#128 - i tallyin'?

hey, remember that show the sopranos? yeah. me too. i was a definite latecomer to it. i heard enough about it when it was on the air, but other than a few months in boston a few years back, i never had hbo, so my opportunities for keeping up with it were essentially nil, especially in that pre-itunes era. i eventually got around to watching the entire series straight through from beginning to end over a two week period about two years ago, shortly after the series had already ended. it's been a while since then, so over the past week, inspired by a stumbled-upon beverage, i went back & watched both parts of the final season, the one with that infamous final scene.

like i mentioned, i initially watched all six seasons of the show (with the split sixth season, sort of like seven seasons, but who's tallyin'?) straight through in a mad dash, so i was devouring a lot of character & story info at once. this time round, going in, i knew there'd be a ton of things i hadn't noticed or comprehended the first time through. i was definitely watching more from an entertainment perspective that first time through, so i was ready to analyze away & let the critic in me spill out this time. after all, with twenty-one episodes in the season, there's a lot of story packed in there.

take the soprano family. while i could care less about meadow going to college or carmela's spec house, the relationship between tony & a.j. during the last season is nothing short of awesome. as tony struggles to maintain his power as head of the dimeo crime family, a.j.'s struggling against a crushing depression that flies in the face of what tony thinks makes a "man." although our circumstances were less extreme & my dad worked at the post office, i couldn't help but think of my own struggles connecting with him when i watched them interact.

when the show was in its original run, there was an obvious fixation on "who's gonna get whacked this week?" in that final season, it takes seven episodes for anyone significant to get whacked & other than one other major whacking a few episodes later, the first half of the season's virtually whack free. looking back at how the season plays out, the lack of solid whacking during the first half definitely makes the second half whackings all that more powerful.

with less whacking, there's even more focus on the family than usual. sorry. i just wanted to use the words "whacking" & "focus on the family" in the same sentence. there's always been a focus on the soprano family, but in the final season, there's a lot of focus on how vito's coming out affects his family, how chris deals with his dead wife & new wife/baby, how paulie handles finding out who his real mom is, how bobby still struggles for respect even though he's tony's brother-in-law & the effects that johnny sack's prison sentence & cancer have on his family.

if you haven't seen the last two episodes yet & still want to, sorry but i'm going to speak to them now. you need to get with the times. it's been over two years since the last episode aired. in the penultimate episode, the scenes where the lupertazzi family quickly whack bobby & leave sil in a coma are epic. we spent eighty-four episodes getting to know them (but who's tallyin'?), so the raw violence of their deaths is SO powerful, especially with bobby, who's nice to a fault & has only killed one person in his life. as for the last episode & specifically the final scene, it's been analyzed to death, so i'm not going to get into all the symbolism & whatnot, but given two things--there's a sketchy dude who goes into the bathroom to tony's right shortly before the scene cuts to black & there was a scene in the opening episode of the second half of the season where bobby asks tony "you probably don't even hear it when it happens, right?"--i've decided that tony got whacked at the end of the episode. mystery solved.

#128 - i tallyin'?
snack: marinated mozzarella balls & boar's head beef salami
drink: sopranos chianti soda



with all that sopranos, i felt it appropriate to eat like a soprano. i would've picked up some gabba goul or made some lincoln logs if i knew what the hell either of them were, so instead, i picked up a tub of marinated mozzarella balls & a half pound of boar's head beef salami from the corner bodega. at first, i asked if they had capicola, not realizing that the dudes are muslim & don't serve any pork. my bad...& a happy ramadan to you, sir. instead, the deli dude suggested that i get some of the boar's head beef salami, so i did. i don't need to be eating pork anyhow. as for the marinated mozzarella balls, i made the decision to get them all by myself. my mom would've been quite proud of me.

beef salami's way different than regular salami. they aren't even close to the same thing. regular salami's spicy & sausagelike, all flecked with pork fat & herbs & spices. the beef salami's essentially a bunch of beef shaped like salami, with no spices or fatty deposits or anything built in. that doesn't mean i didn't like it though. it actually has a sweeter taste to it & when you wrap a slice around one of the mozzarella balls, the sweet beefy salami flavor melds with the oil & sun-dried tomato & spices of the mozzarella marinade. it's actually quite the delightful snack. in fact, i've already gone back to the bodega for more twice this week.

i came across the bottle of sopranos chianti soda last week whilst at eagle provisions, the polish market with a huge beer selection a few blocks from my place, up on 5th ave. it's one of three sopranos-themed sodas put out by hbo, along with the limencello & amaretto flavors. at first, i thought that the bottle, which has a 2006 HBO copyright on the back, might be some relic from the bush era, but the sopranos soda seems to still available for sale online, so i told myself that it was still relatively fresh. other than being italian soda, i'm not sure where the connection to the sopranos is, since i can't remember seeing anyone drink an italian soda at any point on the show. maybe i should check out the deleted scenes in the box set just to be sure.

i drank it during my first night of episodes, when nobody was getting whacked. it was a fitting beverage for the first half of the season...sort of. the first half was laid back, with the limited whacking & character exploration. the chianti soda was laid back as well, but in a less cool way. i've had my fair share of the archer farms (target) brand italian sodas & those things are the bomb. you'd think that a soda infused with the spirit of italian wine & gangsters would be a little more hardcore, but the sopranos soda's far from it. it was essentially like drinking a bottle of watery, over-sweetened juice with minimal carbonation. i hope i don't get whacked for saying this, but just like with david chase & tony's fate, i'm going to leave the other two sopranos soda flavors to the imagination. here's to hbo redeeming itself with the tru blood beverage, which will be available next monday. you'd better believe i'm going to drink hbo's blood.

#120 - mad? these men are CAH-RAY-ZEE!

yeah, i know. everybody & their mother has already written about last sunday's third season premiere of amc's mad men, but i want to write about it too, damnit. after all, it's one of my favorite tv shows & it's been almost ten months since season two came to a close, so i've been jonesing. overall, almost three million people tuned in to the premiere, a 33% increase over the season two premiere, so i wasn't alone. the buzz has totally built. luckily, i've waited almost a week since it aired to get around to writing it, so i'm assuming that i'll be the "final word" on it.

when we last visited the mad men at the end of last season, things had fallen into a serious state of unrest. on a global scale, the cuban missle crisis & the possibility of a nuclear holocaust loomed over american society. the fate of sterling cooper was in question, as they were on the brink of a merger with a british firm (putnam, powell & lowe), leaving things all topsy-turvy for many of the main characters. don draper had been kicked out of his own house and his marriage was in shambles because of his constant cheating & overall attitude towards betty, but in the final scene of the season, she'd revealed to him that she's pregnant.

...& it's under those circumstances that we begin season three. the episode opens with don dreaming about the circumstances surrounding his birth (to a prostitute who dies after giving birth to him) as he warms milk on the stove. he brings the milk upstairs to betty & other than seeing that she's still pregnant, we're not entirely sure where we are on the timeline. we know that he's back living at home & that the sterling/putnam merger's gone through, but not much more. this vagueness is one of the keys to how mad men creator matthew weiner weaves his storytelling magic. much of the time, the characters feel & act like they're in control, but the truth is that they never seem to know the whole story & as such, there's always something waiting to derail them. as the season starts, we get this same feeling.

the premiere seemed to set up a lot of the storylines for season three. don & betty will soon have their third child, but don is still cheating on betty, doing so with a stewardess while on a business trip in baltimore. on that same trip, sal (who we've always assumed was gay but it's never been confirmed) starts getting hot & heavy with a hotel bellboy until they're interrupted by a fire alarm that clears out the hotel. while climbing down the fire escape in the evacuation, unbeknownst to sal, don spies the bellboy in his undershirt in sal's room. at the agency, they fire burt peterson (the head of accounts) & pete thinks that he's been named the new head but soon learns that they've actually replaced burt with a two-man team made up of him & ken cosgrove. there's also tension between joan & john hooker, the new male british secretary who's the "right-hand man" to lane pryce (the new CFO).

overall, it was a slow start to the season, but i'm not worried, as weiner's laid the foundations & in previous seasons, things didn't really take off until a few episodes in anyhow. we're someplace around the beginning of 1963 & since actual historical events have always had some effect on the storyline, there's a lot looming on the horizon. the feminine mystique & the beatles' first album (please please me) are coming out soon. the civil rights movement continues to boil over in the south & martin luther king will soon deliver his "i have a dream" speech. most importantly, JFK will soon be assassinated, an event that changed things for a lot of people. i can't wait to see what effect those things have on the folks at sterling-cooper.

#120 - mad? these men are CAH-RAY-ZEE!
snack: mr krispers barbecue baked rice krisps
drink: lagunitas the hairy eyeball ale



you know who's a mad man? mr krisper. by looking at him, you might think that he's quite the charmer, given his bowler & bow tie & coy smile, but make no mistake about it--that dude's CAH-RAY-ZEE. i was watching TMZ the other day & saw him coming out of the club with his posse & a girl on both arms & within the span of sixty seconds, he had mooned the paparazzi, kicked a stray puppy, jumped up on the hood of a car & puked onto the pavement below before speeding away in his escalade. it was some serious andy dick type shizz, but not as naked & effeminate & pathetic.

despite his craziness, there's one thing that mr krisper can do & that's make a tasty crisp. since he's as mad as a march hare, he spells "crisps" with a "k." he's just that wacky. like the front of the bag says, his mr krispers barbecue baked rice krisps have a "great whole multigrain taste." great? sure, why not? i definitely consumed them at a fairly rapid pace. they're the size of poker chips & made of brown rice, giving them a nice firmness somewhere between a chip & a cracker. in general, my feelings toward barbecue chips are mixed. if they're overwhelmingly flavorful (i'm thinking mesquite here), they need to stay as far away from my mouth as possible, but if they've got a simple barbecue taste that's not too overpowering, i'll invite them in like an old friend. fortunately, mr krisper's krisps fall into the latter category.

if you don't believe that, then you'd better believe that i'm going to give you the hairy eyeball. it won't be my lagunitas the hairy eyeball ale though, because i've already drank it. plus, if i was giving away an eyeball, i'd probably have to give it to mr krisper, because even though he's nuts & possibly dangerous, it looks like he's having some trouble with his left eye & could use the help. this particular hairy eyeball is lagunitas' 2009 new years release, a brown ale with a copper color & a caramel/brown sugar taste. from what i could tell, there wasn't a lick (lock?) of hair or a wink of eyeball in it, but that's just fine with me. that stuff probably would've interfered with the flavor.

the slogan on the front of the bottle--"here's lookin' atcha'!"--sounds like something don draper would come up with. i can see the tv spot now. there's a man. he's out having drinks with a few of his buddies. from across the room, he catches a glimpse of a sultry, red-haired woman alone smoking a cigarette at the end of the bar. she notices him. they exchange a few knowing glances. he calls the bartender over & whispers something to him. the bartender nods back at him, grabs something from the cooler behind the bar, makes his way down to the woman & places a beer in front of her. it's a lagunitas the hairy eyeball ale. she looks across at the man. he winks at her. she smiles & looks at the label, which reads "here's lookin' atcha'!" then they make whoopie. end scene...& we go back to watching an engrossing episode of the beverly hillbillies or the jetsons or something.

#105 - on the fringe.

there once was a time when i was all "j.j. abrams? pfft. whatever. that guy can take his fancy one-word tv shows & cram em." that time's long gone though, so after ignoring it during its entire first season (whilst continuing to blindly follow the sub-par third season of heroes), i finally got around to watching the first season of fringe over the past few weeks. i'd initially stayed away because the two guys i shared an office with for the past six months or so both watched the first season, but they were also both excited about the new star trek & excited about/disappointed with the new terminator, so i figured it might be a little too sci-fi for my tastes. plus, until recently, when i finally got caught up with rescue me, i had a backlog of unwatched tv shows pushing fringe to the rear.

...but now my dance card's pretty free & i'm always up for some obsessive tv watching, so my recent free moments have been plugged with fringe & this sunday evening, i settled in for the last two episodes of the first season. the show revolves around olivia dunham (played by australian anna torv) & her federal team, which investigates occurrences tied to "fringe science." her team includes peter bishop (played by pacey) & his father, walter bishop (john noble, another australian). walter's just been freed from a mental hospital, so he needs his son nearby. it's a major plot point, but just one of many within the show. there are a few actors from the david simon stable--olivia's boss (lance reddick, from the wire) & another agent, played by chance kelly ("godfather" from generation kill). gbenga akinnagbe (the wire's chris partlow) even shows up for an episode. there's also this freaky bald character (played by the tony award winning michael cerveris) who's only referred to as "the observer."

my favorite things about the show? the openings often feature some sort of strange occurrence, a method often employed by the 4400, which i loved. it's set in boston, so 75% of the locales are in the greater boston area...love those sweeping flyovers of the hancock & the zakim bridge. walter is famous for saying he needs two things, one of which is usually a tasty treat. also, the most-uttered phrase on the show, usually in the opening, is "we've/i've/they've never seen anything like it." how fringy of them! to top it all off, the finale ends with two pretty badass revelations that have me eagerly awaiting next season.

so what's next? big love? battlestar galactica? deadwood? chuck? friday night lights? maybe i'll watch them all! other than mad men's return in mid-august, i figure i have at least until september until they start bringing back the series i enjoy. fringe will be back by then, as will dexter & dollhouse. tv-wise, it's going to be a long summer til then.

#105 - on the fringe.
snack: primal strips seitan thai peanut vegan jerky
drink: atwater block brewery vanilla java porter



as i settled in for the first season finale, i tore open a primal strips seitan thai peanut vegan jerky that i'd procured earlier in the day, after it'd caught my eye at the supermarket register. impulse buy! it's made by a company (primal spirit foods) founded by two vegetarian "walking buddies" from west virginia. i wonder if they ever ran into mark sanford out on the appalachian trail.

it's by far my top new snack of the year. i'm interested in purchasing a thai peanut sauce IV if one ever comes onto the market, so there's that. sorry gluten-avoiders, this mofo's made with seitan & that seitan is damn tasty. after eating this one on sunday night, i jonesed for another one all monday & finally, last night, returned to the supermarket, grabbed some veggies & made a beeline for the registers, where i picked up the last remaining two. by the end of the night, they were no more. screw jerky made with meat. this stuff is just plain awesome. in fact, it's so awesome that PETA honored primal strips with their 2004 "best new vegetarian snack award"...which is saying something because those PETAs hate pretty much everything!

i figured a sweet-tasting beer would work well with the peanut sauce flavor, so i grabbed a bottle of atwater block brewery vanilla java porter. it's brewed out of detroit, in a 1916 factory on the river, in the rivertown-warehouse district, where properties currently go for an average of $175K, a 45% decrease from five years ago. that's still much better than the average for detroit ($9K) and the square footage there goes for 1000% higher than the detroit average. it's sad that in detroit, you can now get a house for less than a car. as the ny times reported back in march, the real estate market is so crazy that artists are now moving there & buying houses for $100.

as for atwater block brewery, their vanilla java porter is pretty damn good & pretty damn sweet. it's not overpoweringly sweet, but the vanilla, coffee & chocolate flavors are definitely prevalent. my prediction that it'd be a stellar complement to the thai peanut jerky totally came true. while my prediction was no fringe science, believe me, it was some serious nostradamus shit...& that's close enough. btw, i also predict that you'll find this last line hilariously meta.

#103 - truly thicker than water.

ain't it just the most wonderful time of the year for tv premieres? last week, i got the weeds season premiere & then this sunday, hbo brought back true blood. to top it all off, next tuesday is the season two premiere of a&e's the cleaner! oh wait, i don't care about that show at all, but i do love alan ball's works & loved the first season of true blood, so i'd like to discuss it for a moment...& if you haven't seen it yet, maybe i can spoil a few things for you while i'm at it.

the second season picks up where we left off, with sookie stackhouse (anna paquin) & vampire bill compton (stephen moyer) as a couple & vampire bill now responsible for a young, hot, red-headed vampire who he was forced to turn into a vampire (as punishment for killing another vampire in sookie's defense). they're one of my fave on-screen couples, as sookie is totally cute & full of southern drawl and vampire bill is all "i'm a vampire from civil war times & i talk all properlike." they pretty much get it on in every episode, which is cool with me. in fact, they get it on so much that last season, there was even a scene where bill rose out of the cemetery mud & they did it right there.

as for other characters, other than the hot, young red-headed vampire, there's this vibrating chick who showed up near the end of last season & has taken in sookie's friend & co-worker tara. there's lafayette, sookie's gay, drug-dealing co-worker, who disappeared at the end of last season & who we discover is still alive & being held captive in a dark basement with three other people. sookie's brother jason is about to join the anti-vampire church (the fellowship of the sun) as the vampires & non-vampires continue to ratchet up the debate...& it's revealed that sookie's boss, sam (a shapeshifter), has a history with the vibrating chick. so yeah...a handful of captivating storylines going on.

the premiere ended with some serious hardcore shizz...& when i say "hardcore," i mean hardcore, because that's what we basically got in the scene when sookie & vampire bill finally got it on. there was some hardcore softcore porn side nakedness & from-behind sex going on there, which i guess was helped by the fact that anna paquin & stephen moyer are apparently getting it on off-screen too...& after they got it on, we see a scene where eric (one of the older/more powerful vampires, played by alexander skarsgard) finally appears, still dressed from putting highlights in his hair.  he enters the basement where lafayette's being held & tries to take away a dude lafayette's been talking to, but the dude slaps eric on the cheek with a crucifix.  eric doesn't take kindly to this & hurls the dude around a bit before violently feeding on him...end of episode...hardcore.

#103 - truly thicker than water.
snack: boulder canyon natural foods spinach & artichoke chips
drink: samuels smith's oatmeal stout



while i watched, i fed from a totally unbloody bag of boulder canyon natural foods spinach & artichoke chips. boulder canyon's been making chips out of the centennial state for fifteen years now using a "simple family recipe" made entirely of natural ingredients.  once i started eating them, it was hard to stop.  the spinach & artichoke flavor has a delicious saltiness to it that my tongue went absolutely nuts for...& it doesn't help that i'm a total glutton.

earlier in the day, i'd broken open the bag during lunch & this dude i work with who's famous for coming into the office & sampling whatever snack may be on your desk at the moment (see snack #1 of 2008) came in saw them sitting out on my desk. his reaction--"spinach & artichoke chips? really? that sounds weird." my reaction--"is it really all that weird?  haven't you ever had spinach artichoke dip? that stuff rules." anyway, he stayed away from my chips, so that was cool.

at first, i was going to get something blood-related to celebrate the premiere--a bloody mary, something containing blood orange juice--but in the end, those were, respectively, too much work & too hard to find, so i went with a pint or so of samuels smith's oatmeal stout. sam smith makes some of my favorite beers, beers like the nut brown ale, the taddy porter & the oatmeal stout. they're totally british & have been around since 1758, which means when the old brewery was founded, peeps in britain were all like "i do say, those bloody colonists are getting to be quite the rascally scamps. a good musketing would show them. tut tut. i'm feeling a wee bit peckish. tut tut. barkeep! bring me a pint of samuel smith post haste! tut tut!"...and scene.

the oatmeal stout's a solidly thick beer, brewed with oats instead of barley. like a guinness, it's dark as hell & has a rich taste & smooth flavor--all traits that i adore in a beer. according to the sam smith website, it was "originally a drink for lactating mothers." although my mammary glands are dry as the mojave, it's still one of my favorite beers.  in fact, i probably enjoy it even more than all those drunken breast-feeding brit babies.  i do say...it's bloody good!

#99 - in the weeds.

last night, after weeks of mary-louise parker beckoning at me from the sides of buses & subway walls & random places on the internet, the fifth season of weeds finally began. at the end of last season, she & the family were living down by the border, in san diego. nancy (parker) has just revealed to the tijuana mayor/crime boss (esteban, played by demian bichir) that she's pregnant with his child & he's just revealed to her that he knows she's been talking with the FBI about his drugs/guns/women smuggling tunnel from tijuana to san diego. her brother-in-law has fallen in love with her and her two sons are both growing & selling pot. kevin nealon's doug wilson character is still a stoned child trapped in an adult's body & celia hodes (elizabeth perkins) has been kidnapped by her estranged oldest daughter down in mexico while her ex-husband & youngest daughter are enjoying life, free of her insanity.

the "little boxes" theme that we heard during the first three seasons is now long gone from the opening credits. in its place are opening shots with a pot leaf & the words "weeds. created by jenji kohan" creatively worked into the frame. the first episode's opening shot was of a woman in stirrups & that faded into a shot of the ultrasound, so by all indications, this season's going to have a bunch to do with babies & the parent-child dynamic. probably drug smuggling & other craziness in there as well.

the first episode definitely got me excited for the new season. there's a great scene where nancy & esteban are in a mexican doctor's office & nancy has no idea what's going on because everyone's speaking spanish & we see her forced to forgo her independence because of esteban's forceful insistence that she let the doctor determine whether she's really carrying his son. there's a running joke throughout where celia's daughter tries to get people, one after another, to pay a ransom for her mom & each one turns her down. there's also a weird scene near the end where nancy's sitting in an outdoor mall & a flash mob forms, breaking into a dance number. she asks a kid next to her what's going on. he replies, "a flash mob" & she asks, "why?" his answer--"because it's cool." i'm not sure where they're going with that one, but ok. i'm intrigued.

it's been a solid series through the first four seasons, largely due to the ever-changing supporting cast. guillermo diaz is still on the show & still awesome as guillermo. it seems like so long ago that martin donovan was on the show, but along with albert brooks last season, page kennedy during the first three & short appearances by zooey deschanel & mary-kate olsen, the supporting actors are often what makes the show so different from season to season & even from week to week. this season, jennifer jason leigh is part of the cast (as nancy's sister), so we've got that to look forward to once she shows up. i hope she pulls some single white female shit. that'd be sweet.

#99 - in the weeds.
snack: campo de montleban cheese & new york style everything bagel crisps
drink: smuttynose imperial stout



i'm friggin' fancy like nancy!...only because it rhymes though. with my weeds, i'm having campo de montleban cheese & new york style everything bagel crisps. i picked up the cheese yesterday at bierkraft (the local gourmet beer, cheese & eats spot) after first giving their cheese descriptions (& prices) a good once over. in the end, i went with the campo de montleban because it both is made from the teats of three mammals--a goat, a cow & a sheep--and is only $14.95 a pound. no way was i paying $30 a pound for some cheese, especially if i was just going to eat it while watching tv by myself. $30+ cheeses are strictly for engagements with the ladies.

it's a spanish cheese (la mancha) & isn't one of those stinky cheeses that you eat to show people you have a refined palette. if i was a cheese expert, i'd probably say that it has a partly sharp taste & a firm but slightly creamy texture. since most of the bagel chips were conveniently broken into smaller pieces already, i cut the cheese up into little squares & paired the two up. the sharpness of the cheese & the saltiness of the everything bagel chips make a nice combo.

for my beverage, i went with a smuttynose imperial stout, straight from good ol' portsmouth, nh. it's one of smuttynose's big beer series, which, according to the label, consists of "big beers in big bottles, released seasonally in very limited quantities." this one comes out in mid-february, so it's relatively fresh. the label also suggests pairing it with "fresh fruit & rich cheese on a cold, winter's night or lay it up & savor it with a friend for a special summer treat." i took one part of that recommendation to heart.

since it's a stout, it's a dark beer with a rich flavor. after a while with the cheese, it came in handy for getting the cheesy taste out of my mouth, but by the end of the bottle, after 22 oz, i was imperially full. sometimes i enjoy the big, flavorful beers, but at times like tonight, they're a little too much to handle...but since this one's made by fellow new hampshirites, i'll let it slide this time. sometimes you just have to live free or die, folks.