Went to see Colson Whitehead at Placer High in Auburn on Monday night, LM was driving and let me know about it. He was super funny and rad. Beth Ruyak interviewed him and I was cringing a bit, ok that's an understatement, I was dying from secondhand embarrassment, due to the racial nature of some of the questions and her wide-eyed naivete. He handled it all with grace. He also revealed that Barry Jenkins (of Moonlight) will be directing a miniseries based on Underground Railroad. I started reading it last night. It's brutal, of course. He did say all of the brutality in it was based on true accounts. Insane.
Me and SM went to Journey to the Dumpling last night in Elk Grove. We had concluded that it was too far and were going to go to Quan Nem, but then I realized that by the time we got to 47th ave we were about halfway there so why not? It was in the midst of blocks of massive strip malls and kind of hard to find. These are pan fried pork dumplings with corn. They stayed hot forever, we were warned about the possibilities of hot soup squirts. They were ok. The wrapper was too much like bread.
Beef roll. It was ok. Not as good as Yang's and had the odd touch of lots of strong, raw red onion.
Soup dumplings. Really good. Best I've had around here. I liked the really malty vinegar that came with. I will probably go back to get these, and try the wontons. The menu was pretty boring besides the dumplings, but promised more kinds of dumplings will be coming soon.
I saw the move Toni Erdmann with CH at Tower. I was dreading an almost 3 hour German movie, since the preview looked terrible, but every critic was going so apeshit over it! I'm very glad I saw it in the theater. Unique and the female protagonist gives an incredible performance. There is a lot of stuff about corporate culture, and since CH and I are both enmired in it (spellcheck is telling me that is not a word), she more than I, it was stressing us out thinking of the week to come, prepping for meetings, etc. That made it more interesting, but more relevant. If you aren't in any type of corporate culture that might make a lot of it boring.
I guess Lucky Peach mag is folding? That sucks, I think it's the best around, although overstuffed and has some annoying elements. It is obviously super expensive to produce. I didn't know it had split from McSweeney's. I bet the cookbooks are what did it. They all looked really useless and not appealing to me at all. I really liked the ambition and irreverence. It has been so influential and widely copied.
ReplyDeleteBeth Ruyak is so strange to me. There was often boytalk among my friends in high school about "Who's hot?" on all the local television news stations. There was one kid that worshipped her so much, but he was also seemed the least-likely to be in such a crude conversation objectifying women because he was so innocent and seemed to be forever frozen at 8 years old. He was like the prodigy kid in Revenge of the Nerds, still seemingly far from pubescence even as he got his driver's permit. This boy would never utter a comment about a classmate or a teacher or anyone from the world of entertainment besides Björk (biggest Sugarcubes fan), but he was very enthusiastic in vaunting Beth Ruyak as goddess of TV news. The general reaction is that Beth seemed too innocent or too cloistered.
ReplyDeleteThese memories all flooded back when I read after Prince died that Beth Ruyak was a huge fan because she grew up in Minnesota and even won the Miss Minnesota pageant in 1981. I really wasn't surprised about the pageant queen thing.... Just the idea of her sweatin' in a dance club or intimate venue to the fledgling Prince prancing around lasciviously in some bikini-cut banana hammock.
The guy who intro-ed who, who was a former school superintendant (Ok I can't spell that word) gushed about his crush on her in a very cringe-y way. I wanted to die.
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