For Jim Joyce…Bromo, baby.

I don’t have a lot of movie memories before Star Wars which came out a few days before I turned six. My grandmother took me to see a Lassie movie at Radio City, but otherwise, Star Wars is the first movie I remember seeing in the theater. I went with my brother and my Old Man. A few years later, The Empire Strikes Back was a seminal summer movie–I saw it seven times in the theater, still a record for me–followed by summer blockbusters like Raiders, E.T., Ghostbusters, and later, Back to the Future.

Summer blockbusters. Which ones were your favorites as a kid (even as a grown kid)?

Crying Tiger Pork

Yesterday, my pal Jon DeRosa hipped me to Jonathan Gold, a famous food writer from L.A. who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work a few years back. I’d never heard of Gold before but a quick goodle search of his columns for the L.A. Weekly was enough to hook me.

I went back into the New Yorker archives and checked out a profile on Gold by Dana Goodyear. Here is Gold at a Thai joint called Jitlada in a strip mall in Hollywood:

Gold started to reminisce about the spiciness of the species kua kling that Jazz had ever served him, the first day they met. “It was glowing, practically incandescent,” he said. “You bite into it and every alarm in your body goes off at once. it’s an overload on your pain receptors, and then the flavors just come through. It’s not that the hotness overwhelms the dish, which is what people who don’t understand Thai cooking always say, but that the dish is revealed for the first time–its flavor–as you taste details of fruit and tumeric and spices that you didn’t taste when it was merely extremely hot. It’s like a hallucination.”

I like spicy food but am a rank amateur when it comes to real spice. I’ve never tried anything as intense as kua kling but agree that beyond the initial shock of hotness, the flavors in Thai cuisine really develop and it is an incredible experience.

I also thought this was interesting:

Eating in the San Gabriel Valley, Gold has observed that, unlike in New York, where immigrants quickly broaden and assimilate their cooking styles to reflect the city’s collective idea of “Chinese food,” the insular nature of Los Angeles allows imported regional cuisines to remain intact, traceable almost to the the restaurant owners’ villages of origins. “The difference is that in New York they’re cooking for us,” Gold told me. “Here they’re cooking for themselves.”

I’m sure there are plenty of restaurants in New York that cook for themselves but I think regional cooking as a reflection of L.A.’s “I vant to be alone” sensibility makes all the sense in the world.

Here is Gold’s 99 Essential L.A. restaurants. Dig ’em, smack.

[Photo Credit: Jitlada.com]

For all the passionate Banterites out there…

Ocean Park #83, By Richard Diebenkorn (1975)

I’m with a guy who thinks Wyoming is a country. You think you got problems?

John Cazale (left) apparently ad-libbed that line in Dog Day Afternoon. Cazale was in five movies: Godfather I, Godfather II, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon and The Deer Hunter. Pound-for-pound perhaps the greatest movie career in history. And he was terrific in all of them.

Cazale, who died of bone cancer before The Deer Hunter was released, is the subject of a documentary tonight on HBO.

I’m so there.

The Silver Moon Bakery on 105th street and Broadway is: expensive, friendly, just a little bit pretentious, but most certainly delicious. I had an apricot brioche the other day. Cost me three bucks and it was so worth it. Worth waiting on line for and worth going back for that alone.

Ya heard?

[Photo Credit: The Wandering Eater]

This’ll put a pep in yer step:

Vacation Friday. Bump it.

Busta!

Display Cakes, By Wayne Thiebaud (1963)

Ted Berg’s blog always has something for me every time I stop over. Yesterday, he posted a classic AP Photo of Hideki Irabu who was arrested for Second-Degree Awesomeness earlier this week (I don’t usually take delight in another person’s misery, even a public figure, but I’ve always felt warm-and-fuzzy for Irabu’s misadventures–he was the one true degenerate on a Yankee team filled with boy scouts).

Then came  a post about some of the craziest–nasty or delicious, you decide–food I’ve ever seen.

Check this out, from a joint called Ditch Plains:

Whoa, Daddy. That’s hectic, man. Or “Mad hectic,” as my wife would say.

Oy and vey.

[Photo Credit: Always Hungry]

Have you ever walked out of a movie? First time it happened to me was when my Old Man couldn’t stand Time Bandits and we left the theater–on 86th street near Lexington Ave–half-way through. I saw it again years later and didn’t think it was that bad. I just remember it being muddy and British.

We’ve all sat through movies we don’t like (I think my mom was trying poison me by taking me to see Chariots of Fire), but for me, a bad movie is always easier to take than say, bad theater. Heck, I’ve even sat through movies I hate just so I could get angry–Born on the Fourth of July, Thelma and Louise and The Crying Game come to mind. But I think the only other movie I’ve ever walked out on is Eyes Wide Shut. I went in not expecting much and hung with it for the first hour or so when I found it campy and unintentionally amusing. But finally it got so boring and pretentious that I happily walked out. And I didn’t feel ripped-off, I felt liberated.

So? What movies–if any–have you ever walked out on?

Yeah, she had it going on. And Ike was a superior talent even if he was a world-class louse.

[Picture from Wax Poetics]

Day Dream, By Andrew Wyeth (1980)

One of Hackman’s better leading roles and probably Arthur Penn’s last very good movie. Featuring a young (and busty) Melanie Griffith:

Yeah, the movie is dated–it’s so Seventies–but hey, it’s Hackman, man. Most certainly worth watching.

I was in the Village last night and needed something to tide me over…what better than a slice (or two)? So I hit Famous Joe’s, just off 6th Avenue, which moved locations from the corner of Carmine and Bleeker not too long ago to the middle of the block.

Joe’s is open late and has a wall filled with pictures of celebrities–Adam Sandler, Leo DiCaprio. It’s not my favorite slice in the city, but a representative one, indeed. You sure could do worse.

I took my slices and sat in the little park across the street along with many others who were enjoying their slice in the warm evening air.

[Photo Credit: LA Pizza,  Go Planit and Julie Lim]

Since the Yanks are are in Twin Cities, how about a couple of joints?

This one, like Bill Withers’ “Use Me,” is a sure-shot record, guaranteed to get the ladies jigglin’.

And here’s the Art of Noise cover featuring Tom Jones:

Double Features. Remember them? They’ve practically disappeared from the cultural landscape, just like double-headers. I used to go see double features at the old Regency Theater which was on 67th street and Broadway. It was a revival house that played old Hollywood movies. Had a balcony and everything.

Saw twin bills of Marilyn (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch) and Bogart (High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties) and Buster Keaton (Sherlock Jr, Seven Chances) and and the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, Animal Crackers) there.

When I was 12, I visited my mother’s family in Belgium for the summer. My uncle and his girlfriend took me to the seaside for a few days and I’ll never forget seeing the movie posters for Mad Max II (which was renamed The Road Warrior over here). Raiders was out too but Mad Max II looked like something different altogether, something menacing and sinister.

I eventually saw both Mad Max and The Road Warrior many times on videotape and then on cable. Both movies still scare the bejesus out of me in that way you get scared as a kid, ‘specially if I see them late at night. They are corny in a fantastic way but also filmed in such a tense and seemingly credible manner that I get the willies every time.

It took me almost thirty years to connect with avocados but now that I have it’s hard to remember life without them. When I was growing up, my mother would cut one in half, remove the pit, and then drizzle olive oil and red wine vinegar over them, add salt and pepper, and eat them just like that. I am game to try them in just about any way now, but I usually have them just like Ma did.

Here’s a quick rundown of avocados from Saveur.

[Photo Credit: Travelling Yogi]