 pair of headphones broke at the airport; I compressed them too hard when putting them in my bag and a plastic tab broke off, so one earpiece doesn’t stay on the bridge when they are stored.  (Still usable, just annoying to store and fish out again, becoming a jumble of cables.)  And on the plane, the waist button came off on my shorts; just a tiny thing, but still, one more thing.

Which brings me current.  Now to watch another episode of Desperate Housewives and call the trip good.

As with the trip to Europe, I’m several days behind in posting these updates, but I’ll just plod through them during the coming week, one or two a day (rather than churning them all out at once).  I’ll need to go back and do some second drafts on some pages, too.  And once they all get posted, I’ll revisit each page to correct place names and add a myriad of links.  And some day, I’ll edit together the photos and videos and get them posted to Flickr and YouTube, and then I’ll revamp the entire thing into its own set of web pages on my site, rather than a series of blog posts.

(Of course, I haven’t done the pics/video or web pages steps with either the OutGames or Dublin trip reports just yet.  Sigh.)

My boyfriend is picking me up at the airport.  I haven’t had sex with him in two weeks.  What do you think will happen tonight?  (Yeah, probably collapse into bed and sleep.)

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Updated on May 14, 2010

Updated on June 15, 2010

Added links.
Added travel map.

Couldn’t You Try a Little Harder?

I get leery of places and things which have to tell you up front how good they are in order for you to partake.

I first noticed this back in the mid-90s, when I was working for a gay newspaper and was asked to review a novel (Iowa, by Patrick Moore).  Unlike those which have pull quotes on the back touting how ground-breaking and fantastic the novel is, for this one the publisher put a quote on the front, which implied that they didn’t think that the title, author’s name, and photo of a hunky farmboy would sell the book.  (Instead, they needed a quote by someone I had never heard of, like that would help sell it?)

(You might think that I remember the book so it must have been good.  No, I remember it because of the stupid pull quote on the front, which I even tagged in the review I wrote.)

Later in the decade, I started noticing a motel chain called Quality Inn.  If it’s good, quality should be expected, so if you have to tell me that it is “quality”, I’m inclined to disbelieve.  (This went a step further a few years later when I chanced upon a small restaurant in Kansas City, the Quality Diner.  Er, no thanks!)

And now for the latest: the DVD of Eddie Murphy’s film Norbit just came out, and it touts “Hysterically funny!” in huge letters on the cover, nearly as prominent as the title.  Was this the best review line they got for the film?  Heck, by the whopping 9% rating it garnered at Rotten Tomatoes, it may be the only good review line they got.
 

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Updated on December 21, 2009

I now see that the pull quote on that Patrick Moore book was from Karen Finley, apparently one of the NEA Four.  That should help sell a novel how?

Secrets of the last Harry Potter book

My exposure to Harry Potter is limited to the 5 films to date — I just saw Order of the Phoenix an hour ago — plus maybe 20 pages of reading, but I’m going to lay in my predictions for the Big Reveal in book #7 right now. These may be completely off base, but they are based on standard story cycle tropes — lots of mythology and comics and soap operas in my past.

Here are things we know:

• Voldemort couldn’t kill Harry when he was an infant.  Or at least couldn’t bring himself to kill Harry.

• In all the scenes we see of Harry’s parents’ deaths, it is only his mother we see being killed.  We don't see Harry’s father actually bite it.

• There are any number of wise and powerful people always looking after Harry.  And always seeming to keep secrets from him.  If they’ve known stuff and kept it from him thus far, they probably still do.

• Per the flashback with Snape in movie #5, Harry’s father had a bit of a mean streak in him.

What always happens to a group like the Order of the Phoenix?  (Or like Harry's group of student wizards and witches?)  Why, they get taken down by a traitor in their midst.  Ergo, I predict that Voldemort is Harry’s father, who succumbed to the Dark Side and became the student of Darth Sidious.

Well, maybe not quite that last bit.  But it captures the gist.

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Updated on December 16, 2009