I remember a vague debate back when we entered this decade about what we would call it.  You know, what it will say in those Time Life coffee table books summing up the decade or – hey, a new phenomenon since ’99 – what the VH-1 “I Love the…” shows would term it.  Those shows are a little strange, by the way. We’re reminiscing too young!  Sure, the ’70s had Grease about the ’50s, the ’80s had Dirty Dancing about the ’60s, but we have stuff now about the ’80s and ’90′s?  And lots of it?  I heard somewhere that someone somewhere – maybe social scientists or a think tank – have documented that popular culture is reminiscing at a higher rate, getting nostalgic quicker about more recent times.  That is just weird!  It would be like listening to Gonna Be Starting Something  IRONICALLY when Michael Jackson had just put out Dangerous.  Or something.

Maybe I’m just getting older. Full moon this New Year’s Eve – the first one in 19 years.  Where were you 19 years ago?  I was seven.  Don’t remember what I did for New Year’s, probably didn’t get to stay up.  What could the full moon mean for people this evening?  Anyway, a tangent is oozing out of my blob – it’s about to go out immediately like slime through the vents of a slime infested building in a horror movie, out into cyberspace.  So exciting! – I mean my blog, if I had an editor, this would be neater.  (Shout out to the editors out there.)

I nominate the new decade moniker The Thousand Ands.  We never said “Class of Ought One!  Yes!”  We said “Class of Two Thousand And One!  Yaaaaa!”  I will miss saying it – the addition of “Twenty (Ten)” to the language is already weirding me out.  Just kidding.  Gotta move forward.

So what do you think??  The Aughts or the Thousand Ands.  It didn’t take us much time to say it during the decade itself.  (Peace, decade)

Vote here:

by Lauren Pabst, Contextual Healing

Many of this Summer’s blockbuster fantasy movies pit humans against machines, even as Americans find our government on the robotic side of the real thing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Part I

i, Autobot

“I got you a webcam so we can chat 24/7” says a college-bound Shia LaBeouf, ever so cooly, to love interest Megan Fox via cell phone early on in the trailer for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, which opens today in theaters nationwide.

“Sounds cute, I can’t wait,” Fox replies cutely, flatly.

This little digital commercial is slipped prominently into the promo, just before clips of car chases and robot behemoths firebombing aircraft carriers, walking all over famous landmarks (Brooklyn Bridge! Pyramids of Giza!), busting up freeways and placing our visually pleasing heroes into jeopardy.

The flirty little exchange fits perfectly with the overall tone of Transformers, a fantasy action adventure based on the animated series from the 1980s, in which two squads of alien robots – one good, one evil – duke it out on battlefield Earth.

Though LeBoeuf and company will spend most of the movie along with the good Autobots fighting the evil Deceptecons, this little suggestive exchange aimed at the teenaged, digital device-consuming, YouTubing generation puts all of that robot-blasting in context. Technology (of the type that rumbles out of a tractor-trailer disguise to snatch your car off the highway) can be the enemy… but (in real life, now) before anything else, it is our trusted sidekick – our little digital friend. It’s what allows us to keep in touch with our sexy girl/boyfriends.

Since many of the summer blockbusters deal with the fantasy theme of man versus machine, it seems an appropriate time to take a look at our everyday relationship to robots. While Terminator: Salvation imagines malevolent killer robots programmed by an evil, autonomous, human-hunting computer program the Transformers series offers two sides of the coin – there are evil Deceptecons, but there are also helpful, righteous Autobots. And through our shared righteousness, humanity is on the side of the Autobots.

The friendship of Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky and Optimus Prime in Transformers is one more entry in the lovable-robot canon of American cinema. As evidenced by last summer’s WALL-E, as well as R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars, Haley Joel Osment in A.I., Johnny 5 and the little guy from Batteries Not Included, the friendly robot is well established in our pop-culture consciousness. And let’s face it, friendly robots populate our life – from our trusty cell phone to our colorful, cute iPod, our indispensable laptop computer, our efficient microwave oven, and yes the webcam that allows us to chat with our significant other “24/7.”  Robots today provide unparalleled amounts of stimulation – mentally and in some cases even physically.

But in the Summer of 2009, the theme of man vs. machine is too significant and evocative for us to ignore. Certain other real-life battles are playing out right now, around the world. And like the heroic Autobots, we owe it to ourselves to transform a bit – our point of view, that is. There is definitely more than meets the eye.

Part II

“I’ll Be Back”

The Terminator was the 1984 action movie hit, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a humanoid killer robot from the year 2029, sent back in time to the Reagan era to kill the mother of the as-yet unborn John Connor. Connor would grow up to lead a rebellion against the evil machines that would take over Earth – an Air Force computer program called Skynet had become self-aware somewhere around the turn of the 21^st Century, and was now bent on destroying the human race.

In Terminator 2 (1991), Schwarzenegger was back, this time as a benevolent bodyguard-bot, reprogrammed by the future John Connor and sent back to 1995 to protect his mom and his young self.

Now, twenty-five years after the original, there is a new Terminator movie, the actor who embodied the original killing machine has been “reprogrammed” yet again as the Governor of California, and Terminator-like killer robots zoom around blowing up people. But just like Arnold, these robots work for us.

I felt a bit of cognitive dissonance watching the new Terminator: Salvation in a half-full darkened, cold theater on a hot June afternoon. The scenes of the nightmarish Terminator robots hunting the brave humans of the Resistance were for us images to eat popcorn to, while the real thing is taking place half a world away.

The machines formerly known as Predator Drones are unmanned flying vehicles capable of bombing targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq with Hellfire missiles as they are operated remotely by pilots in an air-conditioned room on an Army base in places like Nevada. The U.S. Defense Department first admitted to arming these unmanned drones on October 25, 2002; they previously had been known to be used only for surveillance purposes.

The first intended targets of these Predator Drones were suspected al-Qaeda members. The drones have since been used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. From just a handful seven years ago, the U.S. now has over 5,300 drones in operation – some as small as insects. Aerial drones also patrol the U.S.-Mexico border in the name of surveillance – these are currently unarmed.

In the words of one senior Bush administration official, as quoted by P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War, “The unmanning of war plays to our strength. The thing that scares people is our technology.”

Leaving aside the question of fear, the use of killer drone technology in the nebulous, seemingly unending “War on Terror” has many furious.

There has been an outcry by civilians in Pakistan, where over 250 people have been killed by the drones over the past year. A popular hit song in Pakistan last summer, as Singer explained on the TV and radio program Democracy Now! had lyrics charging that Americans look at them as insects. There are outspoken critics of the drones within the U.S. Defense establishment like David Kilcullen, an architect of General Petreus’ Iraq war surge, who claims that the unmanned robot killers are serving to further infuriate and radicalize the population of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq creating new enemies of the U.S. with each strike.

Some decry the attacks as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, and point to their illegitimacy, due to the fact that the U.S. has not declared war on Pakistan. But the U.S.’ position is that the authorization of the use of force grated after the attacks of September 11, 2001 applies to all nations, if there are any suspected anti-American militants within their borders. But the use of the unmanned drones has provided the U.S. with a way to launch attacks, while avoiding an overt on-the-ground invasion of Pakistan. Recently, according to Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations, the motive waters have been muddied, as the drone attacks in Pakistan have not focused on al Qaeda operatives, but members of the network led by Baitullah Mehsud – opponents of the Zardari government with an alleged role in the assassination of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

All those who wondered if the drone attacks would end with the changing of the administrations didn’t have to wait long for their answer. In the early hours of January 23^th 2009, three days after President Obama took office, a drone struck two targets in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region. Fifteen people suspected of being supporters of the Taliban and their families were killed, including three children.

In the tribal regions of Pakistan can be found people living a rural, non-urbanized or globalized, traditional lifestyle. Three days earlier, in his inaugural speech, President Obama had referred to tribes:

“…because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”

Do the “lines of tribe” have to dissolve for people to live in peace? That is a loaded statement to make when we consider the context of American treatment of the indigenous tribes of our own country. In fact, the U.S. government carried out one of the first instances of “ethnic cleansing” of an area with the Cherokee Removal Act of 1838, which culminated with a forced march of civilians known now as the Trail of Tears. In fact, Adolf Hitler studied the U.S. treatment of Native Americans (which reads more like a dark library than a “dark chapter”- see the recent PBS series “We Shall Remain”) and admired it as a model of genocide.

Whatever Obama meant by that, the drone attacks have had a major affect on the tribal areas: The Sunday Times of the UK reported in April that up to 1 million civilians have fled the tribal regions of Pakistan to try to avoid these drone attacks, as well bombings by the Pakistani army.

What are the advantages of deploying advanced technology against people? Steven Cohen of the Foreign Policy study program at the Brookings Institute defends the drones on the basis of their being a surgical-like warfare application. “What they do is allow any country that possesses them to pinpoint without much collateral damage,” Cohen says. “The drone, in essence, while it conjures up images of a mechanical monster is in fact far more effective and more humane than dropping tons of bombs on an area.”

How accurate the drones are, however, has been called into serious question. According to the Times of Pakistan, there have been 60 drone attacks by the United States on the tribal regions of Pakistan between January 14^th, 2006 and April 8^th, 2009. Horrifyingly, the Times reports, of these 60 attacks, only ten hit their intended targets, killing 14 alleged al-Qaeda leaders. An estimated 687 Pakistani civilians were killed in the drone attacks; unintended casualties, the aforementioned “collateral damage” (incidentally, also the title of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from 2002).

However, most of the people who will sit in multiplexes this summer watching Christian Bale’s John Connor fight the evil Skynet computer system and its robotic minions, or Shia LaBeouf and the gallant Autobots battle the evil alien robotic Decepticons, blissfully unaware or only muddily informed of the real-world drone attacks, will find themselves cheering on American humans as they face malevolent robots. In the blockbuster movies, like Terminator and Transformers, our (American) heroes are tasked with the burden of being the representatives of humanity that fight against the cold, brutality of an unfeeling robot programmed to murder cooly, indiscriminately.

The irony is so blatant that it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Some are very aware of what the drones are doing, namely, their operators – many of them 18 and 19 year-olds literally assigned to this post because of their Playstation skills. As with their colleagues deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, the drone pilots –working on Army bases in the U.S. – though they may never physically experience the battlefield, have been known to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) due to the jarring nature of their work. According to an August, 2008 story by the Associated Press, “Remote control warriors suffer war stress,” the pilots must guide the drones back to the attack site after the damage has been done, using the drones’ built-in surveillance equipment to gather high-resolution imagery of the casualties. Unlike Air Force pilots who can drop tons of bombs and never face the consequences of their work, the drone pilots cannot avoid seeing the dead bodies their mission has resulted in. A mission that resembles nothing so much as a live video game – with deadly real results.

Like a lot of action movies these days, Terminator: Salvation plays just a bit like a recruiting film for the Army. Set in a nightmare scape of 2018 (whoa! not much time, gang), it’s a watery by-the-numbers adventure where the carbon-based good guys scamper around the Western deserts (hmm) of a post-Apocalyptic United States wearing the official Resistance long olive trench coats oddly reminiscent of another time.

From a character’s pointed obsession with earning the right to wear the natty coats of the Resistance and an uncomfortable parable of redemption and self-sacrifice, Terminator Salvation is a embarrassingly earnest, bleak blow-up affair. Christian Bale’s John Connor (the fully grown charismatic alterna-leader within the corrupt bureaucracy of the Resistance) is brooding and glum. There’s little of the fantasy-rebel glee that characterized the earlier entries in the series, or the first Star Wars movies.

Then there’s the journey of Marcus Wright (Australian actor Sam Worthington), which makes up most of the film, a death row inmate from 2003 (he has committed some vague murders, never really explained) who, after having donated his body to science, emerges fully alive in the sand shitstorm of ’18 as a robot-human hybrid. Connor and company must decide whether the G.I. Joe-looking Wright can be trusted. For his part, Wright proves his loyalty to the human side via heroic self-sacrifice (a theme of the Terminator movies, to be sure, but one made more queasy given Worthington’s striking resemblance to an uber-soldier from one of those Army of One commercials).

In the midst of it all, the movie also offers a small vignette of resistance that could have been written by Sophocles; a bit of American Empire Greek Tragedy-style catharsis:

Connor refuses to follow the orders of the Rebellion’s leaders when they tell him to blow up Skynet’s command central, where thousands of human prisoners are kept. In the movie, it is the fact that he is unwilling to destroy innocent people (AKA collateral damage) that makes Connor a great leader. But what happens next is remarkable. The soldiers of the Resistance, inspired by Connor, actually refuses to follow the orders to bomb Skynet. Not so far-fetched, according to the conclusions of the 2005 documentary Sir No Sir, which retraces a large-scale resistance and its spread throughout the entire armed forces, during the Vietnam war. Connor is then able to save the human hostages, by engaging in the heroic hand-to-hand (or in this case, hand to bot) personal combat most highly prized by action movies.

In Terminator: Salvation, it almost seems like the plot has been designed as a rebellion lightning rod for an impressionable audience. Rebellion is painted in fantastical terms, awesome and escapist within the Hollywood-devised movie scenario. For much of the audience, the movie may be more relevant than the goings-on in the War on Terror. the real robot war being waged in our name, instead of merely identifying with fake cinematic versions.

Do our Summer blockbusters decontextualize current events, further desensitizing us to the effects of the real robot wars being being waged in our name? That all depends if these images of shadow cinematic rebellion remain entirely divorced from substance.

“If you are listening to this – you are the Resistance” John Connor intones breathily over pirate radio waves.

Ditto that.

The trees swoosh overhead – cherry blossoms – the blossoms appear even before the leaves, amazingly. It’s Spring. Every time the dudes throw their football too high it shakes these little white flakey flowers free.

You were just eating. Looked like a buttered roll from the big green place with alll the lights? Dude, it was. Let me get some, dude.

Paparazzi.

This weekend, I got into a conversation about high school curriculum. I brought up the shortsightedness that most high schools will attempt to teach kids algebra and the other abstract, higher maths, while not taking a few days to walk them through how to properly balance a check book.

One conversationalist scoffed – “You don’t have to be able to balance a check book anymore. That’s useless.”

Initially I conceded – with ATMs (or as they were whimsically known in Milwaukee, where both they and I originated, Tyme Machines ["Quick! I've got to get to a Tyme Machine"]) on every corner and McDonalds (where pulling out cash costs $.99 – the same as a four-piece Chicken McNuggets from the dollar menu) that are willing to dispense helpful receipts stating your “Available” and “Ledger” balances, who needed the dinosaurish checkbook? With its tacky faux snakeskin cases, overpriced Tweety Bird-themed refills & etc.

Later, though, I reflected that ATM-ing it and blindly debiting up a storm was fine – if you had a cushion-y cache of funds sitting in your account. How many of us, though, have made that fateful miscalculation – thought the check cleared, forgot about the automatic withdrawl – and been bopped with a $30 overdraft fee? (Sometimes again and again, as the bank tries to suction out the missing funds every two days like a constantly relapsing fiend.)  The ATM receipts can collect in your wallet, but if you’re not penning into a ledger your account status, even this digital generation can fall behind.

But, you might be saying, balancing your checkbook isn’t going to help that. We need the real time banking offered by the ATMs and – better yet – the online banking offered by most major branches. In fact, there’s probably an app for that – I saw those commercials where Chase texts you when your check clears or you have a low balance. That’s cool, I guess, if you skate close enough to the fiscal edge to need these reminders, and I guess this also helps you not bounce your payment to the cell phone company (but if you slip on Sprint, I guess you’re screwed on both fronts).

I guess what I’m saying is that we’re all too apt to get lazy in these digital environs. There is a certain initiative required of balancing your accounts, knowing how  much you’ve spent, and a distinct comfort at being able to look back at your entry of “Groceries” instead of your eyes crossing after staring at entries like “POS DEBIT-23684 10027.”

But I wouldn’t know. I don’t balance my check book, either. But now I’m going to start, and any high schoolers out there who want to know how, just shoot me an email.

by Lauren Pabst

“It looks like he cut this with an ax!”

- An astonished Gail Simmons of Food & Wine Magazine on Hector Santiago’s steak on Top Chef Las Vegas last week. He and partner Ash Fulk ran out of time on the cooking of a chateau briand and had to cut 24 pieces of meat in 2 minutes.

Episode Four of Top Chef Las Vegas was very French. It even ended up being perpetually red neckerchiefed San Francisco-based restaurant owner and contestant Mattin’s birthday. The Quickfire asked the chefs to make an accessible, innovative dish of escargots (snails) and Jesse Sandlin, who created a ELT (escargots, fresh greens and fried tomato) ultimately lost and was sent home. (kicked off the island of asphalt, palm trees and neon in the middle of the desert)

You could tell Jesse was nervous about it. Head Judge Tom Colliccio asked her “What was the inspiration for this?”

“I don’t know” she said. (What about a BLT? Why not.)

“I haven’t felt like myself since I got here” said Jesse in the obligatory exit interview. “I just want people to know that I don’t suck this bad.”

The contestants moved on to the big challenge. They each drew knives listing a “classic French” sauce and cut of meat. The meat-drawers had to pair with the sauce makers to whip up an innovative take on Classic French Cooking, to be judged by super big name chefs in the world of French Cooking – superstars like a guy named Joel Robouchon.

[So, if Top Chef comes from a default setting of low-expectations from Mexican food, they LOVE Classic French Cooking. Chef, sautee, entrée, cuisine, restaurant, sauce, café, bistro, latte, mise-en-place, chiffonade, brunoir – there already exists lots of French validation to cooking. What separates a cook from a chef? I haven’t eaten much French food (do French fries count? That’s a serious question) but it does seem good and complicated (they can fold thin dough every which way and butter it up… oh, the crossaint, crossandwich). But so is –  say, Thai food delicious and complicated to the untrained. And Greek food, Chinese food (definitely!), Indian food, Mexican food, Nigerian food, and more. Is it because the wife of a State Department worker, Julia Child, got around to Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a hobby that marvelously revolutionized American taste buds and eating habits, as the recent movie Julie and Julia suggests, when she “went native” in postwar Paris? Haven’t seen it, but heard that the Julie of the book, the blogger who cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s giant French cookbook in a year was working at the same time as a counselor for people affected by the attacks of 9/11 in New York. French cooking as escaping/coping with (fill in the blank)? The ultimate compliment, maybe.]

Jennifer C. was paired with Mike V., brother to Bryan V. (who won the episode with a “deconstructed bernaise”). Jennifer C. and Mike V. displayed a palpable cooking chemistry in the kitchen.

“How was it cooking together?” asked a judge, after praising their dish. Jennifer professed seriously a highly compatible kinetic energy while preparing rabbit and sauce together. Mike affirmed.

Besides Jennifer and Mike’s bunnies, other teams cooked lobster, frogs legs, trout and young chicken – all fairly dainty cuts of meat with similar cooking times (it seems to this non-chef, merely sometime cook).

For the same amount of time, a big hunk of meat (chateau briand) was assigned by knife-pulling – an Arthurian-like practice (Camelot = $250,000 cash and products furnished by the makers of Kitchen-Aid) to Hector and Ash.

“So a gay guy and a Puerto Rican have to cook dinner for Joel Robouchon, right?” joked Ash as they got started.

Hector shimmied his knife along the fat on long cuts of chateau briand. “I used to work in a banquet hall. This is all people want, filet mignon.”

The oven didn’t get as hot as Hector was expecting it to for the way he wanted to cook the beef. [One French chef judge would later frustratedly list how little time it took to roast a proper chateu briand]. They ran out of time cooking the meat.

“Eight seconds? That’s going to happen quickly” said Ash, saucing the plates in a rush.

Hurried cutting of the undercooked, bloody meat led it to absorb Ash’s sauce and to upset the delicate but boisterous Gail Simmons of Food and Wine Magazine.

“It looks like he cut it with an ax!” she exclaimed of the steak, riled up, mascaraed eyes wide.

Receiving an unevenly cooked end piece, Gail did her best neo-Mae West, almost neck-popping, in asserting that in giving her the end, they had “picked the wrong lady.”

“I am Haitian and Haitians and the French, we don’t like them and they don’t like us” said Classically trained French chef Ron Duprat. His dish went by in the middle – neither the best nor the worst, thus avoiding more than the just the most cursory critique. [It seems possible that the French don't feel any particular way towards Haitians now... but the nation's time spent with their feet on the island leaves a rough footprint, to say the least.]

Hector was told to pack his knives (and axes, if any, we can assume) and go on account of the undercooked meat. A chef and restaurant owner in Atlanta, he had said in an earlier interview that he started as a dishwasher and worked his way up.

“I wish I could have represented my people longer” Hector said before exiting the studio as he had been asked to do, politely.

Next Episode: The chefs visit a Wild West-like “settlement” set in the desert and circle the wagons, appearing to cook with big pots and pans.

On Sunday, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s sweet, fluttery, flattered acceptance speech for “Best Female Video of the Year,” boldly proclaiminig that he was happy for Taylor but that Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! It seemed like a desperate play for the affections of either Beyoncé, her fans, his own egotistically loved personal opinion or (less likely) aficionados of the work of choreographer Bob Fosse (Beyoncé’s “Put a Ring On It” video dance routine was almost entirely cribbed from Fosse’s 1969 “Mexican Breakfast” combination. The proof is in the YouTube).

He definitely had an unnecessary outburst. But really, who the heck knows what it was all about?

It was RUDE, everyone agrees. An offended Jay Leno even seemed reluctant let Kanye apologize (probably a huge ratings draw) on the premiere episode of his 10pm talk show Monday night. After hearing his seemingly sincere apology, Jay pulled some kind of kindly old principal rank on a stunned Kanye, chastising him, and even asking him what his mother – who passed away a few years ago and Jay had met once – would have thought of the embarrassing, probably drunken, incident.

She probably wouldn’t have liked it, Kanye West agreed, appearing flabbergasted as much as ashamed.

[I had a crazy flash that maybe Jay Leno was trying to demonstrate to Bill Cosby and Barack Obama how he thought black boys should be disciplined by their absent male role models that we hear so much about. But Kanye West is a grown man over 30!]

Kanye West was being a pop star boy behaving badly. Wait, that sounds familiar.

When Justin Timberlake snatched off the clothes of Janet Jackson at Superbowl XXXVIII in 2004, it was Janet who apologized in the immediate aftermath. It was a “wardrobe malfunction” Janet claimed, a move that went wrong. Timberlake – who had played the very active role of “ripper of bustiers” within the incident – kept mum, that is, until CBS threatened to ban him and Janet from performing at the Grammys unless they made public apologies to the network and copped to the fact that the whole thing was not a mistake. Timberlake acquiesced but Janet refused and was barred from the ceremony.

In context, Kanye’s outburst – though rude to Taylor Swift – was a pretty Chicagoland, John Hughes-style tortured insider/outsider making a move for the pretty girl by interrupting the prom queen, utterly corny maneuver. Kanye West seems to think that the MTV Network is the school administration and he is the Judd Nelson character pumping a fist. (But Kanye, take it from this fellow cheesy Midwesterner and onetime 80’s aficionado, the 80’s are way over.)

In the past few years, Kanye has made a habit of making a spectacle of himself at awards shows, showing bad sportsmanship and egotism. His lyrics have turned towards the sexualized and shallow (“She love my big, (hahaha), Ego” – on his latest collabo with, hm, Beyoncé). When he does dig deep (like on his brooding, autotune-heavy latest LP “808s and Heartbreak”), it’s about his own emotions and relationships. It seems superstardom has been weird and hard on the goofy kid from Chicago who broke onto the scene by providing infectious beats for Jay-Z then sing-songily rapping on his 2004 debut “The College Dropout” about self-consciousness, materialism, discrimination at the Gap, family reunions, car accidents and Luther Vandross.

Things seemed to take an obnoxious turn after the fascinating events of 2005. In 2005, Kanye had just put out a song about diamonds from Sierra Leone (Where? The kids found out, hopefully, when the song caught on) and spoke out boldly on another live television event.

On an evening at the beginning of hurricane season, they stood side by side in the telethon television studio: Mike Myers, Austin Powers, Wayne’s World himself was somber, talking of needing money for relief efforts in New Orleans. Kanye West seemed stoic and frantic at the same time as he poured out a series of thoughts about the stranded, hungry, hunted poor Black people in New Orleans that he saw on TV that culminated with “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” before the live feed was cut.

(He could have gone even farther; George Bush doesn’t seem to really care about many people except maybe other people named George Bush.)

That was probably the last outburst of quality from Mr. West to date. With all that’s around to burst out about, last weekend’s display from Kanye was boring at best, cringe worthy at worst.

But it got the news cycle churning with fresh gristle; the info-tainment and enter-mation shows chewed on this eagerly like cud for 24 hours until the sad death of “wrong-side-of-the-tracks” love affair movie icon Patrick Swayze.

The liberating, juvenile, giddy admissions of confusion that have made about ½ of his songs so loveable and interesting now seems muddled by the muck of fame. In a business that rewards egoism, it’s not hard to see why Kanye has embraced this aspect of himself that he has seemed to wrestle with on earlier tracks.

It’s not too late for Kanye (still young, though not young enough to be scolded so by Jay Leno).

Another defeat for me (it wasn't even close)

The trees swoosh overhead – cherry blossoms – the blossoms appear even before the leaves, amazingly. It’s Spring. Every time the dudes throw their football too high it shakes these little white flakey flowers free.

You were just eating. Looked like a buttered roll from the big green place with alll the lights? Dude, it was. Let me get some, dude.

Paparazzi.

by Lauren Pabst

“In America, deep frying steak is not a good idea”

– European emigrant Wolfgang Puck to (U.S. Commonwealth of) Puerto Rico native and Top Chef contestant Hector Santiago. Though placed in the bottom four, Hector escaped the first Top Chef elimination on the August 20th season premiere.

An argument can be made that Top Chef is the most decadent TV show ever. It pretty much has it all: elitism, sexy women eating food, competition, money, gluttony, excess, shopping, criticism, rejection. And food; oh, food: plates and plates of food for each challenge, course after course for the taste buds of the judges. Quickfire challenges with arrays of burgers and fries purely as a visual (maybe someone ate them, but who? The crew? The shoppers of the Top Chef Kitchen’s garbage cans?). Tens of thousands of dollars shelled out at various posh Whole Foods branches over five seasons (“I can’t find half my stuff!” Haitian chef Ron Duprat moaned good-naturedly, after asking a Whole Foods employee if they had an “island station”). Lots and lots of food, all of it usually looking good, some definitely going uneaten (“It was so good I finished it all!” has been an occasional judge comment in the past).

But at least every episode, a chicken wing or a salad or a tart displeases the panel of professional food eaters. Someone is dissed and dismissed. Somebody is rejected; sacrificed to the gods of reality television. Voted off the island. Fired. Cut. Sent home. Told to pack their knives and go.

Ultra dramatically, the pronouncement is accompanied by -”jing!” – the sound of a sharp blade slicing (the air?). Often the chucked chef will hang their head at the precise moment of this sound effect, giving us the quick impression of a parody of a beheading. This is what happens when you let them eat (apparently) sub-par cake.

A friend recently asked me the difference between documentary and reality TV. The question was interesting to ponder. Reality TV is utterly constructed, proudly fake. But “documentary film” can have elements of the constructed or forced; the mere presence of cameras has an impact on the action, often times.

But if a documentary is the filmmakers bearing witness to the subjects in a situation, “Reality TV” is the producers leading the subjects by the hand through a series of hoops – through competitions creative or personal. The personal competitions (The Bachelor / Bachlorette, Flavor of Love, The Biggest Loser) are squeamish to watch. The creative ones (Project Runway, Top Chef) also contain an element of discomfort, but are much more interesting. Because the contestants are there for a skill or craft, their personalities come out – perhaps – a bit realer.

Judgment of something so universal and cultural as food is curious. After all, isn’t food a matter of (hm) taste, which is determined by so many things – history, personality, habits, culture? Such harsh judgment of such carefully prepared, abundant food would probably be anachronistic and baffling to much of the planet. This show is no place for the philosophy that, to paraphrase Chris Rock from his book Rock This! (1998), anybody in this world lucky enough to have a steak in front of them (deep-fried chicharrón style or no) should probably just bite the s*** out of it.

But then without judgment, we wouldn’t have a contest or a show, would we.

On the premiere episode, which aired on Thursday, August 2oth, someone was cut (told to get out of there and take those sharp blades she brought with her, with her). She was Jennifer Zavala, executive chef at Philadelphia’s El Camino Real, mother of a three year-old boy. She had earlobes gauged out to the size of nameplate hoops and tattoos that read: “Sacred” on her throat and “Scarred” on her chest – (a weird but fascinating slide show on bravotv.com chronicles the illustrated arms and torsos of the chefs) who boldly stated that she felt she had to win to finance an education for her son.

“I want to win everything, no matter what” said fellow Philly-based chef Jennifer Carroll, another contestant, former sous-chef to celebrity chef Eric Ripert of New York City’s Le Bernadin and now chef de cuisine at his restaurant 10 Arts. Jen C. did win the Quickfire challenge with a clam ceviche (which she rhymed with beach). Carroll’s win in this Las Vegas themed show also came with a $15,000 chip courtesy of the hosting casino.

She won the two-tiered Quickfire, where only four people got to compete after winning in a butchering relay race of “some of the most popular foods in Las Vegas,” according to Tom Colliccio, which were – interestingly – shrimp, lobster, clams and meat, many of which, say, the Paiute probably didn’t have as part of their diet.

Some chefs were shy and nervous, some were boisterious and selfish and thought they were hilarious, some were frantically cocky, some were overeager to please. All this personality was tweaked by the producers who had them (inspired again by the reputably debauched desert city locale) create a dish based on a sin they were personally guilty of [sic]. Quite a few chefs dished up plates of food based on their drinking habits, some on their unhealthy food penchants, smoking,  procrastination, and one on not being able to let go of twenty-seven days spent at sea on a boat from Haiti to Florida.

“I’m not sure how that’s a sin” said Tom Colliccio about the inspiration of that last one, Miami-based Haitian chef Ron Duprat’s Chilean sea bass sitting on top of a squat, colorful stack of chunky sauces and cooked veggies at Judge’s Table, though he didn’t question anybody elses’ interpretations of the nebulous and probably mis-translatable concept of “sin.”

Hector Santiago, from Puerto Rico and a chef/owner of a restaurant in Atlanta smoked, then deep-fried a steak: “Steak and potatoes, Latino way!” he shouted in the kitchen, presenting it on a plate sliced on the bias next to a fresh jaunty pile of light sprouty looking greens.

“It’s a little bizzare… I don’t get it!” New York restauranteur Tom Colliccio sputtered to the rest of the unanimously distainful panel about Hector’s steak, like one who had never lunched above 96^th Street.

“What would you do if a chef in your restaurant put a steak in the deep fryer?” Colliccio fed to guest judge Wolfgang Puck.

“I’d throw HIM in the fire!” fired back Puck triumphantly as host Padma Lakshmi and judge Gail Simmons of Food and Wine magazine giggled in low cut dresses with mock exasperation.

Along with Hector, three chefs landed in the bottom four in a weird electoral college-like system that plucked a loser from every relay race group.

Some dishes were called overcooked by the judges. The chefs guiltily copped: Jesse Sandlin sweated over a dry chicken breast and Michigan chef Eve Aronoff was as flustered as her shrimp were flushed. (or something… hard to write about food you only see)

Jennifer Zavala served up a seitan-stuffed poblano chile with grilled tomatillo salsa based on a hot temper. “Anger can also be really good for you” she said. The big shiny dark green chile was crispy and fried, with creamy sauce-coated chunks of the wheat gluten meat-substitute protien nestled inside.

Tom Colliccio raked his fork through the insides of the chile and looked offended. At that moment, had this week’s loser already been selected?

“I love a good chile relleno… This is not a good chile relleno.” Colliccio said.

[The weird way Top Chef has treated Mexican food in the past doesn't begin and probably won't end with Colliccio's defensive love for chiles relleno. When Rick Bayless was a contestant on Top Chef Masters, the judges and narration kept going on and on about how much Bayless had "done for" Mexican cuisine, as if the centuries of tradition and flavors hadn't obviously done more for him. On that series' final episode (a sociology lesson in itself), Bayless was asked to recreate the dish that made him want to be a chef: in his case, it was the Mexican chile/chocolate/nut/maybe a dozen more ingredients sauce known as mole (literally: sauce, in a Mayan language). The judges were so overwhelmed with the well-prepared traditional Mexican dish that the British food critic (who rather unnecessarily later raved that Bayless "took his mole virginity") suggested that instead of talking about the dish, they just make "weird, guttural noises" to show their approval. Huh?]

“This dish was so clunky to me” complained Gail Simmons [of Food and Wine magazine, also a judge on the upcoming Top Wino] of Jen’s poblano.

“If you cooked that at home, those people would never come and visit you again” chortled Puck. “There’s really no flavor to it” – back to Tom.

Padma called it a midnight special from a vegan bar – not so clearly an insult if you’ve never even considered the idea of a vegan bar. And also maybe not if you have been to a vegan bar.

Jen Z. tasted defeat in Episode One. Or did she?

Next Episode:

“I love that you had the cojones to make that dish!”

- Tom Colliccio to Hector Santiago on tofu ceviche

Seagull: 1, Me: 0