• Thao at the Bowery Ballroom on Thursday, 14 May 2009.
• Angela Lansbury in Blithe Spirit at the Shubert Theatre on Wednesday, 20 May 2009.

Awesome.

– The difference between an adequate cappuccino and a good, or very good cappuccino is usually in the milk.

– The difference between a very good cappuccino and a great one is usually in the espresso.

– If you see the barista spooning foam onto your cappuccino, you’re in trouble. If you see the barista tapping the milk pitcher against the counter while peering into it, it’s a good sign, and at the very least you know he or she is trying.

There are three places in New York that I typically get my cappuccinos (cappuccini?):
* The VBAR on Sullivan near W 3rd St.
* Abraço on E 7th St near 1st.
* Fika on Park Ave near E 28th.

* * * * *

My interest in cappuccinos really started when I was working at WaMu in Emeryville. We had inherited a swanky office space from evolve.com, into which they had poured millions of dollars in renovations before laying everybody off and moving back into the city. Aside from the chainmail-enclosed, neon-lit spiral staircase, the pool and ping-pong tables, and the two SubZero refrigerators, we had a La Pavoni espresso maker. After not paying much mind to it the first couple of years, I had decided that I would take it upon myself to pick up some Illy espresso and some whole milk, and figure out how to make a cappuccino.

While I never mastered the art of making a fine cappuccino (I was able to make a fairly drinkable caffè latte), I did learn that none of the cappuccinos I’d had in San Francisco could really be considered good. In my spare time, I read articles like this one and this one (there are now many more around the Internet, along with a plethora of YouTube videos) over and over again. I also browsed the coffee forums to find out where in San Francisco I could find a good cup of coffee, but only found that many considered San Francisco to be a “cruel joke” when it came to coffee, offering many fine cafés to pass time at but no good espresso drinks to consume.

At some point, I noticed a mention of Bluebottle Coffee Co. in Hayes Valley as a good place to get a cup, but before I could venture over there I happened to meet some friends at the VBAR during a visit to NYC. For the first time, I encountered a caffè latte where the milk had been steamed perfectly: no foam, no dryness, no wateriness. I had given up on believing it was possible, but here I encountered for the first time milk that had been steamed in such a way that it actually tasted quite sweet. Not sugary sweet, mind you, but a kind of sweetness that blended naturally and harmoniously with the flavors of the milk and the coffee, much as the sweetness of a perfectly ripe peach enhances its juicy flavor without overpowering it. I think I drank some four or five espresso drinks that day.

After that experience, I began digging up places where I could find a decent cappuccino in the Bay Area. Bluebottle opened a new store near the old mint building, I made a pilgrimage to Barefoot Café in Santa Clara (during a trip in which I was searching for the best ramen in the Bay Area—a topic for another post), and I ventured to a few places in Marin and in the East Bay. During subsequent trips to NYC, I always made a point of stopping at the VBAR multiple times, and it never disappointed. After returning from Tokyo (where I never managed to find a good espresso drink), I discovered a Bluebottle stand in the neighborhood farmers market, which I found to produce the best and most consistently excellent cappuccinos I’ve had to this day. I also discovered a coffee stand at One Jackson Square around the corner from the Tacit Knowledge headquarters (where I was working) that made good cappuccinos.

Sadly, since I’ve moved to New York, I haven’t had a good cappuccino from VBAR. Fortunately, my cousin introduced me to Abraço on 7th St, which I always visit whenever I’m anywhere near the East Village. It’s not much of a hangout (standing room only, and it’s crowded), but they offer the best cappuccino in town, along with some excellent snacks (olive oil cookies, french toast with cream and a hint of orange-blossom water), and despite the cramped interior, the owner manages to keep his difficult-to-reach turntable spinning with Brazilian music from the 60s.

I also encountered Fika, a Swedish coffee chain that is conveniently located between Penn Station and the Tacit Knowledge NY office (where I work). While they don’t offer the most consistent cup around, they always provide me with a drinkable cappuccino and usually an excellent one. Their interior is like a mini black-and-white IKEA, complete with Swedish nametags for every cookie and sandwich they have on display. Everyone that works there is very friendly, and they’ve already learned to start making my daily cappuccino to-go as soon as I enter the store. They appreciate my loyalty and I appreciate their excellent service.

There were a lot of things in Tokyo that I was unaccustomed to, but the omnipresence of cats and the number of people that would fall asleep in public were the two that caught my eye the most when I was out taking photographs. My DSLR was still fairly new to me at the time, and I had recently signed up for Flickr and was fairly active on it.

At some point someone invited my to add my photo to his group, and so I discovered Flickr groups. Given that I had noticed that a certain number of my photos were of cats or of people napping in the street, I decided to create two groups of my own to organize those photos in a way that was a bit more cohesive than just tagging them. Once I had stopped generally taking photos of cats in Tokyo, I pretty much forgot about the groups.

Just now, however, I happened to log into my Flickr account (something I seldom do these days), and I noticed that my group for photos of cats in Tokyo had reached 52 members. There are some very nice photos there (not as many are street cats as I would like), and I’m glad to have started something. Sadly, no one has joined my group for photos of people napping in Tokyo.

http://flickr.com/groups/tokyo-neko/
http://flickr.com/groups/tokyo-nap/

I saw the film The Cat Returns before going to Tokyo, and at the time the director’s imagination seemed quite remarkable. The vision of an entire underground cat society (complete with a cat king and his Secret Service cats) seemed so fantastic. Yet when I started walking around Tokyo, that same vision seemed so obvious. In Tokyo there are so many cats about in the streets—some undoubtedly feral, but most collared, outdoor cats—and they generally mind their own business. You might find one walking one way down a street while paying no heed to the human walking the other way. Or simply sitting on a parked motorcycle, or on a public bench. They also congregated in groups, and if you walked around a corner at night in Setagaya, it would be no unusual thing to see a group of four or five cats hanging about as though in a meeting, only to watch you suspiciously and without moving until you were out of sight.

Most of the cats seemed to keep within a fairly limited range, and through routine one could get to know them a little bit. There was the cat that would wait outside the Korean restaurant around the corner from my office, and when someone would go in or out of the restaurant, the cat would trot through the door and into the kitchen until eventually shooed out by the owner. Even when the restaurant was closed and shuttered, he would wait. Then there was the little gang that would hang out by one of the dog-leg turns in Shinsen on the way to Shimokitazawa. Mostly they minded their own business, but one night they accosted a passing lady with mews. It was strange—they paid no attention to us, and there was nothing about her that could easily explain the cats’ attraction to her. From a distance, anyhow, she did not smell strongly of fish or anything. She was as bewildered as we were.

I took my camera with me everywhere in Tokyo, and during my nine months back in San Francisco, I took it out less and less. Now, in New York, I’ve probably taken it out with me twice. I need to get back into the habit of taking my camera with me, and perhaps having an interesting theme or two will help with that. Having photographs of my time in Tokyo is really nice, and I’d like to imagine that I’ll have nice photographs of New York to look back to as well someday.

Sadly, I am now the administrator of a Flickr group for which I can no longer be a participant.

• $100 in cash,
• $200 in travelers’ checks,
• $1,000 in a checking account,
• $10,000 in a savings account,
• $5,000 in treasury bonds,
• $15,000 in stocks,
• $7,000 in credit card debt,
• a $20,000 student loan,
• and a $500,000 house, against which I have
• a $300,000 mortgage

How much money do I have?

I’m not really the donating type. I once donated $250 to my alma mater. That’s about it.

In any case, I recently decided that presidential race was getting to be much closer than I cared for, and that I could not let this moment in history go by with the wrong candidate elected. McCain scares me. Palin scares me. Palin is ambitious, fierce, and I suspect largely self-serving. McCain, I think, wants to make his place in history, and doesn’t really care much about ideological stances, e.g., on abortion or taxes or gun control, so much as he wants to restore our country’s military glory and bring us back to better, more innocent times, as if that were somehow possible.

With all this in mind, I decided I would donate to the Obama campaign. I mentioned my thoughts to my brother and he, apparently, had been thinking along very similar lines. So he threw up a page and said that he thought it would be nice to see if we could get like-minded people amongst our friends and acquaintances to contribute and help get Obama into the Oval Office, preferably in a landslide. I’m not much into pushing these things, but the page he put up was so amusing that I felt I had to share it, and so I find myself pushing it where I otherwise would not. And here it is: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/LorinAndJunDai.

There are other companies with the word criterion in the name, and in each case the implication is even more mysterious: Criterion Pictures, Criterion Catalysts and Technologies, Criterion Machine Works, Criterion Games, The Criterion Theatre, and a building near my work, Commodore Criterion.

Perhaps there is some older meaning of the word criterion that is at use here? Perhaps it’s just that the word sounds nice and gives off some implication of selectivity without actually meaning anything?

I think I’ll ask Jon Mulvaney.

Edit: “It’s on the site, stupid”. Turns out the criterion is that “each film in the collection be an exemplary film of its kind.” http://www.criterion.com/asp/faq.asp#FAQ26.

Not too sure what it means. Doesn’t seem too important. My brother threw me a dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and then we went to a few bars, and I had a wonderful time. Tonight on my actual birthday, I cooked dinner for my aunt and uncle after a lazy day that consisted mostly of playing Wii Fit, surfing the Web, and talking to people on the phone. And tomorrow night we’ll have a big steak dinner.

I guess for most people the 30s are a period of increasing stability after settling down from the 20s. My 20s were rather stable, however (almost 5 years working at a bank), and starting in March of last year have become fairly unstable in interesting and mostly appealing ways. I am happily married to Lucía, and true to our wedding vows we seem to be in the very beginning of a long process of travelling the world and growing old together.

9 months ago I owned less stuff than ever before in my adult life, except maybe the start of college (and really, was I an adult then? Am I now?). I haven’t accumulated much since then. A bed. Two nightstands. A little clothing and a few books. I’m not sure if we will continue to live light or if belongings will gather around us like flies, or like metal filings to a magnet. My cousin just told me (while wishing me a happy birthday) that our grandmother used to say that three big moves was equivalent to one big fire as far as ones belongings were concerned. Is this from experience? I know she moved a lot…

Maybe we will live in Manhattan. Maybe we will live in Flushing. Maybe we’ll find someplace else in NY that we’ll want to live in. I still aim to find a place and move into it before winter really sets in. How long will we live there? I expect to live there longer than at any other apartment we’ve lived in (that would be 751 Taraval St., where we lived from something like February 2005 to September 2006), but not much longer. Two years? Probably not more than three. After that? Who knows. Will we rent or buy? Depends on what makes sense, I guess. I hope people will visit. I miss having roommates, but I think house guests are just as good. As long as there’s someone to cook for beyond just the two of us.

It makes sense to see landmarks in the transition from decade to decade. Ten years is a long time, but not too long to group into a comprehensible stage of one’s life. That 30 is a big number in this country is a tradition that makes sense to me. Nevertheless, it is a fairly arbitrary number in the context of my life, and I’d have to say I really began this latest stage of my life around the time Lucía and I decided to get married and move to Tokyo.

I have so many ambitions and so many things I want to do, and yet I don’t want to let go of anything either. I don’t want to stop playing piano, and I’d love to pick up the cello again. I want to do more photography. I want to do things with video. I want to do things with composing. I want to continue to watch lots of films. I’ve always wanted to read more, but I never give myself the time to do it. I want to cook more. I want to travel more. I want start software companies and build projects on the side. I want to see the Met, attend the NY Film Festival, see all the museums, see some live shows, see some plays, maybe even catch the first sports game in my life, spend more time with friends, get a cat, become fluent in Japanese, learn Spanish, resuscitate and keep up German, and take a course in Indonesian. I want to learn more about history, botany, learn how to write, learn how to draw, learn how to make bonsai, and maybe even get some exercise. I’ve always wanted to spend time sailing. All these things are important to me as activities or as dreams or as how I want to see myself, and yet there simply isn’t room enough in this one little life for all of them—at least not if I’m to take them as seriously as I’d like to.

I have wonderful friends, and a loving and huge family. I’m lucky enough to know and like second cousins on both sides of my family. I’m comparatively healthy, I was raised (I think) well, and I continue to learn about all kinds of things. I was lucky enough to have a knack for something that is capable of providing me with well-paying, intellectually rewarding, and fairly easy work. There is always more I could ask from life, and I will continue to do so, but it’s important for me to realize how lucky I am.

pain is a flower
pain is flowers

blooming all the time.

[wikipedia] – [imdb] – [Sunny]

On 35mm at the Kabuki with Lucía, Ben, and Roberto on 24 June 2008 at 21:45.

Even though I haven’t seen enough of Rohmer’s films to make the assertion myself, the comparison between this and Rohmer’s works seems apt. A lot of talking, walking around, emotional manipulation, emotional transformation, and yet very little actually happens, and the entire world is pretty much left on the sidelines so we can better contemplate the relationships. I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of this sort of film, and this one seemed a bit overlong, and yet I could see myself watching this film again and even looking forward to the next Hong Sang-soo film I see. Because in its own way, the film is quite nicely done. We see nice parallels between the beginning of the film where the Director Kim puts his friend’s girl on a pedestal (one that she is quite willing to be on) and at the center of a love triangle (if the three participants in a love triangle are its corners, how can one of the participants be at its center?), and the second half of the film where Director Kim finds himself at the center of a love triangle, ultimately undone by the entangling threads of his own machinations and manipulations which are amplified by his refusal to really let anyone into his own heart or admit his own mistakes.

Interesting how Tae-woo Kim seems to be jettisoned from the film and all but forgotten by the characters once he effectively emasculates himself out of his own jealousy and spitefulness (presumably the fact that he’s trying—and failing—to cheat on his wife plays a part in this). Also interesting is Choi Sun-hee’s obsession with Mun-suk as she tries to unravel what it is about Mun-suk that fascinates Director Kim and what it is about herself that reminds Director Kim of Mun-suk.

There were some odd parts of the film—such as the abrupt appearance of the sushi waiter as the dangerous motorcyclist on the beach—that felt as though they would have been better off left on the cutting room floor.

I’m not sure that the film felt believable in any way, or that I was really able to fully enter into the characters the way I wanted to, but I certainly felt that Hong Sang-soo did a great job of exploring certain elemental characteristics of the way people interact, fool each other, and fool themselves.

Started on 15 June 2008.

It’s nice to be reading more these days.

Unfortunately Philip K. Dick’s style isn’t sitting as well with me this time as it did with Do Androids Dream…, but I’ll keep plowing through it and see if I can find myself more engaged with the novel by the time I get to page 100.