Adapted slightly from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home. Very tasty; still good when lukewarm or reheated (making them excellent for potlucks and/or leftover snacking).

1 1/2 cups finely chopped onion
2 garlic cloves, minced or pressed
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
4 cups grated peeled sweet potato
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp chili powder
2 tsp ground cumin
generous pinch of cayenne
salt and ground black pepper to taste
1 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese

8 tortillas (8- to 10-inch)
tomato salsa
sour cream

Saute the onions and garlic in the vegetable oil until the onions are translucent. Add the grated sweet potatoes, oregano, chili powder, cumin, and cayenne and cook, covered, stirring frequently to prevent sticking, until the potato is tender. Moosewood thought this would take 10 minutes; in my experience, it’s more like an hour. Maybe one is intended to crank the heat up much higher than I’m usually willing to (especially if I’m trying to make something else at the same time and can’t stir constantly). Or maybe they’re settling for less-smooth filling than I prefer.

Add salt and pepper to taste and remove the filling from the heat. Spread one-eighth of the filling and 2 tablespoons of the cheese on each tortilla, keeping the mixture all one one half of the tortilla, and never less than an inch from the edge. Fold the empty half of the tortilla over and cook a few minutes per side in an oiled skillet. Cut each quesadilla into thirds with kitchen scissors and serve immediately, topped with salsa and sour cream.

You can add goat cheese for extra richness, but you still need the cheddar, to melt and keep the quesadilla closed.

I tried more mediocre nut-encrusted fish recipes before finding this one than I have with any other category of dish I set out to make something from. (Admittedly, that number isn’t too large; I think there were 2 or 3 flops.) With a few changes in the main ingredients, this Epicurious recipe was fantastic. I like neither horseradish nor parsley, normally, but here they just… work. I’m totally making this for Thanksgiving.

4 6-ounce sea bass fillets [we used haddock]
1 cup fresh breadcrumbs made from crustless French bread [we used store-bought crumbs]
3/4 cup walnuts (about 3 ounces) [we used cashews]
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) unsalted butter, melted
2 tablespoons prepared horseradish
1 1/2 tablespoons whole grain Dijon mustard
1/4 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese (about 3/4 ounce)
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
4 teaspoons olive oil

3/4 cup dry white wine
3 tablespoons chopped shallot
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup (1 stick) chilled unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter 13 x 9 x 2-inch baking pan. Arrange fillets in prepared pan. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Mix breadcrumbs and walnuts cashews in processor. Using on/off turns, process until nuts are finely chopped. [Maybe because store-bought bread crumbs are so tiny, I prefer the texture you get by crushing the nuts in a Ziploc with a rolling pin. This makes the topping recognizably nutty rather than just a coarse paste.] Transfer to bowl. Mix in butter, horseradish and mustard. Stir in cheese and parsley. Gently press crumb mixture onto fillets. Drizzle 1 teaspoon olive oil over each. [I couldn't get this to go on in a remotely even fashion-- my drizzling technique is poor-- and I'm not sure what purpose it serves. Also note that if you use haddock, it'll probably be more like 2 tsp per fillet.] Bake until fillets are cooked through, about 15 minutes.

Boil wine, shallot and lemon juice in medium saucepan over high heat until reduced to 1/4 cup, about 6 minutes. [Unlike most recipe-site estimates of reduction time, this was about right!] Reduce heat to low; add butter, 1 piece at a time, whisking until melted before adding more. [Once I was impatient and just dropped the whole stick in to melt. It seemed okay.] Remove pan from heat. Stir in dill. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Preheat broiler. Broil fish until crust is golden, watching closely to avoid burning, about 2 minutes. [In my broiler, the top always burns a little and the thinnest bits on the side are undercooked. It's still delicious. I was surprised how many of the crumbs you can blacken without making it taste bad.] Transfer to plates. Serve fish with sauce.

Fully four versions of author James Twitchell appear in Adcult USA: he is alternately a snob and a cultural democrat, and in both guises he will be sometimes supercilious, sometimes warm. A little less of Twitchell altogether amid the scholarship and maybe the contradiction would not need resolving… oh well.

Mean populist Twitchell hates art critics, which seems to have led him to ignore throughout the book that apprehending art (or ads– same thing, says Adcult) has any experiential element. Yes, sometimes people like ads in and of themselves; the Superbowl comes up several times to prove this point. Still, a Busta Rhymes fan who puts “Pass The Courvoisier” on repeat is never treated differently in Twitchell’s analysis from a driver heading down a road that he does not realize will be particularly dense with billboards.

Twitchell’s refrain is that whatever advertising does, it is something that we do to ourselves, not that “they” do to “us”. What he really means is that advertising is blameless. Of what? Doesn’t matter. Criticizing ad agencies makes you a self-regarding aesthete who doesn’t know how the world works. Twitchell doesn’t deny that ads affect behavior; when he plays the friendly snob, he almost makes our tendency to fall for corporate creations like mouthwash or Christmas into an endearing and universal foible. This has been going on for a long time (the parallels between modern advertising culture and centuries-old religion are one of the book’s more interesting parts, perpetually running deeper than the reader expects), so why not stop worrying and learn to love it?

Well, for one thing, it’s untrue that social conservatism is morally neutral just by virtue of the fact that it only reinforces what’s already there. Suppose Twitchell does convince us that any social evil advertising supposedly causes will vanish from advertising only after it vanishes from the rest of our culture– advertising still strengthens the grip of that evil. Twitchell seems to suggest that it’s fatuous to blame advertisers for appealling to our worser natures because “they” are us, creating parallels with, say, an individual who frequently regrets shopping sprees. (Who’s to say that the self doing the regretting takes priority over the self which decided to buy stuff in the first place? etc.) This just changes the language, though, not the debate; why is assigning blame to advertisers for the ads they issue an invalid way for the body politic to resolve its internal confusion over what “we” collectively want?

For another, Twitchell equivocates on the idea of desire. Ads are presumed less problematic if they work via desires the audience already has instead of inculcating new ones. Okay, but this is only plausible if a ‘desire’ is always specific enough to entail a particular action. You could argue that if somebody loves to eat McDonald’s french fries, an ad hoping to motivate them to go do that right now is barely coercion; you won’t get as far claiming that it’s okay to hawk exorbitant engagement rings on the sole ground that people already think love is neat.

I only got a few pages into Twitchell’s Carnival Culture before its “hey you kids, get off my lawn” approach to some of my favorite aspects of culture put me off. Adcult USA promised better, if only because I think Twitchell and I share the same basic aesthetic stance on most advertisements. All his perceptiveness, though, can’t substitute for certain failures of insight.

Frente - “The Destroyer”

This was the one good track on Shape, Frente’s 1996 follow-up to Labour Of Love. I believe that unlike its predecessor, this album’s songs didn’t have the benefit of many years accumulating and evolving on EPs and singles. This is one of those mistakes the music industry seems unable to keep from making over and over again. (For another example, the speed at which Lady Sovereign actually writes new material suggests that if her label makes her put out a second full album next year, it’ll be one song and 40 minutes of belching noises. But that doesn’t mean they won’t try.)

Frente trivia: They were actually the third group to cover “Bizarre Love Triangle” as an indiepop song with cute female vocals. They weren’t even the first in their country– Even As We Speak did a version in 1987. The middle one was by Devine & Statton, one of Alison Statton’s several post-Young Marble Giants projects.

Pro:
- More songs.
- Three-finger chords are now occasionally used.
- Training Mode lets you practice just the hard parts of songs.
- The levels are now divided into four regular songs and an ‘encore’, a fifth song you can only play once you’ve beaten the others. This adds a little drama.
- Two-player mode is now fun; you can play different parts (lead, rhythm, bass) and/or play at different difficulty levels.

Con:
- Almost nothing else has changed. This feels like an expansion pack, not a sequel.
- Freed by success (credibility? money?) to license the songs they wanted, the makers used a bunch of grunge and hair metal, killing most of the variety that made the original Guitar Hero fun to play even if you didn’t like the music. The first game’s hardest songs included some very fast strumming, some hard chord-jumping, some solos, and some finger-twisting blues noodling; Guitar Hero II only really cares about speed. And doing scales. When I realized how much of the game consisted of playing virtual scales as fast as possible, I was reminded of all those alarmists warning that video games would train a generation to enjoy drudge work as long as they got their blinky lights in return.
- It’s too easy. Playing at the highest difficulty, I got the top rating (5 stars) on about half the songs my first time through. Yeah, I’m pretty good at video games, but you know what? I’m not that good. More to the point, anyone else who played all the way through the first game is starting out about as good as I am. I got 100% on one of the bonus tracks the first time I played it. Come on.
- Within a given song, even if you like the song, even if you enjoy the particular skills being tested, the repetition can become mind-numbing. I’m currently stuck on the final boss, which happens to be far and away the dullest song in the game. And the longest, I think.

I have a lot less spare time for video games than I used to, so it may be for the best that this was fun for a few days but has very little chance of holding my interest longer than that, unless there’s a secret fifth difficulty level on which the game becomes a true challenge.

And yet: darn you, Harmonix! The original Guitar Hero, in addition to being entertaining, drew my attention to guitar parts in a way that I doubt anything non-interactive could have done; even now, I hear guitar-heavy music differently than I used to. Having once been irritated by the whole idea of a guitar solo (and being in a position where an inability to engage with whole segments of pop music actually makes me sad), I consider this awesome. Guitar Hero II, on the other hand, has only made me suspect that being a radio metal guitarist in the 80s was like having to play “Chopsticks” over and over again while somebody howled dopey things about girls into a microphone nearby.

Adam Schmitt - “Waiting To Shine” (mp3)

From that school of power-pop that places a premium on ‘clean’ production. During the chorus, the guitar notes cut in and out so sharply it almost feels like Mirwais Ahmadzai’s brilliant, choppy production on Madonna’s Music. Almost. The lyrics don’t mean anything, but that’s not the point either.

This sort of music has a whole cult out there on the internet, waiting for those darn kids to get tired of rap and listen to ‘real music’ again. But (maybe I’m off base here) it seems to me like the deal is not that listeners used to be more sedate and thus appreciate power-pop better– it’s that sensitive guys with guitars like Schmitt, or Matthew Sweet, or Tommy Keene, used to rock MORE than their modern counterparts.

(Trying to confirm or deny this theory, I just looked up John Mayer’s Wikipedia page, from which I learned that he has a Stevie Ray Vaughan tattoo and is a synaesthete.)

Ellen Willis died on Thursday. (Times obituary)

It’s easy for people who believe in the radicalizing power of freedom and pleasure to become self-centered; Willis was anything but. She was also the first writer to make me care about how the 60s were still relevant, and this without herself sounding stuck there. She’s had a bigger effect on my politics than any other writer.

Time to reread Beginning To See The Light, I guess, and think about the fan letter I never wrote.