Kogi Korean BBQ To Go

street life taco style-68, originally uploaded by kogibbq.

Last night I decided it was time to sample L.A.'s newest gastronomic fad, marinated and barbecued Korean meat wrapped in tacos and sold from a truck. It was actually Dnice, recently transplanted from the east coast, who educated me on the fusion street fare after hearing about it on Good Food last weekend.

As ludicrous as it sounds, I stood in a line of over a hundred food fiends on Wilshire and Cloverdale for 90 minutes. After the first 20 I was committed; I had made the effort to drive out to the Miracle Mile at 22:00 on a school night, and anyway all I had at home was cereal and milk. Luckily I had the latest Radiolab podcast to keep me company, and at around 23:30 I finally got to have my photo taken and place my order for 3 tacos -- tofu, spicy pork, and spicy BBQ Chicken.

The tacos were delectable -- beautifully textured toppings wedded flawlessly with the tangy, spicy meat; the overall mouthfeel was pinguid and yet perfectly crisp. As my friend Tom pointed out today, however, nothing short of ambrosia could fully satisfy after an hour and a half in the cold, but Kogi came close -- it could very well be the late night drunk food of the gods.

I can't wait for the fad to pass so I can get this toothsome treat without the long wait.

Deconstructing Religious Violence

I just read The Rumpus Long Interview with Steven Soderbergh. Near the end, the director begins to lament what little effect film actually has on society's problems, and he makes a particularly insightful statement:

Any discussion about the Middle East that doesn’t start with whether monotheism is a good thing or a bad thing is an irrelevant discussion. This is all based on the fact that some people think that a certain piece of land that was host to some events two thousand years ago has magic meaning. I don’t believe that. I think dirt is dirt. Why people are still fixated on this idea of having this particular piece of dirt – I don’t understand it. That dirt isn’t worth one life to me. So you can sit and talk about who had what when and that, but it goes back to a deeper question of our need to create a narrative with this force that is acting upon us. Until we address whether that’s smart or dumb nothing’s going to get solved.

Putting aside the issue of whether stories about the middle east can be told without addressing monotheism, he's right, of course; dirt is dirt. If one were to take some gravel from the Temple Mount and display it next to some similar-looking soil taken from any other spot on Earth -- no rabbi or imam could tell the difference between the two samples. Yet Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been enthusiastically murdering one another for centuries over that soil in Jerusalem. In recent years Israelis have defended their illegal settlements in Palestinian territory by claiming that the land was gifted to them by God. There will always be trouble when deities dole out real estate, not the least because some of the affected parties consider said deity to be non-existent.

Soderbergh's assertion reminded me of an article by Lance Morrow I'd read years ago, and saved for this particular paragraph:

Two monotheisms is one too many in a small, bitter place. Jerusalem is a holy city, God help it — palpably, magically holy. That's the trouble. Holiness makes people crazy. David Ben-Gurion toyed with the idea, when Israel was just starting, of tearing down the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem — a blasphemous idea, until you look behind it to see the point: People cannot lead normal lives in a manifestly holy place, especially one so dogmatically contested. They are subject to ecstacies, and there is nothing worse than ecstatic violence, which is the form that religion may take when it goes into politics; absolutism does not like to share, and considers whatever gruesome aggressions it may commit to be justified as self-defense. Religious indignation expresses itself as massacre.

Morrow's final sentence calls to mind a particularly famous quote from Blaise Pascal's Pensées (which ironically was a defense of the Christian faith):

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

I wish George Mitchell the best of luck in his new endeavor. In the meantime, I'd like to see Soderbergh remake The Passion of the Christ; I have a feeling I'd prefer his version to Mel Gibson's.

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

A satellite image of yesterday's presidential inauguration -- The U.S. Capitol is at the top of the image and the Washington Monument is at the bottom; the brown splotches running vertically down the Mall are the human witnesses to history being made.


(Satellite image courtesy of GeoEye. Click here to view it in glorious high resolution.)

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama gave a wee tip o' the hat to atheists and agnostics:

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers."

Thank you, President Obama. My guess is that this reference to skeptics was one of your many historical firsts. At any rate, we've come a long way since 1987, when George H.W. Bush remarked,

"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

16.1% of the U.S. population is religiously unaffiliated but, to borrow a label from Steven Waldman of beliefnet, we are the political Untouchables. It wasn't always this way, however. There were no preachers or ministers delivering invocations at either of Abraham Lincoln's inaugural ceremonies; John Quincy Adams swore his oath of office not on a Bible, but on a book of Constitutional law. While he was a religious man, Adams actually believed in Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and the state. Like Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Adams was savvy enough to know that

“...a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.”

In fact, it is heartening to note that our Constitution, the founding document of our republic, never mentions a god and even goes so far as to state (Article VI, section 3) that "...no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," i.e., no elected official nor civil servant must profess a belief in any religion, or even a belief in any god, to hold their office. It's an ironic contrast to our most recent election, in which many of the candidates (especially the Republicans) tried to out-Jesus one other. Contrary to Fox News reports, these United States did not come together to form a Christian nation. In fact, many of our "founding fathers" actually wrote about the evils of religion in general and the Christian Bible in particular. Here are some representative quotations:

"One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian." -- Mortimer Adler

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man" -- Thomas Jefferson

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"His [John Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever a man worshiped a false god, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. -- Thomas Jefferson, Works, 1829 edition, vol. 4, p. 322, quoted from Franklin Steiner.

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity" -- John Adams

Ben Franklin wrote "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason" and that "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches".

James Madison, a Unitarian: "I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book (the Bible)."

And Thomas Paine, from The Age of Reason (1794): "What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith." and "The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense."

Again I thank you, President Obama. It is splendid to know that a modern president can have my back, too.