Lèse Majesté

Repo Chick trailer released

One of my favorite movies of all time is 1984's Repo Man. It's one of the great late-night adventures, following a grizzled Harry Dean Stanton and his apprentice, Emilio Estevez, around a lunatic Los Angeles as they repossess cars and try to hit big bounty for a '64 Chevy Malibu which may or may not contain the remains of extraterrestials. It had a great soundtrack inspired by punk rock, and even featured appearances by the Circle Jerks. (The director Alan Cox's next film was Sid and Nancy, based on the life and death of Sid Vicious and his girlfriend.) Cameo roles feature Jimmy Buffett and Michael Nesmith, among others.

There have been rumors of a sequel for a while, and now it looks like they're real! A trailer for Repo Chick has hit the street, written and directed by the same guy. Here it be:

Sadly, the trailer looks far less inspired than the original flick. The apprentice role seems to be a Paris Hilton knock-off, learning the repo trade in the midst of the current economic melt-down. And instead of aliens, we have some odd terrorist group trying to force the U.S. government to close golf courses, ban golf, and go vegan. A member of Chumbawamba is supposedly putting in a cameo appearance.

Could be a total dog, or maybe it'll be another piece of brilliant weirdness. Who knows? But I can't wait to find out.

The April Fools

Too good to be true: Sarah Palin is coming to Minnesota in April to campaign for Michelle Bachmann! It'll be like an intellectual black hole. Will anyone be able to escape the stupidity horizon?

A well-deserved award for Michelle Bachmann

With the end of the year inevitably come awards in all kinds of fields.  Ginandtacos.com has chosen the Anoka lunatic for a well deserved award, albeit one whose name I'm not going to quote here. You'll have to read the official announcement on their site. It's delicious, and takes some lovely swipes at Joe Lieberman along the way.

A few passages from the announcement:

Michelle Bachmann is the new It Girl of Teabagging – the combination sex symbol / Great Conservative Leader for people who think Sarah Palin is a bit soft and a little too book-smart.

Like all great specimens of pure Bircherite insanity, Bachmann forces us to ask repeatedly, "Is this idiot for real?"

Bachmann's award-winning year is more about reliability; no matter what issue becomes salient or what events transpire we can rely on her to represent the lunatic fringe. You can set your watch by her consistent, surreal insanity.

Prairie Home Bigotry

Well, if there were any question whether Garrison Keillor's recent stroke left him with any permanent mental deficit, he has put the question to rest with the rant in his latest weekly column. After a lengthy, misinformed attack on Unitarians, he landed himself smack in realm of Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and the rest of the "War on Christmas" camp:

If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't.

Christmas is a Christian holiday -- if you're not in the club, then buzz off.

Wow. Talk about taking the Twin Cities back to its roots...its roots as one of the most anti-Semitic communities in the nation. Reviving the tradition of restricted clubs, no less...modeling the inclusive teachings of his beloved savior, right?

If you think he was writing this as satire, read the whole piece. He really believes this crap. Not a shred of irony to be found about Christians stealing so many of the traditions of Christmas from pagans. No recognition that it was in fact the Unitarians and Universalists of Boston who led the campaign to make Christmas a major holiday - after the Christian Puritans literally outlawed its celebration. Or that Charles Dickens, who practically defines so many of the modern traditions of its celebration, was a Unitarian in spirit if not fact when he wrote A Christmas Carol.

No, what we have here is a prime example of small town mainstream Protestant bigotry. In prime form. Anoka would be proud.

WTF?

Toby "boot up your ass" Keith playing at the Nobel Peace Prize concert? Are you freaking kidding me?

Chinese food == Linux ?

The TED conference is always a fascinating mish-mash of stuff. I've stumbled across a rather interesting presentation by NYT reporter Jennifer 8. Lee on the TED site (apparently recorded at Mondavi's TASTE3 conference, which I must learn more about). She discusses the spread of Chinese food across the U.S. and across the world, noting how vastly it has mutated but also how successful recipes or concepts spread almost virally although she doesn't use that word. Instead, she proposes that Chinese food is analogous to Linux and open software versus McDonald's Microsoft:

Norm Coleman has Bell's palsy

I'm not usually one to make light of someone's medical condition, but in Norm's case I'm willing to make an exception. You realize what this means, don't you? He can only lie out of one side of his mouth for the time being!

Foodie adventures continued

Film, theater, and art were not my only pursuits on this trip to New York. I also went looking for a number of street food vendors I've been following online for quite a while. I found a couple of them...

The Schnitzel Truck has been making news lately as one of the more assertive new players in the growing vendor wars in the city. I was able to catch them on a day they were serving veal schnitzel, and oh my, this takes street food to a whole new level. Huge slab of freshly cooked schnitzel, Austrian potato salad, and braised sauerkraut. I took it a couple blocks to Madison Square Park where I sat out on a lovely day and ate my lunch in the park. Had to fight off some very aggressive squirrels who were determined to share it. This gentleman was sharing my bench. Note the furball who is about to jump on his shoulder to try to get to his food:

 

Another truck I've been trying to find and finally tracked down was Street Sweets. I found them a couple blocks from MoMA after I went to the museum's members' preview of the new Monet Water Lilies exhibit. They had just finished baking a most delicious treat. It was a sandwich cookie made with two flattened coconut macaroons, filled with Nutella. Oh. My. Gawd.

The one vendor I was still unable to meet up with was the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck. What a concept. Can you imagine the reaction it would get just about anywhere else in the country? ("Think of the children!") You gotta love a guy who offers free ice cream to anyone who will come perform a particular opera song at the cart. What was the specified tune? Glitter and Be Gay from Bernstein's Candide, of course. This entry was caught on video:

The gal can sing! Can you imagine walking down the sidewalk and stumbling upon that performance? Where else in the world would that happen? I love the reactions from the passersby.

BTW, just to wander off topic a bit, this reminded me of my favorite performance of that song by the amazing Kristin Chenoweth:

Complete with Patti LuPone chewing the scenery at the beginning!

Foodie adventures in NYC

A few days ago I hopped the R train out to Bay Ridge in Brooklyn to visit Robicelli's Gourmet Market. I've been reading about the place for months, as it is becoming a legend in the New York cupcake world. Their creations are unbelievable in their creativity. I was hoping to try an Iona, an olive oil and pear cake with blue cheese icing and candied walnuts. OMFG. Unfortunately, they were out of stock.

But I had a great time nonetheless. First I had a gourmet grilled cheese sandwich. Three kinds of cheese grilled in ciabatta, with a delicious addition of Berkshire bacon inside. Matt Robicelli, who owns the place with his wife Allison, sliced the bacon off a full slab and grilled it before constructing the sandwich. As I've said before, bacon is the new black, and Matt clearly adheres to that philosophy in his cooking and baking. In fact, he memorialized it on his forearm:

 

(That photo is from the excellent blog Porkchop Express which has a detailed profile of the Robicellis and their market - go read it.)

We chatted throughout my meal and I was surprised to learn he was a St. Paul boy (with family roots in Iowa farming). His dad had been a tenor with the Minnesota Opera before moving to New York to seek out fame and fortune. Matt had been an EMT until he was injured on 9/11 while evacuating people from Tower 7, and after rehab from that he studied pastry at the French Culinary Institute. After working in a bunch of New York kitchens he and his wife decided to open the store.

Getting back to bacon...since I struck out on the Iona, I had one their best-known creations for dessert. That is the Elvis cupcake, conceived from the King's well-known love of grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches. The Elvis is made of banana cake, peanut buttercream frosting, and crowning touch: carmelized pieces of bacon on top. Yes, it sounds strange. But oh so good. I would be in trouble if I lived anywhere near this place.

Matt spins off wild ideas for cupcakes as you talk with him. He has one in mind now for an upcoming event that I can't wait to see them accomplish. When we spoke it was just a concept, though: chicken and waffles. He isn't sure how to realize it yet. An eggy cake, since waffles are typically eggy, will probably be the start. But the rest remains to be realized.

Yet another Passing Strange post

I managed to see the Spike Lee film version on my recently ended trip to New York. See it on the big screen in a theater, that is - it's playing at the IFC Center in a run that appears to have been extended now into December.

Wow. If you have any opportunity to see it, run, don't walk. The experience is completely different from watching it on TV. The pay-per-view version currently available from Sundance is so heavily compressed, both visually and audibly, that it's like seeing an entirely different work on the big screen. Lee shot almost the entire thing in high-def video and it is crystal clear in the theater. The sound is pristine, too. I could hear and understand lyrics I was never able to make out previously in either the live stage performance on on the PPV version. Or the CD for that matter.

Even when PBS airs it, presumably in high-def, later this season I don't expect it to be as good as the cinema experience. For two reasons: first, your screen is bound to be smaller, and second, they're bound to censor a lot of the lyrics in order to be able to air it.

My previous reservations about the limiting effects of a director's perspective versus the full stage view were lessened greatly by the increased resolution and image size on the big screen as well. This is a marvelous piece of work. I really hope it gets a broader theatrical release than just this one theater so others can can enjoy the film (and the musical) in its full splendor.