Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 50

Doma Kitchen started serving eastern European food in a tiny converted house with only outdoor seating on a small, triangle-shaped lot in Redondo Beach across one street from Whole Foods and Rite-Aid and the other from a psychic reader. They closed to look for a new location – I forget whether the owner of the lot had already decided to redevelop it or if they just wanted more space – and did the occasional pop-up event in the meantime.

In 2015, the restaurant found a space in a storefront next to a movie theater at the end of Manhattan Village mall. At the time I posted this on Yelp:

It was great. The lamb stroganoff and kasha with bratwurst were both different takes from what you usually find and very good. There’s a good variety on the kids’ menu too.

The look of the place is a lot different from the old Redondo Beach location. It’s more trendy than homey, but that goes along with the bigger kitchen and menu, so it’s hard to complain. (It’s also a lot quieter when dining outside than it was when they were right next to a major street.)

It wasn’t long before the mall decided to raze the building and put in a parking structure. They moved to Marina Del Rey in 2017, opening in a strip mall connected to a grocery store. I can’t remember if I ever got around to visiting that location, though I used to visit a Japanese restaurant in the same strip mall with coworkers from time to time. Sadly, it closed permanently on the last day of 2019.

Seeing Ragtime on stage is a vastly different experience from listening to it, and not just because it’s live theater. There’s so much context, so many connections, so much subtext that you don’t get from the songs alone. It’s very much a go-home-and-hug-your-kids kind of show.

I’ve been a fan of the music ever since we did a few songs from it in a revue back in college, but I’d never actually seen it until this month, when I caught 3D Theatricals’ production in Redondo Beach.

It’s a big show — forty-six people on stage, according to the director — and they turned in a great performance. The vocal standout, I thought, was the actress playing Mother. The actor playing Coalhouse had a very different voice than the one on the album, but he had physical presence and was able to really convey both his optimism in act one and his rage in act two. The character needs both to work.

Speaking of differences between the production and the cast album, I should note: when you just have the highlights, Father comes off as just kind of clueless. When you have the full songs and the book, he’s a bit of an obstinate jerk.

I found myself struck by the layers of historical interpretation: It’s a modern production of a 15-year-old adaptation of a 40-year-old novel about life in America 100 years ago. And we’re still dealing with the same problems: Institutionalized racism and sexism, exploitation of the working poor, conflict over how to handle immigration. It really hit at the moment when authorities kill a young African-American because they think (wrongly) that she has a gun. You can argue that any historical fiction is as much about the present day as it is about the period it’s set in, and maybe it’s a matter of each era distilling the common themes from the older work, but it was telling (and disheartening) how topical the story still is.

I love this place. They have a great selection of science fiction/fantasy books (I assume the mystery selection is good as well, but since I don’t read mysteries I can’t really judge it), knowledgeable staff that can find or recommend things for you, plus author readings, movie nights, and other events. They get involved with offsite events like book festivals and science fiction/comic conventions as well. They usually get authors to sign a few extra books to sell later. I’ve bought several signed first editions here.

While the Redondo Beach location was open (it closed in 2014), it was my first stop for books in the genres they carry, and a must-visit stop when gift shopping for readers. The San Diego location is still around.

I’ve been using Pocket lately to offload “Hey, this looks interesting” articles from times when I really should be doing something else to times when I have, well, time.

• It syncs a copy of the article to each mobile device, which means I can see something in the morning, save it to Pocket, then read it on my tablet at lunch.
• Feedly talks to it easily. I’ve even linked it up with IFTTT so that tapping “Save for Later” on the tablet will add an article to Pocket.
• Speaking of IFTTT, I’ve also set it up so that saving an article as a favorite in Pocket also adds it to Delicious.
• The Android app will accept shares even if there’s no network connection, then sync up when it’s online. That means I can look over a newsletter in Gmail at lunch, save the links that look interesting, and archive the email. Then I can read the article at work or at home…or the next time I’m out somewhere, after it’s synced.

TODO (2025): Update this with the way it turned into a recommendation engine.

Speech Oddities

I’ve also started using the text-to-speech feature to listen to articles in the car while driving to and from work. The voice is fairly decent despite the usual flat tones and lack of natural rhythms, but there are a few oddities that take getting used to.

• # is always read as “hash.” This makes it really odd for comics articles, which frequently talk about issue numbers. “Batman Hash 123” just sounds wrong.
• Italics are…always…emphasis, and presented by…pausing…rather than changing tone. This makes it…awkward…for anything involving lots of titles.
• It parses words, rather than using a dictionary, and can’t always figure out whether initials should be read individually or pronounced as a word. This usually works fine, but occasionally leads to phrases like “tah-kay-down notice,” (takedown) “link-uh-din” (who knew LinkedIn rhymed with Vicodin?) or “pohs terminal” (POS as in Point-Of-Sale) On the other hand, it figured out “I-triple-E,” so I imagine it’s got a dictionary for special cases.

In the 1980s, Little Golden Books released a set of “Little Golden Book Land” books bringing back popular characters like the shy little kitten, the poky little Puppy, Scuffy the tugboat, etc. and putting them all together, apparently as tie-ins to an animated TV special.

As thin as its story was, at least “The Shy Little Kitten” had a positive message for shy children: It’s OK if you’re not as rambunctious and social as everyone else, because you can go off and do interesting things on your own, then come back to the company of others when you’re ready to handle it.

There’s a little bit more story in this book, but the message?

1. If you’re shy, there’s something wrong with you.
2. You’ll never have any fun.
3. It’s your own fault.
4. You should change yourself to be just like everyone else.

It’s toxic, whether it’s reinforcing shy kids’ own doubts about their self-worth or reinforcing other kids’ tendency to look down on them (now with extra “It’s your own fault” ammunition).

(And while the target three-year-old audience probably won’t mind, the book also suffers from the same problems as the rest of the “Little Golden Book Land” series: Background characters show up for no other reason than to have them show up, and descriptions are turned into names. We never learn the kitten’s name, but I don’t think it’s “Shy Little Kitten.”)

I hate destroying books, but I’m seriously tempted to toss this one in the recycle bin. Putting it in the donation box would be doing a disservice to whoever picks it up.