Month: May 2014

Categories
News The Fly-By

How to Go On Vacation

I can say with pride my wife Lisa is a “professional vacationer.” It’s not enough the woman works long hours at her regular job, but say the word “vacation,” and her fingers start flying all over the keyboard, checking out websites, looking for the best available deals at various destinations.

You see, the problem with using a travel agency is they basically suggest to you all the ways you can have leisurely fun. There are no guarantees that once you get there you’ll actually participate in things like para-sailing, hang gliding or horseback riding. They look good in the pictures, but I like to come back home alive. It’s why I take so much stock in the activities Lisa plans for a trip. A lot of places, she’s already been. She knows the lay of the land. But, most importantly, she takes great pains to ensure we’re going to take advantage of vacation pursuits both of us will enjoy.

This has not been the case in most of my life. Even the prospect of embarking on a vacation scared me so profoundly that when the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies came out, I was the only one in the theater who never laughed. The scripted family chaos was too close to home to be funny. We were the black Griswalds! Taking a vacation conjured up visions of some “death march” to get there before hotel check-in time. My usually affable grandpa, rather than stopping at highway rest stops, sternly enforced the “urinate in a can” rule until we got to our location. His kind eyes would morph into those of a steely eyed Transformer as he and the steering wheel melded into one determined machine.

Even after arriving at a chosen vacation spot, we were never guaranteed we would find peace and serenity. I have only my brother Larry as personal witness to the family’s annual two-week treks from Fulton, Missouri, to Las Vegas. The prospect of six people riding shoulder to shoulder in one car going across the desert never appealed to me, so I’d come up with some lame excuse not to go. Besides, everybody going knew there was one place in all of Vegas that couldn’t be avoided. It was some off-the-Strip lounge where my mother, yearly mind you, wanted to see a comedian named “Cookie Jar.” He was touted as a poor man’s Redd Foxx. Larry says his jokes were so off-color and downright obscene people started heading for the exits within the first five minutes of his act. But apparently my mother would laugh so hard tears would come to her eyes. She also raved about him because after his shows he’d come to her table and remember her name. Wow! When you’re playing to an audience of 10 people that’s pretty amazing, alright.

As I became a parent, mapping out summer camp for the children was just as challenging as mulling over the family vacation. While living in Florida, we chose to send the boys off to a four-week Bible camp. It’s not that we were all that religious, but we figured there’d be plenty of healthy physical activities to occupy their minds and bodies. Week one went really well. We visited them just to make sure all was good. They chattered about canoeing and hiking. We couldn’t have been more pleased. But, just before the start of the final week, they came home for a brief respite. At dinner, they were strangely silent, until we started to chow down. Then, as if in some Children of the Corn cult-like trance, they rose to announce: “If you and mom don’t change your ways, you will be part of the heathen savages that will be engulfed in the fiery pit of Hell, where Satan will eternally torture you until your heads fall off and they’ll be eaten by rats!”

No, we didn’t send them back for the final week of camp.

All of which brings me back to Lisa’s marvelous plans for a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where we will be when you read this article. It’s one of those all-expenses pre-paid trips where you eat and drink to your heart’s content. There are blue skies and lovely Pacific Ocean beaches. However, just before we left, I caught my wife staring off into space. I asked what was wrong. She said, “Ah, nothing. It’s just that I’ve got a lot of work to do to take you on vacation,” and I said, “It’ll be fine. I checked. Cookie Jar is still in Vegas.”

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

NBA Chaos Theory

“This is why we can’t have nice things.” That’s the first thought I had when I read Marc Stein of ESPN’s tweet dropping the bomb no one (save for maybe Chris Wallace) saw coming: Jason Levien and Stu Lash were on their way out of the Grizzlies organization. The Grizzlies had just finished up a tumultuous season: 50 games won despite injuries; a first-year head coach; long stretches of uninspired, lackluster play; and a barrage of Zach Randolph trade rumors.

Throughout the season, we learned a few things: Dave Joerger, despite his flaws and growing pains, is undeniably a decent coach. (Before you write those angry Lionel Hollins letters, please note that I said “decent.”) Levien, Lash, and John Hollinger proved they could make smart basketball decisions that also took the franchise’s long-term financial health into consideration. On the business side, the team has never been in better shape. ESPN ranked the Grizzlies the #1 Franchise in Professional Sports for a reason.

All of that isn’t necessarily gone, but it’s certainly been jeopardized. Controlling owner Robert Pera has shown some of the smartest guys in the business the door, allowed Joerger to interview for the Minnesota Timberwolves’ coaching job, and has said absolutely nothing about what he’s thinking or where the team is going. Not that he has to, of course. The fact remains, though, that the only people talking about what’s going on are people who were just shown the door, and thus 1) don’t know what’s happening with the team any longer and 2) are, shall we say, motivated to paint what has already happened as the lashings out of a crazy person.

Not that we know whether Pera is a crazy person or not. It’s entirely possible that he is, but it’s entirely possible that he has a carefully thought-out master plan that will take the Grizzlies from good to great. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The onus is now on Pera to regain the trust of the fan base and prove that he knows what he’s doing. Trust takes time to build and no time at all to destroy. There’s every reason in the world to think the Grizzlies are transforming into the Knicks right before our eyes: an owner who wants to call shots he shouldn’t be calling and who lacks the self-awareness to know when to stand back and let the basketball people do their jobs. That works in New York, where the Knicks have a license to print money. That goes a long way to cover up inept management. It doesn’t work in a small market, where the team has to break even to be viable, and a big part of breaking even is careful management, both of the business side and the basketball side. The Grizzlies’ fan base is still young and relatively fragile. A detour back to the broken-foot-Pau days may not permanently damage that relationship between team and city, but it won’t help.

There are on-court things to consider, too. How does this affect Zach Randolph’s decision-making regarding his player option this summer? If Pera makes the wrong moves, will Marc Gasol want to stay around next summer? If the wrong head coach is brought in, will that coach be able to manage the personalities in this locker room? It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where the good things the Griz have built over the past five years are washed away by a bad hire or two.

It could work out, of course. But at the very least, the power structure of the Grizzlies’ unwieldy ownership group has been upended, and relationships there may be damaged beyond repair. A promising front office has been partially dismantled, and a promising young coach has been shown the door, possibly because a player or two didn’t like him (but then, we don’t really know what the players said in those secret season-ending interviews with Pera). At the very least, instability has been injected into a situation where it didn’t seem like there was any, and Pera has taken his basketball team from a smart situation set up for success to, well, who knows?

It was already going to be an important summer for the Grizzlies, but it was only supposed to be roster decisions that determined the future direction of the team. Now there is no direction visible, and all of us get to sit and watch and wait for the Grizzlies to be remade in some image. But whose will it be, and how will it shake out? That’s up to Robert Pera, for better or for worse.

Categories
News

Sun Studio Rises

Joe Boone has the story of Matt Ross-Spang, who has brought legendary Sun Studio back to its roots — and its original equipment.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Good News, Bad News for Shelby County Democrats

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The week leading up to the Memorial Day weekend highlighted both the hopes and the perils facing Democrats in Shelby County and in Tennessee at large.

Locally, the issue of what to do about Henri Brooks still festers in party ranks but is likely to end indecisively, inasmuch as all the available options regarding the volatile county commissioner who is her party’s nominee for Juvenile Court Clerk seem to be of the no-win variety.

In the immediate aftermath of Brooks’ verbal attack on a Hispanic witness and two of her colleagues at the commission meeting on Monday, May 12th, Commission Chairman James Harvey made some resolute statements about backing a possible censure action against Brooks, but Harvey — long famous, in both speech and action, for a tendency to consider multiple options, tentatively adopting and discarding each in turn — seems to have backed off the idea.

With the Commission preparing to meet this week in committee and next Monday in full session, no action is likely unless pressed by a fellow African-American commission member or called for by a prominent Democratic nominee on the August 7th countywide ballot. “It would take a ‘Sister Souljah’ moment,” said one Democrat, evoking the memory of presidential candidate Bill Clinton‘s venturing to criticize racially abrasive comments by a prominent black activist in 1992.

Such an action might well exacerbate intra-party tensions among Democrats, but the lack of such an action leaves the party open to actual or implied Republican criticism regarding Democratic toleration of bigotry.

When the Shelby County Democratic Party Executive Committee met last Thursday for a “unity” gathering, much lip service was paid to the concept of party loyalty and much suspicion was vented of possible GOP skullduggery, but not a single thing was said about Brooks or the May 12th Commission meeting or community reaction to it.

Statewide, the predicament of Democrats as a minority party at the mercy of Republican officials was underscored by the arrival in Memphis on Thursday of three Democratic appointed state Supreme Court justices — Chief Justice Gary Wade, Cornelia Clark, and Sharon Lee.

The three justices, all up for Yes/No retention votes on August 7th, have been targeted for rejection in a campaign led by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, the presiding officer of the state Senate. Two other justices, including Janice Holder of Memphis, have already announced their retirement in lieu of standing for retention. State Appeals Court Judge Holly Kirby, also of Memphis, was appointed by Governor Bill Haslam to succeed Holder.

Wade, Clark, and Lee drew a supportive crowd of fellow lawyers and other supporters at a fund-raiser in their behalf at the Racquet Club on Thursday night, and Memphis Mayor A C Wharton held a joint press conference with them on Friday, endorsing them for retention.

Haslam, who would have the responsibility of naming replacements for the three justices, should they not win retention, has kept a discreet and neutral distance from the matter.

On the statewide front, the good news for Democrats is that three candidates in the Democratic primary are vying for the right to oppose incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander in November. The three are Larry Crim of Nashville, CEO of Christian Counseling Centers of America, Inc., and two Knoxville attorneys, Terry Adams, and Gordon Ball.

Crim ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in a 2012 race for the Senate seat held (and retained) by Bob Corker. Most party attention has focused on Adams and Ball.

Ball, a respected trial lawyer who has won huge judgments against corporations for malfeasance (and can largely self-finance a campaign) was the guest of a meet-and-greet affair in Memphis co-hosted last Thursday night by Jocelyn Wurzburg and Kemba Ford. Under attack in some party quarters for his past support of Republican candidates in East Tennessee (where, as he pointed out, Republicans are often the only choices on the ballot) and for his espousal of a flat tax, Ball endorsed consensus Democratic positions on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.

Adams was in Memphis on Friday for an evening hosted by the Rincon Strategy Group at Bar DKDC at Cooper and Young. Featuring an attack on economic inequality as a major theme (a fact he demonstrates by carrying the text of Thomas Piketty‘s currently modish Capital in the 21st Century on his cell phone), Adams seems to have the support of young Democrats calling themselves progressives.

Again, the good news for Democrats is that both Ball and Adams seemingly represent viable and credentialed alternatives to Alexander. The bad news is that Alexander, who has a well-stocked campaign war chest, is considered to have an enormous, even a prohibitive, lead over any Democrat.

The incumbent senator is now engaged in a primary campaign of his own against challengers including Republican State Representative Joe Carr of Lascasses, who hopes for Tea Party support, and George Flinn of Memphis, whose aim seems mainly that of popularizing his own approach to a national health-care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act.

Another Democrat venturing to run statewide is gubernatorial candidate John McKamey, a retired coach from Kingsport in East Tennessee, who has the formal support of the AFL-CIO. McKamey was headed to Memphis for an appearance before the Germantown Democrats this Wednesday night at Coletta’s on Highway 64.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Someone’s Missing

Spring has sprung. Grass is turning green, and people are slowly inching their way out of their houses. The zombie apocalypse called “winter” has ended, so I know it’s baseball season. Normally, this is my favorite time of year. I shed that thick winter clothing, pull out my flip flops, and check the roster and schedule of my favorite baseball team.

Checking dates. Reading articles. Studying stats. Even though I won’t be attending any games, this is what I do. These things are a ritual for me, something I do year in and year out, something I look forward to doing. I’m like a kid at Christmas.

This season, however, I’m not feeling all of it so much. Forty games into the 2014 baseball season finds me confused and conflicted, as if my life is out of sync. I am an avid Boston Red Sox fan. My distance, however, doesn’t stem from some baseball “hangover” after winning the 2013 World Series. It falls much deeper than baseball.

See, I had a close friend with whom I shared this passion for Red Sox baseball. Normally, my friend and I would already be pulling for the team, taking out all of life’s frustrations by rooting for the Sox. Cheering and yelling.

We did this together, ever since the miraculous season of 2004. It’s been nearly 10 years since the stolen base that sparked the greatest comeback in the history of sports. That stolen base allowed the Fenway Faithful, with our team down three games to none during the American League Championship Series to win four straight against our hated nemesis, the New York Yankees.

That win left my friend and me feeling on top of the world. We were proud of our boys, the Red Sox, and proud to be members of a fan base known as Red Sox Nation. As Jimmy Fallon says in Fever Pitch, “Dy-no-mite.”

I love the Boston Red Sox, and my friend did, also. We both loved the team just as much as we did when we were kids. I’m now 30, and still an avid fan. My friend, however, isn’t as lucky. Robert Schmidt, was the victim of a robbery and murder on July 26, 2012, in a house on East Yates in Memphis. He and his friend, Anthony Conte, were brutally shot to death in the basement of their home. This horrific crime remains unsolved to this day.

Robert and I spent many nights in the shadows of Newby’s on Highland, theorizing the highs and lows that baseball season brings. I thank my Higher Power every day that I was able to share that 2004 comeback moment with Robert, against the team we dubbed “The Evil Empire.”

Watching the World Series last year wasn’t the same without Robert. Even though the Sox won, it wasn’t as enjoyable without him around to share it. That is, in essence, why I remain confused and conflicted about this season.

What am I hoping for?

Besides a miraculous season where the Sox win the World Series again, I hope someone comes forward and sheds some light on the murders. Somebody knows what happened that horrific night and knows who committed these terrible crimes. Do the right thing. Not for me, but for Robert’s and Anthony’s parents. Let’s give them a season to remember, and what it feels like to be three games down and come back. As parents, they deserve answers.

Robert’s mom counts the days he’s been gone. I, however, count the games my friend has missed (255 as I write). There’s not a time a pitcher takes the mound or a player takes an at-bat that I don’t reminisce about my friend. One person out there has the ability to make this a season to remember. Not for the Red Sox, but for Robert’s mom and dad. Step up to the plate.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Tennessee Should Keep a Nonpartisan Supreme Court

Mickey Barker is a former chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court whose political affiliation before his appointment in 1998 by then GOP Governor Don Sundquist was unmistakably Republican. A Chattanooga native, Barker consistently received high marks in judicial evaluations and was twice approved overwhelmingly for retention by the state’s voters under the current “Tennessee Plan.”

He retired in 2006 but has kept a watchful eye on the state’s judicial ferment.

And so it is telling, given his political background and his record of distinguished service on the bench, that Barker finds “frightening” the current efforts by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey and other legislative Republicans to politicize Tennessee’s Supreme Court and turn it into what Barker calls a “partisan branch of government.”

Ramsey and crew, abetted by right-wing donors from elsewhere, including the billionaire Koch brothers of Wichita, Kansas, have organized a well-funded campaign to get Tennessee voters to reject three justices in this year’s statewide retention elections. The Justices — Cornelia Clark, Sharon Lee, and current Chief Justice Gary Wade — happen to have been appointed by former Governor Phil Bredesen, who, though well-known to be politically conservative, was a Democrat.

That’s enough in Ramsey’s eyes to damn the three justices up for retention, though two of them — Wade and Lee — hail from the same highly Republican corner of East Tennessee as Ramsey himself and, before their appointment, had numerous GOP associations there. Ramsey has been quoted as saying he “refuses” to believe that there aren’t capable Republican lawyers who could serve as well as Democrats on the state’s high court. As if that were the point.

Governor Bill Haslam has appointed two Republicans to fill vacancies in recent years, but the governor, who would have the duty to appoint replacements for Clark, Lee, and Wade in the case of their rejection, has made it clear he wants no part of the current anti-retention campaign.

Haslam feels constrained by his position from commenting, but former Chief Justice Barker is not so hindered. Here’s what he recently told Andy Sher of his hometown’s Chattanooga Times-Free Press: “We have three branches of government. Each is to be co-equal and each is to be separate. Two of those branches are political branches — the legislative and the executive. And the judicial branch is nonpolitical. … I am very disappointed that our present legislative branch is apparently seeking to dominate all three branches. We’ve never had that in my lifetime in Tennessee, and it would be a real shame to see that occur.”

The three beleaguered justices have been forced into a barnstorming tour of sorts to raise enough support and money to counter the well-funded purge efforts of Ramsey and his out-of-state allies. To our gratification, Clark, Lee, and Wade were welcomed by a generous turnout of area lawyers at the Racquet Club last Thursday and by the formal endorsement of Mayor A C Wharton on Friday morning.

On August 7th, they deserve the endorsement of Shelby County voters, too — regardless of party. Interpreting the law is — or should be — non-political.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Inconvenienced Truth

I was waiting in line at a convenience store, six-pack in hand. The guy in front of me was buying cigarettes. He was overweight, wearing a worn T-shirt and faded pants. He was chatting up the clerk, a tattooed, middle-aged woman who looked like she had a few rough miles on her. They were in no hurry.

“Well,” I heard the man wheeze, as he finally turned to leave, “that was before Obama screwed everything up.” The woman laughed and said, “You’re right about that.”

The man turned to me, smiled broadly, and said, “Yep, Obama screwed everything up, didn’t he?” Not wanting to mix politics with a beer run, I just looked at him blankly.

Back in my car, I had one of those “I wish I’d said …” moments.

I wish I’d asked him if he had a problem with a health-care system that would allow him to get insurance when his emphysema got worse. I wish I’d asked the clerk if she opposed a $10.50 minimum wage, which would have no doubt increased the size of her paycheck.

Their taxes haven’t been raised. Their guns haven’t been taken. The economy has come back from the depths of the recession. Why rednecks don’t like Obama is a mystery to me. Sort of.

Speaking of mysteries … how about that Robert Pera? The owner of the Grizzlies created a maelstrom last week by suddenly firing his CEO, Jason Levien, and letting Coach Dave Joerger go off to interview for the Minnesota Timberwolves job. Sports-talk radio hosts were melting down; the town was abuzz with rumors that Pera was “weird.” And he well might be. But he’s also 37. I had to fire someone at my first editor’s job when I was 37. Let me tell you, it’s easy to screw it up.

I inherited a copyeditor who was surly and incompetent. After a month, I went to the publisher and complained. “Fire him,” he said.

I called “Keith” into my office, made some small talk, then said, “Uh, I think, uh, Keith, we have to make some changes … .”

Keith said, “Are you firing me?”

“Well, uh, yeah …” I said. Keith stood up and bolted to the publisher’s office, with me right behind him. “Am I being fired?” he yelled.

“Yes,” said the publisher, calmly. “Give me your key and clean out your desk. We’ll have your last check for you in an hour.” Keith meekly pulled his key out of his pocket and returned to his desk.

So I learned how to be a better manager and how to fire someone without screwing it up. Pera can do the same. No reason to panic, Griz fans.

Besides, as we know, one man’s screwup is just another man’s beer run.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

X-Men: Days of Future Past: Mutatis mutan(t)dis

I forgot how thrilling the X-Men movies were until the moment in Days of Future Past when a Sentinel robot shattered Iceman’s head. So I wasn’t surprised to discover that the fifth (or seventh) installment in the franchise is as casually creative and proudly pseudo-profound as its predecessors. With the exception of a few moments of lachrymose speechifying, its unrelenting, almost sadistic intensity makes it the summer’s most ruthlessly efficient blockbuster. You will be entertained. Resistance is futile.

Although I confess an irrational fondness for Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand, bringing back two-time X-Men director Bryan Singer for Days of Future Past was a wise choice. His third entry (after the original X-Men and its first sequel) in the series satisfies serious fan expectations and respects the cinematic universe built by the previous four films. And if you don’t look too closely or think too hard, he also straightens out the previous tetralogy’s knotty timelines, gaps, and inconsistencies.

A movie this size is a big undertaking, and at times it creaks like some superhero version of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The army of recognizable faces in Days of Future Past is formidable: we see old and young Magneto (Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender), old and young Professor X (Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy), new Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), old Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), old Storm (Halle Berry), and more fresh faces and peripheral favorites. At the center of this mutant whirlwind stands Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), an immortal tough guy for whom history is a nightmare from which he cannot awaken.

In Days of Future Past, Pryde sends Wolverine’s consciousness back to the 1970s in an effort to avoid the nightmarish future the surviving mutants now live in, where they are hunted down and obliterated by the sleek, chain-mailed Sentinels. But the fight scenes are only part of the show. Singer’s film is also a poppy, propellant gloss on Jean Renoir’s famous observation from The Rules of The Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”

Take Magneto, whose hostility is partially rooted in his belief that fearful humans will wipe out his mutant brothers. Or take scientist and industrialist Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage). Trask believes that mutants will do the same to humans because that’s the way evolution works. And don’t forget the eternal optimist Charles Xavier, who continues to believe in human decency and human hope even when he’s a drug-addled, powerless version of his former self. Each of them is, at some point in the film, doing the right thing.

Although its most fully realized set piece is a funny slow-motion musical interlude inspired by the 2006 animated film Over The Hedge, Days of Future Past is the most serious film in the X-Men cosmology. There’s not much time for verbal grace notes, but there are plenty of visual ones, from Wolverine’s gray-streaked temples to an army of Sentinels spreading out over a stormy sky like skydiver-shaped warheads. It traduces history because its whole premise is that history is changeable bunk, and for a global $300 million smash hit, it gets awfully dark before the dawn. Good stuff.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Winning at Cheater’s Chicken

CREDIT: Ari Levaux

Cheaters never win, or so we’re taught. But I cheat at chicken all the time, and I never seem to lose.

To cheat at chicken, buy a roasted chicken at the store, bring it home, and use it as an ingredient in some other dish, like enchiladas or stir-fry.

Regardless of the final form of the meal, Cheater’s Chicken Soup is a given. A lot of chicken soup or broth is prepared as an afterthought from the leftover carcass, but Cheater’s Chicken Soup can be made as soon as the bird gets home.

Pull the flesh off of the bones, leaving a greasy pile of skin and meat, and cut the bones into small pieces. With store-bought, slow-cooked chicken, you can count on the bones being only marginally more rigid than the buttery flesh, and kitchen scissors should easily reduce the bones into inch-long sections. It’s especially important to slice through the wide ends of the long bones, where much of the marrow, nutrients, and general boney goodness reside.

Simmer the bone shards in a gallon or so of water. You can turn out a pretty quick soup this way, but it’s better to simmer the bones for at least two or three hours. Then, let the pot cool to room temperature, to let the leaching of nutrients from chicken to stock run its full course, and set the pot in the fridge overnight. The next morning, skim any fat from the surface of the stock, and strain out the bones.

The stock can be stored for a day or two in the fridge, or frozen. When you’re ready to make soup, reheat the stock and add carrots and celery, in large chunks, and a peeled onion, cut in quarters. Simmer for at least an hour, and season with salt, a little at a time, as the soup cooks. If you want a simple, brothy soup, salt is enough. If you want something heartier, add some of the chicken flesh, if you were able to set some aside while your family was pulling at that bird like a flock of vultures.

At this point, the soup, like a freshly procured chicken, is a blank slate. You can season the soup with herbs, like dill leaf or thyme. Garlic helps. Green chile helps. Maybe a pinch of lime.

I was at the store the other day getting supplies for Cheaters Chicken Peking Spring Rolls. The plan was to make chicken spring rolls flavored with scallions and hoisin sauce, Peking-duck style.

Alas, the only flavors of cheaters chicken available were unsalted and balsamic. Unsalted sounded terribly bland, but I wasn’t in the mood to roll the dice with balsamic-flavored Peking spring rolls, so I went with bland.

At home, the vultures dug into that bland bird like they always do, barely pausing to notice the lack of salt or any other seasoning.

As the bones simmered, I made my rolls.

I rehydrated a sheet of rice paper by dipping it in a bowl of water and spreading it out on a plate to soften. In the center of the sheet I placed chicken, scallions, and hoisin sauce, along with cabbage, basil, mint, and little dollops of mayo and Vietnamese chili garlic sauce. I rolled and repeated, and then served the rolls with soy sauce.

The meal was great, but I couldn’t help wondering why I had paid three times the price for a bird that was simply heated. Maybe I was losing at cheating.

The next day I brought home a five-pound bird that, according to Whole Foods, had received regular spa treatment and occasional trips to Disneyland, yet cost only a few dollars more than the one-pound cooked birds in the deli area.

I rinsed my happy, dead chicken and put it in the oven at 350, unseasoned. The entire process took about a minute.

I really wanted to add a little seasoning, but for the sake of science I left it plain, wanting to see if it was possible to screw up a chicken.

But after a couple of hours I broke down. Having just flipped the bird to breast-down in the juices, I couldn’t resist sprinkling salt, garlic powder and thyme on the moist underbelly of the freshly turned chicken. Then, I lined the perimeter of the pan with large pieces of potato and carrot, before sending it back in the oven for more. I cooked it mostly with the lid on to keep in the juices, uncovering under high heat at the end for a few minutes to crisp the skin.

All of this hassle took another five minutes out of my day, and the result was spectacular, better than Cheater’s Chicken. The vultures were especially voracious around the bird that evening.

If you’re looking to bust out the cranberry sauce and whatnot, then you should probably do something a little more involved with your home-baked chicken. Brine it overnight in salt water to add flavor and moisture. Stuff it. Use a meat thermometer to make sure it’s perfectly cooked.

But if you’re just looking for a shortcut around the cheating process, either because you’re too cheap to cheat, or are just a better person, the most important ingredient is just a little foresight. Put the bird in the oven, and then get back to your life.

Because luckily, it’s really hard to screw up a chicken, unless you dry it out. And if you do, you can make extra chunky chicken soup.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Jon Favreau’s Chef satisfying, not spectacular.

That Eli Roth’s cannibal film The Green Inferno played as a trailer to Chef appeared to be a good omen, but Jon Favreau’s foodie film, of which he serves as writer, director, and star, is a chain restaurant movie — serving up fare that is reliable, if not spectacular.

The story revolves around Carl Casper, a chef anointed the biggest thing going in the L.A. food scene, but that was 10 years ago, and where Casper sees beauty in the greens of a bundle of beets, his boss, Riva (Dustin Hoffman), sees it in the greens of a bundle of money brought in by customers who’ve been coming back for the same decade-old menu.

A visit by an important critic finds Casper and Riva at odds. Casper wants to try something new and exciting, Riva wants to play it safe by serving the same old scallops and lava cake. The chef gets slammed by the critic, and what follows is a violent confrontation (one that is filmed and goes viral) that leaves Casper without a job and doubtful about his future. Thrown in the mix is the relationship Casper has with his 10-year-old son, who yearns to spend more time with his dad.

As a food film, Chef never reaches the heights of 1994’s Eat Drink Man Woman, but it does capture the giddiness as seen in 2009’s Julie & Julia of creating and sharing a meal so fine that the mood is electric. And, if the film doesn’t quite make you want to be a chef, it will certainly make you want a sandwich.

It’s clear that Favreau did his homework. It’s seen in such foodie flourishes as the Lucky Peach magazine in Casper’s apartment and the appearance of culinary stars like Aaron Franklin of Austin’s Franklin Barbecue and Roy Choi of the Kogi BBQ Taco Truck in L.A. At one point, Chef becomes a road-trip movie, with Casper, his right-man, and Casper’s son driving across the country, from Miami to L.A., in a food truck. The trip serves as a primer for Casper’s son — Cuban sandwiches in Miami, beignets and muffulettas in New Orleans, and Texas barbecue in Austin. (Interestingly, there is apparently nothing noteworthy foodwise between Texas and California.)

The film is well served by its supporting cast. Scarlett Johansson is Casper’s sympathetic and (duh) sexy sounding board, while John Leguizamo adds humor and energy as Casper’s sous chef. There’s a cameo by Amy Sedaris as well, stirring up memories of the fantastic Jerri Blank as the too-tan, not-hearing-a-word publicist. The film’s biggest laughs, however, go to the brief though wonderfully weird and awkward scene with Robert Downey Jr. playing the ex-husband of Casper’s ex-wife.

It’s ironic, then, that another of these supporting roles points directly to the chief weakness of Chef. Hoffman, as the nervous restaurant owner, does not want to try anything that stretches the imagination. And while Favreau’s character fights the static, Favreau as a writer and director does not push the boundaries. There are at least three musical interludes (two too many), and the ending, while pleasing, is about as pat as they come. Ultimately, Chef feeds you just enough to be satisfied.