Nautical terms

Highly recommended. Start with the definition of slush fund, which was new to me. Also by and large. Listen to some sea shanties while you're at it.

Magnolia at age 10

I just watched it for the fourth time. Still tremendous... I haven't seen a better movie made since. And that includes Ratatouille, which would however be a good remedy for the mood Magnolia puts you in.

On cap and trade

My letter to the editor of the NY Times today should not be taken as an endorsement of the government giving away most of the carbon permits, as is proposed in the House bill. I'm a strong believer in auctioning as a relatively efficient way of enhancing government revenue. Nor do I endorse the bill's inadequate reduction targets. Still, the news article in the Times simply got the effect of a permit giveaway on emissions prices wrong.

To the Editor:

The claim that giving away permits keeps the price of emissions low reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how cap-and-trade programs work (“House Backs Bill, 219-212, to Curb Global Warming,” front page, June 27).

The price of emissions, and therefore the effect of the program on fuel and energy prices, will be determined by the total supply of permits (the cap), not by how they are initially allocated. Consumers will have to pay the price either way, as well they should, for their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

William A. Sundstrom
Santa Clara, Calif., June 30, 2009

Munching down Middlefield

Palo Alto is smack in the middle of food heaven, but the town itself is a little thin, especially at the low-cost end. I recommend Tofu House (my favorite resaurant in PA) on El Camino and Mediterranean Wraps on California Ave. Downtown we now have Patxi Pizza, which is very good indeed, although hardly a budget meal.

So let's drive south on Middlefield Rd., which runs roughly parallel between El Camino and 101. Toward the southern limits of PA you'll pass our fine local grocery store, Piazza's, and soon cross the border into Mountain View. Bear left after the Toyota dealership onto Old Middlefield Rd., which passes through a typical ugly CA landscape of small warehouses and light-industry businesses, punctuated by a string of cheap eateries. At the corner of Rengstorff, we have three quite good Mexican/ Latin American establishments: La Costena, famous for made-to-order burritos, the reliable Los Altos Taqueria, where you can get a hearty bowl of homemade soup along with the usual fare, and the greasy but very tasty La Bamba, featuring a nice pupusa.

Until tonight I had heard good things about but never tried Uncle Frank's BBQ, at the back of a dive bar called Francesca's. I am not a BBQ expert by any means, but I found the food very fine and the portions, well, bordering on excessive. I recommend it.

A sad moment in Old Mid food history was when DeeDee's chaat buffet and Indian grocery, just past Toyota, closed and was bulldozed to make room for... say what?... an overgrown vacant lot! But you can still eat very well for not much on Old Middlefield.

Dafnis Prieto Si o Si Quartet, Stanford Jazz Workshop

I went not sure what to expect, figuring a Cuban drummer with a couple more Cuban guys in the quartet was going to play Afro-Cuban jazz, but also noting that he has been Henry Threadgill's drummer of choice on a couple of occasions, so anything goes. The Latin element was in there, but for the most part it was edgy modern jazz, sometimes with an identifiable beat, which was 7 as often as 4, sometimes just a tight free-jazz pulse. Complex composed passages. The rest of the band is first rate, especially Manuel Valera on piano, who has Keith Jarrett's way with angular solo lines (the rest: Peter Apfelbaum, tenor sax; Armando Gola, bass).

Criticism? Too much drum! Prieto is awe-inspiring, and he plays with the band, not against it, but he's so clever and busy (and loud in a small space) that one is easily distracted. Not an unpleasant distraction, mind you...

Carnatic Jazz

Rudresh Mahanthappa's Kinsmen (2008) is the most exciting jazz album I have acquired in some time. I'm not a big fan of eclecticism and too-clever cultural fusions, so my expectations were not high, despite the rave reviews. Expectations overturned big time. To call it "Indo-jazz fusion" doesn't really do it justice. The highlight here is the interplay between the improvisations of the two alto saxophonists, Mahanthappa and Kadri Gopalnath, the former a jazz player in the contemporary New York vein, the latter not a jazz musician at all but an interpreter of South Indian Carnatic music. Gopalnath's energy and off-kilter tonalities bounce off Mahanthappa's cool virtuosity, backed up by a stellar blended rhythm section. Everyone is probing, exploring, learning. You, the eager listener, will do the same.

MJ, RIP

Well, I never thought he was the greatest, but he may well have been the weirdest, and he recorded some great songs in his prime. Most people seem to think Thriller is the pinnacle, but I kind of prefer Off the Wall, at least the propulsively funky side 1. He was a few months younger than me... strange.

The Wire

Finally finished the fifth and final season on DVD. Was it the best TV series of all time? Certainly a contender, in my mind. What I particularly appreciated was the relentless efficiency of the story-telling: not a wasted moment on the screen. Along with the writing, acting, production, sociological and political themes, all that stuff too. And an appealing crook who read his Adam Smith.

I had heard that the fifth season was a let-down, and how could it not be, following on 3 and 4, perhaps the two most perfect TV runs ever? Still, as a person who briefly contemplated a career in journalism and did a very short reporting stint on a small-town paper, I actually found the newspaper story line pretty compelling. The final episode's closing epilogue was uncharacteristically contrived and unnecessary, however... an unfortunate way to go out.

For all its emphasis on shades of gray, The Wire clung to fairly standard cop-show moral conventions in its portrayal of the police: flawed and capable of very bad behavior, but with their hearts in the right place-- in fact so much so that we were inclined to accept that their ends justified their means. What defied cop-show convention was that the bad guys could be understood as complete human beings in terms of their development, motives, and moral code... and that, nonetheless, to understand is not-- necessarily-- to forgive.