A question I ask myself all too often

I would like to thank the Axis of Awesome for making me aware of this song and the Spooky Men for making a version I can actually enjoy listening to. (Enjoy the beardy weirdies, fellow bear fans!)

New food: Act One

Tuesday night I met up with Dale (so convenient when someone has a RL alias already) for dinner and he wanted to try Act One, a "gastropub" in Rogers Park. I'm always eager to find out more about the local scene. He chose it in part for the drinks menu, and followed my lead in ordering the Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, which I've been curious about for some time. It's dark and bitter, like a good monologue. And the ambience was pleasantly dim and cozy.

That is, until the kneebiters began to arrive. When I heard the guy across the aisle ask for a high chair, I almost asked to be reseated by the window. But his wee ones were comparatively well-behaved; it was the family that took the table I'd been eyeing that made me stabby. I kept thinking how much I'd like to come back later on a weekend when the yuppie pups would be in bed. (I scoped out the bar at one point and noticed monshu's scotch as well as both of ours' gin.)

Service was excellent, the food--as I've been coming to expect--fell a little short of its pretensions. I had the "pork Wellington", which was reasonably tasty, though probably the best portion on my plate were the julienned vegetables. I didn't get a taste of Dale's shepherd's pie, but his flourless chocolate cake was the same one you could've ordered at any mid-range eatery in the tri-state area. (Overall, the dessert list was so stunningly unimaginative that I was shocked by the absence of crème brûlée.)

New food: Café 527

Disgruntled by the delay in reopening the Korean place, I decide to check out the "Korean tacos" at Café 527. The name is really a misnomer, since instead of being served in a tortilla, the Korean ingredients (pulgogi and kimchi) are piled onto a couple sheets of rice-lined laver. So what you really have is a deconstructed maki--and since I've had pulgogi kimbap before, this was not a new adventure for me. The only novel element was the chipotle mayo.

That said, it's a generous portion of meat at a reasonable price. I just wish it tasted more...Korean. Take away the token amount of kimchi and you're left with some tender beef that could've come out of almost any Asian stir-fry. And where were the scallions? Because if there's a savoury Korean dish in this world that isn't garnished with them, then I certainly haven't come across it. But what's especially disappointing that you can't actually eat it as a taco--at least not without getting a messy explosion of juice and filling all over your hands.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by these lapsi given that--judging from their specials--the owners were actually Taiwanese. I thought I'd give them home field advantage and ordered the Taiwanese sausage fried rice on a whim. Again, not bad: a generous amount of food well cooked. In fact, the serving of meat was so generous I had to leave some of it uneaten. I like the taste of Chinese sausage, but the fattiness gets to me after a while.

Which is why this dish struck me as another lesson in missed opportunities. I was expecting them to dice the sausage instead of slicing it and then fry it up first in order to render some of fat. The rice itself was flawless: not too oily and with the right amount of crispness. And I was surprised by the complete lack of soy sauce--a plus for sodium-adverse me, but I can see how a lot of people would find the results too bland.

One can't really speak to service as the set-up is order-and-we'll-bring-it-out. The cashier was friendly and prompt, but it took longer than I expected to get my food given that it was very simple and the place wasn't crowded. This really makes me wonder about their business model. It takes some chutzpah to open up a shiny fast-casual Chinese place right next to Joy Yee--particularly with such a limited menu when your competition's goes on for pages and pages. It could work if everything you had was a world apart from what you could get next door, but if all their fusions are this uninspired then, well, I'm glad I checked the place out while I still had a chance.

Smalltown boy

Borstal Boy was not the movie I'd expected. Of course, it's been sitting waiting to be viewed for so damn long now that it was difficult to remember what I'd been expecting when I first Netflixed it. I'd even forgotten the source materials was authored by Brendan Behan until I was informed during the credits. And I didn't recall that it was his autobiography until I realised the main character was being addressed not only as "Brendan" but also as "Behan".

I'd expected the story of a young Irish idealist becoming radicalised by a stint in the English prison system, so I was thrown to see our hero appear on screen already fully radicalised, and even more so to see the borstal depicted as resembling more a low-budget summer camp presided over by an avuncular Michael York than a correctional facility. Ironically I'd put off seeing it so long because I expected harrowing political drama. But in the end, it was another coming-of-age tale (albeit a bit rougher than many).

Another irony was that monshu happened to toddle by during one of the two genuinely brutal scenes. "This is a pretty violent movie," he said. But it wasn't. There's more footage of rugby than fighting, and five minutes before this depiction of sexual assaults in the dormitory, the same boys were doing Importance of Being Earnest on stage. Apropos of which, one of the film's weaknesses is that it rather misrepresents Behan's background. An early scene has the borstal's librarian (queer as a nine bob bit) urging him to read his "fellow countryman", and the way it's presented one could be forgiven for thinking this was Behan's introduction to fine literature. In actuality, he was raised on Zola and Galsworthy and wrote an ode to Michael Collins at age thirteen.

Oddly, though, the central arc is neither Behan's political nor literary development, but his quasi-romantic attachment to another detainee; his affair with the warden's daughter is given short shrift by contrast. It made me reflect on just how long after his book appeared we had to wait to see an adaptation of it that was comfortable showing one of Ireland's leading literary lights as something of a bender. It's a solid framework, but misses out an opportunity to push the narrative into less conventional territory.

Another weakness is the lack of sense of time passing. The scenery never changes, so whereas Behan's actual detention lasted three years, here it hardly seems like six weeks. But the film is undeniably absorbing; I was so engrossed that I failed to comprehend a single word monshu said to me after pronouncing his opinion and had to catch up with him a moment later to find out what I'd missed. The performances are strong and the cinematography is lovely--so much so, in fact, that they foil the attempt of a crappy, anachronistic Hothouse Flowers song that bursts like a suppurating wound three-quarters of the way in to ruin everything.