October 29, 2007

Beer, Barbecue and Birthday



Just got back from an all-too-short weekend in the Outer Banks, where we attended the first annual PigStein -- a beer and barbecue festival thrown by our friends Chip and Tammy of Chip's Wine and Beer Market and High Cotton. Whole hog cookoff, more than 100 beers for tasting, and staying with friends at an insane beach house. Happy 36th birthday, Rick!



We hit the highway on Friday afternoon, and in just 4 1/2 hours we arrived in lovely Kill Devil Hills -- the site of the Wright Brothers' inaugural flight, and if you want to watch Rick quietly seethe, just bring that up as part of a conversation about North Carolina's "First in Flight" license plates. At Tammy's recommendation, we had dinner at a great Frenchy restaurant, and then headed back to the beach house they rented for themselves and their friends for the weekend. When I become a cult leader, I fully intend to do it in a house like this -- 14 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, roof deck, volleyball court, pool, 3 kitchens, and 2 hot tubs, even though it was too cold to use them. Right on the water. The opposite of tough to take.

The beer and barbecue festival was the first of its kind, and we look forward to many more. Particularly fabulous, in addition to the many, many, many beers we got to sample, was High Cotton's "'Cue Cup" -- a savory parfait in a cup that started with baked beans, had a cole slaw middle and a barbecue top -- completed with a cornbread stick. Brilliant.

The rest of time we hung out with friends, visited the Bodie Island Lighthouse on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, slept late, and watched the Red Sox win. Oh, and drank a lot of beer.

Now if we can just get the mega millions to come in...

Continued ...

October 5, 2007

Better ingredients, worse grasp of geography

Papa John's is selling a pair of new specialty pies that they're calling "Tuscan pizzas." So, fine. They sound tasty enough, one with a bunch of different cheeses and one with a couple different meats and fresh tomato.

That second one, though -- they're calling it the "Roma meats pizza." Now, I've never been to Italy, but I've watched enough Molto Mario to know that Italian regional cuisine is rather a big deal. And, see, Rome is kind of right in the middle there, and Tuscany is up above it. And based on what Mario has taught me, they're not interchangeable, and no Tuscan would put "Roma" in the name of his pizza.

Just sayin'.

Continued ...

October 1, 2007

And you thought he was unintelligible 30 years ago....


Last weekend we went to the wedding of a friend of mine in DC (great party and bitchin' guests -- more on that later), and the night before we went to see Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello at Merriweather Post Pavilion, in suburban Maryland. While I would rather face the fires of Hell than spend time in suburban Maryland, for Dylan and Costello, I made an exception.

My love for Elvis Costello is deep, abiding, and undiminished by the years -- constant since I discovered him in high school (I was kind of late bloomer). He is a genius -- spectacular songwriter, endlessly creative and damn near fearless with the stuff he'll try musically. I have recovered from my mourning period after he married Diana Krall (though it gave me hope that finding happiness and bursting forth with a couple of kids relatively late in life is possible -- plus they seem to be having a nice time), and on Friday night he delivered an excellent (though for my taste, too short) acoustic set that made the drive and the traffic and suburban Maryland worth it.

Dylan, on the other hand...


I've always liked Bob Dylan and respected his genius, his conscience, and poetry and craft that he's brought to everything he's done. I've been a proponent of his new renaissance. I've seen him play an excellent concert, and I've seen him play a set that sucked so loudly that it left the entire crowd's collective jaw dropping to the floor. You never quite know what you're going to get.

The good news: His band ROCKED. Bluesy, hipster, extremely tight, obviously very talented, and clearly jazzed to be playing with a legend. And Dylan's harmonica and organ playing were fantastic.

The bad news: I understood less than 50 words total of his 90-minute set. I wasn't looking for any song to be a replica of the recordings; in fact I'd have loathed that. But it would've been great to get what the crowd of die-hards was cheering about every time he started a song. I'm grateful to know I wasn't the only one with this problem. I started replaying last week's Grey's Anatomy in my head just to stay alert.

The mumbling. The muddy delivery. Good God, the mumbling. In the past I've chalked up Dylan's weird on-stage behavior to being the singing equivalent of Miles Davis playing with his back to the audience. Now I think it's the musical equivalent of those computer-generated pictures where you can see the spaceship if you unfocus your eyes. Or a foreign-language immersion program -- eventually you start to understand French if you're surrounded by people who are speaking it. With Dylan, I started to get scared that I'd lose my ability to understand English if I could make out what he was saying for a sustained period of time. Oui.

The weird news: As Rick and I strained to understand what the hell was going on, he noticed something sitting near Dylan on a cabinet onstage. Is ... that... really? Could that really be the Oscar he won for Best Original Song (on the Wonder Boys soundtrack)? Rick borrowed a fellow concert goer's binoculars to get a better look, and unless we had a simultaneous hallucination, it was either the statuette or a replica. Who does that? I mean really. On the other hand, it's damn near the funniest thing I've ever seen on a stage.

For a long time now, I've been mocking the Rolling Stones for touring -- again and again and again. I wouldn't have wanted to see them on any tour after Tattoo You in 1982. But at least their frontman can still sing. Mick, I promise to (almost) never make fun of you again.

Continued ...