hodgepodge of bits: first off, CONGRATS to andy for being on lloyd schwartz of the boston phoenix's top ten classical music moments of 2003 list:

7) Best new pieces (in chronological order by age of composer) The new pieces I’ll remember best are 94-year-old Elliott Carter’s Boston Concerto, commissioned by the BSO and conducted by Ingo Metzmacher; 84-year-old Leon Kirchner’s Second Piano Sonata played by Russell Sherman at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; 65-year-old John Harbison’s Second Piano Sonata played by Robert Levin in a Fleet Boston Celebrity Series Boston Marquee concert, his moving Requiem at the BSO conducted by Bernard Haitink, and his 1986 cinemascopic ballet score, Ulysses, getting its first complete musical performance with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under Gil Rose; and 47-year-old Andy Vores’s Goback Goback with baritone David Kravitz and David Hoose conducting Collage New Music.

actually the only other thing i feel like posting right now is a link to the new york times' art section's best of 2003 section. despite taking all of his reviews with a grain of salt or two, i was glad to see brantley single out donna murphy again for her performance in wonderful town.

I'm way behind on my restaurant reviews. So I'll start with tonight. Cynthia was visiting, we baked cookies then headed around the corner from our apartment to Eight Immortals for Chinese seafood. It was buzzing the entire time we were there, with at least one party waiting at any time. We started with sizzling rice in seafood soup -- the rice seemed a little over-sizzled but still was quite tasty. The tomatos were a funny, perhaps Californian touch. Then the oyster sauce asparagus, which was a disappointment -- I don't know what possessed me to let anyone order asparagus at a chinese restaurant. The asparagus was too tough, and it just didn't taste like much. The oyster sauce part was a vague waterly liquid that coated the bottom of the plate. The snow peas with flounder filet was quite yummy, as was the sea cucumber and black mushroom with bean curd in clay pot. Although I don't actually remember the black mushroom part. I think they left it out. But it was still pretty damn good. The pepper sauce scallops was okay -- I thought the onions were a bit too undercooked. The flavor of the dish, however, was quite good. The service was definitely below-average Chinese restaurant service. I think it's better if someone speaks good Chinese -- when I went with my parents I thought they might have been more attentive, but it was also the middle of the week and it was pretty quiet. All in all, a really satisfying meal -- a soup, a ho-hum veggie dish, three (three!) seafood dishes -- which left us with two meals of leftovers -- all for a whopping $32 including tax and a generous tip. I'm going to miss the food in this neighborhood when we move.

funny cartoon, and oh so true:

finishing up the mammoth food post ... andy and i went to the nightingale on tremont last week. i'd been there for a very mediocre brunch once and andy had been there for a good dinner. i found it to be quite ordinary once again, which wasn't helped by a wicked annoying, loud show-off kid sitting behind us. i started with a mushroom tart which came with some overly oily watercress with huge leaves. the tart was good, but not amazing. i really didn't want to get mushroom risotto AGAIN which, like so many other restaurants, was their only vegetarian entree, so instead i got a plate of sides. the couscous was really weird. usually couscous is small, but this was sort of engorged and chewy as well as quite bland. the butternut squash puree was ordinary and the plentiful escarole rather salty. the fingerling potatoes were good, though, but they tend to be pretty foolproof. andy had the pork chop which he readily demolished although again it wasn't anything special. per winnie's strong recommendation andy and i checked out sultan's kitchen in the financial district. i had the artichoke fritters, andy had some falafel and hummus. the flavors were quite good, although with all fried food that's not directly out of the fryer, it was rather too greasy and dense. i like my falafel to be crunchy on the outside, and so far cafe jaffa in the back bay is my favorite in boston, although there used to be a food truck that served similarly good falafel. went to cafe jaffa this week and although their falafel is pretty good i feel there must be better out there ... their grape leaves though are still the best i've had in boston, although their baba ghanoush is curiously without a strong taste. last of all, last month andy and i checked out the new korean place, buk kyung ii in allston (globe review). it's owned by the same people who own the "home town" restaurant in somerville, which most korean people i know refer to simply as the "jjajjangmyeon" place b/c they're one of the few places in boston that serve the korean (via china) black bean noodles. when we went to buk kyung ii i got something that was vegetarian but very close to jjajjangmyeon which was huge and good. andy had cheopjae which was about average. we'll have to try it again. so far suishaya in chinatown is still at the top of my list of favorite korean places in boston.

the latest on the food front (i have some catching up to do i think) ... first off, went to gramercy tavern when i was in new york (for my 24th birthday, heh heh) a month ago. it turns out that we were lucky b/c andy had wanted to go to see a bartender who had left one of his favorite places, hamersley's in boston, and was waitressing there. it turned out that the day we went was the last day she was going to be there, so it was cool that andy got to see her there. i'd been there before w/ winnie and the place has a nice ambience. our waitress (not the one andy know) wasn't particularly helpful, though. andy got a fish ragout which he said was good. i started with a salad with grilled slices of portabello which was quite excellent, but in a misstep i got the same roasted vegetable sandwich i had last time (one of their few vegetarian entrees) which also had portabello mushrooms -- a detail that a more competent waitress would have pointed out i think. this time i had it w/ the tallegio, though, which is a really really stinky italian cheese. as before the sandwich was greasy, heavy, and hard to handle, which in retrospect i shouldn't have gotten but oh well. last night andy and i went to joe v's, a new gourmet pizza place that recently opened on shawmut in the south end, pretty much around the corner from the franklin park cafe. the place was stiflingly straight, and the ambience definitely wasn't helped by the fact their electricity was down. so basically we were stuck in a chilly, acoustically dry, small room with very patchy, too bright emergency lighting. despite these drawbacks the food was quite decent. we started with the bruschetta which was plain but good. the tomatoes were fresh and nice and garlicky. the bread was rather spongy instead of well-toasted which i found to be not to my taste, but this may have been due to the lack of electricity. andy had a caesar salad which he said was quite excellent. he especially appreciated the fact that it had anchovies which i had assumed was requisite for a caesar salad, but he says that 9 out of 10 places don't include them. for my entree i had a mushroom and caramelized onion pizza with a cream sauce. it was quite good, although it was heavy, the small plates they gave us were completely unhelpful, and i prefer my crust to be crispy instead of soft. i'd give them another try i think, but not any time soon. a month or so ago andy and i checked out cambridge, 1, the gourmet pizza place that recently opened near the border cafe in harvard square. this is the place that's owned by the same people who own the miracle of science and audubon circle. (i got tired of not knowing their names, so i found a review from the globe of the pizza place .... their names are chris lutes and matthew curtis.) the decor is definitely very similar to the miracle and audubon, lots of wood and dark walls. this place only had pizza and salads (i.e. no sandwiches or pastas), which i find a drawback although i suppose that's a matter of opinion. andy liked that the back faces a cemetery, although i think that's a little on the weird side. the pizza we got was pretty good but not extraordinary. also, i find it annoying that they have a comma in their name, heh. all in all going to both of these pizza places just reminded me of my preference for a nice greasy slice of american pizza from a place like nicole's on tremont. also, worth mentioning, although i hate bertucci's pizza i have to say their bruschetta is tops and i'd go back there just so i could have it. they put together a plate with six pieces of bread, three different toppings, one eggplant based, one tomato based, and i forget what the third one is. yummmm. whoa this is getting long ... i'll post the rest of this later i guess.

this is a little old (from mid-october), but i thought it was pretty funny:

Bush orders officials to stop the leaks Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used. .... On Monday, reacting to reports of internal conflict among his top advisers, the President told one regional broadcaster: "The person who's in charge is me."

p.s. hey, winnie, i taught myself to crochet left-handed. apparently people who are really hardcore and work on heavy afghans learn how to crochet with their non-dominant hand so that they don't have to turn their work over at the end of every row. i figured i would learn it to distribute the stress on my hands, and it's actually pretty easy to pick up, although i'm still a little slow.

Congratulations, Shirin Ebadi, on receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. See this BBC article, and this fantastic graphical nytimes editorial by one of my favorite author/artists, Marjane Satrapi.

I'm a little behind on this. I write these entries and then forget I wrote them and never get around to posting them. Since the Average Joe finale is coming up tomorrow, I better get this little (short this time) commentary out of the way. As usual, Average Joe was stunningly cheesy and yet at the same time, underwhelming. Melana went undercover in a fat suit, they even had a body double to fool the guys into thinking she was leaving the house, yadda yadda yadda. It was really kind of dumb, but the costume was so cool. In any case, she kept the hottie he-must-be-gay guy, and Adam. She very reluctantly kicked off Zach because we all know he's a jerk, but I'm sure she'll be giving him a call as soon as the show is over. Next week (er, tomorrow): a TWO-HOUR SHOCKING FINALE! I'm dreading it already. Did they really have two hours worth of material? I think we find out that Adam is really an internet millionaire or something. Pretty cool. --- Rainbow Grocery has been appointed "My Favorite Grocery Store of All Time." For me, the only downside is that I eat meat and seafood, and Rainbow has neither. It's a natural food coop on crack. The bulk food section is enormous, their organic vegetables are delicious yet not exhorbitantly expensive. Oh my other complaint is that I am scared of the worms in the corn. There's a cute sign above them that says, "Don't be afraid of the worms! This is normal and indicates healthy and delicious corn!" But I am afraid. The other huge plus is that when you leave the house too early on a Sunday morning, and leave your wallet at home, and don't discover it until the cashier announces your total, they will simply save your receipt and let you leave your cart there until you finally make it back almost an hour later. They're just all such nice people.

sorry for the stark bitterness of my last post. today's been one of the first days since i've been sick that i've felt well enough to put a coherent thought together. i owe any and all recovery i've had and may have to my man andy who has been diligently taking care of me. (hi, andy.) i've had some things i've been meaning to post for a while, but the one that i'm thinking about right now is windows CD players. a couple of months ago or so new versions of windows media player and real one player came out, and itunes came out on windows for the first time. first off, itunes looked like it would have some interesting features, like organizing playlists and being able to burn CDs, but it really didn't work for either my windows 2000 machines at home or at work. it starts up a secondary process to help it run on windows which seems like a hack to me, but regardless of the setup there was this ridiculously long delay everytime i wanted to try to do anything w/ itunes. also, i seem to remember it taking up an unusually large amount of disk space. if they ever fix these problems i may give it another go, but there didn't seem to be anything particularly phenomenal about it esp. since i'm really unlikely to ever want to buy a single track from their digital music store. windows media player's new version was an improvement mostly in that it finally accesses the cddb database to bring up the tracklisting info for pretty much any cd you put in. among my gripes is that i hate the box they put for visualizations that i think are incredibly pointless but my biggest gripe is that every time you use the slide bar to skip to a different part of the track the player has a big delay. this definitely is not a limitation of the hardware b/c itunes and real player let you skip around w/out any delay. which brings me to the winner of this round, the new real one player. i'd never really used real one player but i checked it out b/c of the new version and right now it's my windows CD player of choice by far. you can put it into various compact modes, it's really reliable in bringing up the correct CD info, and you can instantaneously skip to different tracks or to diff. spots in a track (the downside of that, though, is that the CD will continue spinning for a couple of minutes after the CD has finished playing to anticipate you accessing the CD again). another big plus for me is that if you change the volume using windows' system volume control, real player respects the system's volume setting, which windows media player doesn't do. in other words, if i adjust the system's CD volume while WMP is running, WMP resets the system's CD volume back to what it was in WMP when the next track starts, completely ignoring the change in volume you had just made. real player does reset the system's CD volume if you change it w/in real player which makes sense. what makes less sense and which is rather annoying is that it also resets the system's wave volume if you change the CD volume in real player. this is prob. due to the fact that real player plays other audio types, but it's the only downside and if like me you just use the window's system volume controls and steer clear of real player's everything works quite well. to wrap up this long post, i've finally gotten around to listening to belle and sebastian's new album. one word: boring. was that harsh? i mean, when was the last time they did something "original"? "the loneliness of a middle distance runner" (from the jonathan david EP)? ... that was june 2000. their last three albums (inc. this one and storytelling) didn't interest me nearly as much as their first three (with their related EPs). won't be getting their next album. oh well.

if you were wondering where i've been for the past two weeks, i've been SICK SICK SICK. i've been sick since before thanksgiving, and i am STILL SICK. along with being sick, i have also been extremely sick of being sick. if i'm not better by monday i think i'm going to shoot myself in the foot. or something. if you're having a bad day, just think about how much worse MY DAY is. right now i'm feeling very entitled to some bitterness.