Coppa

After months of waiting, Coppa has finally opened its doors.  I was lucky enough to find myself there just a few hours after they had announced they would be opening one day early, on Tuesday.

An unassuming little place in the South End, as I was begin seated, Chef/Partner Jamie Bissonnette throws me the sign of the horns while his wife Courtney, the General Manager, slings drinks from behind the bar while directing traffic and chatting up the bar customers.

I've been waiting for this for a bit.  Ken Oringer, Jamie and Courtney made Toro the best place in town for tapas, and I couldn't wait to see what they did with Italian.  I was especially excited about a rumor I'd heard that they were doing a bone marrow and oxtail pizza.  And, holy shit, The Blue Ribbon nearly slayed me. Braised oxtail, mozzarella, tomato, bone marrow, and horseradish tried to take me down in fatty, rich texture and flavor.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  We started off with the Buratta and bresoala, which were fresh and perfectly seasoned with sea salt.  Having sampled the cured meats Jamie was working on at Toro, I jumped right on the salumi section of the menu with the duck pastrami.  Smooth, smoky and perfectly sliced on the antique hand slicer behind the bar, this was the shit.

And the pizza.  Fucking hell.  Enough said.

The wine list is filled with some awesome italian stuff, but my favorite part of the drink list was the Pony Farm (5 Miller High Life 7oz bottles) and, of course, Schaefer in a can.

Good people, good eats, good atmosphere, good times.

If you've got an hour to kill and $20 in your pocket and don't want to have to shell out big bucks (which you won't anyway) to taste what Coppa has to offer, get a drink and a stuzi at the bar and call it good.

I can't wait to sample the rest of the menu and knock into the cocktail menu.  To give you a quick idea, the restaurant kicks as much ass as the website - Coppa.

Go.

Eat.

Enjoy.

Survival of NaNoWriMo

I did it.  I won.  I am officially a winner.  To date over 10,000 are 2009 NaNoWriMo winners.  For those who don't know - if you finish the contest and write 50,000+ words in one month and call it a novel, you win.

My grand total word count was 50,198.  Every sentence seems to me to be worse than the last.  I never fully fleshed out the lead character or gave him a solid and convincing back story.  My plot was all over the place and from time to time my 'prose' turned into what could be called 'babble'.  But the best part is - I don't care.

I really don't.  As much as I would like to have come out of November with a stunning and polish work of art, I don't care.  I wrote it.  Hell, I finished 18,000 over the past three days and didn't go blind in the process.

This past weekend, I ate a lot of turkey, passed a lot of gas, and wrote a lot.  Oh, and I slept.  I made sure to get lots of naps in.  In fact, one of the first things I did upon finishing my NaNoWriMo project was take a nap.

And it felt good.  Really, really good.

Next year, I will do some fleshing out and outlining prior to sitting down and vomiting up words.  I will try to stay ahead of the game the entire time instead of just the first two day.  I'm sure I will attempt to do quite a lot of things, and one of two of them may actually be completed.

To all other NaNoWriMo 2009 winners - congrats.

NaNoWriMo - Week One

Today is the seventh day of NaNoWriMo 2009 and there have been some hits and misses thus far.  I've just his 10,000 word (1/5 way there) and have finally fleshed out my main character enough to know how he reacts to being abducted and kicked in the ribs.

So I've go that going for me.

In the meantime I'm occasionally keeping track of what's going on in #NaNoWriMo land on twitter.  A small selection of my favorite posts so far:

I think my MC might just have decided he's got a tattoo I didn't know of. #nanowrimo
@lyonza

#nanowrimo excuse no.84: My characters have taken out a restraining order against me.
@namott

I just figured out how to NOT write a sex scene XD #nanowrimo
@darknessdescend

I kind of hate all my characters... #NaNoWriMo
@yabtest

heh. Trying to write while feeling sick leads to some rather, um It-made-sense-at-the-time ideas.
@snazel

1K op een uurtje, ik ben tevreden. Straks verder schrijven #nanowrimo nu "even" eten maken, spaghettisaus voor drie dagen - @lilkim8

Now? I have the ghost of a dead headmistress haunting my MC because they doodled a phallus on her portrait in school #nanowrimo #nanolondon - @jayintheclouds

Back to the grind.  For all you out there looking to hit 15,000 words by Monday - good luck.

Review: Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

I listen to audiobooks as well as reading the physical pages.  I have not gotten much into ebooks, but that's probably because I don't own a Kindle, don't plan on owning a kindle, and I'm not sure I would like to use it at all.  I prefer to do my reading on something that won't short circuit if I fall asleep and drool all over it.

So back to the audiobooks.  I have gone through countless through the year thus far, from Dan Brown's Digital Fortress (I would only recommend this to the 17 hardcore Dan Brown fans out there.  The man can imagine a compelling plot, but the writing itself is shit for the most part and does not give the reader any credit) to John Grisham novels - I think I've completed nearly everything that hasn't been turned into a movie.

Recently I picked up Tree of Smoke from the BPL, having attempted to read this book in hardcover about a year or two ago when it first came out.  It was a tough one to get into at the time for me and I dropped it.  The audiobook, read by Will Patton (Armageddon, Gone in 60 Seconds) was much, much better.  I've always liked the way Johnson does everything.  His writing is superb, from Jesus' Son to Fiskadoro to a few short plays I've seen in McSweeney's.  And to be accompanied by Patton's performance really made this audiobook work.

The book itself, is set in Vietnam.   Being much too young to have experienced the war the way so many others had, I've studied the war.  I've read everything Tim O'Brian has written about Vietnam since I was first made to read The Things They Carried and carried my way forward through all of the post-war novels which I felt were equally as good.  I've watched Apolcalypse Now far too many times and still occasionally run quotes from it in my head at random.

But Tree of Smoke is not about that Vietnam.  There is no constant firefight keeping the troops on their toes.  For the most part, there are no troops.  The lead character is Skip Sands, a CIA operative who is tasked with intelligence sorting and gathering, though the tasks he is.  Skip's uncle, known as The Colonel, is described as Coppolla's Kilgore about another decade down the line and with vast amounts of knowledge from Langley.

The story is one of the human condition in an environment as throuroughly fucked up as Vietnam was.  Johnson writes truthfully from every angle.  From the locals, to babyfaced troops fresh from training, to VC double agents, to CIA assholes running what amounts to a version of Internal Affairs, to the women who were left at home in the square states while their sons went to fight, Johnson tells the version of the truth he sees and leaves room for what he didn't want to write about.  He doesn't lead you into a determination of a character through dialogue and action - he allows the characters dialogue and action to flow in a way that forces to you to try and work out the motivations and end goals. 

There is no spoon-feeding here, you've got to want to figure these characters out.  And in the end, I'm not sure I was able to.  The story ends in a far more realistic way than anything about Vietnam that's ever been in a movie - where these characters end up, how thier lives are ended or allowed to continue.

I'm already ready to read Johnson's newest book Nobody Move.

Oh yeah - for those of you who aren't familiar with Denis Johnson's work (and seriously - why not?  Pick up Jesus' Son and read it cover to cover tomorrow.  Shouldn't take you more than an hour or two) and are more concerned about what Oprah or Good Morning America are suggesting you read - Tree of Smoke did win a National Book Award.  So it's got that going for it, which is nice.

National Novel Writing Month - Closer Than You Think

Once again I have commited myself to National Novel Writing Month.  Just as it sounds, it is a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel from November 1st to November 30th.

As a note of disclosure I failed last year.  Miserably.  Really, it was quite a poor attempt and I'm a bit embarassed to only have reached 15,000 words.

This year I'm taking a different approach.  I'm telling everyone.  Lots and lots of people will know what I'm doing for the month of November, will hopefully ask how it's going and will make fun of me and poke me with sharp sticks should I fall short again.

You can learn more about NaNoWriMo or check out my progress here. (it's going to be at 0 words until November, so back off until then!)