A conversation about the upcoming French Open between three tennis fans: Sydneysider Lucy Perkins, New Yorker Asad Raza, and Ecuadorian-North Carolinian Juan José Vallejo. Asad Raza: Hey guys, thanks for coming aboard the 3quarksdaily raft. So here we are at Roland Garros time, again, where for the last several years Rafa Nadal has been the…

Fettuccine alla gricia, a common pasta dish in Rome, has four ingredients: the noodles, olive oil, bits of cured pig's cheek, and grated cheese. Most trattorias offer it. It's not innovative, nor is it usually presented with much elegance. It's simply an oily plate of flat, yellow noodles with some reddish brown bits of guanciale…

by Meghan Falvey and Asad Raza In 1981, Irish republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, conducted a hunger strike at HM Maze prison near Belfast. Steve McQueen's Hunger is an account of that strike. It opened in New York City on Friday, and we recommend you see the film before reading this. Meghan: The restraint…

by Asad Raza Denis Dutton is the author of The Art Instinct. Dear Professor Dutton, Thanks for agreeing to read this; your generosity is much appreciated. Your book is wide-ranging and compendious, so I'll confine my remarks to three topics: landscape painting, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Duchamp's Fountain. One thing I am not very…

by Judith Goudsmit and Asad Raza Respite consists mostly of black-and-white film shot at Westerbork, a Dutch refugee camp established in 1939 for those fleeing Germany. In 1942, after the occupation of Holland, its function was reversed by the Nazis and it became a 'transit camp.' In 1944, the camp commander commissioned a film, shot…

(Interpretations is a new, occasional series of reflections on artworks, films, songs, signs, artifacts, and other items by Asad Raza and other contributors.) In Maurizio Cattelan's Daddy Daddy, Pinocchio has met his end, floating face-down in the Guggenheim's fountain–presumably having jumped, fell, or been pushed off the ramparts of the museum's ascending spiral ramp. There…

To recap an exceptional tournament, tack-sharp tennis mind Lucy Perkins has kindly agreed to take part in another dialogue.  (For our pre-tournament conversation, click here.)  Because of time constraints, we’re going to stick to the men’s final, despite the fact that Venus and Serena Williams produced their best match at a major tournament–it’ll have to…

Perhaps you’re aware that the Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, better known by the name of the London suburb in which it’s played–Wimbledon–begins today.  In case you’d like to catch up, here’s a discussion of the major storylines with my friend and fellow tennis fan, Sydneysider Lucy Perkins. Asad Raza:…

There’s no getting around it: My Blueberry Nights wasn’t good.  As impossible as it is to deny that Wong Kar-Wai is a powerful and important filmmaker, it is equally impossible to deny that My Blueberry Nights is tone-deaf, spaced-out, and derivative.  Strangely enough, one of the things it’s derivative of is Wong’s own film In…

The writer and director Anthony Minghella died last week at the age of fifty-four.  I felt I knew him well, although I knew no biographical information about him until I began reading his obituaries.  He was the type of director who imparted quite personal feelings and predilections to giant-scale movies based on prestigious novels–a rare…

My most valuable contribution to literature is probably this: a couple years back, I used the NYU English Department copier to run off some manuscripts for an impoverished friend.  I had read her book in email attachment (subject line: “the nov-hell”) and thought it was great.  At the time, Porochista Khakpour was freelancing for various…

I recently spent ten days in L.A., and despite being quite busy, I ended up with a pretty good picture of the food scene in that city-state.  My very first night was somewhat revelatory.  I was lagging, beat and needing to be up by five, and we took refuge around ten in Los Feliz’s Cafe…

Note: Herein I discuss the film in such a way as to ruin it for those who haven’t seen it. There Will Be Blood is a movie that begins by making good on some of the remarkable formal promise that Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrated in certain key sequences in his last movie, Punch Drunk Love. …

In his match against James Blake, an overmatched player named Michael Russell won a point by hitting an excellent crosscourt backhand.  At this, my friend Andrew Friedman leaned over and said, “Lucky.  He doesn’t have that shot.”  To “have” or “own” a shot in tennis means that you can hit it nine times out of…

How good are the tennis players competing in the U.S. Open, which starts today?  Consider these names: Frank Dancevic, the Canadian number one, who beat Andy Roddick three weeks ago; Aisam-ul-haq Qureshi, the Pakistani number one, who played Marat Safin at Wimbledon this year; Israeli number one Dudi Sela; and Japanese number one Takao Suzuki,…

Propositions: 1) If you’re only staying for an evening, a weekend or until early the next morning, it’ll be a piece of cake.  Simply arrive in town around 5:45pm.  There are many “No Parking M-F 8am-6pm” places all over New York.  Just park and you’re good for the night or the whole weekend.  For instance,…

First, a few words on the neighborhood.  Inside the door, above a landscape of crushed-ice, a long wooden board has been affixed to the wall, the purpose of which quickly becomes clear.  Fish, having been selected from the tank in front, sail wriggling through the air, hit the board, bounce, skitter along it, hit the…

One thing is clear: Los Angeles is much more interesting than New York, visually.  This is because it conceals more.  In New York the streets are the city, each facade only hiding an array of more-or-less identical, apartmental shoeboxes of space; the triangular Flatiron building on Twenty-Third Street counts as a major departure from the…

Now that nearly every American has access to VHS and DVD and Netflix and Blockbuster, a certain feature of the cinephilia of times past has disappeared: scarcity.  Almost every film one wants to see, one can see – albeit on television.  This has had a major negative effect on the cultural importance of retrospectives, revival…

Last week, Abbas posted a little video I made of a journey to Karachi’s Burns Road to have one of my very favorite foods, nihari.  So I thought I would supply some more information about this gastronomic epiphany. Nihari is a dish of spiced, braised meat that has achieved sentimental status for many Pakistanis and…