MONDOmagazine

Developed by Firaxis
Published by Take-two Interactive

By Miles Baker

I once knew a guy who had scurvy. He wasn’t a pirate but probably often wished he was — just like the rest of us. He wasn’t trying to live like a pirate; he just ate really poorly. If he did — or still does — want to live the life a pirate, but would like not to sleep in terrible conditions and have his teeth fall out, I would suggest he play Sid Meier’s Pirates! The game takes you through every part of a pirate’s existence. You’ll plunder ships, fence captains, woo barmaids, attack ships, claim bounties, have bounties placed on you, face mutiny, and dance with governor’s daughters, among other things. The game is structured so that you can be any kind of a pirate you want: you can just trade with other nations, you can be a patriot by just attacking the Spanish or French, or you can attack everyone and piss off the world. You can also try to save your family that was sold into slavery, but you can also be a dick and let them rot while you keep banging the governor’s rather plain daughter.

All of this is extremely fun, but it shouldn’t be. I don’t mean that in a Grand Theft Auto “how can I do this to simulated people” kind of way, but in a “this game isn’t very good kind” of way. There is no aspect of this game that is well executed: the fencing system is easy, the dancing is a simple rhythm game, the trading isn’t refined, and the ship-to-ship battles are cumbersome and pointless. However, the combination of these crappy elements somehow creates one of the most fun and addictive gaming experiences I’ve had in years.

The game is charming in so many ways: the music, the gibberish the characters speak, your handsome protagonist, the cute animations he has, the fact that your date to the governor’s ball is “rather plain,” all of it. You look past all the bad in order to search for a better boat to raid, keeping your crew happy with frequent combat, and maybe getting around to rescuing your family and bringing the culprits of their abduction to pirate justice — also known as stabbing.

This game was originally released in 1988 for the PC and you can definitely tell, based on how the game doesn’t walk you through every little thing. They expect that you’ll actually read the instruction manual, something I haven’t done in years. The game just drops you on the deck of your ship and you’re out to a sea of possibilities. Ultimately, Pirates! is worth buying because you’ll never have the same gaming experience twice — exactly what you’d expect from a Sid Meier game.

Published by Square ENIX
Developed by Square ENIX

By Diana Poulsen

I was a little worried about Final Fantasy XII. I was dreading what they had done to my baby. She grew up with a specific battle system—there were rules, and there was order, what would become of her now? Would she become a button-mashing monster like her dope-smoking cousin Kingdom Hearts? After getting the game, I slipped in the disk and held my breath.

As is turns out, the battle system is not unlike the old one. Just now you can choose who to fight and who not to. You still select the action and a monster and wait for your turn to fight, but you can run around the monster in the meantime. I guess it looks pretty silly: you run around a monster like duck-duck-goose, and then clobber it.

This is the first Final Fantasy where I have died multiple times within the first four hours (other than that pirate level in the original, goddamn pirates). Apparently, the T. Rex in the first level isn’t a monster that a 4th or even 7th level character can take on. I should have guessed when it started eating the other monsters, but no, I had to channel my inner King Kong and get my ass kicked time after time, unlike Kong.

Speaking of levelling, you can’t level up like a crazy person in FFXII. I’m one of those gamers that likes to level up a lot in the first hour to make the rest of the game easy. I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work well in FFXII. The game is too challenging for that. The licence system does help, though, for getting your characters powerful enough. You can unlock attributes to make your level 14 character powerful, but you have to buy licences to fully use the weapons and armour you buy. If you don’t want a variety of abilities, the licences will allow you to avoid that. For awhile I had everyone equipped with spears since they happened to be the best weapon. Now, just for interest sake, I have everyone with a different type of weapon.

My biggest complaint is that there is no journal. So if you don’t play for awhile you might forget who certain people are and why they are important, for example. Because FFXII is effectively a political drama, it would have been nice to have a journal to remember who the bad guy is, and where the fuck I am supposed to go? Kingdom Hearts II has one, why can’t Final Fantasy?

There is a lot of walking, like Lord of the Rings amount of walking, despite the fact that later you can use chocobos, teleport spheres, and an airship. Thankfully, the side missions are dispersed throughout the game. When you don’t feel like going on the story path you can do a couple of side missions and then move on. The biggest is Hunts, where you hunt monsters for a bounty. Of course, you don’t really make a lot of money. “Money” really just takes the form of whatever loot the monsters drop, so if you don’t fight a lot you won’t able to buy anything good. Once again this is the first FF where I don’t have about 500,000 gil. Hell, I get excited when I have 40,000 gil.

Overall, Final Fantasy XII is one of the best of the series: it’s challenging, the story is engaging and the majority of the characters do grow on you. Oh, of course the graphics

By Elisha Denburg

This dinner only took me about 15 minutes, start to finish. Simple and delicious!

Ingredients:

2 8-oz NY striploin steaks
2 whole sprigs fresh rosemary
1 can lentils (pre-cooked)
1/2 zucchini
1/2 red pepper
2 green onions
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
1 tsp ground coriander
1/4 cup dry vermouth or white wine
juice of 1 lemon
extra virgin olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepperPreparation and cooking:

Rub steaks with some pepper and set aside.

Heat olive oil in a pan until quite hot, but not smoking, and fry rosemary until crispy. Remove rosemary and reserve on a paper towel.

Sear steaks in same oil, a couple minutes per side, depending on how thick they are and how much you like them done. Don’t overcook them past “pink in the centre” or the flavour will be totally gone. Remove steaks from pan and let rest on a plate or wire rack.

Dice your red pepper and zucchini and sauté in the same oil the steaks were in for about 30 seconds. Add vermouth, lemon juice, mustard, tomato paste, coriander, salt and pepper. Stir well and cook for another 30 seconds or so until a nice saucy consistency forms.

Add lentils and green onions, and almost immediately turn off the heat. You only want these to heat through, since the lentils are already soft and the green onions should be a bit crunchy and retain their sharp flavour. Slice steak (or leave whole if you like) and serve over top of lentils and vegetables. Remove crispy rosemary leaves from stems and garnish the plate with them. Serves 2. Enjoy!

By Elisha Denburg

This is so easy, and you only have to wash one pot!

Added bonus: This recipe actually involves putting the lime in the coconut.

Ingredients:
1 cup couscous
1 large boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces
½ zucchini, diced
½ red pepper, diced
½ carrot, diced
1 tbsp tomato paste
2 tbsp curry powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp dried chili flakes (optional)
1 cup coconut milk OR chicken or vegetable stock OR water
juice of 1 lime
lots of fresh chopped coriander leaves
2 green onion, sliced
A splash of oil (olive or canola)
Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking:
Heat the oil in a medium-large saucepan (one that has a lid). Add the curry powder, cinnamon, chili flakes and carrots, and cook for a few minutes or until very fragrant.

Add the coconut milk and, yes, the lime juice too. Be the first to make any joke at this point. Stir in the tomato paste, salt and pepper, cover and bring it to a boil.

Add the chicken pieces, cover for a few minutes or until the chicken is cooked through.

Add the zucchini and pepper, cover again and cook for one minute.

Stir in the couscous and immediately remove the pan from heat, cover and let it stand 5 minutes, or until all the liquid has been absorbed.

Stir in the coriander and green onion. Serve immediately! This is not a laughing matter.

By Elisha Denburg

Here’s a recipe that’s quick, delicious, and appeals directly to that part of us that loves to make mud pies:

540 mL can chick peas, drained and rinsed
2 tbsp tahina (sesame butter)
juice of 2-3 lemons
1/3 cup olive oil
1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped
1 tsp paprika
a good pinch of coarse salt
lots of freshly ground black pepper (to taste)

Tahina (or tahini) is a paste just like natural peanut or almond butter, but made from sesame seeds. You can find it in specialty spice shops or Middle Eastern stores (Akram’s Shoppe in Kensington Market is a good one.) Since it’s all-natural, it separates itself, so be sure to mix it well before using it.

You can add other herbs or spices for your own variation like fresh coriander, ground cumin or some cayenne pepper to make it spicy. Make sure it has lots of flavour (the lemon juice, salt and pepper make all the difference), and never add water.

Place all ingredients except the olive oil in a food processor. Turn the machine on a strong setting and slowly pour in the oil as it’s all blending. Blend until very smooth. Direct any stray chunks back into the mix and blend again.

Bring this to a party and everyone will love you forever.

Changing hearts and minds with the phonetic alphabet for a life you never imagined.

By Daniel Taylor
Illustrations by Dara Gold

In this modern world of brittle mobile phone connections, strange accents and slurred words, a little clarification is often needed. Sometimes, spelling it out to someone just isn’t enough, because even the letters you’re saying aren’t at all clear to them, and you have to remove yourself yet another degree from what you were trying to say in the first place.

Enter the great clarifier of characters, the phonetic alphabet. Many people use given names (M like Mary, D like David, etc), others use the Greek alphabet (Beta, Gamma, etc).

Perhaps the most popular and widely-accepted set is the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which is extremely effective and a lot of fun to use. You can almost feel the air whiz of the bullets flying past your ear as you yell “Foxtrot! Echo! Tango! Alfa!” into the phone while ordering a pizza.

I have done quite a few phone service jobs in my day, and I’ve heard as many phonetic alphabets as I have complaints about cell phone rates. Everybody’s got one, and some of them are absolutely lousy, clearing nothing at all up.

“B as in Boy,” a woman said to me the other day, at which I wondered “Couldn’t that be a lot of things? Couldn’t the words be confused just as easily as the letters? B as in Boy? Or C as in Coy? Or T as in Toy? Or P as in Poi?”

Today, a man said “B as in bee” to me. I had to laugh to keep from crying.

To this end, I offer the phonetic alphabet that I have developed over several years in thankless, low-paying, demeaning, soul-crushing phone jobs. I use it in my professional life, my everyday wheelings and dealings, my prank phone calls, and it is the best there is.

Not only have I managed to suss out a set of infallible words, words that don’t sound like any other, I have also made a point of selecting words that are truly excellent in their own right. They aren’t just good words to distinguish postal codes and funnily-spelled foreign names, they’re just good words, words that I will never get tired of saying, that people will never get tired of hearing. These words that I say to complete strangers don’t just make me better understood, they make me happier.

And so, Gentle Reader: Here is a present that will ease your troubled life and warm your soggy heart. It is my life’s work. I give it to you because you are special, because I love you, because you are The One.

The Taylorian Phonetic Alphabet

Astroboy – An android made in the image of his creator’s dead son, but with rockets for feet. One of the great cornerstones of animation’s Golden Era, the 1980s, and a genuinely ghastly premise for a children’s show.

Balaclava – A toque-mask combination that is most often worn while snowmobiling or while carrying dollar-sign bags out of a bank.

Comatose – A sustained period of involuntary unconsciousness. Usually occurs after an event of extreme stress or injury, or when an actress on All My Children becomes greedy and demands a raise.

Dolphinarium – An aquarium exclusively for dolphins or porpoises. Allows for one of the great exclamations of our time, “To the Dolphinarium!”

Eucalyptus – Used in cough syrups and lip balms, and absolutely crucial in keeping koala bears, which are otherwise violent, grumpy, dangerous little buggers, in a state of adorable sedation.

Frankenstein Monster – I sometimes just use “F as in Frankenstein”, and sometimes go all out for “F as in Frankenberry”, but I find “F as in Frankenstein Monster” to be a delightful mix of effective and awkward.

Grappling Hook – Probably the only thing I have consistently asked for for Christmas every year since I was six but have never received.

Hang-Glider – A semi-cool form of transportation that becomes totally awesome when equipped with grappling hooks.

Intoxicating – Calvin Klein’s Escape and Jack Daniel’s Sour Mash, the converse pincers that I use to pluck women from a crowded bar like stuffed toys in a claw-grab arcade game: awkwardly and with frustrating, repeated failure and shouted swear words.

Jolly Roger – A no-contest winner for best flag ever, anywhere.

Kaleidoscope – Probably the only thing I have gotten every Christmas since I was six but have never asked for.

Lollipop Guildsman – An official member of the Lollipop Guild. I have never seen that movie and am now too old to watch it with any measure of enjoyment, and many people find this appalling and sad. Fuck’em.

Mastodon – The Cadillac of elephants, and at the top of my list of “When they finally get their shit together with cloning, I am totally going to eat a _________”.

Narcolepsy – A lot of fun to say and offers endless comedic scenarios, but actually a very grave medical condition with few viable cures.

Orwellian – Five years of University education in beautiful, unnecessary action. When someone had a postal code with an “O” in it I shivered a little with suppressed glee because in a minute I’d be able to show them that I am smarter than they are, even though they are the ones ordering the Chinese food and I’m the one entering things into a computer and hoping for an immediate, quick, unexpected, slightly-exotic death.

Penny-farthing – The old-time bikes with the big wheel, and another mode of transport that is improved dramatically by adding grappling hooks.

Quantum Leap – The show I am most afraid to admit I love, but am always surprisingly congratulated by others when I admit that I do.

Roundhouse Kick – By far the best of all the kicks.

Spider-man – I don’t love him as much as some do, but there will always be a place in my heart for a sarcastic geek who sometimes kind of abuses his powers for fun and profit.

Tomfoolery – A great word that is simultaneously well- and poorly-chosen. When my father would yell at my friends and I for breaking something or falling on something or falling on something and breaking it, his shouts of “Will you quit your god damned tomfoolery” would only incite further giggles from us, which, at the age of eight, are impossible to cease or even stifle, no matter how hard someone is hitting you.

Ukulele – Probably the best Christmas present I didn’t ask for but got anyway. Unlimited powers for quiet beauty and loud annoyance.

Vendetta – V used to be for Ventriloquist, but comic books change everything if you let them.

Winchester Rifle – Hands down, my weapon of choice for a zombie apocalypse or just swaggering around looking so fucking cool.

X-Ray Specs – When used in combination with grappling hooks, a penny-farthing and a Winchester rifle, people will make fun of you and then really, really wish that they hadn’t.

Yorkshire Pudding – The second-best thing about having roast beef for dinner.

Zeppelin – Another ridiculous mode of transportation, but strangely badass if painted the right colour.

There it is. If you stayed until the end, you now have at your disposal one of the greatest tools imaginable for making a shitty job a lot of fun. Use it wisely.

Scissor Sisters
at the Namba Hatch in Osaka, Japan
Monday, January 29th

By Andrew Nicholas McCann Smith

I couldn’t help but think that the Scissor Sisters got a little ahead of themselves in tackling a one-and-a-half-hour show, with no opening band, in a venue as awkward as the Namba Hatch (on the 3rd floor of a cylindrical building). The room itself looked like a space ship imagined by McDonald’s: with room for 350, it’s one of the larger mid-size venues in Osaka – but with the added capacity comes more responsibility, and the Scissor Sisters aren’t a responsible band. It would be great for housing an intimate show with a skilled major act, but not a still-growing group like the Sisters.

It is always embarrassing watching a band go through puberty. What is it about the temperamental performance, the jarring song structure, and the fumbling for identity that makes it so painful? I’m not sure if they’ve just lost their footing with the release of 2006’s Ta-dah, but the Scissor Sisters seemed to be going through this adjustment period in force.

The Scissor Sisters took stage at 7:30pm, and I was wowed at first: it felt just like a Vegas stage show! The curtains swung open and singer Jake Shears came out tap-dancing, in a pinstriped suit and gorgeous hair, with his long legs cutting across the stage. Singer Ana Matronic was stuffed into a dreadful blue superhero dress, while guitarist Del Marquis was in a tight bodysuit – all the rage in Japan two years ago. Their energy lasted through quite a few disco tunes, Bee-Gees knock-offs, and their amazing singles like “Take Your Mama Out.” With such an eclectic mix of fun numbers, even the Japanese were dancing.

But within a few songs, as the banter began, they became sweaty (boy, did Shears’ hair go sour) and the novelty of their theatrics wore off. Matronic gabbed our ears off about the sex trade in Japan, and Shears made a cheap shot at politics, introducing “Laura” by dedicating it to “the First Lady, that bitch, Laura Bush.”

The worst moment of the concert had to be a power ballad that sounded like it was stolen from David Bowie’s Transformer. Shears walked to the edge of the stage, stood over the audience, and began tracing his palm in the air. Were this a movie, and I a boy searching for meaning and identity, I would have placed my hand in the air and traced with him, from afar. This would have been revolutionary and I would have discovered who I truly was. Instead I found myself… bored. Essentially, that piece sunk the night. From there on out, the Elton John homages began to drag, they stopped playing disco, and the audience returned to stone.

Perhaps the flamboyancy of gay art was merely a growing pain, in the same way that raves were to electronic music. When a kitsch band like the Scissor Sisters can’t pull off their theatrical stunts, perhaps it’s a sign that gay art has evolved past being a mix-tape of queer influence and is finally able to innovate with sophistication, like Antony and the Johnsons and Xiu Xiu, instead of plain garishness.

Or perhaps the Scissor Sisters are still discovering hair growing in places it hadn’t before. (Wow, what a Carrie Bradshaw ending.)

Developed by Capcom
Published by Capcom

By Danielle Zacarias

Generally, I don’t mind hard games. However, I tend to run out of patience for games that feel like they were developed specifically to drive me so insane I would actually contemplate throwing my DS out the window. Megaman ZX for the DS is hard. Really hard. Even on the easy setting it is still kind of hard. Then again, a couple weeks ago, I was playing Megaman on the subway and a kid, after watching me play, asked to play and then made me look like an idiot. He was seven. So maybe it’s just me. Yet even though Megaman ZX often crosses the fine line between challenging and frustrating, it more than makes up for its more frustrating aspects by being a game well worth playing.

The story of the game revolves around two selectable characters, Vent, a boy, or Aile, a girl. Both work for a delivery company called Giro Express. One day they are attacked by evil robots known as Mavericks while transporting something called biometal. In the hubbub, the biometal fuses with your character and you become capable of morphing into Model X, which comes with blasters and the ability to dash and jump up things. So it’s kinda like taking Ecstasy. As the game progresses you acquire more biometals and the Model Xs get more interesting. There are five models and each one lets you do something a little different. One lets you glide, another comes with powerful fire blasters, and another works well underwater. The best model though is Model ZX which comes with both a blaster and a sword.

This Megaman isn’t markedly different from its predecessors on the Gameboy Advance, but that isn’t a bad thing. First, it means that if you’ve played the older versions of Megaman you’ll already be familiar with the environmental hazards that instantly kill you and how to deal with some of the bad guys. Second, it means there was no attempt to add on excessive gimmicky touch-screen features. The action on the top screen is so intense that a second screen competing for your attention would only complicate things.

All around, Megaman does play well. The visuals are good for a side scroller, as colours are vivid and some of the backgrounds are exquisitely rendered. The controls are comfortable, which is a must since you will be playing for extended periods of time. The music is so good that I found myself lingering in some levels just so I could keep listening. Save for the big and mini bosses, most enemies are not difficult and even easy and fun to deal with. Being able to talk to other characters in the game can often also help immerse you in the game by providing you with a lot of extra back story.

So far it all sounds good, right? Well, now for the reasons why Megaman ZX might drive you mad.

There are not nearly enough save points, the big and mini bosses have insane abilities, you have barely enough lives to get by, several environmental hazards are capable of killing you instantly (particularly on the normal setting), the map needs a helluva lot more detail and in order to get some special items, you often have to talk to people repeatedly. But all of this pales in comparison to the thing that drove me really nuts. Suppose you have three lives for a mission and you have three items that will give you health. Use them all up on one life and you will not have them for the remaining two lives. This is compounded by the fact that such health items (like apples, e-tanks and bread) are rare finds.

This basically means you will be playing missions over again many, many times. When fighting bosses, you will encounter moves that are all but impossible to avoid which take off an uncomfortable amount of health. If you want to play Megaman ZX through on normal, be prepared for hours of frustration and the paranoid feeling that Capcom made this game this hard to drive you insane. I suspect hardcore gamers might actually enjoy this aspect of the game, but anyone else out there just looking for a good game with a couple of intriguing challenges should play it through on easy so it’ll grow on you before it can frustrate you to the point of wanting to throw it out the window. Or give it to any seven-year-olds you know.

Bloc Party
A Weekend in the City
Vice Records, 2007

By Lonny Knapp

Why are so many sophomore albums disappointing?

Following up a critically acclaimed and commercially successful album like Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm is not an easy task. Considering that most bands take about ten years to compose the songs for their first record, bands often feel overwhelmed by time constraints when writing the follow-up. High expectations not only of themselves, but from the record company and fans, can often weigh down the creative process, stretching the relationships of band members to the breaking point. Pieces of the People We Love, The Rapture’s dismal follow-up to their stunning debut, Echoes, is a perfect example of a band experiencing a sophomore slump.

If the band is able to weather the storm, the result is often extraordinary. Take the cases of Led Zeppelin II, which finds the band at its guitar-riffing, drum-bashing, banshee-screaming, tight-pants-wearing pinnacle, and The Bends from Radiohead, which is quite possibly the finest-crafted pop record of all time. The pressure to deliver is intense, and Bloc Party are surely aware that people are listening.

A Weekend in the City, Bloc Party’s follow up to Silent Alarm, is a flawed but valiant effort. Enlisting the help of big-time producer Jacknife Lee (U2, Snow Patrol), Bloc Party created an album that is polished but not overproduced. Lee’s influence is prevalent throughout, but thankfully the studio trickery is, for the most part, used sparingly. That being said, those who were fans of the unprocessed production of Silent Alarm may well be turned off by the slickness of A Weekend in the City.

Opener “Song for Clay (Disappear Here)” begins with singer Kele Okereke crooning in a hoarse whisper that soon gives way to a falsetto melody, thankfully brief. The track builds and builds into an urgent, guitar-heavy number that is undoubtedly informed by the hundreds of arena shows the band have performed since last time around. The live experience has affected Bloc Party favourably, and this urgency is refreshing. Technically, they’ve matured, and drummer Matt Tong in particular seems to carry the band with both the subtlety and intensity of his playing.

The band has allowed themselves to experiment, adding textures and rhythms reminiscent of techno and house. “Hunting for Witches” begins with a digital collage of sound before receding to a fierce guitar riff. The “ear candy” is not always enjoyable, and often sounds as if it were added as an afterthought, maybe to liven up the record. The ominous Gregorian chanting on “The Prayer” can only be described as hokey, but by the time the infectious chorus hits, the listener forgives Okereke for his lack of judgment.

“Uniform” is a multi-textured and well-crafted pop song about conformity. The song begins mellow, but soon grows into a fist-pumping anthem, allowing guitarist Russell Lissack a rare guitar solo. “Kreuzberg”, the most beautifully crafted song on A Weekend in the City, finds Okereke at his most vulnerable. Personal, evocative, and reminiscent of U2, it is the track most likely to be adopted by radio and likely to win the band a legion of new fans.

The biggest draw to Bloc Party has always been Kele Okereke, whose earnestness and sincerity rivals that of Bono, but who in weaker moments, also harnesses the pretension of Morrisey. Unfortunately, he seems to share Morrisey’s sense of humour as well, and this lack of wit weighs down the album. [MONDO does not necessarily share the anti-Morrissey views of this writer. We love ya, Moz; keep bitchin’. – Ed.]

Inspired by Okereke’s interest in what he calls the living noise of a city, A Weekend in the City tries to capture every detail of life in a modern city from the ebullient to the mundane. For the throngs of nine-to-fivers, the boredom of office life and commuting gives way to late-night parties, illicit drug use, one-night stands, and early morning escapes on the weekend. But only Okereke can make it all sound so boring. Like visiting a pompous cousin attending art school in London, Bloc Party’s A Weekend in the City is at first exciting and illuminating, but soon becomes a dreadful bore. Come on, guys: lighten up!

A Tasty Dish

By Leo K. Moncel

I went on vacation with my father to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico several years ago. We’d had bad luck with Mexican food, going to a couple of nearly deserted high end places, eating food that was somewhat bland. We found a good Italian restaurant in the old town and, funnily enough, Italian food became our staple. But right at the end of the trip, we gambled with a cheap little Mexican restaurant, flooded out white by fluorescent lights.* On that night, I ate what is still one of the greatest meals I have ever had. This recipe is my reconstruction of that meal as close as I can ascertain through memory and culinary guesswork. It is filling, delicious and defiantly unsubtle. It may seem like a lot of steps, but it’s all easy stuff.

Serves 3
Prep time – about 40 minutes

Ingredients:

1 tbsp mazola oil
2 chicken thighs, skinless
1 green pepper
1 large onion
3/4 cup frozen corn
1/2 can of refried beans
150 grams of grated Monterey jack cheese (almost half a No Name package)
1-6 small jalapeño peppers
Some sour cream
12 small, soft corn tortillas**Preparation and cooking:

Get the oil going in a large frying pan. Get it hot to the point where it flows around silkily, but not so hot it leaps or smokes.

Turn the oven on to 300.

Start slicing the chicken thighs into narrow strips. Throw the chicken strips onto the pan. Cut the green pepper into narrow strips. Throw the pepper strips into the pan. Give things a good stir.

Cut the onion into narrow strips. Into the pan! This is about when the chicken should cease to be pinky.

This is a good time to put your tortillas stacked in the oven in a pyrex or ceramic dish with a lid on it.

Start grating the cheese. Go back and forth between grating the cheese and stirring the pan.

After about 4-5 minutes the onions should look ready to eat.

Here’s where you get that frozen corn and pour it into the frying pan. It’ll kinda kill the heat, but that’s okay. Stir the corn around until it loses its ice. Now really kill the heat. Pour the chicken and fried vegetables into an oven-safe dish.

Glop the refried beans in the dish. Stir around.

Put the grated cheese in, too. Stir again and then put it in the oven.

Use the time while the fajita stuffing is in the oven to dice up your jalapeños finely and put them on a little dish. You should probably set the table, too.

I also advise you to get your sister to make a garden salad now.

Wait about five or six minutes until the cheese is all melted, remove and stir again — you’re done.

Serving:

Serve the tortillas and fajita stuffing separately at the table.
People take their own tortillas and glop the stuffing on with a spoon.
You can sort of fold them up into a U-shape.
Garnish with as much diced jalapeño and sour cream as you deem responsible.

If there’s a salad, save it for after the fajitas. The fajitas as rich as they are delicious and are well serviced by a light follow-up.

Ancillary Notes:

* – Okay, not much of a gamble. It was in the hotel district of the second most touristy city in Mexico.

** – A note on corn tortillas. They taste better and have a superior texture to flour tortillas, but they’re a fucking nuisance. Most supermarkets don’t carry corn tortillas. When you do find them, they are typically smaller and dry out faster than their gummy cousins. For these reasons, I don’t blame you if you go for the easier option and buy flour tortillas. The most hardcore option is to make your own corn tortillas. Bless you if you do.

The Good German
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Warner Bros. Pictures, 2006

By Johanna Craig

There are two ways to bring a novel successfully to the screen. One method is to remain true to the novel, thus pleasing the fans of the book. Alternatively, filmmakers can go in a completely new direction in order to bring in new fans. The Good German, based on Joseph Kanon’s mystery novel of the same name, accomplishes neither of these goals.

Kanon’s novel is a portrait of a broken city. He portrays a place that has become a microcosm of conflict on both an individual and global scale. He grapples with the cost of survival in war, the question of accountability for the Holocaust, and the Allied powers’ imminent descent into the Cold War, by presenting the reader with characters who are struggling with each of these issues themselves. The mystery provides an intriguing storyline that gradually brings everything together and leaves the reader in a constant state of suspense. The result is an entertaining story, but more importantly, a rare perspective on the aftermath of war from the losing side.

In the film, the ageing but still studly George Clooney plays Jake Geismar, an American journalist who has come to post-WWII Berlin to report on the Potsdam Conference and to seek out Lena Brandt, his lover from before the war. Brandt, played by Cate Blanchett, had worked for Geismar and had been married to genius scientist Emil Brandt – who may or may not have had Nazi affiliations – but her husband was conveniently killed during the war (or was he?). Most likely in an effort to make her film character more interesting, and to compact the many original storylines, screenwriter Paul Attanasio melds two of the book’s characters into Blanchett’s Brandt. This completely changes the story’s ending, which would be fine if not for the fact that the screenplay still leaves the depths of the main characters largely unexplored.

One exception is Tobey Maguire’s short-lived Patrick Tully, who presents himself as a fascinating and horrifying mix between apple-cheeked all-American lad and brutal, sadistic soldier. Maguire proves to be the most interesting display of moral ambiguity in the entire movie. Overall, however, the weight of the moral and political struggles that made Kanon’s novel so intriguing is lost in translation to the big screen. Rather, these issues appear as more of an afterthought to the director’s stylistic choices.

What stylistic choices, you ask? Well, in an interesting venture, Soderbergh decided to film The Good German in the tradition of 40s style cinema, à la Casablanca. He does this to perfection, complete with an urgent score, courtesy of Thomas Newman; crescendos at every important discovery; side-wipe scene changes; and highlighting important pieces of paper to direct the audience’s attention. The colourless, shadowy atmosphere gives the movie an ominous, stereotypically historical feel (yes, World War II happened in black and white), and the sets and costumes are impeccable.

Unfortunately, all of this attention to aesthetic detail seems to have distracted the moviemakers from other, more important aspects of the film, like character development. As a result – as much as I was rooting for them – Clooney and Blanchett’s performances left me feeling utterly unmoved. The pace of the film moves too quickly to properly flesh out their roles, and when the most vital discovery about Blanchett’s character is finally revealed, the movie comes to an abrupt end.

On the bright side, The Good German makes for a good drinking game:

Every time Clooney flicks a cigarette into the street – drink once,

Every time Clooney gets the crap beaten out of him – drink twice,

Every time there’s a side wipe – drink thrice,

If someone says the ending seems like it was stolen from Casablanca (or maybe it’s an homage…?) – drink up!

Giving English a friendly push!By Sam Linton

Okay! Wow! Well, it seems that my last article in this series was particularly well received, in circles extending even slightly beyond my immediate network of family and friends. Yes, apparently cuntwaste is the word we all needed. Neat!

But now, I admit, I’m worried. If I want to keep “Lexipoeia” going as a semi-regular column, does that mean I have to come up with that type of brilliance all the time? Can I do that? What if I try and fail? What if I try, succeed, and then everyone hates me for being a prat? If only there was some way, someone I could pass the buck to on this thorny issue, some type of… readership, perhaps?

Of course! The readers! Why, I’ll bet they (you) have loads of brilliant ideas on the future of the language. Maybe they’ve (you’ve) come up with them in conversation, on a blog, in a poem (do not send me your poetry), but they’d (again, you’d) like a semi-professional critique on their (I’m going to stop with these parenthetical asides; I’m sure you/they get the idea) new word or turn of phrase.

So here’s the deal: You come up with the word/turn of phrase you want popularized, I’ll give the helpful, linguophilic commentary and maybe suggest a few tweaks. I’m not saying that my opinion is of a higher value than yours, but hey, I am the one writing the lexicographical column here, plus extra exposure for your new contribution to the language can’t hurt, right? Just send an email to samlinton (at) mondomagazine.net with “Lexipoeia” in the subject line. Be sure to spell it right, because I won’t read misspelled emails. Being on the internet is not an excuse to ignore the rules, Dammitt!

Of course, the printing of reader submissions will still be subservient to my own ideas for language; it is, after all, my column. Which brings me to this week’s mini-topic of “coining the phrase”. We live in a global age (arguably, we have lived in a “global age” since at least 1492, but that’s not what I mean here), where it is no longer enough to have something recognized in the immediate circle of one’s friends.

With the advent of the internet in all our lives, it has never been so abundantly clear that you, the people you know, and everyone that you have ever communicated with, make up only a tiny fraction of the world’s population. Hell, you only make up a tiny fraction of the english-speaking population of the world. The chances of you becoming the next Alexander Pope (a man whose words are oft quoted) are slim, at best (unless you’re really good at writing, in which case I apologize, Mr. Vonnegut).

However, if you don’t mind the anonymity, the internet can be a useful tool for bandying things about. Just ask the guy who coined the term “pwned”. Well, you can’t, because no one knows who (s)he is, but you get the idea. The point is that on the internet, no amount of self-promotion for your own word is excessive, because no one knows who you are. You can’t accuse someone anonymous of shameless egotism, can you? The multiplicity of the internet is also crucial to the dissemination of bon mots; where “pwned” started out in multiplayer games (I’m betting Starcraft), it’s catchiness quickly lent its use to online forums, political discourse, and, of course, Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia: another great source for the introduction of a phrase, as it has a kind of quasi-legitimation built right in!

I’ll leave the discourses on how wiki works to Stephen Colbert (smarter AND funnier than me), but for today’s lexicographer on the go, it is another great resource to be exploited. My “in language” addition to their article on the onion has been up for at least the past six months. Does this make “dicing one’s onion” a legitimate phrase. Yes, it does. If it weren’t, it would have been deleted long ago [Readers: please don’t delete my onion addendum].

Anyway, my point is this: the internet seems to work as a fragmented community of subcultures that occasionally cross over and into one another. The more cultures you frequent and popularize, the more the internet (and therefore, society) will start to sound like you want it to. I don’t know whether or not this is actually true, but I feel it’s an approach worth cultivating. And remember, another valuable resource in popularizing your contributions to the lexicon is this column. You can even have your name attached, if you want it. As I said before, it’s a living language. Let’s keep it that way!