- Brogrammer Bento: While influenced by traditional nori-wrapped rice, this bento provides Bro-friendly panko-crusted goodness. Because they didn't serve sushi back in the frat house in Bloomington, the purely Japanese rice triangle with sour plum or salmon is augmented with good old-fashioned fried chicken croquettes, a few tired Iceberg lettuce leaves covered with sesame-infused salad dressing, and green-tea ice cream. The rice is sourced locally from the rice paddies recently planted in Islais creek by anarcho-syndicalist Japanese-American 99-percenters, the chicken from coops installed in disused public housing units in the Crocker-Amazon, and the lettuce from the site of the old Schlage key factory. The green-tea ice cream is sourced from a restaurant in the mall in Citrus Heights.
- Salome Salumi: For Gay Pride, this Oscar Wilde inspired choice starts off with an assortment of "Herod" brand beef and turkey salumi. This is followed by chicken a la Bosie: boneless white meat, lightly poached. The "Pitcher of Dorian Gray" is a can of Red Bull. The Salome theme is carried out finally with a dessert consisting of "seven veils" of cotton candy hiding a cupcake representing the head of John the Baptist, surrounded by a blood-red raspberry coulis on a miniature platter. This meal includes a Flip Wilson video retrospective entitled: "The Importance of Being Ernestine".
- Mid-Century, Cold War, Prop 65 nightmare: "Precious Inorganic" Farm organophosphate-dipped Gem Lettuce in a not-Tuscan-but-Tuscan-inspired California Mentholated-Kool vinaigrette (made from cigarette-infused vinegar and rancid California olive oil: the Surgeon General warns this will give you the buzz of your life). The main course is a von Neuman Ranch cornfed nitrate-cured machine-smoked ham and processed non-dairy-creamer-based cheese sandwich on No Wonder it's completely genetically modified bread. For dessert, "Neapolitan Ice Cream" reconstituted from freeze-dried astronaut ice cream bought 20 years ago on a visit to the Johnson space center when the US could still launch their own astronauts without any help from those Commie bastards. To wash it all down, Coca-Cola to protect your "precious bodily fluids" from fluoridation. Dental implants and cancer treatments not covered by your high deductible insurance plan.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Curated Food Packages
First, off Hat Tip to the incomparable changoperesozo for giving me the idea. Here are a few "curated food packages" as consumed by the digerati in modern-day San Francisco. Warning: this post requires a degree of local knowledge about San Francisco neighborhoods similar to that implicitly assumed by New Yorkers when writing about New York, to wit: mention of neighborhoods east of US 101 and south of I-280.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Sunday afternoon in the city
So I spent the afternoon ranging up and down the Embarcadero in search of fine chocolate, sunny walking, and a first peek at the newly opened Exploratorium at piers 15 and 17* in San Francisco, at the Embarcadero and Green St.
I just have to say, to those who were worried that the new building would somehow be detrimentally slicker than the old, do not fear! Yes, the steel struts in the ceiling are painted, and it lacks the dingy atmosphere of the old building in the Palace of Fine Arts. There are no hordes of wedding parties having their pictures taken, no swans, no faux Roman ruins, and admittedly, no free parking.
And, on opening weekend, the way-finding was atrocious; I was there with my friend Simplicitus, who has a museum membership, and after stumbling in the first doors you come to (as you're walking from the Ferry Building side), being directed through the gift shop, and past the ordinary ticket line, all the way to a desk in the back, he was finally able to confirm his membership and we got in.
Once inside, things were much the same as at the old location; lots of interactive exhibits, more space, and a general air of controlled pandemonium. Nowhere near as slick as the Academy of Sciences, and lots of old favorites I remember from my first trip 30 years ago. The shop is still there, but cleaner. The views out of windows to the surrounding piers and out to the bay do not detract but add a little needed light.
Upstairs and across a bridge to Pier 17, there's a great quieter room devoted to the Bay Observation Gallery, with some incredible experiments in scientific visualization, including an intriguing atlas presenting examples of archival material on various aspects of the Bay watershed; very nice!
A quiet oasis away from the more frenetic main floor. All in all, I think a great addition to a waterfront that is spiffing up in preparation for the America's Cup as well. The Giants won, the atmosphere was mellow, all was good in the city by the Bay today.
*For those of you unfamiliar with the admittedly peculiar pier numbering system, remember that odd piers are north of the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, and even piers are south.
I just have to say, to those who were worried that the new building would somehow be detrimentally slicker than the old, do not fear! Yes, the steel struts in the ceiling are painted, and it lacks the dingy atmosphere of the old building in the Palace of Fine Arts. There are no hordes of wedding parties having their pictures taken, no swans, no faux Roman ruins, and admittedly, no free parking.
And, on opening weekend, the way-finding was atrocious; I was there with my friend Simplicitus, who has a museum membership, and after stumbling in the first doors you come to (as you're walking from the Ferry Building side), being directed through the gift shop, and past the ordinary ticket line, all the way to a desk in the back, he was finally able to confirm his membership and we got in.
Once inside, things were much the same as at the old location; lots of interactive exhibits, more space, and a general air of controlled pandemonium. Nowhere near as slick as the Academy of Sciences, and lots of old favorites I remember from my first trip 30 years ago. The shop is still there, but cleaner. The views out of windows to the surrounding piers and out to the bay do not detract but add a little needed light.
Upstairs and across a bridge to Pier 17, there's a great quieter room devoted to the Bay Observation Gallery, with some incredible experiments in scientific visualization, including an intriguing atlas presenting examples of archival material on various aspects of the Bay watershed; very nice!
A quiet oasis away from the more frenetic main floor. All in all, I think a great addition to a waterfront that is spiffing up in preparation for the America's Cup as well. The Giants won, the atmosphere was mellow, all was good in the city by the Bay today.
*For those of you unfamiliar with the admittedly peculiar pier numbering system, remember that odd piers are north of the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street, and even piers are south.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
What's your brand?
There was a time, not so long ago, when the intended response to the question, "What's your brand?" was "Marlboro" or "Parliament Lights" or "Virginia Slims". I had never heard it asked outside of the context of cigarette smoking. The idea of a personal brand, other than a literal branding of the skin in certain sub-cultures, pretty much didn't exist.
Don't get me wrong; marketing, in particular the psychological juggernaut that convinces people to desire what they do not need and create a culture in which not to have what everyone else has is a lonely, desperate place (truly lonely and desperate with actual physical effects of depression, not just those alleviated by Abilify in conjunction with your regular antidepressant), is America's greatest contribution to world culture. Let's get Godwin out of the way and point out that Hitler and Goebbels went to school on the Liberty Bond drives of WWI, marketed erroneously as "The War to End War". Just ask Jeremy Pivin, now chewing the scenery over at PBS with the story of how Harry Selfridge single-handedly introduced the idea of American marketing and the shopping culture to England (surely an exaggeration). God only knows what the Dowager Countess Grantham would have made of it, but I'm certain she never would have gone to Selfridges; Lady Edith, poor dear, on a lark, perhaps.
Personal identity, always an American obsession, primarily because we have no ironclad traditions to fall back on, has always been part of our culture. We make it up as we go along and hope for the best. As a multi-generational child of the American West (while your ancestors were at Ellis Island getting the consonants removed from their names mine were cutting down trees and operating steamboats in Washington Territory), I was brought up not to ask too many questions about people's pasts. I think this was in part because my parents were young during WW II, when every question about how the family was doing was freighted with the possibility of the worst possible news about Uncle George, but also because one of the reasons people came West was to make a fresh start.
We are determined not to be defined by who our parents are and what they did.
We move to express our freedom and to get away from the communities that stifled or nurtured us.
We can all grow up to be president.
We are all individuals!
But, the point made by hushing of the lone voice in the crowd in "Life of Brian" who cried out "I'm not!" when Brian tells the crowd they are all individuals to great cheers, the truth of the matter is that while we are all individuals, we take comfort in being members of a group. So we take short cuts to individual expression by identifying with groups. This starts out small (son, neighbor, Cub Scout) and ends up big (Democrat, Libertarian, Notre Dame fan). These identifications all become part of our personal brand.
Some of these identifications we chose freely, some are thrust upon us, but all of them are manipulated by that other great invention, the limited-liability corporation with all the free speech rights of the individual. In the ever-more apparent second Gilded Age of the American experiment, are we truly free, or is our personal brand as permanent as the kind inflicted on our animals as a short-cut to identification: free to roam the range until our brand condemns us to the slaughterhouse.
My brand is skeptic, American, Giants fan, California native, scientist, engineer, brother, son, and uncle, Caltech graduate, former Austinite (it was better back in my day, man), gay man, cycling fan, and lover of police procedurals: the worst (NCIS: LA; you have to work hard to make the exposition that painful and wooden) and the best (Southland; man, what I'd give to be the guy who gives John Cooper a smile). I live in San Francisco, where today the sun shines and the sky is blue after a horrible week for the country. It's the city of Saint Francis, I always tell people who complain about the homeless, or the dogs, or the relentless do-goodery.
My hope is that we can set aside our brands and learn to work together, and recognize that an individual belief, identification, or surety about the superiority of our way over the other guys' leads to smugness, violence, pain, and a lifetime of regret, anger, and vengeance.
Don't get me wrong; marketing, in particular the psychological juggernaut that convinces people to desire what they do not need and create a culture in which not to have what everyone else has is a lonely, desperate place (truly lonely and desperate with actual physical effects of depression, not just those alleviated by Abilify in conjunction with your regular antidepressant), is America's greatest contribution to world culture. Let's get Godwin out of the way and point out that Hitler and Goebbels went to school on the Liberty Bond drives of WWI, marketed erroneously as "The War to End War". Just ask Jeremy Pivin, now chewing the scenery over at PBS with the story of how Harry Selfridge single-handedly introduced the idea of American marketing and the shopping culture to England (surely an exaggeration). God only knows what the Dowager Countess Grantham would have made of it, but I'm certain she never would have gone to Selfridges; Lady Edith, poor dear, on a lark, perhaps.
Personal identity, always an American obsession, primarily because we have no ironclad traditions to fall back on, has always been part of our culture. We make it up as we go along and hope for the best. As a multi-generational child of the American West (while your ancestors were at Ellis Island getting the consonants removed from their names mine were cutting down trees and operating steamboats in Washington Territory), I was brought up not to ask too many questions about people's pasts. I think this was in part because my parents were young during WW II, when every question about how the family was doing was freighted with the possibility of the worst possible news about Uncle George, but also because one of the reasons people came West was to make a fresh start.
We are determined not to be defined by who our parents are and what they did.
We move to express our freedom and to get away from the communities that stifled or nurtured us.
We can all grow up to be president.
We are all individuals!
But, the point made by hushing of the lone voice in the crowd in "Life of Brian" who cried out "I'm not!" when Brian tells the crowd they are all individuals to great cheers, the truth of the matter is that while we are all individuals, we take comfort in being members of a group. So we take short cuts to individual expression by identifying with groups. This starts out small (son, neighbor, Cub Scout) and ends up big (Democrat, Libertarian, Notre Dame fan). These identifications all become part of our personal brand.
Some of these identifications we chose freely, some are thrust upon us, but all of them are manipulated by that other great invention, the limited-liability corporation with all the free speech rights of the individual. In the ever-more apparent second Gilded Age of the American experiment, are we truly free, or is our personal brand as permanent as the kind inflicted on our animals as a short-cut to identification: free to roam the range until our brand condemns us to the slaughterhouse.
My brand is skeptic, American, Giants fan, California native, scientist, engineer, brother, son, and uncle, Caltech graduate, former Austinite (it was better back in my day, man), gay man, cycling fan, and lover of police procedurals: the worst (NCIS: LA; you have to work hard to make the exposition that painful and wooden) and the best (Southland; man, what I'd give to be the guy who gives John Cooper a smile). I live in San Francisco, where today the sun shines and the sky is blue after a horrible week for the country. It's the city of Saint Francis, I always tell people who complain about the homeless, or the dogs, or the relentless do-goodery.
My hope is that we can set aside our brands and learn to work together, and recognize that an individual belief, identification, or surety about the superiority of our way over the other guys' leads to smugness, violence, pain, and a lifetime of regret, anger, and vengeance.
Friday, March 29, 2013
Nightwalks 1
Long walks in the night, a typical San Francisco evening, and one full of hope and ambition. Well, maybe not ambition (let's not get ahead of ourselves) but I'll take hope. Listening to Mahler's 5th on the iPhone helped.
Maundy Thursday, as I realize I did nothing for the poor today. I'm not a believer, but pope Francis washed the feet of criminals today and I did nothing. Maundy Thursday always makes me think of the docent at Westminster Abbey: the 60ish woman with the comically clichéd bad teeth, and the pageboy haircut that must have been quite daring when she first went to Vidal Sassoon in the 60s, explained to me in the treasure room that the silver platters were used by the Queen to distribute alms to the poor on Maundy Thursday. Quite the highlight of Holy Week, if you ask me.
On my walk, I wended my way out of Noe Valley over the hill to the Castro, through the Wiggle to Divisadero, and along Divisadero north through Alamo Square and north of Geary to California. I've been noting / complaining for months about the Brooklynization and the Marina-ting of the Mission, but failed to consider the converse: the Missionary zeal to colonize other neighborhoods.
San Francisco is much like the suburbs where the same big box stores repeat with tedious monotony mile after mile: Target, PetSmart, Vons/Safeway/Ralphs/Kroger (shudder), Home Depot/Lowes, Fondue Pot / PF Changs / Macaroni Grill , and on and on ad nauseum. In San Francisco, we have home-grown chains, carefully maintained under the 12-store limit that the Board of Supes has determined, but we have chains nonetheless. These chains start as superlative individuals and then typically spread across the city, sometimes with good effect (Martha and Bros) and sometimes not (Pasta Pomodoro).
I had to stop for ice cream at the newly opened Bi-Rite grocery at Divis and Hayes, practically next door to Nopa. Quite possibly the only ice cream outlet with service slower than the original, kitty-corner from Dolores Park, but there were only three people ahead of me so I enjoyed my canonical Salted Caramel and Orange-Cardamom sugar cone.
Another Mission invasion I noted was the Delfina Pizzeria on California at Fillmore. Fillmore Street has spruced up even more (not that it ever needed sprucing, much) but the only business I recognized from my first encounter with the street in 1997 was the Extreme Pizza, and even that was nicer than the almost hole-in-the-wall I remembered.
After a trip back towards Market on the 22-Fillmore (where the only unusual thing that happened was a young guy who was contact-juggling two stone balls, God only knows why) I stopped in at HiTops (slogan: Cold Pitchers, Hot Catchers; really?) to once again try to figure out what that place is about. Some pathetically attended Western regional game from the Vernal Vacuity tournament (Wichita St vs LaSalle for the honor of losing to Ohio State, most likely; LaSalle sounds to me like the rejected name for the Edsel and Wichita State is presumably in Kansas, I guess) being played to an audience of approximately 400, and the Giants losing to the As in the last gasp of spring training at Telco park.
After that a visit to the incomparable Patrick at Moby Dick and then home.
Maundy Thursday, as I realize I did nothing for the poor today. I'm not a believer, but pope Francis washed the feet of criminals today and I did nothing. Maundy Thursday always makes me think of the docent at Westminster Abbey: the 60ish woman with the comically clichéd bad teeth, and the pageboy haircut that must have been quite daring when she first went to Vidal Sassoon in the 60s, explained to me in the treasure room that the silver platters were used by the Queen to distribute alms to the poor on Maundy Thursday. Quite the highlight of Holy Week, if you ask me.
On my walk, I wended my way out of Noe Valley over the hill to the Castro, through the Wiggle to Divisadero, and along Divisadero north through Alamo Square and north of Geary to California. I've been noting / complaining for months about the Brooklynization and the Marina-ting of the Mission, but failed to consider the converse: the Missionary zeal to colonize other neighborhoods.
San Francisco is much like the suburbs where the same big box stores repeat with tedious monotony mile after mile: Target, PetSmart, Vons/Safeway/Ralphs/Kroger (shudder), Home Depot/Lowes, Fondue Pot / PF Changs / Macaroni Grill , and on and on ad nauseum. In San Francisco, we have home-grown chains, carefully maintained under the 12-store limit that the Board of Supes has determined, but we have chains nonetheless. These chains start as superlative individuals and then typically spread across the city, sometimes with good effect (Martha and Bros) and sometimes not (Pasta Pomodoro).
I had to stop for ice cream at the newly opened Bi-Rite grocery at Divis and Hayes, practically next door to Nopa. Quite possibly the only ice cream outlet with service slower than the original, kitty-corner from Dolores Park, but there were only three people ahead of me so I enjoyed my canonical Salted Caramel and Orange-Cardamom sugar cone.
Another Mission invasion I noted was the Delfina Pizzeria on California at Fillmore. Fillmore Street has spruced up even more (not that it ever needed sprucing, much) but the only business I recognized from my first encounter with the street in 1997 was the Extreme Pizza, and even that was nicer than the almost hole-in-the-wall I remembered.
After a trip back towards Market on the 22-Fillmore (where the only unusual thing that happened was a young guy who was contact-juggling two stone balls, God only knows why) I stopped in at HiTops (slogan: Cold Pitchers, Hot Catchers; really?) to once again try to figure out what that place is about. Some pathetically attended Western regional game from the Vernal Vacuity tournament (Wichita St vs LaSalle for the honor of losing to Ohio State, most likely; LaSalle sounds to me like the rejected name for the Edsel and Wichita State is presumably in Kansas, I guess) being played to an audience of approximately 400, and the Giants losing to the As in the last gasp of spring training at Telco park.
After that a visit to the incomparable Patrick at Moby Dick and then home.
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