Vanity Shot

My photographers, Rich and Max, like to give me shit a lot, especially when we're out on somewhat bizarre assignments. Rich was snapping pictures of me yesterday as I was walking around a garbage dump that a real estate developer is going to turn into a bird sanctuary, near a condo development he wants to build. I thought he was just fooling around with lighting, because he kept saying that it was the wrong time of day and everything was backlit. But then later that afternoon, he comes to me with this, which he'd been fooling around with, apparently bored. And yeah, it's ridiculous, but I also think it's pretty bad-ass, so I'm posting it. The whole "shot into the sky Jesus halo" thing is pretty cool.

Benjamin Hesse: Ice Mountain EP

Hey Everyone! Here's an album you should check out. It's a collection of old-timey tunes and folk-rocky tunes by my friend (and, shit, ok, in-law) Ben Hesse, who's a talented young weird-beard based in Philadelphia. You can get the album here, here and here.

And here's what Ben says about the album:

JDub Records co-founder, Benjamin Hesse, releases his third recording this week - the Ice Mountain EP. After surviving a dangerous winter climb in Rocky Mountain this past year, Ben returned home to craft an album of music inspired by his near death experience. The result is the Ice Mountian EP – a collection of originals and old-time songs. It is an album of Americana that falls somewhere in between Neil Young’s On the Beach and the Folk Anthology. Recorded at home with the help of friends, the album is being released this week for free on iTunes as well as on Ben’s website.

Listen! Enjoy! Obey!

Hamlet @ Baltimore Shakespeare Festival

[just Ham and his dead dad, chattin', no big deal]

The BSF's plays on the Meadow at Evergreen House are for sure a highlight of any Baltimore summer. There's something about watching Shakespeare outside, away from genteel trappings of an actual physical theater space, that makes the production actually seem more civilized.

I went on Sunday night with my parents to see Hamlet, this year's offering, which was markedly less fancy, staging-wise, than last year's Macbeth. It was just a wooden stage, a rudimentary scaffolding, and some corrugated tin sheeting. The set, I thought, was a little incongruous with the costumes, which seemed period-sensitive. The costumes made the set's bareness seem more a function of pure cost-saving measures.

That aside, this Hamlet was for me, as I imagine a lot of productions are for others, a series of reminders about where certain expressions come from. As my mom joked afterwards, "That play is great, but it's just so full of cliches!" Among them were these:

- "I know a hawk from a handsaw," Hamlet's downplaying of his madness to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, is the origin of the name of the Gypsy-rock band A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

- Hamlet's line from Act I, Scene 4, a bitter remark about the king's carousing after marrying his mother -- "The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse / Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;" -- could be the source of a great name for an Irish music album: "The Up-Spring Reels"

- Ophelia's line about Hamlet, "I that sucked the honey of his madness," is pretty dirty, in retrospect, when you think about what she's talking about.

- That Nick Lowe song, "Cruel to be Kind," comes from a Polonius line.

- "Infinite Jest," the title of the novel I'm currently reading, is a Hamlet reference, and comes from the Yorick scene. My dad also pointed out, that the line, "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well," is never actually spoken in the play. It's one of those mis-heard, mythologized lines, like "Play it again, Sam," which also was never spoken. Someone should put together a list of those.

Aside from a few small quibbles, I thought this was a great production. The "To be or not to be..." speech was delivered to Ophelia, going straight into "Soft you not, fair Ophelia..." which I think is an edit (isn't he onstage alone, delivering his suicide contemplation as a soliloquoy?). Also, the second act ended with Hamlet actual killing Claudius (or fantasizing it -- there was no difference from our perspective) as he prayed, and after intermission we came back and they played the scene again, with Hamlet deciding nah, I'll wait until he's good and sinnin' again. That was odd. Also, at the very end of the play, Hamlet's line is, "I die, and the rest is silence." But Dan Crane, the lead actor who played Hamlet with a really great physical presence most of the time (confidently striding everywhere), and whose sense of humor onstage showed that he really gets the text and has pretty much internalized it, said, "I die, and the rest is _____," straight into Horatio's chorus-like end speech. That was edgy, I guess, and not terribly important overall in the play, but we sort of felt cheated.

Other highlights included Emily Clare Zempel's performance as Ophelia. When she wandered off to drown herself, she exited the stage, tearing apart some flowers, and walked out through the audience mumbling "God be with you," creepily, over and over again, walking in the general direction towards the stream that runs through Evergreen. That was cool. I also thought that Bruce R. Nelson's performace as the ghost of King Hamlet was really great. It was like watching a guy with really bad nerves trying to ply his son for some favor. And that's essentially what the ghost does to his son. Off-putting, however, was the fact that Nelson also played Claudius, which brings up all sorts of metaphysical questions that have to be suspended for the play to make sense.

I highly recommend this production, before it goes off at the end of the month. Bring a picnic and a few bottles of wine. Get there early. Enjoy.

When I dip, you dip, We dip

[i put my hand up on your hip...]

What a n00b I am, apparently. It wasn't until recently that I discovered the French Dip sandwich. It's hot, thinly-sliced roast beef with optional swiss cheese on a French baguette, with beef jus served on the side. Get that? You dip the sandwich in the jus, and it's delicious.

This handsome fellow is from Java Joe's, a pretty good lunch place in downtown Baltimore. The wikis tell me little of interest about this sandwich, except that two restaurants in L.A., Phillipe's The Original and Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet, have been arguing for almost 100 years about who lays claim to its provenance. In my limited experience, the jus is just absolutely perfect with the crunchy toasted crust of the roll. I can't imagine serving it "wet" -- as they did back in the day -- by dipping the whole sandwich before serving, could be much better. I'll try anything, though.

Anyone know of any particularly good French Dips out there?

Just a Few Wickets on a Saturday Afternoon

[The General]

Grant Grubor. Thurmont, July 4, 2009.

In the spirit of trying to write more on this blog every day, and making it more of a general interest type of chronicle, with more record reviews, thoughts on politics, and the like, in addition to my normal profiles of places and trips I take, here's a blogpost cross-posted from my place of work. It's about eminent domain, a topic I find very interesting.

Big eminent domain case in New York has Baltimore connection

July 1, 2009

News reports indicate that one of the highest-profile eminent domain lawsuits in the country will go all the way to New York’s highest court, where it will be argued in October.

Developer Bruce Ratner, of Forest City Ratner, wants the Empire State Development Corp. to condemn and seize dozens of properties in a low-density neighborhood near an old rail yard in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, so that he can build a new arena for the relocation of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, plus 16 high-rise apartment towers. He already has a $200 million-a-year sponsorship deal for the arena with investment bank Barclays. The project is called Atlantic Yards (and Barclays Arena), named for the disused rail yards on the western edge of Brooklyn where it is proposed.

Although about half of the buildings needed for the more-than-$1-billion project have already been demolished, in August of last year, nine property owners sued the ESDC, saying that the grounds for eminent domain were not valid. That suit was dismissed, then appealed, which brings us to today.

Forest City Enterprises, the developer’s parent company, is controlled by the Ratner family, and is also running the show over in East Baltimore, where so far more than 800 families have been displaced by Forest City Science + Technology Group’s East Baltimore Science + Technology Park. In this case, Forest City has leveraged the support of Baltimore’s housing department to condemn and seize hundreds of properties, many of them using the controversial “quick-take” method of eminent domain. We published a series about this type of thing last year.

One of the main arguments made by the anti-Ratner camp is that the benefits of the whatever Ratner could bring to Atlantic Yards are negligible compared to the destruction of the neighborhood. A number of similar cases (.pdf), even in Maryland, have used the same rationale, and it really gets to the heart of the matter as far as eminent domain is concerned: According the landmark Kelo vs. City of New London, if the economic benefits of a project are not so great that they’re in the “public interest,” then an eminent domain taking is unconstitutional.

Every developer has a business model, I guess, but when you really think about it, I wonder just how many companies there are in the country, aside from Forest City, that make a living out of seizing large swaths of property that they’ve convinced local authorities are “blighted” and redeveloping them as mega-projects like this. Are they so few and far between that there’s no consensus on the pros and cons of such a model? A cost-benefit analysis of property taxes versus incentives dangled? A comprehensive look into the profitability of the sorts of projects that come and replace the so-called blight?

Yeah, it sounds like a book idea, I know, but I’m going to look into this.

Albums Every Man Should Own

About 2 months ago, some friends from college and I were talking about this list that came out in Esquire magazine -- "50 Albums Every Man Should Own," and trying to figure out what we thought of it, but then realizing we didn't know nearly as many of these albums, which seem sort of canonical, as we ought to. Thus we embarked on an online quest to review each and every on of these records, regardless of whether or not we're familiar with them already. I'm going to post those reviews (well, at least my takes on them) as they come. Here are the first two:



Bruce Springsteen - Darkness on the Edge of Town [1978]

At this point, I've given this record a close listen about 5 times, and I cannot bring myself to find anything all that remarkable in it. I just don't get what people see in the operatic voice Springsteen uses for choruses ("Badlands," "Someting in the Night") or in the juxtaposition of searing guitar solos and glockenspiels ("Candy's Room"). As [my friend]Anthony put it, "Springsteen's always been kind of [lame]," but he's the workingman's lame-o, supposedly, so I guess (as a non-working elitist who happens to like a lot of "working class" music) I'm supposed to see something in it, but what? There are Springsteen records that I like. I recently, in the course of listening to this one, revisited The Wild The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, a party record from 5 years earlier that has a lot more to offer, I feel. I guess what I mean is, I'm not terribly interested in Springsteen's "grown-up" musings or his "grown-up" affectations. This record starts pretty slow. "Adam Raised a Cain" has some fire to it, but it suffers from the same self-importance as a lot of the other songs on the record. The basic premise is, as a working man himself, the narrator's dad never saw the fruits of a hard life of labor ("Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain") and the same restlessness and desolation was passed on to his son, both literally and symbolically through the baptism ritual -- all of this summarized in screaming, bluesy chorus of "Adam raised a Cain!" There are two main problems, though. First of all, Cain is known chiefly for his lake of filial responsibility and brutality towards Abel. Is our narrator (Springsteen) gearing up to murder his brother? Is that the legacy of a long life of alienated capitalist labor? And secondly, what the hell is his dad so upset about? What form does this pain take? Why has his work left him so hollow? Looking at this record in a somewhat literary lens, the songwriting leaves far too much of its content unstated. If I set my imagination to it, I can think of some ways in which working-class people might experience deep, passionate pain (by incurring huge debts, by sinking into the monotony of middle-America, by feeling stifled by the pressures of monogamy, etc), but Springsteen makes the mistake of assuming that you know all about their specifics already. And that's fine for some people, I guess -- they probably hear a song like "Promised Land," which is for sure the apogee of this record -- and really identify with it. But maybe BECAUSE I'm such a phony and not a Jersey guido who fixes up Mustangs and goes to the annual fireman's carnival, I sort of need it spelled out to me. I need a Raymond Carver or a Woody Guthrie who is going to repeat the details of the banality of modern existence in order to hammer it home WHY these are such horrors to the human spirit. In "Promised Land," our narrator sets the stage for his existence: "Working all day in my daddy's garage / Driving all night chasing some mirage / Pretty soon little girl I'm gonna take charge / The dogs on Main Street howl 'cause they understand / If I could take one moment into my hands / Mister I ain't a boy no I'm a man / And I believe in a promised land." Okay, I get that. He's coming of age, he knows what he believes, he wants to take his life into his own hands. But then the climax of the song: "Blow away the dreams that tear you apart / Blow away the dreams that break your heart / Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted..." But wait -- what were the dreams that the world has forced this guy to defer? What is his life in the way of? Who's lying to him? It's a terrifying proposition of a landscape, for sure, and the album does have a real sense of cohesion (from the "Badlands" to the "Promised Land," all seen from the window of a souped-up stock car, hewn by the singer's own hands, using the same skills he learned in the "Factory," practicing "the work, the work, the working life..." Etc.), but it's all so vague. I suspect all the working-class Joes at Springsteen's sold-out arena shows like to pretend they identify with this kind of angst, and it makes them feel good to portray themselves as complex, conflicted men, but I bet they kinda just want to hear "Born in the U.S.A." or "Rosalita" anyway. "Racing in the Street" is my favorite song on this record, because (a) it's the most specific and honest on the record, and because (b) as a carefully-wrought piano ballad, it's pretty pleasing musically, too. I love the detail about the narrator's wife and how she's getting old and the house is always dark when he gets home from racing, and I love his admission that he only races for the money. It's just a lot realer than most of the pained, lonesome cries on here. And no shitty mid-70s saxophone solos, either.



Willie Nelson – Phases and Stages [1974]

A few things about this album. I think it’s good, and I think it represents one of the best eras in commercial country music: when all the instruments were still being recorded live and for the most part unaltered (ten years later it was all guitar pedal effects and overdubbing) , and when the lines between pop country and pop soul weren’t so clear. “Forget I Ever Happened” is a perfect example of the latter. I love everything about that song, from the trilling mandolin in the beginning to the funky backbeat behind it. It’s great for the same reason that Don Williams’ “Tulsa Time” is great—it doesn’t abandon country’s common roots with the blues, in black folk music, with all its stilted rhythms and swing—but it still makes use of, by my count, seven instruments in twangy accord (I heard guitar, mando, lap steel, regular steel, bass, fiddle and drums). There are other triumphant moments on this record. “Phases and Stages (Theme) Walkin’” is a great, sorta mournful type of self-deprecating Opry song, and “Bloody Mary Morning,” a bluegrass-tinged honky-tonk number, is the rare pop country tune with actually impressive lyrics (“As we taxi down the runway / With the smog and haze reminding me / Of how I feel / Just a country boy who’s learning / That the pitfalls of the city are extremely real”). But other songs are just weird. “Sister’s Coming Home / Down at the Corner Beer Joint” has this jarring transition in the middle from a boyish, interesting song about how a young man learns to understand, via his sister, how not to treat women (or perhaps he’s jealous of his wronged sibling? It’s not entirely clear which makes it intriguing), to a sly, from-a-distance song about how his sister is a free spirit, a fun-lover, and maybe a woman of ill repute. But most importantly, this album is a concept album without a coherent concept. What is Willie telling us about the Phases and Stages of life? What is his folksy imagery (“Cryin’ and ironin’…Ironin’ and cryin’…”) meant to convey? That these are times and feelings and periods that we all go through? What’s the unifying thread here? I don’t exactly get it, and by the time “Phases and Stages (Theme) No Love Around” arrives, the whole trope has gotten really grating. Bottom line, I dig the idea of a life cycle concept album coming out of Willie’s mouth, but this is not that, or at least not that done well.

Dirty Projectors / TVOTR, Washington 6/9/09

[dirty]

I went to go see this show much more for the Dirty Projectors than for TV On the Radio, and it is only for that reason that I didn't come away totally disappointed. It was one of those rare nights when the opener just totally blows away the headliner. It's not that I don't like TVOTR -- I do. I dig their grittier first two albums much more than their poppy latest, Dear Science. It's just that their live act had serious problems, which may have had more to do with the venue than anything else. And because I don't really want to talk about TVOTR too much, I'll make it brief: The sound was all off. It was just a wall of mid-tone fuzz and noise that was completely uninteresting and obscured virtually everything subtle about TVOTR's music, including Tunde Adebimpe's and Kyp Malone's certainly very interesting voices. A few songs, including "Dancing Shoes" and "Staring At The Sun" were presented as bang-it-out punk songs, and the crowd was really into it, which was fun, but others, including "Crying," were just crowded, sound-wise, to the point of incoherence. I wasn't offended by this show. I was just so uninterested I kinda wanted it to be over, the whole time.

Now to the main point. The Dirty Projectors, a Brooklyn sextet led by Dave Longstreth, are, along with Deerhoof, probably the most challenging and interesting rock band I've heard in years. That is, their music exists within a largely conventional rock context, but constructs songs that are chordally, harmonically and structurally alien to any genre I know of. TDP play a sort of shuddering, disjointed music, with Longstretch strumming an electric guitar with fingerpicks while singing in a tortured, back-of-the-throat high range about love and weirder things. Each riff he plays sounds random, kaleidescopic -- as though improvised without thought to completing a musical phrase or fitting its rhythm into any sort of box. But then you realize that they're not random; they're highly composed riffs that he can return to, verbatim, later in songs, and that fit deftly into the overall picture of what the band is doing.

His abrupt guitar and vocal utterings are cushioned on one side by absolutely incredible vocal harmonies by Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle, and punctuated by unpredictable drum kit outbursts. Angel Deradoorian, a freakishly young-looking guitarist, keyboardist, and honey-throated singer, adds atmospherics. The whole thing bridges the gap between indie rock, West African pop (via Langstreth's cascading guitar licks) and Charles Ives-ish spastic avant-garde classical compositions.

Imagine how hard that must be to replicate live.

Just as one stand-alone example, the song "Remade Horizon," from their new record (released two days ago) Bitte Orca, takes a side-trip mid-song so that Coffman and Dekle can sing alternating two-note 16th-note phrases without missing a beat, so that the effect is something like a 12-tone bird song. Then Langstreth comes in with a guitar solo that mirrors their parts. Then Nat Baldwin somehow locates a bass line that compliments this, and Brian McComber continues to freak out on the drum set. I was really curious how they were going to do this one live. Whether they would even attempt the vocal acrobatics. They did, not once, but twice. They added a vocal bird-twitter part at the beginning of the song, too, only to revisit it again at the end. It was unbelievable. It made my hands shake to watch it -- that's how good it was.

"Stillness is a Move," the so-called "right at home on R&B radio" single from Bitte Orca (it's not that at all, that article is terrible) took the form of a demented Mariah Carrie song when performed live. Langstreth is off to the side, awkwardly scratching out the song's bagpipe-like descant, while McComber hits out a hip-hop beat and Coffman prances about the stage singing stilted, poperatic lines about love. I didn't really like this song on record, but live it was stirring.

The rest of the set I can't write specifically about, because I don't know the album well enough to name songs. But in general, I think that's a problem not easily overcome. It's damn near impossible to hum the melody of a Dirty Projectors song or sing along with it. Langstreth's singing is melismatic and intense. The overall vibe is jerky and loud. But for a band that I wasn't sure could pull off their compositions on a stage in front of a big crowd, this performance just blew me away.

The Alarming Mediocrity of Good Stuff Burgers

[like it's been hacked up by a cat]

What did I expect? Just because the guy was a contestant on Top Chef, his restaurant should be good? That's like going to a concert by an American Idol winner and expecting the Rolling Stones. But one likes to think there are some standards in the world. Standards that dictate things like, say, folks who make hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV as chefs, ought to be able to pull off passable burgers.

But when I went to Good Stuff Eatery in Capitol Hill last weekend, the feeling I came away with -- shit, "disappointed" doesn't begin to capture it. For starters, the place had all the right visual cues that I should expect great things. It was brand new, spic and span, sleek almost to the point of Jetsons-esque diner-kitsch futuristic. Then you look at the menu, which boasts about farm-raised beef, and has down-home contrived names for each of its sandwiches, like "Uncle D's Chili 'N Cheddar." So I ordered. I ordered the Good Stuff Melt, because it was the rare afternoon when I wasn't in the mood for bacon on my burger. At $6.89, the Melt promised three types of cheese, carmelized onions, and grilled mushrooms. KB and I split some fries with rosemary on them and I topped it all off with a black-and-white milkshake, kind of like a chocolate-dipped vanilla soft-serve after a few minutes in the blender.

Look at the picture above. That's how my sandwich arrived. The bun was so shriveled and moist that it looked like it had been used for fastball practice before it was served. The patty was 1/3 pound, tops, and this was a 7-dollar burger here. So I guess it wasn't quality or presentation that I was paying for here. Maybe the taste? Nope. I bit into a way-well patty with far too much cheese (I thought the "3 types of cheese" referred to variety, rather than a quantity of cheese meant to compete with the meat) and the other fixin's quite lost in the mix. This burger comes nowhere near even holding a candle to 5 Guys, even in spite of the chain's messiness. The milkshake? Sure, it was good, but it was an unseasonable 80 degrees out and I quickly lost interest. So it wasn't THAT good. The fries were run-of-the-mill. Nowhere near as deftly spiced as those from The Brewer's Art, and the dipping sauces (like the burgers) sounded good but came up way short. An Old Bay mayonnaise might as well have just been Old Bay and water, it was so heavy on the allspice. The mango sauce was not suited for potatoes of any kind. The sriracha mayo was great, but that was it.

For the first time in I don't know how long, I did not finish a burger and a milkshake. Not to mention a burger-milkshake-fires combo that came to almost $17. Get bent, Spike. This is the last time I go to a restaurant based on Top Chef endorsement alone.

FOOD: C-
I can cook a better burger than this in 7 minutes flat. Over-done, poorly-proportioned, pathetic presentation, unremarkable fries, and a tasty, but far-too-rich milkshake. All of it overpriced, to add insult to injury.

SERVICE: B+
Fine, whatever. The counter girl recommended the fries I chose, but they were nothing special. No one was mean or anything. We did see Spike drifting in and out of the place looking disinterested. A couple was overheard at a nearby table saying, "Why is he always here?"

AMBIENCE: A
I actually really dig this part of south Capitol Hill, and would consider living here if I ventured to move to Washington. Plus the decor was, for a burger joint, pretty ideal. It relived some of that 50s futuristic drive-thru glory that usually makes places like In-N-Out taste better.

Nostalgic for Baltimore, Anyone?

[shyuck, shyuck, shyuck...]

I went to Faidley's the other day for lunch, intending to get a crab cake, but ended up just doing it Mad Men-style, with the working lunch of straight oysters and a beer.

The following night, I had oysters that really blew these ones out of the water at Hank's Oyster Bar in DC, which I think is my current favorite restaurant in the District, but it was Bawlmer, man, and it was REAL. I perused seafood:


[god made ROCK ...fish]

And this handsome fellow came home with me, to be grilled up on Friday. He's all fillets and ice in my freezer right now:


[oh, hi]

And Brooksie knows what's best:


[brooksie]

Felice Bros. @ Birchmere, 4/15

Despite the hellish drive from Baltimore to Alexandria during rush hour, I had a lovely time with KB seeing the Felice Brothers, the latest greatest hillbilly punk band (or are they just a punky hillbilly band?) to emerge from New York. I love this band's self-titled record, mainly because they sound just like The Band on a lot of tracks, but also because they make music that is strikingly rough-edged in an era where that's becoming the norm for garage rock bands, but still hasn't caught on in the country scene. Bluegrass is great, sure, with all its flourish and technical wizardry and hot fiddling, but there was certainly a vacuum to be filled for bands that play low-budg old-time string band music with the same type of voracity that the Sex Pistols or the Stooges played rock. A few years ago, Old Crow Medicine Show started the big push to fill that gap. The Felice Brothers, from upstate New York, are the latest.

Fittingly, drummer Simone Felice was wearing an OCMS t-shirt while he sat behind the kit. His two brothers, James (accordion, keyboards, vocals) and Ian (guitar, lead vocals) were two his right, along with Greg Farley, the slightly ADD fiddler and washboard-scraper who did lots of vaguely hip-hop dance moves when he wasn't playing and wore absurd nut-hugger jeans, and Christmas, the group's bizarre, strung-out looking bassist. They played a good mix of songs from Felice Brothers and their new one, Yonder Is the Clock, which came out just a few weeks ago. "Run Chicken Run," "Cooperstown," and "The Big Surprise" were new to me, while "Helen Fry" and "Frankie's Gun!" were raucous and familiar. Highlights were "The Greatest Show On Earth" and "Radio Song," and very rough-edged version of "Whiskey In My Whiskey," which had a fast, hustling beat, lots of yelling, and featured Ian playing a dirty country guitar solo while standing on his brother's bass drum.

The thing about the Felice Brothers is, they sound like shit in concert. But then again, they sort of sound like shit on record. Their singing voices would make most A&R men cringe. Their playing isn't amateurish, per se -- it's just not especially impressive. What they've got, really, is a real sense of poetry to their songs, dressed up in ripped clothing and wild, drunken energy. "We're just a bunch of dirtbags," Ian said at one point in the show. And he was right on. Christmas, the wide-eyed, strung-out looking bassist, literally had no elbows on his shirt, it was so badly torn. The five of them kept drinking from one another's beers and passing a pack of cigarettes around during the show. Farley, when he wasn't scratching out gloriously scratchy double-stop solos, was either smashing the drum kit's cymbals with a washboard or messing around with the other players' instruments. When they finally ended the set, with a hoarse, drunken version of Townes Van Zandt's "Two Hands" -- my favorite TVZ song, coincidentally -- no one in the crowd wasn't dancing.

Mekong Delta

[k likes pho]

When the bosses in my office heard that just up the street a restaurant called Mekong Delta had opened, they took it as a sign of generational drift. How could one possibly give such a name to an establishment and expect anyone to come? It would be like naming an Iraqi tea-house The Falluja Cafe! Have these kids no historical memory?

OK, fine, so some bad stuff went down in the 60s in the Mekong Delta. But there's some good stuff goin' into my belly on Saratoga Street's own version of the place. I had lunch there a few weeks ago with my friend KC, but it wasn't the first time I'd been there. A week or so before I went with my colleague AR, and at 12:30 we were told that if we didn't have a lot of time, we shouldn't hang around, because each meal is made individually, without line cooks, and that we could expect to wait 45 minutes. For lunch!

KC and I arrived at 11:40, and the service was considerably more expeditious than that. I got a mixed seafood pho with huge gobs of (real) crab meat swimming in a sea of scallions and salty broth. King prawns, scallops, and (I think) some fish meat mingled around the traditional Vietnamese rice noodles, and the whole deal was seriously slurpable:


[slurp!]

KC got the Vietnames "crepes," which our server recommended for someone who was interested in "something different," misreading us, perhaps, as regular customers. It was a tasty savory pancake -- perhaps a bit too pasty -- filled with fried veggies, chicken, and a few too many styrofoam-tasting bean sprouts, and it left me wondering if there was some sort of French Indochine connection here. I mean, are there "crepe" shops set up all over on the streets of Hanoi? What other fusions are there? Pork belly rolls in buttery boules? Guess I'll have to go there and find out.


[dip!]

FOOD: B+
This was no 3-visit Frank Bruni review, but the two dishes we did have were really tasty. I'm not a huge connossieur of pho, so I need to wait until I eat something from MD that has tripe in it before I can call myself a man, but overall a good lunch for $10 apiece. Oh, and the lightly-hinted-at flavor of the cold white tea was great

AMBIENCE: B-
Kinda crappy. The place is too small -- it's in a rowhouse at the corner of Liberty and Saratoga, and every table is sort of near the door. We were wedged up against a fridge full of cokes. But maybe when it gets sunnier out they'll add some sidewalk tables.

SERVICE: B
The first time we went there, the suggested wait was outrageous. If grandma can't cook everything customized in less than 20 minutes, hire some line cooks! But the manager is very nice, and our food came moderately quickly the second time, with no mistakes.

Americana in the City

[Deer Tick]

Flanneled weird-beards of Baltimore: Fear not! Americana, with the occasional tinge of indie rock, is alive and well in this town. This past weekend we checked out a total of five acts, at three different venues, all but one of which fell under the general banner of "rootsy" and, curiously, they were some of the best shows we've caught in a while.

Friday night Deer Tick, a Brooklyn-via-Rhode Island country-rock band, opened a bill at the G Spot, for the second time. The first show was with Wye Oak headlining, a little over a year ago; Friday it was moody troubadour Matthew Houck, also known as Phosphorescent. Both times, Deer Tick narrowly out shined the headliner. Led by guitarist and singer John Joseph McCauley III, the band sometimes hits high emotional points that you don't expect out of them. "Little White Lies" and "Art Isn't Real a.k.a. City of Sin" trickle along with finger-picked guitar parts and chiming lead lines, but McCauley's voice is brash and mature, and especially suited to lines like "I gotta get drunk, I gotta forget about some things/ I lived in lies all my life/ And I've been livin' here all my life." The band also played local favorite "Baltimore Blues No. 1."

Houck, we were told by a neighbor, was pissed about the sound system, but it was difficult to tell because this is the first time we've seen him. His brand of psych-drenched country-folk seemed cool enough, though, and his voice is outstanding. And the keyboard player in his touring band did things rarely heard of in relatively straight-laced country music—rolls and riffs straight out of the blues idiom, making a kind of ornate joinery with Houck's singing. But the songwriting falls a bit short. The best Phosphorescent song played, "Reasons To Quit," sounds like a tired reworking of the Louvin Brothers' "Satan Is Real," both in melody and lyrical tone. An encore version of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody" was good, but not great.

Saturday, J. Roddy Walston and the Business, the ubiquitous Jerry Lee Lewis-meets-Queen bar rock band, returned to the Ottobar after something of a Saturday night residency there a few months ago. Beefed up by openers Egg Babies Orchestra, the rumor was that the bar had its biggest bar tab ever. The Egg Babies are a spectacle worth spectating. Each show they play is different, both in song selection and theme, and Saturday was "Movie Show II" a sequel to an earlier performance in which the band played '80s movie themes while projecting scenes from the movie behind them. "Neverending Story" was incredible. "Stuck In The Middle With You" over the cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs was fun, and "St. Elmo's Fire" and "The Glory of Love" over scenes from the Karate Kid Part 2 were transcendent.

J. Roddy's set was pretty much all old songs. But that doesn't change the fact that this is probably the best live rock band in Baltimore. The energy is unbelievably high, every song is anthemic, and J. Roddy lurches around, rocks back and forth, and literally dry-humps his keyboard when things get really wild. Not to mention bassist Zach Westphal's glorious head banging with his elbow-length hair, which honestly is one of the best parts of the show. We were standing behind a hardy crew of frat types, clearly loving the cock rock, who kept hugging each other and nearly kissed during "I'm Going Out," Roddy's Thin Lizzy-ish chant about "going out with my friends." Highlights included an encore version of the delightfully filthy "Full-Grown Man" and and artfully delivered "Nineteen Ought Four," a slow blues-rock ballad that compares a love affair to the Great Baltimore Fire.

And Monday night, after missing two opening acts by the pitifully early hour of 10:30, we returned to the Ottobar for six or so cuts from Maryland-based alt-country outfit Cotton Jones. This show was disappointing. Michael Nau seems like he has a really talented singer/songwriter/performer package in him somewhere that is so obscured by the mediocrity of his band it's almost painful. In fact, listening to the gal who sang, played keyboards, and shook a sleigh bell and could not bring herself to sing on key or in any harmony more interesting than a fifth off of what Jones was singing, was quite literally grating. Add to that the two totally unnecessary electric guitars on stage, and body language from the band that could be mistaken for nothing other than, "I'd rather be anywhere but here right now," and what you've got is a band that sounds like an imitation M. Ward that's earning only a tiny fraction of what they could be making if they were a trio. Sad to see and say, but tough love seems to be what Cotton Jones needs in order to cut some of the fat out of its live act.

Cross-posted at City Paper's Noise blog

Raphael Saadiq @ Ram's Head Live, 3/23/09

[oh, he means it.]

Monday night I found a good way to keep my weekend birthday celebration going: by checking out Raphael Saadiq at the Ram's Head. I previewed Saadiq's show for City Paper last week, but there's far more to be said aside from what I heard on the record and in my interview with the singer. Namely the muscularity of Saadiq's stage show and the devotion of his fans in the audience.

Saadiq bookended his set with versions of the 5th Dimension's "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In," playing a pearl-white telecaster himself and dancing gamely while doing it. He then jumped into a set of songs from his album, The Way I See It. "Let's Take A Walk" started with about 16 slow, crashing 7-chords that hit on the last syllable of each of the opening lines ("This place is CROWDED--" BWAAAANNGGGGG!!!" etc.) then jumped right into the stilted, mid-tempo groove of the song. This song really highlighted two things for me. First, as my concert companion pointed out, Saadiq only sings songs about love and sex (and bluntly!: "This place is crowded / Don't know 'bout you / But I need some sex / Some sex with you / 'Cause you're on my mind..."), and second, soul rhythm guitar, while hardly thought of as a virtuoso pursuit, can be really effing impressive. Rob Bacon, Saadiq's touring guitarist, literally never stops riffing. It's true that soul tunes are highly chordal: meaning, they're based on definite, discernible changes, usually based on the blues (I-IV-V and II-V-I etc.), but Bacon was just killing it with these neck-sliding 9-chords and blues turnarounds right in the middle of lines. I was sort of entranced.

But enough guitar nerdery. Let's talk real for a minute. And by real I mean an 8-and-a-half minute, 5-song medley of Tony! Toni! Tone! slow jams that Saadiq inserted almost exactly in the middle of the set, including "Anniversary," "Lay Your Head On My Pillow," and a few others whose names fail me despite my extensive command of the Tony! Toni! Tone! catalog. As soon as the slow jams started, most of the crowd -- largely 35-45-year-old black couples, which was refreshing to see in the usually frat boy-choked Ram's Head -- paired off and started slow dancing like they just couldn't wait to get home and get their clothes off.

If the slow jams were ecstatic, the stuff from the new album was paradise. "Staying In Love" and "Sweet and Tender" were full-steam energy. Saadiq's two back-up singers were hopping and jogging in place, both, like him, wearing suits and skinny ties. One was a peppy little pistol of a woman and the other was a tall man who had sweated through his shirt (but refused to remove his sport coat) by minute 2:00 of the 6-minute extended version nof "Sure Hope You Mean It," complete with minimal, Four Tops-style turn-and-step choreography. I felt like I was seeing the closest thing available to an early sixties soul show, or maybe just like I was in the James Brown scene from Liberty Heights.

Matt & Kim @ Ottobar, 2/27/09

Walking away from the triple bill headlined by Matt and Kim—the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based dance-punk carnival band that was the darling at last year's South by Southwest festival—at the Ottobar Thursday night, we were wracking our brains trying to think of another band, or any sort of live act, that does as good a job as Matt and Kim do at becoming fast friends with the audience. Much of Wham City acts stage hyper-positive, interactive play-dates at their shows—Dan Deacon has his gauntlet, Blue Leader wants a few games of Nintendo with you—but most of that stuff is parallel play. None of them do what Matt and Kim do, which is to appeal immediately to the most sociable in the audience, to impress upon them how likable and un-rock star they are, to make everyone in the place feel a degree of ownership over the music: These are my buddies. They've come over to jam. Isn't that cool?

That social invitation probably the same reason that a good deal of punk-influenced art-school bands, like occasional Matt and Kim tour-mates Double Dagger and the Death Set, prefer to set up in the mosh pit, or at least do the majority of their performing from there: It's democratic, intimate, and makes concerts feel like dance parties, without the self-consciousness of a performance. But Matt and Kim don't play from the floor. She pounds her drums and he sings and does hand-stands on his keyboard rig from the stage, both of them upfront and close to one another, with flickering slides of their album cover projected on screens behind them. The charm is in their intense familiarity and bubbling enthusiasm for what they're doing. "Kim," Matt will say before most songs. "Kim, are you ready?"

Thursday night began with a set of Misfits-meet-Siouxsie punk dirges from local band Sick Weapons, which features Blood Baby guitarist Peter O'Connell and Elie Beziat's moribund yowling of lyrics such as, "I can't fuck for the fun of it." Midway through their set, Beziat chugged a few 5-hour energy drinks onstage, offering one to the crowd. (Double Dagger's Nolen Strals raised his hand and was obliged.) "If these were around when I was your age," Beziat observed, looking at the small bottle in her hand, "maybe I wouldn't have done all that cocaine and dope and morning-after pills."

Following them was Hollywood Holt, a nerdy Chicago rapper whose "Throw a Kit," a song about souping up mopeds, is really just a more frenetic version of the Cool Kids' "Black Mags." Hollywood was a high-octane, slam-dancing showman, though. His voice through a stage mic is on the high side—he sounds a tad like the Digital Underground's Shock G: nasally and strained—and he frequently raps along with the studio version of his voice from pre-recorded tracks. But, "Hollywood" was a great dance track.

Matt and Kim set their instruments up onstage with some Biggie and T.I. tracks being piped in, and immediately started dancing with the crowd from the stage. Throughout their set, which was moderately long and touched on both their self-titled debut and last month's Grand, Matt kept gushing about how great it was to be in Baltimore. Shout-outs were made to Double Dagger and local DJ Emily Rabbit; past shows were reminisced. Kim's infectious and constant smile was impossible not to imitate. At one point she apologized into the mic for "breaking the rule" of not drinking more than two beers. In response, Matt took two song breaks to explain her "three stages" of drunkenness: the first is giggly. In the second, she "tells you all kinds of things that you don't want to know about feminine hygiene" The third is "Violent Kim." Did the crowd want to see Violent Kim? They did. Matt handed her another beer.

As for the songs, what they lose when played live in production value and Kim's vocals they gain in raw energy. "Cinders" and "Lesson Learned," two of the rowdier tracks from Grand, were great. Matt's keyboard work is mostly confined to the types of synth and organ work that you'll hear from Wham City acts, and with limited range he makes a surprisingly robust sound. Older tracks, such as "Good Old-Fashioned Nightmare" and "It's A Fact" sounded fresh. The crowd of mostly college-aged kids was with the band on every line, and the dancing was wild.

When the end of the set came, Matt was ebullient—stammering and thanking and telling the crowd "how much it means" to him that this was their biggest ever show in Baltimore. The finale was "Silver Tiles," a hand-clapper of an anthem with a huge, singable chorus—"And all our hopes and all our friends/ Through parking lots, it's where we've been"—that doesn't appear on any album. "This song is all about old friends," Matt said, and it looked like he was near tears. Then he took his mic, got up from his stool, and jumped onto the upturned, waiting hands of the audience.

Cross-posted at City Paper Noise Blog.

Weekends @ Metro Gallery Feb. 25

[TGIF! LOLZ!]

I'm starting to think that most of the press on the Baltimore band Weekends is written by their very close friends. For example, a blog that I'm just discovering exists, BMore Musically Informed, had this to say about them:

Already garnering comparisons to Ponytail this Baltimore duo fills any rock and roll void one might possess with riffs of pure joy. No Age's Nouns was a similarly great record, but each and every jam on Weekends' s/t debut blows Nouns out of the water.

Really? Where have they garnered comparisons to Ponytail, pray tell? Among your friends? Because I haven't seen any, and the two bands sound absolutely nothing alike. Their sounds are as disparate as No Age and Ponytail. One is really loud, sludge-hammer noise-punk, and the other is really loud, but melodic surf-guitar riffs with a girl out front screeching nonsense. Don't get me wrong -- I like both bands, but the comparison is inapt.

Or take, por ejemplo, this incredibly undescriptive "No Cover" profile from City Paper last month, which includes the following quote from guitarist Adam Lempel:

"I saw Brendan playing [and] I was just like, 'I want to be in a band with that dude,'" Lempel says while doing a vigorous impersonation of Sullivan on guitar. "[He was] rocking out so hard. He was just into it in a good way."

This quote, to me, captures hipsterdom in its most perfect, putrid nutshell. It's like, being "into it" is ultimately BAD, and Lempel liked Sullivan's playing because he was INTO IT, but just like, not in a lame way. He's really venturing into uncharted territory here: a hipster band with musicians who are actually enthusiastic about music. Their approach, as reported, complete with self-described "rudimentary" drumming and a marked aversion to something called "blog rock," which we don't really hear defined in any way, offers no argument to me about why I should listen to this band. In fact, the only possible type of person I could see reading that review and thinking, "I really wanna check Weekends out," is the lowest, vilest type of poseur who jumps up every time they read the word "Copycat," puts on their pom-pom winter cap, wriggles into their skintight jeans, and heads out for a six-pack of Pabst (not Boh) before the show.

All that said, I went to go see Weekends last night because I've met Lempel at shows before, and he's a Hopkins grad, and he's always seemed like a really nice, genuine guy. I arrived right after Bad Liquor Pond finished up, and left right before True Womanhood took the stage. I'm sick, and I'm going on vacation next week. Gimme a break.

They did about 7 songs, almost all of which sounded like No Age covers. Sullivan's guitar work, I think, is a lot more interesting than Lempel's. He makes a lot of use of his Strat's low-end, so that bass tones don't get completely lost in the wall of fuzz these guys pump out. Lempel's approach has more to do with playing mathy melodies, one string at a time, with an octave pedal on, which is not very captivating. Likewise, Lempel's a better drummer. The few songs they played that deviated from the ear-blowing noise-punk model featured Lempel playing beats that were...I dunno...funky. I mean, the music honestly never approached danceable, unless you consider violent torso-bobbing dancing (funny side-note: I noticed a kid who was a few years under me at college in the audience who is an Orthodox Jew and also sort of a punk in his spare time, and he was dancing in just the aforementioned manner, and it looked like he was getting really into his davenning). The vocals were highly-reverbed and completely inaudible. The crowd was small and not terribly enthusiastic. If Weekends is going for the type of cultish, sweaty mosh masses that the usual bullshit MICA bands draw, they need a new business model.

And again, I find myself stepping back, because in reality, Weekends was alright. I mean, they're derivative, but they're sort of fun. They do rock out. They twitch and spasm and lurch around with their guitars, as if the instrument is some sort of wriggling snake that is very strong and hard to control. It's loud, and therefore subversive. They seem to be doing what they've rehearsed to do. I guess I'm just getting tired of all these bands that think that reworking the White Stripes model over and over again is the best outlets for their talents. Let's think it through a little more, and develop the concept, eh, guys?

Ray's Hellburger

[monsterburger!]

Everyone knows DC is a burger town. They gave us 5 Guys, which is a gift I'd never exchange. In fact, writing about it right now, I'm thinking of going and getting a burger from there for lunch. Actually, screw that. I packed lunch today. I'll get 5 Guys for dinner.

Anyway, KB and I finally tried the place Serious Eats called the best burger in DC -- even though it's in Arlington, Virginia, technically, which I guess is Metro DC -- Ray's Hellburger. It opened last summer in this strip mall in downtown Arlington. The place is not without affectations. They don't serve fries, which reminded me of Thrasher's, the famous Ocean City fries place, which refuses to serve ketchup, as if any modicum of predictability would compromise the integrity of the whole friggin' place. So no fries with my burger? I can deal. But Ray's recently got rid of their potato salad, too, which is a disappointment, and the only side available really, were these deep-friend cheese balls, which sounded good at first, but were ultimately not at all worth it.

On to the burgers, though. This is a fantastic piece of meat. I had the Let's Get It On burger, which, as you can see from this menu, has applewood bacon, swiss, cheddar, mushrooms, grilled red onions, sauteed peppers, roasted garlic and lettuce and tomato. I added Ray's signature "Diablo sauce," which is a chipotle mayo, because it looked good. I washed it down with an excellent draft Old Dominion root beer.

There are generally two main ways, I think, for a burger like this one -- the type that comes with lots of toppings and a generously-sized (10 oz) patty -- to stand out. One is to think up really cool combinations (The Dizz, in Baltimore, is great at this -- for examples see their Black and Bleu burger, the Mediterranean Burger, etc) of toppings and give the burger a real identity based on a number of different flavors that mash together. The other, is to have a real stand-out rub or very high quality meat, so that the actual burgerrific flavor comes through strong in spite of all the toppings and sauces (come to think of it, The Dizz's Curry Burger and Whiskey Rub burger are examples of this type -- I should really blog about them soon). My experience with Ray's was the latter. They advertise their meat as "premium aged" and "freshly ground" and it really comes through. Especially with a medium rare specimen, like mine, the meat is as much a pleasure as what's on it -- the parts, in other words, are superior to their sum. Let's grade this:

FOOD: A-
Great meat that lives up to its billing, and easily the best burger I've had in DC. I've never been to any of Ray's other spots (Ray's the Steaks, Ray's Classic), but if the quality is emphasized like it is here, I'll buy it. The only reason these vittles fell short of teacher's pet status is that I don't have a lot of patience for restaurateurs who think it's cool to NOT sell sides for the sake of authenticity. Funny, barbecue places never do this, and they're arguably the most meat-focused people in the world.

AMBIENCE: A-
Ray's is a tad crowded. I heard a rumor whilst there that they're moving to a new place relatively soon. But the simple, old-school menu reminded me a bit of Fatburger and the place was lively in general.

BOOZE: A
There was no booze. But man, that was some good root beer.