Author: Matthew Groff

  • The Chef Show (Sort’a Review)

    I don’t actually like writing reviews of show. (Though I did it for Trotsky on Netflix, and somehow got a bumper crop of readers.) I never feel that I get down to the real reason why I like a particular show, but when I have a dialogue or conversation, I feel like I do much better. Either way, I don’t do it often, but here we go again.

    I started watching The Chef Show with Jon Favreau and Roy Choi, and it is presented like a companion piece to the movie Chef that came out in 2014. Though the movie was a little weak on plot, it sure made up for it with the passion its characters had for the food they made. It reminded me of Big Night, and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, as both of those movies were infused with an infectious love of not just food, but the joy of preparing food.

    Which gets us to The Chef Show, which isn’t like a normal cooking show. What is being presented isn’t for me to learn how to cook anything. It’s more like I’m being shown the joy of preparation and being around other chefs. The one detraction I have is that it does have a Food Network/reality show feel to it, like “would you believe that we happen to run into…” ya-da, ya-da. (Like Jeffery just “happens” to be walking by Ina’s kitchen when she is finishing making a meal.) We all know it’s staged.

    The best parts are just Favreau and Choi working together in the kitchen. There is a feeling of friendship between the two of them, and also a teacher/student relationship. Which is fun to watch because Favreau is an A-Lister in Hollywood and has more money than all of us, and doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to, and there he is being politely yet firmly being chided by Choi on his knife skills, and Favreau takes it with a smile. It’s fun to watch, but more than that, it is enjoyable to see the joy in the hard work of preparing food.

  • Debate

    That happened last night. I watched 10 Democratic candidates, not really debate, just gave well-rehearsed sound bites a try for two hours.

    Yes, I am being very cynical about it.

    There is still a part of me that feels like this is too early for us to be talking about who the next President will be. The 2020 election should start in 2020. Having this being in 2019 just perpetuates the issue of the industrial complex of unending campaigning.

    But being cynical, I know that this system will not change. Money and politics have been locked together from the beginning.

    Yet, as I watched the 10 talk last night, it didn’t make me feel optimistic. Even if one of the 20 does defeat Trump, my fear is the actions of the next Republican who wins. The way I see it, it has been a slow descent for conservatives from Nixon to Trump. Each conservative has been a little worse. From Reagan’s welfare queen, to Trump’s everything awful that comes out of his mouth, and all the crap in between.  The next Republican will just try to dismantle whatever the Democrat did.

    This is the cycle we are in.

    I think the real problem, honestly, is that modern Conservatism, that came out of the 50’s and early 60’s is nothing but a reaction to liberal policies. Where are the conservative policies that move the county forward, other than cut taxes and regulations?

    The real debate is, Democratic ideas vs Stopping Democratic Ideas.

  • The Finder of Lost Things

    My kid asked me the other day what my super powers were. I said always being one step ahead.

    She didn’t find that funny.

    – I can fly and climb walls, – was her answer.

    Valid, I will give her that, though over-done.

    I have spent a day or two, on and off, thinking about this question, and I think what I want to do is find all the things that have been lost. What a power that would be!

    I could find the Ark of the Covenant, and all those car keys!

    I could discover lost languages, and all that lost time!

    Dates that went nowhere and timeshare presentations!

    All that lost money I would find!

    Lost connections, and lost loves!

    And while I’m on this, where are the people with super powers that are just lazy about life. You know, the guy who can create dimension portals, and all they use that for is making it quicker to get a beer from the fridge. Or the person with laser vision that only uses it to heat up food.

    Just an idea.

  • Habits

    I am trying to break my old habits, and see if I can create some new ones.

    The kid is the person who is indirectly influencing me to do this reexamination. I am concerned that I am not engaging enough with my kid to try and avoid screen time. (For most people screen time refers to phones and computers, but here I want to include the tv as well.) Right now, I say that we are doing about two hours a day. I think that is a pretty good number, but something keeps poking at me in the back of my head, so I think that number is too high.

    When I think back to my childhood, the tv was always on, and I turned out fine.

    Right?

    What I remember is watching tv in the morning when I got up, most likely about a half hour. Went to school and was home by 3pm, and that was when Jeopardy was on. But I would say that I was home for about an hour watching tv and snacking before I went outside to play. Parents were home by about 5:30, and they would watch the news, about an hour. Dinner time, and then we would watch about another 3 hours of tv. So, I think I watched about 4.5 hours of tv a day growing up.

    So why do I feel guilty about our two hours for the kid?

  • Too Long

    I have been away far too long from this. The new job happened, and then we all got into the swing of things when it comes to living in California. It has been a learning curve.

    The worst part is that I have completely let myself fall into old and bad habits. There is no working out, and I have noticed that, though NYC was a grind, car culture has made me lazy. I drive everywhere, and I don’t move. At least NYC meant that I had to walk everywhere, and that meant on most days I got my 10,000 steps in.

    It’s as if two different and competing ideas are in my head right now.

    First, there is the part of me that feels like with all these changes, I have lost my stability, and everything feels like it’s on the edge of spinning out of control. (This is not actually true, but it is the feeling that I have, since my life of the past 12 years has changed. And as I co-worker said to me, people don’t deal with change well at all.) I don’t know what my new stability is, or how to create it, so in the end, it feels like nothing is really getting accomplished.

    The other side is that I keep trying to force my new CA life to behave like my NYC life. The best example I can give is that in NYC, once I got home, I never went back out. Such as, I tried to schedule my life around the idea of being out (Leave for work, then rehearsal, then drinks with friends, then dinner, then home and done,) for as long as possible, and when I got home at the end of the day, my day was over. Here, not unlike when I was in TX, I can come and go from event to home, to event to home, but in my head, it’s like once I get home, I can’t leave again… Which is silly, but that was the way I lived for 12 years.

    Anyway, the point here is that I have trying to get out of old habits, make new and healthier ones, and find a way to live a new way, with new possibilities. It’s not as easy as I thought it would be.