Finally, a bit of Game of Thrones season 2 footage. Yummy.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE12H1HorUU]I can’t wait for more.
Check out my detailed coverage of season 1 here.
Or a look at my own books here.
Author Archive for agavin – Page 96
Restaurant: Sfixio
Location: 9737 Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, CA.90210. 1 (310) 385-1800
Date: November 13, 2011
Cuisine: Italian
Rating: Excellent new Italian
Sfixio is a brand new Italian in downtown Beverly Hills with a modern Tuscan slant. It’s owned and by a husband and wife pair: Chef Massimo Denaro in the kitchen and his wife managing the front.
The location has received a chic modern update too (it used to be Da Vinci for the last 30 years).
The brushed aluminum bar.
I brought this wine from the vineyard in Tuscany. Parker 93. “The 2006 Brunello di Montalcino is a beguiling wine laced with all sorts of black cherries, minerals, spices, licorice and menthol. All of the aromas and flavors are layered together through to the exquisite, refined finish. The 2006 shows a level of richness and density this bottling has lacked in some previous vintages. Today the tannins remain a touch austere, but another few years in bottle should do the trick. Anticipated maturity: 2014-2026.”
They had good bread, particularly the raison.
An extensive menu.
And a live jazz band (who were quite good)!
“Insalata di Spinaci (Fresh baby Spinach with Walnuts, soft Tuscan Pecorino cheese, pears olive oil and balsamic Vinaigrette Reduction).”
“Burrata con Pomodorini (Imported fresh Burrata caprese with organic heirlooms tomatoes).”
“Tartara di Branzino. Fresh wild Seabass from Greece Tartare dressed with a fresh grapefruit orange, lemon sauce, topped with tiny diced veggies.” Very nice, a bit like a cerviche.
“Pappardelle al Cinghiale (Homemade Pappardelle pasta with Braised wild boar in Chianti wine flavored with Juniper berries).” I had this dish all over Tuscany this year. This one was good, probably in the top 75% of those I had. Not as great as this one say, but very good.
“Crespelle alla Fiorentina (Homemade Crepes with Ricotta Cheese and Spinach topped with Tomato Sauce and Melted Reggiano Parmesan).”
“Branzino e Verdurine (Fresh Wild Seabass from Greece cooked on Flat Iron with sautee seasonal veggies).”
An osso buco special on mashed potatoes. Certainly an excellent meaty rendition of this dish. The meat was not only tender, but very flavorful.
The dessert menu.
“Tortino al cioccolato con Fragoline (Chocolate cake with strawberries).” Very very “dark” and chocolaty. A little too dark and dense for my taste, I prefer creamier and sweeter, but it was certainly well done.
Overall, Sfixio was very good. LA is full of Italian restaurants, and there wasn’t anything radical here, but this is certainly a chef operating at a high level, with a good palette, excellent ingredients, and really solid execution. So I recommend, and we’ll go again.
For more LA dining reviews click here.
Comparison with real Tuscan joints here.
Title: Twilight Saga: Eclipse
Director/Stars: Kristen Stewart (Actor), Robert Pattinson (Actor), David Slade (Director)
Genre: Fantasy
Watched: June 2010 & Nov 16, 2011
Summary: Livarot
Eclipse is clearly the lame duck of the three pre-Breaking-Dawn Twilight films. It’s so cheesy that it makes the original and New Moon seem high art. First of all, the A-story is about as weighty as a sesame seed. We’ve got this entirely lame plot where ginger-haired hipster Victoria is still after Bella because of the ridiculous happenings of the first film. In order to thwart the plot crushing clairvoyance of Alice she has to act indirectly, raising an army of “Newborn” vampires to come after Bella and the Cullens. In this featherweight version of the vampire legend, new vampires are not just crazy (that’s fairly typical) but are extra strong. Well, at least we are told this. What we are shown (in the “final battle”) is that the Newborns die easily without causing the good guys to even break a sweat — only a few ribs. I find this incredibly lame. In my fictional universe, vampires grow in strength with the years, but at the same time very old vampires are extremely rare — and extraordinarily twisted, powerful, and dead. Did I mention they only come out at night and like to decorate their enemy’s houses with body parts?
But none of Eclipse‘s A-story really matters. It’s the B-story (romance) that holds the focus. This episode is all (I mean all) about the love triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob. Which is about as cheesy as Fourme d’Ambert, but again does have a certain charm, and more than a little humor. The “plot” forces ever more competition between our studs, leading to post-modern lines like “I’m Switzerland” or “does he own a shirt?” This trend climaxes (or doesn’t) in the amusing talkfest inside the tent at the end of the movie. Jacob has been hanging outside (shirtless of course) in a blizzard, but he ducks in to check on freezing Bella. Poor Edward just isn’t much help — no heartbeat = no bodyheat. “You’ll warm up faster if you take off your clothes,” Jacob advises when he crawls in the sleeping bag, right in front of his rival.
I must also mention that every time the A-story cuts in my skin crawls. The flashback with the Native Americans and the “cold ones” (vampires) was particularly seizure inducing. The little flash overs to Victoria and the Volturi “plotting” are perfunctory and really make no sense given the essentially first-person nature of the narrative. The plot (cough cough) is really driven (and hampered) by Alice’s corny power. This happens in the entire series. Since she can see the future, most decisions consist of her instantly knowing someone is going to show up or something is going to happen. Then they hop to it. Occasionally, like in New Moon, this screws something up briefly. Truth is, this is an amazingly lazy device on the part of Stephanie Meyer. It’s like a continuous deus ex machina. It even traps the author in Eclipse so she has to invent a whole reason Victoria can sneak up on them via her leaving it as a “last minute decision.” This is totally bogus. If she decided to leave it to the end to decide, she’s decided and Alice would know. BS alert!
But I’m not done. Continuing my theory that the series is teenage girl wish fulfillment we have this big B-story thread where Edward wants to get married but Bella resists. I’m pretty sure this is just to create further reason for him to actually do what she (and by proxy her teen audience) wants him to do: propose. Then there is his insistence on celibacy. But others have certainly gone into the whole vampire = the dangers of sex or whatever is going on here.
I’m not sure if I loathe the movie or actually enjoyed it as an odd sociological study (owing to it being so popular) or liked it because Kristen Stewart is hot. It was definitely not because of Edward’s eyebrows or Jacob’s six-pack.
Read my Twilight review or New Moon or Breaking Dawn, part 1 or part 2.
For more Film reviews, click here.
Or read about my own paranormal novels.
Title: Twilight Saga: New Moon
Director/Stars: Kristen Stewart (Actor), Robert Pattinson (Actor), Chris Weitz (Director)
Genre: Fantasy
Watched: Nov 2009 & Nov 15, 2011
Summary: The Moon is made of cheese!
In honor of the upcoming return of everyone’s favorite sparkly vampires, I rewatched the earlier offerings. Oh, where to begin. The cheese is so thick in this series that it might as well be set in a Paris fromagerie. But it does have a certain charm. Hands down the best part of the whole series is Kristen Stewart. I have to admit, I do kind of like her. Here she’s severely hampered by the script, but she still makes the best of it. In better movies, like the brilliant Adventureland, she shines (and I’m not talking the CGI sparkle kind of shine).
One really funny bit is how close the real film is to the trailer for the parody movie, Vampires Suck:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksJvEH-R_ew]Now, Vampires Suck, really sucks. It’s almost unwatchable and all the good parts are in the trailer. But it does point out some of the hilarious cheese in the real films, particularly New Moon. The original story is structured pretty much entirely around the Bella, Edward, Jacob triangle. There is a certain decency to this core. It’s not mature adult writing, but a sort of codified teen girl fantasy. Bella, the weak normal girl, shy and insecure, is pursued by not one but two hunk hotties. The aloof cool type AND the hot and emotional no-shirt-wearing type. Fermented milkish as this is, it knows its audience. Where the movie totally fails is in paying any decent respect to the traditions of Fantasy and Horror. The dreadlock swirling, furry vested members of the Black Eyed Peas (I mean bad vampires), the zero research Matrix dressed Volturi (although their leader plays the role with a delicious camp), and the sparkles. Although they didn’t film in Volterra, they should have, cool city. But the franchise’s mythological characters, despite their continued insistence on the challenges of their existence, have it easy. Really these vampires and werwolves are just wish fulfillment, stripped of the double edged nature of the original legends that spawned them.
See, those older tales, like most folk stories are cautionary in nature. The focus on the karmic cost of power and pride. In the end, it always brings down the monsters. Twilight isn’t about that. It pretends to be. But this is a giant “tell” where the characters and the story pretend to “tell” us that these powers have costs. It goes to great lengths to pretend so. But in the end it’s just complex machinations to support the central triangle of wish fulfillment.
New Moon is considerably better than Eclipse, but both suffer badly from essentially being diversions. Stephanie Meyer apparently originally plotted the story as two books (what became Twlight and Breaking Dawn). When the first did well she inserted two extra installments in the middle. I can’t fault her that decision, made her tens of millions for sure.
Read my Twilight review or Eclipse or Breaking Dawn, part 1 or part 2.
For more Film reviews, click here.
Or read about my own paranormal novels.
Restaurant: Western Smoke House
Location: 10640 Woodbine St. Los Angeles, CA 90034. (310) 837-3544
Date: November 12, 2011
Cuisine: BBQ
Rating: Solid Texas BBQ
This time of year we have a lot of birthday parties to go to (my son is three). Due to rain (drizzle) one got moved to this western (Texas) style BBQ joint! Boy, is that a lot better than luke-warm delivery pizza!
The unassuming Palms frontage, literally across the street from the amazing N/Naka.
The menu.
Lemonade (sweet but real, not packaged) came in jars! Moonshine style!
The decor is full-on Lonestar State.
Slaw.
Potato salad.
Cornbread, one of my secret weaknesses.
Greens, in case you get stopped up.
Chips for the kids.
Likewise with the chicken fingers.
Brisket! I love good BBQ brisket, and this was good.
BBQ chicken. This was tender and very smokey. Not the heavily sauced style, but just nicely smoked.
Sweetish and tasty baked beans.
Some birthday cake!
And two kinds of cobbler.
I’m not sure what this is. Trifle? I didn’t get a chance to try it, but I’m actually a big fan of these custard-based old school desserts.
Not a fancy joint, but tasty. I have to go again and try the ribs. I love ribs.
For more LA dining reviews click here.
Restaurant: Maison Giraud [1, 2, 3]
Location: 1032 Swarthmore Ave, Pacific Palisades, Ca 90272. 310-459-7562
Date: November 16, 2011
Cuisine: French
Rating: Awesome French baked goods
I’ve been waiting for Maison Giraud, the new local (just blocks away!) Pacific Palisades restaurant bakery from acclaimed LA French chef Alain Giraud to open for what seems like forever. Finally, the day has happened. Today is the first time they are serving at all, bakery and breakfast. By next monday they plan to be open from breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The Swathmore Ave frontage has been revealing itself in stages since at least the 4th of July.
The menu is out front. We didn’t have time to actually sit down. You can find the full menu on the website. Soon…
Clean inside. We proceeded straight to the bakery counter to find that it had already been picked fairly clean :-).
These gorgeous (I only had my iPhone for photos, sorry) pane raison.
On the left a single chocolate croissant and on the right a croissant batter thing with tiny blueberries and bakeries custard. We tried both of these. Stellar! Much better I thought than Bouchon Bakery. The pastry had that crunch/chewy mouth feel that is intensely Parisian, but very rare in the states. Must be the butter from Normandy!
We’ll be back as soon as we can (perhaps not until after the holidays) to try it out for dinner. The menu, at a glance, looked a lot like Annisette’s minus the raw bar. There was a lot of good stuff though. I didn’t see a Croque Madame though. I may have to ask for it special.
Continuing the big upgrades on my website, I’ve built out new pages for my books: The Darkening Dream and Untimed. And I’m in the process of working on a generic “Andy Gavin: Author” landing page too which I should have done in a couple hours. These pages are an attempt to look less bloggy, more like typical author and book sites. I’ll, of course, be continuing to refine and add. One of the nice things about using WordPress is that it’s easy to continually modify. I’ll add reviews and promotional information. Sample chapters, etc. When I get my professional cover art for The Darkening Dream I’ll have to reskin those pages.
Please let me know (via comments) what you think about the new pages. Or any suggestions you might have. Comments are turned off on the book pages themselves, but you can use this one here.
At a technical level, these new templates show off some of the power of the builder platform premium theme I’m using. It has cool layout tools that make it easier to create different layouts in WordPress and then assign them to different pages. Each of these layouts can reference or use separately constructed menus and widgets as well. That way, for example, I have a different more bookish menu on those pages, but it’s shared by a number of layouts. I’ve also been using a quick redirects plugin to create virtual slugs that I can use to build out URL hooks that are independent of the pages themselves. And one of yesterday’s projects was getting that animated jQuery “featured post” slider going. Builder had one that formed the core, but like many WordPress plugins it was setup for a single instance with just one category. I hacked the code to add parameters to the shortcode enabling me to feature different feeds on different pages. Took all of 15 minutes (mad coding skills — and I don’t even really know PHP). One wonders why the authors didn’t build it that way to begin with. I’ve noticed that PHP code is often extremely “non-functional” with an over reliance on global variables. I don’t mean the program doesn’t work, but that it doesn’t adhere to proper functional programming style to allow easy and modular reuse of code.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9a5V9ODuY]
The trailer actually looks pretty good. A hair cheesy, but not all Twilighted out or anything. For those of you who haven’t read it, the book (at least the first of the three) is pretty darn excellent. The second two devolve into pseudo-political nonsense reminiscent of the Zion scenes in the later Matrix movies. But the first is a fantastic and intense read.
For my list of book reviews, click here.
Cliff painted this gorgeous cover to steampunk novel: The Map of Time
I’ve officially signed a cover artist for The Darkening Dream. His name is Cliff Nielsen and he’s a very experienced artist using a cool ethereal multimedia style. You can check out his work on his website but I pasted two into this post. I originally found him though this image of the dude with the watch. I was searching the web for “clockwork men” since the villains in my second novel, Untimed, are… you guessed it… clockwork men. Google brought up this image and I had to find out who the artist was. Then I discovered I already owned a decent collection of books he drew the covers for (e.g. City of Bones, which I reviewed recently).
My homebrew TDD cover
A lot of covers these days are just simple photos (like my homebrew tree cover below) or stenciled vector art. But I’ve always been partial to “painted” covers, so in researching cover design options I kept coming back to commissioning an original illustration. Perhaps it’s because of my early years as a 70s and 80s Science Fiction and Fantasy reader, where nearly every cover was painted. Back then, photographic covers were always a sign of some cheesy film tie-in.
In any case, Cliff’s art resonated well with my own style. Although it must be noted that the above clockwork man is far too 19th century for the mysterious “Tick-Tocks” in my second book (who blend their outfits into whatever era they visit), but it’s still a great image and very evocative.
Another Cliff cover: The Thief and the Beanstalk
So Cliff is reading/skimming the book and I hope to have some content sketches back shortly. I can’t wait. One of the best things about working with artists (and I was fortunate to have worked with dozens of great ones at Naughty Dog and my other companies) is seeing your ideas realized in a visual form.
For an interview with Cliff, and a photo, see here.
For more information on The Darkening Dream.
For more posts on writing, click here.
I added a gallery to the site and populated it with some of the standard images I had on hand for my games and books. At the moment this is mostly my draft book covers and tons of Crash Bandicoot photos (I collected them for my big series at the beginning of the year). Truth be told, the hardest thing was choosing a gallery plugin and getting the CSS configured properly. I spent about 90 minutes tracking down why my images we running off to the side in an infinite row. It turned out my theme has “white-space: nowrap;” turned on be default in the CSS. There are a lot of CSS parameters.
I’m slowly expanding the site from a mere blog into a professional author and book site — one page at a time. To that effect, I wrote a new longer form bio yesterday. Also a formal contact page, but that’s boring, so check out the bio, which I like to think is actually amusing.
Title: Breaking Bad
Genre: Contemporary Dramedy
Watched: Season 1, November 1-9, 2011
Summary: Darkly engaging
Friends kept recommending this show and — even better — it’s “free” (included) in my Netflix streaming subscription. The pilot opens with a serious bang, starting with the episode’s chaotic conclusion then flipping back to the turn of events that brought us there.
It’s an interesting premise: what happens when a nebbishy High School science teacher, dying of cancer, tries to take care of his family by becoming a Meth producer. At some level the concept isn’t far off from Weeds (another dark and delicious snack — at least for 3-4 seasons) but Breaking Bad is considerably bleaker and more realistic. Things devolve rapidly into the grim reality of crime and murder. No sexy latino dealers here.
The characters are well drawn and feel fairly real, despite the somewhat over-the-top scenario. And as usual, that’s what really matters in drawing in the viewers. The first season kept me fully engaged. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.
Breaking Bad is typical (and yet not) of recent well executed serial television in that it doesn’t follow a neat and clean three-act structure or episodic loop (like say Terra Nova, which is a bit of a throwback). In some ways these newer shows have more in common with long novel series or old school Dickens-type serial pulp writing — just without as much cheese. Really, we’re about 10+ years into a golden age of long form visual drama. And I’m loving it.
Dark Souls is an interesting entry into the 2011 holiday game rush. At one level, it has state of the art graphics and physics-based ultra-visceral hand-to-hand fantasy combat. But it’s also a throwback to old school RPG game design.
This puppy doesn’t baby you in any way. You’re instantly tossed into an arcane character creation screen with a cryptic interface. You’re forced to make choices about class and attributes armed only with one sentence descriptions.
And it only gets less accessible from there.
After a pretty but incomprehensible bit of backstory you’re tossed into a grim and desolate undead prison. This serves as a “training level” and it is a lot easier than what is to come. But even this little intro ain’t easy — and the game gives you little or no clue what you’re supposed to do our how the mechanics work.
Now on the other hand: the control feels pretty darn good. And after a few minutes the hand to hand combat feels great. Vicious, but great. There’s a real satisfaction to smacking around the depressingly dank baddies.
Then comes the first “real” level. And I start to die. And die. And die. And die some more. The game is so hard that the first night I spend two straight hours dying between the first and second checkpoints of the first level! My shoulder muscles got so knotted that I was literally in agony. And I didn’t even reach that bonfire (checkpoint). I had to go out.
But all I could think about was getting back to it. And when I returned, agitated as hell, at eleven at night, I wisely decided to force myself not to play — or I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. Instead I came back to it the next afternoon and got through on my first shot. Then, entering virgin territory, I started to die again. And again.
This is a game that requires you to learn every little nuance of each stretch between the unfairly distant checkpoints. Death has a steep penalty: taking all your liquid souls (experience) from you. If you can reach your corpse before you die again you can recover it. Unfortunately, your corpse is usually being guarded by whatever killed you last time!
Relentlessly cruel as the game design is. I can’t help but want to keep playing. This might be the first action fantasy game where the you fight with hand held weapons and it actually feels like you’re fighting with hand held weapons. The physics based swords, axes, maces and whatnot hammer relentlessly on your foes — and on you. It’s pretty cool.
And the art design is damn creepy and atmospheric. Weird and mysterious. The enemies are varied and dastardly. I dig it. I’ll just have to see how far I can force myself through the sadistic gauntlet of evil!
More more posts on video games, click here.
I just added comments by Disqus, which are a pretty major upgrade on the default wordpress commenting system. Particularly given how Disqus is all javascripty and supports various logins such FaceBook, Twitter, and OpenID.
Let me know how the new system works for you all, as it’s hard to beta test myself. It seemed to import the old comments okay.
I’ve moved the blog over to self hosting on MediaTemple. Welcome!
As you can see, it looks a little different. I’ve switched to a new iThemes Builder based theme that I’m in the process of customizing. It looks a little ghetto now, but expect changes in the imminent future.
Please also contact me by comment or email if you encounter any technical issues with the transition. I need to know as I can’t test the whole site myself :-). Some features may have moved around a bit, or be missing, and there are some new ones. WordPress.org plugins are a bit different. I’ll be adding a whole bunch of new features soon.
[ Updated 5:30pm ] I even got Facebook comments working. This shall be interestingly experimental :-).
I’m moving my hosting from WordPress.com to MediaTemple in the next 24 to 48 hours. The site should remain up but I won’t be doing my daily posts until things are settled out with the move.
Expect theme and feature changes and improvements. By hosting it myself there are all sorts of plugins that I can add: like Facebook comments! There may be some (hopefully) brief wonkiness as I add them though, or the occasional broken feature on the site that was supported by some WordPress.com feature that I have to replace.
Thanks for your patience.
Restaurant: Ocean Avenue Seafood
Location: 1401 Ocean Avenue. Santa Monica, CA 90401. 310-394-5669
Date: November 5, 2011
Cuisine: Seafood
Rating: Good, but overpriced
I’ve been going to Ocean Avenue Seafood for probably fifteen years, but while it was once a staple in our rotation it’s been a few years. OAS offers classic American seafood right above the bluffs overlooking the Pacific.
The have both an extensive ocean view covered patio and a clubby inside.
The menu.
Fresh baked sour dough bread.
A green salad.
A sampler of six various Pacific oysters with cocktail sauce, horseradish, and mignonette sauce. Each of these six were different, but all were good.
Their clam chowder. It’s not as goopy creamy thick as I ideally love, but it did have a nice bacony flavor.
Grilled salmon with mash potatoes and asparagus. Pinot noir reduction. My wife is a connoisseur of salmon, and she likes this one.
Lobster roll. The fries and slaw were good. And while this roll had lots of lobster it was somehow lacking in flavor.
Expresso so I can stay up through the movie we are going to see.
Overall Ocean Avenue Seafood has a lot of competition. Both the Blue Plate Oysterette and the Hungry Cat have very similar cuisine and are located nearby (the Blue Plate about a block away). Both are a little less expensive than OAS and a little more “modern.” OAS does have more different types of fresh fish if that’s your thing, they have 7-10 grilled fish at all times. Just depends what you want.
Since I’m waiting for both my line edits on Untimed and my proofreading on The Darkening Dream, I’m researching website construction. I have to morph, upgrade, or supplement this blog with a genuine author website and I can’t bring myself to hire someone to do it given that I’ve written far bigger and more complex websites and apps. It’ll just annoy me to no end to not be able to control it all myself. But at the same time, old school coding the whole thing manually (I’d probably use Ruby on Rails for that) is overkill and probably too much work.
So I read this Professional WordPress book yesterday and today to see if it would be reasonable to just extend WordPress. I think it is. A few plugins and some custom theme programming will probably do the trick. The problem is that I host on wordpress.com and they don’t allow you to install extra plugins (they have some installed by default) or add any PHP code. So I’ll have to migrate to a self hosted server. Maybe Media Temple VPS? Rackspace? Research. Research. Research. Anyone have any suggestions/experience with the good hosting platforms?
And I have to teach myself PHP, so 
I grabbed the bird book. PHP is one of those popular but slightly icky languages like PERL and JAVA that I’ve never been very partial to. It’s like Ruby, but 100x uglier and more primitive. I am a LISP (and Ruby) guy after all. Oh well. This is easy peasy programming, so I’ll just suck it up. Using something like WordPress will make my life much easier maintaining the site as it’s choke full of content management features. If I program it myself I have to go and code everything manually, which really isn’t very efficient.
I even wonder if one of these newer WordPress themes/frameworks like PageLines Platform isn’t a good idea. Anyone use one?
More to come as I get into it.
Location: 465 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048. 310.246.5555
Date: October 31, 2011
Cuisine: Modern Spanish
Rating: Fantastique
My brother and I were in midtown and decided to check out Trésfor lunch. I’d already hit it for weekend brunch a couple months ago, and figuring as I’ve recently hit everything else Jose Andres (é by José Andrés and Jaleo in Vegas and a recent Saam meal), stopped in.
The room was dead at 11:45am, but the food wasn’t.
The lunch menu.
“Octopus tacos. Hydroponic bib lettuce, maggie’s farm baby greens, smoked heirloom cherry tomatoes.” Very nice octopus treatment. Succulent grilled meat and a zesty limey vinaigrette on the whole thing.
“Hawaiian bigeye tuna ceviche. Coconut ginger soy, plantain chips.” Not your typical cerviche as the lime flavors weren’t that blast you Peruvian type. But that meant you could taste the fish, and it was good. The plantain chips were tasty too.
I’m nuts over Jose’s Gazpacho. I’ve even made it from his recipe a number of times at home.
And with the soup itself. Yum yum!
“Herb roasted ham and cheese. Tomme de savoie cheese, carmelized onions, herbs.” This was like a Spanish Croque Monsieur. I love this kind of grilled ham and cheese.
Some good fries too with a spicy ketchup.
“The SLS Burger. House made brioche bun, lettuce, tomatoes, onions with cheddar.”
“Lemon tart. Raspberry sorbet.” Not your typical version, but really good. Bright bright flavors and some pate de fruits thrown in there too.
“Hazelnut pear clafoutis. Coffee ice cream.” Like a bread pudding. The ice cream was really good too.
And this crazy zesty lemonade, which served nicely as an aperitif.
Overall, this was a very tasty lunch. It was a little expensive — as you’d expect from a hotel restaurant — but it was very good, which I’ve come to expect from the SLS offerings.
A review of Trés for brunch can be found here.
Click here to see more LA dining, or reviews of The Bazaar and Saam (also at the SLS).
Title: Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc
Author: Dara Marks
Genre: Writing Guide
Length: 327 pages
Read: Oct 22 – Nov 3, 2011
Summary: Best book I’ve read on character arcs.
I’ve been finishing up my fourth (and hopefully final) draft on my new book Untimed. In discussing the previous draft with one of my writer friends he recommended this book on writing. It’s aimed at screenwriters, but while the mediums are different, there are a lot of commonalities — stories are still stories.
The Inside Story deals with character and structure, and the relationship between these and theme. I’ve read a lot of books on writing in general and story structure in particular, and this is certainly the best on the subject of the transformational arc. It has certain overlapping information with Save the Cat (reviewed here) — but the style is radically different and more serious.
Inside Story focuses very clearly and with no bullshit on the basics of film structure. The A Story forms the external plot, the B story the internal challenge of the protagonist (usually hindered by a fatal flaw in opposition of the story theme) and the C story is contains the relationship challenges required to solve the internal conflicts, and then change enough to overcome the external ones. This book walks through each stage of the arc both in the abstract and specific, using three consistent film examples (Romancing the Stone, Lethal Weapon, and Ordinary People).
It’s clear after reading this that the deficit in many films is a lack of proper arc and thematic development. Sometimes even good (but not great) films forget this key component. Speed is a good example. It’s a well executed and watchable film, but it fails to really have any arc or theme. Unless you consider “Jack must stop the bomber” to be a theme. There’s no development. Jack stops the bomber by way of guts, determination, and cleverness — all of which he possesses at the start of the film. He really doesn’t have to learn any lesson. The film gets by by way of excellent execution and casting. Lethal Weapon, however, is a character driven (even if intense) action film. No one remembers the specifics of the drug dealer plot. They remember Mel Gibson and Danny Glover‘s characters. And they remember them because they actually have problems they learn to overcome (which incidentally also helps them stop the bad guys).
So how does all of this apply to my novel? Or so I asked myself as I read. Untimed does have a fairly clean three act structure. It does have a character who needs to change in order to overcome his antagonist. C story solves B story solves A story. But on the other hand, I didn’t conceive of the book originally with a clear “theme” in mind, the protagonists issues are not structurally in opposition to this theme (what theme I have, organically grown), and the intensity of suffering is muted by a sometimes light tone. Does this matter? Perhaps less in a novel. Even less in an action novel. Even less in a series book. It’s perhaps this neat and packaged arc that makes so many great films difficult to sequel. If the character has already changed, it’s hard to make him change again. All too often the studio/writers attempt to regress the protagonist in a sequel, to undo and then redo the conflicts that made the first film great (Die Hard 2!). The best sequels, films like Terminator 2 or Aliens, change up the formula and give the character something new to overcome. Still, it’s really really hard to do this three times. Can anyone even think of a stand alone movie where the third installment is great? And Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban doesn’t count, even if it is the best of the eight films.
In fact, this leads me to the interesting observation that not only do individual Harry Potter books have very weak arcs, but even the entire series doesn’t cover much emotional transformation. How is Harry (or Ron or Hermione) terribly different at the end of book 1? Even at book 7? I mean as people, not in terms of circumstance, which is only the A story. The answer is “not very different.” Yeah, they grow up a bit, but there is no fundamental quality that they gain which isn’t present in book 1. Still, these are good books. Some of them are even great books (like the first and third). So go figure.
