Where’s My Tip, Because You Just Got Served

July 19th, 2009Blog4 comments

Four Letter Words: Love him or hate him, Gordon Ramsay is brilliant with food. I’m now addicted to his tee vee show The F-Word on BBC Channel 4.

I’ve been describing this as Top Gear with food instead of cars. It’s a pastiche of cooking challenges — a bit of Hell’s Kitchen mixed with Throwdown with Bobby Flay — as well as celebrity interviews, cooking instruction, and various adventures in raising livestock in one’s backyard.

It’s also a really interesting peek into another culture. British culture is vastly different from America in all the little details. Not just terminology like “Christmas lunch” and “Sunday lunch”, but in their methodology and world view. I wish I could back that up with real anecdotal evidence, but it’s something I’m still studying.

Vassup: Saw Brüno with my mates tonight. At last check, Rotten Tomatoes rates it 69% Fresh, which sounds fair. I feel like 69% of the bits hit their target; the remaining 31% felt like filler. Whereas Borat was smashmouth comedy from front to back, Brüno needed time to accelerate. It was the scripted stuff — the stuff that wasn’t out there looking for trouble — that fell flat.

Still a good movie, but I feel like making fun of red state America can only go so far. You want state of the art comedy? EASTBOUND AND DOWN.

So I did end up buying that Grizzly Bear album that iTunes suggested. So perhaps part of me is a hipster. Nothing wrong with that I suppose.

If an album contains a song that exemplifies an emotional quality that I like, I buy it. Sometimes when I listen to a song it feels like an echo of a writing project I’m working on — like it belongs in that project’s “soundtrack”. Then it’s a no-brainer to buy it.

So this album is Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest. The song is “Two Weeks”. Its tone, its quality, even its lyrics fit into a project I’m working on right now. So there it is: I had to have it.