Favorite Restaurants

This post maybe limited usefulness, but I thought people visit New York all the time and often want restaurant recommendations from people who live here; also when people ask me to recommend restaurants I can never remember until after they leave, so I thought it might be good to keep it in one public place.

My food tastes tend to run on the cheap side. A good example of this is Dim Sum Go Go vs Momofuku. Momofuku has stunningly good steamed pork buns, but they cost 9 bucks a pair; Dim Sum Go Go has excellent steamed pork buns for like a dollar each. But I also understand that some times you want to spend a lot of money on kick-ass food. I also have a bad habit of giving restaurants too many points for being easy to get to from my house without being aware of it: I feel like Michael Angelos is one of my favorite places to get pizza, but I am not sure how much of that is that they are in delivery range. [EDIT -- Ba is right, and Momofuku and Dim Sum Go Go do not have enough in common to justify a comparison: both are excellent in their own way.]

Fette Sau (BBQ, Williamsburg Brooklyn) -- it is possible I have been out of Texas too long to remember if this is as good as Texas BBQ, but as far as I can discern, it is. Also -- hipsters in their natural environment. (Thank you Sara.)

Sripraphi (Thai, Woodside NY) -- I do not understand why the best Thai food I have ever had -- and not expensive at all -- is off the 7 train in Queens and not in Manhattan, but it is. As soon as you walk in you know this is another level of Thai food -- for starters the place is abnormally big inside considering its location. It looks to me like it was so good they expanded into the restaurant next door. They also have a nice backyard area. (Thank you Jason and Ximena and Alex)

Natural Tofu Resturant (Korean, Sunnyside Queens) -- similarly, my favorite Korean food is also in Queens, lava hot bowls of bibimbab. Don't let the name fool you -- they are not vegetarian, though they do make great tofu if you are into that kind of thing. (Thanks Nathaniel)

Zen Palate (Asian Vegetarian, 9th ave a 46th) -- this is a vegetarian resturant recommended by a meat-eater from Texas so you can trust me -- it is not at all like other vegetarian places that serve you piles of colored much like in Brazil (the movie). Sara and I lived at this place in college.

Dim Sum Go Go (Chinese, Chinatown) -- Steamed pork buns are one of my favorite things, and I can eat them like White Castle sliders at Dim Sum Go Go you can afford to eat them like that as they cost about the same. (Thanks Jason and Ximena)

Momofuku (Pork, Village) -- BBQ pork sandwich and pork buns are awesome, and if you do it at lunch with a glass of water it will only be 22 bucks, which is a good price for that kind of quality. (Thanks Brady)

Fatty Crab -- everything is VERY spicy and everything is delicious, even generic looking Chinese soup with noodles, and unripe mango to be dipped in a salt-sugar-chili powder.

Katz's Deli (Deli, east Houston) -- It was in the famous orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally, but the tourists have not ruined this place (except for creating crowds). Egg Cream and Pastrami is my favorite. The "Buy a Salami for Your Boy in the Army" sign is also one of my favorite rhymes.

Michael Angelo's (Pizza, Long Island City) -- the Special Pie is a regular at my house. (Thanks Sara)

Patsy Grimaldi's (Pizza, Brooklyn) -- this is were I land on the great New York pizza debate. Also quite famous and tourist-y, but still excellent.

Vatan (Indian, 3rd Ave and 28th street) -- vegetarian, price fixe, all you can eat, but classy. The system they have of just bringing you lots of little things is awesome, plus you do not have to make any decisions except Mild, Medium of Hot. (Thanks Sara)

Baoguette (Midtown) -- Vietnamese sandwiches, 5 bucks, which is only 5 bucks more than free.

The Sparrow (Astoria, Brunch) -- my local. The brunch burger is one of the Sparrow's already excellent burgers served between english muffin halfs and toped with a fried egg, which makes just about anything better (See also Bibimbop)

Perry Street (Perry Street and the West Side Highway) -- The burger and the fried chicken are excellent, and they have a cocktail with chili in it that I cannot remember the name of right now but it is awesome.

The Redhead (East Village) -- this is the best fried chicken I have had and they also have an excellent cocktails menu.

Black Hound (cakes) -- this bakery makes the most amazing little cakes that only cost a buck more than a pint of ice cream and are way more awesome. I recommend Bee Cake especially, and the tarts and the one that looks like a coffee cup.

Special Note (outside of New York City)

Austin, TX: Freebirds -- When Sara and I went back to Austin for three days we ate here every day. Nuff Said.

Favorite Stand Up Comics

Thinking about stand up comics this week, and I decided to make it into a separate category. I really admire stand up comics -- it seems like a really hard job, but I really admire how amazingly low tech it is. Just storytelling, basically.

Eddie Izzard

Dylan Moran

Bill Bailey

Ron White

Mike Birbiglia

Patton Oswalt

Kevin James (no. really. King of Queens is terrible, but he is really good).

Jim Gaffigan

Daniel Tosh

Jim David

Stephen Wright

Mitch Hedberg

Maria Bamford -- check out The Maria Bamford show on YouTube.

Favorites List: Criteria

One of the good things about making the favorites list is that it has thrown me back on my criteria.

Why is it that I loved Popbot but hated Hellboy 2? My complaint about Hellboy 2 was that, while the monsters were pretty, a movie should primarily be a story and the story failed on so many levels. But Popbot was all gorgeous art loosely strung together with a bad narrative.

One of the tenants of criticism is that a work teaches you how to judge it, suggests its own criteria: Hellboy is a summer blockbuster that placed a lot of emphasis on the story (Hellboy has a character arc, for example, whereas the characters in Popbot do not); Popbot is designed to highlight the art above all things (being mostly composed of splash-page paintings individually signed, for example).

There is an element of the irrational and contingent in these judgements. Maybe my mood effected my judgement - though I look to the work to guide my mood as much as possible.

And of course as I learned from Stanley Fish, only philosophers need to insist on some kind of rigid logical consistency. We can, and really should, live without feeling the need to make sure everything lines up just so.

Still, I cannot help wondering why I go to the trouble of separating out the New X-Men and JLA stories by Morrison that are my favorites while basically just saying that Buffy is one of my favorite shows, without getting more specific. Certainly part of it is that with comics it is very easy to see at a glance when Morrison is being assisted by my favorite artist, whereas with Whedon it would take some time to look more carefully through the credits -- and even so the collaborations are more fluid and less on the surface.

I can think of movies that I thought were perfect until the third act: Shaun of the Dead for example (which became by the numbers), and maybe Dark Knight (which had too many balls in the air). For those reasons I kept those films off of my favorites list. But I grabbed the first fourteen issues of Planetary, basically cutting the end off of that story all together. It feels less arbitrary to stop at an issue of a comic than at an act of a movie, but still.

I also tried to represent certain creators I really like, even though what I like about them is diffused across several works none of which I would necessarily call a favorite. For example: Zombies vs Robots vs Amazons for example, is there partly because Wood is one of my favorite artists, but he has never been put together with a really top notch story like WE3. (I am looking at you, Matt Fraction).

This is quite rambling I know. The point of it is this: I would like to continue to think about this, and I would like to hear from you about your own criteria and how it effects your calls on movies and the like.

On a larger scale I have two ideas for continuing the Favorites series, which I quite like. One is to begin to go through the lists picking items and writing short reviews based off of recent viewings. The other is to create a "least favorites" list, as I think that will help me to continue to think about what I value in the things I love.

Favorite Art

In spite of the fact that I am engaged to a painter, and live in New York City, there are very few museum shows that have really blown me away, and very few major painters or sculptors that I find myself thinking about in my free time. So this is going to be a VERY short list, at least for now.

Da Vinci

Turner

Klimt

Rothko

Vija Celmins

Murakami

Robert Longo (The director of the terrible Johnny Mnemonic believe it or not; I have no idea how he landed that one random pop culture gig. Longo cannot be appreciated except in person: he does large scale charcoal drawings that are so fine they look like photographs unless you are two inches away from them).

Duane Hanson

Chris Ofili

John Currin

Jeff Koons

Antonio Gaudi

and my friend Jennifer Tomaiolo

and Sara Reiss, my fiancee (who will have a new website up shortly with lots of her work)

Favorite Books

This is the quintessential desert island question, and I think I have this one down pat.

Poetry (the old stuff)

Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language is my favorite anthology;

As for my very favorites canonical poets and poems I will rush by them as most are not very telling: Chaucer (Pardoner's Tale and Wife of Bath's Tale), Dante (The Comedy), Spenser (Faerie Queen), Donne (Holy Sonnet 10 and 14), Marvell (Coy Mistress, The Garden), Milton (Paradise Lost, Lycidas, and Samson Agonistes), Pope (Rape of the Lock, the end of the Dunciad), Blake (The Mental Traveller, Milton, The Crystal Cabinet), Coleridge (Rime, Khan, Christabel), Shelley (Bloom's selections from Epipsychidion, The Triumph of Life, the end of Adonais), Keats (La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Odes, Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion), Clare (I Am, A Vision), Beddoes (Dream Pedlary), Whitman (Song, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, When Lilacs Last), Melville (Fragments), Dickinson, Tennyson (Ulysses, In Memoriam), Browning (Last Duchess, Childe Roland), Arnold (Dover Beach), Hopkins (Spring and Fall, I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark), Dante Rossetti (Orchard Pit), Swinburne (Anactoria, August, At Month's End), Bronte (Last Lines), Yeats (Adams Curse), Hardy (Darkling Thrush), Frost (Directive, the Wood Pile, The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Most of It, For Once Then Something), Stevens (Sunday Morning, Domination of Black, Snow Man, Idea of Order, Poems of Our Climate, Auroras of Autumn, Of Mere Being, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction), Eliot (Preludes, Prufrock and Sweeny Among the Nightingales, but NOT the Wasteland, and probably not anything else), John Wheelwright (Any Friend to Any Friend) and Hart Crane (At Melville 's Tomb, Voyages, Brooklyn Bridge, Voyages, Repose of Rivers, The Broken Tower).

Poetry (contemporary)

Heaney's Beowulf

John Ashbery -- basically all of it, but especially the more recent stuff including Can You Hear Bird, Girls on the Run, and Your Name Here

Paul Muldoon's Madoc: A Mystery

James Merrill's The Book of Ephriam (the first book of the Changing Light at Sandover)

Mark Strand's The Continuous Life and Eating Poetry (from Reasons for Moving)

Ron Padgett's How to Be Perfect, You Never Know, and Tulsa Kid

James Tate's Selected Poetry, especially List of Famous Hats and Goodtime Jesus

Charles Wright -- all of it.

Criticism and Theory

Bloom's Anxiety of Influence, Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Poetry and Repression, and Ruin the Sacred Truths, Figures of Capable Imagination, The Breaking of the Vessels, Agon, and Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climates.

Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, Solidarity

Freud -- basically all of it but especially Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism; also the Major Case Studies

Emerson's Major Essays, especially Fate, Self-Reliance, History, The Poet, Experience, The Divinity School Address, Representative Men

Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist and the Decay of Lying; also, of course, The Importance of Being Ernest

Walter Pater -- The Renaissance, Appreciations. Really all of it.

Valery's Dance and the Soul

Zizek's Fragile Absolute, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, Looking Awry: Zizek is good but repetitive, so his first books may be your favorites.

Ashbery's Other Traditions

McKee's Story

Paglia's Sexual Personae

Perry Meisel's The Cowboy and the Dandy

Booth's Precious Nonsense

Christopher Ricks' Reviewery

Novels and Short Stories

Pynchon's Mason and Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow

Moby Dick

Cormac McCarthy' Blood Meridian

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca -- NO KIDDING. I LITERALLY could not put this book down. Pulpy and Mesmerizing.

Kafka, especially The Knock at the Manor Gate, The Imperial Message, The Doorkeeper, The Problem of Our Laws, A Parable, and The Cares of a Family Man

Donald Barthelme, especially Snow White, 40 Stories and his non-Fiction

Borges, especially Pierre Menard Author of Don Quixote, the Garden of Forking Paths and my all time favorite The Three Versions of Judas

David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, and the Christmas stories (including the newer one about the Dutch Christmas)

Favorite Shakespeare Play

MacBeth (and Hamlet)

Kids Books

Harold and the Purple Crayon

Favorite Movies

I find this list quite hard to write. TV and comics are manageable because there are a limited number of great creators who do long runs on single titles; books I have kept track of over the years quite well; music for me is a newer interest and thus quite small. But I do not know how to make a list of favorite movies without leaving off huge chunks of things, because there just seem to be so many. This list will need the most help from you to remind me of what I have forgotten.

Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds

Oceans Eleven and Twelve

David Mamet's Spartan, The Edge, the Spanish Prisoner, and State and Main, Redbelt

The Bourne Movies

Grosse Pointe Blank

Dark City

A Few Good Men and the American President

Mystery Science Theatre 3000

Solaris

Royal Tennenbaums

Groundhog Day

From Dusk Till Dawn

Eyes Wide Shut and 2001

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Blue Velvet

Romeo and Juliet

A History of Violence

Brick

Mission Impossible 3

Scott Pilgrim vs the World

The Prestige

Big Lebowski, Barton Fink, No Country for Old Men

Brain Candy

Galaxy Quest

Dead Man

Alien: Resurrection and City of Lost Children

The Double Life of Veronique

Memento

Punch Drunk Love

Synechdoche, NY

Bringing up Baby

The Third Man

The Birds, Vertigo, and North by Northwest

Don't Look Now

Chinatown

Back to the Future

ET

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Once Upon A Time in the West

Chicken Run

Emperor's New Groove

Triplets of Belleville

Toy Story, Bug's Life, Wall-E

The Iron Giant

Unfaithful

Center Stage

My favorite Superhero movies (not to be confused with my favorite movies of all time; I add this one only because I get asked about it all the time):

X2

Hulk

Spiderman 2

Iron Man

Favorite Music

I used to have swathes of free time to read, and watch movies and television. For years a listened to music rarely, and stuck to what my roommates liked. Believe it or not , for 2 years in Oxford I did not even own a stereo, and I still have to admit to preferring recorded music to live music. My need for music developed late, in conjunction with the invention of the iPod and my need to run, run errands, and commute. As a result my list of favorite music is a bit limited, uncooked, and lacks historical perspective. Nevertheless, here it is. My tastes tend to run toward indie, rap and country -- the genres that in my opinion have the best lyrics, and dance, which is good to run to. Classification of music by genre is very confusing: let me know if something on this list should be somewhere else or called something else.

Indie

The Mountain Goats -- basically all of it, but especially Tallahassee, All Hail West Texas

Neutral Milk Hotel

Olivia Tremor Control

Magnetic Fields

Belle and Sebastian

Beulah

The Polyphonic Spree

The Arcade Fire

Super Fuzzy Animals

Tegan and Sara

Apples in Stereo

The Weakerthans

The Dirty Three --

Palace / Bonnie Prince Billie

Dance

Anamanaguchi

Mika

Daft Punk

Rap/Hip-Hop

Kanye West

K-OS

MIA

The RZA and the Wu Tang Clan

Bone Thugs n' Harmony

Slaughterhouse

Mos Def and Talib Kweli

Girl Talk's Feed the Animals and Night Ripper and All Day.

MC Chris is Dead

And though I hate the album, Gheto Boys' "Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta" is one of my favorite songs of all time.

Classics

The Beatles -- just about all of it

ABBA

Guided by Voices

Bob Dylan

Leonard Cohen

Johnny Cash

Other Stuff

My Bloody Valentine

New Pornographers

David Holmes

Man or Astroman

LCD Soundsystem

Hot Chip

Unkle

Gillian Welch -- Revival, Time (The Revelator), Soul Journey

I like REM fine, but I would have to say that "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I feel fine)" has special significance for me.

Tom Waits

Sun Volt

And I have to grab my favorite running album of all time, Running Cadences of the US Armed Forces.

Favorite Television Shows

Television, more than any other medium, has become my go to thing for the last few years. I much prefer short form serial storytelling like comics and television to long-form stuff like novels, especially since working, and working out. Television also feels more social: Sara and I CAN read a comic book together, but watching TV together is much easier. I used to have hours to read alone -- now I prefer having something 40 minutes long lined up to coincide with blocks of time as they appear. And like comics, once you find something you like, you are set for a while -- seven seasons of Buffy and five of Angel is a lot of television. Television, more than movies, is a writer's medium, which I think makes for more consistent quality and the idea of a show-runner means I get quite a bit more of Whedon than say, Soderbergh.

On of my criteria of television is the ability to watch it over and over and not get bored. But part of this is that certain television shows have become comfort programming (when I am working or getting ready for bed), at least one guilty pleasures that I would not necessarily recommend to others, but that I have to admit I love.

As always, the list is personal, and subject to revision (help me remember anything I have forgotten). And as always, your own lists in the comments will be appreciated.


The Cartoons

Golden Age Looney Tunes, especially Duck Amuck and Duck Season/Rabbit Season

Samurai Jack

Avatar

Batman: The Animated Series

Invader Zim

Venture Bros.

Frisky Dingo

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Home Movies

The Simpsons (Seasons 3-8)

Fantasy-Sci-Fi

Lost and Battlestar Galactica: I have very mixed feelings about these two. I loved them as they went by, but the endings were very bad, and unlike, say, Buffy, a lot hung on how the shows wrapped up, because so much of the interest in the show was -- how will all this be pulled together in the end? Basically it is very weird to feel like a show should be on my favorites list, while also leaving me with the feeling that I never want to see an episode of wither again, and I would not recommend either to others.

Buffy (admitting the weakness of season 1, 7, and the end of 6), Angel (heretically, I prefer Angel to Buffy overall), and Firefly. And Dollhouse: the end turned me around.

Quantum Leap

Twin Peaks

The Sitcoms

Seinfeld

Arrested Development

30 Rock (Season One)

Sports Night

NewsRadio

MASH

Dr Katz

Frasier

Third Rock from The Sun

Andy Richter Controls the Universe

Drama

The Shield

Justified

Deadwood

The Wire

West Wing (The Sorkin Years)

Damages

Breaking Bad

Pushing Daises and Wonderfalls

Kings

K-Street

Columbo

Murder One (based on a distant memory)

The British Stuff

Quite Interesting

Green Wing

The Mighty Boosh

Spaced

The IT Crowd

No Angels

Pocoyo

The Guilty Pleasure

24: Season 5 -- every season of 24 just repeats. Season 5 was the one where it worked the best.

Jericho

The Unit

Favorite Comics

Myspace, Facebook, and Hulu, among others, are always asking for lists of your favorite books, tv shows, music and so on. I actually really like being defined by my taste in those things, but I always blank out a bit every time I fill one out, like when you go to blockbuster and then, as soon as you get there, you cannot remember a single movie you wanted to see, even though you know there are many. Also, my students are always asking for recommendations of things to see and read. Every term at least one student comes and asks if I could hand them a list -- right on the spot -- of the most important works of world literature across all time. I was asked this today. Usually I just cop out a bit and tell them to read a Bloom edited poetry anthology and the works of Shakespeare.

So. I have decided to do a series of posts on my favorite stuff. This will maybe not be so interesting for regular readers -- because nothing I say is likely to surprise anyone -- but I think it will be a good thing to have on the toolbar, and I can update it, and link to it, whenever I want. You could take this time to do the same -- you can make your lists in the comments if you like, just to have them, and then you will remember where they are. Lists are always fun. I expect to forget a few things. Remind me.

This is, as Borges says, a personal cannon (I have to find that essay again, but I don't have it near me now). It is not a "Best of" list. This is my desert island list.

Favorite Comics

A big part of my criteria here is Comics I Never Have to Apologize For.

Casanova (Fraction, Ba, Moon)
Steampunk (Bachalo)
Hellboy (Mignola)
Morrison's New X-Men: E for Extinction, Assault on Weapon Plus, Here Comes Tomorrow (Morrison, Quitely, Bachalo, Silvestri)
Frank Miller's Batman (ALL OF IT)
Sin City: The Big Fat Kill, The Hard Goodbye, A Dame to Kill For (Frank Miller)

We3 (Morrison, Quitely, Grant)

Ultimates 1 (Millar, Hitch)
Morrison's JLA: JLA: Earth 2 (Quitely), Rock of Ages, Prometheus, Crisis Times Five (Porter and Dell), One Million (Semeiks), Classified (McGuiness)
The Maxx (Kieth)
Toy Story (the Morrison and Quitely Story in War Stories)
Flex Mentallo (Morrison, Quitely)
Fantastic Four: 1234 (Morrison, Jae Lee)(I have to re-read this to be sure)

Iron Fist: The Last Iron Fist (Fraction, Brubaker, Aja)
All Star Superman (Morrison, Quitely, Grant)
The Authority: The Nativity (Millar Quitely)
Sugar Rush (Joss Whedon, Fabio Moon

Zombies vs Robots vs Amazons (Ashley Wood)
Punisher: The End

Planetary 1-14 (Ellis, Cassaday)
Jack Kirby's New Gods

Spiderman Loves Mary Jane (McKeever, Miyazawa)

Scott Pilgrim

I do not know if these count as comics, but:

Edward Gorey's The Pornographic Sofa, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, and The Doubtful Guest