don't have a cow, man

c4ts, sugarpockets, avert your eyes: this post focuses on pork. well, david chang, who specializes in making pork-related korean-esque dishes. in the interest of full disclosure, i've been to momofuku noodle bar and i think the pork buns are fantastic. it's fine if chang isn't trying to make authentically korean dishes or whatever and that's not what annoys me. people fall all over themselves praising the noodle dishes, while i find them to be...lacking. what can i say? there is a korean word that describes the taste, which can only be translated to, uh, "meaty." there is nothing offsetting the overwhelming pork-y flavor and the noodles lack the nuance and balance that i think a good meat-based dish should have. i haven't tried his ssam bar because, well, it's pretty impossible to get a seat there.

anyway, chang's a skilled chef and he has some innovative ideas on how to run a restaurant, but holy cow is he overrated. in his new yorker profile last week, he came off somewhere between earnest/likeable and psychotic/self-important. i'm sure he's some of both, as most people are.

apparently he's a james beard award finalist? and proving that bloggers know nothing, listen to this ignoramus's opinion on who should win:

Steve Plotnicki, Opinionated About Dining: “Chang: I'm torn between him and Dufresne, but Chang's Bo Ssäm, which could be the single greatest casual dish ever invented by an American chef, tips it in his favor”

hey moron, korean people have been eating the dish for years and it's offered by many other korean restaurants. chang didn't "invent" it, he just made it that much pork-ier.

while we're on the subject, frank bruni managed to make it out to park slope to try out moim, a korean restaurant. he wrote a fairly glowing review, but the menu made me pause: what kind of self-respecting korean restaurant charges for banchan? $4 for kongnamul! my mom would weep. not to mention, what are these "korean desserts" they serve?

two americas -- part two

I was just going to respond in the comments section to Blogger E's post below, but I found myself being needlessly and typically maximalist, so I thought it best to unleash my feelings here, dear, dear, indifferent reader.

Regarding the New Yorker fretting E draws our attention to, I wonder how much stock we should put into the opinions of Sasha Frere-Jones--a man whose taste in music tends toward major label releases, but who gets to lay claim to indie cred by introducing MIA, Dizzy Rascal, Feist, and others to the literati. Not a bad gig. As E points out, Frere-Jones laments the state of indie rock--to his credit, actually he hedges his bets a little, saying merely that he harbors some "unease"-- because the movement has come to embrace a diversity of musical stylings. But let's interrogate this unease.

I'm old enough to remember in the mid-1990's when the post-grunge, fledgling indie rock kids put all their eggs in the Sebadoh and Pavement baskets, while at the same time harboring some dismissive views about hip-hop: hardly a muscial genre worth our time, one of my old colleagues at WXDU told me. Of course, the post-Native Tongues movement and members of the Wu-Tang Clan put to rest that stupidity, and now Clipse, Devon the Dude, Mad Lib, et al. draw in the skinny-jeaned and dandruff-coiffed, and no one complains. Enter alt-country, singer-songwriters, and--gasp--chanteuses like Feist, and indie rock's become a true alternative to the collective wisdom of the A&R guys over at the Big Five.

But Frere-Jones' "unease" reminds me that there're still those pitiable, superficial indie rockers out there who can't see past punk rock. To them, and to Frere-Jones' conflicted mind I say this: It's okay for there to be more than three emaciated dudes in a band. It's okay for songs to be languid and moving, for them to be "black-sounding," as Patrick Bateman would say. It's okay for good and dignified muscians to mine disco and lite-rock and reinvent those tired forms. The astonishing thing about Feist is that she has done the impossible: She has reconstituted lite rock, repackaged it, and fed it to scores of scenesters, and in the process made us all forget her shady beginnings with Peaches and all that clash-rock cacophany. If indie rockers can't evolve past "Fuck the Pain Away," 0r shouldn't, as Frere-Jones' uneasy alter ego might suggest, then really the "movement" is what the main-streamers have accused it of being all along: more artifice than substance; snobbery for snobbery's sake.

I for one am not buying that. Nor is my pretend millworker dad.