Just next door to Fanny is Blue Stove, a bright and airy bakery run by a friend of a friend (a lovely slave to the stove named Rachel) offering an array of home baked pies in unique and classic flavors like pecan (with an excellent sweet cream topping), cherry, key lime, and blackberry mousse. Just like Fanny, it's situation in a slightly less traveled section of Williamsburg makes it feel more like a secret spot frequented by in-the-know locals rather than a passing trend.

There's no static menu, you're limited to ordering only what has sparked the baker's fancy, but I can promise (now having sampled three little pies, which was the perfect amount for a four guest dinner party) that everything is absolutely top notch. Before the bakery moved in to this adorable space with its a peekaboo pantry, black and white tile floors, beautifully aged pressed tin, and homemade welcome sign, the baker would take orders and deliver pies to those with a sweet tooth for fresh baked goods, building up a quite a reputation among those who prefer their pies without a lot of artificial junk.

We loved the pies we grabbed to go, but there's an array of large tables should you prefer your sweet to stay with a cup of coffee or tea.

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Posted on March 23, 2009

Just what does 4.7 births per second look like? Or 200 stars born a second? And how crazy is the amount of food (per ton) produced every second? so_many_a_second is a neat little visualizer that works as a compelling time-waster. And if you've grown bored of the statistics shown, create your own. The site was inspired by artist Chris Jordan who said this in his artist's statement:

Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences.

I discovered this simple visual aid on previous Brix Pick VSL.

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Posted on March 16, 2009

I recommended Back Forty awhile back for their impressive New Year's Eve menu and since then it's become a favorite destination for my friends. Recently it was the site of a very well deserved lazy Sunday group brunch. Fresh donuts with icing like Pillsbury's orange rolls, pork jowl nuggets, spice-dipped feta, and poached eggs over creamy cheese grits and mushrooms.. yes, it was great, but since I hate to repeat restaurant picks, Back Forty is making my list this week for their VooDoo Root Beer.

It's an amazing, spiced cold weather drink made from Chelsea Stout beer, that's dark as molasses fortified with dark rum that's been spiced for days. My friends tried to make a version at home, they recommend using a darker stout than Guinness and plan to infuse their rum for with cloves and vanilla a couple days beforehand.

If all that seems like too much hassle, just stop by the long wooden bar and order yourself one or two. But do it quick, Back Forty changes up their menus often and it might not stick around forever.

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Posted on March 16, 2009

It's hard for me to imagine what seeing the new Watchmen movie might be like for someone who's unfamiliar with beardo Alan Moore's celebrated, world-changing comic book. As he's said himself, Watchmen was never intended to be adapted for the screen; the structure is just so Byzantine and there's so much alternate reality era-hopping action and dense supplementary material that, as my mom said (who saw the movie without having read the book), the experience can be very, very overwhelming. But for those of us who have read it, the film works as sort of an accompaniment, an abbreviated reminder of why we liked the graphic novel so much in the first place.

Watching the film un-spool, those of use who love the book can only base the success of the movie upon a mental check list of what they got right (keeping Dr. Manhattan nude, for one), what they got wrong (the miscast Malin Ackerman sounding like a ditz), what they kept (to my shock, the Comedian's heinous act in a bar at the close of the Vietnam war), and what they omitted (the octopus thing – which I actually think is okay). It's impossible to separate the movie from the source material, but I've come to the conclusion that they pretty much did the best they could within the confines of a three hour, mega-budget studio movie – particularly when you consider that previous productions (which nearly got off the ground) intended to move the story to the present day and replace the Cold War backdrop with George W. Bush era terrorism.

As you might have read, the adaptation that finally made it to the screen is extremely loyal to the comic. The opening credit sequence is a fantastic montage of an alternate history that fills in some of the back story for the uninitiated, setting up the Minutemen and imagining an America where costumed adventurers really do exist, but are as flawed – if not more so – than the rest of us; a central theme made abundantly clear as the film plays on.

Next comes the first of many literally hard hitting fight scenes between a mysterious dark figure and the now grizzled Comedian (who is played to perfection by Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Other commendable casting choices include, surprisingly, Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, an actor who I've only found believable as a god-like unfeeling naked blue phenomenon and the voice of credit cards.

Patrick Wilson is fine as Nite Owl, though still not as middle-aged and soft as I imagined; Carla Gugino is great as a former pin up/crime fighter who eats up her hard boiled lines like a pro. But it's Bad News Bear Jackie Earle Haley who stands out the most, delivering spectacularly creepy gravel-voiced monologues (“Beneath me, this awful city, it screams like an abattoir full of retarded children. New York… The dusk reeks of fornication and bad consciences”) that put Christian Bale's Batman to shame. His freckled cheeks shake with anger and insanity and he gets all the good lines. When Rorschach's on screen, the movie is at its best: pure, albeit graphically violent, cinematic fun – or at least as fun as a movie that's message is that humans are destined to slaughter themselves and the only way to temporarily halt the self destruction is through deceptively crafted holocausts can be.

On the opposite end of the acting spectrum, every time Malin Ackerman was on screen, I cringed. She delivers her lines as if she has no idea what the words mean, and while she's a dead ringer for Laurie Jupiter in that wig (minus about fifteen years) she lacks the grit. We're denied the chain smoking, faded ex-crime fighter wryly working her way out of a stale long-term relationship and instead presented with someone who'd make an unconvincing entrainment news correspondent. And she doesn't even smoke those crazy cigarettes! The producers managed to keep in shots of penises, major full frontal sex scenes, a man's arms sawn off by a power tool, and an insane skull-shattering cleaver attack — but don't worry all you morons who took your little kids (and believe me there were tons of 2 to 11 year olds in the audience with us), while your impressionable offspring will go home with fodder for years of nightmares and lingering, soul destroying questions ('Who is Richard Nixon?' being the least of them), at least they won't think that women smoking cigarettes are glamorous.

In the end, I have the same issues with the film that I did the book; I never cared for the Mars scenes -– maybe just because I couldn't get my head around that crazy clock-like flying spiked palace thing, and the ending relies too much on exposition to whittle down the sprawling plot that it's just a bit of a let down. At the same time, I'm impressed they kept the ending (which is a downer, to say the least) intact. Heroes are supposed to save humanity, but here they act as self righteous mass murders (or complicit impotents) enacting some kind of cynical social engineering conceived to save us from ourselves. I thought it was surely too bleak a message to put on the silver screen, but there it was.

People were gearing up to dislike this movie from the get go, critics either hate it because it's too close to the book or balk that it's not faithful enough. Personally, I was pretty impressed and although the book could only properly be adapted in the form of a British mini-series made in the 90s (I'm referencing you, Neverwhere), for a big Hollywood movie, this is as close as we're going to get?Alan Moore, forgive me.

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Posted on March 16, 2009

Since our good friend Mike introduced us to early 80's oddity Thundarr the Barbarian, Jim and I have been bingeing on the show like a couple of college freshman. With its wildly inconsistently scaled animation and far out and often non sensical concepts, it's easy to assume that Thundarr were a cheapy Japanese show, but it in fact it comes from Ruby-Spears, the American production team behind some Space Ghost writing and Scooby Doo Where Are You?, as well as the Q*Bert cartoon that I vaguely remember.

When I try to imagine the creative duo I see a pair of men reclining in the Hollywood hills, drinking scotch in the afternoon (pretty much exactly like Dudley Moore would have, if he had had a song-writing partner in 10 — which is exactly how I envision every creative duo from the 70's and 80's) but, according to their official site, they more closely resemble twelve-year-olds with balls for chins and giant brains.

But to continue to indulge my own imagination, I see Ruby and Spears hanging out on shag carpets in front of a yarn-art strewn wood paneled wall punctuated by a huge picture window that affords a splendid view of the naked women sunbathing next door as they hash out crazy ideas like: an evil wizard finds a experimental miniaturized city that was shrunken in 1994 by Harvard scientists, a city called the City of Thieves, which the evil wizard will only agree to enlarge if the residents will help him enslave all mankind which, of course, being a city of thieves, they agree to (City of Evil).

Or how about Mindok, a floating green brain that unfreezes a group of ancient scientists in order to create a robot body to house his brain. “If you refuse”, he screeches, “I won't protect you, not even from me!” (Mindok the Mind Menace)

Or how about a post apocalyptic Atlanta run by corrupt lawmen, actual pig-men, who are secretly servicing a tiny blue wizard with a Prince Valiant haircut and a very odd pelvic strut. (Trial by Terror)

Or a bunch of cultists who kidnap the residents of an ancient landlocked cruise ship (the community's elder sports and admiral's hat) in order to make sacrifices to longevity-bestowing vapors (Raiders of the Abyss).

Even the show's premise seems wildly absurd, despite the fact that's it's just a mash up the most popular concepts the producers swiped from Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian. This is a transcription of the introductory narration:

The year: 1994. From out of space comes a runaway planet, hurtling between the Earth and the Moon, unleashing cosmic destruction! Man's civilization is cast in ruin!
Two thousand years later, Earth is reborn…
A strange new world rises from the old: a world of savagery, super science, and sorcery. But one man bursts his bonds to fight for justice! With his companions Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel, he pits his strength, his courage, and his fabulous Sun Sword against the forces of evil.
He is Thundarr, the Barbarian!

The idea of super science alone is flabbergasting, but Thundarr's companions are equally stunning. Ookla is a Mok – and as we find out in one episode, the tribe of the Moks (who are a blatant rip off-off Wookies) are hairy beast-men who horde gold for no purpose (except to bait pirates into attempts at stealing it) and live in Carribean-like shacks cobbled together with millennia old relics like Jaws and Oreo cookies advertisements.

Princess Ariel is a sometimes vulnerable woman whose feelings gets hurt when Thundarr refuses to admit she's pretty (he's kind of a jerk, but we'll tackle that next) but she is far, far more powerful than the titular character — when she can be bothered. She's a really skilled wizard who can create and control tornadoes, turn objects to dust and reflect magic spells, but most of the time she waits around for Thundarr to hack at things with his fabulous Sun Sword for a while before she even lifts a finger.

She's also way more educated than he is, and she's constantly explaining what a train, car, or animal is (functioning cars and trains have miraculously lasted two thousand years) and sometimes, much to her frustration, she has to explain even more complex concepts. “Baa-ter-eee, what is “bat-er-eee?””, “Spaaace?? What is spaace?” are typical of the questions Thundarr will frequently pose.

Aside from being a moron, Thundarr also follows in the great 1980s children's entertainment tradition of kind of jerky heroes. In Thundercats, this snippy attitude is explained away by the fact that Lion-O is a child in a man's body. Here, Thundarr is short with people just because. I mean hey, he is a barbarian.

You can enjoy this forgotten bit of fun on Boomerang, which has no commercials and some great interstitials showcasing vintage toys. Soon, you too will be using Thundarr's go-to expletive, Demon Dogs!

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Posted on March 16, 2009