Ron's View

A few weeks ago, Gail and I spent a weekend in Detroit. I described the trip only briefly in a post that had a minimal restaurant roundup and a few comments on the Detroit Tigers’ baseball field, Comerica Park. I returned to Comerica park in a second post that contained photos Gail took with her phone. There was much more to say, but I never got around to it. And now I’m back from a second trip to Detroit, so it’s time for another restaurant roundup.
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I’ve been silent all week, but I’m back, with a backlog of posts that I hope to get written. I was out of town and continuously busy from early Monday morning to late Wednesday night. Yesterday I needed to get caught up on various other things, like watching Monday night’s episode of 24 and Tuesday night’s episode of NCIS, as well as picking up from school the final papers for my course. The most pressing item now is reading the papers and determining course grades, which are due on Monday. I probably shouldn’t be writing blog posts until I’ve completed that. But I will. More soon.

Last night I wrote a post on newly-announced NYT columnist Ross Douthat in which, as an example of his writing, I quoted from his recent post on RNC chairman Michael Steele. A couple of days ago, the New Yorker’s George Packer gave his thoughts on Douthat’s selection as the NYT’s new conservative columnist. Packer notes that “Douthat, the Times’s choice to replace Bill Kristol on its Op-Ed page, is so thoroughly his predecessor’s opposite that the selection is itself an admission and correction of a mistake. … this excellent choice shows that the Times has begun to see its conservative columnist as something more than a quota hire.”

Packer goes on to comment very briefly on all the NYT columnists, and I found his observations sufficiently interesting that I wanted to share them. Here they are (italics mine):
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Ross Douthat (with co-author Reihan Salam)

Two days ago the New York Times announced that Atlantic writer, editor, and blogger Ross Douthat would become their newest columnist, ending weeks of speculation about who would replace Bill Kristol, joining David Brooks in the conservative-columnist slot. I have read some of Douthat’s work in the Atlantic. I look at his blog from time to time — mostly when references are made to his posts by fellow Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan — but I haven’t subscribed to it. In particular, I haven’t read enough to form a clear sense of his thinking or to decide how eager I am to read his columns. But everything I’ve read about his selection by writers I like is positive.

Douthat will be blogging at the Atlantic for another month. I looked over some of his recent posts and enjoyed his comments on Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele (and Sarah Palin). These comments are in a post yesterday afternoon, Douthat’s first since the announcement of his move. An excerpt follows:

I think Steele’s stumbles, while different in form from Sarah Palin’s unsuccessful broadcast-network interviews (he’s said too much; she didn’t say enough … and was tongue-tied doing it), reflect a similar underlying difficulty – the attempt to brazen through an intellectual vacuum with charisma alone. Both Steele and Palin are extremely charismatic, as American politicians go, which is a big reason why Republicans of different stripes – moderates for the Marylander, conservatives for the Alaskan – have been so excited about them. But they’ve both attempted (or been asked) to chart a new direction for the Right on style alone, and they’ve floundered as soon as they’ve been pressed for substance. Steele has responded by telling his interlocutors whatever they want to hear, Palin responded by telling her interlocutors next to nothing at all – and the results, in both cases, are and were unfortunate.

The point here, to return to an earlier theme, isn’t that a brilliant rat-a-tat-tat of bright policy ideas from either Steele or Palin’s lips would suddenly convert an audience of fence-sitting voters to rock-ribbed conservatism. It’s that given conservatism’s current straits, having something intelligent and fresh-sounding to say about how your political persuasion bears on the great issues of the day ought to be a baseline for rising right-of-center politicians. Insufficient, yes, but necessary all the same – not least because if you haven’t figured out something smart-sounding to say in advance, all the charisma in the world won’t save you from saying something foolish.

Watermelon -- Alinea

I wrote a post on Olive Garden in January, inspired by an article by Wall Street Journal restaurant writer Raymond Sokolov comparing Olive Garden to the great Chicago Italian restaurant Spiaggia. In passing, I noted that we had thought of eating at Spiaggia when we went to Chicago last November, or at Alinea, but the possibility vanished when we decided instead to see the Lang Lang concert at the Symphony Center on our one free night. However, I didn’t elaborate on Alinea. I return to Alinea now because I read the most fascinating review of it today.

The review is by Zeke Emanuel, brother of President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm and health policy advisor to Peter Orszag, Obama’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. The Atlantic has just launched a new food site that features an article by Emanuel on dining in DC with the comedian Larry David. This prompted Ezra Klein, at his blog, to write about the Emanuel article and to include Emanuel’s review of Alinea. Klein gives no reference, so I don’t know where the review might first have appeared. I can only refer you back to Klein’s own post.

Or quote the review in its entirety. Let’s do that. Here are two sentences from it to whet your appetite. “Four themes emerge from the dishes. The first is that no matter how experienced a diner you are, no matter how many of the nation’s premier restaurants you have eaten at, you will taste things you never knew existed.” The review follows, below the fold.
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Porter Creek Pinot Noir

I saw online last night that Eric Asimov had an article in the NYT today about California Pinot Noirs, and since we took a trip to Northern Sonoma County last October to visit vineyards, I went staight for the article. It turned out to be written from Healdsburg, where we stayed. And it turns out to be the featured article in the Dining section of the print edition, with a cute accompanying drawing of a tipped-over wine glass with red wine pouring out into the shape of California.

In reading the article last night, I was of course on the lookout for mentions of the vineyards we visited. The thrust of the article is that a lot of California pinots are overdone, but there is now a most welcome counter-revolution, with several vintners returning to lighter wines. Here is the opening passage:
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When I went through our newspapers this morning, I opened the Wall Street Journal’s fluffy section — Personal Journal — looked at an article on its front page about a feature at tripadvisor.com that lets you compare the real costs of booking with one airline versus another on a particular route (including baggage fees, food, and so on), then read an article on the back page about the Big East basketball conference’s annual tournament that started tonight at Madison Square Garden. The Big East is the biggest of the major conferences, with 16 teams, and a noteworthy feature of this year’s tournament is that all 16 are invited, not just the top 8 or 12. It was an interesting article, to the extent that reading about the end-of-regular-season, pre-NCAA-tournament conference championships are interesting. But I didn’t think much about the fact that there was such an article. The WSJ has articles on just about any imaginable topic.

Late this afternoon, I looked at the WSJ’s front section, which evidently I had failed to do in my first pass this morning, and I noticed the banner headline on a green background stating “It’s Official – Sports in the Journal D12.” Wow! Sports in the WSJ. I mean, I knew it was due to happen. Ever since Murdoch bought it, it has slowly moved towards a regular paper. And as local papers die (our own Seattle Post-Intelligencer, owned by Hearst Corporation, is likely to die this week), the diversifying WSJ will be better positioned to compete with what are in effect its only national competitors, the NYT and USA Today. But still, a WSJ sports section? I turned immediately to D12 to see what they would be covering. And found an article about the Big East basketball conference’s annual tournament. Somehow I was oblivious this morning to the fact that I was reading the inaugural WSJ sports page. I turned back a page, anticipating that there might be more sports pages, but there weren’t. One page in from the back was the usual Leisure & Arts page. But it did have another sports article, one with a business slant written by Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith, in which the economics of the NCAA basketball tournament is discussed.

The Zimbalist article had no real surprises, but I can’t resist quoting two comments in which Zimbalist can’t quite restrain himself from pointing out, in passing, the absurdity of big-time college sports. First, in a discussion of the finances of major college basketball, he observes:
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A few months ago I wrote a post, Thomas Friedman and Conventional Wisdom, in which I used quotes from Bill McKibben (in his NY Review of Books review of Friedman’s book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America) and Glenn Greenwald (in a then-new post on his blog) to explain what has long bugged me about Friedman. I can’t resist returning to this subject because yesterday (thanks to a current Greenwald post, on a different subject) I discovered a brilliant appraisal of Friedman and his book by Matt Taibbi that appeared two months ago at New York Press.

Taibbi’s article is more than a little snarky, but in an informative way, and I highly recommend it. I especially recommend its discussion of Friedman’s extrapolation from a graph, with suggestions of other extrapolations one can make with Friedman’s methodology. I’ll end with one typical passage:

Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot, Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days: “I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.

Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: “I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, ‘We need better headlights for our tri-plane.’” And off he goes. You the reader end up spending so much time wondering what Dubai, BP and all those Balinese workers have to do with the rest of the story that you don’t notice that tri-planes don’t have headlights. And by the time you get all that sorted out, your well-lit tri-plane is flying from chapter to chapter delivering a million geo-green pizzas to a million Noahs on a million Arks. And you give up. There’s so much shit flying around the book’s atmosphere that you don’t notice the only action is Friedman talking to himself.

John Yoo

I haven’t posted in a while about Bush, the rule of law, torture, and the eight-year reign of unconstitutionality. Partly this is because I’m not an expert on any of this, so I am more likely to insert long quotes from others than to say anything original. And it’s partly because when Joel was home in December for the holidays he regularly made the criticism that my typical posts are cut-and-paste jobs, consisting of a couple of lines of my own followed by a long quote from Glenn Greenwald’s blog. Joel had a point. I am a huge admirer of Greenwald’s blog, and invariably anything I might want to write when it comes to Bush and the law Greenwald has already written about with greater insight than I can bring to the matter. So why not just quote him? But because of Joel’s comment, rather than quoting Greenwald, I have simply shied away from the subject. Well, today I’m jumping back in. I’ll have lots of quotes, but not from Greenwald.
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We got back an hour ago from taking Joel to the airport for his return flight to Boston. He’s been here for the week on his mid-semester break. His normal pattern has been to take the overnight JetBlue flight back to Boston, but when we made the reservations, I asked if he wanted to try the Alaska daytime non-stop and he said sure. The only problem is that it leaves at 8:50 AM, hours before he usually awakens, and worse yet, Daylight Saving Time started this morning, making the departure even an hour earlier than that, in effect. We all got up around 6:00 AM (5:00 AM as far as our bodies knew). We’re home now, and Joel should be sitting on the plane at the gate.

Anyway, one sees a lot of weird art on people’s blogs, so I decided this morning, while we were waiting for Joel to get ready, that I could do it too. I used found objects left over from last night. For a farewell dinner, we went to the Westlake branch of the superb Seattle pizzeria Tutta Bella. This has become something of a pattern, since it’s not far from Jessica’s condo, making it a convenient meeting spot, and since Jessica will eat the food there. To start, we had a large Salerno salad (insalata di Salerno, described on the menu as “Small fresh mozzarella, crunchy shaved fennel, cherry tomato halves, cucumbers, basil, romaine, dijon-balsamic vinaigrette & fresh cracked pepper.: The fennel made all the difference. Excellent salad. And we also had a small Caesar salad (insalata di Cesare), since that’s what Jessica prefers. It’s description: Romaine, house made focaccia croutons, shaved parmigiano reggiano, classic caesar dressing. Then we shared 3 pizzas, the house Tutta Bella Pizza (Pomodoro San Marzano, Isernio’s Italian sausage, fresh mozzarella, roasted onions, roasted mushrooms, Grana Padano); the Ciro (Pomodoro San Marzano, prosciutto di Parma, fresh mozzarella, roasted mushrooms, slivered garlic, fresh basil, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil); and the Regina Margherita (Pomodoro San Marzano, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil, Grana Padano). They were all excellent. These were accompanied by a bottle of Planeta la Segreta Rosso (50% Nero d’Avola with an explosion of fresh fruit balanced by a zesty spiciness), and followed by small orders of chocolate and raspberry gelato. A few slices came home in a box.

Later last night, I decided to squeeze 6 grapefruits to make juice for Gail, Joel, and me to share. Joel ate two slices of the leftover pizza overnight and the final two before we left for the airport this morning. The result was that we now had a pizza box and 12 grapefruit halves that I had to bring out to the yard waste bin. What better way to bring out the grapefruit than in the pizza box? I piled them in. And that’s when inspiration struck. I tried a couple of arrangements before arriving at the one pictured above. The installation won’t last long. It is destined to find its way into the bin before the end of the day. But the photo above will preserve it indefinitely, as well as preserving memories of our night out.

If you aren’t excited by my art, perhaps you’ll prefer the art captured in the photo below (HT: Andrew Sullivan.) I wouldn’t blame you for preferring it. It is the work of the Norwegian artist Rune Guneriussen, more of whose work can be seen by clicking the links here. I still have a ways to go in developing my compositional skills.