johnnyhongkong says…

Mary Milan and I finally took in Garden State. It wasn’t as bad as I expected but also not as good as everybody told me. Mary Milan sort of had the same opinion, except it wasn’t as good as she imagined and not as bad as I told her I thought it would be.

Still, there’s something that bugs me about Zach Braff being the genuis hyphenate we’re supposed to think he is and I think it has something to do with how the word “independent” was used.

When the film was released in 2004, all I remember is how everybody talked about how “independent” it was and how cool it was for such a “quirky,” “indpendent” movie to be released.

Please…

Just because it was released by Fox Searchlight and Miramax doesn’t make it indepdendent. Independent movies don’t have Natalie Portman in them. They don’t have the money to hire Amanda Scheer-Demme to be your music supervisor and trend consultant.

The phrase “independent film” had truly lost its meaning on this film and became a marketing term.

Its success – and Braff’s Claudius-like crowning as the voice of my generation – was preordained because they had, in their market research labs, figured out how to sell a movie and soundtrack to the disaffected, detatched, lost, unfeeling twentysomethings of today.

Finally, the thing that sticks in my craw about Garden State is that even its wake-up call to feeling feels canned; the moments when Braff’s character finally “feels” come off cloying at best and empty at worst.

Anyway, Mary Milan links Garden State and Punch Drunk Love as similar kinds of movies. Who is this woman?

I’ve been seeing the new Sheraton “We Belong” commercial a lot on TV recently.  Everytime it begins, I think of the Levi’s commercial that uses Megan Wyler’s indie Omaha/electronic/Postal Service/Jenny Lewis style cover of Johnny Cash’s “Walk the Line.”

Anyway, did you know that the Sheraton commercial was:  

Developed to introduce the brand’s new positioning around warm, comforting, connections, the campaign invites guests to belong.  Created by Deutsch and directed by the award-winning international duo Jan Vogel and Rene Villar-Rios who are credited with renowned campaigns for brand powerhouses including Nike and Coca-Cola, Sheraton’s campaign features people from around the world warmly greeting each other and is set to a new rendition of the Pat Benatar song We Belong. It speaks to a core human truth – the need to belong.

How nice but what I’m interested in is whether or not that’s Dennis Haysbert in the commercial?  Check it out for yourself.  It happens around 30 seconds in.  If it’s not (and I happen to think its not), then there’s a Dennis Haysbert doppelganger out there, which means that there is a possibility for President Palmer’s evil twin brother to pop up on the coming season of 24.

This is part of the conversation I had with my Adjuster today where I learned that the nice coffee lady who was brewing a batch of her favorite coffee bean in the world for me was not in fact so nice and that I was angry with her:

Adjuster: “I imagine that you had some sort of feeling toward this woman at the coffee shop.”

Me: “Well, if I’m being honest…anger is such a bad way to describe it…”

A: “Why? Because it’s too broad…?”

M: “Yeah. I need synonyms for anger…”

A: “…I hope you’re being honest…why would you say that?”

M: “I wasn’t angry with her.”

A: “But you said you were.”

M: “Well, like on a 10-point Likert scale, I was like at a 1.”

A: “Why won’t you just be okay with being angry at her?”

M: “It just seems so…I dunno, petty to be angry at your barista, it’s ungraceful.”

A: “But you felt like she trapped you…”

M: “She just wanted to tell me about her favorite coffee bean. She even gave me a large when I ordered a medium! How can I be angry with her?”
A: “That’s besides the point. We’re not talking about the morality of being angry with your barista, just in that moment, for whatever reason, she made you angry.”

Take home lesson: if I hear about coffee beans, I might turn into the Incredible Hulk.

Timothy Wu drops some science on Chinese dumplings in Slate. Word.

Like a great pasta dish, great dumplings are all about balance.  Wu calls this, “the magic-ratio”:

The magic ratio – a factor in foods from sushi to sandwiches – is the perfect ratio of protein to carbohydrate. The right ratio seems to activate some kind of pleasure center in the brain, bringing about calm and quiet elation. Some dumpling devotees describe dumplings, done right, as mildly orgasmic.

Mary Milan and I waited 90 minutes on Saturday to eat xiao long bao at Din Tai Fung in Arcadia, which by most accounts gets this dumpling business right.

They were good, about as good as many of the great ones I’ve had in my life, but the items we had that were transcendent were thier dan dan mien (homemade noodles in a sesame/peanut sauce) and pork and vegetable buns (packages of onioney, porky, bready goodness).

Wu writes that “any dumpling joint worth its salt needs a chain-gang of workers who roll the skins and fold the dumplings on site, non-stop, since repeated kneading yields better skins.”  Din Tai Fung Arcadia proudly displays their chain-gang just as you walk in, behind a glass window, workly quickly in a climate controlled kitchen.

They are all Mexican.

So one month into cell phone ownership and things are going smoothly.  We haven’t gotten out first bill yet but we stayed within our minutes by miles.

One thing I still don’t quite get is this whole ring tone business.  Time was, back in the day, vibrate was the only classy way to go. Not only inconspicuous and totally non-intrusive in the shared aural landscape, it was also a fun little party in your pants.

Boy have times changed.

Now, not only is letting your cell phone ring encouraged, the ring itself (like iPod skins and bedazzling the shell of your phone) has become an emblem of your personality and character.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but a simple “ring-ring” will do me just fine.  But alas, there is no such thing.  There are however, bleeps, boops, “cosmic tonal oscillations,” that asshole Motorola VO guy saying, “Helllllooooo, Moto!!,” or for an extra $2.99, the chorus of Madonna’s “Hung Up” from Confessions from a Dance Floor, or worse yet, any other damn song for that matter.

And worse just came to worst.  Emanating from the adjoining office, which belongs to a nice, middle aged woman who carries a rolling suitcase to work, was the cell phone ring tone version of the chorus to “Memory” from the musical Cats.

Now, I’ve seen more than my fair share of musicals and while I don’t generally like them, I do have soft spots for a number of songs in the show-tune catalogue.

But I don’t want that information to be announced to the world without some oversight.  I don’t wanting to be in the middle of chilling hard with my hip friends and suddenly have the chorus to “Seasons of Love” from Rent come blaring out of my cell phone because Mary Milan decided it would be funny to make me lose my manhood by calling.

“Dude, was that your fiancee calling to remind you where you left your balls?”

Fuck.  That shit would be embarrassing.

Like your Netflix queue reflects your cinematic inclinations and your shopping list reflects your gastronomical tastes, a song on your ringtone lets mixed company know of your musical tastes (and in this case, a preference of live theatre).

What does “Memory” say about this woman (like we need to get into it)?  It bears mentioning that there is nothing ironic about her choosing this song as her ringtone.

She loves musicals and “Memory” might be her favorite song…of all songs ever written.  Making “Memory” her ringtone is not a lukewarm choice.  By choosing it, she forsakes all other songs in the Andrew Lloyd Weber oeuvre and on a global scale, all other songs which have been ringtoned.  Now what that says about her I don’t want to get into.

So it’s her favorite song…of all time.  Whatever.  That’s Kool and the Gang for her.  Who am I to judge her?

But I just think some things are best left to the privacy of your own home and selfishly, I don’t need the image of her with her wrinkly, smoker’s skin and brittle yellow-orange hair, in a cat suit, prowling around her house, pawing at a framed picture of Michael Crawford and singing:

Touch me/It’s so easy to leave me/All alone with the memory/Of my days in the sun/If you touch me/You’ll understand what happiness is/Look, a new day has begun.

I just don’t need that shit.

So it’s Mardi Gras in late September tonight in New Orleans as the Saints were triumphant in their return home to the city and to the Louisiana Superdome thirteen months after 1.3 million were evacuated from the Crescent City and about 20,000 of the city’s most desperate used the Superdome as a “shelter of last resort” from Hurricane Katrina and the water flooding over the broken levees around Lake Ponchartrain.

As the news has it covered from every possible angle, I just have a additional observations:

Cool pregame entertainment with Green Day and U2 playing their hits, singing some N’awlins standards, Bono rewriting lyrics to “Beautiful Day,” and having New Orleans brass play behind them. My one question: couldn’t they have found one band actually from the state of Louisiana to play in the pregame festivities? Sure New Orleans is famous for its jazz and maybe the jazz combo of Harry Connick Jr. and Branford and Wynton Marsalis (9th Ward, baybee!) wouldn’t be rollicking enough to amp up the crowd but what about Tim McGraw? Better than Ezra? Britney Spears? Come on now, is ESPN telling me that they couldn’t get Hank Williams Jr., of Shreveport, LA, to do the “My Rowdy Friends on Monday Night” song live at the Superdome?

Is the elder Bush trying to make for the missteps of his son by showing up at the Superdome and doing the coin toss? I’m not saying it’s in bad taste but maybe the city of New Orleans has just about had it with white guys named Bush. Though to be fair, former president George Herbert Walker Bush has been raising a lot of money with Bill Clinton for New Orleans. Maybe I’m cynical here but no matter how much money the elder Bush raises or how many ceremonial coin tosses he attends, there’s nothing that’s going to make up for those five days when GWB Jr. and the rest of the administration sat on their hands last year before getting their asses handed to them by the media.

Spike Lee wouldn’t take Kornheiser’s bait to lambaste the Administration for their delayed response. Though he has been outspoken about the Bush response and made the 4.5 hour documentary When the Levees Broke, he refused to in his words, pull “a Kanye West.” He did throw a few well placed jabs saying that he couldn’t believe it took Bush and Co. so long to come help American citizens.

Though the Saints won, it bears saying that Reggie Bush, the Bush that the city has rallied around, did very little to contribute to the win. He has, in fact, not done a whole lot to contribute to any of the three New Orleans wins. Yes, this is filed from the department of “could it, in the grand scheme of things, be ‘ironic’?”

The spirit of a city – the character of a place – is defined by the few things that galvanize large segments of the community that are experienced together. Hardships and heartbreaks, triumphs and happiness, all of which were lived through over the last 13 months and finally seen tonight – collectively felt and released – in the microcosm of a game. This is the uplifting spirit sport. This is why when the city wakes up tomorrow and has to go back to the harsh realities of putting their lives back together and rebuilding, they had something to cheer for on Monday night and being undefeated, at 3-0, the city will have something to cheer for again on Sunday. New Orleans may be the city that care forgot, but not their football team or the NFL.

And lastly, I wanted to have something about the cutaway to the wait staff at Emeril’s New Orleans watching the game, something about how food is so much a part of the character and spirit of a city and how cool I thought that was since after Mardi Gras what is New Orleans known for but its magnificent food, but I sort of got swept away in the ideas above. For what it’s worth, if I didn’t have to go into work today, I planned on staying home to spend the day making a slow, simmering, smokey gumbo which would have been ready for kick off.

Mary Milan and I saw Jackass: Number Two today. No review needed; you’ll either go or you’ll not. If you’re a fan of Jackass, rest assured, it’s high-larry-ous (I’m not even being a homer because we are brothers in moniker.  I’m still pissed that I was named Johnny Hong Kong when Knoxville just some dude named P.J. Clapp).

The cherry on top of the cinematic sundae of the unrestrained male id financed by the coffers of MTV and Paramount Pictures is a bit of post-modern comedy where a “terrorist” has “terror” perpetrated on himself. After years of getting to know the Jackass guys as a bunch of guys willing to test the limits of physical comedy, in Number Two, they explore uncharted waters, testing the limits of fear as a comedic tool. The two bits that capitalize on fear are brutally effective – they are discomfiting to watch and also gut bustingly funny. I mean, isn’t that what comedy is all about?

That said, I can’t wait for Borat.