December 26, 2007
Two Movies with Nothing to Do with Each Other, #8.
Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf (2007) and Kenny Ortega's High School Musical (2006).
Eloise: I never thought I'd have Angelina Jolie's butt that close to my face.
Me: I never thought I'd have Anthony Hopkins' butt that close to my face.
Which just about sums up Beowulf, really: a relentlessly puerile cartoon aimed directly at 12-year old boys and savvily hitting the ceiling of a PG-13. (I can't believe Neil Gaiman (and Roger Avary) were partly responsible for this crud, which, acting- and writing-wise, is only a few degrees removed from a videogame's cutscene. Actually, that's what it is: a videogame on the big screen, complete with different quests and big bosses at the end of every level.)
Still, it's worth seeing the film on the big screen for one reason alone. My friend Eloise and I saw it in 3-D and on an Imax screen, and ten minutes into the film -- and that includes the Paramount logo -- my 12-year old mind was screaming HOLY BEJEEZUS EVERY MOVIE EVER MADE FROM NOW ON HAS TO BE IN 3-D!!! To have spears, bodies, rocks, arrows, and boobs all flying at you within inches of your face is absolutely thrilling, and there aren't very many real-life situations that would let you have that experience. (I mean all at the same time.)
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Don't knock it till you've actually seen it, they said. It's really not that bad. Well, I've finally gone and seen High School Musical, and they're right: it's really not that bad, but that's saying very little. The melodies are fairly catchy, but the lyrics are irredeemably awful, as if the writers put words like "free", "brave", "believe", "fly", "you", "me", and "together" into a blender and figured out how many variations they could come up with. Despite its "Up with People" blandness and plot schematics right out of "Clifford the Big Red Dog", High School Musical is charming, and there's something to be said about young people who can act, dance, and sing. And there's a sweet chemistry here, particularly in the first scene when the two young leads tentatively discover themselves (and each other) during an impromptu karaoke session.
Every decade needs its Grease or Dirty Dancing, and this is the 2K version. (I must confess a general dislike for musicals, and the fact that I'm not the target audience for HSM probably renders my complaints pointless. But Richard Wong's Colma: The Musical was one of my favorite films this year, and Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is probably in my top 50 of all time. So there.)
Interestingly, there's a way for the movie to be read as a Coming Out narrative, but I won't bother. I guess it's also pointless for me to say that it's a happily sanitized vision of high school, with no drugs or concealed weapons or teenage pregnancies or No Child Left Behind to menace the students. It's perfectly harmless and inoffensive, which, I suppose, is better than a lot of girl-oriented merch (the impossibly thin Barbie, the slutty liplinered Bratz, the disempowered Disney Princesses). If anything, what's most disturbing is Disney's aggressive marketing to pre-tweeners. If there's any real upside here, it has to do with introducing different standards of beauty for little kids out there, especially for my Chinese Pinay daughter: perhaps my favorite part of the movie was Vanessa Anne Hudgens' beautiful, beautiful, Chinese Pinay nose.
December 13, 2007
Best Concert Year Ever.
34. Shonen Knife, Slim's, SF, 12/11/07.
(Snagged by Laurel, since we were standing in front of the monitors.)
There used to be a time, back in those days when Kurt Cobain was still alive and saying things like "When I finally got to see them live, I was transformed into a hysterical nine-year-old girl at a Beatles concert," Shonen Knife was being derided as part of some Hello Kitty Orientalist Conspiracy, only valued for being petite and cute and not having real musical chops and playing sub-Ramones songs. Well. That's clearly because they've never seen Shonen Knife live.
Funny, too: I was properly introduced to Laurel about three years ago at a Shonen Knife concert, also at Slim's, and we've been carrying halves of a BFF medallion ever since, ha ha. (Just be gentle when you pull out the feeding tube.)
And with that, my concert year comes to an end -- 34 shows!!! -- with some of the most memorable concerts I've ever been to, period. (And since this is an end-of-the-year thing, I'd like to say "thanks" to my 2007 concert buddies too: Laurel, Rinna, Eloise & Son & Weiss, Lan & Juan, Jens, Randall, Karen & Craig, Romeo, Roy, Talaya & Ben, Jeannie, & the other Eloise (who calls the other Eloise "the other Eloise" too). Here's to 2008.)
Best Concert Year Ever highlights:
4. Midlake, Bottom of the Hill, 3/4/07.
I didn't write anything down, so here's Midlake's setlist, off the top of my head:
1. We Gathered In Spring
2. Roscoe
3. Van Occupanther
4. In This Camp
5. Balloon Maker
6. Some Of Them Were Superstitious
7. Children of the Grounds [at least that's what the title sounded like]
8. Young Bride
9. Chasing After Deer
10. Bandits
11. Head Home
[encore]
12. It Covers The Hillside
13. Branches
Exit music: Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne"
And I dug how people were singing along to America's "Sister Golden Hair" while Midlake was setting up the stage. Needless to say, Midlake was just fantastic.
Other random things:
- The new song rocked harder than most Midlake songs, i.e., big crunching guitar solo in the middle.
- The DVD projecting the films behind them broke down at some point, but I seem to remember something from Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible."
- I've never seen so much gear for a small-club performance before; they were unloading a U-Haul trailer and the equipment basically covered half the passageway in front of the restrooms at the Bottom of the Hill.
5. Gene Loves Jezebel, Red Devil Lounge, SF, 3/8/07.
Michael Aston, the lead singer, called me "a sick motherfucker," but that's okay. (I had yelled out for "The Motion of Love.") Later he elaborated: "No single heterosexual has ever requested 'The Motion of Love.' But then we're in San Francisco." (The woman next to me said, "I love that song, and I'm straight!" Maybe I should have asked for her number or something.)
Okay -- so I'm not the biggest Gene Loves Jezebel fan, and, I swear, I can probably only really recognize three songs in their entire oeuvre. So I was pleasantly surprised at how kickass Aston's backup band was.
What I remember, kind of:
- "Don't Fear The Reaper"
- an acoustic version of "Desire"
- a Doors song played on FM radio all the time, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was
- "Suspicion" somewhere in there
- "Exploding Girl" dedicated to "the people of Palestine and their struggle"
- "Gorgeous," of course
- women climbing up on stage and practically molesting Michael Aston
p.s. To the random drunk/high hot chick who danced with me, drank my beer, rubbed up against me, and gave me a kiss: thank you.
9. LCD Soundsystem, Mezzanine, SF, 4/30/07.
LCD Soundsystem's setlist, if my beer-fogged mind can remember:
- Us and Them
- Daft Punk Is Playing At My House (speeded up a notch)
- Time to Get Away
- North American Scum (great shout-along for this one)
- All My Friends (probably the highlight of the concert, just a slow-driving accretion of layers)
(note: here's where the order gets tricky, because it's late and I'm tired and I had a good amount to drink, so take it with a grain of salt)
- Tribulations (excellent)
- Watch The Tapes (more shout-along for this song)
- Movement (rawk!)
- Yeah (plus Murphy does a series of drum/cowbell solos on this one)
(encore)
- Someone Great
- (didn't recognize this one, though it sounded vaguely familiar, like something from the '80s; rocked harder than usual. A cover maybe? The refrain sounded like "I need it") [This turned out to be Joy Division's "No Love Lost".]
- New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down
10. Explosions in the Sky / Eluvium, Slim's, SF, 5/1/2007.
To see a nice chunk of Temporary Recordings' roster in concert -- including Mono -- in a span of five days is absolutely thrilling. So it was with great excitement that I caught this particular sold-out show.
Eluvium started the concert. Not sure how to describe the live experience, since it's just Matthew Cooper with a guitar, hunched over laptop and keyboards for the most part, plus projected loops of film in the background, featuring birds flying in circles around a smokestack. Interestingly, he didn't play any of the solo piano pieces, or even the Philip Glass-like compositions, but the long, droning melodies slowly being overtaken by cascading sheets of noise. Beautiful stuff, but loud -- members of the audience were pressing hard on their earplugs.
The setlist, I think (as usual, not sure of the titles):
- Ostinato
- Under The Water It Glowed
- Taken
- Zerthis Was A Shivering Human Image [if not, it sure was harsh and metallic like this track]
And then finally, Explosions in the Sky. Damn, they're great to watch live; like Mono, the audience was treated to the sight of the band swaying in unison (though a couple of the guitarists would disappear from (my) sight, presumably fiddling with the pedals on the floor). Fantastic show, with a respectful audience that stayed dead silent during the quiet passages.
I'm even worse with EitS titles, so I can write for a fact that "The Only Moment We Were Alone" was the last song, and the absolutely glorious "First Breath after Coma" was the first one, and "Catastrophe and the Cure" was the penultimate song, but everything else is a blur.
13. Up Dharma Down / The Dawn, saGuijo, Makati, 6/7/07.
15. Battles, Slim's, 07/02/07.
Saw them twice this year, but the first time was the best: total eekamony-eekamony madness.
16. SUNN O))) / Earth, The Independent, SF, 7/4/07.
18. The Polyphonic Spree, The Great American Music Hall, SF, 7/17/07.
19. Sonic Youth, Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, 07/19/07.
It's odd when you know exactly what the setlist will be -- in this case, Daydream Nation in its entirety -- which returns the concert-record experience to its original historical state, i.e., having the shellac / vinyl / 8-track / tape / minidisc / CD / mp3s be the musical record of the concert. Not the best venue for rocking out, but a stellar show all the same. And thanks to Eloise for the tickets!
20. Slint, Bimbo's, SF, 07/22/07.
Spiderland in its entirety; enough said.
21. The Smashing Pumpkins, The Fillmore, SF, 07/31/07.
This was actually a rather disappointing concert (write-up here), but made memorable for the way the tickets were purchased. Thanks again to Eloise for the tickets!
22. Mandy Moore, The Fillmore, SF, 08/22/07.
24. The Treasure Island Music Festival, SF, 09/16/07.
No concert write-up, but I mention it in one of those monthly mix posts.
25. The National, The Grand, SF, 09/29/07.
Maybe not the greatest band live, but when they're playing music from my favorite album (Boxer) released in 2007, it's still quite an experience.
26. Charlie Louvin, Amoeba Records, SF, 10/06/07.
In the presence of a legend: Charlie Louvin, his voice, his band, and about 25 other people on a Saturday afternoon.
27. Boris / Damon & Naomi, The Independent, SF, 10/14/07.
29. Mono, The Independent, SF, 10/28/07.
Second time to see them this year, and this was the best of all. No concert write-up, but you can get a sense of their live show in my DVD review.
31. M.I.A. / Cool Kids, The Fillmore, 11/7/07.
Just unbelievable: I've never been to a concert with a crowd this excited before. Maya Arulpragasam is a goddess. I think I've written that before.
32. Dengue Fever, The Independent, 11/9/07.
Third time to see the Coolest Band in America in 2007, and maybe the sixth or seventh overall? Concert write-up here. Chhom Nimol is a goddess. I think I've written that before too.
33. PUFFY, Slim's, 11/15/07.
Once again, snagged by Laurel, since we were standing in front of the monitors. (We did wait for two hours in the cold so we could be right up front.) The last time PUFFY came through SF, I stupidly blew them off for a terrible Claire Denis film, for which I had already bought tickets. Note to self: You never, ever do that for one of your favorite bands ever. And this Slim's gig was just about perfect.
December 09, 2007
Items May Have Shifted During Flight.
It's been a great week for me in terms of Filipino food. Last week I was the lucky beneficiary of a delicious estofado a la poeta (props to the guinataan too), which was accompanied not only by late, if minor, Kurosawa (with analysis both high and low, the latter to which I mostly contributed) but a conversation about Filipino cuisine.
(I actually have the transcript of a lunch conversation I had at Market Market, somewhere in my files around here, which I should really post some time, with Tita Cely Kalaw, the proprietor of the legendary Bamboo Grove, and the naming of Bicol Express, and her dream of restaurants specializing in quickly-disappearing provincial cuisine, using only ingredients from those provinces.)
But all this was preceded by a dinner earlier that week with my new friend The Llawyer at Palencia, a relatively new Filipino restaurant in San Francisco (in the Castro) that friends have been raving about. Funny, though, how the food -- and this "review", for that matter -- ended up revolving around the bagoong, which was served with the kare-kare.
Bagoong, for those of you not familiar with it, is what happens when you take ground-up shrimp or krill and let it rot and dry it out in the sun, then you take the whole salty mess, and mash or grind it until it's smooth. It smells exactly as it sounds; needless to say, the taste is absolutely unique (and no, belacan and terasi just don't quite cut it).
The kare-kare arrived, but the bagoong -- we shrimp-allergic eaters very gingerly scooped the bagoong onto the side of the plate, then realized we were being too careful -- was, to put it mildly, off. It just wasn't right. But it was off in an interesting way: it wasn't that it was bland, but that there was something else, something added (anise?) or subtracted. We couldn't tell what it was, but something was clear: a substitution had been made.
This was doubtless a concession to the western palate, unused to the unsettling alien pungency redolent of deep churning fathoms and sundried decay. But that was the whole point of bagoong: You were supposed to be able to smell it once Mom opens the jar from the fridge. No, to hell with that -- before you take it out of the fridge. (Thus accounting for the greater consumption of baking soda in Southeast Asian households in the United States. I'm just kidding about that last bit.) No active sniffing was required; bagoong needed a precise calibration of stink, a concoction of funk and ferment that could only be accurately confirmed by comparison with what Nanay or Lola or Tita used, even it was from a glass jar.
And this is, I suppose, the problem with first-generation immigrant cuisine, as the standards will always be impossibly high. These criteria are so inextricable from the exacting standards of sentiment and memory, that any restaurant-created Filipino meal almost demands nothing less but absolute fidelity to the food made by the older maternal women in our lives. That makes us -- those of the first and second immigrant generations -- the hardest to please. No chef in a white apron could stand against the might of an elder woman in a frayed housedress.
In my interviews with Daly City immigrants, the thing they missed most from the Philippines was, surprisingly, not food. It was the unhurried quality of life in the Philippines, the intimate way in which people could relax with friends or neighbors after work, or have weekends free. (No doubt that for some, this was also facilitated by maids and/or an extended family, but you folks know what I mean.)
But food would always be mentioned next, though qualified almost instantly by "Marami ring Pilipino food dito, pero hindi pareho, eh." [There's lots of Filipino food here, but it's not the same.] And when asked what the difference was, they answered that it wasn't just the way things tasted in restaurants, but some ineffable quality to the food perhaps related to the sentimental reasons described above. I suspect it ultimately had to do with who was doing the cooking.
And because of this, despite the agents of globalization -- importers, the distributors at Ranch 99, your Tita who managed to sneak in that bottle of alamang through customs at SFO -- Filipino immigrant cuisine is perhaps fated to labor, heroically and creatively, as an inexact copy.
The Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, back in 1688, began to notice a mysterious malady afflicting young Swiss nationals returning from overseas. He called the new disease "nostalgia", using a precise Greek nostos, or "to come home", and algos, or "pain", "to define the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one's native land".
Hofer's theories didn't quite work; he figured that the source of all the melancholy and insomnia had to do with "the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling." (Consequently, the paths through which those animal spirits walk are enlarged through constant use, therefore accounting for daydreams.)
Harebrained, maybe. But I like how nostalgia, despite its ordinary usage nowadays, is, etymologically, a disease at its roots, and so is its companion disorder, homesickness. When it comes to Filipino food, like Proust's shell-shaped cookie, a mere bite collapses time and space in a single act. Perhaps, then, our taste buds are perpetually afflicted with nostalgia and homesickness, an accompanying medical condition of the immigrant experience.
Other than food, music is the other medium most evocative of nostalgia, similarly dissolving temporal and spatial distance. But there is also something similar to food, in the manner in which we listen to "imperfect" music. Like a needle skipping over scratched vinyl, our ears compensate for the gaps of song, filling in what's missing.
Perhaps our palates work the same way. We adjust and readjust, slowly, realizing that things are not quite the same, that something is off, and our tastes learn to shift by themselves, along with the sometimes sorrowful awareness that the flavors will never be quite right, or never be quite like what we remembered, that, despite the attempts at creating something new, like the bagoong at Palencia, or our new lives in new places, imperfect improvisations will simply have to be made.
We have all lost something in the passage, and sometimes we carry with us baggage better left behind. But food, and its memory, is particularly tenacious in its survival; nothing else immediately summons up the rawness of emotions as food does. And this is why the reaction is immediate when the flavor is not quite right, when ingredients are inevitably lost in transit. But we always make do, somehow, and we keep stirring the pot.
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(This isn't a restaurant review, obviously -- I leave that to the critics and Yelpers -- but I feel obligated to add some notes about Palencia:
1. There was a banana heart in the kare-kare. Not chunks from a can -- an actual banana heart. And the kare-kare was quite good, but maybe the peanut sauce (clearly made from scratch and not from a jar!) could have been thicker.
2. I do love the fact that knives were pointedly (no pun intended) missing from the table, because Filipinos eat with a fork and spoon, dammit. You ever seen a big wooden knife on a Filipino's wall? Of course not.
3. The ukoy was nice and crunchy and didn't require any oil to be soaked up with a napkin. If I weren't allergic to shrimp I might have fought with the Llawyer for the third piece.
4. White tablecloth? Check. White capiz chandelier? Check. Unfailingly polite white waitstaff? Check. I think they do need more Filipino-looking fixtures, but the blown-up sepia photograph by the bathroom and the giant haunted-house mirror were nice touches. (No, really: remember the scene in Nick Joaquin's short story "May Day Eve"? It was that kind of mirror, a ghostly-woman-in-white-holding-a-candle-materializing-behind-you mirror.)
5. Okay, that was a somewhat unfair dig at the waitstaff, who was very generous with their time (we lingered over our jasmine tea until almost closing time last Sunday night). Thanks.
6. The traditional Filipino music playing in the background was nice, but be a little braver, people: there is a lot of contemporary loungey / folkish stuff coming from the Philippines that would make diners ask, "Who is this? Where can I buy this?" in a way that you won't get with banduria renditions of "Bahay Kubo".
7. The sans rival was off too, alas. Slightly toasted / burnt, which was a nice twist, but the butter... Remember Oprah's horror at discovering the amount of butter that went into French cuisine? That's why sans rival has a French name; don't be afraid to use it! There should be at least a slab of butter cream between each layer. Sans rival = death by butter, and this just didn't have the requisite amount of culinary sin involved.
8. The nilaga was excellent, actually: just the perfect amount of saltiness and delicacy and cloudiness that hinted at a stock pot simmering for hours in the back. Which is the way it should be.
9. I'm returning, anyhow, to sample their upcoming brunch menu. Should be good.
10. The portions are huge, by the way -- not "huge for a nice restaurant in the Castro", but "huge for a Filipino restaurant in the Bay Area". It's the semantic difference between "big" and "big-ass", folks.
11. One rather funny grace note of sorts: towards closing time, we could hear someone, in an American accent, practicing something in Tagalog he had just learned: "Sino ang tatay mo? Sino ang tatay mo?" (This means "Who's your daddy?", a translation of a rhetorical question that could probably be useful in certain contexts.)
Oh, I'm descending into Yelpish snark here, but that Filipino restaurant in Berkeley that opened a few months ago? Terrible. Sorry.
December 05, 2007
The October / November 2007 Mix.
I want to make a quick plug for my new favorite album, Anna Järvinen's Jag fick feeling, from the Häpna label. Reviews later (like every other blogger out there, I feel obliged to come up with my year-end list soon), but here's the album blurb (plus downloadable mp3s and a video), and you can buy the whole album right away from Klicktrack (there are 30-second samples for each song). Or, if you want the physical thing, it's arriving on Amazon in a week. I'm not kidding, though, when I write that it's one of the greatest things I've heard this year. I just wish I could understand what she was singing.
(For people who don't know how this works: a flash widget opens at the bottom of the entry. Sometimes it takes a long time. You can play them and do other things, like d--nl--d them. Then I delete the mp3s after a while.)
1. Bergheim 34, "Take My Soul"
from the 2003 album It's Not For You As It Is For Us
I love the cold, Teutonic, skeletal clatter: the metallic rattle of robot femurs in a disco laboratory.
Forced Exposure link.
Bergheim 34 discography.
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2. Caribou, "Melody Day"
from the 2007 album Andorra
I was totally unprepared for the twin-drum attack at the Caribou show at Slim's a few months ago, but you can hear it on the bridges of this track of swirly, sun-tinged electronic pop.
Video on YouTube.
Amazon link.
Official website.
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3. Wild Billy Childish and The Musicians of the British Empire, "Date with Doug"
from the 2007 album Punk Rock at the British Legion Hall
There are more things in the Billy Childish discography than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and this three-minute, eleven-second track is but a tiny fraction of Childish's output. The man's a jack of all trades: singer, painter, composer, poet, Stuckist, guitarist, "the king of garage rock" -- and purveyor of this ragged piece of pop bubblegum, with Nurse Julie on vocals. (It's an unnecessarily mean song though, but it's part of Childish's long war against the insipid.)
Amazon link.
Official website.
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4. Hem, "Jackson"
from the 2002 album I'm Talking With My Mouth
Something in the water in Brooklyn feeding all this talent -- check. (That's where Hem is from, and not somewhere a little more south.) You may be more familiar with the faster Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash duet from At Folsom Prison; Hem slows it way down and luxuriates over one of the greatest opening lines ever: "We got married in a fever."
Amazon link.
Official website.
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5. Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, "What Have You Done For Me Lately?, Part 1"
from the 2006 compilation Daptone 7-Inch Singles Collection, Vol. 1
It's a 21-year old song made to sound 35, and the dance pop of Janet Jackson's original is channeled here into a furious Declaration of Asskicking.
Amazon link.
Official website.
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6. Jean Knight, "Do Me"
from the 1971 album Mr. Big Stuff
This song just sounds dangerous, a nice thick slab of sizzling funk that can't be healthy for you.
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7. Jesse Sykes and The Sweet Hereafter, "Your Eyes Told"
from the 2004 album Oh, My Girl
Tin roof shaking, crashing black
Well, i ain’t going back
Deliver me, take me in
Let me breathe your coarse wind
Day is empty, night too long
River hums a sweet song
Every song your lungs sang
Every lie your eyes told
Canyon whisper, canyon weep
I thought you were behind me
Tin roof shaking, crashing black
Well i ain’t going back
Deliver me, take me in
Let me breathe your coarse wind
Sublime music for driving in a dry country.
Amazon link.
Official website.
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8. The Zombies, "This Will Be Our Year"
from the 1968 album Odessey and Oracle
The warmth of your love
is like the warmth of the sun
and this will be our year
took a long time to come
don't let go of my hand
now darkness has gone
and this will be our year
took a long time to come
and I won't forget
the way you held me up when I was down
and I won't forget the way you said,
"Darling I love you"
You gave me faith to go on
Now we're there and we've only just begun
This will be our year
took a long time to come
The warmth of your smile
smile for me, little one
and this will be our year
took a long time to come
You don't have to worry
all your worried days are gone
this will be our year
took a long time to come
and I won't forget
the way you held me up when I was down
and I won't forget the way you said,
"Darling I love you"
You gave me faith to go on
Now we're there and we've only just begun
and this will be our year
took a long time to come
Yeah we only just begun
yeah this will be our year
took a long time to come
My first reaction upon hearing this song was, "Where has this been all my life???" People should dance to this at weddings.
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December 04, 2007
PokerStars Sunday Million Tourney.
Yes, it's an ad. Yes, I think I get beer money for it courtesy of the folks at Mad Crowd Media. (Actually, my kid brother, who people constantly mistake for my elder brother when we're in the same room, is managing director of the outfit.) Yes, I'm about to totally ramble because I don't know how to make this ad post count.
I've never played poker online myself, and I think I've played Texas hold-'em exactly once, at a graduation party in Milpitas, CA. (The city is 15% Filipino, so: clearly a connection there.) I can't bluff, which is why I'm bad at a) dates; b) telling students I loved their work; c) convincing players to raise their bets. Ah, but the joy of card games. I did use to play Pusoy Dos back in the day, and can happily admit to bringing the game to Ithaca, NY -- okay, to one household in Ithaca, anyway, where its name was met with skepticism. "Pussy Doze? What sort of perverted game are you teaching us, Vergara?"
How these PokerStars folks figure out your Filipino identity is a mystery to me -- a Philippine address? A nickname like Cookie, Bongbong, or Doods? A particularly wily way of bluffing? Do Filipino Americans count? What if you're only a permanent resident alien and have a Philippine passport? Beats me. But check out that phallic stack of chips anyway, and marvel at the wonder of a champion poker player actually named Chris Moneymaker. I'm off to bed.
--- AD BEGINS HERE, JUST IN CASE YOU WEREN'T SURE ---
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