RIYL: Ohmega Watts, Blue Scholars, Talib Wekli, Zion-I, Abyssinian Creole

We know Mass Line Media, and we love Mass Line Media — the pundits behind Blue Scholars and Common Market, two of the Pacific Northwest’s hip hop heavyweights — but who knew MLM’s own Gabriel Teodros would rise to the surface with an album as mature as his first and only full-length album release is. Teodros’s voice is smooth and his topics try to come across as heartfelt, but the biggest complaint I have about the album is how much political ground Teodros tries to cover. “Racoon Rock” is just a touch too self-conscious to come across as old-school, and “East Africa” doesn’t quite hits the notes it aims for.

But in the vein of Canadian supergroup Da Grassroots revolution, Lovework tries to bring the modern sound back to a ’90s essentialism. Think De La Soul, think jazzy beats and breathless breaks. Think the neo-soul, back on the block vibe of the Sound Providers. While Teodros has some room to grow, the frontman for Abyssinian Creole’s gamble certainly paid off. Lovework stands out in the good way.

Recommended Tracks:

“No Label (Esma Remix),” “Beautiful (GT Version),” “Sexcapism,” and “In This Together”

On my plate: homemade caesar salad, pineapple, orange, and peach juice, and roasted corn salad with grape tomatoes, red onion, and balsamic vinegar

On my plate: basmati rice, spicy dahl (stewed lentils with ginger and tomatoe), aloo gobi (spicy cauliflower, potatoe, and pea curry), pudina raita (yoghurt sauce with mint), and homemade traditional naan

On my plate: spiced pear upside down cake with caramel honey lemon glaze

On my plate: hot white tea and Kashi Honey Sunshine cereal with fresh strawberries, blackberries, and bananas

There’s tofu, and then there’s tofu, the former being that squishy thing your aunt has absolutely no idea how to cook and thus puts in a casserole with cheese the moment someone in the family declares themselves vegan (just toast will do, thanks) with the latter being the soup that bullies chicken noodles around on the playground until they cave and tell the teacher. In short, tofu, especially soon tofu, is tasty enough to change even the most haunted tofu memories into periods of mental vacancy (read: bliss of the mouth). Now that we’ve warmed up with the secrets of delicious ramen and the know-how to navigate the unusual world of Asian sweets, it’s time we got down to business. Enter BCD Tofu House.

BCD Tofu is a chain restaurant, and while we are both undoubtedly skeptical about the chops of a chain restaurant, you need to spend a minute looking at the menu, or as the case may be, finding yourself unable to decipher it. Yes, to clarify, you have not lost your grasp of the English language, for BCD Tofu House is indeed a Korean chain. What does this entail, besides a special list you cannot navigate and an inevitable heap of runny nose-inducing kimchi? It means tiny plates filled with mounds you can’t even begin to recognise, inconceivably heavy chopsticks even I look incompetent with, lots of barley tea whether you ask for it or not, and of course the oddity that is soon (soft) tofu.

The stuff comes out looking akin to a volcano, with rich red broth bubbling over a stone cauldron like some medieval witch’s brew, like something you fear to put on your oh-so-delicate tongue if you wish to ever taste again, as if the dish’s willpower could easily outstrip your own in a rochambeau. You try to pass the time while your liquid lava cools to a reasonable temperature by distinguishing the vegetables (and/or meat) in your soon tofu bowl. This is impossible. At this point the stew will refuse to present anything to you but a united, orange front. If this wasn’t enough to intimidate even the most adventurous of diners, add to that the face of a fish fried whole staring up at you, a plate of indeterminable red blobs, raw egg, and of course the, er… distinctive smell of Korean pickles. Scared yet? You should be. Especially if you ordered your soon tofu spicy.

Truly though, before you question both the validity of my story and my sanity, might I remind you that BCD Tofu House is a highly successful Korean chain restaurant that manages to please expatriate and unrelated clientele alike. It has profitable storefronts in Los Angeles, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, and many more metropolises besides. So take a bite. Go ahead. I’ll wait for your hallucination to clear.

You see, soon tofu (and indeed the majority of Korean dining in general) has such a foreboding buildup because the payoff is staggeringly glorious. The tofu is so mind-numbingly soft you won’t even notice it melting in your mouth, the onions punctuate the dish in surprising bursts, and for the persevering taste buds, the whole concoction is an unsuspecting basin of joy that could very well move you to go home and buy stock in the stuff. Don’t like tofu? Doesn’t matter. You’ll like BCD. Trust the Koreans. And go eat some tofu immediately, if not soon.

On my plate: roasted potatoes and cibola onions with sourdough panini of scrambled eggs, colby and cheddar cheese, and roasted tomatoes

Some girls get bitten by the ballerina bug, while others never stop wanting to ride ponies. Some of us fail to outgrow either Disney princesses or the colour pink, and a number of children will always be finger-paint fans. I myself was never bitten by the ballerina bug. I was, however, bitten by the jet setting bug, and now I’m afflicted with a disease I affectionally call terminal wanderlust.

It started with something simple, make-believe on my bed as though I were on the Kon-Tiki raft myself, and only blossomed with my first international flight and subsequent adventure in England and Switzerland. On swallow does not make a summer, but sometimes we forget to count swallows and before we know it, the season is upon us. I never thought it would happen to me, as someone who is not only admittedly metaphobic but also suffers from motion sickness and collegiate-level means. And yet, I am addicted to travel, and that initial foray into the wonderful world of unfamiliar discovery was only perpetuated by more recent international adventures, a stirring in my soul that manifests as itchy feet, and a barrage of media reminders that leaves me sore like a combination scab/bruise every time I watch The Motorcycle Diaries or read Jules Verne or Into the Wild. I’m sure we’ve all had the dream of leaving the world behind on an infinite road trip that we imagine will answer all of our questions and bring us closer to the inner versions of ourselves. And there are numerous accounts in society that encourage this; Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin are among the myriads of authors silently whispering in our ears “just leave already!” like tiny devils on our shoulders, the way it is in old cartoons. I am just not satisfied by reading, watching, imagining, by anything that doesn’t involve packing a bag and alerting my bank.

My problem is a complex one, because while travel is now assuredly deep within my bloodstream, I am constantly at war with my own insticnts. Both experience and the lessons of others serve to remind us that even in Vegas, we are not always Hunter S. Thompson, and the open road has its own dream-crushing realities, but the elation that comes from close encounters and the danger of having to sacrifice something for the great unknown is too addictive to be truly paralysing. So begins the struggle: do what feels right, or do what feels conventionally reasonable? It’s an endless dichotomy; I am delighted to find that someone can get properly lost in my own backyard, but frustrated by the sacrifices it entails for those of us with serious ambitions. I am always planing my next long-distance extended-stay holiday, but also spending an equal amount of time massaging around dates and figures that don’t want to fit together nicely. I take those trips which fall into place comfortably, but, as my sister so aptly states, the standard I have set for travel in the last few years is certainly not the norm, and likely skewed from the plane of reasonable. Still, I cannot deny that I love to travel madly and will look for any excuse, programme, or mission that will so allow it. On every application form I boldly check the “willing to relocate” box and review my travel photographs regularly. I subscribe to travel magazines and get excited about things like public transit systems and maps. I read blogs about culture in cities I’ve never been to and check out guidebooks at the library for locales I have not yet decided to go. I constantly check airline fares. I aspire to learn about five new languages.

For one not so deeply enamoured with the world of travel, it can be difficult to comprehend why I’d go to such great lengths, travel such intense distances, and not bat an eye at such outlandish opportunities — Climb Mt. Fuji? Body board in -10º water? Yes, please. — but there’s something empowering about being self-sufficient and something alluring about packing your bag and heading west that will never altogether leave us. The romantic version of travel has been employed in far too many novels, movies, and songs to count, and while I certainly have experienced a picture closer to the truth than any of Jack London’s works ever could paint, travel writers, good travel writers, put human wanderlust under the microscope, not just its redemptions but its shortcomings too in a very real way, taking a few hundred page picture of an aspect of human nature (albiet an extreme version of it) that, despite leaving a few bodies such as Alexander Supertramp’s by the wayside, remains alive and well today. To a large extent, I hope that need for distance, for exploration, for a never-ending feed of the new will never diminish, as if it is somehow genetically encoded into our DNA. For you, the urge to take a vacation may crop up only after nine months of stress, and for me I might find the need to move every three years too strong to deny, but in whatever way the art of travel must be perfected by us all.

There is more than one kind of travel as well, and though not all of us can take an epic road trip across the entire continental US, or backpack through all of Europe over the course of three months, we can take weekend adventures. I don’t just love visiting the glitz and glamour of Tokyo and Paris, but I love the countryside and the mountains. I love backpacking through national parks and camping on beaches. I love trains, planes, and automobiles. I like talking to people as much as I like quietly observing. I can pack my essential belongings in a single bag, I can sleep anywhere, and I have a list at least twenty-five items long of places I’d love to be my next destination. I have difficulty with my acquaintances underestimating my commitment to travel, mistaking my passion (not interest, but passion) for the art of travel as a passing comment, a sidelong suggestion that will never make it off the drawing board and into cold hard tickets. But what my colleagues fail to understand is that around every corner is an opportunity to travel in some fashion, to another country, another city, another neighbourhood, and I am not about to pass up such fortuitous conditions. What my friends may never understand is every trip proposition is a serious one for me, and every idea feasible. I have long since understood that my jet setting habits might be too different for the average person to fathom, and my priorities of a different nature. Every destination beckons to me with new promises and old comforts, and the grass will always look greener across the borderline (or, as the case may be, time zone), so essentially, I can deprive myself, I can deny myself, and I can pretend I’m a homebody, but the bottom line is that, however alone, however misunderstood, I am a traveller, in every sense of the word.

Want to know where I’ve been? Check out my Dopplr 2008 Annual Report.

RIYL: Aberfeldy, Tilly and the Wall, Mates of State, Au Revoir Simone

The Camel’s Back is the third album from whimsical British duo Psapp (pronounced as simply sap) and marks the group’s full maturation from 2-minute synth hodgepodges to calculated yet catchy songs. It’s simple songwriting, but frontlady Galia Durant’s vocals are breathy (like Inara George or Nina Persson), just breathy enough to wear thin by track 10, but her lyrics are unique enough to keep the record spinning long after the same keyboard riffs and cow bell beeps outwear their welcome.

Most of the songs are just that: a multi-layered mix of violin, on-the-beat-keys, solid guitar, and perhaps just a touch of the moog to round it all out. The most beautiful moments are when the two singers harmonise á la Mates of State, adding another dimension to the strikingly sparse structure. Psapp don’t exactly do simplistic, but they don’t exactly create as full a sound as, say, multi-member British folk group Aberfeldy. Still, there’s something strangely alluring about the sing-song of “Fickle Ghost” and the measured melody of “Fix It” that make The Camel’s Back an excellent album.

Lying firmly in the genre of indie-pop, Psapp has certainly improved their widespread appeal this time around and produced the sort of album you wish you knew the words to so you could sing along. In short, The Camel’s Back is charming and folksy right to the end. If Psapp isn’t immediately classifiable to you, it might help to know they toured with Juana Molina and José Gonzalez to promote their second album, and it might make more sense if you give their first album, Tiger, My Friend, another listen to appreciate just how far Psapp really has come.

Recommended Tracks:

“Part Like Waves,” “Fickle Ghost,” “The Monster Song,” and “Fix It”

You could call it a せんと, 온천, 温泉, 民宿, or any number of other confusing names/symbols. but you’re probably most familiar with the terms spa, sauna, or even Turkish bath. In the world of public bathing, it’s known as pure bliss.

That’s right, whether you’re in Kyoto or Pyongyang, Hong Kong or Hanoi, Shanghai or Taipei, nothing soothes the muscles after a long day of sightseeing like the steaming pools of a bathhouse, and nothing proffers true cultural immersion better than a room full of shameless, naked Asian ladies chatting away merrily as they wash each others backs or a gaggle of surly men sprawled in various states of consciousness in gigantic tiled pools. This is the magic of a bathhouse.

In Los Angeles, we’re lucky enough to enjoy not one or two, but tens of options for bubbling bathhouses, most of which are Korean-run and, before you panic and perform a frantic google search, thoroughly certified and regularly checked by the LA health board. So they’re clean, and they cost under $20 for all-you-can-stand steam treatments, but what else makes a bathhouse worth frequenting? Well, unlike their western counterparts, Korean spas let you stay as long as you want at no extra cost, well into the wee hours of the morning, as many are open late if not twenty-four hours a day. Let’s not forget the facilities themselves, either. Aside from the lengthly list of services (which include skin scrubs and massages), there’s a variety of pools of varying temperatures and elemental compositions, some equipped with massaging jets, a number of dry, wet, and stone saunas, and usually a large common area with a restaurant and beverage bar, televisions playing an endless stream of Asian soap operas, and large pillows or even separate rooms for napping. If that isn’t reason enough to brave gender-segregated communal nudity (only in the bath areas), than might I remind you that Korean spas are just so damn relaxing.

Spas here stateside are much more lax than their parents abroad. Further east, bathhouses have stricter rules, usually banning tattoos because of their traditional association with gangs and prohibiting drunkenness (though let’s be honest, sitting in a 40 degree-celcius pool with any substantial amount of alcohol coursing through your veins is a terrible action plan). Unfortunately the market for spa-goers in the good ol’ US of A is also limited to aficionados such as myself and expats, so our bathhouses are a good deal less elaborate, though no less functional. Of course, our complete lack of natural hot springs, the original impetus for public bathhouses, could have something to do with it.

While American bathhouses are less strict about tattoos, they are just as rigid about etiquette as those in Asia. Afraid of committing an irrevocable faux pas? Let me walk you through the public bathhouse experience. First you’ll arrive, giddy with anticipation to release all tension in your hard-as-a-rock shoulders or ready to soak off a heavy night or two of partying. Then, after you pay, the cashier at the front will give you a romper suit and a key. You’ll take off your shoes and place them in your assigned small locker, then proceed to your gender-specific area. You’ll find your locker and strip down to your birthday suit and grab a towel on your way through the sliding glass doors to the pool room. In addition to the myriad tubs beckoning you underneath, you’ll find a series of squat half-showers with nozzles and shelves. By the door there may be low stools or basins. Grab one of each. Some bathhouses have options to purchase or bring your own bathing materials, while others offer big canisters of shampoo and soap free of charge. In either case, bathe yourself head to toe thoroughly before enter any of the pools. Feel free to shave, brush your teeth, gossip, or any other grooming necessary.

Then you get to enjoy the pools. At a minimum there will be three: a hot, tepid, and cold water bath, but many more of varying composition are quite common. The Oedo onsen in Odiaba (in Tokyo) is eight stories. There will be a similar number of saunas, usually somewhere off of the romper-suit-required common areas. The trick with both is to go back and forth between pools, always ending with the coldest room/bath to close your pores so you don’t get sick from whatever smog you’ll absorb the minute you step back outside. That’s it. You bathe, and if you want to get fancier you can purchase a spa service, such as a dead skin scrub, or a massage, or a hot stone shiatsu, or any of the eighteen thousand different seaweed wraps available. Don’t worry about messing up. Trust me, if you botch offensively some patron will not hesitate to scold you thoroughly, but in the spirit of helping you understand foreign cultural customs and NOT to scare you away from ever returning. Generally patrons are considerate and patient, and the spas are happy for your business.

So if you’re adventurous, or health-conscious, or just seeking some serious relaxation, consult my list below of pre-approved and gold star-worthy korean spas. Not in Los Angeles? Don’t fret. There’s always Spa World in the Washington D.C./Metro Area, Inspa World in Queens/NYC, or Imperial Spa in San Francisco/Bay Area, so you don’t have to live in Southern California to soak away your troubles. It may seem daunting, but I promise it’s worth your while.

Hankook Sauna

3121 W Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90006-2413

Yelp review
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Olympic Spa

3915 W Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90019

Open Mon-Sun 09:00-22:00

Yelp review
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Wilshire Centre Health (next to Brass Monkey)

661 S Mariposa Ave, Los Angeles CA 90005

Yelp review
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Grand Spa

2999 W. 6th St, Los Angeles CA 90020

Open 24/7

Yelp review
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Natura

3240 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90010

Open 06:00-20:00 Sun-Thurs, 06:00-23:00 Fri-Sat

Yelp review
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Century Sports Club

4120 W. Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90019

Open 06:00-22:00 Mon-Fri and 07:00-22:00 Sat-Sun

Yelp review

All pictures published under the Creative Commons license.