The weekend before last

CSIowa won the contest, and she wanted me to review:
The weekend before last
Xoco
Water bottles
Coraline
Last three episodes of Lost
Where the Wild Things Are

I won't be able to do them all, but I'll try to squeeze as many as I can in to a 45 minute writing session.

Considering I was in Chicago for the Shakespeare Association of America Conference, reviewing the weekend before last doesn't seem fair. There are five conditions on which I gauge enjoyment, and three of those were met during my trip to Chicago: 1) I was among friends, both childhood friends--the best kind--and new friends--the kind you meet at a Shakespeare Association; 2) I was in a place that allowed me to wander--as much as I try to avoid being a dandy or a flaneur, I can't help it. When I was a preteen, I told my mom that I wanted to spend my days at the Jack in the Box on Shea just off Scottsdale Rd watching people and occasionally having conversations with them. Being from an ill-defined suburbia on the corner of Scottsdale, that Jack in the Box was as close as I was going to get to a kind of city life that I had imagined while reading Catcher in the Rye. Don't make fun of me--I look back on that preteen with an amused fondness. At any rate, I have tried to resist the flaneur impulse ever since, but somewhere like Chicago just brings it out in me with an unreckoned force. 3) I was among really good food (more on that later).

The conference was great, as the Shakespeare Association Conference always is, but the location, right on the Chicago River at the Hyatt Regency on Wacker, was even better, so I didn't spend as much time at the actual conference than I probably should have. Don't get me wrong--I went to almost every major event, my own seminar, and even went to occasional optional sessions, where I learned that not only is everyone reading The Winter's Tale right now but also that my own reading of the play is the most convincing still, which was met with a fancy relief. The one moment of the conference that I could have done without was the graduate student breakfast. First of all, it is not really a breakfast, and I am not a muffin guy when it comes to breakfasts. I don't like my breakfasts on the continent. Give me an egg and a tortilla or don't give me anything. Second of all, graduate students take themselves too seriously sometimes, and the students at the table I happened to be sitting with wanted nothing to do with nonsense. Third of all, the "big name" that came to our table to grace us with her presence acted like a big name, which is to say she wasn't the least bit interested in any of us; instead, she was interested in how successful the graduate breakfast was turning out to be. The more she thought about how successful it was, the less successful it actually became. By the time she started talking to me about my "interests," I had formulated a response that would sound something like, "Well, I was going to do Theatrical Affect, but now that I have been to this really successful graduate breakfast, I have totally changed my project to something more feasible! Thanks so much for organizing this graduate breakfast--It has changed my academic life!" I lacked the huevos to pull that off, and I lacked the huevos to get up and leave, and I also lacked the huevos on my plate that should come in any breakfast instead of muffins and tasteless cantaloupe.

Speaking of taste and tastability, one of the restaurants I went to in Chicago was Xoco, pronounced Zoko, I think. This is Rick Bayless's new fast restaurant. Bayless is a pretty well-known chef who, in the course of getting a PhD at Michigan in anthropology, realized he not only wanted to study the food of Mexico, he wanted to make it. So he did. And now he is on tv sometimes, recently won Top Chef Master, created the Frontera Grill, Barak Obama's favorite Chicago restaurant, and is brother to Skip Bayless, the mad guy on ESPN. Xoco is his take on Mexican street food, which doesn't need a take because Mexican street food is the best food in the world by a wide margin. The menu consists of a bunch of tortas, the Mexican hot sandwich, some soups, some hot chocolates, some aguas, and churros. The restaurant is tiny, and the lines are famously long (even though it only opened last August), so I got there early, and there was no line. Except that I was supposed to meet Darren there, and Darren couldn't make it until 12:30. So I ended up doing tasters until then. Let me add that when I was in Mexico, and I was constantly being bombarded by cultural awesomeness, nothing quite thrilled me like a good torta. Not the helotes, not the tacos, not the chipotle, not the pan dulce, not chicharrones, but tortas. When I told my mission president that my favorite food was tortas, he gently remarked that my love for tortas was a sign of youth and immaturity. I liked that one. No Mexican restaurant in the states, even in Tucson, has gotten the torta right. Xoco gets it right, even if it is slightly more gourmet than my street tortas. The one I got was a pork carnitas torta with habanero sauce, pickled onions, and something else. I also got agua de jamaica and some churros. Darren said it was the best lunch meal he'd had in a year, and he's lived in Chicago for seven or eight. I say it was the closest I have ever gotten to my favorite Mexican meal, the street torta and an agua de jamaica, only it was a little more refined. The food was inexpensive and the atmosphere was, well, crowded. Since I am not trained in restaurant reviews, and I have no language for foodie details, let me just grade it by using a test Kathryn concocted. If my brother Mark says that "this is the best ______ I've ever eaten" in his sincere voice that is always on the brink of sarcasm, that means it was a good meal. Mark would have said it four or five times for Xoco.

I've only reviewed two things and I am already approaching my self-imposed 45 minute rule, so let me run through one more as quick as I can.

I couldn't figure out a good Christmas present for Kathryn last year, so I went to a sporting goods store in California and browsed, finally walking away with a blue Nalgene water bottle with a pop-up top. I think I liked it more than she did, so a month later I bought myself a yellow one. Then we decided the kids needed water bottles instead of using a new cup everytime they need a drink, so I took them to the store to go through the same process. Here is what I found:

Metal bottles, or, excuse me, stainless steel bottles, are severely overrated. They are hipper than skinny ties right now, but they are hard to clean and you can't see the doodads that come from backwash in them. They are also hipper than boyfriend jeans right now, and they are hipper than big sunglasses and pink polos and winter tights and clean-shaven faces and belt buckles and trim suit coats. So ignore them.

Nalgene bottles are great, but only if they have a wide opening so you can put ice in if you need to. Smaller openings, contrary to erroneous opinion, are also harder to drink from. But Nalgene bottles also have that annoying plastic connector to the lid that makes dishwasher use difficult and that makes the bottle hard to store well. Therefore, I bought us Nalgenes without that thing and with a circle opening for carrying convenience.

The last thing I'll say about water bottles is that they are essential, but only if they are not disposable. Disposable water bottles, or bottled water, as has been well documented, are a sign of the Apocalypse. Kathryn has stopped buying cases of bottled water, which has made our lives much more pleasant, and we feel like we are doing something for our children and our children's children and the seagulls that get their heads stuck in water bottles and oil spills. I'll add pictures when I have another 45 minutes some other time.