watch this space. i am working on studying the multitudes of california and san francisco propositions and will announce my slate soon.

this past week or so has been rather arty. first off, on friday andy and i went to a dance performance with bess. it was this woman named maureen fleming at the emerson majestic i think. her dance has a rather japanese aesthetic so it's veeeery slow, which is highly unusual. it relies a lot on the lighting and music to keep it interesting. it wasn't bad as a concept, but fleming doesn't really do much revelatory with it so it ended up being a little long and the kind of thing you only need to see once. it was fun seeing it w/ bess, though, and we all went to excelsior (apparently it's lydia shire's) for drinks afterwards. andy had the tuna tartare and fried artichoke which he said were both pretty good. the artichoke came w/ these two subpar limp, kind of soggy things that looked like fries and were some sort of goat cheese/potato concoction. not so good. the bread that came w/ the tartare was very buttery and kind of like naan, and rather addictive although really heavy. the two desserts we had were really quite bad. the apple meuille feuille (hmm is that the right spelling, winnie?) was far too sweet (it came w/ rum raisin ice cream i believe) as was the chocolate cake we got. i forget what it was exactly, but it came w/ peppermint ice cream. (by the way, did you know that troquet, which i still need to go back to, is expanding to include a lounge as well?) then yesterday andy and i went to hear the BSO, conducted by a fellow named rozhdestvensky. andy had gotten free tickets randomly from virgin and they were prob worth less than 30 bucks each since they were in the first row, but we thought we might as well. the program was: GLAZUNOV Overture on Greek Themes No. 2, Op. 6 SIBELIUS Six Humoresques for Violin and Orchestra PROKOFIEV American Overture --- SHOSTAKOVICH Suite on Finnish Folk Tunes, for soprano, tenor and chamber orchestra (American Premiere) SHOSTAKOVICH Excerpts from Hypothetically Murdered we've both agreed previously that whoever does the programming for the BSO's season needs to be fired. we had to leave after the first half b/c every single piece we heard was so fluffy it left a distinctly saccharine taste. i felt like it was the boston pops or something. the programme must have been geared towards people with extremely short attention spans since every piece was in itty bitty, easily digestible sections. blech! dull, dull, dull. i actually like sibelius but in this context it was hard to appreciate it. it wasn't helped out by the violinist, alexander rozhdestvensky (the son of the conductor. gimmick anyone?), who had a rather uneven sound; overly rough and masculine on the low strings and too thin on the high ones. his vibrato also seemed a little weird to me. his runs were flawless, though. i wasn't fond of the conducting either, which felt lackluster to me. dyer (of the globe) didn't seem to have a problem with any of it, though, which makes me wonder if i'm just being overly critical. well, he prob. had better seats than we did, heh.

cooking, eating Recently i've been cooking meat -- I almost never cook meat. But since I've been cooking for other people who eat meat, I can do so -- and it's really fun! Last night I made the North African Beef and Lamb Stew (which has some cool name I can't remember off the top of my head) out of Cooking for Mr. Latte and it was quite excellent. After simmering away on the stove for two hours the chuck roast and the lamb shoulder just melts away in your mouth. I really love the spices, the combination of cinnamon and ginger. I tried the Roasted Beet and Vidalia Onion Salad as well -- which I'm saving for wednesday -- and that too turned out excellent, even though I substituted sweet italian flat red onions for the vidalias. Last week I went to Pesce in Russian Hill, which is an Italian seafood tapas kind of place. We started with the Smoked Salmon Bruschetta with Horseradish sauce and capers, but it was a little underwhelming, probably because the horseradish was on the side buried under the sliced onions. The dungeoness crab tower was good but not stunning. The squid ink risotta was quite delicious. Our last item before dessert was a red snapper filet which was amazing. It came with pesto mashed potatoes and I forget, something else on the side, and it was a fabulous combination of flavors. At the recommendation of my cousins, who have an illustrous apartment in Russian Hill, two blocks down from the curvy part of Lombard street, we ordered a bottle of the prosecco which was as delicious as they had said. We ended the meal with a molten chocolate cake ('volcano' chocolate cake, I think they called it) and bread pudding -- the cake, disappointingly, had been overcooked and was not very volcanic.

the phanatic's head has been found. Well that's a relief. philly.com

I LOVE YOU GAVIN NEWSOM!!! (even though i voted for matt gonzalez)

got back from puerto rico last night. (it was 20 degrees in boston when we got back. blech!!!) had a lot of fun (despite some humongous hassles w/ our mini-trip to culebra). here are some pics, although i'll post more about the trip later. the first pic is of an alley in old san juan and the second is of el morro (a spanish fort). some obligatory "puerto rico is so beautiful" pics: la puerta de san juan (gate to san juan) flamenco beach at culebra sunburn ...

like winnie i've been listening to wagner, or trying to rather. as i've said before, i find quite a lot of opera to be rather boring. the first act of die walkure, though, is more boring than most. the entire first act consists of only three characters and there is little to no action, although there arias where they sing -about- things happening, like a battle. this is more or less my first major foray into wagner, and i've never really been a great fan of german opera in general (although strauss is on my list of things to listen to. i've heard arabella and der rosenkavalier, but i need to listen to them again.) in this act, anyway, wagner's music tends to be either very conversational and unmemorable or really overdone and wet. i mean, how many times do we have to hear the siegmund lietmotif in scene three which is 25 minutes long? so far there are only a few arias i more or less liked in act one, all of which siegmund sing, but the act definitely gained momentum as it went along. and is it just me or is the fact the major love duet is incestuous a major turnoff? hopefully winnie's having better luck with das rheingold. well, i think i'll take a break from wagner for now and maybe pick up this ariadne auf naxos cd i've had for a while. or maybe go back to some rossini. i started watching that barber of seville DVD winnie. it's pretty cool and pretty catchy. i'm looking forward to watching the rest of it. in other music news i've sustained my pj harvey kick, and now i have all her cds and a bootleg video which i paid too much for on ebay. i like her music a lot, but it's not really something you can listen to over and over again b/c there's not quite enough depth. but she's still cool. been using andy's indian cookbook (by madhur jaffrey) over the past year or so. i've made cauliflower, potato, and okra dishes with moderate success. i think i'm going to tackle something harder like a malai kofta-esque dish next. heh heh heh. p.s. andy and i are leaving for PUERTO RICO tomorrow until sunday. the plane's at 7 AM!!!!!!

it's times like these that i actually appreciate living in boston. here's two excerpts from an article at cnn.com about the massachusetts supreme court ruling in favor of gay marriage: "The history of our nation has demonstrated that separate is seldom, if ever, equal," the four justices who ruled in favor of gay marriage wrote in the advisory opinion. A bill that would allow for civil unions, but falls short of marriage, makes for "unconstitutional, inferior, and discriminatory status for same-sex couples." ... Massachusetts has one of the highest concentrations of gay households in the country with at 1.3 percent of the total number of coupled households, according to the 2000 census. In California, 1.4 percent of the coupled households are occupied by same-sex partners. Vermont and New York also registered at 1.3 percent, while in Washington, D.C., the rate is 5.1 percent.