There has been some sort of epic progress at Intelligentsia in recent years – beginning with Geoff Watts’s first trip to origin sometime earlier this decade and culminating (so far) in Mike Phillips’s win at this year’s USBC. Ten years ago – and I was there – Intelligentsia was a cute neighborhood coffee bar that had just moved its roasting operations offsite, had comfy couches and a fireplace, and served the Starbucks drinks but better and for less money. The baristas were quite obviously too cool to talk to. I spent weekend afternoons there drinking a small French Press and reading Jack Kerouac novels. At home, I would read alt.coffee. One day, I told myself, I was going to work as a barista at Intelligentsia. Well, check that childhood dream off the list.

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Yes. That’s right, I went ahead and bought a Leica from eBay. And as it happens, selling all my digital equipment. It was brought on by these two posts on The Online Photographer, and so I plumped for a double-stroke M3 (with some peeling vulcanite but otherwise in sound condition) and a newish Zeiss ZM 50mm f/2 Planar. It’s a normal lens, an old optical formula with new multicoatings, which is all I ever wanted out of a lens anyway. I haven’t really seen what sort of look I’ll get out of it, but so far I really like how it feels in my hand.

I feel like I haven’t grown all that much as a photographer since I started shooting digital, and I feel like that’s a real problem. Maybe I’m about as good a photographer as I’ll ever get, and this is giant waste of money (I can always sell off my Leica like I’m selling off my digital, but the whole project isn’t anything near free). I think I’m at least a “very good” photographer, but I could be an excellent photographer if I put some serious work into it.

It doesn’t bother me that my camera is “hard”. Not one bit. But after a raft of Linux distributions I couldn’t get to behave just the way I wanted them to, I settled on Slackware. I did it on a laptop, no less, so should already know that it’s not the sort of thing to bother me. My next photography project will be dump all of this silly small format and go for a proper 4×10 outfit. Actually, the whole point is that it’s going to be hard.

But why an M3? Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank shot with an M3, you know. Did I really drink the Leica coolaid? In a sense, yes. But let me run through the reasoning some. My first thought about the exercise was that shooting film instead of digital will help me to visualize photographs without the help of a rear screen. Black and white would help me think in terms of line and shape, the true soul of a good photograph. Ok, then why not a Contax G2 with a 45 Planar then? Well, kind of the whole point of the exercise is that I’m not dependent on the camera to do anything for me.

An M3 is perfect for that. It doesn’t even include a light meter. My light meter is literally a list of shutter speeds and light conditions on a piece of graph paper taped to the back of the camera.

Honestly, though, a big part of the reason is that this is my last chance at being young. Law school won’t be over until I’m past thirty, and then I have a career to worry about, so no more time to play with antique cameras. I’m running out of chances to do it.

And you know what? I’m totally in love with the camera. It feels just right in my hands – compact but heavy. The viewfinder is gorgeous, and I look with both eyes open and see the framelines superimposed over my normal vision. And the shutter is soooo crisp. I can’t wait to get images back.

1. Tuna tartare, wonton chips aïoli microparsley,
2. Duck ham “sashimi”, melon, micro shiso
3. Wild mushroom, sunflower sprouts, 5 spice tofu
4. 24 hour (en sous vide) beef short ribs, mango bbq sauce on brioche, potato, chives
5. Gorgonzola dolce ice cream, frais de bois
6. Tomato
7. Nantucket bay scallops, walnut poached
8. Duck leg confit potstickers, cucumber
9. Warm blueberry soup, crème fraîhe sorbet, hazelnut
10. Chocolate pots de crème.

Yes, only ten courses this time. But this time I won’t be cooking way over my head out of Thomas Keller coffeetable books.

UPDATED::: Tentatively scheduled for 1 August.

(If you don’t live in Chicago, but want to come, I will definitely make room for you)

Really, this post could just as well be called “photography before my Leica.” These photographs don’t really make all that much sense set next to each other, 10 is kind of arbitrary, and there are a few old film photos that may be better than a few of these. Well, the best 10 on my Flickr, anyway.

Here

Why just now? Leica, what Leica? An explanation is forthcoming.

Because they review each others books! Not, as this piece suggests (near the end). If they never had anything mean to say, then we’d call it The New York Praise of Each Others’ Books. In mean, the paper has a history of bruising confrontations between heavyweight authors, most notably Edmund Wilson-Vladimir Nabokov. But it’s still each others’ books. That’s what happens when you get real authors to write book reviews instead of, say, me.

As a Review of Each Others Books, it’s not so bad. Now if it only wasn’t so blasted New Yorky. (How’d I know you were going to say that? –Ed.)

The day of my LSAT was absurdly hot, and that Chicago summer muggy, so it’s time to write one of these again. Nothing philosophically heavy, but no cotton candy either. This year, I’m going for books that really evoke a sense of place well.

Walker Percy, The Moveigoer
Fredrick Barthelme, Waveland (yes, so two for the Gulf Coast)
Aleksandar Hemon, Love and Obstacles (Chicago)
E. St. J. Mandel Last Night in Montreal (which I am going to register for “Brooklyn”)

And not just because the author sent me a very nice card to thank me for my review. Written with a fountain pen and addressed to my work.

It’s a Tom Stoppard (he of Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead and Jumpers and Arcadia) play, and directed by Chris Newell (he of Court Theater, who directed that Hamlet I kept going to again and again) so you already know it’s kind of a heady, tightly plotted, tightly acted play. That Chris Newell brings a Court Theater sort of minimalist set is no bad thing, especially compared to the overwrought use of physical machinery to drive home the point in Desire Under the Elms earlier this season. By all rights, this is more a Court Theater production than a Goodman production, but since you can’t exactly have the Chicago premier of a new Stoppard play in an intimate little venue in an out of the way neighborhood (why not?) it may as well have been at Goodman.

The play itself is nothing if not a display of Tom Stoppard’s wit. There is constant bantering on, an onslaught of verbal repartee, as always. But it is also a play about Communism in Czechoslovakia, something that must sit close to Stoppard’s heart. The play follows Jan, a Czech philosopher, who at the beginning of the play is in London studying Marx with a Cambridge philosopher the apty named Max. He is a complete fool (and no doubt an easy tool), and as expected, Stoppard gives him – nor any of the other Communists – any quarter.

However, what is most interesting about the play is not the relationship between Rock ‘n’ Roll and Coummunism (there is a good case to be made that Rock, blue jeans, and Marlboros were what brought down Coummunism) nor between art and politics (though the treatment there is quite subtle as well) but the lives as lived in Max’s family. Not a little of it has to do with the playing of Mary Beth Fishher, who plays Max’s wife the classics professor, and then his daughter as the years move on. Max proves no less the fool in dealing with his wife’s breast cancer than he does with Communism behind the Iron Curtain, never realizing how his theoretical ideals fail to match up with the reality around him until it hits him in the head, and then weakly relinquishing his ideals but always only for the moment. Change the scene, and there he is again storming on about how his ideals have been betrayed by everybody else. How the theory still works, minor details aside. The women always know what’s going on, that there is a life to be lived – world historical importance be damned. I won’t reveal any more about their lives (go see the play yourself) except to say that the doubling of the mother/daughter parts works spectacularly well.

In face, the whole of the play works spectacularly well. Everyone in the audience was grumbling about missing all the references, but really, that’s half the fun of it, knowing that you’re in just a bit too deep. It’s a can’t miss. Go see it.

Wow. Not a lot of content lately. Well, I have an excuse. I’ve been busy with studying for the LSAT for the last month, and there’s a lot of content on its way. I promise.

In fact, starting now, my latest book review is over at The Front Table on Emily St. John Mandel’s Last Night in Montreal.

And I just found out about Allison Hemler who baristas at Joe and blogs about food. Plus how could I not link a blog entitled Not Enough Spoons?

Admittedly, I was skeptical about what a Star Trek prequel, especially one directed by JJ Abrams. Start Trek, to my mind was the very last bastion of optimism about science and diplomacy bringing peace not only to the Earth, but to the galaxy. And JJ Abrams is, after all, the high priest of postmodernist TV. But it’s the new Star Trek movie, so how could I not go see it? Plus, Dana Stevens gave it a thumbs up, so I went.

But prequels invariably suck, and this movie was no exception. What was worst about it is that it played out like an extended episode of Lost, where the major plot device is time travel and the confusion of characters between the personal timeline and the supposed multiple universal timelines. There were even polar bears! Alien polar bears, but nevertheless, polar bears. I half expected a cliffhanger, a week to go by, and then a voice proclaiming “previously… on Star Trek,” but alas no. Sure, time travel is a constant feature of Star Trek, and Abram’s version of how time travel works is more akin to Star Trek than to, say, Back to the Future, but there was no mistaking Abrams’s hand in the movie.

Moreover, the action sequences make the movie distinctly un Star Trek. The roving camera, the constant, relentless cutting between cameras (in the opening battle scene, I counted an average of 4 seconds per cut) which may well be how action movies are made nowadays (and the new Battlestar Galactaca is shot that way as well, which also gets critical raves) but I’m really not into it. It’s not fitting for Star Trek, which to me has always been much more about telling a story than fighter-jet jocks in space.

What’s most disturbing about the movie is that there is no spirit of negotiation in it at all. The universe is decidedly zero-sum, there are no win-win situations, and with Nero being clearly driven only by his spite, zero sum is the best case scenario. Lose-lose is decidedly possible, and the only way to prevent that is with a healthy dose of shooting. Not to mention strong-arm executive decision-making.

I think the most instructive comparison to the movie would be the episodes in The Next Generation where Yar is killed, and then returns thanks to a time-travel plot device. The first episode is about creative empathic problem solving when confronted with a creature that refuses to be reasoned with due to an earlier traumatic episode (Nero much?) and the second uses time travel as a way to open up a discussion on the possibility of free will and the meaning of a life. Heavy stuff for a summer blockbuster.

Which, I guess is what the movie is meant to be. It’s an action thriller, not a Star Trek movie.

You know what? I’ve had fucking enough of Zach Greinke throwing at the heads of White Sox players and (just barely) missing. You know he does it on purpose. I’ve really had it. Sure, it means he’s a “gamer” or whatever. But you know what you do to gamers? You play them right back. So next time he throws way to close to Q! or Alexei, or whatever, I want Ozzie to put in Lance Broadway (or whoever replacement level long reliever) to throw at the heads of some Royals. Or for A.J. to charge the mound and tackle Greinke to the ground. Or whatever.

Zach Greinke is the Rajon Rondo of the AL Central. He just fucking mugs you, and you can’t let him get away with it. Make him pay.