Yelping all the Way Back to Boston

It's pretty amazing how I can scout out my new neighborhood in East Cambridge through yelp.com. I have a good idea where to get Greek food (at the end of the block), where to pick up a few things grocery-wise (up on Cambridge St.), and go sit in a coffee shop (looks like Starbucks... argh). The coffee shops really are sub-par in the Cambridge/Somerville area. Most of that is due to lack of space in retail settings. Everything is so cramped that there is no space for armchairs or couches. Or free wi-fi, apparently. Oh, The Golden Roast, how I long for your comfy seating!

I'm in the Kendall/MIT Square neighborhood, and it looks alright. I know it's very industrial-parkesque down there from the occasional jaunt to the movie theater, but that means I'll be close to MIT for free classical music concerts. Perhaps I can find a nice quiet place to study at MIT as well.

Grand Tasso

It's rare, but it does happen on occasion that a song affects me deeply. Last night I was listening to the Red Stick Ramblers, one of those young and upcoming bands that is preserving Cajun music, and I was dumbstruck by the song Grand Tasso. You can listen to it for free here, it's under their 2002 album "The Red Stick Ramblers." I can't stop listening to it.

Apparently it's a traditional song with additional lyrics by two of the band members, and I'm frantic that I can't find the lyrics to the song anywhere since I'd love to learn it. My French isn't good enough to decipher it, and although I can make out some of the lyrics (mixed with some English), I imagine the dialectical differences would defeat me.

In Cajun country, there is a food called tasso--a highly spiced and dried pork sausage that is an essential ingredient in gumbo and other gastronomical delights. There is a community called Tasso, by Bayou Mallet, near Eunice, deep in an area of road houses where Cajuns come to dance at the fais do do's each Saturday. The place figures in many a traditional song.

Well, there you go! The Red Stick Ramblers not only play traditional Cajun music, but they incorporate Western swing and jazz influences from folks like Bob Wills and Django Reinhardt, and they cover some of their songs as well.

Great stuff. I know Michael Doucet also recorded Grand Tasso, but the droning fiddle of the Red Stick Rambler's version gives it a touch of melancholy that fits so perfectly and the vocalist has that touch of world-weariness that carries it home. Anyone who covers That's What I Like About The South has got my admiration.

Kill!

Based on the same source material as Kurosawa's Sanjuro, but much funnier, I saw Kill! a couple of days back. It was a relief, actually, since the last couple of samurai films had been heavy going with all the tension and unhappy endings. Kill! is rather goofy in its humor, and bless the director, Kihachi Okamoto, for that. I imagine in 1968 it was time to back down from the strident anti-authoritarianism of films earlier in the decade.

Tatsuya Nakadai, a former samurai who is now a yakuza, and Etsushi Takahashi, a ridiculously strong yet goofy farmer who wants to become a samurai, form a hilarious Felix and Oscar Odd Couple as Nakadai susses out the situation and manipulates it to a fine resolution. Nakadai, last seen in Harakiri, with his deadpan face turns in a great performance.

Recommended.