Author: Josh Philip Ross

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[joelicious]

Josh and Jenny at Joe's ShanghaiNew York City life is not all politics and broken windows. With Jenny working these days down near Wall Street, I thought it would be nice to end our week by meeting somewhere in between for dinner. My colleague Young decided to join us and suggested an excellent Chinatown restaurant we’d never tried, Joe’s Shanghai.

Tucked away on narrow Pell Street, Joe’s is pretty much the quintessential New York Chinatown dining experience. There’s only the barest stab at decor, you have to wait for a table that you’ll share with other parties, and the service is rapid and minimally communicative. The only thing that could possibly distinguish Joe’s from a dozen similar joints is the food, and Joe’s pulls it off.

The specialty, of course, is soup dumplings (pictured above), which are filled with ground meat swimming in their own little pools of rich, vinegary broth. But their other dishes were also exquisite. We tried the shrimp fried rice cake, which consisted of chewy medallions of sticky pounded rice that was somewhere between a noodle and a dumpling, and bean curd home style, which was exquisitely crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside. Joe’s Shanghai is definitely worthy of return visits!

On our way back to the subway, we stopped for our usual Chinatown desert of egg tarts, this time opting for the Portuguese style, which involves caramelized sugar on top.

I love Chinatown.

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[how i spent my saturday morning]


We park our car on Lena’s Place. This is not the actual name of the street. The actual name is Huntington Street, and we park in the alleyway that dead-ends at the Gowanus Canal, with cement factories on either side and the elevated F-line subway looming overhead, wrapped in its protective black matting to prevent chunks of decaying concrete from falling on peoples heads (and cars).

The block where we park is not a pleasant block. There are piles of broken glass, random garbage, heaps of charred refuse. Lots of used condoms. With no residents, no one seems overly concerned that the city does not in fact clean this particular block. Ever. Which is why we park there: anywhere else and we’d have to move the car for weekly alternate-side street cleaning. But not on Lena’s Place. Also, the street is wide enough that we are less likely to get sideswiped and lose a mirror than on other blocks.

The reason we call this block Lena’s Place is because that’s a better name than Crack Alley, which is what we were calling it before. I have never actually seen anyone do crack on Lena’s Place, but it seems like the sort of thing one would do there, or the sort of place where one would do that sort of thing.

In any case, Lena’s Place was the name we gave to a restaurant in our little neighborhood of Seoksu Sam-dong back in Korea. We never worked out the restaurant’s proper name, but for some time we’d been calling it the Staring Place, in reference to an uncomfortable meal we’d eaten there during which an elderly Korean woman sat across from us and watched the entire time, occasionally giving us complex verbal instructions that we obviously couldn’t understand. The restaurant was, however, not half bad, plus they had worked out how to deliver to our apartment without giving us trouble. So we decided we needed a better name for the joint than The Staring Place. It turned out that the owners were the parents of one of my students, a young girl who used Lena as her English name (so we didn’t even have her name right). In honor of this middling student whom I occasionally caught cheating, we began referring to the restaurant as Lena’s Place rather than The Staring Place.

Unfortunately, renaming can take you only so far. When I went out to the car today to run some errands, I found that the window on the passenger-side door had been smashed in, filling the interior of our car with tiny bits of glass. The vandals had stolen almost nothing — our change tray was tossed on the floor and the change was gone, but a dollar bill was left sitting on the seat, as was a pile of admittedly not very marketable CDs — Pimsleur Russian, a Boss Hog album, some Central Asian music. But the window was gone, glass was everywhere, and worse yet, there were downy feathers all over the interior of the car. Either some pigeons flew in and made sweet love, or else the vandal tore his down jacket on the broken glass. I hope it was the latter, both because that’s far less disgusting and because the fucker deserved it.

Fortunately our insurance will cover it. I sort of assumed that if we parked on the street, eventually we would lose a window, so I got the deductible waiver for glass repair. I took it to a place on Fourth Ave. where a pleasant, balding fellow named Mohamed took care of everything in a couple of hours.

So with all the windows back in place, I took the car back home and parked it — where else? — right back on Lena’s Place.

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[musical friends meme]

So I picked this up from my cousin Louise over at her blog: What music do I link with my various friends and acquaintances? Metallica reminds Louise of me because she knew me back in my middle school days, when I was convinced that Metallica was the greatest band in the world. (I was a serious true believer.)

So I’ll start with Louise, and work through other friends to see what I come up with.

Louise: Schoolhouse Rock. I’m just a little too young to have caught Schoolhouse Rock as a kid, so I was introduced to it by Louise.

Jenny: This is a tough one — we’ve spent so long together now that a lot of music reminds me of her — but after her semester in Salamanca during college, she came home with a CD that she played, slightly apologetically, of a Latin pop star she’d really come to like: Shakira.

Daniel: Daniel and I were music buddies for a long time, and he was instrumental in shaping my current tastes, so as with Jenny, it’s kind of meaningless to pin it down to one particular artist. But of all the artists I didn’t like until Daniel taught me to hear them, probably my favorite today is Talking Heads.

T: We also shared a lot of music during our long relationship, but two artists in particular stand out: Yukari Fresh, a treasure she found in Japan (and whose music is woefully underappreciated in America), and Solas, the Celtic band good enough to get me to go with Thekla to the town of Doolin in County Clare, Ireland, and while away the evening in a pub, sipping Bulmer’s cider and listening to very, very good Irish musicians. (It was a brave sacrifice.) I also think of Thekla in association with Erin McKeown, whom we first saw at the Postcrypt coffee house on the Columbia campus (where I met Thekla) when Erin was just a 19-year-old bundle of hippie wool tumbling in from Brown University to blow our minds at an open stage night, and Noe Venable, who went to high school with T.

Lori: This is the Eskimo one, who I dated back in college, and she’s the one who convinced me that I should really give Everclear a try (the band, not the beverage). Their album Sparkle and Fade is the only good thing they ever did, but it’s a lyrically rich, underrated gem from the mid-nineties era of post-punk, post-grunge hard rock that would’ve been working-class except nobody had a job. (Did we really elect a second Bush?)

Berit: The lyrics of Everclear’s “Santa Monica” are a good summary of how I felt about my relationship with Berit as it collapsed over the summer when I met Lori. But the musician who brings Berit most strongly to mind is, of course, PJ Harvey, whose power to make Berit squirm with erotic delight was something I could never match.

Lorie: This is the non-Eskimo Lorie, the one I’m still friends with (and really need to call). Back in high school, when we first dated, I spent a lot of time lying in her room, inhaling second-hand cigarette smoke and staring up at her magazine photos of Mike Patton’s torso (which was very nice in those days). Lorie and Ashley were rabid fans of Mr. Bungle, Patton’s first band (Ash even had the side of her head shaved, just like Mike), and also fans of Faith No More, whose “Epic” video is a classic document of the late-eighties thrash-funk moment, when dressing like Arsenio Hall while rapping over heavy metal briefly seemed like a great idea. (Trivia: Though FNM T-shirts insisted that “THE FISH LIVES!”, the fish in fact died. And the answer to the question “What is it?” was widely agreed to be “Losing your virginity.”)

Ashley: Ashley was also a music buddy for many years, so there’s a ton of music I associate with her, especially all those obscure Bay Area bands we used to go see: Bluchunks, Fungo Mungo, the Limbomaniacs, the Deli Creeps, MCM and the Monster, Dizzybam. But it was later, after I’d come to New York for college and Ashley had moved to Norwalk, Connecticut, that we would spend weekends in her odd little attic apartment above a flower shop on a windswept highway intersection, drowning our loneliness with Rolling Rocks, excessive flirtation and hours of listening to Soundgarden (What is it with Ashley and fish-abuse videos?) and Morphine.

Lauren: Bhangra, yo!

My father: Stan Getz. Lester Young. Oscar Peterson. Miles Davis. Slim Gaillard. Lord Buckley. Crosby Stills & Nash. Sly and the Family Stone, who he and my mom used to see live at the Electric Circus.

My mother: All of that, plus Ray Charles, who played at the first rock concert she ever went to.

My sister: Little Mermaid. Sorry, Shana. I know you’re older now — heck, I’m going to your college graduation this spring — but you did watch your Little Mermaid video about 10,000 times.

Did I miss anything obvious? I don’t think so — at least not involving anyone I still know. Enjoy the music.

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[phone scripter to the stars]

As many of you know, I have been pitching in a bit to help Steve Harrison’s Congressional campaign, mostly doing bits of writing and editing.

As part of that effort, I did some major editing of a phone script for automated calls, to be delivered by none other than President Bill Clinton. Someone from the Harrison campaign was kind enough to let me hear the finished product, and sure enough, Bill Clinton is reading the script I handed in!

I have been promised a WAV file, but not until after the campaign, just to be sure no obscure regulations or rules of protocol are violated. As soon as I get it, I will of course link to it.

In the meantime, there have been a lot of great developments on the Harrison front, including an extremely tepid endorsement of Fossella by the conservative Staten Island Advance (punchline: “On balance, [Fossela]’s the better candidate for Congress, though we’re less than thrilled to concede that”) and a very strong endorsement of Harrison from the New York Times. You can read all the latest news on Harrison at Blue Spot.

Go, team!

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[actual substance]

While the GOP attacks Kerry’s botched comments on Iraq, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee attacks the Republican Congress and the Bush administration for their botched war in Iraq. The difference couldn’t be clearer.


[Via Daily Kos.]

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[old media still matters]

In the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about the impact of new technologies and new sources of information on the political process. But the fact remains that the the mainstream media — newspapers, magazines, talk radio and especially television — still set the terms of our public discourse.

That’s why the video below is so satisfying: it’s the White House press corps literally laughing at and mocking the official Republican spin six days before the midterm elections. Mouthpiece Tony Snow, trying to get some traction with the irrelevant story about John Kerry’s unfortunate (and genuinely embarrassing) misstatement, claims he’s actually trying to help Kerry by offering him a chance to apologize. And the press corps are having none of it: listen for the question at the end.


This is just further evidence that the GOP is running a campaign almost entirely focused on fantasy. Keep in mind that John Kerry is, at the moment, merely the junior senator from Massachusetts, and not currently running for office. And he’s being attacked for a comment that was clearly a slip of the tongue — he failed to say out loud a few crucial words that were on the page in front of him.

What else have the Republicans got? In Virginia, Jim Webb is under attack for the sexual perversions included in his novels about men driven to depravity during the Vietnam War. He’s being attacked for depicting horrifying behavior in fiction, while the vice president is out declaring actual horrifying behavior to be a no-brainer. Rush Limbaugh displayed deep confusion between acting and reality when he accused Michael J. Fox of “acting” because he “depicted” the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, which he actually has, instead of coming across smooth and polished, which he may no longer even be able to do.

Other than that, there are scary pictures of Osama Bin Laden — you know, the guy who attacked the United States during the Bush administration and remains at large. Oh, and in Tennessee, you have racist sexual innuendo, backed by nothing. And that’s pretty much it. Pure fantasy.

[Via TPM Cafe.]

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[sex and violence]

There has long been a debate over whether pornography encourages rape by normalizing misogyny and arousing passions, or discourages rape by providing an alternative outlet for lustful urges. Unfortunately, this debate has generally been religious rather than clinical: instead of basing their positions on data, partisans have created moral edifices around their underlying sense of what should be true.

According to an article in Slate, there is now meaningful evidence that access to Internet pornography reduces the incidence of rape. There is also evidence that violent movies reduce violent crime. Really. Check out the article and make up your own mind.

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[anjalic]

Mistress of Disguise | Seven X Eight | Feline Woman by Anjali

Twelve long years have passed since Portishead first unleashed Dummy upon an unsuspecting world, tapping into a deep, hitherto unnoticed craving for ethereal female vocals over moody, noir-tinged tracks with sophisticated electronic production and hip-hop beats. Eight years after Portishead’s final album, the revelatory PNYC Live, where can one turn to satisfy this peculiar, overly specific jones?

Well, if you’re willing to forgo the extraordinary Portishead scratching in favor of some sitar and don’t mind your spy movie music taking on an Austin Powers vibe, I suggest you give Anjali a try.

Formerly the drummer in UK Riot Grrl band the Voodoo Queens, Anjali Bhatia now claims descent from the Bhatti line of maharajas of Jaisalmer. Whether that’s true or not, her music has ventured as far from Riot Grrl radicalism as her identity. One can hear traces not only of UK trip-hop, but also of Cibo Matto and other late-nineties electronic experimenters, not to mention heavy doses of Anglo-Indian fusion, tinged with old-fashioned Bollywood goodness.

Find more MP3s at Bazaar Sounds, Anjali’s Beggar’s Banquet Site, and her personal web page.