Month: February 2005

“American Idol” – is it me, or is it getting more annoying with each season? (and they’re now in the phase where they’re not focusing on the lousy singers)…

Thanks to the handy dandy VCR, I watched UPN’s “Veronica Mars” and it is a watchable fun show. The detective work is clever – it’s the mind of Nancy Drew meeting the sexy shiny style of Magnum, P.I. (I think it’s a strange combo for me to come up with, but that’s what I’ll come up with), and the cast is attractive. (although, for a cast in high school, they sure look too old).

But, I sure do still dig “House, M.D.” on Fox: crazy Dr. House finally admits that he is addicted to Vicodin, but he still says it’s not a problem. Nope, Dr. House says the pain in his stroke-afflicted leg is the problem and the painkiller would let him do his job. Oh, and he swears the only thing in his life is his job (that of being the gifted diagnostician with the seriously sucky bedside manner). Well, clearly Dr. House is an addict who won’t take the first step of rehab (’cause you really ought to admit that you have a problem). Gripping tv, even if the plots get over the top.

A NY Times profile of an Asian-American Orthodox Jewish performing artist, Rachel Factor in “True to Her Orthodox Beliefs, if Not to Her Roots” by Sarah Bronson:

In many ways, Rachel Factor’s show is typical of one-woman performances: there’s the microphone, the bar stool, the empty stage; several original songs; autobiographical monologues full of humor, pathos, bittersweet memories.

And if the title, “J.A.P.,” might be offensive to Asians or to Jews, who may recognize the shorthand for “Jewish American Princess,” then that is not so unusual either. Performers often lampoon their own heritage, and that is precisely what Ms. Factor, a Japanese-American and unreligious Christian who converted to Orthodox Judaism, is doing.

“If you break down the words of the title, it represents where I’ve come in my life, in terms of my self-image,” she explained in a telephone interview recently. “The meaning of the words are very beautiful. I’m Japanese. And Jewish. And American, just as American as anyone else who was born here. I don’t consider myself a princess, but I consider myself worthy for the first time in my life.”

In the show, Ms. Factor, who was born Christine Horii in Hawaii, relates her journey from a high-kicking Rockette at Radio City Music Hall to Israel, where she now lives with her husband and two children. She is currently on a 41-city American tour, performing to sold-out auditoriums at synagogues, community centers and Jewish high schools, all the audiences filled exclusively with women, as her strict faith demands. [….]

Growing up in Honolulu, Ms. Factor had all the advantages of a prestigious prep-school education, she says in the production, but felt ashamed of her Asian looks. She opens her show by re-enacting her childhood efforts to create creases in her eyelids with tape and eyelash glue.

At 18, she left for Los Angeles to pursue a dance career and quickly found professional gigs, including work as a backup dancer for Jody Watley and Belinda Carlisle, a stint as a Rockette, and jobs in the choruses of the Broadway productions of “Shogun” and “Miss Saigon.” Highlights of her show are the moments she demonstrates, in a long skirt, the moves from her music videos and concert tours.

Despite the ignorant comments she often encountered, like “What country are you from? No, where are you really from?,” she embraced her culture and set out to date Asian men. But she met and fell in love with Todd Factor, a television commercial producer, who told her it was important that his wife be Jewish. Her reaction, as she recalls in her show: “Well, it makes a lot of sense then that you would be dating me!” [….]

“It was a difficult choice,” she said about abandoning public performances in favor of Orthodoxy. “Not only was it my career and my livelihood, it was my artistic outlet and my identity. I thought I couldn’t reconcile Orthodox Judaism with my desire to express myself in the manner I had been doing.” Soon after her conversion, the family moved to Israel, where Mr. Factor could study at a yeshiva for the newly Orthodox.

In Jerusalem, Ms. Factor performed the show, which she had initially written before her second conversion, for a friend, who urged her to repeat it for neighbors. She added a monologue about her Orthodox conversion, and soon women and girls were coming in groups of 40 to hear her speak and sing. Living rooms gave way to local theaters, and tickets sold quickly, particularly to American expatriate Orthodox women who felt validated by the story of a glamorous dancer who had chosen to join their community.

Hmm. So, she felt weird about being Asian in the white man’s world. And, she finds spirituality vitality in Orthodox Judaism and now lives in Israel. Hmm. I wonder what it must be like to be Asian in Israel. Do people there still ask the stupid question of “Where are you really from?”

R.W. Apple, Jr., of the NY Times discusses the savoriness of Puerto Rican cuisine in the early 21st Century, in “Puerto Rico, Flavored with Contradictions.” Just reading the article made me feel full:

Far from the cobbled streets of Old San Juan, in the shimmering new Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, Wilo Benet has developed a menu at once sophisticated, innovative and (with few exceptions) grounded in indigenous traditions and ingredients. After stints in the vaunted kitchens of the Water Club and Le Bernardin in New York, Mr. Benet came home to Puerto Rico and continued to soak up influences from chefs as diverse as Paul Prudhomme in New Orleans and Jean Vigato of Apicius in Paris.

Now he presides over Pikayo, off the museum’s lobby, a restaurant filled with modern Puerto Rican art, divided by frosted glass partitions and gauzy screens, furnished with ample chairs (with a pillow at the base of the diner’s back) and washed by changing, soft-hued lights. This is a big-time room, frequented by the city’s elite.

Betsey [ak.a. Mrs. Apple] and I and our chum Susana Torruella Leval, San Juan-born but long resident in Manhattan, were impressed by the kitchen’s artistry: not only the way the food was cooked but the way it looked on the plates. All of us loved a buttery dish of tender Japanese squid, flavored with roasted garlic and cilantro, and tuna tartare with spicy peanut sauce, a ribbon of balsamic vinegar and pine nuts. I was completely hooked by fat, flavorful grilled shrimp topped with smoky, finely shredded chorizo, nestled on a beurre blanc infused with soursop, a lushly sweet-and-tart tropical fruit. Orange shrimp, deep-red chorizo and off-white sauce: it made an edible color study.

Ah…

The past week has been dizzying, not the least because I had (have) one of those nasty colds, which is down to an annoying cough. My brother went off to San Francisco to make his fortune. P– and I have been making random progress with our Japan/Taiwan trip in March. We’re emailing to Taiwan, skyping to Malaysia, and writing letters to my councilman from Bensenhurst in Inuyama. My cousin T- is in on a flythrough, lamenting on the lack of IP materials available in Chinese law schools. We went to Doyers Vietnamese, which is basically the Vietnamese version of Wo Hop — in the middle of the most secluded place in Manhattan’s Chinatown, but incredibly cheap food. So cheap in fact that we actually spent more money on dessert at Cha Cha’s In Bocca Al Lupo Cafe in Little Italy afterwards.

At least it’s not the Amazing Race, which ended last week in a relatively disappointing fashion. Well, we’ll have a whole new set of people in 2 weeks. They’re casting for Race number 8, which will have teams composed of 4 family members. We tossed around the idea of me with P–, P–‘s sister and her husband. Boy, that would be something!

V-day was spent in our tradition of going to Kam Suh, a Korean restaurant on E 32nd St. For some reason, there was no problem getting a table. We had oyster pancakes (we could have done without because the free pan chan appertizers also included them), bulgogi, kalbi, and kimchi gigae. We finished the whole thing — I don’t know how. P- had done some Crate and Barrel shopping, finding some nice throw rugs, as well as a really cute Valentine’s Day card.

Hope you’re all having a nice V-day.

NY Times article: “Between Truth and Lies, An Unprintable Ubiquity,” by Peter Edidin – profiles the story of Harry G. Frankfurter, a Princeton philosophy professor, and his essay. “On Bull—-” (NY Times, as a family publication, couldn’t exactly print out the title, but you and I and the rest of the universe can pretty much figure it out; be advised that the appearances of the word “bull” in brackets below were what the Times had, not any editing on my part!):

The opening paragraph of the 67-page essay is a model of reason and composition, repeatedly disrupted by that single obscenity:

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much [bull]. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize [bull] and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry.”

The essay goes on to lament that lack of inquiry, despite the universality of the phenomenon. “Even the most basic and preliminary questions about [bull] remain, after all,” Mr. Frankfurt writes, “not only unanswered but unasked.”

The balance of the work tries, with the help of Wittgenstein, Pound, St. Augustine and the spy novelist Eric Ambler, among others, to ask some of the preliminary questions – to define the nature of a thing recognized by all but understood by none.

What is [bull], after all? Mr. Frankfurt points out it is neither fish nor fowl. Those who produce it certainly aren’t honest, but neither are they liars, given that the liar and the honest man are linked in their common, if not identical, regard for the truth.

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth,” Mr. Frankfurt writes. “A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.”

The bull artist, on the other hand, cares nothing for truth or falsehood. The only thing that matters to him is “getting away with what he says,” Mr. Frankfurt writes. An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to [bull] “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it,” he writes. “He pays no attention to it at all.”

And this makes him, Mr. Frankfurt says, potentially more harmful than any liar, because any culture and he means this culture rife with [bull] is one in danger of rejecting “the possibility of knowing how things truly are.” It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.

The reader is left to imagine a culture in which institutions, leaders, events, ethics feel improvised and lacking in substance. [….]

For Mr. Frankfurt, who says it has always been his ambition to move philosophy “back to what most people think of as philosophy, which is a concern with the problems of life and with understanding the world,” the book might be considered a successful achievement. But he finds he is still trying to get to the bottom of things, and hasn’t arrived.

“When I reread it recently,” he said at home, “I was sort of disappointed. It wasn’t as good as I’d thought it was. It was a fairly superficial and incomplete treatment of the subject.”

“Why,” he wondered, “do we respond to [bull] in such a different way than we respond to lies? When we find somebody lying, we get angry, we feel we’ve been betrayed or violated or insulted in some way, and the liar is regarded as deceptive, deficient, morally at fault.”

Why we are more tolerant of [bull] than lying is something Mr. Frankfurt believes would be worth considering.

“Why is lying regarded almost as a criminal act?” he asked, while bull “is sort of cuddly and warm? It’s outside the realm of serious moral criticism. Why is that?”

Hmm. Curiously interesting. But, I still wonder – wouldn’t it have been easier for the Times to just print “B.S.” than putting in “bull” in brackets? Or, is the abbreviation “B.S.” also considered profanity by itself?

A NY Times article on the wok, by Julia Moskin:

WHEN Grace Young’s family went to restaurants, her father always insisted that they sit right next to the swinging door to the kitchen. A liquor salesman who felt at home in every restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown, her father said food had to be eaten just moments out of the wok, while it is still fresh, hot and exuding wok hay, a Cantonese term, unknown in other parts of China, that translates loosely as “wok energy” or “wok breath.”

Wok hay is what happens when excellent ingredients – like ginger, noodles, shrimp, walnuts or Chinese chives – meet a wok crackling with heat. It is both a taste and aroma and something else, too, a lively freshness that prickles your nose and makes you impatient for that first taste, like the smell of steak just off the grill or a tomato right off the vine in August. Food with wok hay tastes intensely of itself.

“Wok hay makes the difference between a good stir-fry and a great one,” said Ms. Young, who traveled to China in 2000 and 2002 to study and document wok cooking and traditions. Her book, “The Breath of a Wok” (Simon & Schuster, 2004), is both an attempt to define wok hay and a guide to achieving it in an American kitchen. “It’s something that you create with a hot wok,” Ms. Young said, “but it’s also something you release that is already in the food.”

Today is the first day of the Lunar New Year, a 15-day celebration of renewal, which is the most important holiday of the Chinese year: Christmas, New Year’s Day, Easter and Yom Kippur all bundled together. It is considered the most auspicious time to buy a new wok or other cooking tools.[….]

And, fitting in with the holiday, I saw “The Wedding Date” movie the other day: cheesy movie, nothing too taxing, but heavy on the idea that all you need is love…