Dig this fun piece from the L.A. Times Magazine on 50 different kinds of Soda Pop. 

RC was Boss, right Cappy?

Blue Note week continues.

This one is a favorite…

It wasn’t too long after Cliff started writing at the Banter that we realized our constrasting styles worked well together.

“You guys are like peanut butter and jelly,” said Steve Goldman. When I told this to Cliff he corrected the analogy, “More like peanut butter and chocolate.”

Say word.

I tried this recipe for summer squarsh carpaccio a few days ago and it was really lovely.

From Rachel Ray…

[Photo Credit: Last Night’s Dinner]

No, you don’t have to be a Gay man to love Mildred Pierce. This film noir is one of my wife’s favorites–a Lifetime movie as high pop art. Based on the novel by James M. Cain, good, old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama–featuring the most ungrateful daughter in screen history–has rarely looked this sharp:

Peace to Chyll Will for hipping me to this most gifted dude:

Actually, the sun is nowhere to be found this morning in the Bronx. But here’s Glenn Gould playing Bach–The Goldberg Variations, 1-7. A nice way to start the day:

Let’s git on der good foot this morning, shall we?

Joe D, By Bart Forbes

Got a cousin who does well for himself in the food distribution business here in New York. A few months ago I ran into him on the street. He was with an older gentleman with white hair and a white beard. Goes, “Let me introduce you to Henry Fudge: best pork in the country.” I’ve had Fudge Farms bacon and pork chops. I don’t know enough to make any grand proclamations but I know that it sure am good.

Guest Writer: Ted Berg

I might be the wrong guy for this assignment because I don’t harbor any guilt over any of the movies I enjoy. Movies are made for entertainment, and pleasure is pleasure. Sure, a thought-provoking film might hold my attention after the credits stop rolling — entertaining me over a longer period of time — but a good blockbuster full of high-speed chases and tremendous explosions can provide a thorough and enrapturing aesthetic experience like few others.

I know a lot of European cinema supposedly developed in reaction to the escapism of Hollywood, but I don’t really understand the beef with escapism. I’ve seen a bunch of Italian Neorealist films, and nearly all of them bored me to sleep and not one featured a giant ape wrestling dinosaurs. Sure, Peter Jackson’s King Kong was a bit heavy-handed and hardly provoked introspection, but it held me in a vice grip throughout because, well, apes wrestling dinosaurs. And yeah, it might have lacked the subtleties of L’Avventura, but subtlety is for suckers. Give me movies that fully exploit the medium.

xXx opens with a suave dude in a tuxedo doing some spy stuff at an obvious bad-guy party featuring a Rammstein performance. His presence is too obvious and inexplicable in a mosh pit full off tattooed and pierced fire-breathers, and the leader-guy bad guys spot him swiftly and kill him handily. Then they light some drinks on fire to celebrate.

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Breakfast with Bob.

From the stellar 1966 Playboy Interview:

PLAYBOY: Some of your old fans would agree with you – and not in a complimentary vein – since your debut with the rock-‘n’-roll combo at last year’s Newport Folk Festival, where many of them booed you loudly for “selling out” to commercial pop tastes. The early Bob Dylan, they felt, was the “pure” Bob Dylan. How do you feel about it?

DYLAN: I was kind of stunned. But I can’t put anybody down for coming and booing: after all, they paid to get in. They could have been maybe a little guieter and not so persistent, though. There were a lot of old people there, too; lots of whole families had driven down from Vermont, lots of nurses and their parents, and well, like they just came to hear some relaxing hoedowns, you know, maybe an Indian polka or two. And just when everything’s going all right, here I come on, and the whole place turns into a beer factory. There were a lot of people there who were very pleased that I got booed. I saw them afterward. I do resent somewhat, though, that everybody that booed said they did it because they were old fans.

PLAYBOY: What about their charge that you vulgarized your natural gifts?

DYLAN: What can I say? I’d like to see one of these so-called fans. I’d like to have him blindfolded and brought to me. It’s like going out to the desert and screaming and then having little kids throw their sandbox at you. I’m only 24. These people that said this – were they Americans?

The Beat Conductor vs Metal Face:

David Lebovitz, you’re a good man.

Here, he hips us to RUB barbeque. Many thanks. Looks like one is worth a try.

IF YOU’RE NOT KNIEVEL, YOU’RE NOT #1

It was the 1970s, and the bewildered youth of America needed a hero. Instead, we got Evel Knievel. Knievel, the self-proclaimed world’s greatest daredevil, roared out of Butte, Montana sometime in the 1960s with a unique flair for self-promotion, a collection of red, white and blue capes and a willingness to put himself in harm’s way by jumping over things on a motorcycle. Cars, Greyhound buses, a shark tank – Knievel revved up his motorcycle and flew over them. Sometimes he landed safely, sometimes he’d crash or careen out of control, his body thrown across the tarmac like an unwanted rag doll, leaving Wide World Of Sports announcers to ask each other “Will this be Evel’s final jump?”

In any era, a self-made celebrity like Knievel is bound to wind up on the silver screen. Knievel’s story was told in an eponymously titled 1971 film starring George Hamilton as Knievel, who famously described himself as “the last gladiator.” However, after his infamous Snake River Canyon jump, his line of toy cycles and dolls and another 5 years of jumps and crashes, the time was right to try to make a movie star out of Evel himself.

Thus, in 1977, movie audiences around the world were treated to Viva Knievel!, starring Evel Knievel as…Evel Knievel.  Could he act? Would it matter?  Not to kids like me, who could barely put down our Stunt Cycles or put away our Tour Vans long enough to sit through one of the greatest bad movies of all time.

As a film, Viva Knievel! is much like watching one of Knievel’s crashes. It’s an unholy mess, and yet we can’t look away, and it contains one of the strangest casts in movie history. Gordon Douglas directed the film, and one wonders if he got the job due to his rapport with Frank Sinatra. Douglas directed Sinatra in five films in the 1960s and was known as one of the few directors who could control Sinatra or at least get along with him. Warner Brothers may have felt he’d be the man to ride rein on Knievel.  The problem with that thinking is that Frank Sinatra may have been difficult, but he could actually act and pretty damned well when he wanted to.

The film opens with Knievel sneaking into an orphanage at night to bring children the uplifting gift of Evel Knievel action figures. One child is so moved by Knievel’s presence, he throws away his crutches and tells Knievel he’s the reason he can walk again. That’s right folks – Knievel might have inspired your children to shatter their own bones emulating his crazy stunts, but don’t worry – his inspiration will have them out of their hospital beds in no time at all.

Soon enough, Knievel’s setting up his next jump with his alcoholic mechanic sidekick Will, played by Gene Kelly. GENE KELLY? Yes, that Gene Kelly. The cinematic icon, beloved the world over, now inexplicably reduced to playing Evel Knievel’s second banana. (What’s worse is that Kelly is genuinely bad in the role.) We also meet Evel’s unscrupulous promoter, played by Red Buttons. Apparently Warner Brothers was under the impression that the best way to make Knievel a movie star was to surround him with people who were really current and hip in 1977, you know, like Red Buttons and Gene Kelly.  We’re treated to a great scene of Kelly threatening Buttons because he feels Evel’s last jump hadn’t been safe enough.

“What’s the matter with you? Evel is my pal too!” is Buttons’ meek response.

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Come on, what else could I write about during Shark Week?

Deep Blue Sea opens with an homage to and ripoff of Jaws, as do roughly 90% of all movies about dangerous aquatic creatures. Which is fitting, since Jaws impressed and traumatized me at a very young age and gave me a so far life-long fascination with sharks. I used to check over my shoulder in the deep end of swimming pools, looking for fins; I still to this day scan the horizon only semi-ironically if I’m in the ocean above my thighs. The idea of huge monsters in the murk coming at your vulnerable body from below… it still gets to me more than just about any other horror trope.

That’s one reason I started watching Deep Blue Sea when I came across it on TV for the first but certainly not last time, a decade ago. Another reason, I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit, is the early scene featuring Thomas Jane is a bathing suit:

Hello, ladies.

Deep Blue Sea’s set-up is pretty simple: rich and famous executive Samuel L. Jackson is threatening to shut down the research of driven scientist Dr. Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows… what? Her hair’s pulled back and everything!), so she flies him out to her floating lab to demonstrate how close she is to curing Alzheimer’s using protein from shark brains. (Indeed, the film’s conceit that a drop of shark brain fluid applied to dead human brain cells will cause them to completely regenerate and spark to life in 6.5 seconds is perhaps its most ridiculous moment of all, which is really saying something in a movie where LL Cool J kills a genius shark with an oven to avenge his dead pet parrot.)

At the lab, far out at sea, we meet the weekend skeleton crew: neurotic engineer Michael Rappaport, dour researcher Stellan Skarsgård, pixie-ish researcher Jacquelyn McKenzie, comic-relief cook LL Cool J, spunky control tower operator Aida “Janice Soprano” Turturro, and macho shark-wranger and ex-con Thomas Jane. Naturally, a huge storm arrives, just as Dr. Saffron Burrows’ rushed research is coming to a head – and as the experimented-upon sharks are acting less and less like fish, and more and more like evil masterminds.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, the sharks’ brains have been genetically engineered to many times their natural size, which made them smarter, “as a side effect.” When the storm hits, they turn the tables on the lab staff in a hurry. Their first assault gruesomely takes out Stellan Skarsgård and causes a huge helicopter crash (take that, Megashark!) that severely damages and floods the lab, kills Janice Soprano, and sets the brilliant demon-fish free to stalk the significantly less brilliant human characters.

The following scene (SPOILER ALEEEEEEEEEERT!) is by far the best in the movie, and almost single-handedly elevates it from so-bad-it’s-good empty calories to something a bit more. This Samuel L. Jackson speech, and its abrupt end, genuinely startled me more than a movie had in a very long time, and in a fun, wry, knowing way.

Obviously Deep Blue Sea is hardly the first movie to kill off what the audience thought was the main character much earlier than expected – see Psycho for the most dramatic example, decades earlier. But Deep Blue Sea gives you no previous hints that it’s going to be that kind of movie. Everything has gone according to the rulebook, and suddenly the rulebook is set on fire. And to do it in the middle of a big, dramatic speech about togetherness and cooperation – that’s just awesome. Sure, working together to overcome obstacles is great and all, but massive, vicious genetically engineered predators with rows of razor-sharp teeth will trump any amount of community spirit.

Dr. Saffron Burrows takes most of the movie’s blame for causing all the trouble by pushing nature (and pissed-off mutant sharks) way too far in her single-minded pursuit of an Alzheimer’s cure. “What in God’s creation…” wonders Samuel L. Jackson. “Not His,” says Stellan Skarsgård, “Ours.” He is, naturally, the first to die, though really it’s as much because he’s a smoker as because of his blasphemy.

This is what happens when you smoke, kids.

So the movie (like so many before it) posits that the Doc brought this misery on herself and her friends because she played God, but I tend to disagree. I think if you can really find a cure for degenerative brain illness, and the price of that is a few terrifying evil mutant sharks, you damn well go for it; the unforgivable mistake of the Deep Blue Sea crew was, rather, surrounding huge unnatural killing machines with freaking mesh wire fences. (Jurassic Park teaches the same flawed lesson about human hubris. I mean, go ahead and mess with nature – just don’t keep your only backup generator on the other side of the goddamn Velociraptor habitat! Common sense, people).

Deep Blue Sea was directed by Renny Harlin, whose spotty record includes the mega-flop Cutthroat Island as well as the minorly entertaining hits Die Hard 2 and the Long Kiss Goodnight. No one would really confuse him with an auteur, but he knows how to direct action and he keeps things taut. Meanwhile, the screenwriters are no one of any distinction. But somehow the movie has a spark of life and ingenuity and just sheer joy in its own stupid premise that elevates it above most similar summer junk.

For example, I have to give the film full credit for its handling of the obligatory leading-lady-in-her-underwear sequence, which often, in these movies, comes with only the flimsiest of pretexts. Here Saffron Burrows, having gone back to her quarters in a staggeringly stupid fit of determination to save her research, is attacked by a shark in neck-high water, stands on a desk, and takes off her wet suit to reveal her bra and panties… then stands on said wetsuit for insulation and fries the shark with a loose electric cable. I just can’t argue with that reasoning.

Fair play.

In the end, this movie is both saved and cursed by its self-consciousness. That’s what allows the writers to play with the rules of the genre so effectively at times, but it also stops the film from ever being particularly affecting – it never really lets you forget that you’re watching a movie, and a silly one. And so as entertaining as it is, Deep Blue Sea is never all that scary, or sad, or uplifting. It will not distract you from your popcorn.

Just as the movie opened in Jaws’ shadow, it closes there too – with a huge shark exploding in a fountain of blood and flesh, and two exhausted survivors (though not, I have to admit, the two I initially expected). Deep Blue Sea isn’t one fourth of the movie that Jaws is. But it connects to that same primal fear… and then adds hot people in wetsuits, and all manner of explosions, and ludicrous scientific jargon, and an original LL Cool J track. And I have now watched it at least four times.

Short schedule here at the Banter this morning with an afternoon game on the schedule. Man, I’m still cranky about the past few days. Two hits last night? Got to be kidding me, man.

Feelin’ just ornery enough for some Cube–what up Loc?:

Sorry I forgot to pass this along when it came out. The Times’ review of David Chang’s new midtown spot:

It is a strange feeling, sitting in Má Pêche on a Friday night, well underneath Midtown in the basement of the Chambers Hotel, Modest Mouse playing at half volume on the stereo system as people drink wine and talk and stab at sticky pork ribs with chopsticks. The seats at the restaurant have backs to them. They are comfortable. There is plenty of space.

There is nothing like this at the other restaurants in David Chang’s four-restaurant Momofuku confederation — of which Má Pêche is the newest, the largest and the first not located in the East Village. There is no extra space in the other Momofuku restaurants at all, no real creature comforts beyond the food and the service. There are just counters, nooks, sharp corners and little chance for intimate conversation, even at Momofuku Ko, which flies the standard of excellence for them all. (There, you just stare at the chefs and wait for the magic.)

Got to be a worth a try, no?

[Photo Credit: Oyster Locals]

Balsamic Strawberry Jam.

Yes, please.

From the Savory Sweet Life (thanks to Saveur for the link).