News of the World

Really in the soup here with getting the new Ristretto launched, work, life, enjoying summer in PDX, including getting last night to Belly, which I really loved. I don't know that they yet have a website but you can check out the menu over on Food Dude's site. The staff was delightful, the room warm, friendly, easy to be in, exactly what, I think, the neighborhood will respond to (and exactly not what Terroir was). The "loaded potato - tender little tongues of gnocchi with teeny hunks of bacon, crème fraiche and shaved white cheddar -- was great; so was a Proseco cocktail called Bee's Kiss. Wish I'd had room for the blackberry cobbler with chevre ice cream that was delivered to the table next to ours - next time. Suspect we'll be going a lot.

Anyway, my blogging is still going to be sketchy so figured instead to point out some things I have my eye on:

Business Week calls Sam Zell's takeover of the LA Times a "Deal from Hell." Haven't read it yet but do obsessively follow the story, usually via LA Observed, and especially because I have friends down on Spring Street (though fewer since the layoffs). If you want a prelude to the miasma, check out Frontline's News War, chapter 21. This is an incredible program, and you can stream it for free.

I've done a lot of reading this summer, some of it tangential to the book I was writing ("Leaving Los Angeles"), notably Judith Freeman's "The Long Embrace" and DJ Waldie's "Holy Land." I also was given, by my agent, an advance reader's copy of "Hero of the Underground," the memoir of former NFL player Jason Peter (at right) and his decade-long descent into the seventh circle of hell drug addiction.  And when I say drug addition, I am not talking a hamster-wheel habit, but full-on frontal self-annihilation that, for reasons that must have to do with the god I don't believe in wanting Peter to survive, Peter survived. Reading this book actually made me hurt, and had I done 1/10,000th of the amount of cocaine Peter did, I would be dead. Many times over. Or, as I wrote to my agent, "I am not sure how to express how unsettling this wound up being, for me. This book is a sledgehammer.  When I think about the book, I feel this sort of hollow whistling in my chest.  Jesus." It was written with Tony O'Neill, whose own addiction memoir, "Down and Out on Murder Mile," will be released in late October. Though I have an advance copy (we all share the same agent, so you know who I run with), I have not yet read it, except to note that the action takes place three blocks from the Hollywood epicenter of my little novel, "The Bad Mother," which will be available later this month.

My sweetheart Din and I are enjoying the city, going out a lot, including later today to Guestroom Gallery to see Rob Mars's Beauty in Hindsight 
(image at left). The gallery is around the corner the new Ristretto, which is set to open -- at 3808 N. Williams -- in a few weeks. See you there!

Comments

[Sigivald]

If you haven't been to Toro Bravo, you totally should.

Be sure to try A) the anchovies and B) the smoked beef.