Zaiaka Bottoms Out

Alas, but not all excursions on our Great India Buffet Tour can be pleasant surprises. Recently, after a series of happenstances led us to search for a buffet in the Monroeville area, we ended up at Zaiaka, only to experience a series of disappointments.

Zaiaka in Holiday ParkFirst of all, to say that Zaiaka can be found in Monroeville (as their website does) is more than an exaggeration. Luckily Sabrina knew where it was because it took much driving beyond Monroeville to reach its Holiday Park location. We arrived around 1:00pm, having called earlier that day to ascertain that the buffet ran until 3:00pm.

When we approached the buffet, we noticed a lot of the items appeared to be depleted. Such is expected at any buffet; in the time we spent there, however, the buffet was never refilled, which I could understand if we had come at 2:15, but two whole hours before the buffet closed?

Luckily, Zaiaka served us fresh naan at our table, which we thought at first was a nice touch, but in retrospect realized was probably so they didn’t have to keep it refilled at the buffet. The naan was tasty and fresh.

The buffet offered a fairly standard selection of curries: Saag, Chicken Curry, Tikka Masala, Chana Masala… all the standards. Sabrina enjoyed a spiced cabbage dish that was a little out of the ordinary. The one surprise for me was that I actually enjoyed the Mattar Paneer, when I usually find it underwhelming. There was some sort of extra spice or flavor that made it more intriguing than usual. However, despite the standout flavor, this curry was no exception to the rule of Zaiaka curries that became imminently clear.

Every curry on the buffet was very greasy. In many cases it was plain to see the oil (maybe ghee?) pooling in all the little nooks on top of the curry. It reflected clearly in the taste and consistency as well. The curries were universally heavy, and otherwise nothing special.

At the end of our meal, when we went up to the cashier to pay, the bill came to just under $20. While not absurd for a buffet, this was certainly on the more expensive side (our top choice, Tamarind, was $17.95 total inclusive of two buffets), and considering the mediocre quality and the lengthy trek out to Holiday Park, Sabrina and I found ourselves wondering whether it had even been worth the trip.

It was clear at the end of our meal that Zaiaka belonged at the bottom of our current list of India Buffets. Maybe Zaiaka is an appealing destination for Indian food lovers in Holiday Park, but given the plethora of better choices in the city, we can’t fathom ever going back.

Zaiaka Authentic Indian Cuisine on Urbanspoon

The Prince and the People

Due to the craziness of summer, we have fallen a bit behind in our Great India Buffet Tour, and so when schedules coincided for free time two weekends in a row, Sabrina and I took advantage to make two buffet trips.

Prince of IndiaOur first trip was to the Prince of India buffet in Oakland. I have been to Prince of India a number of times throughout the years and found it enjoyable, but Sabrina had only been to the restaurant once, her freshman year of college, for what she reports was an abominable experience. She had not returned in the intervening 11 years, but it was the only buffet we could find open past 3pm on a Saturday, so she made the leap to venture back.

The buffet at Prince of India was small and unsurprising. They had all the standards, Chicken Tikka Masala, Saag, Chicken Curry, Mattar Paneer, naan, pakoras, rice, etc., etc. The Prince of India also includes free fountain drinks as part of their buffet, which was unique to our buffet experience so far.

The food was… good enough. Sabrina reported that it represented a definite improvement over the semi-traumatic taste experience she’d had there 11 years ago. We both agreed the food was good, but just good. Sabrina found the saag to be a bit greasy, though, I didn’t mind it, but I’ve rarely met a saag I didn’t like. The Tikka Masala was tasty and we found the moistness of the chicken to be great, but, we both agreed, the sauce was unabashedly mild. We expect buffet food to be mild, but this one was extra mild. Prince of India does offer hot sauce on the buffet, but unlike some of the fresh made chili sauces we’ve encountered at other buffets, this one appeared to be no more than something of the Frank’s Red Hot ilk. There was a spiced cauliflower dish that I found enjoyable, considering that I never usually go for the dry vegetable dishes, I suppose it qualifies as the most pleasant surprise on the buffet. The rice pudding was perhaps my favorite part of the meal because if was very heavy on the cardamom.

At the end of the meal, we concluded that Prince of India was necessarily at the bottom of our list so far, but that’s not to say we disliked it. We simply found it pleasantly mediocre. While we would not go out of our way to make a trip back to Prince of India, we also wouldn’t talk anybody out of going. Considering that they have buffet hours until 5pm on a Saturday (and I believe the buffet is open fairly often other days, too), they may be the best place to go if you have a sudden buffet craving during off hours.

People's Indian RestaurantThe following Saturday, my plans for a short trip fell through, and so I proposed to Sabrina that we might try People’s Indian in Bloomfield. We had heard good things about it online, and we knew they had lunchtime buffet hours on Saturday. Joining us for this trip was Will, a fan of People’s from previous trips.

The buffet at People’s was among the smaller of the buffets we’ve visited, but we were otherwise greatly impressed. Aside from Tandoori Chicken there were none of the typical meat dishes in sight. There was a Chicken and Mushroom curry, a Chicken Shahi Korma, Aloo Saag, Chana Masala, spiced Zucchini and Matter Paneer. They had plain rice as well as a rice pilaf, and in addition to naan and pakoras, they offered Samosas on the buffet.

The first thing that struck us as we ate our inaugural bites was that the food was actually spicy. Hot spicy. Not extremely spicy, but certainly hotter than any other buffet we’ve tried. No need for extra hot sauce here. The dishes were also complex in flavor and fresh tasting. The Chana Masala was a particular favorite of mine and Sabrina’s. I was also a big fan of the Shahi Korma, Sabrina was impressed with the moistness of the Tandoori Chicken and Will noted that the saag was richly flavored without being greasy. Sabrina liked the samosa filling, though found the wrapping less than ideally crispy, but chalked that up to an unavoidable consequence of being served on a buffet.

As we mused over our dishes it became clear that a Buffet Tour upset was in the works. Our assessments were confirmed by a delightful apres diner treat, an offering unique so far to People’s buffet, a cup of hot chai to accompany our our dessert. While we all enjoyed the chai, Sabrina and I shied away from the fried dough dessert, but Will declared them to be a simply perfect specimen of Indian doughnut-ery. I had some of the rice pudding, and found it to be the only mildly disappointing thing on the buffet. There just wasn’t enough spice or flavor to it. No matter, I took a few bites and thoroughly enjoyed my chai.

By the end of the meal, People’s ranking was clear. While we did not think it strong enough to topple the leading buffet, Tamarind, we did find that it merited second place, pushing out Coriander, which had previously held that position. Despite having a much smaller buffet, People’s boasted a taste quality to trump Coriander in the end!

People's Indian on Urbanspoon

Prince of India on Urbanspoon

Summer DVDs

I don’t believe in paying for cable (so I don’t), I don’t own a working television (that’s not quite true; it’s unplugged, and I just don’t know how to hook up the digital antenna and analog converter) and I’m at work for the duration of prime time. And yet, one of my favorite pastimes is keeping up on current TV programs, a pursuit made possible by the delightful phenomenon of TV on DVD. Sure I’m always a season behind, but I get to avoid the commercials and the nail-biting wait between mid-season cliffhangers altogether!

Since I’m even too cheap for Netflix, I get my TV fix through the Carnegie Library system. It’s an imperfect system, certainly, but it renders almost precisely the same result as Netflix. Yes, I don’t get to decide which DVD I get right now, but when I put a hold on a DVD I get it eventually, and when I have enough holds out on DVD’s, then I always have something coming in. And when it’s in, I have the whole season and don’t have to wait for the next disk after I send the old one back.

As a result, I spend a fair bit of time mining the Amazon bestseller list for TV on DVD to find new things to order. Some of them turn out to be great favorites (like Burn Notice), some turn out to be watchably middle of the road (like the Mentalist), some of them get returned after one or two episodes (like Gossip Girl).

Rather than spend a whole review on each new show or season, which I do not have the time nor the the motivation to do, I figure I will occasionally write a survey piece on recent watchings to give a broad recommendation at a glance. Below you will find my most recent summer DVD adventures. These DVD’s don’t necessarily have anything to do with summer so much as they happened to be the DVD’s that arrived and got watched during the first half of my summer.

Men of a Certain Age, Season 1MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE

As a result of one of the most pleasant surprises in my recent DVD watching, I can honestly say I quite like Men of a Certain Age. When it first arrived from the library, I worried at first that a show about middle aged men might not be the best fit for a young professional woman, but I found a lot to enjoy and recommend about this show.

First of all, it’s character centered and character driven. It’s all about these three guys (Ray Romano, Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula) on the verge of turning 50 facing different life situations and dealing with those situations with various degrees of success. Their conflicts are realistic, their choices understandable and their friendship believable. Many shows have tried to create a “Sex and the City” for straight men (of course, my personal favorite, Queer as Folk, is the most authentic way to do Sex and the City for men), and I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Men of a Certain age accomplishes this feat–after all, sex is a sometime topic, but certainly not the controlling topic of their coffee shop conversation–but it definitely captures the dynamic of three male friends, and how that friendship helps inform the way they live their lives, in a realistic and entertaining way.

Perhaps the best part of this show is its humor. With the advent of cleverly written shows that skillfully encompass both comedic and dramatic elements, I find that I have grown weary of laugh-track comedies. Shows that exist for the sole purpose of getting laughs seem largely empty to me anymore. This program showcases more humor than the average drama, likely because Ray Romano is both producer and main actor, but it is done in an exemplary way. I never watched Everybody Loves Raymond when it was on the air, but I had enjoyed random snippets of Ray Romano’s comedy in the past (once when being interviewed at the wrap up of Everybody Loves Raymond, he was asked what he’ll do next, and replied, “Well, I am heir to the Romano cheese fortune”). The comedy in this show is witty, dry and never forced. Some jokes are so subtle that if you blink you might miss them. The comedy is clever and the show never beats you over the head with it. Even better, no laugh track in earshot!

The Good Wife, Season 1THE GOOD WIFE

The two times I’ve had The Good Wife out from the library, I’ve picked it up with some worry that it might be boring. It’s a show about a political wife who goes back to work in a law firm in her 40’s after her high-profile husband (a state’s attorney played by Chris Noth) goes to jail amid political scandal.

The wife is played by Julianna Margulies, and she plays a character who is admittedly kind of a cold fish. She deals with her inner struggles silently and uses an emotionless exterior to mask emotional turmoil. And yet, somehow Margulies finds a way to make this woman likable, relate-able and even morally ambiguous. She is faced with interesting problems, such as finding employment in the firm of a former law school buddy (who is now a partner, from having been in the game as long as she was out of it) as a junior associate and being pitted against another new hire, who is fresh out-of-school, in direct competition (played by Gilmore Girls alum Mark Czuchry). Instead of him being a typical nemesis, she finds she actually likes him and their relationship is realistically refreshing, characterized by shades of competitiveness, friendship and co-worker comrade-liness.

Ultimately what I like about this show is that it always surprises me by being more interesting than I expect it to be. Is it one of my very favorites? A show I find compulsively entertaining? No, but it is definitely worth my time and rings true with genuine conflicts and dilemmas for its characters.

Mad Men Season 4MAD MEN SEASON 4

I have been following Mad Men with steady but not avid interest on DVD since the first season. It’s hard to say exactly what intrigues me to keep watching Mad Men. Upon picking up Season 4 at the library, the Sharpsburg Librarian told me that she had lost interest after Season 2. I can’t say I don’t understand why. Mad Men is a character driven drama that is slow moving compared to the television dramas at the top of my list.

Yet, Mad Men has an undeniable appeal, both as a character study and as a near-past period piece. The milieu of the early 1960’s is enough familiar and enough foreign in to be its own draw. The political and social issues surrounding the characters are novel both for their relevance and their antiquated-ness–sort of a see how far we’ve come and yet how for we still have to do. The decor and costumes are like an old photo brought to life (in HD, moreover), the backdrop of history, out-dated social mores and commercial products (they are working in a ad agency, after all) add depth, and the character conflicts still ring true to the motivations of most audiences. I, personally, find Mad Men specifically interesting for its historical setting because my parents lived through those years, and they enjoy Mad Men and share with me their experiences and commentary about living through those times as a result of what they see on the show.

Season 4 was as interesting in these respects as any other season, but it was not what I would call a banner year. I figured, after the big upset at the end of season 3 (where every interesting character quit the old firm and started a new one), there would be a new status quo on Mad Men, but aside from a more “modern” looking office building, the ins and outs of the ad agency were basically the same. Season 4 skips ahead one whole year to a time where the new agency is already established. From there it is a relatively quiet season. Characters tackle personal and professional challenges, but nothing especially spectacular. The season ends quietly, too, with not cliffhanger or shake-up. Season 4 of Mad Men will certainly please devoted fans, but it didn’t take the show to any new levels of storytelling.

Weeds Season 6WEEDS SEASON 6

Weeds is another show that, when confronted with writing a review of it, has me wondering aloud, why exactly do I watch this show? I am, in no way a marijuana enthusiast. I suppose I like that its plots are character-driven. It does offer a good bit of sophisticated humor (and some unsophisticated, as well). One perfectly arbitrary thing I like about Weeds is that the show does 30 minute episodes; sometimes it’s nice to be able to squeeze in an episode to a short time period (including the span of time between when I finish dinner and when I inevitably start nodding off on the couch).

What I think I like about Weeds is that the characters are easy to relate to, and yet they often make decisions that ordinary folks wouldn’t make. This fact results in lead character Nancy Botwin getting into more than her fair share of trouble. Another thing I like about Weeds is that she always manages to get out of trouble (though, usually, from there, she gets into different trouble) by an avenue you wouldn’t expect. So many shows that rely on “character gets in trouble” plot-lines in order to create dramatic tension solve those plots in very predictable ways. If a character does the crime (even if that crime is making his wife mad), then that character does the time. This is one reason why I was never able to get into Curb Your Enthusiasm, because the humor of the show relies primarily on Larry David “getting in trouble” with various people and institutions and then getting his inevitable comeuppance. In Weeds, the characters get into all kinds of hairy situations, but then get out of them in surprising ways (which oftentimes represent the advent of an even hairier, but altogether different situation).

In this season, the cast and show grows a bit by going on the road (fleeing the results of their previous season’s debacle). They get out of their Southern California milieu and find themselves challenged by new situations, opening up the door for new plot-lines. I enjoyed this season more than the last couples seasons, which had grown, in my opinion, a little stagnant. Still watchable but not as interesting as they had been earlier in the series. And so, Weeds re-invents itself in small ways to make for an entertaining Season 6.

Braddock’s American Brasserie: Eh.

On the Fourth of July, Ted and I tried a new-to-us fine (semi-fine?) dining restaurant, Braddock’s American Brasserie & Streetside Bar. It’s the hotel restaurant and bar in the Renaissance Hotel downtown, and we had a Groupon. Our plan was to have dinner and then walk out and watch the fireworks. Braddock’s claims that its aim is to serve updated and upscaled meals based on the traditional cooking of Pittsburgh’s many early immigrant communities, and it also touts itself as having the largest selection of whiskeys of any bar in Pittsburgh. This sounded like a super set up.

The bar is separated from the restaurant proper by the hotel lobby (which is beautiful). I like this arrangement, because the noise from the bar doesn’t intrude on the dining room. The dining room itself was done up with big leather booths and dark walls, a sort of more cleanly lined take on old-school fancy restaurant decor. Including Ted and I, there were perhaps seven or eight tables. Ted noticed that despite the fact that the dining room was perhaps only one/fifth full, the three servers were running around frantically as though the place were packed – this was not a good omen, it turned out.

We spent a long time waiting for service with the menu and drink menu. They did have perhaps two or three dozen whiskeys on their list, but frankly, having recently been at McCormack’s Whisky Grill in Richmond, VA, and Village Whiskey in Philadelphia, the selection just wasn’t comparatively all that impressive. I ordered a Blanton’s, though, which I’ve had before and enjoyed.

It came with lipstick on the rim of the glass. Not just a whisper of gloss, either. Bold red lipstick stains, that the bartender and the server both should have noticed. I sent it back. I mean, come on, if I’m spending upwards of $15 on a pour of whiskey, the glass should be clean and sparkling.

The server was very apologetic and hurried a new glass back to me, though, so there was that. Then Ted and I ordered the cheese plate. Frankly, it was uninspired. There were six cheeses, one of which I could identify straight away as Beemster XO, which is a good cheese, but readily available at Giant Eagle – I like my cheese plate experiences to offer me something I can’t pick up readily at the grocery store. There was also a very young gouda that was bland and frankly had no business being on an upscale cheese plate. There were two good goat cheeses, but here we ran into another problem: the bread served with the tray was grilled in garlic butter. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like a nice buttery garlic bread. But the flavor of the bread itself completely overwhelmed the subtle tastes of the soft, light goat cheeses. So we asked for more bread, plain.

Here commences a 20-minute wait for bread.

The server came over and apologized after about seven minutes; he apologized again when the bread finally came out after twenty. Guys: it’s fucking bread. How on earth could it take 20 fucking minutes to get me some plain baguette slices? Honestly – how?

Shortly afterward, our entrees came. Ted ordered the special, swordfish steak served with roasted roma tomatoes and a hearty rice pilaf. I ordered the “Housemade Potato Gnocchi and Lobster,” described as coming with “three types of mushrooms, artichokes, and parmesan cream sauce”.

The food was less bad than it was incompetent. Ted’s roasted tomatoes were very good, the tomato flavor being nicely condensed by the roasting and flavored with olive oil. His pilaf was a nice blend of heartier rices, but it was underseasoned. His swordfish was also dreadfully underseasoned, as well as overcooked.

On my plate, the gnocchi themselves were excellent, perhaps the best I’ve had – they were buttery, hearty without being starchy, semi-soft and just generally deliciously potato-y. But then things went awry. For one thing, there were absolutely no artichokes – perhaps they got lost wherever the bread went missing. The cream sauce was fine, delicately flavored, though noting noteworthy; the lobster was dropped onto the dish in artless chunks, but otherwise fine. But then the mushrooms – oh, the mushrooms. There were a million of them, heaped over all the rest of the dish, and their strong umami taste completely overwhelmed the light cream sauce and delicate lobster flavor. It was just a terrible idea – who put this dish together? I tried a gnocchi with a bite of Ted’s roasted tomato and it was excellent. Braddock’s – simplify. Since clearly, when you try to get “fancy” you go awry. (Of course, how simple is a rice pilaf and a fish steak, and that, too, went awry. So … I don’t know what to tell you.)

With my meal I had a glass of wine, a $13 pinot noir that was fine, but nothing to write home about – Braddock’s wine list, in fact, was not particularly impressive at all. Ted had a cocktail of whiskey and fresh muddled berries that he liked a lot. We took a look at the bar menu, and it seemed to have simpler fair, sandwiches and moules frites. Perhaps we should have taken our Groupon to the Streetside Bar.

We won’t be returning to Braddock’s. The whiskey list the bar touts doesn’t stack up to other whiskey bars I’ve been to, and the wine list was dismal compared to what I’d expect for a restaurant holding itself out as traditional fine dining. The kitchen was incompetent during our visit, both in terms of getting our food out to us, and in the composition and execution of the dishes. There were a few quality moments in the meal, but at Braddock’s prices, they simply weren’t worth it. Even discounting our $40 Groupon, our meal, with two drinks apiece, one appetizer, and two entrees came in at $107. At this price point, any of the upscale Big Burrito restaurants – Eleven, Soba, Casbah – is a much better, tastier dining experience, and you can have much better food for much less money at Point Brugge or (the BYOB) Piccolo Forno, to name just two better values off the top of my head.

The fireworks were nice, though.

Braddock's American Brasserie on Urbanspoon

The Theme of Today’s Books is: Panama.

Last year about this time I was in Panama. It’s not a spot I’d recommend visiting. Far and away the two best things about the place (we stayed in Panama City and on the truly depressing island of Taboga) were the Bed and Breakfast we stayed in while in Panama City, Casa Las Americas, and the touristing we did related to the Panama Canal – the canal itself, and the canal museum located in the “old section” of Panama City. Nothing in this museum is in English, and Ted and I speak no Spanish, but we still managed to spend almost three hours there, looking at all of the exhibits and trying through the decipherment of cognates to piece together what the panels of texts throughout the museum were trying to tell us – part of the fun actually turned out to be this construction of our own, poorly translated history: “Holy shit! Teddy Roosevelt conquered France!”

The front cover of McCullough's book, featuring a painting of a ship steaming through a canal bounded by forested hills.Anyhoo, while we were at the canal itself, which has many displays in English, and where you can (and we did) eat lunch while overlooking the Miraflores locks, waving to the sparse crews on the enormous ships that pass through on their way to and from the Pacific, we also hit the gift shop, ’cause, c’mon. While there, I got a Panama Canal t-shirt – OF COURSE – and a book by David McCullough, “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914”.

I finally got around to reading it, and the chief reflection I have after it is that reviews of good books are much, much more boring than reviews of bad books. “The Path Between the Seas” is a dense historical account, but McCullough, who won the National Book Award twice, once for this book, and the Pulitzer Prize twice, is an able narrator. The book must surely be the definitive account of the building of the canal – no stone is left unturned by McCullough, either in the account of the failed French efforts on the Isthmus or the triumphant American ones. Considering that the book was written in the 1970s, McCullough even does an admirable job of addressing the lives of the massive population of oppressed black laborers that built the canal, though his account is still very much a part of the “Big Men Doing Big Deeds” style of history. Despite its density of fact, the book is very readable. Basically, all of this boils down to, if you have any interest in the Panama Canal, American history at the turn of the 20th century, or engineering history generally, you should check this book out. Even if you don’t have an interest in any of those things, you might be surprised at how interesting this book actually is, if you’re patient with it.

The front of The Leafcutter Ants, featuring an ant cutting a piece out of a green leaf on a black background.The other book on the table for today is “The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct” by Bert Holldolber and Edward O. Wilson. You see, while we were having breakfast one morning on the shaded veranda of the Casa Las Americas, we had the pleasure of watching some leafcutter ants at work. They came up the side of the building, to the second story where we were seated, marched along the edge of the porch, and began to swarm gently over some flowering bushes that were planted in the large, deep planter that rimmed the entire porch. We could see them carefully chewing out pieces of the leaves and bright pink flowers, which, when finally freed, they then carried over their heads like little sails or parasols (in the southern U.S., leafcutter ants are known as “parasol ants”), marching off in a train that passed the incoming train of ants exactly. It was fascinating and lovely in its way, each little ant with its brightly colored confetti, tromping through the shade and sun. Said our host, the American ex-pat owner of the B & B, “They’re not good for the bushes. I guess I should kill them or something, but they’re just working so hard – it doesn’t seem right.” He watched them with us for awhile, and then went about his work.

A line of three little brown ants with pieces of green leaf held aloft over their heads.With these industrious little Panamanian ants in mind, Ted picked up, not too long ago, from the Borders as it went out of business, “The Leafcutter Ants.” It is a small, shiny book with lots of pictures, and I figured it would make a nice thematic coda to the book on the canal.

Well, let me tell you, just because a book is small and shiny and full of pictures doesn’t mean it’s going to be a light read. This book reads like a scientific paper. It is dense with particularized terms and scientific details – this chemical, this sensory lobe structure, this genetic marker, etc. Now. That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting – these little ants inhabit a fascinating world, where they live in symbiosis with not just fungi but bacteria as well, and in competition with different fungal and ant foes, and the way they’ve evolved in tandem with their mutualist partners to cope with these threats is a testament to the beauty and intricacy of natural selection and the world of life in general. I’m just saying, don’t pick up this book thinking that it’s shiny and small and full of pictures and think that it’s going to be an easy read. Ants might be wee, but they are COMPLEX.

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (3D)

The movie poster for Cave of Forgotten DreamsLast night Ted and I made the trek out to Robinson to go to the Cinemark theater at Settler’s Ridge. “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” was released months ago, but the Robinson Cinemark is the first place in the area to show it; Tuesdays, by the by, are the “sale” days out at that theater – our 3D tickets were $8.25 apiece.

First, a word about 3D: in general, like Roger Ebert, I’m opposed. I’ve seen several “blockbuster” type movies in 3D, and I never think the experience adds much to the viewing. To begin with, 3D movies do not resemble human, stereoscopic vision – rather, what they allow is for you to examine all of the plains of focus in the shot, since all of the plains are simultaneously in focus, as opposed to traditional 2D films, which confine the viewer’s examining gaze to only that plain that the director has chosen to focus on. The thing is, my experience has been that there’s never anything worth examining in these 3D blockbusters’ other plains – the directors never seem to take the opportunity to fill the middle or far distance with anything visually interesting or important, making the opportunity to examine them not worth the distractingly unrealistic nature of the 3D format, nor the increased ticket price. In general, it seems 3D directors only value the ability to have fists, swords, exploding debris, or what have you “fly out of the screen” at the viewer, and I don’t see that that enhances the movie-viewing experience, certainly not to the tune of five extra bucks.

Cave drawings, in black on undulating stone walls, of mane-less lions

A pride of lions from Chauvet cave.

However, also like Roger Ebert, I thought “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” utilizes 3D differently and well. The movie is a documentary that explores the Chauvet cave, discovered in France in 1994, which contains the earliest known cave paintings produced by human beings – the paintings, spanning thousands of years, are between 40,000 and 30,000 years old. A rockslide sealed the mouth of the cave many thousands of years ago, preserving it perfectly until it was recently rediscovered. Since its discovery, the French government has kept it carefully sealed and guarded, allowing only scientists to briefly enter the still nearly pristine cave; even they must limit their visits to a scant hour or two at a time, and they may only tread on a narrow, carefully laid steel track. This cave and its artifacts are treasures of humanity, and the care with which they are being preserved gives one a sense of relief.

A cave painting, in black on undulating stone walls, of horse heads.

Horses on the Walls of Chauvet

The drawings themselves are breathtaking, heart-rending renditions of prehistoric animals in overlapping numbers, doing battle, nuzzling, running, uttering. The geology of the cave itself is also stunning, and here is where the 3D makes the film: all of the plains of focus in the cave are worth examining in the minutest of detail – the geologic formations, the bones of animals preserved over time, and the drawings themselves, which were drawn upon undulating walls and which the artists rendered in such a way as to take advantage of the walls’ undulations in conveying a sense of movement in their animal subjects.

Werner Herzog narrates the film, and if you’ve ever seen a Werner Herzog movie before, you know he’s absolutely crazy, which can be fun. (I highly recommend you check out Encounters At the End of the World, streaming live on Netflix, for an example of his batshittery and the unexpected joy it brings to some of his films.) But crazy can be distracting, too, so it’s lucky that Herzog chooses to narrate Cave of Forgotten Dreams only lightly, and so does not tread on the absolute wonder he documents in this cave, which seems to represent the beginning of human-ness, the birth of what Herzog calls the human soul.

A painting, in black, on an undulating rock wall, of a rhinocerous with an enormous horn

Chuavet Rhinocerous

What I found most striking about the drawings was their continuity over time: scientists have determined that different drawings were made up to 5,000 years apart, and yet they clearly share the same artist’s conception of the world and its creatures. Considering the fragmentation of our modern culture – our inability to meaningfully understand our ancestors’ lives of only a hundred or so years ago, or even our inability to understand our contemporaries if they are located too far from our experience – it astounds me that these ancient artists’ work and its content was coherent and meaningful to their fellow artists thousands of years later.

I was also struck by their impression of the natural world as literally teeming with life: the animals on the cave walls are in crowds, they suggest multitudes. I believe that if you could transport one of the artists from 30,000 years ago to the present, the absence in the modern world of this crowd of life would be the most shocking change. Technology, of course, has advanced, but these people, our ancestors, had tools, and understood their usefulness – once the shock had worn off, I’m sure they would see and understand that our buildings, equipment, transportation devices, are all just improved tools for survival. But I get the sense that the absence, in our ever-diminishing world of environmental degradation, of the teeming host of fellow creatures that must have been of such bedrock importance to a time-travelling paleolithic artist would be irreconcilable.

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

I suppose the most accurate thing I can say about Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker is that I didn’t hate it. Further, I can credit it with keeping my attention. So many enormous epic fantasy audiobooks get returned to the library before I finish reading them (which did happen here) and never get re-ordered (this one actually did).

WarbreakerBrandon Sanderson is a newly crowned heavy-hitter in modern fantasy. His inaugural solo publications (such as Elantris) held promise, and then he was chosen to aid the terminally ill Robert Jordan in finishing his vast Wheel of Time epic. Sanderson is now a full-fledged epic fantasy author of large reputation. Problem is, I find the quality of Sanderson’s stories pretty middle-of-the-road.

Part of my unenthusiastic reception to this book comes from the fact that it is a certain shiny, glowing sort of epic fantasy, all about bright castles of polished marble, bored and snarky men-made-gods and characters who talk like modern day Americans. This novel comes down definitively on the “sorcery” side of “sword and sorcery,” and does not much medieval/historical sort of world-building. The center of this story is its high concept magic revolving around Sanderson’s invention of “bi-chroma,” a color-laden version of the concept of the soul (at least, a partial soul). Both of the main characters, while not one dimensional, are certainly not challenging in any way. They are both young, naive girls with the moxy to take on great odds and defy authority to make a difference in the world. They don’t wrestle with moral conflicts of any depth, or at least not ones the reader can relate to (Vivenna’s moral qualms over accepting a supply of bio-chroma isn’t exactly an issue burning in the heart of contemporary man).

Sanderson’s fantasy is “clean.” The story is crisply plotted, the concepts are well-explained, the characters are likable, if not incredibly nuanced. Despite a few moments of violent conflict, this novel is certainly not belonging to the genre of gritty realism within fantasy. It was simply not my style, but despite this fact, Sanderson did, at least, give me motivation to read on.

One more thing must, unfortunately, be said about this novel on audiobook. Normally I don’t mention much by way of review of the audio production unless it is downright fantastic (such as in the case of Sookie Stackhouse books or anything by Orson Scott Card). I must say that this audiobook reading rubbed me the wrong way. The more I listened to it, the more I managed to ignore it, but the audio actor (I’m purposely not looking up his name because I don’t want to blame it on him if his performance was prompted by the audiobook director) had a tone of voice in reading this novel that was a bit overdone. It reminded me of the way a teacher might read chapters of a book to his fourth grade class. Again, not fatal, but it affected my enjoyment of the book in a subtle way.

Cross-published on ARWZ.com

“Travels in Siberia” with the worst traveling companion ever.

I’m a little behind on my summer reading list. First I read Ivan Turgenev’s “Sketches from a Hunter’s Album,” a classic short story collection from 19th-century Russia. I would recommend it. Turgenev was the first noble author to write about peasant characters as though they were people; also, his descriptions of the natural world are moving and transporting. And if you yourself are, or aspire to be, a writer, you should not go forward without reading “Bezhin Lea” – its composition is basically perfect.

Travels in Siberia by Ian FrazierFrom Turgenev I turned to Ian Frazier’s “Travels in Siberia”. I hadn’t read any of Frazier’s past work, but I gathered from reviews of this book that he had gained fame for travel writing in the U.S., and that his trips through Siberia were equally entertaining. I love nonfiction, and I love travel writing – there are many places in the world I don’t anticipate getting to see first-hand, and it’s nice to get a glimpse of them through others’ accounts of their sojourns.

The book is about Frazier’s encounters with Siberia. He traveled to Russia for the first time in the early ’90s, and claims to have been beset with a kind of mystical “Russia-love.” He vowed to return, particularly to Siberia, which he became fascinated by through reading. He approaches Russia via Alaska in the ’90s, then returns for a full-length drive across Siberia with two guides in 2001. He makes a cold-weather sojourn several years later, and the book recounts all of these trips. The majority of the book is concerned with the extended 2001 road trip.

Frazier has done a lot of reading and research into the history of Siberia and its major players, and I found the parts of the book where he has condensed this research to be interesting; likewise, I found interesting his descriptions of the places and natural environments he moves through as he travels.

About a third of the way through the book, however, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying the reading experience at all. It took me a few more pages of consideration, but then I realized why: I hate Ian Frazier.

Don’t misunderstand, I’ve never met the guy. But his book is a nonfiction, first-person account, and so obviously, you get to know the author as you read. And he’s … awful. He doesn’t seem to realize this, but as a traveling companion, Ian Frazier is just awful.

Most notably he is irritatingly nervous about everything. Yes, Siberia is a place where much could go wrong, and I can tell you from experience that it can be a little nervewracking to travel through a country where basically no one speaks English, and you speak none of the native tongue (though Frazier seems to know basic Russian, whereas I, when in Panama, knew no more than 10 words of Spanish, none of which involved negotiating taxi fares). But Frazier is well-outfitted, well-funded, and guided by two men who both speak fluent English. And yet he worries. Incessantly and obsessively, about things that seem not to merit any concern at all. When they camp near a ferry stop (one must camp in most of Siberia) he worries that his tent will be run over in the night by a vehicle coming to wait for the ferry. When they must travel with their van in a train car over a roadless stretch of territory, he worries for three days straight that there are not enough safety precautions, and the cars are full of gas, and what happens if one of them spontaneously explodes? He experiences a bout of food poisoning in St. Petersburg, and thereafter never eats a meal without worrying that it will murder him. He frets CONSTANTLY over the fact that Russians don’t wear seatbelts, even though the guides have provided a seatbelt for him! He panics when his guides are late returning to camp from a trip to a nearby village. This is but a sampling; his obsessive, half-irrational fears are chronicled on nearly every page of the book.

Besides these endless worries, and probably because of them, Frazier barely engages with the actual people and life of Siberia. His guides frequently visit the villages they camp near, for supplies but also for socializing; Frazier never accompanies them, staying by himself in the campsite. When he is offered vodka, he refuses. I can say authoritatively: unless you are a recovering alcoholic, or have a religious prohibition on its consumption, if a Slav offers you vodka, you should drink it. I’m not saying get wasted – but take one shot. Because it’s very rude if you don’t. This doesn’t seem to phase Frazier a bit. If he is a recovering alcoholic, and has not mentioned this fact in his book, I retract my statement. But I doubt that’s the case. Frazier turns down an offer for lunch from a random passerby who knows English and seems happy to meet an American; he often seems awkward and bored when Siberians in off-the-map places put on programs for the American author who has come, they think, to chronicle them. In all, Frazier seems much more interested in retracing the steps of the explorers of a hundred years ago that he has read about simply for the sake of doing so, rather than experiencing the Russia of here-and-now. I found myself wondering over and over again, Why would this person go to Siberia if Siberia as it is seems to leave him terrified and disinterested? Reading books would have more than sufficed for his purposes.

Besides all this, he is unpleasant in other ways. Let me illustrate with an incident he recounts without comment: he is in a regional museum in a Siberian city. Another man, an Englishman, approaches him, having heard him speaking English, and, in a friendly manner, asks him where he’s from. Frazier, who is from New Jersey, tells the man that he is from London. He says, “I didn’t even bother to put on an accent.” Obviously skeptical, the Englishman asks where in London; Frazier replies that he lives in a neighborhood by the Thames that the Englishman probably hasn’t heard of. Pushing on, the Englishman offers his name and the fact that he is writing a book. Frazier offers none of the same information, and shrugs the encounter off. End scene.

What the fuck is that? Does Frazier think it was a joke? Why would you be rude to the first person besides your guides that you have encountered in Siberia who speaks your language? Why would you recount the incident in your book? Does Frazier think he is a wit? I’m literally perplexed by his account of this encounter. What an ass.

[As an aside, Frazier notes that the man’s name is Simon Richmond, and says that Richmond exclaimed that he was going to put Frazier in his book. An internet search reveals that there is a Brit named Simon Richmond who authors and co-author’s Lonely Planet guidebooks, including one on the Trans-Siberian Railway and one on Russia in general. I do not know if he put Ian Frazier in one of these, but I feel inclined to buy one on principle – Richmond, I’m sure, deserves my money much more than Frazier did for his book.]

Frazier’s an ass on other occasions, apparently without realizing it. He’s also maudlin, overly nostalgic for his youth in Ohio, and deeply self-centered, irritatedly demanding that his guides take him to abandoned prison camps even though they’re clearly made very uncomfortable by this. In general, Frazier is preoccupied with his own needs and expectations … “privileged” is a word that kept recurring to my mind. And then we have this garbage, written after the passage in which the reader learns that Frazier coincidentally finished his Siberian road trip on September 11, 2001:

“But out in the rest of the actual world, people were thinking about us, in a larger sense, and specifically about [the World Trade Center]. The attack that targeted it represented not so much the beginning of a new war as a cruelly and ingeniously updated new wrinkle in an old, old war, one going back almost to the beginning of Islam. The recently ended Cold War, in whose ruins Sergei and Volodya and I had been wandering would have been difficult to explain to ancient ghosts who knew nothing about twentieth-century physics. But the September 11 attacks would have made perfect sense to, say, Saladin: the flying machines, the proud towers, the slaughtered innocents, the suicidal believers, are a simple story that exists out of time. To Yermak and the other Christian conquerors of Siberia’s Muslim khan, September 11 would have been easily understandable, and perhaps further inducement to victory, had they heard its story while gathered around their smoky Tobol River campfires.”

So. The conflation of modern-day Muslims with their ancient predecessors, exoticizing them and construing them as unevolving, ahistoric savages? Check! The depiction of terrorism and religious bigotry as a universal truth for all Muslims, in the past and present? Check! Bonus construal of the 9/11 attacks and America’s response to them as a religious war rather than a geopolitical one, thus casting all members of the “opposing” Muslim religion as combatants? Check and check!

People, that’s racism.

In summary, “Travels in Siberia”, though containing interesting facts, was a nightmare to read, basically because Ian Frazier seems like a nightmare to spend time with. The fact that he does not appear to realize that fact at all is mildly fascinating, but not fascinating enough to sustain a reader through 471 pages. Feel free to skip this book.

White Collar, Season 1

I didn’t know what I expected when I ordered Season One of the television show White Collar from the library, but I didn’t expect what I got. It wasn’t unwatchable, but if I’d had anything else of greater intrigue on hand last week, I probably wouldn’t have watched it.

White Collar, Season 1I found White Collar searching through the Amazon TV on DVD Bestsellers, as I often do when looking for new shows to order from the library. I guess I didn’t read the description, because I had some expectation that it would be a sort of general cutting-edge drama about high class people of dubious morals or white collar crime. Something in the vein of Burn Notice or Leverage. I was disappointed to read the back of the DVD box and discover that it was, in fact, a procedural crime drama.

Sigh… aren’t there enough procedural crime dramas already?

The premise of this one requires a bit more suspension of disbelief than a supposedly “realistic” show (i.e. not scif-fi or fantasy) ought. FBI Agent Peter Burke, working for the white collar crime division, catches notorious criminal mastermind Neal Caffrey for a second time when he breaks out of prison four months before his scheduled release (it was for a girl, of course; what else would prompt such a stupid move from a notorious criminal mastermind). Alas, he misses the girl by a day, and in a ludicrous turn of events somehow manages to convince Burke to bring him on as an FBI consultant (complete with super high-tech tracking anklet that even Caffrey can’t outsmart) rather than send him back to prison, paving the way to these two formerly mortal adversaries become partners in a “buddy” crime drama setup.

As if that weren’t a hard enough premise to swallow… Neal Caffrey is a super duper good-looking 20-something criminal mastermind. I know that people are supposed to be better looking on TV than they’d be in real life, but Caffrey’s casting (Matt Bomer) is extra preposterous. Yes, he looks awesome stylish in his retro-chic suits and narrow ties (apparently they’re all the rage), but wouldn’t it have made more sense to have the 40-something Tim McKay (Burke) play the seasoned criminal mastermind brought into advise the FBI, and maybe the role of somewhat square Agent Burke would have provided a nice contrast to Matt Bomer’s unreal good looks? I warmed up to Bomer a little bit more when I read on his Wikipedia entry that he went to Carnegie Mellon around the same time I was at Pitt (if only I had been single at the time!) and played the role of Ben Reade on the ill-fated soap Guiding Light, which Saundra and I used to follow in our younger days.

The more I watched this show, however, the more I realized that Bomer isn’t the only thing that’s “too cute” about it. The relationship that develops between Burke and Caffrey is just too friendly to be believed. If Burke is supposedly the one who tracked Caffrey down and put him in prison the first time, is he really going to become bestest friends with Caffrey now? They try to plant some seeds of doubt in their relationship mid-season, but it only lasts for about one and a half episodes, and not long after Caffrey is declaring in a drug-induced stupor that Burke is the only person he can really trust. Not even to mention the episode where they become roommates.

Adding to the list “too cute” items in this show is Tiffani-Amber Thiessen in the throw-away role of Burke’s wife. It’s not that she treats the role lightly or plays it in a way that you can’t take her seriously. She does a fine enough job with what she’s given, but the wife character just doesn’t do much. She just adds to the home-y scenery of Burke’s house, giving the boys a cozy place to go where they can talk about cases and use her for a sounding board. Otherwise she provides a marital relationship for Caffrey to admire (he’s still after the girl, remember), and sweet moments of marital support for Burke in bookend scenes. It’s a regular gig for Thiessen, I guess, but she doesn’t do much of consequence for being billed as a main character.

This show tries its darnedest to be better than a typical procedural, weaving an overarching plot of Caffrey’s search for his mysteriously estranged love (the plot thickens as we learn she is not estranged by choice) into the episodic weekly crime stories, but given the rest of my take on this show, I can’t really bring myself to care much. The effort at characterization is appreciated, but not terribly successful due to its unbelievability. If you’re looking for something light and you love crime drama, you may enjoy this series, but it was all “too cute” for me.

The Great India Buffet Tour: India Garden in Oakland

Last Sunday night marked the fifth stop on our Great India Buffet Tour of the Pittsburgh area, to take advantage of the Deluxe Dinner Buffet at India Garden on Atwood Street.

Indian Garden OaklandThis was by no means my first visit to the India Garden in Oakland (nor was it Sabrina’s or Nik’s), a venerable institution of cheap spicy eats for the college crowd that has been around since my own college days. I’ve been there before for the late night half priced special, as well as to the lunch buffet on a non-Great-India-Buffet-Tour-related trip.

The evening started with a modicum of confusion. Seeing from the website that the dinner buffet was offered on Sunday night, and that dinner was served until 11:00pm, we naturally assumed that an 8:00 start time for dinner was not a problem. But as we sat and chatted, the waiter confirmed that we were getting the buffet and informed us it would be closing at 9:00pm. Okay… certainly not fatal to our evening, but that would have been nice to know on the website so that we did not risk planning a prohibitively late dinner.

Taking in the buffet, we decided that on the scale of size, this buffet fell somewhere on the scale of smaller than Taj Mahal but larger than Coriander, effectively making it the second largest buffet we have visited so far. There was a wide selection of vegetable curries, including favorites such as Saag and Vegetable Korma. There was a potato and chickpea curry, a yellow dal, a vegetarian Sambar curry and a mattar paneer. There were two chicken curries, as well as a shrimp and a goat curry, making for an impressive non-vegetarian selection. In addition, there were some dry vegetables, and a salad bar with an array of chutney and pickle, but I didn’t avail myself of any of these, save for some hot red pepper sauce.

My favorite item on any India buffet is the Saag (aka the palak, depending on some difference of regional dialects of which I know nothing, or so I presume). That night the saag was served with mushrooms, which was a first in my experience, but certainly no less agreeable than any saag with chicken, paneer, lamb, chickpeas or potatoes (moreso, actually, than the potatoes) I’ve had in the past. It can hold its own against any saag in the city. The vegetable korma was tasty, and no objections were raised on the consistency, as they were at Coriander. The chickpea and potato curry and sambar curries were tasty enough, the yellow dal was nothing special, and the mattar paneer was better than average, as I am usually extremely underwhelmed by mattar paneer, and this one I found okay (though, didn’t encounter any paneer).

The highlight of the buffet was within the meat section. I didn’t try any of the shrimp curry, but Nik highly recommended it (I was too full by that point to go back just to try the shrimp). There was a goat curry offered, but I don’t recall that any of us tried it… mostly we were enamored of the Chicken Chettinad. I have had chettinad from a few Indian restaurants in the past, but it is not a terribly common Indian Restaurant menu item, and this is the first time I have seen it on a buffet. It is a flavorful and fragrant curry which relies on many of the brown spices, such as cinnamon, clove and black cardamom. It was, by far, mine and Sabrina’s favorite item on the buffet. The other chicken offering, the more predictable Tikka Masala, was enjoyable. It was a particular favorite of Nik’s.

The dessert selections were limited: a fruit salad and a rice pudding. I was the only one who availed herself of dessert, enjoying two small helpings of the refreshingly sweet and spiced rice pudding.

A table-wide assessment of the Buffet Tour thus far resulted in the India Garden dinner buffet ending up a solid third on the list. The quality was good, we found, enough to trump Taj and Taste, despite the enormity of the Taj buffet, but it still came in behind Coriander and Tamarind, which remains our leader several stops into the tour after pulling ahead as the early front runner.

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