Flavor is the third in Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty series, the first volume of which kept me very well fed in the first half of 2018 and has remained a steady contributor to my cooking rotation ever since.  Plenty More was a bit of a step down.  I’m afraid that Flavor is a further step down from Plenty More.  According to my notes, over the course of the past five months I have made 27 recipes from Flavor, and only a couple of them have been definite make-agains: one for a charred green bean dish and one for asparagus pancakes using Korean gochujang chili paste.  The press kit describes these recipes as “low-effort, high-impact”, which is true of Plenty, but time after time I found myself making recipes out of Flavor and thinking, hmm, I suppose this is pretty tasty, but not nearly tasty enough to justify all that work.  Sometimes the recipes didn’t even reach that bar.  For instance, there’s a white bean mash recipe that involves making a complicated herb oil and an aioli along with the beans, and the end result was actually not as good as what I get by taking a couple of minutes to mash up the beans in a oiled skillet with a pinch of whatever flavor boosters I happen to have at hand.  Similarly, there’s a tagliatelle recipe which, even if you don’t make your own pasta by hand, still has you making a bunch of separate elements⁠—a mini-recipe for crispy chipotle shallots, another mini-recipe for pickled green chiles, and then there’s the actual pasta sauce⁠—and after all that, the net effect of the dish is, essentially, “ouch”.  (Tip: reduce those pickled chiles by about 75%.)  So all in all, I wish I could have checked this out from the library instead of buying it unsampled… but then again, there are about 2.8 million more important reasons that I wish the libraries could have been open for the past 55 weeks or so.

9 to 5
Patricia Resnick and Colin Higgins, 1980

This is not part of the 20th-century series; as the sparse activity on this site in 2021 will attest, I have been buried in work this entire year and haven’t really had an opportunity to make much headway on any of my viewing lists (or my reading list, or my presidents series, or my podcasts, or…)  The only break I ever have from the grind comes each weekend when I head over the bridge to visit Ellie for a few hours.  These are supposed to be social occasions, so intently studying the cinéastes’ newest favorite is not on the agenda.  Lightweight ’80s movies are a better match for the moment.  This one I knew only from the HBO guide that arrived at my house when I was in fourth grade.  It turned out that Ellie and I had the same misconception about it, viz., that it was about female office workers banding together to fight for better working conditions.  As it turns out, this fight takes the form of a wacky kidnapping plot, so it’s less John Sayles and more Soupy Sales.  The main thing that struck me about the film was that the office tower used for its establishing shots (800 W. 6th Street in Los Angeles) is gorgeous.  Initially I was going to be defensive about this (“Hey, I was born in the ’70s! I imprinted on beige concrete and unbroken lines of dark brown smoked glass!”), but I did some poking around and discovered that the architect was William Pereira (no relation to Moriah Pereira, so far as I’m aware), known for everything from the LAX Theme Building to the Transamerica Pyramid to the UCSD library.  So with that kind of pedigree I think maybe I’m in the clear?

Starman
Bruce Evans, Raynold Gideon, and John Carpenter, 1984

We also watched this one, about an alien on a reconnaissance mission who gets shot down over Wisconsin and crashes near the home of a young widow.  Taking on the form of her late husband, the alien forces her to take him to Arizona for his scheduled pickup; though initially a hostage, she ends up staying with him voluntarily after getting to know him a bit, first disarmed by his naivete and then moved by his miraculous feats.  Considering that all he ends up seeing of the world is a few gas stations and a couple of diners, it seems perhaps unearned when the alien makes a concluding pronouncement about the human race: “You are a strange species, not like any other, and you would be surprised how many there are. Intelligent, but savage. Shall I tell you what I find beautiful about you? You are at your very best when things are worst.”  I guess it is a commonplace in sci-fi for characters (or narrators) to weigh in on how humans compare to beings from other planets, despite the fact that we’ve never encountered any; as here, the comparison may be tempered with caution but is generally flattering.  We have so much potential and all that.  I guess that in the parlance of a Youtube comment section it boils down to this:

Nobody:

Writers:  The mediocrity principle bums me out, man!

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