Reviewing is a difficult art. There are certain constrained forms I particularly like. The obituary. The chess column. The restaurant review. All so constrained by the necessaries, requiring clever use of what little room there is for the decorations. The English tend to do them best. Zia Mahmoud does the most with the least with The Guardian‘s bridge column. Haiku fascinates me. The very word puts me on edge. I hate haiku about as much as shakuhachi music, but at the same time I love it about as much as a good egg breakfast, a short speech, photos of Japanese taking photos of cherry blossoms with unbelievably expensive cameras (snap thanks to a great photographer, Mark Alberding), and the way sacred cows get in the way of traffic in New Delhi. Short is good. Less is more. Small is beautiful. Metre is a useful discipline for the poet’s natural tendency to ungrammatical excess. Some of the most elegant writing going around today is to be found on this website. I particularly like: Continue reading “Cavallero, Birdman Eating, Lentil as Anything reviewed; Beer haiku”
Pastry Art Design, at 280 Smith St, next to Gluttony, is a strange old bakery I’ve never quite been able to categorise. It has a two for one loaf deal on Saturdays and Sundays, so I picked up a white sourdough cobb and a fruit loaf for $3.50. They do very good pastries, good cold pizza squares and focaccias, as well as bread which is good without ever being outstanding. Certainly, it is a cut above Baker’s Delight. But the exception to this goodness was an inviting but dreadful loaf of olive bread: the olives were those tasteless unripe green olives dyed black by being soaked in lye and pumped with oxygen (a revelation to be found in Stephanie’s Cook’s Companion) found on poor quality pizzas. As indication of how olivy it wasn’t, consider that I took a piece of the stuff and ate it happily with lemon buter on top. I think there are too many laws already, but there should nevertheless be a law against such fraud.