PicoBlog

Hi! I’m so excited about this feature and our very first interview! I say my “Health Era” but I’ve kinda always been healthy and aware of what’s good for my body and what’s not. I don’t always listen to that voice, but I definitely try and always have. I would say I have good healthy instincts. I grew up with a mother who is and always was very active a…

Lawmakers and Gov. Katie Hobbs hammered through the stalemate of bipartisan budget negotiations by handing a pot of cash to every lawmaker who agreed to vote for it.  And the resulting cascade of one-time money is helping to patch up some long-ignored needs in rural Arizona.  We’re often quick to label lawmakers’ priorities “pet projects” and their spending allotments “slush funds,” but a string of stories in local papers shows how critical and long-overdue many of these “pet projects” are to the local communities lawmakers are elected to represent.

Currently sitting in my local hipster coffee shop doing local hipster things like writing on my Substack and praising antifa. Considering how much time I spend in places like this now, it’s hard to believe that American coffee shop culture is a pretty recent development. Back when I attended NYU towards the end of the previous century, coffee shops weren’t even a thing. Greenwich Village had a quartet of them on a single corner, but they had a faded bohemian vibe, relics of the dying 60’s counterculture, sort of like what Hard Rock Cafés are to the 80’s today.

A Quiet Place: Day One Dir. Michael Sarnoski 99 min. It was a familiar sort of deflating news to hear that writer-director Michael Sarnoski would follow up Pig, his eccentric and beautiful debut feature (and one of the best films of 2021), with the second sequel to a horror franchise that had already run out of steam. We usually have to squint hard to find, say, the naturalism Chloe Zhao carried over from Nomadland to Eternals or the migrant allegory Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck brought to Captain Marvel after a string of socially conscious dramas like Half Nelson and Sugar.

The Killer Dir. David Fincher 118 min. One of the incidental details of David Fincher’s The Killer—and this film is nothing if not packed with incidental detail—is that the unnamed assassin of the title, played by Michael Fassbender, spends the first part of the film in an emptied-out top-floor WeWork office in Paris. It’s here that he waits (and waits and waits) for the right opportunity to hit a target in a hotel penthouse across the way.

Thor: Love and Thunder Dir. Taika Waititi 119 min. There don’t need to be four movies about Thor. We have learned all that we can learn about the God of Thunder a.k.a. Point Break a.k.a. One Divine Hammer (okay, that last one is mine), and the series has experienced a full evolution from the Shakespearean intrigue of the first Thor, which Kenneth Branagh occasionally treated like King Lear, to the goofy irreverence of Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok, which seized on Chris Hemsworth’s talent for mild self-deprecation.

Vengeance Dir. B.J. Novak 107 min. B.J. Novak clearly wanted to say something important with Vengeance, his feature debut as a writer-director, and that’s the film’s biggest problem. It’s not the wanting to say something, of course, but the straining for importance and the nakedness of the intent. Novak also stars as Ben Manalowitz, a writer for New York magazine with an itch to branch out into podcasting in order to make a grand statement about the state of America today.

Before we get down to the business of today’s post, a few words about the upcoming second anniversary of The Mix on Friday, Jan. 19. (These are actually the same words I posted last week, but I am reposting them here in case any of you missed them. If you didn't miss them, feel free to scroll down to the Crab Louie section.) Many of you reading this generously signed up for annual subscriptions and as Bar Regulars to The Mix on that day back in January of 2022.

…a periodic feature on The Mix in which we go in search of the origins of certain regional foods, sampling several examples of such—and traveling hundreds of miles—along the way. Previously, we have gone in search of Hot Pie, City Chicken and Tavern-Style Pizza. This time, we headed north to Boston. As a rule, regional food preferences have old roots. If there’s a particular dish that is eaten in a certain part of the country, chances are locals have been eating that dish for decades if not centuries.