Eat-LA and Off-Ramp get your goat ... Shirley Jahad's electric car diaries ... Dinner Party Download ... "Did I leave my i-Phone at the bar ..." RL Greene's tribute to his twin brother ... Charles Phoenix and the Third Dimension ...Leigh Brackett's screenplays include The Big Sleep and The Empire Strikes Back.
Eat-LA/Off-Ramp Collaboration - Goat
So far, the Eat-LA/Off-Ramp Collaboration has brought you pubs and pizza. Now, with the help of Eat-LA contributing writer Linda Burum, who also writes for the Times and LA Magazine, we check out the number one meat-on-the-hoof in the world - goat. COME INSIDE for more pics and a full list of goat restaurants and sources.
The short list on where to Get your Goat, compliments of the Eat-LA/Off-Ramp Collaboration and Linda Burum:
VIETNAMESE
(Connie Trang, daughter of the owner of Phong Dinh Restaurant, with Eat-LA's Linda Burum. Credit: John Rabe)
Phong Dinh, 2643 N, San Gabriel Blvd., Rosemead
626-307-8868 Serves goat prepared seven ways.
Binh Dan Restaurant
10040 McFadden Ave., Westminster, 92683
714-839-7050
Seven course goat dinners plus a la carte.goat items
MEXICAN REGIONAL
Birrierias Tlaquepaque, # 1 & # 2
1753 E. Florence Ave., Los Angeles, 90001
323-581-4327 and
1734 E. Florence Ave., Los Angeles, 90001
323-581-0800, 323-581-0800.
Across the street from one another.
#1 Is a closet size spot with a counter, an ordering window. and a few stools.
#2 is larger with plenty of seating and a hand cranked machine that spews out homemade tortillas.
Birrieria Apatzingan
10040 Laurel Canyon Bl., Pacoima, 91331
818-890-6265.
Recommended by blogger Bill Esparza AKA Streetgourmet who says: the house birria en caldo is “Exceptional” ... from “a very specific pueblo, in this instance, Nochistlan de Mejia in Zacatecas.”
El Parian Birrieria
1528 W Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, 90015
(213) 386-7361. Another classic Jaliscan birria joint.
Monte Alban
11929 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, 90025
310-444-7736
Oaxacan style goat barbacoa and huge tacos on handmade tortillas.
INDIAN, PAKISTANI AND HIMALAYAN
Ambala Dhaba,
18413 Pioneer Blvd., Artesia, 90701, (562) 402-7990.
1781 Westwood Blvd., Westwood, 90024.
310-966-1772.
Fabulous Indian goat -- kid, actually -- served five ways.
Al Watan,
13619 Inglewood Avenue, Hawthorne, 90250.
310-644-6395
Twenty five years in business, with unbeatable goat tandoori, saucy goat karahi, korma, and biryani.
Al Noor Pakistani restaurant,
15112 Inglewood Blvd, Lawndale,
(310) 675-4700
Goat hoof with spicy sauce and goat biryani.
Tibet Nepal House
36 E Holly St. Pasadena, 91103
Phone / Fax: 626 585 0955
Gamule Khasi fresh goat cooked with tomato, onion ginger and other seasonings.
KOREAN
These Korean goat specialists are known for Yeomso Tang (Goat Stew) and other cook-at-the-table goat dishes. Don’t miss the fried rice seasoned with the broth that’s served at the end of the meal.
Chin Go Gae
3063 W 8th St., Los Angeles, 90005
(213) 480-8071
Bulrocho
955 S Vermont Ave. Los Angeles, 90006,
213- 383-0080
Han Mi Jung
4100 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, 9001,
(323) 735-9200
JAMAICAN AND CARIBBEAN AFRICAN
Veronica’s Kitchen
528 West Manchester Boulevard, Inglewood, 90301-1628
(310) 673-4890 and
15355 Sherman Way, Van Nuys, 91406-4200
(818) 781-3015?
Bold and very spicy goat stews Nigerian style.
Port Royal
1412 Broadway, Santa Monica
(310) 458-4147
Curry goat
Derrick’s Jamaican Cuisine
6806 La Tijera Blvd. Los Angeles, 90045
Phone: (310) 641-7572
FAX: (310) 641-7509
Curry Goat
Natraliart Market & Restaurant
3426 West Washington Boulevard
Los Angeles, 90018
(323) 737-9277
Curry goat.
Mama Fina’s Dominican Restaurant
17625 Bellflower Blvd., Bellflower, 90712
(562) 867-8128. Tomato-cuminn seasoned goat stew
Restaurant Ecuatoriano El Caserio
309 North Virgil Ave.
Los Angeles, 90004
(323) 664-9266
Braised-in-lager seco de chivo, an Andean dish now served throughout Ecuador. "Friends introduce other friends and they love it," says owner William Velasco.
WHERE TO BUY
Claro’s Italian Market
1003 East Valley Boulevard
San Gabriel, 91776
(626) 288-2026 and six other locations
Al Watan Market
Mr. Saleem Ahmed
13649 Inglewood Ave., Hawthorne,. 90250
(310) 978-1927
The shop carries fresh locally slaughtered Halal goat which they will cut to your liking. They also carry very good frozen goat legs from Australia and will cut them to order.
Marc Haefele: Leigh Brackett, screenwriter and sci-fi royalty
How's this for a Hollywood resume? Leigh Brackett had her name on the screenplays of "The Big Sleep" in 1946 and "The Empire Strikes Back" in 1978. But that’s not all. Off-Ramp's literary commentator Marc Haefele has the background on the multi-talented and influential writer. COME INSIDE for Marc's script and a lurid cover illustration...
MARC'S SCRIPT:
Leigh Brackett also won the nickname "The Queen of the Martian Catacombs" for her many sci-fi sagas … stories with titles like the "Thralls of the Endless Night." As a woman, she was a pioneer in both her fields.
With her screenwriting credits, Brackett could have abandoned nickel-a-word sci fi. But she once said, "If I sit down to write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter...But a screenplay...has to be a compromise.... [Sometimes] I sort of went off into corners and wept." The heroes of her space operas were principled, tough, lost souls, close kin to the characters she helped create for Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne; in space or on the range, she personally believed in old-fashioned heroism of one tough man -- or one hard-bitten dame -- against the town, the mob, the odds or the entire universe.
Raised in Santa Monica, Brackett started selling pulp fiction in her early 20s. She'd also peddled a couple of b-movie scripts before she was tapped by director Howard Hawks to work with William Faulkner (yes, that William Faulkner) on "The Big Sleep." … And Humphrey Bogart, whom she called "the greatest actor that ever happened."
For Hawks, she wrote three versions of the same classic movie: 1959's ``Rio Bravo," remade in 1967 as "El Dorado" and "Rio Lobo" in 1970. A friend recalled, "It got better every time." All versions starred John Wayne, a lifetime pal whose rugged politics she shared.
In 1946, she married fellow Sci-Fi writer Edmond Hamilton. Her young writing protégé, Ray Bradbury, was best man at the wedding. The couple spent half their lives together in the Antelope Valley and the other half on an Ohio farm. There she drove her tractor around the property and her Porsche into town, and wrote the sci-fi classic novels "Star Man" and "The Long Tomorrow." In 1972, she wrote Robert Altman's version of Raymond Chandler's final great novel, "The Long Goodbye." It plunged Chandler's 1940s idealist detective into the sexy, cynical seventies, and the results infuriated many critics. But Brackett said, "It felt right at the time."
Brackett's famous last script, for the second Star Wars movie, "The Empire Strikes Back," finally united her long-divided selves of sci-fi-scribe and screen writer. It remains uncertain how much that screenplay resembles the final cut. Yet, as her friend, sci-fi wizard Mike Moorcock points out, George Lucas’s entire Star Wars series was deeply influenced by Brackett's interplanetary sagas. As were dozens of modern sci-fi writers, from Bradbury to John Brunner to Harlan Ellison.
Brackett never saw "Empire." She died of cancer at 62 in 1978, a few months after her beloved husband.
For Off-Ramp, this is Marc Haefele.
Dinner Party Download Welcomes Actor Paul Dano
This week: Actor Paul Dano is achin' for bacon... the classic story of New Coke...and why BYOF will sadly not be the new BYOB.
Spy v. i ... or the Prototype iPhone Case tests journalism, law.
Off-Ramp host John Rabe and CyberFrequencies producer Queena Kim hash out the case of a prototype iPhone left in a bar ... did Gizmodo cros the intellectual property line?
Charles Phoenix expands into 3-D with a new slide show
Charles Phoenix and the Third Dimension is not a band ... it's the new 3-D slideshow the local historian is bringing to the Downtown Independent Theatre on two upcoming Sundays: May 9 and May 16. The show on the 16th follows the one-day 3-D film festival put on by the LA 3D Club. COME INSIDE for more info about both events!
RH Greene, Dracula memoirist ("Incarnadine"), pays tribute to his brother
5-1-2010 UPDATE: This is a rerun from 2009, so there's no book signing ...
RH Greene, who wrote "Incarnadine, the True Memoirs Count Dracula," tells us his own true memoir -- that his book is privately dedicated to his twin brother Tom, who RH says was the other half of his heartbeat. Greene will be at Book Soup on Sunday, November 15 at 4 PM. (8818 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90069-2125, (310) 659-3110.)
More on "Incarnadine," from Greene's news release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
LOS ANGELES, CA - Roll over Edward Cullen, and tell Sookie Stackhouse the news. INCARNADINE: The True Memoirs of Count Dracula is coming to U.S. bookstores and to Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. And despite the boom in vampire sagas, author R. H. Greene thinks he has something unique to offer.
"It's for grown-ups, for one thing," Greene says of the first installment in his two-part Dracula "memoir." "I've never read a Twilight novel or seen an episode of True Blood, but I stand in supermarket checkout lines, like everybody. It does seem like we're going through the Hannah Montana era of gothic fiction, doesn't it? I mean, there's an Edward Cullen Barbie doll coming out, you know?"
The conceit of Greene's novel is that it'sa "newly discovered Victorian artifact" once owned by Mina Murray Harker, the heroine of Bram Stoker's 1897 classic Dracula. In Greene's premise, the handwritten manuscript languished for over a century in the cornerstone of a remote Bulgarian farmhouse before being excavated by looters. Their "minor literary payload" turned out to be a first-person chronicle written by Dracula himself, covering more than three centuries of both his human and "un-dead" existence.
In the memoir, Dracula tells the story of his life before he became a vampire, and then leads the reader through his own unholy transformation and that of his three "wives." The action begins in the late Middle Ages during the last great battles of the Ottoman invasion of Eastern Europe, and ends with the first meeting between Dracula and Bram Stoker's protagonist Jonathan Harker.
The encounter with Harker sets the stage for a "very free" approach to Stoker's characters and event structure in Memoirs, Volume Two, which Greene has just completed writing. "Book two is called The Charnel House, and it's a very different piece of work, though in the same spirit as INCARNADINE."
According to Greene, the first-person voice lets the reader experience the Dracula mythos with an unusual amount of intimacy, and also allowed him to write a book in which "Dracula is the hero and God is the villain, which is the way I think a 'Prince of Darkness' would see things. We've kind of gotten away from the spiritual in vampire fiction, but it's clearly one of the core concerns in Stoker's original.
"There's also a whole wealth of detail in Slavic folklore that was unavailable to the author of Dracula, and it's been great fun researching those older traditions and trying to incorporate them into INCARNADINE in a way that feels authentic."
Interestingly, just a month after Greene's Dracula origin story goes to press, the Bram Stoker estate is coming out with Dracula The Un-Dead, an "official sequel" by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt that Greene says "sounds like a detective novel based on the new Amazon extract."
While Greene says he was unaware of the sequel's existence while working on INCARNADINE, "I wish them a lot of success. Nobody deserves to benefit from the ongoing interest in Dracula more than a writer with the last name of Stoker.
"Between their sequel and my story of how Dracula came to be, I think there's a unique opportunity for readers to re-evaluate their relationship to one of literature's most lasting works. And who knows? Maybe it's Dracula's turn to reign supreme again over the genre Bram Stoker virtually invented for him. I'm pretty sure audiences are still going to care about him long after True Blood is just a pile of discount DVDs at Costco, and Edward Cullen has crumbled into dust."
Driving on Sunshine
KPCC's Shirley Jahad brings us another installment of her EV Diaries. COME INSIDE for the link...
In the EV Diaries, Shirley logs her experiences with the new electric car from Mitsubishi. Two things: it's darn quiet, and it doesn't go quite as far on a charge as many Angelinos would like.