Zameen Goes Mobile

Zameen Goes Mobile

zameen.jpgZameen—the latest mobile unit offering up big, fresh Mediterranean/Middle Eastern hand foods—shown here with owner/entrepreneur Ed Watson. And this baby was designed expressly to cater to the food needs of UCSC students who tend to hang out around the Performing Arts parking lot. Music Students, digital arts students, painters, actors, serious students on their way to the library.

Lots of wraps, lots of roasted veggie, roasted meats, and hummus-intensive offerings, many featuring the housemade wood-fired pita bread that enfolds all those delicious flavors. Be smart and add a healthy dose of harissa or jalapeño sauce. Both are hot!

Hot! On site weekdays from 11:30 – 2:30.

Where Heaven Meets Hell – stunning new documentary

Where Heaven Meets Hell – stunning new documentary

friedlanderfilm.jpgFrom emerging filmmaker Sasha Friedlander comes that rare documentary film managing to combine cinematic savvy, memorable subjects, and jaw-dropping visuals. Where Heaven Meets Hell—sure to be the hot ticket at this year’s Pacific Rim Film Festival—follows the treacherous livelihoods of four young Indonesians who work the toxic terrain of sulfur mining. Six months of filming has produced an indelible document of hope and heartbreak.

For those familiar with documentary work that manages to merge photographic grandeur with social consciousness—Ed Burtynsky and Werner Herzog are two giants of this difficult screen genre—Friedlander’s sensitive filmmaking instincts (more…)

Crab Cake Epiphany

Since childhood I have been in search of the ultimate crab cake. Call it a harmless obsession. A mild culinary neurosis. Whatever. I dream of a crab cake so utterly packed with fresh, sweet lump crabmeat that only the barest trace of seasoning is required to hold it all together.

The search for the ultimate crab cake has led me deep into the Chesapeake region many times, and one unlikely Irish pub in Annapolis almost provided me with my dream crab cake. Almost.
The search is finally over. It ended overlooking the atmospheric marshes and waterways of Manahawkin New Jersey (why would I make this up?) at a rustic crab shack known as Mud City Crab House. Here was my heart’s desire. A crab cake so moist, so deeply satisfying, so full of lump crab meat as to be almost baroque in its perfection. The surrounding nautical atmosphere, from weathered ship’s lanterns to faded wainscotting set exactly the right tone.

If you’re even remotely close to the Atlantic City region of the Jersey shore, stop by Mud City Crab House and understand what divine crab is all about.

The Master – film review

The Master – film review

masterduo.jpgWith the face of a gaunt, young Richard Burton by way of Neal Cassady, Paul Newman, and Montgomery Clift—Joaquin Phoenix sails beyond mere Oscar contention in The Master, and into an electrified circle of hell. The latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson—who has mined existential murk aplenty in There Will Be Blood and Magnolia this magic realist variation on the master-slave theme offers up its uneven insights in whopping 65mm, with cinematography by Romanian magician Mihai Malaimare.

It is a war of masculine wills, between WW II veteran and über loser Freddie Quell (Phoenix) and oleoginous cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who meet as improbably as they part. Without revealing the interconnective tissue, let’s just say that Quell stows away on Dodd’s ship one night, a ship that is sailing through the Golden Gate toward a fundraising tour of the East Coast. Quell is such a lush that he mixes dangerous alcoholic cocktails out of anything handy, including kerosene and other toxic ingredients. Dodd takes to the cocktails, and also to Quell—for reasons that only a psychiatrist well-versed in Nietzsche could grasp. (more…)