Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Gulf Coast Seafood
Wall Street Journal - "The Only Man in New Orleans Being Forced to Eat"
"It wasn’t long ago that Davis would have found glazed salmon, broccoli florets and sweet potatoes as appetizing as a wad of paper. But he enjoyed this recent meal so much that it inspired him to anoint his personal chef the finest in all of New Orleans. “Hands down,” Davis wrote.
That chef is named Will Jones. He’s from Louisiana and loves crawfish. Which is why he was stunned when Davis said he didn’t eat seafood. This, to him, was heresy. Jones took it upon himself to introduce New Orleans’s basketball star to its cuisine.
He started by serving him locally sourced rainbow trout. Then they moved onto salmon. “And salmon was a big hit,” he said. At that point he felt comfortable experimenting. Davis’s palate has expanded to appreciate oysters, king crab and shrimp—but only after its digestive tract has been de-veined.
“He’s pretty adventurous when it comes to seafood,” Jones said. “But he has a way with how things look.”
Only now is Davis finally embracing the food that makes New Orleans distinct. "
Sunday, February 19, 2017
New Movies
June 23, 2017
Vulture - "Jason Momoa and Keanu Reeves Are Up to No Good in The Bad Batch Trailer"
"“All of us here, we weren’t good enough. Smart enough, young enough,” Keanu Reeves intones in the teaser for Ana Lily Amirpour’s second film The Bad Batch. But they sure as hell are cool enough. Reeves, who continues to embrace the weird in his career and rightly so, is joined by Jason Momoa, Suki Waterhouse, and Jim Carrey for a very Tarantino-style dystopian movie from the A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night director. As should be clear from the desert setting and everyone’s facial hair choices, the film also contains cannibalism. The Bad Batch premieres June 23, so you have plenty of time to become bad, dumb, and/or old enough to join in the fun."
June 23, 2017
Written & Directed by Sofia Coppola
Based on the novel The Beguiled by Thomas P. Cullinan
Starring Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Colin Farrell
June 30, 2017
Directed by Andrew J. Cohen (Neighbors)
Starring Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler
Saturday, February 18, 2017
The Traveling Statesman
New Yorker - "Journeyman: Anthony Bourdain's moveable feast"
By Patrick Radden Keefe
"Bourdain believes that the age of the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food, and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth."
...
"Halfway through the meal, we were joined by Stephen Werther, a bespectacled entrepreneur who is Bourdain’s partner in a new venture: a Manhattan market modelled on Singapore’s hawker centers, or open-air food courts. It is scheduled to open, sometime in the next few years, at Pier 57, a cavernous former shipping terminal on the West Side. If Bourdain’s show offers a vicarious taste of an intrepid culinary expedition, the market will provide an ersatz consumer experience of his show. The best street-food venders will be recruited from around the world and awarded visas—assuming that the United States is still issuing them—allowing New Yorkers to sample their octopus tostadas and their yakitori chicken hearts. Bourdain Market, as it will be known, is a preposterously ambitious venture; it will be three times the size of the original Eataly—Mario Batali’s super-emporium of Italian food in the Flatiron district. Werther was accompanied by Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, a married couple who run Roman and Williams, a design firm that creates seductive contemporary spaces, such as the Ace Hotel in New York. They had agreed to work on the market. Their background is in Hollywood set design, an ideal match for Bourdain’s sensibility.
“Imagine a post-apocalyptic Grand Central Terminal, if it had been invaded by China,” Bourdain said.
“But underwater,” Standefer joked.
Bourdain elaborated that the market should bring to mind “Blade Runner”—high-end retail as grungy, polyglot dystopia. "
...
"As “Parts Unknown” has evolved, it has become less preoccupied with food and more concerned with the sociology and geopolitics of the places Bourdain visits. Lydia Tenaglia calls the show an “anthropological enterprise.” Increasingly, Chris Collins told me, the mandate is: “Don’t tell me what you ate. Tell me who you ate with.” Bourdain, in turn, has pushed for less footage of him eating and more “B roll” of daily life in the countries he visits. It has become a mantra for him, Collins said: “More ‘B,’ less me.”
Since visiting Beirut, Bourdain has gone on to Libya, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, seeking to capture how people go about their daily lives amid violent conflict. To viewers who complain that the show has become too focussed on politics, Bourdain responds that food is politics: most cuisines reflect an amalgamation of influences and tell a story of migration and conquest, each flavor representing a sedimentary layer of history. He also points out that most shows about food are premised on a level of abundance that is unfamiliar in many parts of the world."
Hat Trick
ESPN The Magazine - "Hat-Tossing Fans of Capitals Winger Alex Ovechkin"
"With 13:07 left in the third period, Alex Ovechkin rifled a wrister from the left circle, netting the eventual game winner and the capper on his 16th career hat trick. Everyone knew what was coming next: The Caps faithful showered Ovi with hats. Exactly 210 ended up on the ice—Caps hats, Ravens hats, Nats hats, Orioles hats, even a Blues hat, tossed by a very confused or very respectful fan—plus one bandanna. Then the ice crew skated out, snow shovels in hand and gathered them all up. But then what? While most teams donate the caps or offer them to the scorer (because if anyone needs a closetful of headwear, it's a highly paid pro athlete), the Caps add theirs to one of 16 glass cases set into a wall near Section 113. Each holds headwear from a home hat trick since 2008. So in that sense, a $25 hat liberated in a moment of euphoria isn't so much thrown away as it is reunited."
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Super Bowls: "I’ve been in a lot of them"
MMQB - "Tom Brady Tells the Story of the Super Bowl 51 Comeback"
by Peter King
"Two big Grady Jarrett sacks forced the Patriots to kick a field goal. With 9:48 left, it was a two-score game. When Fox came back from its break, Brady and McDaniels were deep into play-diagrams for the next series. “There were still a lot of calls on the call sheet that we liked, based on the style that they were playing,” Brady said. “The Super Bowl is a strange game. I’ve been in a lot of them, and it may go one way and then it may go the other way, and I know at the end of all those games that I’ve played in the Super Bowls, the defenses have a hard time stopping the offense at the end, in every game.”"
...
"Brady’s in the shotgun with 31 seconds left on the play clock, with his receivers fanning out and Amendola settling in the left slot. Cornerback Jalen Collins starts on Amendola’s outside shoulder. But then Collins walks, almost aimlessly, to the inside shoulder and stares a hole through Brady. With about 21 seconds left on the play clock, Brady changes the play. He gives Amendola a sort of stop sign, and Amendola moves out a couple of steps. Collins does nothing. Now, Brady can hear a coach talk to him until the 15-second point of the play clock, but he doesn’t recall exactly what McDaniels told him on this one.
“I think he said, ‘Don’t forget about Danny,’ or ‘Danny has a great shot on this.’ Something like that,” Brady said. “I wanted to give Danny a better chance to get open. So I pushed him out because I knew at that point I had changed the route and I wanted to make sure Danny would get the leverage or put him in a better position to get the leverage based on the route that he had. I wanted to move him out because I didn’t want him to get stuck inside of Jalen … [Collins] being inside told me it was probably man coverage, a perimeter corner on the inside of the field … When I pushed Danny out, Jalen didn’t really adjust, so I was really looking outside after that to see if the corner was going to try to get involved and maybe trapping that to the flat. But once I saw the corner go with the outside receiver, or it might have been James White, I just threw it to Danny.”
But, one of the benefits of running a tempo offense is you’ve got a trusted voice in your ear. Brady said he likes McDaniels’ reminders because they’re not oppressive or unrelenting; they’re notes based on what McDaniels is seeing from the sideline. “No question part of the advantage of going fast is the coach-to-quarterback communication,” Brady said. If you’re set at the line with 31 seconds left, there are two advantages: You limit defensive substitutions, and a second set of eyes can help you."
Carly Rae Jepsen and Lil Yachty for Target
Starring Carly Rae Jepsen and Lil Yachty
Directed by Roman Coppola
Choreographed by La La Land’s Mandy Moore
Produced by Mike WiLL Made-It
The Verge - "Carly Rae Jepsen and Lil Yachty succeed in making me want to live at Target"
Saturday, February 11, 2017
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Monday, February 6, 2017
Super Bowl MVP at 39
Washington Post - "Tom Brady rejected NFL’s medical culture. At almost 40, he’s never played better."
"Much of the credit for his remarkable longevity goes, whether anyone likes it or not, to the fact that he sought out an unconventional Eastern-medicine masseuse-trainer, Alex Guerrero, at whom NFL doctors look askance. Brady has been mocked, and Guerrero has been called a quack and a fraud, because of a dicey past in which he made extravagant claims about unproven products. But much of what he and Brady have done makes nothing but sense. NFL weight-training was hurting his joints and robbing him of flexibility, and the food he was eating was inflammatory and making him stiff.
Brady now consumes no dairy, white sugar or white flour. He uses resistance bands and anti-gravity treadmills and focuses as much on pliability as strength. He meditates and does yoga. What’s more, he has steered about half the team to Guerrero’s care, to the consternation of NFL medical staff. “I’m 39, and I never hurt,” Brady says. “My arm never hurts, and my body never hurts. I know how to take care of it. . . . Hopefully I can keep passing that message on to a lot of young athletes.”"
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Thursday, February 2, 2017
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