Only a Blockhead: Food and Drink

Food and Drink

09/23/2012

Coffee! Life! Japan!

"Coffee Life in Japan" has more in common with that spate of books popular a few years ago where an author picked a popular foodstuff — cod, salt, spam, whatever — and then produced a book in which every fact he or she could dig up about that foodstuff was, in more or less entertaining fashion, and with some firsthand reportage thrown in — a behind-the-scenes look at a spam farm in Slovenia! — retailed.

Pour yourself a cup of coffee and read the rest of my review of Merry White's Coffee Life in Japan here.

—David

Posted at 11:18 AM in Books, Food and Drink, Japan, Pleasure, Reviews, Tokyo | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/18/2012

Random Albion *

Notes from a recent visit to the United Kingdom

Heathrow Airport A very long walk down boring, utilitarian corridors to a shabby customs area.

On public transport Passengers talk loudly on cell phones oblivious to those around them.

On escalators People stand to the right and hurry up the left. (In Kanto, Japan, the opposite. I’m told that Kansai, Japan follows the British pattern. How do these differences happen?)

Architecture and history Obsolete old buildings are lovingly restored and brought back into use. Near Reading Station, a gorgeous, red stone Victorian 2nd floor frontage stretches the entire block. (Sadly, below, half the stores are boarded up.)

Food and drink The beer is superb. Brakespear Bitter (an Oxfordshire speciality) manages the impossible—to satisfy, yet be low in alcohol. A mat on the bar says, “Perhaps the greatest beer in the world at 3.4% alcohol.” Andrew Jefford (Financial Times)

There are culinary treasures, and a full English breakfast is one of them. Sausage, bacon, tomato, mushroom, eggs fried or scrambled, sometimes baked beans and, if you’re really lucky, black pudding (blood sausage) and fried bread. All those flavors in your mouth.

Service A ten-pound note (1300 yen; 15 dollars) causes problems in the hotel cafe; they don’t have enough coin to make change for a cup of tea.

Shop assistants think nothing of talking to each other when customers are in earshot, and sometimes even while serving. They’re bringing their individual selves to the job, along with fulfilling a duty for their employer. It feels slovenly, but it can also make for a friendliness uncommon in Japan: at the market, a question about a loyalty card led to a genuine conversation about where I live, and whether I liked Japan or Britain better.

Footpaths The countryside is crisscrossed by rights of way. They can be muddy, and treacherous with horse and dog poo, but they make for glorious walking, riding and cycling.

But what ultimately sets Japan and the UK apart is the washlet, which is quietly revolutionizing an essential of life. Britain is still a nation of dirty bottoms. I didn’t enjoy reverting to the barbarism of wiping away feces with dry paper.

Narita airport: short corridors carpeted and decorated. Back to the womb.

--Julian

* Thanks to David for inadvertently suggesting this title.

Posted at 09:44 AM in Food and Drink, Japan, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/30/2011

City Life

"City" and "Civilization" have the same etymological root.

Last week, because I live close to a great metropolis and frequently pass through it, I was able to hear John Adams's Dr. Atomic Symphony performed, to hear Gary Snyder and Shuntaro Tanikawa read and talk, to pick up (and read), on a whim, a short book by Samuel Beckett, to engage in lively conversation over ramen and beer in a back-street dive with a street musician who looked like an early Rolling Stone a bit the worse for wear and an older man, impeccably turned out, who he called "Sensei." Another week might also have included an exquisite meal at a French, Indian, Thai, or Japanese restaurant, and would certainly feature social encounters, unpredictable and exciting, of the kind that only great cities can offer.

I am always amazed to hear people deplore urbanization and talk about how much they hate cities.

Different strokes, I guess.

—David

Posted at 11:01 AM in Food and Drink, Pleasure, Poetry, Tokyo | Permalink | Comments (0)

10/19/2011

How to Brew

a proper cuppa.

For my British friends:

Regarding the tea cosy: it is entirely acceptable, if not required, that you put it on your head and refer yourself as the Bishop

Read about the whole process here (and don't miss the comments).

--David

Posted at 12:39 PM in Food and Drink, Humor | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/09/2011

Things I Didn't Do in Finland

Become a devotee of the Baltic diet

Eat in all the right places

Encounter a Russian monk

Recall Smokey or Yogi

Shit on anybody's head

Get down

Go up the down staircase

Eat at this Japanese restaurant

Agree

Encounter any funny-eared, short, barefoot types

Remember that he used to look like this

Think this was the best advertisement for a photography studio

Resist doing a little tagging

Forget to look at the sky

—David

Posted at 05:18 PM in Aetherial Monuments, Food and Drink, Photographs, Travel | Permalink | Comments (1)

06/24/2011

The simple pleasures of summer

Edamame green soybeans in their pods, locally grown, bought on the vine.

Boil for 10 minutes. Sprinkle with coarse salt. Savor with beer (especially if that beer is Baird’s Suruga Bay IPA.)

--Julian

Posted at 05:19 PM in Food and Drink, Japan | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/17/2011

Kitchen

—David

Posted at 04:47 PM in Food and Drink, Photographs, Pleasure | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/03/2011

Hot coffee; cold morning

Hot coffee's bounty

on a cold morning:

warming hands, stomach and heart.

--Julian

Posted at 06:52 AM in Food and Drink, Pleasure | Permalink | Comments (0)

02/01/2011

Truth, wisdom... and eating in

Two quotes from an interview with Jack Nicholson in the London Daily Mail: The first, with adjustment for sexual proclivity, is true for me. The second I aspire to.

“If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women.”

“I was up around where I live and I looked out at the blue skies and the clouds and I realized that this was paradise.”

I could leave it at that, but as someone going through a change of taste in movies, some other comments resonated with me. Nicholson was giving the interview to promote How Do You Know, a romantic comedy with an unfortunate forget-it-as-soon-as-you-hear-it title in which he has a supporting role. Why, wondered the Mail, would someone who rarely gives interviews agree to promote a romcom that “showcases the talents of others”? Because, he says,

“It’s very important…. What I liked about this script is that…. It hasn’t got people flying off walls and lots of guns and yelling. It’s a movie that’s based on a good script and good acting, and it’s supposed to move you.”

I like to be moved, and increasingly dislike the “guns and yelling.” So I’ll definitely be cycling over to Hiratsuka, one city up the coast, to catch How Do You Know when it opens next week.

And I could leave it at that, but there’s just one more image of Nicholson and a gourmet dinner that I want to pass on.

“I would never complain about my life, even though I really would like to have a mate. It’s not like I’m starved for company – I have a few very good lady friends – but there’s only a certain amount of times a woman wants to see you and never go out for dinner. I got tired of arguing with women about going to have dinners, so I hired someone to cook. The food is better at my house.”

Aah, to be able to say that!

("The food is better at my house," I mean.)

(Jack Nicholson, 2010. Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

(Thanks for the Pop Candy blog for alerting me to the Nicolson interview.)

--Julian

Posted at 02:27 PM in Film, Food and Drink, Pleasure | Permalink | Comments (0)

01/14/2011

Vicarious Japan

Japan Times readers (print or online) can--apart from enjoying Blockhead David’s book reviews—feast on Robbie Swinnerton’s twice-monthly restaurant column.

But Swinnerton also blogs, and that’s what I’m writing about here. In The Japan Times we can read about the excellent food and drink he discovers, of all kinds and in all price ranges, mostly in metropolitan Tokyo. But the blog is something else. It’s where he has the space to write about what can’t be fitted into an every-other-week column. But more than that even, it’s where he can print all the photos that there’s no room for in a one-illustration-per-article newspaper.

And so on the Tokyo Food File blog (“morsels from the foodiest city on the planet”), we’re likely to find several images of the restaurant, inside and out, to set the scene. And, ah!, course-by-course photos of his meal, bringing it alive in a way that mere description cannot. As someone who doesn’t journey to the capital often, I can dine vicariously and deliciously once a week or more. And so can you.

As I write this, the latest entry is Food File highlights of 2010 (part 2) about a soba restaurant. It’s masterful.

--Julian

Posted at 05:11 PM in Blogging, Food and Drink, Japan, Photographs | Permalink | Comments (0)

Books David Finished in 2013

Barry Eisler: Winner Take All
Well, I said I was hooked on Eisler's John Rain series. This one was good too, with Macau and Rio de Janiero added along with increasing complexity in the assassin's character. A quality thriller.
Barry Eisler: A Lonely Resurrection (previously published as Hard Rain and Blood from Blood) (John Rain series) (Volume 2)
This is the second I've read in Barry Eisler's series about assassin John Rain, and I'm afraid I'm hooked. They're well written, his evocation of Tokyo rings true, and his protagonist is interesting. It seems odd to suggest that the actions of a character who is a cold-blooded assassin could be morally ambiguous, and in most novels like this he would not be; he would be either a good guy--his assassinations were somehow justified--or a bad guy--defined as such because of his assassinations. Rain moves back and forth between those camps: sometimes he's only in in for the money, but thinks he's at least not in the pay of absolute evil. Other times the people he kills are absolutely evil, so the killings could possibly be defined as heroic. Other times somebody irritates him, and ends up with a broken neck. In keeping his protagonist wondering about whether he's doing the right thing, whether he could choose to do otherwise, and whether he could atone for what he's done, he keeps us, his readers, guessing about how we should feel. This places the book a rung up from the run-of-the-mill.
Theodora Keogh: The Double Door
Though not quite as coldly elegant as The Tattooed Heart, Theodora Keogh's The Double Door is another excellent short novel that belongs on your "we forget how weird the '40s and '50s in the USA were" shelf. The double door of the title is between two buildings in New York City. The first is occupied by a family made up of a neurotic and unlovable mother, a girl with a heart of ice who is her 12-year-old daughter, and the girl's father, a South American gigolo who passes himself off as European nobility. The other is where the nobleman indulges in debauchery with a select circle of friends augmented by young men picked up off the street. That one of this gang is a monk on leave from the monastery only adds to the gothic tone of the book. It's not surprising that one of the few positive reviews Patricia Highsmith ever wrote was of one of Keogh's novels. Fans of Highsmith's cold eye will certainly enjoy her work.
Roz Kaveney: Rituals - Rhapsody of Blood, Volume One
This is a well-written fantasy—largely urban—about two heroines who, mostly independent of each other, set about removing evil-doers from the world. Both of the heroines are, perhaps, a bit too heroic—they hardly seem challenged by encounters even with monumental evil—but Kaveney's intelligence saves the book. She manages to weave together lots of the world's mythologies (she writes hilariously about Judeo-Christian mythology in particular) and augment them with her knowledge of music, opera, history and literature to produce a fantasy more than usually engaging.
Dr. Kenjiro Setoue: Doctor Stories from the Island Journals of the Legendary Dr. Koto
Dr. Setoue, a successful surgeon, took a temporary job at a clinic on a remote Japanese island in the South China Sea. He intended to stay six months, but has ended up spending his life in that remote place and caring for the people there. Setoue's Island Journals are unexciting, and that is as it should be. He does what needs to be done, and writes about it simply, but in a way that helps us to understand why he remains with the aging islanders, and why they have come to trust and depend on him. He is, it is clear, a good man.
Theodora Keogh: The Tattooed Heart
Readers of Dawn Powell must be grateful to Gore Vidal for bringing that, for a time, forgotten writer to our attention. Unfortunately, although she surfaces now and then on the Internet, Theodora Keogh has yet to find such a high-profile champion. That's a shame, because The Tattooed Heart alone demonstrates that she is worthy of our attention. It is the story of a chaste, though always simmering, first love between a twelve-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl, a summer romance destroyed by adults and adulthood. Most of the story takes place on a New England estate with lots of woods for the young people to roam in, and the atmosphere is almost gothic: accompanying the young lovers one sinks into Keogh's world as into a dream. Published in 1954, the novel remains compelling. Surely it, and the rest of Keogh's work, are worthy of reissue? NYRB, are you listening?
Tristan Garcia: Hate: A Romance: A Novel
Tristan Garcia's Hate: A Romance is about the cultural, political, and intellectual life of France—which is to say Paris—in the last two or three decades. Since that life can be seen as a series of conversations (also arguments, shouting matches, and hissy fits) this is appropriate: we never quite know what Garcia thinks about AIDS, Israel and Palestine, head scarves on Moslem women, Internet culture, or any of the rest of the issues that he, or rather his characters, are on about. We do see them loving each other, and thanks in large part to a sort of man without qualities from the provinces, hating each other, and doing their best to destroy each other, before the novel's end. The book is compelling, though thanks to the odiousness of this interloper, at times it is hard to read. Hate is the 27-year-old author's first novel (he's also published a book of philosophy), a fact that makes it all the more impressive.
Nicholson Baker: The Anthologist: A Novel
Nicholson Baker is in top-form in this novel. He combines two of his modes: avuncular observer of the minute and often missed and ranter at a society that seems to want to discard everything old. In this case Baker, or rather his protagonist, Paul Chowder (Baker noted in a recent Paris Review interview that his writing is eighty percent autobiographical) rants at what he feels was a wrong turn taken by poetry in the Pound era: the rejection of rhyme. One may not agree with Baker/Chowder's conservative take on what poetry should be, but one will learn a lot about poetry, and, as with all Baker's books, about life from this book.
Martin Solares: The Black Minutes
I remember how exciting it was, back in the '70s, to discover Gabriel Garcia Márquez and other Latin American writers who seemed to offer a whole new way of writing fiction. Sure, magical realism, as Márquez's style came to be called, was overdone in the years to follow by the master's epigones, and sure it's a style that's easy to parody, but at the time it was pure gold. Martín Solares is no magical realist, but in The Black Minutes he gives us a narrative that is, in its fecundity, reminiscent of the Latin American Boom . He grafts his tale—a detective story within a detective story—onto a police procedural, and gives us something that transcends the genre to such an extent that it has to be considered something else: literature at its most rip-roaring.
Sara Gran: Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
A private eye novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is, with its odd mix of the occult with the mean streets we've come to expect, entirely original. This is the first in what will surely be a series, and I, for one, am eager to follow the further adventures of Ms. DeWitt.

Books Julian Read Recently

Ian McEwan: Sweet Tooth
[Skull, no, Skillduggery] McEwan’s latest and surprisingly gentle novel paints a vivid picture of 70s Britain. There are also interesting insights into both the mysterious world of the MI5, and the life of a novelist. The whole thing is a little off kilter, (rather as late Woody Allen movies tend to be). Is it because McEwan is less than competent at channeling a female protagonist/narrator? Suffice it to say, all is explained. Extremely clever it is. Fairly entertaining, too, but--to this reader--less than completely satisfying. (***)
Edmund de Waal: The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance
A English potter, descended from a rich, Jewish family that was dispersed and dispossessed of everything in Hitler’s Europe leading up to World War II, traces the history of the one remaining family heirloom: a collection of antique netsuke. De Waal brings the family members and their lives, and the places—Odessa, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo--and times they lived in, to vivid life. Along with this pleasure is a harrowing account of anti-Semitism. Thank you, C and L, for recommending this. I enjoyed it deeply and learned a lot from it. (*****)
Tom Lubbock: Until Further Notice, I Am Alive
Our own death is absolutely inconceivable: it’s a koan as inexplicable as one hand clapping. This is made abundantly clear in Tom Lubbock’s death memoir, written while a brain tumor gradually takes his language and his life. We all face death; it cannot be faced; this book dives into that paradox. Lubbock mentally thrashes this way and that, trying to grasp death and to come to terms with it. It’s an endless, impossible process. Round about the 80-page mark, it brought me (not him) to the exhausted realization that the present moment is the only refuge. That death doesn't exist apart from life. This book was a valuable meditation. (****)

Films Julian Watched Recently

Amour
[Life’s last act] "Amour" is about a loving couple in old age. It’s beautifully made and acted, but watching it made me miserable and frustrated, in the same way as watching a film about slavery, or the persecution of, let’s say, gay people. I think choosing the manner of one’s own death is the next taboo to be overcome, and this film is a useful contribution to the debate. After seeing director Michael Haneke’s "Cache", I knew better than to expect a tale well told, and here we have odd digressions, and the fate of a main character unexplained. (***)
Lincoln
[What a tale!] Lincoln and the abolition of slavery didn’t figure in my (British) history classes, so the first six words of this sentence were the extent of my knowledge. A (Canadian) friend found the account a little dry, and an (American) friend fell asleep over the DVD. But I was riveted, having no idea how the apparently impossible became possible through the intelligence and stubbornness of a president, or how the story played out against the background of a civil war still in progress, political venality, and the prevailing idea that full humanity extended only as far as white males. The script sensibly avoids offending modern sensibilities by not employing the racial epithets of the time in the name of authenticity. An amazing and inspiring story told with understated bravura. (****)
Cloud Atlas
[A banquet of stories] On returning home, I was asked if Cloud Atlas was a drama? A love story? Yes, I said, and comedy, action, and science fiction. What it doesn’t have--pace a raft of dodgy metaphysical messages--is a point. But so what: This is a three-hour storytelling feast of pure bravura. If you have a comfortable theater seat and an empty bladder, sit back and be enthralled. (****)
Les Miserables
[A hard slog] The musical Les Miserables was born of the artifice and distance of the stage, but the film drops us right into extreme squalor and aching poverty, and being so close to that much suffering and dirt was a bit overwhelming for a fastidious and sensitive soul like me. Things move slowly when sung, so there was lots of time to think that the same inequality-induced suffering continues today in the Paris banlieues (and for the homeless in Tokyo parks), and that the bloody fight for freedom and justice is an endless one, with Syria the latest example. This long musical is creaky and only sporadically tuneful, but the film is magnificently staged, acted and sung. And I might have actually enjoyed it if it had been trimmed by an hour. (**)
Silver Linings Playbook
[Great fun] This is a rom-com but one that journeys very far from the genre before getting reeled in. Snappily made, superbly acted and with music that Danny Boyle would be proud of, it's bracing, hilarious and always surprising. (****)

Things NC Consumed Recently

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
More than forty years on since my last reading, this classic novel is remarkable not so much for its romantic longings as for its emphasis on American violence, its depiction of a country in which California hardly matters and its meeting of the Mid West and East Coast. Plus its succinct nine chapters, its elegant prose and its almost noirish tone: Tom breaking Myrtle's nose would seem to foreshadow Lee Marvin throwing hot coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat - and the use of flashbacks helps too. I'd like to thank the publicity for the recent film version and my current cold for sending me back to the novel (and my young self).
Isabelle Eberhardt
In 1904, Isabelle Eberhardt drowned in the desert, leaving behind, among other things, various writings in French (a novel, travel notes, a journal, short stories), Islam, Lake Geneva, a husband, debauchery in kif, sex and alcohol, and a small collection of male clothing, which she wore habitually, along with her man's name. The lazy say she was an early hippie, because of her nomadic, hedonistic life, and being the first one to die at 27. Lindqvist has her in a line from Villon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Celine and Genet. Her story can only get stranger and more fascinating. "In The Shadow of Islam", "The Passionate Nomad", "The Oblivion Seekers" and Annette Kobak's biography are one way in. You'll find there an apt fatal romanticism for vast desert spaces and a depiction of Islam to ponder. Among other things.
Listen to Britain - Humphrey Jennings
Terence Davies is surely right to say Listen to Britain is in part an attempt to define the nation on the eve of its being invaded. But that invasion never came. A little prematurely, Humphrey Jennings's film records what left later, with something messier, less defined usurping through the back door. Terence Davies is surely right to say Listen to Britain is one of the greatest things these islands have produced.
Patience (After Sebald)
Grant Gee's documentary uses a palette of pale black and white, maps and talking heads to comment on W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, an account of his walk through Suffolk. Unlike the book, where a variety of genres (and photographs) coheres to make a recognisable whole, the film suffers slightly from a lack of direction. It is too specific to serve as an introduction and lacks an overriding arc that might describe a thesis. However, with its archival footage, interviews with the author and shots of the route taken, it is essential viewing for those already in thrall to all things Sebaldian - even if the ending, alas, veers close to Conan Doyle and fairies-in-the-garden territory.