Songs I Like

Arcade Fire's "Headlights Look like Diamonds"
Radiohead's "High & Dry"
Nouvelle Vague's "Teenage Kicks"
Vinicius Cantuaria's "Silva" album, as performed at the Jazz Bakery in Culver City, Calif.
In regards to Cantuaria, I went to his concert last night. The jazz club was set up like an elementary school theater, with plastic lawn chairs and a small stage that would have been the right size for a kindergarten Christmas pageant. As it was the last night of a five-night show, only a sixth of the seats were filled. I sat in the front row, two feet away from the singer, close enough to snap this picture of him. When Cantuaria wanted the audience to sing along he kept repeating this one phrase and looking at me. I didn't understand Portuguese so I stared back at him. The 15 of us in the audience finally figured it out. One of the phrases we sang was "vagabundu," which means vagabond in Portuguese.

The Tang Dynasty

In China, Lunar New Year is called the Spring Festival and Tang is dubbed Fruit Treasure.

Toro! Toro! Toro!

Squids and Scorpios play prominent roles in my life; the former as a joke between Pork Chop and me, and the latter as my Western zodiac sign that explains a lot why I can be a moody SOB. I didn't eat any squid on Sunday night at Torafuku, which is my favorite Japanese sushi spot in Los Angeles. It's not that the American outpost of the well-known Tokyo restaurant doesn't serve cephalopods to its core patronage of Japanese expatriate diners. I wasn't in the mood to gobble up tentacled treats after seeing The Squid and the Whale with Isabel and Joe. Instead, I dined on onigiri stuffed with baby anchovies, miso soup, eel sushi and negitoromaki, which is the poor man's version of toro sushi as the leftovers of the buttery soft tuna belly are chopped up with green onions and wrapped in seaweed. Joe mistakingly dipped his onigiri filled with ume, or plum sauce, in soy sauce. Torafuku's Japanese-American waiters were so efficient that they took away the little plates before I could snap my after-dinner shot, Geewee-style. The only proof of my yummy meal was the soy sauce square set in a corner above the white space, as befitting a Zen painting.

Taco Truck Brigade

How did I miss this cool exhibit last year?