Barack-oli Tree House

Credit: Brock Davis/Flickr via Slate

Having always liked broccoli's resemblance to trees (I guess that makes cauliflower winter trees) and probably because I went to architecture school, I couldn't resist posting this photo. I came across it in a slideshow that accompanies yesterday's Slate article, "Why Broccoli?" by friend L.V. Anderson, who you may know as the woman behind the blog A Temporary Omnivore in Paris.

The slideshow, which includes a photo of Barbara Bush holding a broccoli stalk around the time her husband declared, "I'm president of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli," was compiled to restore our faith in broccoli, should recent broccoli slander have lowered our opinions of the vegetable.

The caption: "Ironically, even when broccoli is being slandered as a socialist, no one cites its housing potential for the needy and very tiny."

Anyway, read L.V. Anderson's article.

Signing off, A.M. Chou.

Bánh Mì of the Month

East Borough Spring Roll

COSTA MESA - A foodie or gourmet I am not. A gourmand—perhaps. Mostly because I enjoy eating and tend to overeat.

Take this afternoon, for example: I wasn't particularly hungry but because it was on the way home, I stopped at East Borough at The Camp and ordered not one, but two items from the menu. Having already tried the Vietnamese Ham Bánh Mì (with pâté, which you have to request) and Bò Kho Beef Stew Baguette—consecutively and in that order—I opted for the Vietnamese Pork Loaf Bánh Mì and, because I can never order just one thing, the Tofu Spring Roll. And lucky me (and you and everyone else), if you check in on Yelp!, you get two dollars off one of their bevs. According to the cashier, as long as I keep checking in, I can keep getting the discount. If you're a social media zombie, you'd probably appreciate their entire webpage dedicated to social media, including Instagram. Smart, since their food is photogenic.

Right, the food. It's all been good thus far. The Bò Kho Beef Stew Baguette, one of their three Signature Baguettes, was the perfect marriage between a Bánh Mì and my mom's winter beef stew, complete with the bite-size chunks of potato and carrot. While I have yet to compare East Borough's sandwiches to those in Westminster and Garden Grove, the mother of all Little Saigons, and Houston, of course, I have no complaints about this place, except for the FRAÎCHE VIETNAMESE slogan (?). Would have been better SANS.

East Borough assumes you want jalapeño, so if you don't (I don't), remember to ask them to leave it out. I've forgotten both times and have had to dissect my sandwich, which only prolongs the wait for that first bite.

PHOTO VIA EAST BOROUGH.

One Bouquet, Four Rooms

For the most part I don't like grocery store bouquets. But in trying to break away from my purist if somewhat bland choices, I purchased Trader Joe's $5.99 "Designer Mix" and broke it up into four different arrangements for four rooms in the apartment. The arrangement above, on the kitchen table, is the largest of the four and my favorite. The glass cylinder, from Vons, doesn't distract the eye. Evocative of an English garden, the small, languid bouquet has an effortless appeal. If the flowers were hair they would be the messy ponytail.In the bathroom I've placed a small bunch of daisies in a small cup that until today has been collecting dust for years. I think it's a Seletti cup, the ceramic or porcelain cup that looks crumpled, but it was a gift so I'm not sure. In the bedroom, I've placed a couple of lilies that have yet to bloom in a square glass vase. And in the living room, a couple of unidentified violet flowers in a sake bottle add a touch of color to the white coffee table.

An Introduction

Later this month I'm moving to Costa Mesa, within walking distance from the "SoBECA District." "SoBECA" is an acronym for "South on Bristol Entertainment, Culture and Arts," which doesn't really make sense. But moving on.

SoBECA's two big features are The LAB ("Little American Business") and The CAMP, which are located across from each other along South Bristol and anchor this Orange County anomaly. And I can't figure out what I think of them.

A self-proclaimed "antimall," The LAB is out to combat retail monotony, but with an Urban Outfitters. The CAMP is out to bliss you out, as evidenced by the white painted messages in every parking space, which are a bit too...cutesy.

And unfortunately for these two landmarks, The LAB's website design smells of my sister's old Sassy magazines, and The CAMP's could be a website for Fair Trade coffee circa 2002.

The Best Kind of [Street] Closure

LOS ANGELES - This week I finally got a better look at that green thing on Griffith Park Boulevard that I've driven past countless times since I began working in Silver Lake. First of all, it has a name: Sunset Triangle Plaza. And, lucky for Silver Lake residents, it's Los Angeles' first street-turned-pedestrian-plaza. On Wednesday the organization de LaB, which hosts an event once a month (or more) centered around a particular designer, invited some of the people behind this project to speak on its who-what-when-where-why. These people include Streets for People's Margot Ocañas and Anna Peccianti, Frank Clementi of Rios Clementi Hale Studios, and the president of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, Bill Roschen. Interestingly, Streets for People is an initiative of the planning commission with the County Department of Public Health, who, obviously, promotes health and well being for LA County. So, aside from the fact that the plaza appeals to the eye (although some beg to differ), its purpose is to get people, including myself, moving a bit more. Considering that it opened more than a month ago, and I work less than a mile away, I could have walked there on one of my lunch breaks long ago…

In addition to the beckoning field of polka dots, Sunset Triangle features a line of potted plants at each end, like opposing rows of pieces on a chessboard; a basketball goal; the same tried and true moveable tables and chairs as the ones used in New York's pedestrian plazas; and only the second bike corral installed by LADOT. Wednesday's speakers confirmed that, since its unveiling on March 4, the space has been well received and, at least anecdotally, a boon to the shops that front the plaza. Apparently the kids like it too; a young girl was spotted hopscotching from one polka dot to the next. Cute.

As for the choice of green (Behr's Lemon Grass and Grape Green, for those who care), it was the result of a process of elimination, No Parking Red being one of the first eliminated.

The plaza is supposed to disappear in a year, but I wouldn't be surprised if it stays, as I think it should. If Angelenos can circumvent this street for a year, I don't see why they can't give it up for good—and for a good cause.

Frank Clementi of Clementi Hale Studios (far left) and Marissa Gluck of de LaB (center).

On Terry Gross

I finally Googled Terry Gross today. I've been curious about what she looks like for a while now. Of course she isn't at all what I imagined. In any case, her radio show, Fresh Air,  has significantly improved my hour to two-hour drives. Last night Terry interviewed Maya Rudolph. While I'm not that into her, the clip of her as Beyoncé telling LL Cool J about the birth of Blue Ivy made me laugh out loud, which I'm not prone to do alone in my car. Later I tried to reenact this for my boyfriend with little success. He and I have a lot of things in common, but "If I Were a Boy" is not one of them. Without further ado…

On Improv

Last night I received the following fortune in a fortune cookie:

Better is the enemy of good.

This fortune was appropriate for me for a number of reasons, but because I had my fourth improv class today, I will somehow relate the two in this post. To the two followers of my blog, be warned that, as an exercise, I am writing as quickly as I can while maintaining some kind of logic. My tendency is to spend a very very very long time on a post, but for what?

Improv. Improvisation. I was given the gift of improvisation—in the form of seven classes at iO West in Hollywood—literally, as a gift certificate, and I have gone to four out of five classes (you can miss two). I have learned a lot and realize every week that improv is very, very hard. There are moments in class where I just marvel at the art form, yes, I just called it an art form, and I want you to know why. Why it's an art form, and why I marvel at it. First of all, all you need is yourself and another person. Sure, a few more is good, but you only need two people to make this art form happen. My instructor Levin describes it as us, the improvisers, sharing with the audience part of something that is already going on somewhere in the world. I like to think of what's happening on stage as a parallel universe, and for however many minutes, the audience gets to be a voyeur into it. It reminds me of Belle's mirror in Beauty and the Beast ("Show me the beast!") But there is so much more to it.

What has been most challenging for me is letting go of my ego. I never really understood ego, but I think I'm finally beginning to. People who have interacted with me to some degree might see me as sarcastic, self-deprecating, hopefully funny. All of those things are not helpful in improv. Which is partly why improv is so hard for me. It is not about being funny. It is not about who has the best joke on stage. Rather, believable scenes played out on stage will, if we trust ourselves and our partner(s), be funny, because, as the book we were all given at the beginning of class says, "The truth is funny." Flashes of scenes are running through my mind as I write this. Flashes of scenes that were acted on the black stage of The Loft at iO, by various pairings and combinations of my fellow classmates, one week after the next, scenes that only existed in the flesh in that moment, at, say, 2:17pm on a Sunday afternoon, and never again, except in our memories, to be remembered later among ourselves and our instructors, but probably not even that. But back to my ego. The best way I can describe it is, I'm in a scene with you. We are to act out a scene, or rather, allow a scene to unfold. I might already be, for whatever reason, imagining a scene in which I'm playing a stewardess, and you a passenger. Because I think that is a manageable scene. Somehow I've managed to create an entire scene in a matter of seconds, but we are given a suggestion of "lawnmower" and suddenly the scene I had prepared is not right for "lawnmower." While I'm readjusting my mind to envision a lawnmower in my mind and generate associations with the word, the image, whatever, you have begun the scene (because I'm silently reorganizing my thoughts) and you say, "I know what to get Dad for his birthday!" And BAM—you are my sister or my daughter and our dad or my husband has a birthday coming up, and it could be lawnmower (or not at all), and what do I say now? Sure, I can say, "Great! What is it?" but now I am in this scene and I have to commit to whatever you give me, and man, we are nowhere near the airplane that I was envisioning earlier. I have no idea what you're going to say, but I have to listen very closely so that I respond, instead of exclaiming something fabulous that I thought of earlier, because then, I'm not being fair to you and only trying to make myself look good or inventive or whatever. But in improv, it's not about me, it's about you and me.

Over and over again, in trying to do something better—better than myself from five minutes ago, better than you, better than the group, I overlook doing something good or even doing anything at all.