Brown Motion

Pankaj Udhas came to town.  He is a 62 year old native of India who has carved a niche for himself with his melodious bassy (not smelly, but low freq desi) voice to sing Ghazals. Primarily written as poems of love, the cultural origins are Arabic that made it to the Indus valley in the 11th and 12th centuries and finally morphed into today's music that sometimes appears in popular Hindi dramas created in Bollywood. For a person of that age I would be surprised if I am able to get a complete coherent sentence out let alone sing with such depth and nuance as to amaze a fan base crowd of about 500 in the local auditorium. The attendee demographic was largely 40 plus in age and not surprisingly almost 40% Urdu speaking which I had never seen in any bay area gathering before. Yet some of the native silliness was evident in the organization of the event to the execution of the program.  While there was ample surrounds to accommodate and manage the modest crowd the ticke...

I know not about this Californian band but I refer to the toungue tingling food we ate this afternoon. Its a place that serves Sichuan Food and it was clearly something to be experienced. Under the pseudonym of Schezuan or Schezwan we have tried various incarnations in the states before but not having been to the province I am not sure what to believe when it comes to matters of taste. Kung Pao chicken was our most famous encounter with this central Chinese province over the last couple of decades. Cooked from coast to coast it has stood its test of time and I almost equate that to comfort food.. land at an unusual airport late one night and go out to seek some nourishment chances are you will find a burger joint and someone selling Kung Pao. This place we ate today was amazingly different. So the common thread between Kung Pao and the dishes we enjoyed was the preponderence of Red Chillis and Chilli or Sesame oil.. we had a fish soup that was essentially covered with a bed of th...