For the most part, the CIA is a place for the honing of skills and the refining of talents. Those that sign up without any practical experience in a working kitchen find it all a bit overwhelming.  Being a Professional Chef is not for everyone.

Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef at The Culinary Institute of America follows Johnathan Dixon from the moment he is accepted until the last time he pulls out of the student parking lot.  In between we watch as he is yelled at, injured, overwhelmed, confused, and embittered.   He is also inspired, enlightened, and expanded far beyond his initial ideas about what it means to cook and serve food.  Then he is yelled at some more.

The spirit of Gordon Ramsey is alive and well at the CIA, but there are softer voices as well.  Jon wonders why so many of the Instructors like screaming and demoralizing the students when a handful of his Instructors are kind and patient and inspire loyalty through guidance instead of intimidation.   In many of the classes it doesn’t seem to matter what the Instructor is like, there is just so much information to absorb in so short a time that it seems impossible that anyone can take it all in.

Jonathan finds that much of the CIA is like practicing scales, he doesn’t expect to master Mexican cooking in two weeks, but he does expect to add a few notes to his repertoire.

The stories are intense and amazing.  For anyone, like me, who has thought of going to Culinary School, this is a must read.  The work, the hours, the dangers, and the lifestyle of being around great cooks and lousy cooks is instructional.  There is also a lot of info about having to do things that are not always fun or interesting.  I decided long ago that all the yelling was not for me.  And in the end, so does Jonathan.  His future is not inside restaurant walls, but he still has plans that center around food.

Beaten, Seared, and Sauced is a great book.  It’s the story of a real person trying his best to become something that is, at times,  just beyond his grasp.  This is a whole different feel from so many memoirs where we are given the impression that the person was born to become something-that it was always their destiny to arrive where they did.  Here we see that the journey is a little more difficult for some than for others.

Jonathan Dixon’s book didn’t make me want to go the CIA, but it did make me want to read Escoffier and Keller and compare the two.  It also made me want to up my game when it comes to cutting an onion.

Exit Through The Gift Shop is the story of a handful of graffiti artists who have taken the art of defacing private and public property to a new level.  Not content with plain old spray paint, they use giant posters, much in the style of application as an old fashioned billboard.  Some of these people do very interesting, if very repetitive work.

Enter our Hero, Thierry Guetta, a slightly insane Frenchman who has video taped his every waking moment for the better part of his life.  While out one day, he runs across a Street Artist and starts to follow him around.  He says that he is making a documentary about Street Art.  Before too long, he has filmed all of the major players in the Street Art world, all but one-Banksy.

Banksy finds himself in Thierry Guetta’s home turf of LA and they get together for several days of art creation in the dead of night.  As it turns out, Thierry is not making a documentary and he never even watches the endless hours of video he has recorded.  When pressed to put his movie together by Banksy, he spends six months creating an hour and half long collection of ten second film clips spliced together.  Banksy is so disgusted by this that he tells Thrierry, who has taken up a bit of Street Art himself, go make some art and have a little show while he puts the film together himself.

Here the story is completely taken over by the mad Frenchman as he has hired people to bang out knock-off Warhols, Lichtensteins, and Rosenquists-along with every other pop artist who ever lived.   At one point we see his team of Photoshop wizards cranking out his ‘art.’

The funny bit is that he books a giant space to have an art show-and he gets Banksy and other street artists who had befriended him when they thought he was making a documentary, to promote the show.

In the end, the Life is Beautiful Exhibition rakes in over a million dollars and we are left wondering-what the fuck? but in a good way.  Thierry now goes by the street artist name Mr Brainwash and many of his fellow street artists are not all that happy with him.  The fact that Mr Brainwash’s art looks a lot like their art might have something to do with that.  Or maybe it is just plain jealousy that someone who is clearly not an artist is doing so much better at the self promotion needed to succeed as an artist.

Exit Through The Giftshop is filled with funny bits and I laughed out loud several times at the sheer absurdity of it all.   There have been rumors that Mr Brainwash doesn’t exist, that he is merely Banksy being Banksy.  But Thierry Guetta is the one being sued by photographer Glen E. Friedman for one of the countless acts of copyright infringed Mr Brainwash commits to create ‘his’ works of art.  MBW lost the case.

I loved Exit Through the Gift Shop.  You really need to watch this one.

Like most Beatles fans, I was never very fond of Yoko Ono.  As far as his Asian women went, I always thought he did his best work while he was with May Pang.  But he ended up back with Yoko, as if nothing had happened.

Double Fantasy is John and Yoko thumbing their noses at the world.  You hate Yoko?  Tough. Think I wasted the last five years?  What you think doesn’t matter to me.  It’s my life and I’m living it the way I want to.

Of course, there was at least one person who did take afront to John Lennon coming out of seclusion.  It still boggles the mind that John Lennon walked home at midnight every night and everyone in New York seemed to know about it.  Maybe all those rap stars with their thug body guards have the right idea.  Though it’s hard to imagine a body guard could have done anything.

So I listened to Double Fantasy, all the way through, just as I did when I first bought it and how I pretty much listened to it every time.  I do the same thing with my Beatles albums, though I do tend to skip Revolution #9.

Double Fantasy is a damned good album, even with Yoko doing the occasional dying chicken impression.  In fact, my favorite track on Double Fantasy is by Yoko Ono, Hard Times Are Over.  It still reaches out and grabs me.  The whole album has taken on this odd prophetic feel, as if they knew John was going to die and they wanted this to be their last statement.

It’s been very hard
But it’s getting easier now
Hard times are over, over for awhile

The leaves are shining in the sun
And I’m smiling inside
You and I watching each other on a street corner

Cars and buses and planes and people go by
But we don’t care
We want to know
We want to know in each other’s eyes
That hard times are over, over for some time

Hard times are over
Hard times are over
Hard times are over, over for awhile

It’s been very rough
It’s getting easier now
Hard times are over, over for awhile
The streams are twinkling in the sun
And I’m smiling inside
You and I walking together ’round the street corner

Hard times are over
Hard times are over
Hard times are over, over for awhile

Hard times are over
Hard times are over
Hard times are over, over for awhile

Hard times are over
Hard times are over
Hard times are over, over for awhile

You start with one Main Character who has either lost everyone and everything they care about, or who soon will lose everyone and everything they have ever cared about.  This person needs a few skills that will make it logical for them to have survived while everyone else died.  They are immune to the Virus, are an Ex-Seal or Special Opts, have a bunker with years worth of water and food-just in case, lives out in the middle of nowhere and don’t even know the world has ended-yet, or has great leadership skills that will allow them to Take Charge.

You then focus on Your Main Character and follow them around as they fight off evil hordes-search for food, water, and shelter-met the occasional Good Person-protect the handful of people that they have chosen to protect-and maybe try to rebuild the world.

As a general rule be vague about what caused the end of the world.  A classic modern example is found in The Road:

“I knew this was going to happen.”  Old Man

“You knew this was going to happen?” the Man

“Well, this or something like it it.”  Old Man

How the world ends doesn’t really matter, just that the world as we know it ends.  Since most of us are pretty fond of the world as we know it, putting an end to it is a very emotional experience.  Even bad post apocalyptic stories usually get this part right.  Our hero wanders around, starving and wearing rags.  He walks into a grocery store, only to find it empty or filled with rotting food.  He walks into a clothing store, only to find the clothes ruined by time and weather.  He looks at empty farm land, only to see the fields have gone feral and he doesn’t know how to farm, or how to defend the farm from Them.

Our hero will almost always be on some kind of Quest.  Whether this is an actual quest given to him by God as in The Book of Eli or a pointless waste of time Quest like The Man and The Boy heading for the coast in The Road.  Give them something to do besides sit around and wait for the end.

There are two main choices here, go in search of something-food, other people, Sanctuary-or create your own stronghold and kill the evil things left roaming the world like The Last Man On Earth.

My favorite post apocalyptic stories end on a slightly upbeat note.  Eli finds a small community of normal people who are printing books.  BBC’s Survivors find colonies here and there as they wander around the UK.  Both the Postman and The Road Warrior end with the fact that these are stories of the Bad Old Days and life is better now.

Of course, I also love a number of post apocalyptic stories that end with no hope at all.  Planet of The Apes ends with Bright Eyes discovering he was on Earth all along.  Logan’s Run, the book, ends with out heroes heading out to space, since the computer running Earth has gone a bit mad over time.  12 Monkeys leaves us with a world in ruins as our hero can’t change the past after all.  Various zombie movies leave the world to the zombies.  And Cat’s Cradle left a handful of people alive on an island surrounded by ice.

What matters in these stories is that our heroes face a new world unlike the old world.  We share the end of their world with them.  We mourn the loss of family, fast food, cars, warmth in winter, clean water, new clothes, and so on so forth.  We face the prospect that our hero might have to kill someone to survive and we can ponder what all this means and what we would do in a similar circumstance.

One of my favorite scenes in Children of Man is when our hero meets with a Government agent who has moved into The Tate Modern and surrounded himself with works of art.  My own idea was always to raid a military base and then move into the bunker that is the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth.  This would need to be a world where most everyone is dead and I can just walk in a pick up guns and ammo-but then why would need guns?  To fight for the things that are still out there.

For a good list of post apocalyptic stories check out 60 Years of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.

The new season opens up with a collection of Previously on Eureka clips, the most interesting one being a small clip of Jack and Tess breaking up via hologram-this scene is interesting because it was never aired, never put in webisode, and never shown to the public in any form or fashion.  The general consensus is that the actress who plays Tess got a much better job on Eastwick, but then that show was canceled so she went back to Eureka.  This doesn’t explain why Syfy decided to blindside fans of the show and leave us stumbling along and searching the internet for a missing episode.

As the season opener rolls along it make a little more sense, we are assaulted on every side by new faces, new characters, and an alternate timeline where nothing makes any sense anyway.  The hardest part for me to deal with was Baltar’s tough guy mafioso accent and his constantly calling the Sheriff ‘Sport.’

I’ll admit that the standard formula for Eureka can be a bit predicable, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  Perry Mason was predictable, House is predictable, Three and Half Men is predictable-that doesn’t means it’s bad or unsuccessful.  Nothing annoys me more than great shows changing the entire formula of the show.  There is little danger of the new changes in Eureka being permanent. The great thing about Time Travel is that you can destroy the universe if you want to-so long as you still have the Tardis nearby, it can all be put back together again.  Also, the usual the Sheriff Saves the Town formula was used in the season premier.

I like Eureka and look forward to the new season, but I never liked the autistic kid in the first place and am not crazy about him being the linchpin of the story.  I would also like to see Stark return, since it seems his role in True Blood didn’t pan out very far.

One thing I did truly and completely hate in the season opener was the over use of really bad special effects ala Warehouse 13 and Sanctuary.  Just because you have all those damned green screens laying around doesn’t mean you have to use them on EVERY SHOT! Ok, other than that I’m glad to see the return of Eureka.