"I read your book." | Sung J. Woo

In sync with the paperback release, EA is once again spending a little time on BookBrowse‘s home page this week!

Nude, winning Peggy.

Roger hires fur coat Don.

Dick drinks and forgets.

Sally cries U.N.C.L.E.

Betty smiles at a dollhouse

Don turns Japanese.

There was a time in my life when I read purely for pleasure.  Before then, I read pretty much for pain, or more accurately, I read and it caused me pain.  Like reading Thoreau’s Walden and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage for English class – now there was torture.  But thankfully, there was Stephen King and Stephen R. Donaldson and Stephen Coonts and even some authors not named Stephen, and I was in bliss.  These were my lazy high school years.  I remember reading Misery in a single day, from nine in the morning until nine at night, and I had no other desire than to feel every word on the page.  It was pure hedonism.

A review of four books I wrote for The Nervous Breakdown.

“My life is very”

Don doesn’t know the next word.

Lonely.  Sad.  Drunk.  Dark.

Last night, my wife and I completed our David Chang experience by eating at Momofuku Ko.  The first time I visited one of his restaurants was a little more than a year ago, on my way back from getting my ass kicked by the Wii Tennis gods, where I had myself some rosemary ice cream.  Yes, you heard that right, rosemary ice cream! Since then I’ve also had stuffing-flavored ice cream, and last night, I had perhaps the weirdest of all, BBQ sauce.  And just to prove that I’m not making this up, click on the thumbnail of the cellphone photo I took of the Milk Bar’s menu.

Anyway, in case you haven’t heard of Ko, it’s the most interesting of all of his restaurants, because you eat what the chef prepares for you (i.e., no menu to choose from).  And it’s an adventure even getting in the door, because there are only twelve seats and two sittings, which means on any given night, there are a maximum of 24 diners.  The only way you can get a reservation is by signing up for an account on his website and then logging on at 10am to see if there are any spots open.  I got lucky, as a few days ago, I was able to refresh the page like a coked-up monkey and snag somebody’s cancellation.

Dawn and I sat at the head of the table, so we had the good fortune to have the vantage point of the photo above, able to look at the entire kitchen and all the diners.  There was another couple sitting catty-corner from us, and they were Canadians on a visit, at Ko to celebrate her birthday.  The music was on the loud side, but we kinda liked it.  I especially liked it when they played Safety Dance, the 80′s Men Without Hats staple!

But you’re at Ko not to talk to people or listen to music.  You’re there to eat, and boy, eat we did.  There must’ve been about a dozen courses total, and the three chefs kept it all moving at the perfect pace.  Some dishes were just a bite, while others were more substantial, sort of like tapas.  My favorite of the night was the lobster tortellini with breaded sweetbread and some exotic mushroom that was sauteed and diced.  Dawn’s favorite was my second favorite, a succulent oyster and grilled pork belly with kimchi surrounded by a warm broth.  There was a lamb rib that was as hearty as a hug, and a dessert that featured what seemed like ground-up peanuts in the shape of blueberries.

Was it all that I’d expected?  Absolutely.  This was creative cuisine at its finest, and the only downside was the guilt I felt for eating it all so quickly.  These chefs spend hours preparing the meals, and they take surgical care assembling their dishes, and there I am, shoveling it down like I was going to the electric chair.

In the end, we were stuffed, but that didn’t stop us from modifying our route back home to stop at the Milk Bar, where I got the BBQ sauce ice cream and also picked up a dozen cookies, a truffle of cake, and an order of pork buns for breakfast.  Except this morning, neither of us is in shape to eat the buns because our stomachs are still full.  It’s like we went on a bender, which I suppose we did.  But man, I wouldn’t change a thing.  David Chang, thank you.

Everything Asian is now a part of the Reading Group Gold books, thanks to the reading group guide written by the always amazing Stewart O’Nan.  You can get it in PDF or read it right off your browser.

Joanie cuts her hand

Lane’s cut from his family

Dick is cut from life.

Floating and bundling
a stack of sleeping bodies
Only in a dream.

We caught the matinee of Inception at the NYC AMC Loews in Lincoln Center yesterday, to watch the movie in real IMAX format.  The marketing folks have done their job, because it’s been a long time since I’ve been this drawn to see a film.

By the way, I’ll be talking about the plot of the movie quite a bit here, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading…

Maybe it was all the various temporal trickery that’s discussed in the dream-within-a-dream mechanics, but I couldn’t believe how quickly the two-and-a-half hours passed by.   There’s nothing quite as satisfying as surrendering yourself to the big screen to the point where you lose track of time.  Even though Inception details a fair amount of exposition via Ariadne, it also has plenty of action to keep it chugging along nicely, and as a popcorn movie, it succeeds brilliantly.

My first gut reaction was astonishment, astonished that Christopher Nolan was able to get funding to make a blockbuster with brains.  Inception is not as complicated or ingenious as Memento (and therefore ultimately not as rewarding), but how in the world did he convince the producers to drop that much cash?  Of course he’s proved his big-budget chops with the two Batman movies, but still, major kudos.

There was lavish praise heaped upon the film before it even opened, and though some of it is justified, I feel that the accolades were also a by-product of the terrible movies that have populated the theaters this summer so far.  Because as interesting and creative as Inception is, I didn’t feel knocked out by it, unlike some of the previous films that traveled similar territories: Dark City and The Matrix.  But those movies didn’t have the hype machine working overtime, either, so there’s the expectation factor to consider.

Still, I’d take a single Inception over a thousand Transformers any day.

Favorite part of the movie: Arthur’s floating sequence in the hotel, where he ties up his sleeping compatriots in preparation for the “kick.”  More than any other part of the movie, that bit seemed so utterly dreamlike.

Unintentional recall of another film: When Cobb lets go of Mal, I was reminded of the scene in Titanic, where Rose lets Jack go.  I guess it was Leo’s turn to do the letting go this time.

Unintentional recall of a TV show: The final scene with Fischer and his father, which takes place inside the vault, reminded me of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s holodeck in its deactivated state.

Minor linguistic complaint: I’m a fan of Ken Watanabe, but his accent was difficult to decipher at times.  The funny thing is, he had a large part in The Last Samurai, and I don’t recall having trouble understanding him at all back then.  Did he have a better dialect coach for that movie or something?

Congenial ambiguity: In all the forum posts I’ve read, the reaction has been remarkably similar.  When the film cuts before the top stops spinning, there were light chuckles all around our theater, too.  Why is it that people didn’t rage against the ambiguous ending, like the way so many did when The Sopranos silenced to black?  Is this good or bad?  You can take it either way, I suppose.  Perhaps the audience didn’t care enough about the characters or the movie to have a strong reaction.  Or perhaps they were content with not knowing, happy to leave the theater with a question mark.  Whatever the reason, I love the idea of all the people exiting the shared dream of the movie’s fiction with satisfied smiles on their faces.

In five days, the paperback edition of Everything Asian will be hitting the shelves.  Pick one up!  Tell your friends!  And if your friend is Oprah, be sure to give her a copy!

Anyway, back to reality.  Tomorrow I’ll be visiting the West Windsor Library in Princeton Junction for an event titled “Studio Scrawl: The Art of the Short-Short Story.”  I did this presentation at Pingry for their students a little while back and it went over well, so I’ll once again be singing the praises of J. Robert Lennon and his awesome short-short stories.  If you still haven’t read Pieces for the Left Hand, man, am I jealous.  I wish I could read it for the first time all over again.

Next Friday at 9pm (7/23), I’ll be at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Mouth to Mouth Open Mic featuring Ali Wong and yours truly.  It’s my paperback launch, so come on out for some good literature and comedy.