The Brisket Debacle

I cooked my first brisket on Friday - well, I started it Friday, I guess it was technically Saturday when I finished.

Needing dinner for 8-10 people on Saturday night, it seemed like an opportune time to cook my first brisket on the pellet grill. The recipe I used call for seasoning the big cut of beef overnight in the fridge, smoking it for 4-5 hours and then wrapping it in aluminum foil and cooking for another 4-5. 

Now it was pretty chilly at 7:30 Friday morning when I threw the brisket on the grill, and being from Costco it was a healthy size (17 lbs), so I figured we would be looking at the long side of that timeline for sure. 

But when it didn't reach the foil-wrapping temperature of 160 degrees until 4:30, a whopping nine hours in, I knew I was stepping into the twilight zone.

After swadding the brisket in heavy duty foil, I had to dash back to Costco to buy more wood pellets, for fear of running out if it took another nine hours to finish cooking - but it turns out that was not going to be the biggest issue of the night. 

I watched the temperature slowly creep up toward the goal of 203° as Audrey and I watched an episode of Shogun, after which she went to bed. Sometime later I looked up from my loong-running game of REd Dead Redmption 2 to peer at my wireless thermometer and noticed two disturbing things: 1) the brisket was only at 186°, but even more disturbingly, 2) it had been 188° when I had checked previously...

I dashed outside and sure enough, an error code flashed on the grill's panel. Due to either underheating or overheating, it had shut off, and the lid was cool to the touch. I rushed inside for a cookie sheet and threw my foil-wrapped, beefy treasure into the oven, then covered the grill to protect it from the snow shower that was starting.

At 10:30 I turned the oven up to  315 from 275 and at 11:30, the thermometer finally beeped to let me know the target temperature had at last been reached.

But now it had to rest for an hour before slicing and storing it...

So at half past midnight, I started slicing the brisket into manageable chunks and stashing it in a couple of our largest Tupperware containers. Most of the flavour in a brisket comes from the thick line of fat in the middle of it, and the grease from that meant that some serious kitchen cleaning was needed before I eventually crawled into bed at close to two a.m.

The grease got me to thinking though; the Traeger is highly resistant to flare-ups since it uses indirect heat and has a very efficient grease management system...but with so large a cut, is it possible a small grease fire had shut the grill down on me?

Thankfully, depsite being largely a salvage job, the brisket itself was very tasty and still fairly tender (I mean, why not, it took 16 hours to cook!) and everyone enjoyed the sandwiches we had for supper Saturday night.

But today I went to clean out the grill, and sure enough, in addition to a gooey Grease Management System and lipid stalagmites that had blossomed on my foil-wrapped drip tray, there was a deposit of fat in the very bottom of the grill next to where the auger delivers fuel to the firebox.

That is more than enough fat to fuel a fire of sufficient size to trigger a shutdown (turning off the fan to deprive the fire of oxygen), but not big enough to cause any damage as far as I can tell.

It took a screwdriver, a shop vac, a bunch of concentrated Dawn, an eighth of a roll of shop towels and about an hour to get everything cleaned up and reset, but with the mystery resolved, the Traeger is ready to be put back into action.

And the amazing thing is, I can't wait for my next opportunity to test myself against the brisket again!

Numanoids, et al

 It has been my best March ever in terms of live music. Today we saw the U of A Concert Band show "The Old Sod" (featuring Rhondda, the daughter of our dear friends Shari and Dave, on flute) at the Winspear, wherein I learned that Dutch composer John deMeij wrote a Lord of the Rings-themed symphony.

Last week Audrey and I saw Alan Doyle (formerly of Great Big Sea) who is an exuberant and charismatic performer, and also deeply enjoyed the banter and dark yet often funny ballads from his opener, Adam Baldwin.

The week before that, the Rare Hipster was nice enough to take me along to Midway Music Hall to see '90s industrial music legends Ministry along with Front Line Assembly and Gary Numan, and I was a little surprised that the act I enjoyed the most was Gary Numan.

I mean, of course as a fan of new wave and electronic music I love "Cars", his signature tune, as well as a couple others from his early days and time in Tubeway Army like "Are Friends Electric" and "Down In the Park." I had come across his 2017 album "Savage (Songs for a Broken World)" and liked a couple of tracks from it, but since the show Mar 6, I have been streaming a fair bit of his material.

I was unsure how what I thought of as Numan's electro-pop sound would fit in with the hard-edge music of FLA and Ministry, but the man is nothing if not adaptable. He came out rocking hard, with the synth tones still present but masked a bit by a mix that really gave center stage to his two guitarists. 

It was kind of a short set for a man with 21 solo albums to his name (that is a new album almost every two years on average!), favouring tracks from his last few releases (Savage in particular) but still making room to fit a guitar-forward "Cars" into the middle for an appreciative crowd.

When the album featuring that track, "The Pleasure Principle" came out in 1979, most critics piled on pretty relentlessly, mocking the synth tones he pushed through guitar effects pedals, calling his music pretentious and inhuman. He was even accused of taking jobs away from "proper" musicians.

Obviously he hung in there, and today he is not only recognized as a pioneer in electronic music, but maintaining a cult following for his recent releases, which feature not only catchy hooks and powerful, dramatic rhythms but also soulful and insightful lyrics.

My Name is Ruin (probably my current fave)

My name is ruin, my name is vengeance

My name is no-one, and no-one is calling

My name is ruin, my name is heartbreak

My name is lonely, my sorrows a darkness

My name is ruin, my name is evil

My name's a war song, I'll sing you a new war

My name is ruin, my name is broken

My name is shameless, I'll tear your world open

When the World Comes Apart

And when the sun fell down

And when the moon failed to rise

And when the world came apart

Where were you? Were you with me?

When my light burns out

And when my fire is cold

And when my breath is the wind

Where will you be / I will find you

Dear God?

The End of Things (Live)

Everything I work for

Everything I long for is always just too far

Everything I hope for never comes to me

Everything I bleed for burns a scar on me

Everything I fight for leaves a bitter taste

Everything I cry for laughs into my face

Everything I scream for barely knows my name

Everything I'd die for will die just the same

In here

With me

Dude has led an interesting life (flying aerobatics, racing formula cars)  and I am glad he is still putting out music, and that I had the opportunity to see him perform live. All 91 minutes of his 2018 concert film Live at Brixton Academy can be streamed on YouTube and I have watched it twice now, but I will leap at a chance to hear him in person again.

Oscars 2024 - Never Kenough

In retrospect, cramming the Oscars, a Risk game that ran late and a Beer Fest into the same weekend that the clocks sprang forward was probably ill-advised.

The telecast even started an hour earlier, making it challenging to get the 8+ pounds of roasted pork to the potluck table before Jimmy Kimmel started his opening monologue (5 minutes late, as it turns out!). I think Kimmelo is a great host, a bit sharper in tone than Billy Crystal, but smart, funny, appreciative and willing to poke. His acknowledgment that the people who snubbed Greta Gerwig's director nomination for Barbie were in the room that evening was a great example, while his description of Robert Downey Jr's 'highest career moment' felt offside to many. 

In my mind, acknowledging RDJ's troubled past, chequered with substance abuse, arrests and rehab stints, was a great reminder of how far this actor has come - this was his third nomination, after all, and his win later on was a great validation for everyone at the time who said, "this guy is amazing and will go places...if he can get his act together." After all, Downey made sure to thank his wife Susan, and described himself at the start of their relationship as a snarling rescue animal that she loved into life.

It was a night for great speeches actually, with acknowledgements of the ongoing tragedies in Gaza and Ukraine and the importance of musical education, but also personal moments like RDJ's and Da'Vine Joy Randolph's. There are still some laundry lists of thanks, but many people took the time to say something genuinely appreciative or meaningful.

Snubs notwithstanding, I was generally happy with the awards themselves.

Oppenheimer winning Best Picture felt appropriate and Christopher Nolan finally garnering the Best Director award was a real treat which I hope gives him even more latitude in his future projects than he has had in the past. Poor Things, a movie I described as an R-rated Edward Scissorhands and which I enjoyed far more than I expected, took not only the costumes and production design gongs but a surprising Best Actress Oscar for Emma Stone.

And Barbie, which was hampered right out of the gate with snubs for Director, Best Actress, and Best Picture, and which really deserved more recognition for being such a bold and frankly educational film, at least won Best Original Song for Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” But Ryan Gosling’s amazing and electrifying performance of “I’m Just Ken” set a new high-water mark for performances of a musical nominee, starting the song from his seat in a hot pink tuxedo and cowboy before leading the cameraman onstage and joining five dozen dancers, co-writer and guitarist Mark Ronson, four of his fellow Kens from the film, Slash and Wolfgang Van Halen. After returning to the audience and handing the mic to his cast and crewmates to sing a verse or two, Gosling got the entire auditorium on its feet to belt out the chorus, with indoor fireworks capping off the entire thing.

In household entertainments, The Rare Hipster both ‘lost’ March of the Dead with 7 or 8 drinks taken (5 for me, and his last one was a bit dubious due to a huge slate of names appearing at the end) but won with 15 correct guesses for awards! My nephew Mark won the raffle for a free night at the movies.

And with the earlier start, most people were on their way back home before 9 pm! But the rest of us stayed on to chat and go to bed late, which is why this blog post came in late – apologies!

Balancing Act(s) - Dune Part Two, Reviewed

(Spoiler-free, I think? I mean, this book is pretty old...)

Movie adaptations of literary classics (and I certainly include Frank Herbert's 1965 masterpiece Dune in that category) are a decidedly tricky business for everyone involved, from the producers trying to replicate success from one medium to another, to writers choosing what parts of the canon to keep, remove or change; directors and production designers trying to re-depict vistas, characters and technology on the screen; and fans of the original material and previous adaptations holding their breath to see how the latest interpretation has turned out - to their eyes, at least.

Director and co-writer Denis Villeneuve's 2021 Dune adapted the first half or so of the novel, and was acclaimed by many critics and fans (myself included) despite being viewed as an unfinished work. It is hard to believe that such an epic depiction of family, politics, betrayal and war serves primarily to set the stage for an even more titanic tale of clashing cultures, revenge, prophecy, propaganda and planetary deliverance, and which is ten minutes longer to boot.

So does Villeneuve deliver the goods with his conclusion, Dune Part Two? Does he stick the landing? Well, yes and no.

It is a marvelous adaptation in the truest sense of the word; one artist rearranging elements of another's work to create a new version in a different medium. The broad strokes remain largely unchanged, depicting the struggles of Paul Atreides (Timotheé Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) as they look for succor amongst the hardened and suspicious desert Fremen. Paul strives to balance his compulsion to avenge his murdered father with his desire to avoid a galactic holy war in his name.

Meanwhile, Fremen leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem) believes more and more in the possibility that young Paul is the mahdi, the deliverer promised by prophecy but also contrived by the manipulations of the Bene Gesserit religious order. Jessica leans into this belief (and the possibility that Paul is also fulfilling the BG prophecy of the kwisatz haderach) while Paul actively avoids it, and his eventual Fremen love interest Chani (Zendaya) openly disputes it.

It's been a while since I read the novel but I don't recall the external tension being this pronounced, with so many disbelievers among the Fremen of Sietch Tabr, with the underground shelters of the southern hemisphere being depicted as more fundamentalist ("[Stilgar] is from the south. Could you not hear his accent?" made me laugh.) And Chani's perspective and resistance to manipulation is a welcome addition, giving her character far more depth than in the novel.

In fact, all the female characters enjoy more nuance and agency in this movie than in the novel; Chani, Jessica, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), and even Paul's sister (Anya Taylor-Joy) who, unlike the book, remains both unborn and unnamed by the end of this version. 

Villeneuve has his work cut out for him, balancing the agendas for not only all these characters but more, as well as the various factions they represent. But he not only does so with a clarity the 1984 film and 2000 mini-series don't match, he still finds appropriate moments for action scenes that blend brilliant spectacle and scale with plot momentum and character dynamism. The first Fremen attack on a Harkonnen spice harvester is a feast for the senses, with drama and a real sense of consequence.

He also continues to display a singular and masterful visionary eye, depicting the introductory gladiator battle of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (a hairless and nearly unrecognizably cruel Austin Butler) not just in black and white (in order to differentiate the sands of the Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime from those of Arrakis), but in infra-red, under a black sun. Amazing!

Dune Part Two is a great story with wonderful performances by an amazing cast, but it would almost be worth seeing in IMAX even with the sound off just for the amazing visuals. And not just the cinematography by Greig Fraser (The Batman, Rogue One) either, although his sunsets, desert vistas and transitions between Paul's visions are at times breathtaking. The costumes and production design are artful and ambitious in a way that far too few films, even science-fiction, are too timid to attempt.

Fans of previous adaptations (including Jodorowsky's unmade version) may see nods and homages to them in this film as well; I saw traces of H.R. Giger in the cityscapes of Harkonnen-occupied Arrakeen and the costumes and architecture of Giedi Prime, and David Lynch's art deco flourishes elsewhere.

And the sound! IMAX increases the bass and resonance as much as the screen size, bringing even more impact to the distorted vocals of the Spacers Guild (presumably?), unfamiliar languages, the thud of descending harvesters and the roar of cresting sandworms. 

I am thrilled beyond words at the notion that more of Herbert's lexicon (Fedaykin, crysknife; Bene Gesserit, etc.) will be getting an even larger footprint in popular culture. What future filmmakers are seeing this film, glimpsing this unique world, and becoming inspired to create their own works in the future?

Now, there will inevitably be those who will say that Villeneuve and his co-writer Jon Spaihts took liberties with the canon and that they were excessive or unneeded, but I will not be one of them. Every departure seemed to make for a better movie in my regard, a film that felt expansive and epic yet personal and tightly spooled despite being the better part of three hours long (2:46). So why can't I be more fulsome in my assessment of Part Two? 

For much the same reason I can't say The Empire Strikes Back is a better film than Star Wars. Without giving too much away, despite ending the movie at virtually the same point as the novel, the sense of resolution is muted, and the movie wisely avoids the temptation to tie a triumphal ribbon around the whole affair. Instead, arrows are pointed to the future, a natural point to pause (but not really finish) the story is reached, and Villeneuve, clearly a fan of the novel's sequels, has already committed to a third film incorporating Herbert's sequel Dune Messiah. 

A sequel has not yet been greenlit by Warner Bros., but this is not surprising; Part Two was not confirmed until 4 days after the release of Dune, so perhaps the same will hold true for the next film? I certainly hope so and will buy a ticket (in IMAX again) as soon as I am able.

In the meantime, though, how can you judge whether or not someone has stuck the landing when they are so evidently eager and unfinished?