So Much for Question Time

Lots of bloggers are cheering President Obama's impromptu debate with House Republicans in Baltimore today: Besides the thrill of seeing Obama parrying the usual GOP attacks with aplomb, the whole exchange was reminiscent of the highly entertaining Prime Minister's Questions in the UK. But it looks like that won't happening again, as the GOP is now regretting having cameras at the meeting. Even if they did allow cameras in the future, though, I doubt that the sort of unscripted debate we saw today could survive in the American media landscape. The cable news networks seem to like reducing debate to dueling talking points, and pundits and politicians for the most part oblige. And while Obama dove into the debate with enthusiasm, too many politicians, Democratic and Republican, aren't well-prepared to do what he did: It's not merely about intelligence or rhetorical skills, but about refusing to reduce things to sound bites and talking points. There's a reason most Presidential debates, for example, feel more like a press conference than an actual contest of ideas.

Top Chef 6.11: Ham and Jam and Spamalot

To nearly everyone's relief, Robin was eliminated last night (which the AV Club celebrated with the immortal phrase from the Simpsons, "Poochie's dead!"). It was past time for her to go; at the same time, her tearful exit made me feel for her, as she clearly wanted to prove she could compete with all the young upstarts there. But alas, it was not to be.

Jennifer's continuing on-air burnout is even more heartbreaking, given how high she was flying at the beginning. But badly cooked meat is unaccountable at this stage, and if she's eliminated next week, it may well be an act of mercy. I don't know what Eli was thinking -- maybe something along the lines of Hung's notorious cereal diorama from Season Three -- but his offering looked absolutely dreadful, straining even Nigella Lawson's preternatural poise and equanimity. Having won the Quickfire, however, he's still got some life in him.

It'll be interesting to see Kevin's traditionalism square off against Mike's more avant-garde (or "effeminate," (?!) as Toby Young put it) style in the next few weeks. Bryan seems to split the difference, so perhaps he'll pull through in the end.

Top Chef 6.10: Meat Is Murder

Like other viewers, I'm getting worried about Jennifer. She started out so strong, but in the last few challenges has been getting overwhelmed by the stress of the competition. She wouldn't be the first contestant on the show to break down under pressure, but it would be a shame if she went home before the remaining also-rans (hint: rhymes with Schmeli and Schmobin) did.

Speaking of going home, Mike Isabella's leek dish looked awful on the plate, and apparently tasted awful too, so it was no surprise that he was sent packing. Of all the contestants this season, however, it seems like he got the worst rap: Yes, he made a bunch of sexist comments and his cockiness was off-putting at times, but there seemed to be an underlying decency to him (note how he got everyone to wear red neckerchiefs after Mattin was eliminated) that got obscured. Of course, that may have been of his own volition. And in any case, his dishes seemed good, but not great, at least by Top Chef standards: The show rewards hot-shot, experimental cooking, even though a lot of great food is neither.

The range of vegetarian meals offered was pretty disappointing: Like others, I was puzzled that no one thought to use things like cheese or risotto to make a more satisfying meal. Kevin, the winner, actually got closest to the mark with his mushroom/kale duo: if you're looking for meaty, umami flavor without meat, mushrooms fit the bill quite well. I'd also have liked to have tried Mike Voltaggio's banana polenta; now if he can just keep his player-hater tendencies in check.

So next week is something called Top Chef All-Stars Dinner, which appears to be the usual assortment of petty rivalries, but without the reverence for the craft of cooking that makes Top Chef proper such a good show. In other words, it'll be like all the other reality shows out there.

Top Chef 6.9: Purple Monkey Dishwasher

The Quickfire challenge was rather clever: Essentially a game of Telephone with food (hence the title of this post). It wasn't really something that tells you much about what makes for a good chef, but it was a fun exercise.

Restaurant Wars was surprising for a few reasons: The Blue team got away with naming their restaurant Revolt, Robin actually made a good dish, and both Jennifer and Kevin were at serious risk of elimination. It was strange how all the members of the Red team seemed to have been dragged down together. In part, no doubt, that's due to how the workload was distributed, with Kevin and Jennifer taking on much more than they could handle. I also imagine that Laurine's handling of front of the house duties impacted the performance of the group as a whole as well: If the front had been handled by, say, Jennifer -- who has demonstrated excellent executive abilities -- things might have turned out very differently. On the other hand, the pressure of the competition seems to be getting to her, moreso than any of the other contestants.

The bickering between the Voltaggio brothers was typical reality show fare, but what does it tell us about their cooking styles? Michael clearly feels confident and comfortable in his skin, and rightly so, but I could easily see his brassy tendencies getting the better of him down the road. Bryan, on the other hand, is pretty consistent in his execution, but I wonder if he'll more fully demonstrate his creativity when the stakes get really high. Like most people, I'll be surprised if both brothers aren't in the finale.

One other thing: Was I the only one incredulous about the use of the word "sustainable" to describe the meals being prepared -- given that the competition is in Las Vegas, a city that is, almost by definition, unsustainable?

Top Chef 6.7: Stressed Umami Asian

I liked the idea of the Quickfire challenge: It reminded me of the Second City challenge in Season Four in which Richard Blais and Dale Talde had to make "green perplexed tofu," and famously came up with tofu marinated in beef fat and seared with grill marks. That kind of invention is, at least for the TV viewer who can't taste the food the contestants are serving, really appealing.

The rest of the episode? Not so much. I agree with Scott Tobias that we're now waiting for the lesser competitors to be knocked off -- though it was surprising to see Mike Voltaggio in the bottom bracket this week. I suspect, however, that it'll be a fluke.

I think a Restaurant Wars episode is in order, don't you?

Top Chef 6.6: Deconstructing Ron

Some random points:

1. I'm not sure I totally get the deconstruction trend in haute cuisine; even chefs, on this last episode and in previous episodes of Top Chef, often mess up when trying to do a deconstruction of a dish. (Ron, who was sent home last night, seemed particularly clueless.) I think this is one of those instances where simply seeing the food and watching people react isn't enough; you have to actually taste it for yourself to see how the deconstruction works.

2. Toby Young's return was not particularly welcome; who would ever pronounce "paella" like it rhymes with "Stella"? That said, he seems be less snide than he was last season. Also: Where did Gail run off to?

3. The gap between the front-runners and the rest is becoming enormous, more so than in any other season. Ash, Laurine, and Robin don't look like they'll be around much longer. Ashley and Mike I. have some talent, but have had some serious execution problems. Even so, the general level of talent seems to be vastly above that of last season; there's no way someone like Hosea would still be in contention by now, much less win it all.

Top Chef 6.4: Mastering the Art of French Cooking

This season, as with most of the other seasons, a divide is emerging between the contestants who have some sort of background in or affinity for French cuisine, and those who don't -- with the latter usually ending up at the back of the pack. Hector, who packed his knives and went last night, was an obvious example: Latin-American food was essentially all he knew, and he seemed to flounder when asked to do something outside of that milieu. Meanwhile, Jennifer, Kevin, and the Voltaggio brothers, who all appear to have Francophilic tendencies, are consistently at the top. Occasionally you get some outliers (Ilan from Season 2 specialized in Spanish cuisine, and won); and French cooking experience doesn't automatically mean you'll excel (Ron boasted of his French background, and Mattin is actually French, but neither did well in the last challenge); but generally it seems to be the case that knowing and appreciating French cuisine is a prerequisite to doing well on Top Chef.

But why is this? Is it just culinary imperialism, or is it that, as Michael Ruhlman once wrote:

[The fundamentals of cooking] may have been best categorized and explained by French cooks beginning hundreds of years ago, [but] these fundamentals apply to every kind of cooking there is, Mexican, Italian, Russian, Asian, because food behaves the same in one country as it does in another.

That's my sense as well, based on my (admittedly limited) cooking experience. Once you figure out how to make a béchamel sauce, for example, you can do virtually any cream-based dish, from macaroni and cheese to chicken korma. And it may be that being able to see past specific dishes to the forms that they embody (how very Platonic!) is the mark of a great chef. I've noticed that self-taught cooks don't do very well on Top Chef, and it may be that lack of theoretical training that holds them back.

Top Chef 6.1: First Thoughts

The contestants I'm most impressed with so far are Jennifer Carroll, Kevin, and the Voltaggio brothers. Obviously, with Bryan running Volt in Frederick, Maryland, I'm rooting for him, but I rather like Michael's inventiveness and imagination. Tasked with creating a dish inspired by one of his vices, he decides to make a rack of lamb (wink), marinated with the juice of two coconuts (wink wink). Cheeky, but an example of good culinary thinking.

Kevin won the first elimination challenge, of course, and he seems to really know what he's doing. Likewise with Jennifer Carroll, who won the first Quickfire challenge: When she said she's made boys cry in the kitchen, I was in love.

Michael Isabella seems like he could be the next Marcel: Knowledgeable, but an ass.

Jennifer Zavala's decision to use seitan in a dish was probably her downfall; as Spencer Ackerman points out, it's eaten out of necessity, rarely for pleasure.

Potential dark horses: Hector, Eli, Mattin, and Ron.

All in all, this could be a pretty good season.

Thoughts on The Hurt Locker

I saw the movie a little over a week ago, and I still have it rolling around in my head. Spoilers to follow.

***

One thing about this movie that unsettled me was watching characters who were members of my generation in a war zone. Of course, I know a good number of people who have served or are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the movie reminded me that these wars, like Vietnam was for the Baby Boomers, will be an enduring feature of my generation, in ways we haven't yet acknowledged.

I disagree with this assessment from n+1, which asserts that The Hurt Locker is a pro-war film. Certainly the focus on the men of Bravo company excludes all other perspectives, and to the extent that we do see other perspectives, they aren't presented sympathetically: The Ralph Fiennes-led band of contractors suck Bravo company in a shooting match, the touchy-feely colonel doesn't know what to do when out on patrol, home life for Staff Sgt. James is drudgery, etc. But I would hazard that the tone of the movie, in its own way, exemplifies what the Iraq War has become: With the original case for war having evaporated by the time they're deployed, the men of Bravo company struggle to carry out their mission, with no goal higher than getting out of there -- or in Staff Sgt. James' case, the thrill of defusing bombs. The Hurt Locker is pro-war in the sense that it doesn't portray war as utter futility; but then, I think any attempt to tell a true war story (in Tim O'Brien's sense) could be labeled as pro-war, even as it refuses to sentimentalize about it. O'Brien himself put it best:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.

In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

I will be very disappointed if The Hurt Locker doesn't get a slew of Oscar nominations -- at the least, for Best Actor and Best Director. Jeremy Renner is excellent as displaying all the contradictions in Staff Sgt. James' character; and Kathryn Bigelow does an extremely good job at creating a near-constant state of tension, even when nothing's happening. I expected to come out of the theater with my senses assaulted by war violence; instead I came out with only a weird sense of dread. In a way, that was more disturbing.

Wasting Time Productively

As is well known, the problem with combating global warming is that the costs of mitigation are mostly upfront, while the benefits, in terms of avoided destabilization of the Earth's climate, are in the future. This doesn't jibe well with human behavior, which is more attuned to taking on direct and immediate threats, such as war or terrorism or (for some people) same-sex marriage.

But suppose that failing to control pollution and develop clean energy resources resulted, not in extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels, but ZOMBIES??! That's the premise of the Web game Super Energy Apocalypse, which take real data on the cost of energy and toxic waste removal and pairs it with a typical "defend your base against enemies" scenario. It's pretty amusing, both for its playablity and for its assumptions about human psychology. Sustainable resource management? Boring! Killing zombies with wind-powered gun turrets? Fun!

Tool Time, Now With Market-Based Mechanisms

I was watching an old episode of Home Improvement (don't ask), and in it one of Tim Allen's sons, per the conventions of late 80s/early 90s sitcoms, goes on an environmental crusade against Binford Tools, the company that underwrites Allen's fictional TV show. The son meets with the Binford CEO, who explains to him that the company is committed to being environmentally responsible. The son counters by saying that, in fact, all Binford's done is buy pollution credits -- an allusion, I presume, to the cap-and-trade system set up in the 90s to combat acid rain -- and that Binford's claim to environmental responsibility is a sham.

Two thoughts:

1. Sitcom writers get a bad rap, but let this be said: They do their homework. Working in something like emissions trading -- an arcane topic now, and even more so 15 years ago -- into a sitcom plot takes some skills.
2. It's important to remember that emissions trading has always been viewed askance by a certain cohort of environmentalists. A emissions credit, in effect, gives a company the right to pollute, and for some, that is profoundly immoral. Indeed, emissions trading has something of a center-right provenance to it: I believe Reagan's secretary of state George Schultz was an early proponent of emissions trading, Bush the Elder was a strong supporter of getting emissions trading into the 1990 Clean Air Act, and the US negotiators to Kyoto were pushing cap-and-trade for carbon emissions over the objections of the Europeans. (Of course, now the EU has gone all in.)

Perhaps the bipartisan enthusiasm for cap-and-trade now has to do with the rightward shift in American politics over the last few decades. You certainly don't see that many greens today deploring the immorality of allowing polluters to buy credits to comply with regulations. Certainly not in toto: carbon offsets routinely get raked through the coals (no pun intended), and cap-and-trade is often dismissed in whole or in part. But even then the preferred alternative is usually a carbon tax, which embodies the same principle as cap-and-trade: Pollution is OK, so long as you pay for it. I don't lament at all that the moral absolutism about pollution, as embodied by the kid in the Home Improvement episode, has largely fallen away among greens, but it's kind of interesting to see one example of how much attitudes about the environment have changed over the last 15 years.

One thing that hasn't changed, however: Tim Allen is still the douchebag's comedian.

I Need to Wake Up

With the exception of An Inconvenient Truth -- a slide show! -- most environmentally-themed entertainment has been frankly rather lousy. The AV Club has a good rundown of some of the most cringe-inducing efforts.

On Cold Mountain and Gone with the Wind

Am I the only one who finds it a little disturbing that the best Civil War films -- nearly all Civil War films, for that matter -- have an objectively pro-Southern slant to them? This is more true, of course, of GWTW than Cold Mountain, but still. There is a film that needs to be made, if not of the Civil War, then of the Reconstruction years, from an explicitly pro-Northern perspective. If Nathan Newman's recounting of the era is accurate, a great tragedy centered around Ulysses S. Grant could easily be written.

Movie Review: Enchanted

It was either this or Beowulf (non-3D version); and as tempting as a nude CGI Angelina Jolie may be, I was strangely not that enthused about the movie. But as far as Disney-approved satire goes, Enchanted is pretty entertaining, I must admit. It succeeds mainly on the strength of Amy Adams' performance, which is incredibly sweet and has more depth than a movie like this deserves.

Of course, if I were to write a Disney satire movie, I'd probably use this list as a jumping off point.

One of My Great Pet Peeves

Why can't Hollywood do an accurate portrayal of Washington, DC?

It's a problem that extends to the whole DC region, too. In Syriana, I believe there's a scene where George Clooney is standing outside what is obviously an Ikea -- only thing is, the only Ikea in the region is in College Park. And let's not forget the gleaming set of skyscrapers that populated Ft. Detrick in the disaster flick Outbreak, which if you've seen the actual Ft. Detrick in Frederick, is an absolute farce.

Zombie Lincoln

Yes, the coverage of the 2008 election is still ridiculously superficial: